by D. J. Butler
The guards wore the same livery, but over thick leather breastplates. Leather skirts studded with bronze disks and bronze greaves rounded out their armor. The bearers had a short sword or dagger each, other than Fix. His ability to hold a long spear in his right hand while steadying the sedan chair pole on his shoulder and still trot along, keeping pace with the unencumbered bearers, was impressive.
Only one gate connected the Lee to the Crown, and that would be easy to watch. There was no guarantee that all the gates out of the Lee wouldn’t be watched, but Indrajit thought it unlikely. So they took the longer road, exiting the Lee by the south gate into the Caravanserai. The sleeping camels, the merchant trains coming and going, the tents of the spice-men and the jewelers and the wandering smiths ignored their flight as they rounded through the big trading-ground and dropped down onto the East Flats.
Both the East and West Flats lay down close to sea level, so a bluff separated the Caravanserai from the East Flats, but it was a slope with many trails down. The bearers appeared to know the way, and were sure-footed as goats. Fix also navigated the footing easily, but Indrajit cursed and tripped and caught himself and cursed again, several times over before they’d reached the flats.
Small creatures scattered before their approach. Indrajit caught just a glimpse of one, a six-legged rodent gnawing on a small limb that looked like it might—hopefully—have come from a reptile.
The stink of fish climbed to meet them, like the rising, inchoate din of an orchestra tuning up. The huts of fishermen and smugglers and sailors, and the net-shops and provisioners and taverns that catered to them, lay scattered in such chaos that it was barely possibly to identify any strip of ground between them to call a road.
Indrajit barked his shin on the corner of a porch that sagged off one end of a tavern called the Alewife. “Hort’s ribs!”
“Think of all the lovely experience you’re getting,” Fix muttered to him. The stocky man didn’t even seem winded. “Perhaps you can compose an epithet to the Alewife, with her apron of tree’s bones.”
“Hey, that’s almost like a kenning,” Indrajit said.
“It is a kenning,” Fix insisted. “Like the dolphin highway instead of the sea, or sheep in the pastures of the sun instead of the clouds. I read about your people’s poetics, you know. Before you ask, not in a fascicle. In a codex, as it happens.”
“Well…”
“Well, what?”
“Fine, it’s a kenning. It’s just not a very good one.”
The Fountain’s bearers said nothing.
The section of the East Flats contained within the city’s walls was called the Dregs. Zalaptings wearing the House Miltric hammer and sword didn’t even bother to wave them through, but slouched, half-asleep, as the sedan chair passed through the gate. Only three main streets were discernible in the Dregs, one running from the East Flats Gate to the Crown Gate, steeply uphill and zigzagging, and a second running downhill, breaking off from an early turn of that zigzag and connected the Crown Gate with the Spill Gate. The third street ran level, just inside the wall, turning right from the East Flats Gate and connecting to the Spill.
Dawn was close now. Fatigue hung around Indrajit’s shoulders and made his head heavy, and the soles of his feet ached. They carried the sedan chair through the Dregs and into the Spill.
Once through the gate, they were within a few minutes’ walk of the Paper Sook.
“Okay, right here is good,” he said. He and Fix both had to grip the sedan chair poles and slow the forward momentum by main strength, the bearers were so intent on their task and so insistent in their pace.
Ilsa without Peer climbed out of the sedan chair. While Indrajit was still wondering whether it was customary or appropriate to tip the bearers, she went ahead and did so, producing one Imperial for each of the men. She also said bless you to each in a singsong voice, as if she were a priestess or a queen.
The men had beatific expressions. When Ilsa released them, the bearers still stood there, staring at her with idiotic smiles on their faces.
Ilsa finally had to order them to return to the Fountain.
With the sky turning gray in the east, the three entered the Paper Sook. Burning lamps and candles indicated that the workers in money had been at it for some time already, tallying the results of the previous day’s shouting, making certain of the amount of liquid wealth and the status of long-term bets, and drinking tea and liquor to fortify the throat for another twelve hours of shouting today.
“Okay,” Indrajit said. “Time for Holy-Pot Diaphernes to tell us the whole story.”
Chapter Nine
Apprentices who looked like praying mantises with fur on their shoulders and about their midsections were stoking the blacksmith’s fire with more fuel and pumping air into it with a two-man bellows as Indrajit and his companions approached.
“Do you think he’s in there this early?” Indrajit asked. “There’s no noise to hide his private conversations.”
“He’s in there,” Fix assured him. “He’s doing the paperwork and writing letters, the stuff that doesn’t require talking.”
“You understand his business much better than I do.” Indrajit led the company toward the alley behind the blacksmith’s.
“I was sort of studying the industry,” Fix said. “Trying to figure out how he worked. Thinking maybe I might go into it myself.”
“Yeah? What’s so attractive about it?”
Fix looked at Indrajit in surprise, but then began the explanation. “Well, in theory, you can start the business with no capital at all, since the risk-assured pay you up front. As long as you can calculate the risks right and recruit a large enough pool of initial policyholders, you can start the business with no cash of your own. I’m a little capital-poor, so—”
“Stop!” Indrajit raised a hand. “I thought you were going to say because I’m sick of physical labor, or because I want a job where people aren’t trying to kill me, or because it will make me rich. Whatever it is you’re saying instead, it’s making my head spin.”
“Fine,” Fix said. “I wanted to get rich.”
“Good. That I understand.”
“And I want to impress a woman.”
“I understand that even more.” Indrajit thumped Fix on the back. “Wait…do you mean a particular woman?”
Fix shrugged and look at his feet.
“Huh. So you too are complex, my friend.”
They had arrived at Holy-Pot’s door. Indrajit sucked his teeth.
“Should we knock?” Ilsa without Peer asked.
“Considering it. On the other hand, I’ve always wanted to just kick a door in and make a dramatic entrance. Some of the best scenes in the Epic involve kicking doors in, and it’s great fun to pantomime the action.”
“That door might be more solid than you think,” Fix pointed out.
“Yeah,” Indrajit agreed. “Also, it feels as if we’re not in quite the right dramatic moment. I mean, we’ve been pursued, it’s been an exhilarating and dangerous evening, but we’re not being chased at this second. Also, we’re not trying to catch Holy-Pot red-handed. So…”
He knocked.
No answer.
“Maybe you’ll get to knock the door down after all,” Ilsa said.
“Diaphernes!” Fix bellowed. “Holy-Pot Diaphernes!”
Indrajit looked up and down the alley nervously. “There are still two different jobber companies trying to find us right now.”
“Holy-Pot!” Fix bellowed again and hammered on the door with the bronze pommel of one of his knives.
Indrajit began looking for ways to escape, if the bravos suddenly arrived. The route through the blacksmith’s shop looked promising. Also, the building opposite the alley from Holy-Pot had a low enough roof that he thought he could pull himself onto it in a pinch, though that would probably mean abandoning Ilsa.
“Holy-Pot Diaphernes!”
The door opened. Diaphernes trembled in the doorway, a mere sack
pulled over his second face, a sheet wrapped around his waist and held against his hip to keep it in place.
“Spilkar’s darts!” the risk-merchant hissed, and his eyes grew wide. “What are you doing in my place of pusiness?”
“Spilkar’s darts, indeed,” Indrajit said. “It is to avoid Spilkar’s darts that we’ve come.” He pushed Ilsa without Peer forward, and she dropped her hood.
Holy-Pot’s visible jaw went slack.
“We should probably collect more of this flower, if we’re going to continue working with Ilsa,” Fix said.
“It isn’t hard to come by,” Ilsa told him. “It’s a weed that grows wild in Ildarion. With my people dead, no one else has any use for it.”
“We have a use for it,” Indrajit said. “Here, let’s experiment.”
He tore his own sprig into two pieces, making sure that each half had both some yellow flower and some green leaf in it, and pressed one of them against Holy-Pot’s jaw. Two breaths later, the risk-merchant’s eyes cleared, and a wave of astonishment crossed his face. “What is that?”
“By that, do you mean Ilsa’s magical power of fascination, or the herb that prevents it?” Indrajit grinned.
Holy-Pot raised his visible eyebrows. “You are Ilsa without Peer?” He frowned as if in furious thought, then opened the door wide. “Come in, and quickly.”
They filed inside. Holy-Pot took Indrajit’s half-sprig and pinned it inside the sack over his second face, and Fix locked the door behind them. Holy-Pot sat at his desk; as Fix had predicted, he had correspondence in front of him. Indrajit didn’t write, but he recognized the mechanical device with two pens and two inkpots, whereby Holy-Pot could write a letter on loose paper, and the machine simultaneously wrote out the same letter on a page in a copybook.
“Something has gone terribly wrong,” Holy-Pot said.
“What do you know about it?” Fix pressed him.
Holy-Pot spread his hands. “I only know that you are here. If things had gone well, you would have shown up six days from now, having completed an uneventful contract, and I’d have paid you the rest of your wages. Instead, you are here, with the opera singer. Something went wrong.” His eyes narrowed, and he looked at Ilsa. “Did someone make an attempt on your life?”
She nodded.
Holy-Pot leaned back in his chair and exhaled. “Do we know who?”
“An assassin,” Indrajit said. “That’s what we know. And Mote Gannon’s Handlers, at least, seem to believe that I’m in on the plot.”
And something else that niggled at the back of his conscious mind, but didn’t quite come forth.
“We want to know more about the contracts,” Fix said.
Holy-Pot started, as if bitten. “I don’t share my contracts. Not with anyone, even employees. Or hirelings, as the case may pe.” He glared at Fix. “Like I don’t share my client lists.”
“We can’t protect Ilsa,” Indrajit said, “if we don’t know who we’re protecting her from.”
“What do you mean?” Holy-Pot looked shocked.
“Who would want to kill her?” Indrajit asked. “Other than whoever sold the risk?”
Holy-Pot laughed. “No, no. You’re confused. It’s your poetry, Twang, it’s gone to your head. The risk-assured party on the underlying contract would pe harmed py Ilsa’s death, and therefore they sold the risk to protect themselves. Propaply because so much depended on her.”
“What do you mean, so much depended on her?”
“Well, the Palace of Shadow and Joy has peen struggling. It hasn’t had a hit in years, other than the shows starring Ilsa.” Holy-Pot Diaphernes smiled at the singer. “Maype they signed the underlying contract, pecause they’re worried about the possipility she might simply get sick or have an accident.”
“I don’t see how that makes any sense at all for a contract that lasts only seven days,” Fix said.
Holy-Pot shrugged. “Maype the Palace wished to protect certain performances.”
“What do you mean, maybe?” Indrajit asked. “Do you mean that you don’t know who signed the contract?”
“Or is this some way to speak hypothetically,” Fix asked, “without committing to who sold the risk?”
“I know who signed the contract. I read the underlying risk-selling contract very carefully, and I had a copy made. Look, I can’t just send you to the merchant who pought the original risk,” Holy-Pot said.
“Why not?” Indrajit smiled. “We’re friendly. Look how friendly we are.”
Fix put away his knife.
Holy-Pot leaned forward. “People come to me pecause they trust me. If they thought that at the first sign of things going funny, I might send thugs after them, I’d lose customers.”
“Thugs?” Indrajit protested.
“The first sign?” Fix objected. “Since we last saw you, we’ve been in two pitched battles, spent the night huddled on a rooftop, and then run nearly a complete circuit around Kish, carrying a sedan.”
“Which was very light,” Indrajit added, “because the occupant inside is such a delicate flower.”
Ilsa without Peer snorted.
Holy-Pot shook his head.
“Look,” Indrajit said. “We’re not thugs. And don’t you…I don’t know, have an obligation to notify the risk-assured? Or the other risk-merchant—isn’t there another risk-merchant involved? Don’t you have to tell that person what happened?”
Holy-Pot leaned back. “I don’t have to. I don’t have to do anything, unless I want to make a claim, and I can’t make a claim unless the risk-assured makes a claim under the underlying contract. Which he would make to the original risk-merchant, and yes, there is another risk-merchant involved.”
“Okay,” Indrajit pressed. “You don’t have to, but you could, right? As a courtesy, you could let the risk-merchant and the risk-assured know about the night’s developments.”
“I could,” Holy-Pot conceded.
“In fact,” Indrajit continued, “maybe, if you did that, your reputation as someone who keeps his business partners fully informed would help you attract future customers, right? And the fastest way to inform those people would be to send a messenger. Right?”
Holy-Pot nodded to both propositions.
Indrajit spread his arms. “There it is. You send us as messengers.”
Holy-Pot snorted. “So that you, as messengers and not ruffians, can peat him up?”
“Hey,” Indrajit protested.
“Say the risk-assured isn’t to blame,” Fix said. “If that person tells us why they were particularly concerned about the next week, couldn’t that give us useful information, information that would help us protect Ilsa over the next week? I assume your risk-repurchase obligation hasn’t ended, just because one attempt has been made, right? You’re still on the hook, your money’s at risk? And in fact, if you try to wiggle out now, after Ilsa has been attacked, won’t that be bad business practices on your part? Won’t that look like a merchant who wants to renege on his obligations?”
Holy-Pot sighed. He looked up at Ilsa and nodded. “The man who signed the risk-contract was a high-placed servant of Orem Thrush.”
“When you say high-placed,” Indrajit began.
“His majordomo,” Diaphernes said. “The man who runs his household and manages most of his domestic affairs.”
“Orders his wine,” Indrajit said. “Deals with his tailor. Hires and fires maids and footmen. Has the coachman whipped when he gets the coach painted the wrong color.”
“Yes,” Holy-Pot agreed. “I suppose.”
“Sells risk for the Lord Chamberlain?” Indrajit asked.
Holy-Pot shrugged. “If you’re asking whether Orem Thrush is the real peneficiary of this risk-contract, I can only say that it seems likely.”
Fix looked at Indrajit. “Are you sure you want to go ask?”
Indrajit hesitated, looking at Ilsa. She seemed nervous. “Well, I am definitely uncomfortable,” he said.
“Orem Thrush is a cruel ma
n.” Ilsa’s singing was soft, her voice like the bleating of a frightened lamb.
“But if it wasn’t Thrush who tried to kill you,” Indrajit said, “there’s no one better positioned to keep you safe.”
“That’s true.” Holy-Pot looked pleased with this line of reasoning.
“What’s the majordomo’s name?” Indrajit asked.
“Thinkum Tosh,” Ilsa said. “He’s a Zalapting. Maybe you can talk to him and avoid seeing the Lord Chamberlain at all.”
“That sounds like a good objective,” Fix agreed.
“Zalapting,” Indrajit murmured. “Those guys don’t usually rise above menials, do they? I thought they tended to have limited brainpower.”
“The smart ones can pe as intelligent as you or I,” Holy-Pot said. “Or anyway, they’re as smart as you. And their opsessive attention to detail makes them good managers. Some of the pest clerks here in the Paper Sook are Zalaptings.”
Indrajit nodded. To Ilsa he asked, “Does Tosh live in the Lord Chamberlain’s palace, then, do you know?”
“His room is directly below the Lord Chamberlain’s,” Ilsa said.
“Is it a nest?” Indrajit frowned. “According to the Epic, Zalaptings are stupid and live in nests.”
“It’s a room,” Ilsa said.
“If we go try to talk to the Zalapting,” Indrajit said, “take him a message, see if he knows anything, definitely not beat him up, what about Ilsa? Is there a place here she can stay?”
“She’ll stay with me,” Holy-Pot said. “I’ll get more joppers for the door.”
“Maybe shut down business for the day?” Fix suggested. “Give us a chance to see if we can find anything else out?”
Holy-Pot nodded, but didn’t promise anything.
Fix sighed. “Back to the Crown it is.”
* * *
Indrajit and Fix bought a couple of bright green cloaks and threw them on, hoods up to cover their faces. With only the brown skin of their arms and legs showing, they looked like fifty thousand other people in Kish, at least.
