CHAPTER 1
“Watch your step,” Fix said. “Some of the tiles are loose.”
In the darkness, Indrajit’s partner Fix, and the sole member of their jobber company who was not a partner, the dog-headed Kyone Munahim, both appeared as inky blotches. The blotch that was Munahim had two black antennae: the hilt of his long sword and the end of his long bow, both of which he carried bracketed to his back. Fix’s melodic tenor voice sounded even more feminine when Indrajit couldn’t see his stocky, broad-shouldered body.
“I noticed,” Indrajit said. The tiles were of baked red clay and the rooftop was four stories above the street. Cool moisture from the sea drifted past on the night breeze. The three members of the jobber company called the Protagonists had come here by climbing an equally tall building two blocks away, endowed with trellises and a climbable exterior. Then they had carefully threaded their way over rooftops, jumping two alleyways. “And I would be very sad to have to sing the epic formulas of my own death by falling.”
“You would be dead.” Munahim’s voice was a baritone rumble. “You wouldn’t sing anything.”
“Then I would be sad, as a ghost, to hear my successor Recital Thane of the Blaatshi Epic sing of my death.”
“You have no successor,” Fix said. “That’s why you came to Kish in the first place. To look for an apprentice. If you fall, it’s the end.”
Indrajit ground his teeth. “And you both completely lack poetry in your souls, which is why I am still looking.”
“True,” Munahim said.
Kish lay spread beneath them, a constellation of torches and oil lamps that stretched uphill and over one city wall into the Crown, the quarter holding the decadent old capital’s principal temples, its biggest banks, its greenest parks, the palaces of its great families, and its wealthiest institutions, such as the Hall of Guesses and the Hall of Charters. The Spike, the knob of rock at the peak where the five temples of Kish’s ragged mixed pantheon crouched, was brilliant with light. About and below them, the quarter called the Lee spread out in thicker gloom, drifting out to other city walls to the south, east, and west, and beyond them the great flat trading ground called the Caravanserai. Beyond the Caravanserai and unseen lay the Necropolis, once part of an ancient layer of the city, but now home to the mostly silent dead—the dead and those that ate the dead, including Ghouls. The Lee was home to more popular institutions, such as the Racetrack, and families that were well off but not fabulously wealthy, and businesses that didn’t need immediate access to the caravan roads or the sea.
Including this building, which was the home of a wholesaler of beans named Eion Osiah. The building vibrated with the sound of the party that rattled within its lower floors; the sounds of drums and flutes wafted up from open windows. Indrajit crouched close to a chimney, its heat warding off the chill of the evening.
“The line is secure,” Munahim said.
The Kyone threw the unanchored end of the rope over the edge of the roof. The line made a slithering sound against the tiles as it bounced into place.
“I have the bag,” Fix announced. “I’ll go first.”
He was simply repeating their previously agreed plan, but in the shadows of the rooftop, maybe being explicit was a good idea. Indrajit steadied himself against the chimney and waited. Fix appeared briefly at the edge of the rooftop, rope wrapped around his waist, yellow light from below limning his muscular frame, his chiseled face with its oversized, beak-like nose, and his short, black, bowl-shaped hair, and then he dropped out of sight.
“I could go instead of you,” Munahim suggested. “If you prefer.”
“You’re so very good at being our backup,” Indrajit said.
“You tell me that a lot.”
“It’s your bow,” Indrajit said. “You can intervene to protect us in a fight from far away. And, of course, with that big sword, you can also jump into a brawl. I just have my blade, Vacho. And Fix has all his knives and his hatchet and sometimes a spear or a falchion, but even if he were to throw them, he couldn’t throw very far.”
“He could throw a spear.”
“Not as far as you can shoot. And also, you’re a natural tracker.”
“I have a good sense
of smell,” Munahim admitted.
“So even if we end up in a chase, or going down under the city or something, you can follow us.”
“I can’t smell my way down a rope,” Munahim said. “Or through a crowded ballroom. For that matter, I can’t shoot my bow down through three stories of building.”
Indrajit patted Munahim on the shoulder. Like Indrajit himself, Munahim was tall, with long muscles. They were lean and rangy, where Fix was blocky and powerful. “You’ll do your best.”
“I just want to help the pack.” Munahim’s voice had a faint whine in it.
“Company,” Indrajit suggested. “‘Pack’ doesn’t sound quite right.”
Fix’s whistle warbled up to the rooftop over a twittering of flutes.
“You’re the bosses,” Munahim said, surrendering.
“And you’re a very fine jobber, and we’re lucky to have you in the company. Remember the sign that we need backup?”
“Supposedly it’s a whistle,” Munahim said. “But my experience suggests that it’s more likely to be screaming, yelling, and the clashing of swords.”
“Good boy,” Indrajit said.
He gripped the rope with both hands, wrapped it around his hips, and lowered himself down the side of the building.
Like many of the fortified homes of the wealthy in the Crown and Lee, Osiah’s palace had no windows on the first or the second floor. On its third and fourth stories it had windows and even balconies, but their height off the ground deterred casual breaking and entering. Second-story men had to become third-story men, which required climbing equipment, extra-tall ladders, or descent from the rooftop.
He landed on the balcony beside a bead-filled doorway. The light bleeding through the beads was dim. Fix stood across the doorway from him, already wearing his toga over his kilt and tunic. Since the short Kishi hadn’t removed the falchion, ax, or knives from his belt, or the empty bag hanging from his shoulder, he looked bulky around the waist, but the toga-wearing class of Kish tended toward plumpness, anyway. Fix handed Indrajit the second toga and Indrajit wrapped it around himself, over his own tunic and kilt, taking care that his leaf-bladed sword Vacho was thoroughly covered, but accessible.
The togas weren’t really disguises. For one thing, even in a city that swarmed with all thousand races of man, Indrajit was distinctive. He was Blaatshi, with a long, bony nose, a subtle crest on his head, and eyes quite far apart. Also, the merchants of the Paper Sook—the market in Kish where companies themselves were bought and sold, along with currencies, commodities, risk, and other, even stranger and more abstract, investments—knew Indrajit and Fix. They were the Protagonists, a small jobber company that worked for Orem Thrush, the Lord Chamberlain. The Lord Chamberlain had the contract for overseeing the Paper Sook, and Indrajit and Fix spent a significant amount of their time investigating crimes among
those traders. To the men and women dancing and drinking below, their faces were known, and not necessarily welcome.
But a toga might suggest that Indrajit and Fix had been invited, to other guests and especially to staff. And a merchant who had drunk enough might not notice their faces at all, and just see two more in a sea of togas.
If anyone looked, their worn sandals would give them away.
“She won’t be down on the lower floors,” Fix said, his voice low. “She’ll be kept out of sight.”
“She’ll be under lock and key,” Indrajit whispered. They had both said these things many times before; they were reminding each other.
Tonight, they weren’t investigating a crime of risk-merchantry fraud or insider trading, much to Indrajit’s relief. They were rescuing a princess.
Well, not really a princess. But a dancer named Sanara Chee, who was favored by the Lord Stargazer, Bolo Bit Sodani. The Lord Stargazer was, like the Lord Chamberlain, one of the seven Lords of Kish, heads of the city’s great families, fortunate acceders into the Auction House and its many blessings, and rulers of Kish, at least by day. The Protagonists worked mostly, though not exclusively, for the Lord Chamberlain, and tonight they worked for Sodani. He had hired them because Sanara’s clientele tended to be merchants of the Paper Sook. Three days of knocking on many doors and a few heads had led them to an assistant cook of the household of Eion Osiah, who could be bribed into admitting that the dancer in question was a prisoner in his master’s house, though he couldn’t be bribed into letting Indrajit and Fix into the building.
Indrajit didn’t enjoy trying to puzzle his way through the strange language and stranger ideas of the Paper Sook merchants, and he liked feeling like a hero. Fix also had a fondness for rescuing women in difficulty; he was a warrior in unrequited love himself. As a young initiate, a Trivial, of Salish-Bozar the White, he’d fallen in love. He’d left the ashrama to try to win the woman’s love, but had lost out to some merchant.
Indrajit pressed an eye to the bead curtain and pulled two strings aside. He saw small beds. “I think this is a nursery.”
Fix slipped through the curtain and Indrajit followed. The room was a rectangle three times longer on one side than the other and was full of beds, only three or four cubits in length. Heaps of embers in fireplaces set into the two narrow walls warmed the room, and the bed occupants were covered with wool blankets.
Little red heads peeped out from beneath the coverings. Not red hair, red heads. Eion Osiah was of a race of man called the Haduri, who had skin the color of boiled lobsters and knobby horns on their heads.
“That’s a lot of children,” Fix murmured. “Maybe Osiah wants Chee because he has a harem.”
“I don’t know that a harem is much different from having a mistress,” Indrajit said.
Fix shrugged.
“I don’t care why he wants her,” Indrajit said. “I’m here to rescue the princess.”
“Yes, and if we have to negotiate to get the princess, it might be helpful to understand why Osiah wants her.”
“There’s an epithet about the Haduri,” Indrajit said.
“What is it?” Fix asked.
“I’m trying to remember,” Indrajit said. “It’s one of the really obscure ones, in an optional side story.”
Fix grunted and passed through the room, into the hallway beyond. The building was rectangular, and the hallway, lit by oil lamps resting in mirrored niches every few paces, paralleled the outer walls. Indrajit and Fix crept down the carpeted hall, opening doors on the left and right to peer within. Indrajit saw a bedroom, a sitting room, a library, and then a blank stretch of wall before the next door. But that door opened to a bath.
“Fix,” he whispered. “Secret room?”
Fix looked where Indrajit pointed him, and agreed there was space unaccounted for. They took a lamp from the hallway into the bathroom and probed the tiles, but found no hidden passages. The music from below echoed loudly in the bath, which made Indrajit feel as if he were being loud, and he caught himself holding his breath twice.
They carried out a similar search in the library. With distaste, Indrajit pulled at books and bookcases and tried manipulating the torch brackets, but they found nothing.
“A secret room could be accessible from below,” Indrajit pointed out.
Fix nodded, his hawklike nose enormous and his brown skin ruddy in the lamplight. “But this is the most private floor, so an entrance is most likely to stay hidden up here. Let’s not give up yet.”
“What about the back, then?”
They followed the hallway around to the other side of the floor, ignoring the doors they passed. At the narrow end of the building, a staircase spiraled down. On the far side, where Indrajit judged they were opposite the blank stretch of wall, a door opened into an office. They let themselves in.
The office wasn’t deep enough to reach the opposite hall, and it was also wide enough that surely, if there was a secret room, it had to be adjacent to this one. Indrajit closed the door behind them. The door had both a lock and a bar. Indrajit pointed them out.
“Private office.” Fix turned the lock but left the bar alone.
They stood on a square of carpet and looked around. Two reclining couches lay beside a low table at the right end of the room. Two tables heavy with documents dominated the center of the room, and a desk occupied the left. Around the desk stood shelves stacked
with scrolls and parchments, and on the back wall, opposite the door, hung a painting. It ran nearly floor to ceiling, and showed a Haduri man and woman, both wearing togas and smiling.
“Eion Osiah.” Indrajit set their lamp on one of the tables.
“And his wife?” Fix suggested. “One of the wives of his harem?”
“I know where I would hide a secret door.” Indrajit stepped forward and grabbed the heavy wooden frame of the painting. For a moment he feared he was pulling it forward and it would fall on top of him, but his intuition proved correct. The frame was hinged along one side, and the entire painting, frame and all, swung outward like a door.
Behind, beyond a narrow entrance, waited the secret room. On the floor lay the dancer Sanara Chee. She was bright yellow, with four eyes set in a rectangular pattern deep into her face, and a long, forked tail. She wore a green garment that was so tattered and torn that Indrajit wasn’t sure what article of clothing it had once been. A shackle on her ankle was attached by a short chain to an anchor in the wall, and two more shackles pinned her hands. A bottle of water stood beside her. A gag ran through her mouth.
Her four eyes all snapped open and she stared at them.
“Frozen hells,” Indrajit muttered.
“We’re here to rescue you,” Fix said softly. “I’m going to remove the gag and we’ll get you out of that shackle, but we need you to keep your voice to a whisper.”
Chee nodded.
“Find the key,” Fix said.
Indrajit searched the desk and its several drawers, finding loose coins, wax seals, an inkpot and quills and a ruling stick, a small pen knife, a wad of gum, and two ledger books, but no key. He checked the desk for secret drawers and found nothing. From the secret room, he heard the soft sobbing of Sanara Chee as Fix removed the gag from her mouth.
Then he heard laughter at the door. A woman’s voice.
“Shh,” a man shushed her.
Indrajit slipped out from behind the desk, gripping Vacho’s hilt inside his toga just to reassure himself that it was there.
A key scraped in the lock.
“Get in here!” Fix hissed.
Indrajit snatched up the lamp and sprang through the entrance into the secret room. He pulled the painting-door shut behind him, feeling it press snugly against the wall just as he heard the creak of the office door’s hinges.
Fix snuffed out the lamp.
“Shh,” he whispered. Probably to Indrajit and the dancer both.
They pressed themselves to either side of the painting.
Whoever entered the office carried a lamp, and its light bled through the painting in patches. Indrajit turned to look and could make out Sanara Chee, crouching against the wall with a look of deep uncertainty on her face. Fix leaned toward the painting, cocking an ear toward the office and scowling.
“We must
indulge in silent pleasures, my dear,” the man’s voice murmured. Indrajit recognized it; he and Fix looked at each other and nodded grimly. Eion Osiah. “My wife will not object, but your husband most certainly would, and the drummers can only play so loud.”
The unseen woman laughed again. Her voice was musical, her laughter lilting.
Indrajit saw Fix stiffen.
“What is it?” he mouthed, barely vocalizing the words.
Fix said nothing, but his lips were twisted into a snarl.
Indrajit heard the lock being turned again, and then the bar being settled into place.
“Where shall I have my way with you, my tasty one?” Osiah moaned. “The desk? The table? The carpet? But we need not be imaginative, there are the couches.”
“Who says I shall not have my way with you?” the woman purred.
Fix hurled the painting-door open and leaped through it.
“What?” Indrajit grabbed Vacho and struggled to draw it; the hilt was caught in his toga.
Eion Osiah spun about. He was short and sinewy, with long, pointed teeth, and he wore a vermilion-colored toga with indigo trim. A dagger jumped into his hand and he shoved his companion between himself and Fix.
She was taller than either of the men. She had a coppery red-brown complexion reminiscent of Fix’s, and a willowy frame that was graceful rather than voluptuous, but her lips were full and her smile was seductive. She trained that smile on Fix, and then her eyes opened wide.
“Who are you?”
Osiah demanded. “Wait . . . I know you.”
Indrajit had a sinking feeling they’d be running for their lives at any moment. He grabbed Sanara Chee’s chain and tried to yank it from the wall. It wouldn’t budge.
“I know you, you filthy worm,” Fix growled. “I know your evil.”
“It isn’t my evil.” Osiah was trembling. “It’s the way of my race. It’s what we do.”
“Womb-hungry Hadur,” Indrajit recited, remembering the obscure epithet. “From others, always stealing.” He left Chee in the secret room and Vacho in its sheath, but stood behind Fix, ready to act.
“We have to,” Osiah said. “The other races of man are always trying to kill us. We have to reproduce in large numbers.”
“Perhaps they’re always trying to kill you because you act as if all women belong to you.” Fix’s voice was strained, as if he were trying to swallow a whole tamarind pod while speaking. His body was taut and trembling.
Indrajit had never seen Fix like this. Usually, his partner was calm and mild, until the moment when mayhem was necessary, and then he was brutal and direct.
What was bothering Fix?
“Hello, Fix,” the woman said. “Are you disappointed in me?”
“It’s not my business,” Fix muttered.
“You’re acting like it’s your business.” She smiled.
“You know him, Alea?” Osiah demanded.
“We’re old friends,” she said.
Fix emitted a strangled groan.
“I know you,” Osiah said again. “Both of you. You’re the Lord Chamberlain’s men. The Portolans.”
“The Protagonists,” Indrajit said.
Alea. Was this the woman Fix had left the ashrama for? The woman who had married another man, and for whom Fix was still trying to make his fortune, so he could impress her? She was beautiful enough, but . . .
Indrajit felt disappointed.
“Alea.” Indrajit stepped forward, taking his hand from Vacho’s hilt and spreading his arms to show his harmless intentions. “We’re not here for you. But we’re going to take Sanara Chee with us now.”
Alea looked past Indrajit into the secret room. Her face twisted into petulant fury and she turned to slap Osiah.
Osiah plunged the dagger into her belly.
She dropped to the carpet.
With a wordless howl, Fix headbutted the bean merchant. Osiah dropped his dagger and banged against the wall, and then Fix had his ax out of its loop on his belt, and raised overhead, ready to strike.
Chapter Two
“Wait!” Indrajit grabbed Fix by the wrist.
Fix pressed Osiah against the wall of his study with a hand on the red man’s throat. Osiah was choking for air and Indrajit struggled mightily to prevent his cracking the bean merchant’s head open with his ax.
“What for?” Fix grunted.
“Look to Alea!” Indrajit gasped.
Fix spun instantly, sliding out of Indrajit’s grasp. Osiah grabbed for the lock to let himself out, and Indrajit hurled him to the floor and sat on him. Alea lay in a pool of blood and she wasn’t breathing. Fix gathered her up in his arms and burst into tears.
Two floors down, stringed instruments joined the drums and flutes in a frenzied Xiba’albi dance.
“You invaded my home!” Osiah groaned.
“Shut up,” Indrajit said, “or I will kill you.”
“Don’t leave me here,” Sanara Chee pleaded.
“We won’t,” Indrajit assured her.
Fix stood. “He dies. He’s a kidnapper and a rapist and a murderer.”
“All true,” Indrajit said. “But we need him to unlock the dancer.”
Fix dropped to one knee over the bean merchant and raised his ax again. “Where’s the key?”
“I don’t have it.”
“It’s inside his belt,” Chee said. “It’s just one key for all three locks.”
Fix ripped Osiah’s toga away, revealing short pants and a soft leather belt. He tore the belt roughly from Osiah’s body, nearly knocking Indrajit over. Inside the belt, he found several keys on a thin ring. With a moment’s trial and error, he unlocked the shackles at the dancer’s ankle and wrists.
She promptly kicked Eion Osiah in the head and then spat on him.
“We can’t leave him.” Fix trembled. Was it with rage? He still held his ax.
“Of course we can.” Indrajit stood and dragged Osiah up with him. The red man squirmed, but Indrajit was much stronger, and held his prisoner off the floor, feet dangling. He carried Osiah through the painting-door, knocked him once against the wall to stun him, and then shackled him into place. Osiah resisted, but Indrajit tied the gag into place in his mouth, as well.
Chee spat on Osiah again.
“They’ll find him,” Fix said.
“Maybe.” Indrajit shrugged. “But it won’t be until after we’re gone. And if they don’t find him . . . well, justice is done.”
Fix took a deep breath, then nodded.
“We need to take Alea with us,” Indrajit said.
“We’ll wrap her in our togas.”
The blood, fortunately, was all on the carpet. The two men wrapped Alea’s body in the toga sheets, knotting them together, and then tossed the bloody carpet into the secret room. The brick floor of the office was unmarked.
Fix set the manacle keys on the floor in the secret room, out of Osiah’s reach. He shut the painting-door and Indrajit slung the sheet-wrapped corpse over his shoulder.
“Can you climb?” he asked Chee.
“Show me an open window,” she said. “I’ll jump.”
“I admire your sense of the dramatic,” he said. “But we’ll help you climb.”
They took both lights with them, replacing the one they had taken from the mirrored niche and leaving the other on the balcony by which they exited. The music continued below and the red-headed children all slept soundly.
Indrajit tied the rope around Sanara Chee and called softly. From the rooftop, Munahim hauled on the line and helped the dancer up the wall.
Indrajit nodded through the bead curtain toward the sleeping children. “Who are their mothers, do you think?”
Fix stared into space, his eyes narrow.
“Fix? I said, who do you think are their mothers?”
“We have to help her,” Fix said.
“Sanara Chee? We’ll take her to Bolo Bit Sodani, she can’t get much more help than that, being under the wing of one of the Lords of Kish. And then we get paid, too.”
“Alea.”
Indrajit took a deep breath. “I don’t know quite how to say this, but . . . you aren’t her husband, my friend. She chose another man over you, ...
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