Endgame

by C. J. Cherryh

  "What's a midtowner know?" Raj asked as they eased out onto the water. "What about legacies?"

  "Listen, when you get a Family as old as the Adamis were, you got sort of other Families attached—of servants, spare cousins, you understand, them the Family has to care for, that can't care for themselves—people who've served for generations; hangers-on, old staff— most of 'em unspoken relatives, you understand, even in the lowest of the low in the kitchens; them that'll say and do things no hired servant would dare, because they consider themselves responsible for the Family—part of the Family. The Kamats haven't been around Merovingen long enough to have legacies of their own, but they took on the Adami legacies; and the Adamis—" Kat touched her brow, and took the pole out of the rack.

  "You mean crazies?"

  "Listen, the Adamis birthed no few. And deathangel made the rest. If there are Adami legacies around, they'll know things about this island no Kamat would ever find out."

  "Like where to hide a baby?" Raj asked, grimly.

  "And how to get her out of the nursery without anyone seeing," Kat said by way of reply. "Remember, Raj, we're most likely looking for someone who isn't entirely bow t' th' wind, but it's also probably someone too careful to give 'erself away by skipping work. Lord only knows why they took the baby—"

  Raj felt a finger of ice trace the line of his spine. "You don't—you don't think they'd hurt her, do you?"

  To his relief, Kat shook her head. "No, I don't think so. We Bolados have legacies of our own. A few of them are crazy as any swampie, but they wouldn't harm anyone on purpose."

  "Which leaves by accident." His heart sank again. "Ancestors. If the baby starts fussing again, wakes up and starts crying—Lord, they can't feed her. . . ."

  "We don't know that. And that crying's the only place we're lucky. If it is some legacy that has her, they've been sheltered in Kamat all their lives—they won't know the canaler tricks that could hurt a baby, like a dose of whiskey and sugar, or bindroot straight on. They'll just do what Morgan did; exactly the kind of things Morgan did. . . ."

  "Which means she'll cry herself into a fit again," Raj said. "Let's put the word out, get folk all over Kamat Isle and 'round about, listening for a crying baby!"

  It took every last bit of his set-aside, and he wished to the Ancestors he had Altair Jones and her karma with Moghi and the Trade, if it came to the convolute underside of Merovingen-below, but Raj had Kamat and the several Isles around covered and surrounded by forces more slithery and less forceful than the blacklegs that poked and pried into corners: every roof-climbing rascal friend of Denny's he thought marginally trustworthy, and every Kamat runner he could recruit, and a couple of the workers' and servants' kids he knew well enough to trust—all bribed and sent to standing in odd corners or perching on the walkways till the blacklegs moved them on, and then circle about to perch elsewhere close: while Kamat called in political favors and dreaded what this all might portend, Raj and Kat and their motley army patrolled the length and breadth of Kamat Isle by water and by bridge, by rooftop and by the tangled undersides of wooden walkways.

  Raj and Kat tied up below Kamat East's Bluewater Bridge and slipped along the half-flooded waterside, following yet another youngster who'd heard the wail of an infant. Though sunset couldn't be far off, neither of them had eaten or rested since putting this plan in motion. The turmoil had communicated itself to the tenants on the Isle, and there was no shortage of crying babies. This was where Kat proved her worth: blacklegs and blueshirts might have barged in and demanded to see the infant in question; Kat just politely rapped on doors, presented herself to the woman of the house, and gossiped what little news there was in the search, while Raj stayed in the background but kept a sharp ear for his newborn daughter's particular wail.

  Kat's easy speech and calmness quieted fears the blackleg searchers roused; her plain clothing, bare feet and canaler's breeches conveyed no particular class, and no threat; Raj's looks and hightown dress were distinctive enough to lend him immediate credence as Kamat's contract husband—his strained and anxious face enough to win him sympathy from every female and most of the males. Here was the baby's young father, shunted aside from the police and the in-laws, but nevertheless trying to do something.

  This time was no different from the rest. The young mother in Kamat's East underside showed no sign of alarm at their presence, and no nervousness, and the thin wail that emerged from a half-barrel in the corner that served as a cradle was nothing like the youngest Kamat's outraged bellow: the thin child taken from its bed couldn't have been more unlike his daughter's pink-and-white perfection. Raj leaned wearily against the woman's doorpost, while Kat fished verbally for information, using gossip gathered in a dozen other similar encounters as bait.

  The rumor-fishing wasn't particularly good; Kat waved him on, and he bade the young woman a civil good evening and made his exit, hoping it didn't look as hasty as it was. Living like a hightowner has got me spoiled, he reflected, as he breathed in careful, shallow breaths, trying to avoid inhaling as much of the stench of rotting tangle-lilies as he could. Time was I wouldn't have noticed the stink. Time was, that little apartment wouldn't have made me feel like I was about to smother. The old place Denny and I had wasn't any bigger—might have been smaller, I disremember. Could I go back to that now, if I had to?

  He looked back over his shoulder at the apartment door, both shadowed by scaffolding and lit by pole-lamps on the walkways above; mere inches above the waterline, likely to flood, and always damp and crowded. He thought about all he'd been through until now—and decided that maybe it wasn't that bad after all.

  I could do it. Beats not being alive, that's for sure. I could even go back to the swamp if it came down to it.

  "Hey!" called a high voice from above them. "Raj!"

  Raj looked up. Crouched on a rickety walkway stair that should have been condemned was a girl clad in cast-off clothing four sizes too big for her, short hair standing up in spiky points from the damp; she twisted her head sideways so that her cat-green eyes and high cheekbones caught the feeble light, and he recognized her immediately. This unmanageable, willful adolescent, pretty as a feral kitten and as wild, was one of Denny's smarter young friends from the bridges. She went where she pleased and did what she willed—and today it had pleased her to accept Raj's coin and go baby-hunting for him.

  But once she made her bargains, she was as trustworthy as Jones and nearly as wily.

  "Lady-o," he called. "You got something?"

  "Maybe," she said cautiously, her voice just above a whisper. She shifted again, bringing her face back into the shadows. The sky above was blood-red with the dying sun, but down here on canalside it was full night, except the lamps above. "Yey, maybe," Lady-o repeated. "A light where there shouldn't be none, an' a baby cryin' where ain't never been one afore."

  "Where?" Raj and Kat exclaimed simultaneously.

  The child-woman jerked her pointed chin sharply upwards. "Above. Just by old Foundry-Kamat bridge. The Kamat bridge-house."

  "The bridge-house?" Raj bit off what he had almost blurted out—that it was impossible, that no one could get to the old bridge-house that had once guarded the Kamat side of the hightown Kamat Foundry bridge. Lady-o would take offense at doubt—Lady-o took offense very easily, and let no man, woman, or child call her a liar. But right now Raj needed her, needed her climbing expertise very badly. Lady-o could climb like the cat she resembled—she frequently had no other choice, being too small to defend herself from bullies and blacklegs. If anyone could find a way up there, Lady-o could; Lady-o would have to, for the old Kamat-Foundry bridge had collapsed from the Foundry side in the last major quake, and had never been rebuilt. The stair leading up to it had disintegrated in the aftershocks and was never replaced, in favor of two new, open-air bridges. The old bridge-house, a small, round, two-room shelter meant to house bridge-guards, had been abandoned to the elements when the stair collapsed. The Kamats held the Isle by then, had other con
cerns than salvaging wood from a perch that precarious, and after the scavengers were through with it there was nothing of value left in the shelter. Not even the bridge-brats use it for shelter, Raj recalled, because everyone knows the floor is rotten. Everyone knows. —And who was the first to spread the story, I wonder?

  Lady-o got up off her stairs and led the way along the flooded margin, and around the corner. She pointed. Raj looked up, and could just see a sliver of the place, black against the darkening sky. The bridge-house remained outwardly intact, a little round turret tacked to Kamat's wall, with a lonely tongue of bridge-timbers sticking out from beneath it. The bridge itself had long since been pulled down from below as a possible hazard to traffic on the canal.

  "You're sure?" Raj asked the child.

  "Sure as flood an' th' Retribution," she answered firmly. "There's a light up there, I seen it. A little light, slimmer'n a canaler's candle, but I seen it. An' by the wailin' there's a baby up there too."

  "Someplace no one can get to," Raj murmured. "A place nobody looks at even when they're looking right at it. It's walled off from inside. And if anyone should hear something—"

  "They'll figure it was a trick of the echoes along here," Kat finished, as Lady-o nodded.

  "Ever'body knows ye go up there, ye fall through th' floor," Lady-o said, in an unconscious echo of Raj's earlier thought. She looked up, following Raj's gaze. "Ye wanta get up there?"

  "Yey," he answered, grimly. "If you can find me finger and toe-holds, Lady-o, I'll be right behind you."

  "Raj," Kat protested, and Lady-o started to snicker, then turned around and got a look at his face. Whatever she saw there must have convinced her; she closed her mouth and nodded. And Kat shut up.

  "Les' think 'bout this a minute," Lady-o said, and studied the face of the building. She pointed, and Raj squinted against the dying light. "Lookee—we got up here, this drainpipe. Then catch that ledge, an' up where they put them scallops on the corner . . . then cross t' that balcony an' up th' support an' we're at th' right floor. An' see that winder, right up 'bove the balcony roof? What you reckon that winder gives on a room or summat what goes t' th' bridge-house? Bet it ain't all walled off."

  Raj traced the way Lady-o had described, ending at the window. It was dark—which meant it might well belong to an unused access, perhaps now relegated to storage.

  Kat stepped back as far as the walkway would allow, and eyed the area of the bridge-house. "I'll see if I can find anybody to listen to me in there, and maybe we can find the entrance to the thing," she said. "Damn sure nobody went climbing up the side of the building in broad daylight with a baby. There has to be a way to the bridge-house from the house itself; maybe one of the Adamis will remember it."

  "And maybe won't," Raj said, thinking how the Adamis might feel more allegiance to their own, how the Adamis might have overheard too much, or have purposes of their own. "If there's a way in, I think it's nothing they've told Kamat. We might not find it—go tell Richard. Not the blacklegs. Richard."

  Kat gave the bridge-house a second, misgiving look. "Raj, be careful."

  "May not be any time for careful." Raj bent to strip his shoes from his feet and leave them for Kat to take with her. "Ye comin'?" Lady-o hissed, and he hurried: Lady-o flitted for the rickety stair, and he was not minded to lose her in the darkness.

  He caught up with her just below the bridge-house. It was a full three stories up from here, and mostly blank wall, except for the windows and decorative balcony Lady-o had pointed out. The Adamis that had built the House had not been minded to have the noxious smokes and grime of Foundry blowing in their windows. And by now it was full dark.

  "Watch," hissed the child. Raj looked sharply up, and saw a furtive flicker, more a glow than a light, in the middle of the dark blot of the bridge-house.

  Someone's put a rag or something across the window—a dark rag, or it'd be noticed by day. But when they go by it with a light, some still leaks through.

  At precisely that moment, a baby cried. A fierce howl of pain, and frustrated anger. It might have come from across the water, from ramshackle apartments on Foundry's failing high story—but Raj knew very well that it had come directly overhead: he knew that cry, knew that baby-voice. It was his baby, his little girl—

  Anger he'd been carrying inside since the abduction exploded into a white rage. He was scrambling up the side of the building, fury carrying him, before Lady-o even realized what he was doing. His hands and feet found crevices and protrusions he couldn't see, and his anger gave him strength he never knew he had— not since he'd clambered pilings at swamp-edge. A moment ago he'd looked up at the climb and wondered how he was going to manage it. Not now—

  He paused for a breath, halfway to the bridge-house, and Lady-o scrambled up beside him. "What're ye gonna do when ye get up there?" she hissed at him. "Ye better think 'f that now, afore ye get yerself in trouble!"

  He wedged himself in the false balcony, and peered upward. Canal-water lapped and gurgled below. The tide was coming in, and wooden Kamat shifted a little and groaned on its pilings. "I'll get in through that window, and see if it really does give out on the bridge-house," he said slowly. "If it does, I get in and get the baby and wait for Kat. If it doesn't, from there I can get on what's left of the walkway. There's a door there—I guess what I'd better do is just bust it down. Then get the baby, and wait for Kat again."

  "What 'f those skits has a gun?" the child asked shrewdly. "Ye go bustin' any door down, ye c'n well get kill't."

  Raj shook his head, though he knew she couldn't see him. He could barely make her out, and she wasn't in the shadows of the false balcony. "Don't think there's going to be a gun. Anybody with enough money for a gun or a reason to even own one would have taken the baby someplace else. Keeping her here is too risky for a sane kidnapper."

  The child shook her head. "Then ye don' think it's Janes or summat? Or mebbe old Cardinal Willy? I thought that was the word."

  "Sometimes the word can be wrong," Raj replied, studying the next leg of the climb as well as he could in the uncertain light from the pole-lamps below. "I'm thinking it's a woman—an Adami woman that wants a baby so bad she'll do anything to get one."

  Lady-o's dark head bobbed then in slow agreement. "Yey, Tree's Mama got like that afore she died. Carried 'round a rag-dolly she said was 'er baby. Kept walkin' off wi' peoples' babbies till they wouldn't leave 'er alone wi' kids. They says it was deathangel got 'er."

  "And there's been enough of it in this town," Raj said sourly. Deathangel. Deathangel never did me a favor but once—

  He found he could no longer clearly remember the assassin that had nearly killed him, out in the swamp, the one who had died himself. It seemed a lifetime ago now. But fear didn't.

  "Let's make for the window," he muttered, and grabbed for the next set of handholds.

  This time he let Lady-o go ahead of him, and paid close attention to where her hands and feet went. She looked like a strange kind of wall-climbing lizard, dark against the gray-weathered wood. He eased along in her wake, getting some minor scrapes on his hands and feet, and ignoring them.

  A couple of timber-ends that might at one time have supported some portion of the bridge gave them a place to perch beside the darkened window. Peering into the shadows of the recess, Raj saw that it was roughly boarded over from the inside. His heart sank, as Lady-o reached out and ran her hand gently along the bottom of the frame.

  "Took out th' glass," she said softly. "Lessee if they was as lazy as I think they was." With that, she flicked her hand to her side and when she brought it up again, a thin blade glittered against the darkness. "Grab m'belt," she said shortly, and hardly waited for Raj to do so before leaning out toward the window.

  She did something with her knife hand, as Raj clung to her belt with one hand and a cracked place on the wall with the other. She was a lot heavier than she looked, and his arms were screaming with pain before she hissed satisfaction and pushed at the window.
r />   The boards swung back. She waved at Raj, tossed her knife inside, and grabbed the ledge with both hands as he let go of her. She swung herself over the sill, dropping into the shadows as silently as a falling feather. He looked longingly at the sill. It was just out of reach; he'd have to go completely off balance and grab for it—and hope.

  The baby cried again, and he lurched for the strip of wood, found himself clinging to the sill with both feet dangling out over nothing. Sweating, he managed to drag himself up and over, and fell heavily to the floor inside.

  The window hadn't been boarded up, after all. The interior had been fitted with wooden shutters held in place with a catch. That was what Lady-o had meant by "lazy"—closing up the old shutters, not even sparing a board and a nail. Or somebody had pilfered the metal. The child had simply flipped the wooden bar up with the blade of her knife, and allowed the shutters to swing open.

  "Ye didn' see that," she hissed out of the darkness. " 'F some knew I got them cat-tricks, they'd be after me t' help 'em B 'n E, an' I ain't lookin't' end up on Hangin' Bridge."

  "I don't blame you," Raj whispered back, and stood up, slowly, letting his eyes adjust to the deeper darkness inside this room. He wished now he'd brought a lantern or something. The tiny room seemed to be empty of all but dust—which was odd, definitely odd.

  Lady-o hissed again. "C'mere—" He fumbled his way as quietly as he could to where she was crouched against the wall, the worn boards were age- and use-smoothed, and still warm under his bare feet.

  Wall? No—it was a door, and she lay with her eye level with the sill. He imitated her, and saw a very faint, furtive gleam of light somewhere beyond it.

  "This's like a hall or somethin'," she breathed into his ear. "Like there was this private entrance t' the bridge, through th' bridge-house. Ev'body else had t' take the walkway an' stairs, but the old Family didn't have t' go outside till they got t' the bridge proper. Figger they closed it up when there weren't no more bridge."