In the Palace of Shadow and Joy

by D. J. Butler

  Indrajit raised his eyebrows at Fix. “If you have the same appointment I do, you must be a real piece of work.”

  Fix laughed, a girlish sound deeply incongruous with the wall-like man from which it emerged.

  They followed the Doorman into the building.

  “Also,” Indrajit said, “just Fix? One name?”

  Fix said nothing.

  The Doorman gestured at a bead-filled doorway and stepped aside. Indrajit found that his heart was beating fast; despite his assurances to himself to the contrary, there was no guarantee that Holy-Pot hadn’t brought him here to kill him.

  “Fix,” he whispered. “Does Holy-Pot Diaphernes want you dead?”

  “Probably not.” Fix walked through the bead curtain.

  Taking a deep breath, Indrajit followed.

  The room behind the beads was dark, lit by a pair of candles—genuine wax, not cheap tallow—standing on a single sconce beside the doorway. The atmosphere was further darkened by a thick smoke. Indrajit sniffed—not yip or tobacco, but also nothing else he recognized, either. Maybe just incense.

  Behind a table against the far wall, in front of another beaded doorway, sat Holy-Pot Diaphernes. He looked tall, but that was probably just the result of his being thin. His skin was the gray of a porpoise’s hide, and his long arms ended in thin fingers that drummed a complex pattern on the red-stained tamarind wood of the table. Holy-Pot’s visible face looked directly at Indrajit and Fix, golden, catlike eyes unblinking and thin lips pressed together. His long forehead, pointy chin, and pale complexion made his face resemble the crescent moon.

  On the left side of Diaphernes’s head was a second face. Indrajit had never seen it, and didn’t know anyone who had, but that side of Holy-Pot’s head was covered with a veil. Exhalations where a mouth should be lifted the bottom half of the veil rhythmically, and when it rested, Indrajit could make out the profile of a long nose and chin.

  Indrajit had no idea what the pot was. Vaguely, he thought it meant that Diaphernes was some kind of priest, though not of one of the city’s five favorite gods.

  “Indrajit,” Holy-Pot Diaphernes purred. “Fix.”

  “I’m here because I owe you,” Indrajit said. “The amount I…failed to return.”

  Holy-Pot nodded. “And the amount you failed to collect. And your fee.”

  “Fine.”

  “What’s the job?” Fix asked.

  Did Fix also owe Holy-Pot money? Or was he just a regular hireling, a solo jobber?

  “What do you know apout risk-reselling?” Holy-Pot’s voice sounded like that of a cat about to pounce on its prey, though his expression was mild. He had trouble pronouncing the sound B.

  “Nothing,” Indrajit admitted.

  “Some,” Fix said.

  “Let me simplify.” Holy-Pot cleared his throat, emitting a soft whistle from the veiled face. “An important party has an interest in a certain person. They have hired joppers to protect her for the next eight days. And they have taken out a risk-selling policy, which means that they pay a risk-merchant, and if the person is killed or kidnapped, the party will pe paid py the risk-merchant.”

  “Someone paid this party?” Indrajit asked. “What did they sell?”

  “Ah, no. A person is said to sell risk when he pays another person to take the risk in his place. The risk-merchant on the other end of the transaction is said to puy the risk. The risk-seller is only paid if the risk is realized, if the feared event comes to pass. A curious terminology, put one grows accustomed to it.”

  “That’s you,” Indrajit said, looking for a shortcut. “You sell…no, you buy the risk.” He thought he had it right.

  “No. The risk-puyer involved in this particular transaction wants to protect herself from what she regards as a high-risk contract, so she has entered into a risk-reselling contract with me.”

  “So she pays you part of the fee she earns,” Fix said, “and if she has to pay out to the risk-assured, she collects some of that amount from you, instead.”

  “My head hurts,” Indrajit said.

  “Correct.” Holy-Pot’s face became decidedly unexpressive.

  “What do you need from us?” Fix asked.

  Indrajit nodded. That was the right question.

  “I worry that the original risk-merchant might pe cheating. I do not think she is, put she may pe. Perhaps she will kidnap this person herself, take my risk-repurchasing payment from me, and then hold the person for ransom.”

  “Or the risk-assured party might do that, too,” Fix suggested. “Risk-merchanting fraud.”

  “That is also a possipility, correct.”

  Indrajit was beginning to understand. “So we are going to watch the situation for the next eight days. And if anyone tries to mess with this…risk-assured? Or is the risk-assured the…who is the risk-assured?”

  “You will watch the opject of the risk-contracts,” Holy-Pot Diaphernes said. “If anyone tries to interfere with her, you will stop them.”

  “Does the risk-merchant have jobbers at work, too?” Fix asked.

  Holy-Pot nodded. “Mote Gannon’s crew.”

  “The Handlers,” Fix said.

  Indrajit nodded, though he didn’t know anything about Mote Gannon or his crew. “Why only the two of us?”

  Holy-Pot shrugged. “I do not think it is likely anyone is cheating. Only possiple. So I do not wish to spend too much money. Also, I want you to keep out of sight of the Handlers, so I do not wish to hire a large company with a distinctive uniform. The contracts start at sunset tonight and continue until the seventh sunset thereafter, so I wish you to pegin opserving the opject immediately.” He reached under the table and produced two small purses, dropping them in front of the two jobbers. “Partial payment in advance. A similar amount upon completion for Fix, and for Indrajit, upon completion, the forgiveness of all debts.”

  They took the money.

  “We’ll need to get close to the object right away,” Fix said.

  “Who needs guarding?” Indrajit asked. “Who is the…object?”

  “Ilsa without Peer,” Holy-Pot Diaphernes said. “The actress.”

  Chapter Three

  “I heard she’s a werewolf,” Indrajit said.

  “Oh, I heard she was an illusion,” Fix murmured. “She doesn’t exist at all. She’s a figment of the public’s imagination.”

  “No, she changes into a wolf. On the full moon. Or the new, I can’t remember.”

  “Maybe you heard that she’s Orem Thrush’s secret daughter. Maybe that’s why someone wants to kill her.”

  “One of the other great families, you mean? The Lord Marshal? I heard he’s a real bastard. Killed a servant for boiling his tea too long. When one of his horses came up lame at the Racetrack, he had a nail pounded into the groom’s heel.”

  “Perhaps she’s a priestess in the entourage of the Vin Dalu Rao.”

  “The Dismemberer? He’s terrifying. I heard he’s incapable of feeling pain, and that he runs a foundling house entirely to care for the children of the enemies he’s killed, raising them as his own sons and daughters as the ultimate act of revenge.”

  “I’ve also heard she’s a Xiba’albi spy. And that she’s part of a burglary ring, and while theatergoers watch her perform the part of Zolit in The Wanderers of Love, her accomplices are burgling their homes.”

  “Now you’re making fun of me.”

  “A little bit.”

  “Still, the burglary thing sounds like a good idea. Maybe we should suggest it to her.”

  Indrajit and Fix moved laterally across the Crooked Mile, up toward the Crown. They walked alleys and secret staircases and through the cracks between stores, taking a winding route free of sedans and retinues from one zig of the Crooked Mile to the next zag and on to the next. In their shortcuts, they scattered pecking flocks of long-plumed red Kishi Fowl and hunched-over, scurrying rats.

  At a wooden post supporting the sagging corner of a plastered building Fix abruptly stopped. Le
aning closer to the column, he examined a sheet of parchment pinned to it with a brass nail.

  “What are you doing?” Indrajit asked.

  “This notice is outdated.” Fix collected the scrap of writing material, secreting it inside his tunic. “So I’ll reuse the parchment.”

  Indrajit snorted.

  They were headed for the Palace of Shadow and Joy, a theater in the Crown, where Bank Street with its guildhalls collided at an oblique angle with the Street of Fallen Stars, lined with old-money villas and foreign embassies. The Palace was one of Kish’s grandest theaters, the sort where only the highest of high opera could be performed, and where only residents with good taste, spare money, and lots of leisure time attended.

  The sort where actresses like Ilsa without Peer performed.

  “So are you part fish?” Fix asked. They skipped across another stretch of the Crooked Mile, briefly exposed to the bright blue sky, and then plunged again into narrow, brick-lined darkness. He made fish lips and mimed blowing bubbles.

  “I’m Blaatshi,” Indrajit said. “We’re an ancient and noble people, but in recent years our numbers have dwindled.”

  “Everybody is an ancient and noble people,” Fix said. “But my question is, since you’re green and you have eyes on the sides of your head, are you descended from fish? Also, that bony ridge you have for a nose…it would look good on a fish.”

  “That’s ludicrous. In the first place, I’m not green. I’m mahogany, with hints of green.”

  Fix considered this. “Mahogany is brown with red in it.”

  “I know what mahogany is.”

  “So you are brown and red and green.”

  “You see why I use the word mahogany? It sounds much more elegant.”

  “But don’t red and green cancel out?” Fix asked. “Wouldn’t that make you brown and white? Or do you see yourself more like a Bonean stripehorse, but with three colors? Or spotted, like a leopard?”

  “My complexion is a rich brown.” Indrajit felt he should be losing his patience. Instead, perversely, he was enjoying the banter. “When viewed at different angles and under different lights, it may appear to contain shades of a dark red and a dark green.”

  “Ah.” Fix nodded. “You are complex.”

  “All Blaatshi are. And in the second place, none of the thousand races of man is descended from fish. We are all descended from the original men. Naturally, the Epic suggests that the original men looked like contemporary Blaatshi do, but I am willing to entertain the possibility that that is an embellishment of one of my predecessors. In any case, my eyes are set farther apart than yours, but that doesn’t make me the child of a trout. Does your large nose make you the child of a hawk, or an elephant?”

  “My nose isn’t large. It’s prominent.”

  “Prominent is such an excellent word. It’s almost as good as fascicle.”

  “I’m glad you appreciate my vocabulary. It’s so hard to find peers who are men of letters.”

  “Oh, I’m not literate,” Indrajit said. “Reading makes you weak.”

  “Weak?” Fix smiled faintly.

  “But instead of fascicle, couldn’t you have said book?”

  “It’s not a book. Too small.”

  “What about pamphlet?” Indrajit suggested.

  “Wouldn’t that rather imply that someone published the papers, with, for instance, a political or an informative objective?”

  “You are indeed full of large words, Fix. And by the way, isn’t that name rather…inadequate…for such a literary man?”

  “What do you mean?”

  The stink of camels and goats briefly choked Indrajit as they crossed the Crooked Mile again. Shouted sounds of haggling suggested the presence of an impromptu livestock market, the sellers likely being nomads from the Endless Plain. Beneath the beasts’ reek lurked a dark stench of blood and offal that oozed from the butchers’ shops on this stretch of the street.

  Better the butchers than the tanners, anyway.

  “Men who read and write have long and ridiculous names, don’t they?”

  “Like Indrajit?”

  “Indrajit is a proud and ancient name, a name for poets. Inder is a name given to the storm-god Hort in the oldest parts of the Epic.”

  “And jit?”

  “It’s a grammatical termination of unknown origination.” Indrajit sniffed. “It may be a diminutive.”

  “You’re telling me that you’re Little Hort?”

  “As I was saying, literate men have long names, and also strange titles. Like Lucius Stratographos Kallipygian, Keeper of the Fourth Decan.”

  “You made that one up.”

  “True. But you know what I mean.”

  “Well, I learned to read in a discreet fashion. Probably the other readers just haven’t heard of me yet, or haven’t gotten around to giving me my longer name.”

  “I expect it will be Fiximon Nasoprominentus Fascicular.”

  The gate connecting the Spill and the Crown was narrow and guarded. Indrajit and Fix fell quiet. Indrajit adopted a facial expression that communicated that he was minding his own business, and wouldn’t everyone else like to mind theirs? He noted with pleasure that Fix wore a similar mask.

  He didn’t recognize the jobbers minding the gate. They were lavender-skinned Zalaptings and slate-blue Luzzazza, tall and with down-turned ears, and they wore the hammer and sword device of House Miltric; the Lord Farrier had the contract for the city’s gates.

  Having passed through, he nodded back in the jobbers’ direction. “Those guys don’t have to waste any time today thinking about the insane and unwholesome details of risk-merchant arrangements.”

  Fix nodded. “On the other hand, if a riot breaks out, they’ll have to put their bodies between the rock-throwers and the rich.”

  “You don’t look like a man scared to skin his knuckles.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Maybe, if this thing with Ilsa works out, you and I could look for a gig like that.”

  “What? Become jobbers?”

  “Well, we are jobbers, aren’t we? Only as individuals there aren’t many things we can do, so you and I alone are never going to be contracted to dig out a well, or collect taxes, or lead a sacred procession at midwinter from the Sun Seat to the Stone of Winter.”

  “Priests aren’t jobbers.”

  “Guard a procession, then.”

  “You’re suggesting we form a jobber team. A squad.”

  Indrajit hadn’t really intended to suggest that, but as Fix said the words, it struck him as an interesting idea. He paused for a moment…but this was, after all, just talk, and if something came of it, he could use the money. “If this works out. I wouldn’t mind working for myself a bit. Be hired by someone more important than Holy-Pot Diaphernes.”

  “Would we have to form a joint-stock company? Or a registered partnership?”

  “What? Surely not.”

  “Put up a bond?” Fix pressed. “Enter a risk-merchantry contract to cover damages we might cause?”

  “Ugh. You say risk-merchantry, and I lose all my enthusiasm.” Indrajit turned onto Bank Street, Fix close on his heels. Above them rose high minarets, crenellated walkways, and arches that reached over the streets below to join building to building. They passed the Imperial Library, with its virtual palisade wall of statues of sages and teachers, their history stretching back centuries, into the years of Imperial Kish and beyond.

  The scholars probably all had long names. And titles.

  “And I assume you’re imagining that you would be captain,” Fix added.

  “Forget it,” Indrajit said. “It was a terrible idea.”

  “I’m not saying no. I’m just thinking out loud. You’d want to talk to a notary first, at the very least.”

  “This sounds worse the more you say. I guess I’ll just keep working alone, at the crummy little jobs.”

  “This job doesn’t seem so crummy.” Fix shrugged. “We’re backup bodyguards for an actress
. The hard part will be figuring out how to get close to her without making her nervous. Probably, nothing will happen, and we’ll get paid. And if anything does happen, probably Gannon’s Handlers will take care of it. We’re being paid to be there, out of sight, just in case.”

  “I’ll congratulate myself afterward, when the week has gone by uneventfully. Maybe I’ll ask you to write the congratulations in a fascicle.”

  Bank Street was not cluttered with shops like the Crooked Mile, but merchants’ carts did rattle slowly along it, or stood with their windows open to display wares. Trees were planted at regular intervals here, banyan and pipal and sweet-smelling ketaka. Indrajit stopped at the sight of a tailor’s wagon, his eye lighting on a red cloak with elaborate patterns embroidered into the shoulders.

  They would need some way to get close to Ilsa. He fingered the cloak, and when the tailor, a man with a trunk like an elephant’s and no chin whatsoever, told him the price, he opened Holy-Pot’s purse.

  Delighted to find that he had enough money for the cloak and to spare, he bought it. Fix watched the entire exchange with narrowed eyes, but said nothing.

  They continued.

  “That’s the Palace at the end of the block.” Fix pointed with his square chin. “We should find a discreet place to observe it for a few minutes.”

  “There’s a coffeehouse across the street. They charge way too much for something they call Burning Sea Blend, so I’d never ordinarily buy it. But if we pay for a couple of cups, they’ll let us sit for a while and we can watch the opera house.”

  “I suppose if their beans come all the way from the Burning Sea, they’d naturally be expensive. You’d have to factor the costs of the caravan merchant who brought them, including his reasonable profit, into every cup.”

  Indrajit led them toward the coffee house, an elegant, two-story building with a fountain in front. “They grow the beans about thirty miles from here. And they taste like mud.”

  “Why would anyone buy their coffee, then?” Fix scratched his chin.

  “They don’t really sell coffee. They sell the illusion of being the kind of person who buys expensive coffee and a place to sit and drink it. Mostly aspiring poets, is my understanding. And, in our case, they sell a good view of the Palace of Joy and Shadow.”