Chapter Seventeen
Heron had arranged for us to take rooms at an inn named the Angel’s Shadow, which made me smile despite myself. The place was put together well enough, with well-aired rooms, mostly fresh linens, a common room that smelled of mutton and wood smoke and thyme, and a small courtyard that Tobin immediately appropriated for the troupe’s rehearsals—a situation, it turned out, Heron had arranged for in advance.
I checked my room—small bed, small window, small hole in the wall I stuffed with candle wax and lint to defeat prying ears or eyes—dropped my bedroll and bag on the floor, and kicked the door shut. Then I undid my doublet.
I ran a questing hand first over the outside, then across the inner lining. Aside from the slightest change in stiffness, there was no hint that Fowler and I had now twice opened up the doublet and fit the three small letters and the larger envelope that had made up Jelem’s packet among the garment’s padding. It hadn’t been an easy job the second time around—whoever had brushed the doublet had also noticed the hasty stitching Fowler had done after removing the papers and decided to repair the job proper—but we’d managed to open the seams, adjust and restuff the doublet, and sew it all back up with proper-colored thread liberated from one of the padishah’s carpets, all without being walked in on.
I picked off a few lingering bits of cord, then gave the doublet an experimental shake. No tell-tale crackle of paper, no rattle of broken seals, no sigh of documents or lining shifting underneath the cloth. Good. I’d initially been amazed that the wax on all three letters had survived the trip; now, given that I’d guessed their contents, I wasn’t surprised. If you were going to send contraband like that across the border into Djan, you’d damn well want to make sure they didn’t come popping open at the first bend or tap. If anything, I expected there was glimmer in the seals, holding them tight and the paper safe.
Part of me wanted to take the doublet and bury it, if not in a hole in the ground, then at least in the bottom of my travel trunk. The idea of carrying the information those letters contained, let alone whatever magic was cast on them, made my skin crawl whenever the fabric brushed up against me. But I also knew that the best way to keep the package, and therefore myself, safe was to keep it on me. Between shadow-casting yazani and darkness-draped assassins, I wanted to be as indispensable as possible. Besides, I doubted any of them would expect me to keep something that valuable on my person after what had happened in the cellar.
Which reminded me. . . .
When I walked back out of the inn, the members of the troupe were busy unloading the wagon, taking various parcels into either the inn or the stables, or setting them to one side in the courtyard. I waited until a bundle of stage swords came off the wagon, put them over my shoulder, and headed into the stables.
Two of the stalls had been set aside—at no small expense, I was sure—for the troupe’s gear. I set down the blunted props, removed Degan’s Black Isle blade from its hiding place among the pile of swords, and hied myself up to the hayloft.
Five minutes later, I was walking back into the courtyard, brushing dust and bits of hay from my sleeves. Degan’s sword was far up in the rafters, hidden alongside a beam and behind some stray bits of thatch. Unless someone knew where to hunt, the chances of stumbling across the weapon were exceedingly low—much lower than, say, finding it under my bed or behind a loose wallboard in my room.
I’d considered putting the neyajin’s dagger up with Degan’s sword as well, but decided against it in the end. While I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of carrying around an unknown piece of portable glimmer, neither was I willing to leave it behind. It struck me as the kind of magic that, if nothing else, I could use as a bargaining chip in a pinch. Besides, you never know when a smoke-edged dagger might come in handy. So, instead, I’d slipped it and the scabbard I had bought for it down my other boot.
I found Fowler standing off to one side in the yard, partaking in one of the Kin’s favorite pastimes: watching other people work.
“Well?” I said as I put my backside up against the wall beside her.
“Two Ravens in the street,” she said, still watching the wagon.
“Heron’s men?”
“Sure as hell not local talent—they’re too obvious.”
“And?”
“Thought I saw someone up on the roof, to our left and across the street. There’s a trellis up there, so I can’t be sure. I’ll take a look later. The best blind spots for us to come and go look to be to the south and east: too many overhangs and blocked lines of sight to be able to watch the inn without being obvious.”
“What do you need?” I said.
“Money. If you want me to recruit some coves and set up a perimeter, I need to be able to flash them something other than my winning smile.”
I took half of what I had left from our traveling money—not as much as I would have liked—and handed it to her. “See what you can do about shorting the inn’s owner a bit as well,” I said. “If we can skim what Heron’s giving him and keep the hostler from raising any noise, it’ll make things easier.”
Fowler smiled. “He looks like the nervous type. If I can promise to keep the more eager members of the troupe out of his daughters’—or his sons’—bedrooms, I expect he’ll be willing to go a bit lighter in the purse.”
“Just make sure you aren’t cutting in on anyone else’s action. I don’t need the local talent complaining about us coming in and taking away their whoring money; it looks petty.”
“Angels forbid,” said Fowler. Then, as I pushed away from the wall, “I still don’t like this, you know.”
“What?”
“You, out there, with no one on your blinders.”
“It’s just like the Lower City,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”
“It’s nothing like the Lower City and you know it. Not after what happened with Raaz and that Blade. At least give me until nightfall to—”
“You heard Heron,” I said. “We have seven days. I don’t have time to wait. I need to hit the street now, to start sniffing for rumors now, to start spreading money and names now. If I want to stand any chance of turning up a lead on Degan before the audition, I have to get started.”
“And what if a week isn’t enough?” said Fowler. “Have you thought about that? It’s not the Empire out there—it isn’t even Ildrecca. Weighing down a few palms and pattering up a couple local coves isn’t going to get you to Degan—hell, I doubt it’ll even get you a rumor of him. If you think—”
“What I think,” I said, “is that we don’t have a choice. Who’s going to work the streets? You? You barely patter the local lingo, never mind the cant. We both know better than that. It has to be me.”
“But it’s Djan. Just being an Imperial around here is bad enough, but an Imperial asking questions? That isn’t going to make you any friends.”
“Then I’ll make an effort to smile nicely when I talk to people.”
“Dammit, Drothe, you know—”
“What I know,” I said, “is that I’m going to need a safe, secure roosting ken I can come back to, no matter how well or poorly it goes for me. And that I need you to make this inn that ken.” I took a step closer. “If I had more time, I’d go slower. But I don’t. There’s no time to recruit Ears, turn mumblers, make unfriendly bosses friendly. It has to be me out there and you back here. It’s the only way it can possibly work, and we both know it.”
Fowler grumbled and groused and kicked at the ground, but she didn’t argue. She couldn’t. She knew I was right.
I turned and headed for the inn’s main gate.
“If you end up getting dusted,” she called after me, “make sure they bring your body back. I’ll be damned if I spend the next month learning the alleys and sewers of this place, just so I can wind you and shove you under the earth.”
“Done!” I called over my shoulder. Then I stepped out onto the street and into el-Qaddice.
I eased in slow: wandering the main streets, stopping at a couple of coffee stalls, chatting with a rug merchant who had the right kind of look in his eye. From there, I moved into the side streets, ducking in and out of late afternoon shadows and under the reed canopies that hung over tiny local bazaars. I listened more than I spoke, browsed more than I bought, and was careful to spread some copper supps and silver dharms when my lingering seemed to arouse suspicion. If I dropped Degan’s name, it was as if by chance, and I relied more on description than anything. I doubted that he was going by “Bronze” or “Degan” anyhow.
By the time I moved into the alleys near sunset, one thing was clear: The influence of Djan ran deep on the streets of the Imperial Quarter. I could see it in the loose robes and draped kaffiyehs of borrowed fashion; could taste it in the cardamom and mint and pepper that laced the local street food; could smell it in the oils laced with cinnamon or clove or sweet rush. But more important, I could see it in the manners and actions of the Dorminikans around me. Everything was done with an eye over the shoulder—a featherlight awareness that nothing could be taken for granted or done without the risk of consequence. Local legionnaires still swaggered, hawkers still called out in Imperial, and brothels still advertised their services with paper ribbons above their doors, but it didn’t have the feel of a district at ease with itself. We were surrounded by a city full of people who had been the empire’s enemy more than its friend over the centuries, and that weight showed.
That went doubly so among the Kin, who not only had both the Quarter’s legionnaires and the despot’s green jackets to worry about, but also the local Zakur. I quickly discovered that there were no real bosses to speak of in the Imperial Quarter—not really. Oh, they might call themselves Anglers or Rufflers or, in one case, an Upright Man, but their organizations were just shadows of the true thing. Most failed to rise above the level of a street gang, and of those who did, all were little more than a successful raid or a failed payoff away from falling.
No, very little, I found, happened in the criminal island that was the Imperial Quarter without the tacit approval of the Zakur. That in itself wasn’t terribly surprising—I’d expected as much, more or less, given el-Qaddice’s location and particular circumstance—but it was the level of control that surprised me. Even the purse cutters and drop coves were expected to offer up a cut to the Djanese bosses.
That being the case, I kept my name close and my title closer. Better to play the new cove in town than the Gray Prince come to swagger his way through the streets. The first might get you ignored, but the second will draw the kind of attention that could end with a dagger thrust in an alley.
In the end, though, it wasn’t a dagger in the dark that caught up with me; it was a pair of Cutters waiting for me as I came out of a second-story bone shop well after midnight.
“Any luck with the dice?” said the taller of the two as he leaned up against the wall in the stairwell. He was smooth—of face, of manner, of voice—with a smile that reminded me of a knife. Farther down the stairs, his partner—a brick of a man—stood eating sweet rice out of a folded palm leaf. He didn’t bother to look up at us.
I sighed and put away the few coins I’d acquired while talking to the gamblers inside. “Is this going to take long?” I said. “I have things to do.”
The man shrugged himself away from the wall. “Who knows? I’m just the hired help. But,” he said, indicating the stairs, “I will note that this is the only way out. . . .”
He showed the blade of his grin again. I walked down the stairs. The one eating rice deigned to nod as I passed.
My, but they raised them polite down here.
There was a sedan chair waiting in the street. It was respectable as these things went, with a painted door in the side and wicker screens covering the windows. The roof had a pair of folding panels, which had been pulled back to reveal more screens up top. Even this far on the thieves’ side of midnight, el-Qaddice could hold on to the day’s heat, radiating it back along the alleys and, I’d guess, into any enclosed boxes traveling through them.
Eight bearers crouched against the wall beside the stairs, passing a skin between them and drinking deeply. My night vision was still sleeping from the gaming den, but I didn’t need it to see the sheen of sweat that covered the men’s bare backs. They moved with all the crispness and energy of a wet rag, making me wonder just how used they were to their job.
Then one of the screens slid down and I understood a bit better.
To say the man inside was vast would have been like saying the sea was deep, or the desert sun was warm. He spread to fill the entirety of the seat, his silk-covered sides pressing against the arms of his chair. A leg like the mast of small schooner sat propped up on a tasseled pillow, the foot wrapped in linen and smelling of unguents and poultice. The earthy, acrid aroma called up memories of Eppyris and his apothecary shop, back before I’d caused him to become a cripple and made his wife hate me. I took a step back from the man and, for the sake of those feelings alone, decided I already disliked him.
“For someone new to el-Qaddice,” he said in Djanese, not bothering to look up from the piece of paper he was folding, “you’ve managed to achieve a great deal in a surprisingly short amount of time. Tentative patronage? Housing at the padishah’s expense? I’m impressed.”
“I like to keep myself busy.”
“Yes, I can see that.” His thick fingers, surprising in their dexterity, never stopped moving across the paper. “I’m much the same myself, although I know I don’t look it. My pastimes are more . . . sedentary.”
“I never would have guessed.”
A slight pursing of his lips beneath his thin mustache. “Yes, well. The hour’s late. I was wondering if I could interest you in a cup of tea, so that we might discuss our business in a more comfortable setting?”
I crossed my arms. “Not thirsty.”
“Then a light meal, perhaps? I understand your people are fond of stuffed grape leaves. I know a cook who can—”
“Not hungry, either.”
I knew I was being rude, but I didn’t care. In offering to share his salt, the Zakur was also offering me his protection—at least for the duration of the meal. It was an old Djanese custom, built on countless generations of life among the dunes, where simple hospitality could be the difference between life and death. By declining, I was saying I didn’t trust him to keep his word. A slap in the face of his honor, I admit, but at this point I didn’t know if he had enough honor for my insult to leave a mark in the first place, and I wasn’t willing to risk my life to find out.
“I see.” He raised one finger slightly in the process of folding the paper, and I suddenly felt cool steel at the side of the throat.
The man set the paper down on his broad lap and looked at me. “Since you insist on behaving like a barbarian,” he said, “we’ll proceed in the imperial manner. Abul?”
A sharp, quick punch caught me above the kidney at precisely the same instant the knife vanished from my neck. I gasped and dropped to one knee.
“There,” said the man, picking up the paper again. “Now that we have the requisite violence out of the way, I can explain why I’m here.” He wiped a fleck of my spit from the window edge. “I wanted to make something clear: The Imperial Quarter doesn’t belong to you. It will never belong to you. There are no great sheikhs of the Kin among your people here. No Rufflers or ‘Standing Men’ or—”
“Upright Men,” I said from my knees.
“What?”
“They’re called Upright Men, you bastard. Get it right.”
Another flick of the finger, another punch. I winced and didn’t quite fall over.
“No Upright Men,” he said. The chair groaned as he leaned his head out the window. Several of the bearers started to stand, ready for a collapse that didn’t come. “And no Gray Princes, either,” he added.
My eyes shot up to meet his.
“Yes,” he said, his eyes crinkling with a smile. “I think we understand each other.”
I nodded. No stirring up the local Kin. Fragmented and frustrated was how they liked them, and a Gray Prince stepping in to give a bit of order—or even worse, a sense of purpose—wouldn’t sit well with the native crime bosses.
I didn’t bother asking how he’d figured out who I was. This was his—the Zakur’s—city: If anyone could gather up enough whispers and rumors and bits of overheard conversation to piece it together, it would be them. Even if it was a guess, it was one I’d confirmed with my look.
No, I wasn’t overly surprised that they’d sussed me out; I just wanted to know how they’d done it so damn quickly.
The Zakur . . . Angle Master? Ruffler? Upright Man? . . . turned back to his folding. “You realize that I say this merely to avoid any misunderstandings between your esteemed personage and my own people. We recognize and respect your position and your prestige.”
“Of course you do,” I said, looking back at the Cutters.
“Of course. Ah, there!” He made one last fold and held up what had become a paper reproduction of a desert wolf. It was damn good. “A frivolous pastime, I admit, but one that requires great precision and planning.”
“Speaking of frivolous,” I said as I climbed to my feet, “you could’ve delivered this message any of a dozen different ways: by the street, via a messenger, through a Prig or Beggar Boss . . . hell, you could have even written it on a folded f*cking frog, for that matter.”
He looked at me through narrowed, puffy eyelids. “True.”
“Which means there’s more to this than just warning me off.”
Another twitch of his lips. “I can see why you’re an emir of your kind. Yes, there’s another reason.”
“And that reason is?”
He turned to more fully face me. The sedan chair creaked in protest, and I caught a renewed whiff of the damp peat and vinegar scent coming from his foot as the air shifted about him. Gout? Worse?
“Why are you here?” he said.
I blinked. Smiled. Would have laughed in his face if I didn’t think it would’ve gotten me killed in that moment.
Why was I here? The very question I would have likely asked if a Grand Sheikh of the Zakur were to show up in Ildrecca. What did he want? What were his plans? Who was he working with? Because, Angels knew, someone like that—someone like me—didn’t just show up this far from home for no particular reason, and certainly not without making contact with the local powers that be if he didn’t want them to be nervous.
Only I had, because instead of thinking like a Prince, I’d been acting like a Nose. Again.
Dammit.
There was no good answer. Whatever I told him would be carved up and held to the light. Lies would be assumed, duplicity expected, misdirection anticipated.
F*ck it. I decided to tell him the truth.
“I’m here looking for someone.”
“And?”
“And what? That’s it.”
The corners of his mouth turned up, his heavy lips making the smile look like something between a smirk and a pout. “You could have searched in a dozen different ways,” he said. “Through the Kin, an agent, a local boss—even by writing a note on a folded f*cking frog; surely you don’t expect me to believe that a Gray Prince would come all the way to Djan just to search for someone?”
“It’s not my problem what you decide to believe.”
“Ah, but it is.” He settled back into his seat and held up the paper figure, rotating it gently between his fingers. “Because what I believe can directly affect what you accomplish here.”
“You don’t want to cross me,” I said. “Not in this. It doesn’t concern you.”
His eyes turned back to me. They were small, hard things now. “You threaten me?”
“I warn you.”
He stared at me for a long time—or what felt like a long time: It was hard to tell given the rapid pounding of my heart. When it became apparent that neither of us was about to back down, he grunted and turned away. He snapped his fingers, and the bearers rushed forward to put their shoulders beneath the rails of his chair.
“It has come to my attention,” he said as the chair lurched upward, “that someone has been smuggling magic from the empire into el-Qaddice over the past few months. I believe you used to smuggle relics into the Despotate not so long ago, yes?”
I kept my face blank, even as my guts rolled over inside me. He knew about the glimmer? Angels—just how much had Jelem sent down here? And more important, how many shipments had he moved in the last few months?
“Dealing in relics and dealing in glimmer are two different things,” I said, my voice even.
“But smuggling is still smuggling, no matter what the nature of the goods. And in my city, I oversee the smuggling of all things magical.” He looked down at me from his enclosed perch. “Don’t think us such the fools that we can’t see why you’re truly here, Shadow Prince. You would do well to think about handing the magic over, as well as disbanding whatever organization you’re putting together. As I said, the Old City is ours: You don’t want to challenge us.”
“And if I say I don’t have anything to do with any smuggled glimmer?” I said. I decided not to mention anything about my not having an organization.
“I would say only a foolish man denies a truth that’s obvious to all.”
I crossed my arms. “You have no idea how foolish I can be when I put my mind to it.”
He smiled. “Truly, this answer pleases me to no end.” The screen to the chair slid up.
It wasn’t until after he and his Cutters were gone that I noticed a folded bit of paper lying at my feet: the wolf. Only, I realized when I picked it up, it wasn’t a wolf; rather, it was a hyena. A hyena with hunched shoulders and an open mouth and a lolling tongue: laughing. At me.
I walked away, leaving his message torn and crumpled in the street.