Bared Blade (21 page)

I put a hand on my chest. The shirt was a wreck all right and there were definitely some scrapes and blisters underneath, but nothing too awful. My dip in the bay must have helped stave off the worst effects there.

“That’s not too bad, but yeah the face definitely feels like I’ve been to the wars. I suppose the upside of that is that no one’s likely to recognize me at the moment.”

About then, Vala reappeared carrying a brown bottle. “Tell someone next time!” she growled at me. “I shudder to think what all that shit floating in the bay has already done with the open wounds on your face. I’m going to have to get pretty drastic with both the magic and this—” She raised the bottle to pour some on my cheek and I winced in anticipation.

“Let’s go a little deeper into the dark,” said Triss. “That’ll let me cover you better and muffle any yelps.”

After
, we found a bathhouse that catered to the night trades, and I bought the shirt off a passing workman’s back for five times what it was worth. Then we headed for the sign of the Spliced Rope and located Coalshovel’s offices next-door to the kip-claim under a tiny plaque that said Dry Goods.

We settled in atop the roof of a small unmarked building across the way while we checked the place out and talked through our strategy. This wasn’t going to be like asking questions of old comrades in a bar. Coalshovel didn’t know me, though he might have heard of me …or seen the wanted posters. He wasn’t going to want to talk to me about anything half so hot as the Kothmerk, so this was going to be more like a raid on potentially hostile territory.

We decided I should go in first with Vala, who looked
basically harmless, to say nothing of distractingly sexy. She’d find someplace to perch that put her eyes on the door, while Stel would keep a lookout from up here. That was the initial plan anyway. But that was before we’d spent the better part of an hour up on the roof without seeing any sign of life from the shop front across the way, despite a number of passersby rather furtively trying their luck with the bellpull. I began to get a bad feeling about the thing.

“Does that place look a little
too
quiet to you?” I asked quietly.

“I don’t know,” responded VoS. “I’ve never done anything like this before. It’s a cloudy night and they’re smugglers, aren’t they? Maybe somebody’s out on a run?”

“It’s possible, but if that were the case, I’d expect them to have left some muscle behind to keep an eye on the store. If they do any business at all out of the offices, there’s bound to be a strong room for larger valuables plus a chest for cash storage. It’s not like a legitimate business. They can’t give bank notes to their clients. Triss?”

“Something’s wrong. The shadows over there look empty and dead. I can’t say for sure without thoroughly tasting them, but that’s the impression I get from here. The building’s been abandoned.”

“So what do we do?” asked Stel.

I shrugged. “To borrow a smuggler’s terms, what we
should
do is cut our lines and run for the open sea before the law arrives. But that’d leave us as much in the dark as we are now. It’s risky, but I think I’d better go in and have a look around.”

“You mean
we’d
better go in and have a look around,” said Vala.

I snorted. “Sure, but let’s not go in through the front door, shall we?”

“Roof?” asked Stel.

I nodded. “Around back first, I want to check the back door before we try anything. Then up the wall and we can cut our way in.”

A
s
it turned out, the sellcinders didn’t have a visible back door. What they did have was a rabbit run that exited through a trapdoor on the flat lead roof of the office. It was butted up tight against the building’s nearest neighbor, a taller structure with a series of bricks removed to make a ladder for the run. So, in event of emergency: out and up, then over and off onto the chimney road.

The trapdoor was sealed from below with a heavy bolt, but after we’d spent a while listening for activity below, Triss was able to slip between the cracks and draw it for us. The door opened down into a narrow space bordered on two sides with rough lath and studs, implying plastered walls. The bricks of the neighboring building made a third wall, while a wooden panel with a latch on our side provided an exit. VoS was sensible enough not to dispute my going first. She couldn’t make herself invisible after all.

The wooden panel folded in the middle like a decorative screen, so that it could be slid to one side without taking up much space either in the rabbit run or the large cupboard it backed. Maybe five feet deep by three wide, the space was
lined with cedar and full of hanging bundles of expensive cloth. The cloth gave a good illusion of a packed space while still allowing for quick and quiet movement, front to back. Light leaked in from a broad crack at the base of the cedar cupboard’s front door, so I spent a few anxious moments waiting while Triss edged his nose under the door.

“Empty,” he whispered after a while.

I slipped the latch on the door and eased it open. The room beyond was filled with the sorts of items you would expect to find in the back of a legitimate dry goods dealer, if perhaps a little too rich for the neighborhood. It was lit by a single dim and aging magelamp hung from the ceiling. As I slid forward toward the nearer of the storeroom’s two doors, I heard a faint scuff from the cedar cupboard and knew that Vala had started down behind me per our agreed upon timeline.

The door I checked first opened into a narrow front room with a counter dividing it. The second door, at right angles to the first led into a small office with a desk and two more doors, one of which had been reinforced with bands of iron and a heavy locking bar that had been chained in place. The other opened on the front room. That was it. No people, no noise, no sign of occupation beyond the piled heaps of goods.

When I checked the front door, I found it not just locked but also barred from within. Like the strong room, it had been reinforced with heavy iron bands. That gave us an empty building with all of its entrances barred from within. The easy answer was magic, which could drop or raise a bar from without, but that felt wrong somehow.

Still, I checked the front door and the rabbit run and found that the building’s owner had gone to the not unexpected trouble and expense of having them tamper-warded. A really good mage-thief could still have opened or shut them without tripping the spells, so that wasn’t conclusive, but it was more than a little suggestive. VoS joined me as I was making the check, peering over my shoulder with Stel’s eyes.

“Interesting. Do you think there’s another way out? Maybe through the strong room?”

“Not the strong room, but there’s almost certainly another
exit. We need to find it and check, but I’m willing to lay a bet right now that it’s all bolted up, too.”

“Don’t take the bet,” said Triss. “The shadows here taste like death, not abandonment. It reminds me of a tomb, except there are no bodies.”

A little while later Vala called out low and soft from the storeroom, “Found the back door. It’s hidden behind an empty crate and heavily bolted. I agree with Triss. This place feels like death. I’m going to see if I can’t crack the strong room without making too much noise. I think I’d better go through the wall from back here. Stel, give me a hand?”

While they worked at that, Triss and I prowled around the building, looking for any further exits. No luck. And the strong room held nothing but coin and bits of expensive flotsam. I leaned one hip against the counter while I tried to find an angle on the thing that I liked. We needed to get out of there, and soon, but I hated to walk away with nothing. Triss slid back and forth across the floor behind the counter in his version of pacing.

“It’s way past time we left,” said VoS after several long minutes had slipped past without any further discoveries.

“You’re right. I just feel like we’re missing something obvious and important. It’s possible that Coalshovel and his people are all just out for a walk, but that feels wrong. Doubly so since he’s a front man for a big sellcinders up in Highside. There’s a small fortune in the strong room. You don’t just walk away and leave that unguarded when you’ve got a boss. Not in this business, not unless you’re in a mood to watch someone take your skin off an inch at a time.”

“You think this is about the Kothmerk?” asked Vala.

“It’s got to be. This doesn’t fit the way things normally work in Tien. Especially not down here in Smuggler’s Rest. No blood. No bodies. Unguarded money left for the first neighbor bold enough to check out the silence…”

“So,” said Triss, “say it is the Kothmerk. How does that change the equation? What’s different?”

Then I had it. “Durkoth. The Durkoth are what’s different.”

“I missed a step there,” said Stel.

I ignored her. “Triss, check the floor. Look for anything strange, any boards that have been moved, anything.”

But Triss was ahead of me, shooting across the floor to a spot at the end of the aisle behind the counter. It was on the very edge of the area where he’d been pacing.

“Fire and sun, but I should have seen it earlier. The boards here aren’t seated quite the same as the ones around them. I noticed it before, but I thought it was old work because the nail heads are just as rusty as their neighbors, which they wouldn’t be if they’d been recently hammered in again.”

“But if they weren’t hammered down, but rather persuaded from underneath…” I said.

“Exactly.” Triss slid down through the gap between two boards, only to reemerge a few seconds later. “There’s a big patch of dirt under here that looks like it’s been smoothed out by a cobblestone layer. No roach tracks, no nipperkin spoor, no fresh fallen dust. It’s a subtle thing. A human would need good light and a suspicious mind to see it, but it’s there.”

“Want to bet the Durkoth ghosted the lot and our missing bodies are down below somewhere?” I wasn’t expecting any takers and I didn’t get any.

“Sounds like a lot of digging for not much return,” said Vala. “Especially since there’s no telling how deep the Durkoth would think is deep enough. I wonder if your friend Qethar had anything to do with this. Fivegoats said he was burying people.”

I shrugged. “Could be, but I haven’t got any answers. This whole mess makes no sense.”

“Time to leave?” Vala didn’t wait for an answer, just headed for the rabbit run.

I motioned for Stel to follow her and fell in behind.

“
So
, where does that leave us?” Stel was perched on a little dormer with her back to me, looking out over the harbor—she sounded depressed.

“I’m not sure,” I replied from my spot up on the widow’s walk. The more I learned about this whole thing, the less sure I was of anything. It was a lot like the way I felt about my life.

We’d taken up a roost on one of the larger houses in the nameless little neighborhood between Smuggler’s Rest and Dyers Slope. I find that houses with servants are less prone to check out the occasional odd scuffing noise from above. There’s always someone else to blame them on and not a lot of communication between the social layers. Given the location, the place probably belonged to a well-off smuggling captain, which meant there was probably also a fair amount of night traffic that no one was supposed to talk about or pay too much attention to.

“What happened to Coalshovel had the look of the Durkoth snipping off loose ends,” I continued as the timesman’s bells rang one. “Which means that your Reyna probably
did
try to fence the ring through Coalshovel’s boss. I wonder if Miriyan Zheng’s dead, too, or if she cut a deal.”

“Dead.” Triss had taken up a perch on the railing—a gargoyle’s shadow without the gargoyle. “There’s no way she’d have agreed to what happened back there.”

I blinked. “You’re not suggesting her heart’s too pure to betray her own people, are you, Triss?”

“Don’t be silly. If she’s a typical sellcinders, the question isn’t ‘Yes or no?’ It’s ‘How much?’ I have no doubt she’d sell Coalshovel and whatever muscle might have heard the wrong things. What she wouldn’t do is leave the goods in that strong room unguarded for so long. Counting the time we spent on the roof, how long were we there? An hour and a half? Two hours? Plus whatever time it was empty before we showed up.”

“Point,” I said.

Vala frowned. “Does that mean that the bad Durkoth have the ring now?” She leaned on the railing beside Triss, keeping an eye up the Kanathean Hill behind the house.

“No,” I said. “Well, probably not. For that matter, we don’t know which Durkoth are the bad Durkoth. Not beyond the
ones that attacked your caravan. Nor if there are any
good
Durkoth for that matter. Take Qethar. I have no idea whose side he’s on, beyond his own. He
could
be working with the ones who killed your friends. Or he could be an agent of the rightful king trying to recover it for his master.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” said VoS. “When did it occur to you?”

“It’s been kicking around the back of my head for a while, but it wasn’t until you said ‘bad Durkoth’ that it really gelled. Basically, I know shit about Tienese Durkoth politics. They don’t have an official embassy or anything but there are as many as a couple of dozen in the city involved in various businesses. But I couldn’t tell you if they’re all affiliated somehow, or if they’re divided into factions, or hate each other’s guts, each and every one. I know even less about how they might interact with the broader Durkoth world, about which, in turn, I know practically nothing at all.”