by D. J. Butler
Orem Thrush shrugged. “Yes. And also, the prestige. She was indeed without peer. For me to lose her would be…a blow. My rivals are always acting against me, of course. It is likely they are acting against me now.”
Indrajit struggled to think through the moving parts, many of which were new to him. It was certainly possible that the risk-contract was not what had motivated the attack, but was only coincidental.
“If you didn’t order him to do it, why would Thinkum Tosh sell the risk on the singer?” Fix looked puzzled. “Did he have some interest in her? I mean, a financial interest?”
The Lord Chamberlain shrugged. “Not that I’m aware. Perhaps”—he looked reflective—“perhaps he had information that an attempt was to be made on her life. He told me nothing of it, but then he wouldn’t have told me, if he hoped to profit.”
“Is it possible that Thinkum Tosh was working for one of the other families?” Fix asked. “That you had a traitor in your house?”
Orem Thrush fixed them both with a stare that would have penetrated brick.
Indrajit raised his hands. “Our only interest is to protect Ilsa. That’s how we get paid. We do not want to get into your affairs, unless doing so helps us understand how to protect her.”
“It is possible,” the Lord Chamberlain conceded. “If he was a traitor or a spy, I didn’t know about it.”
“Maybe he was spying for another house, and threatened to confess, and they killed him for it?” It was only a suggestion, but it wasn’t the craziest idea Indrajit had ever had.
“Rank speculation.” Orem Thrush frowned.
“Is there anything else you can tell us…or show us…that might help? Maybe, the manner of his death? Was he poisoned or garroted?”
Orem Thrush smiled. “Or killed in some other lurid fashion characteristic of one of my enemies, or of the House of Knives? Or was he killed by trained venomous snakes, such as Pelthite assassins are said to employ?”
Indrajit shrugged.
Orem Thrush shook his head. “The body is destroyed. Tosh’s throat was cut with his own dagger. We found him yesterday morning on the floor of his room. There was no other sign of violence, and no sign of any forced entry.”
“Are you having anyone look into the death?” Indrajit asked. Kish had no police force as such, but Thrush clearly had the wealth to hire jobbers to investigate a crime against him. A thought occurred to him. “Was that why Grit Wopal was tailing me yesterday?”
“I’ll show you his room.” The Lord Chamberlain stepped through an open doorway. Indrajit and Fix lurched to follow.
Orem Thrush hadn’t answered his question. That seemed like an admission in the affirmative.
The room was ascetic and spare. A cot, a trunk, and a niche in the wall.
The Lord Chamberlain stood against the wall beside the niche. “This is one way I communicate with my majordomo.” He pointed at a hole in the ceiling of the niche. “At night, I drop messages down this shaft to him. He rises—he rose—before me, and attended to those tasks first.”
Orem Thrush’s facial transformation seemed to have come to a rest, or at least to a pause. Indrajit shuddered, looking at the man. He was still recognizably Orem Thrush, the man they’d been speaking to all along. But he also looked like a native-born Blaatshi, wide-set eyes, mahogany-green skin, and all.
“The chest?” Fix pointed.
“Clothing. Feel free to look.”
Indrajit rifled through the chest: tunics and kilts, nothing more.
“Where does that leave us?” Indrajit asked. For his part, he was left with more information, none of which he was certain he could trust, and more questions.
“You’re not going to tell me where Ilsa is, are you?” The Lord Chamberlain said.
Taking a deep breath and preparing to be beaten again, Indrajit shook his head no.
“Then you should leave now,” Orem Thrush said. “You will try to protect Ilsa in your fashion, and I will protect her in mine.”
Chapter Eleven
“We’re being followed, of course,” Fix said.
Indrajit nodded. “We can’t go straight back to Holy-Pot’s. We need to lose our tail.”
“Did you see how he looked at the end?” Fix asked. “He could have been your brother. What race of man is that?”
“It’s not one I know an epithet for.” Indrajit shook his head. Had Orem Thrush deliberately chosen to look like Indrajit? Could he have done the same thing quickly? Was it an instinctual transformation? Did the Lord Chamberlain experience a physical change, or was it pure illusion, magic?
And how many people knew about it?
Perhaps the Lord Chamberlain did, after all, wander the streets of Kish unseen.
Four Eyes had given them their weapons at the door and shown them out, with clouds gathering on the northern horizon. Now the Yifft, Grit Wopal, trailed brazenly a dozen steps behind them. Indrajit and Fix were both limping; Wopal whistled a cheerful tune that Indrajit thought he recognized, though the words eluded him. Something about the wedding of a fisherman and a seamstress.
“I hurt too much to outrun him,” Fix said.
“Punching him in the face is no longer an attractive option,” Indrajit added.
“We could hire horses,” Fix suggested.
“I don’t know how to ride.”
Fix stared. “Really?”
“My people are fishers. On the other hand, I can handle a boat of just about any kind.”
“Oh, good. In that case, let’s jog down to the East Flats and rent a tidy little yacht. We can sail out to the Paper Sultanates, lose him in all those islands, and then sail back.”
“You’re bitter.”
“I just got beaten to the floor, apparently because you punched Wopal.”
Indrajit shrugged. “Thrush would have had us beaten in any case. That was about showing his power, not about punishing me. He as much as said so. He would have found another pretext.”
Fix grumbled wordlessly.
“Still hurt,” Indrajit added.
“Well, let’s find a crowd of people where we can lose the bastard. What do you think, the Racetrack? A nice, crowded game of Street Rûphat?”
“The Caravanserai, I think. Or the Necropolis.”
“They’re both the wrong direction. But if you insist on one of those, the Caravanserai is closer.”
“Good. It’ll throw him off the track.”
They descended through the Lee and out the South Gate, into the Caravanserai. There were crowds here, scattered haphazardly across the flattened ground, clustering into evanescent markets for exotic goods or caravan supplies, knotting up to launch or receive actual caravans, and trembling to announcements of foreign doings and surprise shifts in prices.
There were also tents.
Indrajit stepped into a blacksmith’s tent at one end, crossed it to the protest of two bleary-eyed apprentices, and exited the back, dragging Fix in his wake. Accelerating as much as he could with his battered legs, he ducked into and out of, in quick succession, a leatherworker’s tent, an armorer’s, an oil merchant’s, and a seller of long colored feathers pronounced enthusiastically to be from distant Fasha and Ngharâdu-Isst.
Stepping out of the feather merchant’s shop, he grabbed Fix to be certain he didn’t leave the other man behind and then turned ninety degrees to his left, plunging immediately into the tent of a seller of flavored ices. With snow brought down from Karth and Ukel, and flavor syrups in a dozen varieties, the rotund and pale green merchant was doing a brisk business.
“Free sample?” the merchant called out to the two jobbers.
“Only if it’s large enough to cover my entire body!” Fix’s retort triggered a laugh in response.
Indrajit turned his head slightly, his peripheral vision good enough to be certain that the tent flap behind them shut entirely before their Yifft tail appeared.
“Faster, now,” he murmured to Fix.
Another ninety-degree turn sent them marching str
aight back toward the walls of Kish. Most likely, Grit Wopal would realize what they’d done and come after them. Hopefully, he wouldn’t realize it in time to actually catch them, and they’d have lost him.
Also, hopefully, his third eye didn’t give him any sort of ability to follow them, regardless. Indrajit imagined Wopal seeing through walls with the eye, or seeing visible spoor on the ground where they had passed, like a dog smelled scent, or seeing backward and forward in time to know where they were going.
But no, if the Yifft could do any of those things, they wouldn’t have been able to shake him at the Fountain the night before. The Yifft saw other kinds of visions.
What had he said about Indrajit? A man who was failing at his quest, had lost his way? How could he possibly see anything of the kind?
Even if it were true?
“I think we lost him.” Fix looked over his shoulder as the two jobbers reentered the Lee through the South Gate. “If you don’t know how to ride, we could rent a sedan chair. Get off our feet, move a little faster.”
“If it’s all the same to you, I need to keep the money.”
“It’s not the same to me,” Fix said. “But I’m pleased to see you learning a little financial discipline.”
“It’s not discipline,” Indrajit said. “I’m starving. I almost stopped and ate those feathers, I’m so hungry.”
They climbed the Crown and descended into the Spill, Indrajit muttering every prayer he knew to Spilkar, Lord of Contracts, begging for the power to protect Ilsa without Peer. For good measure, he asked Yispillin, seer of the gods, to blind the Yifft spy Grit Wopal, and anyone else looking for Indrajit and Fix, and to hide their passage from all hostile eyes.
Which was a lot to ask. Kish was full of hostile eyes.
Nothing stays secret in Kish, they said.
As they approached the Paper Sook, Fix jogged his elbow. “What’s that?”
That was a column of smoke, rising from the vicinity of Holy-Pot Diaphernes’s office, and a bustle of activity, including cries for water and yelps of panic.
“Holy-Pot works behind a blacksmith’s shop,” Indrajit said. “An accident?”
They slowed their pace and circled around the risk-merchant’s office, squinting down the alley.
The smithy, and the risk-merchant’s office with it, were gone. Fire had been only part of the cause of destruction; splintered timbers and furniture lying in the alley, smashed and upended, suggested that someone had deliberately destroyed the building. Jobbers in orange tunics hulked in the alley and stalked the Paper Sook, squinting in all directions.
“Any chance those fellows are carrying out the city’s fire prevention contract?” Indrajit murmured.
“I don’t see any buckets of sand or water pumps,” Fix answered. “Do you?”
Rattled and nervous, the Paper Sook nevertheless continued its business. Indrajit and Fix filtered across the square of men shouting and waving papers, and stood behind the corner of a stationer’s shop, looking back toward Holy-Pot’s former premises.
“Coincidence?” Fix asked.
“Frozen hells, no. Who do you think did this?”
“The Lord Chamberlain. As soon as we left, he sent men down here to wreck the place.”
“If we’d come straight here, maybe we could have warned Ilsa. Instead, we spent precious time trying to lose a tail.”
Fix slammed a fist into the wall. “Wopal didn’t care if we lost him or not. He wasn’t really tailing us at all, he just wanted us to delay our return, so this could happen.”
“Frozen hells.”
Fix’s nostrils flared. “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that.”
“About what? About Wopal?”
“Your hells are always frozen. Why is that?”
Indrajit thought about it. “Well, a hell with fire might be okay, I guess. You could fry fish there. But a hell where all the water is frozen is a hell where you can only starve.”
“Huh.” Fix stared up the Paper Sook, squinting in thought. “So the hells in the Epic are all frozen.”
“Yes. What about your hells? Are they fiery?”
“I don’t have any hells. Don’t have any gods, either. The Selfless of Salish-Bozar determined over a century ago that all detail about the afterlife is useless, so there are various adepts who have memorized reams of description of heavens and hells known to every race and cult. I could never bring myself to care much.”
“Not useful enough?”
Fix shrugged. “I’ll do what I need to do in this life. I know how to be a good man, and when I fall short, I can try to do better. I don’t need someone to tell me that if I steal, I’ll have my hands roasted, or if I sleep with my sister, I’ll be forced to eat my own children for all eternity, or if I don’t memorize enough lines of the Epic, I won’t be able to catch fish. That’s for children, or fools.”
“Ouch, that’s a little personal.” The orange-tunicked jobbers were poking their heads into various stalls along the sook and asking questions. “I do like saying frozen hells, though.”
“I’m not stopping you.”
“Also, I’m hungry.”
“We should have bought some of that flavored ice. I don’t think the feathers would agree with your digestion.”
Indrajit nodded at the jobbers in orange. “Those guys are looking for something. I bet it’s Holy-Pot and Ilsa.”
“That suggests that our employer and our charge were not captured in the attack that destroyed the building.”
“Which in turn means we still have the opportunity to complete this contract and earn the second half of our wages.” Indrajit nodded. “Which, at the risk of repeating myself, I could really use.”
“That makes our course of action obvious.”
Indrajit cocked his head to one side. “It does?”
“We go talk to the risk-merchant. The merchant who signed the underlying contract, the agreement whose risk Holy-Pot is only repurchasing.”
“Because that person would be willing to help Holy-Pot, because they both have an interest in keeping Ilsa alive?”
“That’s my thinking. And if not, then perhaps as colleagues, he’ll have some idea where Holy-Pot might go to ground in an emergency. I mean, unless you know some secret address where Holy-Pot might be hiding.”
Indrajit frowned. “No, I don’t. But I don’t know who the risk-merchant is, either. Holy-Pot wouldn’t tell us that. Although I think the risk-merchant is a woman. Didn’t Holy-Pot call her she?”
“Holy-Pot didn’t identify the risk-merchant. But the contract was probably registered.”
Indrajit already had a slippery grasp, at best, on this whole risk-selling concept. Risk reselling was foggier still. Now Fix was suggesting something that sounded like an additional layer of complication. “What are you talking about?”
“The risk-merchants of the Paper Sook are a kind of guild. What’s the basic function of a guild?”
There were no guilds in the Epic. “Uh…to provide training for its members?”
“The basic function of a guild is to limit the number of people practicing a trade, so you can keep prices up. Keep out foreigners and new people, make any one who joins pay their dues.”
Indrajit struggled. “Why…you have to have some people in the trade, don’t you?”
“You have to have some. But too many people, and they compete, and bring down prices. So the guild limits the number of risk-merchants.”
That made a kind of perverse sense. “So they must have a list of all the guild members.”
“Yes, but that won’t help us. How would we know who we’re looking for? But even better than that list is the registry of risk-merchantry contracts. About twenty years ago, the Paper Sook pressed the great families really hard, and got a law passed that the only risk-merchanting contracts that are enforceable in the courts of Kish are those that are written down in the registry. And the rules of the Paper Sook provide that anyone who enters into a risk-merchanting contra
ct that is not registered can no longer buy and sell in the sook.”
Blurred and fog-shrouded though it was, a light began to appear at the end of Indrajit’s mental tunnel. “So Holy-Pot’s risk-reselling contract and the underlying contract should both be written in the registry.”
Fix nodded. “Should be. Including the name of the risk-merchant who entered into the underlying contract.”
“Where is the registry?”
Fix nodded, indicating a stall that the jobbers in orange tunics had already passed. Indrajit took the opportunity to scan the Paper Sook for any sign of Grit Wopal, and saw none.
“You really learned Holy-Pot’s trade well,” Indrajit said.
“I think he was unhappy about that,” Fix said. “He had stopped giving me work for several weeks, before this job came up. But what I don’t know is how to convince the Registry Clerk to show us the information.”
“Oh, that’s easy. That’s just talk!” Indrajit waved a hand in a theatrical flourish. “Show me the clerk!”
The Registry Clerk of the Paper Sook was a woman with a head like an inverted cone, bright yellow skin, and hair that resembled ferns or the branches of an amalaka tree and rustled when she moved. She wore a dark fur wrapped around narrow shoulders and shivered, though the day had become warm. She stood at the back of a stall behind a broad counter on which sat three large codices; on shelves behind her stood more stacks of books.
“My name is Thinkum Tosh,” Indrajit said, resisting the urge to wink at Fix.
“Yessss?” The yellow Registry Clerk turned out to have two forked tongues.
“I’m a servant of the Lord Chamberlain, Orem Thrush. He bids me thank you for your trouble.” Indrajit put the last of his full coins, a recently minted Imperial with its milled edges whole and toothy, onto the table in front of the woman. It was a bribe if the clerk wanted to take it as one, and a tip otherwise.
The clerk tilted her head to one side to look out into the sook. Indrajit turned his head just slightly, enough to see that a man in an orange tunic was passing by. “Many of the Lord Chamberlain’s sssservants are in the ssssook today.”
Indrajit waved dismissively. “Jobbers. Muscle, for a simple task. I am here because I’m entrusted by my master with more serious, complicated transactions. Such as merchanting his risk.”
