by D. J. Butler
The clerk eyed the coin but didn’t touch it. “Tell me more.”
“It’s quite embarrassing, and I hope you can spare me another beating.” A deep purple bruise was showing on Indrajit’s forearm, and he pointed it out.
“I’ll ssssee what I can do.”
Indrajit nodded. “I was entrusted by the Lord Chamberlain to merchant some risk of his—oh, I hope I am using the terms correctly—and I did so. On the Lord Chamberlain’s behalf, I entered into a contract that started yesterday. Only I’ve misplaced my copy of the contract, you see. And I’m not accustomed to the ways of the Paper Sook, and I can’t seem to retrace my steps.”
“You’ve forgotten who you ssssigned the deal with.” The clerk’s fronds trembled.
“Spilkar’s fine print, that’s exactly right.” Indrajit wasn’t totally sure what fine print was, but he thought the words fit. He jerked a thumb at Fix. “And this fellow, who has some knowledge of how the sook works, told me that you might be able to help me.”
The clerk hesitated, eyeing the coin. “Asssuming it was a regisssstered contract of rissssk-merchantry.”
Indrajit shrugged. “Well, I didn’t register it. But the merchant seemed reliable and honest, so I assume she did the things that are supposed to be done.”
The clerk took one of the codices in her hands and began thumbing through its pages. “Would the contract have been in the Lord Chamberlain’ssss name, then?”
Indrajit resisted looking at Fix, and hoped his information and his guess were correct. “I signed it myself, so I assume the entry in your book should say my name.”
“Thinker, did you say?”
“Thinkum Tosh.” If the entry had any significant detail, such as, for instance, Thinkum Tosh—Zalapting, the deception might come to an immediate halt. But that was one purpose of the bribe, to ease the transaction over any such bumps, provided the jostling wasn’t too large.
“Oh yes, here it is.” The clerk swiveled the codex around and pointed it at Indrajit. “Name and address.”
“Ah, yes. Could you, perhaps, write it down?”
“I’ll take you there,” Fix said.
Indrajit nodded. Without his noticing, the Imperial had disappeared.
Indrajit followed Fix out into the sook. Avoiding catching the gaze of any of the men in orange, they threaded their way through the shouters and the paper-wavers and then down a street that turned three times at right angles in quick succession, until Indrajit thought it was tracking back parallel to the sook itself, in an uncobbled, muddy lane bordered with square brick buildings, shoulder to shoulder with only an occasional crack of an alley breaking the monotony, like so many dusty yellow crows waiting for something in the alley to die so they could feed on it.
“Seventeen.” Fix pointed. “The risk-merchant is named Frodilo Choot.”
“Do you know him?”
“Her. You were right, she’s a woman. I recognize the name, but that’s all.”
They knocked on a heavy wooden door, and were quickly admitted. This shop resembled the Registry Clerk’s stall more than Holy-Pot’s place, with a front counter before which stood two stools. The doorman who had let them in was heavily muscled, covered with coruscating purple scales, and appeared to have no eyes whatsoever. After shutting the door, he shuffled into a corner.
A squared-off, broad-shouldered woman swathed in bands of densely tooled, green-dyed leather, stood behind the counter. The tooling looked astrological, and heavy on the moon signs—Bonean, maybe, and the woman’s face, pleasant, slightly yellow, and devoid of any makeup, could be from Boné as well. As they entered, her tongue crept out between her lips and briefly probed the air, as if she were a reptile, sniffing with it. Behind her, strings of beads formed a curtain in a doorway leading into the back half of the building; on the counter in front of her were an ink pot, a pen, and a few sheets of paper, bound together.
“Look,” Indrajit said. “It’s a fascicle.”
Fix chuckled, but Frodilo Choot only smiled.
Her smile was pleasant. Distracted. Unengaged. It didn’t have the piercing quality that Holy-Pot’s did, when he was negotiating a contract or haggling over a fee.
“Is she stoned?” Fix asked.
Choot smiled more broadly and tongued the air again.
“It’s Ilsa,” Indrajit said. “She’s under Ilsa’s spell. Ilsa!”
There was a moment’s hesitation, and then Holy-Pot Diaphernes peered through the beads.
“Oh, thanks pe to Spilkar!”
Chapter Twelve
Holy-Pot emerged from the back room. Behind him, partially revealed as the strings of beads swung back and forth, stood Ilsa without Peer, last of her kind, bizarre of appearance but potent of sound.
And scent. Indrajit checked the sprig of Courting Flower at his throat and looked to see that Fix’s was also in place.
“How are you not dead?” Holy-Pot’s limbs trembled. He had replaced the morning’s black sack with a proper veil and was now properly clothed in a kilt and tunic. “Those joppers.”
Indrajit sighed. “Yeah, sorry.”
“Probably in the pay of Orem Thrush,” Fix said. “At least, that’s what the people in the Paper Sook seemed to think.”
“And we probably tipped Orem off. We went to talk to the Zalapting, Thinkum Tosh, and we got taken right into the presence of the Lord Chamberlain.”
“Was he the one who had you beaten?” Ilsa croaked. “Or was that done by the jobbers in orange?”
Indrajit grinned in what he hoped was a reassuring way, remembering at the last second that he had lost a tooth today. “The meeting with the Lord Chamberlain was preceded by some unconventional preliminaries.”
“He had us beaten,” Fix explained.
“Is there any food?” Indrajit asked. “I’m starving.”
“Frodilo?” Holy-Pot asked. “May we have pread?”
“Of course,” Frodilo Choot murmured. She twisted slowly, then gestured indistinctly toward a space behind the shop.
Diaphernes disappeared into a back room and emerged with a loaf of bread and a chunk of cheese. Fix quickly cut both in half with one of his knives, and he and Indrajit wolfed the food down.
“Orem Thrush had you peaten,” Holy-Pot said. “Put not killed.”
“I need to leave town,” Ilsa croaked.
“All things considered, that sounds like a terrific idea,” Indrajit said.
“May I suggest a boat?” Fix added. “We’re close to the docks; we can easily buy out some fisherman’s rig, and Indrajit actually knows how boats work. Unlike horses.”
“Agreed.” Ilsa sang, and the contrast with her speaking voice sent tremors up and down Indrajit’s spine. “But I need to get something from the palace first.”
“Uh.” Indrajit ground his eyes with the heels of his hands, feeling exhausted. “I hope you don’t mean the Lord Chamberlain’s palace.”
“The Palace of Shadow and Joy.”
“Oh, good. That suggestion is only moderately insane, as opposed to suicidal.”
Ilsa shot Indrajit a look so poignant, he lowered his head in shame.
“Really, Ilsa,” Holy-Pot said, “is there anything you can’t do without? I mean, you have money, and you know I’ll pay to…keep you alive, too. Let’s get you passage to Pelth or Poné and just replace whatever you leave pehind when you get there.”
“There are things in the Palace of Shadow and Joy that I cannot replace,” Ilsa sang. “Not in Pelth, not in Boné, not anywhere in the whole wide world.” She looked into Holy-Pot’s eyes and her nictitating membranes fluttered.
Holy-Pot met her gaze briefly, then looked away. “Yes,” he agreed. “We need to take her to the Palace of Shadow and Joy.”
Indrajit checked the risk-merchant’s veil to be certain there was still a sprig of the Courting Flower pinned to it. There was. So Holy-Pot’s mind wasn’t being bent by Ilsa’s weird power, he was just…persuaded.
By what?
Som
e confidence existed between Ilsa and Holy-Pot. What had they talked about, while Indrajit and Fix had visited the Lord Chamberlain?
“As dangerous as it is for me and Indrajit out there,” Fix said, “it’s more dangerous for you. Indrajit’s already proven he can talk his way into the opera house without trouble. Why don’t you tell us what it is you need, and we’ll go collect it?”
Ilsa shook her head vehemently, a motion which surprised Indrajit, since he hadn’t realized she had a neck. Holy-Pot, more hesitantly, also shook his head.
“Well, Diaphernes,” Indrajit said, “you at least should stay here. No sense attracting any more attention than we need to.”
Holy-Pot again shook his head.
“How did you get out of your shop, anyway?” Fix asked. “It looked completely demolished.”
“It did?” Holy-Pot looked surprised at the news, but not outraged. “Well, I had a pack way.”
“A secret door through the blacksmith’s?” Fix looked surprised.
“A tunnel.” Holy-Pot sniffed with both noses, his veil lifting enough to reveal a receding chin on the second face before it fluttered back into place. “If you must know. Not that it’s any of your pusiness.”
“You don’t seem as put out as I thought you’d be,” Indrajit said, studying his two-faced employer.
“Apout the place of pusiness?” Holy-Pot shrugged. “That’s not really where my value is stored. I can rent a new office in five minutes’ time.”
“Where is your value stored, then?” Indrajit immediately regretted asking the question, knowing he would either get rebuffed, demonstrating again his insignificance in Holy-Pot’s eyes, or he’d get a baffling mini-lecture on risk-merchantry, which would make Indrajit feel stupid.
In the event, it was the latter.
“In my receivaples, mostly, also represented py the large surplus I’ve accrued on my palance sheet.” Holy-Pot looked down his nose at Indrajit and snorted. “Premiums receivaple and claims receivaple under risk-merchanting arrangements in which I hold the underlying contract.”
“Okay,” Indrajit said.
“And bank deposits,” Fix added.
“Yes, some cash, of course,” Holy-Pot Diaphernes agreed. “Mind you, cash in the form of cash generates a very low return, put of course I have to maintain enough liquidity at all times to meet my payaples when they are due.”
“Naturally,” Fix said.
“Forget I asked,” Indrajit said.
“I didn’t even lose my petty cash.” Holy-Pot reached inside his kilt and produced a sack, shaking it to evoke the jingle of coins. “I grapped that on the way out. And I have a spare copy of all my records at an off-site location, so all I lost was the correspondence from this morning. And it’s pretty likely that even that is just lying on the ground in the wreckage.”
All Indrajit’s bruises stung him at the same moment. “Well, I’m glad to see you’re getting off so lightly.”
“In fact…” Holy-Pot laughed, his voice suddenly light. “I had sold the risk on my own office space, too. So I’ll collect on that and come out ahead.”
Indrajit took a deliberate step backward, so as not to be tempted to punch Holy-Pot in both his faces.
“Tell me about these tunnels,” Fix said. “Can we take them to the Palace of Shadow and Joy?”
Holy-Pot took a sudden step back and straightened his spine. “Oh, that would pe…a pad idea. Propaply not possiple. Put certainly very dangerous.”
“Why?” Fix furrowed his brow. “How far down do your tunnels go? Are we talking about some cellars and maybe sewers of Imperial Kish, or did you escape your shop by crawling all the way down to the Druvash levels?”
“Well…I don’t know for sure. Put Kish is very, very ancient. And the Paper Sook is puilt on top of old levels of occupation, so peneath the sook there are tunnels. And champers, and caverns. Several levels of them. Maype many levels.”
“Yes,” Fix said. “That’s true of the whole city. Kish is the world’s first city.”
Indrajit snorted. “Please. The Epic records the building of Kish, long after mankind had separated into the thousand races. Kish is old, but there were cities before her. Many cities, some of which lasted a thousand years.”
“Fine.” Holy-Pot shrugged. “Put the registered merchants of the Paper Sook—”
“The guild,” Indrajit said, looking at Fix.
“The guild, if you will,” Holy-Pot agreed, “years ago walled off a section of those tunnels peneath the Paper Sook and the surrounding streets. We used to deal with strange disappearances at night, and unnatural noises peneath the floors, and queer peasts tunneling into our cellars. So we walled off the area peneath the Paper Sook as a protective puffer against the larger, wilder lapyrinth peneath the city. And it turned out we could also use that space for…discreet passage from shop to shop, when necessary.”
“Someone patrols this buffer?” Fix asked.
Holy-Pot shrugged. “From time to time. Not constantly.”
“So we could at least get to the edge of the Paper Sook unseen.” Fix nodded his approval.
“But are there exits?” Indrajit asked. “Underground, I mean. Can you leave the sook’s cellar and get into the larger catacombs beneath the city?”
“There are gates,” Holy-Pot admitted. “They are locked.”
“Do you have keys?” Indrajit asked.
“The locks are arcane,” the risk-merchant said.
“Magic,” Fix murmured.
“Yes, I know what arcane means.” Indrajit growled. “But that doesn’t answer the question. Do you have the passwords, or the secret gestures, or whatever we’d need, to get past the gates? If we can get from the Paper Sook to the Palace of Shadow and Joy entirely underground and therefore unseen, I’d say that was ideal.”
“You’re insane,” Holy-Pot said.
“The risk-merchant is right,” Fix added. “Look, say we walked to the northernmost point of the catacombs beneath the Paper Sook and exited there. We’d have, what, a mile as the crow flies to go? Or more? Through unmapped caverns, with who knows what strange races of men or beasts waiting in ambush to eat us?”
“I’m not sure I believe in vast hordes of unknown monsters living beneath Kish.” Indrajit shrugged. “I mean, some monsters. But, you know, even monsters have to eat. So if there’s some beast that eats men, there can’t be all that many of them, or we’d know about it. But you’re probably right. We’d get lost. Let’s call the underground route our backup plan, then.”
“It can only pe our desperation plan,” Holy-Pot grunted.
“So we take the sook’s tunnels as far as we can, then we get out and walk.” Fix nodded. “I wish we had a little more disguise than that, but with luck, we’ll be fine.”
Indrajit grinned. “I know where we can get a bit of disguise.”
Fix waited for more explanation.
“How many of those orange-tunicked jobbers did you see?” Indrajit asked him.
“A dozen, maybe more.”
“A big jobber company, right? And were they all Zalaptings, or Ildarian?”
“It was a mixed company.” Suddenly Fix smiled. “You know, if you’re a jobber in an orange tunic, looking for a runaway risk-merchant, the one person you don’t look twice at—”
“—is another jobber in an orange tunic.”
“Stay here,” Fix said to Holy-Pot Diaphernes.
Frodilo Choot continued to smile, as if sunk deep into a yip-induced trance.
Indrajit and Fix emerged into the warren around the Paper Sook, and in short order found two of the jobbers in orange. They were swarthy Yuchak tribesmen, an unusual race to see working jobs in Kish, and they seemed to be searching the sook by sense of smell, stooped and snuffling at the ground from time to time.
Indrajit smiled at the Yuchak and passed them, taking a good hard look at the glyph on their tunics. Then it was a short walk to a cloth-merchant Indrajit knew on the Crooked Mile, where a few small coins purc
hased orange cloth. At a bookstand nearby, they acquired a bottle of black ink, and then they hid in an alley and fashioned two rough tunics of the orange material, with an imitation of the jobbers’ glyph inked onto the front.
Fix dropped the empty ink bottle and the surplus scraps of orange cloth down the seat-hole of a cramped latrine in the alley corner.
Indrajit stuffed both orange tunics inside his own tunic to conceal them, and looked down the hole of the latrine. “I guess while we’re down there, we should avoid walking beneath any shaft of light.”
Fix shuddered. “That’s why I never use latrines. You just don’t know what’s beneath you. It doesn’t have to be man-eating beasts; I don’t want some risk-merchant out for a stroll looking at my nethers, either.”
“So, what? You just use the ground?”
Fix nodded. “Rain takes it out to sea in time.”
“You’re the reason Kish smells so bad.”
“Kish smells bad for all sorts of reasons. My tiny contribution goes unnoticed, and gets washed away on a regular basis.”
They returned to Frodilo Choot’s office, and Holy-Pot and Ilsa each donned one of the improvised orange tunics, Ilsa putting it on over her black cloak. Then, with Choot waving a torpid goodbye, they lit two oil lamps and descended.
They accessed the catacombs by walking down stairs at the back of Choot’s shop, stairs that ended in a heavy door. This was, if anything, even heavier than the door that opened onto the street, and it had a lock as well as two iron bars. On the other side, the lamps of Choot’s basement revealed an unsteady and irregular world of ragged brick columns, putrid streams trickling across time-eaten cobblestones, and walls thick with multicolored lichens.
They took lamps with them.
Something, Indrajit would have sworn, scurried away into the darkness as he stepped out of Choot’s building. Something at least as long as Indrajit’s arm, with a white tail and many legs.
Holy-Pot shut the door. “When Frodilo recovers herself,” he asked Ilsa, “will she realize that she has to come down here and lock the door?”
