I extended my arm as far as I could and slowly, carefully set the satchel on the ground, shrinking away from it as best I could inside his savage grip. His breath was sour, and his lank, greasy hair trailed into my face.
“Take whatever you want!” I gasped.
“All in good time,” he muttered, and his grin was dirty, cruel.
He was going to kill me. I knew it as sure as I knew the sun would rise. He would do what he wanted with me, and then he would cut my throat. Nothing else was worth the risk.
“Just don’t touch the bag,” I said. It wasn’t really a plea, and it certainly wasn’t a trick. It just came out.
His brow furrowed. Skeptical ideas chased themselves through his eyes, which flashed momentarily to the discarded satchel. He kneed me hard in the stomach, and I doubled over, wheezing.
“How stupid do you think I am?” he rasped. “We will not be making any deals. There is nothing you have that I can’t take for myself, and you have nothing worth having anyway. You have nothing, you are nothing, and that is what I’m going to teach you before you die.”
I kept very still. His hand was not on my mouth, but if I cried out for help, he would stab me where I stood, and there was no one to hear anyway—not here, not now.
And then, with the softest of sounds, and just as it had done when I was sitting by the fire with the Mahweni boy, the satchel moved.
If he had been looking directly at it, he might have been less surprised, but he caught the shifting of the fabric out of the corner of his eye and jumped. For the briefest of seconds, his knife hand was forgotten. I was forgotten.
I was still half doubled over, my head level with his stomach, with the bandaged hole in his side. I butted the spot hard as I could and he staggered back in pain, releasing my hand. I stepped between him and the satchel and, as he raised his hands to grapple, went low. I kicked him in the groin, then scythed at his left leg, catching him hard on the knee.
He crumpled, but I had bought myself only a few seconds. He was bigger than me, stronger. Stay a moment longer, and he would kill me. There would be no talk. Just the blade of his knife.
I had one advantage, and that was speed. I stooped to the satchel, snatched it up, and was running before I had it slung safely over my head.
Astonishingly, the baby never truly woke. I ran, taking a thoughtlessly direct route along the dirty side streets between Pancaris and the north wall to Morgessa and eventually out through the West Gate to the Drowning, and as the wind turned, I caught the familiar stench of filth and refuse on the air. Watching me as I approached the edge of the shanty was a huddle of heavyset baboons, so I doubled my pace and arrived at Rahvey’s hut breathless and trembling. Baboons are strong, fearless creatures with almost human cleverness, and they bite. I had always been more comfortable in the city than in the wilder places at its edges, but now it seemed that nowhere was safe.
My sister answered my knock with drowsy irritation, anxiously glancing back to where her husband lay snoring. She took the child from me without a word, seeming not to notice my mood and closing the door in my face.
I looked around for the baboons and then curled up on the porch. I did not, could not, sleep.
*
I WAS UP AT first light for my Kathahry exercises as soon as I had washed and changed, Rahvey watching, bleary eyed, as the child nursed.
“What are you doing?” she asked, her face skeptical, even contemptuous. “Not the exercises. Your life. Job. Are you still working for Morlak?”
I hesitated. “No,” I said. “I have a new position. I was going to talk to you about it. I was wondering…”
I faltered, and she framed a brittle smile.
“If I could keep the baby here,” she said.
“Well, yes,” I said. “Just for today. I can pay.”
Her eyes narrowed. “How much?”
Reluctantly, I showed her the last of Vestris’s silver coins. It was a week’s wages for anyone in the Drowning.
Rahvey took it, sensing what it cost me to give it up. “Trying to make a good impression?” she said, and this time the smile was less bitter, more knowing. “At work, I mean. Yes, all right. But don’t tell Sinchon, and be sure to get back here tomorrow.”
“Yes,” I said. “Thanks.”
“This changes nothing,” she said, in case I might get ideas. “You took the oath. The child is still your responsibility.”
“I know.”
She considered the baby at her breast, and her smile—a tiny pocket of joy glimpsed through the crack in a wall—betrayed her. She looked at me and closed the crack, but at the same moment, the door of the hut juddered open and Jadary, her youngest, shuffled out and gave me a sleepy wave. She drifted to her mother’s side, all eyes on the baby.
“You can help me with her today,” said Rahvey.
“We’re keeping her?” exclaimed the girl, her face lighting up.
“Just today,” said Rahvey sternly.