Bared Blade (23 page)

“I should throw you out on your ear,” he said. “You’re a very expensive grade of poison at the moment. Especially with your face all beat up like that and drawing extra attention.” Then he sighed. “But that’d violate my neutrality. I don’t suppose you’re enough in funds to afford a private booth?” he asked none too hopefully. He also knows what I make as a jack.

“Actually,” said Vala, who had started to look a bit nervous herself, “I think we can manage that.”

Erk raised his eyebrows. “New dance partner?”

I shook my head. “Client.”

Vala grinned wickedly. “Why not both?”

Before I could think of anything clever, Erk said, “Why don’t you follow me.”

As we headed for the back and the private booths, Stel came in the door behind us and wedged herself at one end of the bar. Erk led us into a maze of twisty little passages lined with shimmery green gold curtains. The unintelligible buzz of dozens of conversations filled the air. Somewhere near the back of the building he pulled one of the curtains aside to expose a shallow alcove with a table just big enough for two and a pair of chairs.

Vala shook her head. “We want a three seater.”

“Costs more,” said Erk, but he didn’t argue, just led us forward a few yards and opened a different curtain, exposing a tiny U-shaped booth. “Suits?”

Vala nodded. “Suits.”

“Should I be looking to direct a third back here?” Erk asked as we slid into the booth.

“Just don’t stop the big brunette when she heads back from the bar,” I said. “She’ll be able to find her own way.”

Erk didn’t say anything, just nodded and let the curtain drop, but I caught his eyes flicking to Vala as he did it. He was a damned shrewd man and I had no doubt that he’d just made the right guess. Still, him knowing was safer than leaving Stel out in the main room with no backup.

“Am I really just a client to you?” Vala asked with a sexy little pout. “There’s no chance for a …
dance
.” Her voice dropped low and husky on the last word.

I blinked several times. “I …uh …well—” Then Triss flicked me playfully on the ear, and my mouth snapped shut as I realized I was being teased.

“Not nice,” Triss whispered to her over my shoulder. He hung against the back of the booth in my shape, just as the light would have placed him. “But well played.”

“Oh, it’s not
all
play,” said Vala, dropping her voice into a husk again. “All this cloak-and-dagger stuff does set a spark to the kindling, if you know what I mean.” She started to reach across the table toward me, then froze as her posture shifted subtly.

“Can we talk so openly here?” asked VoS. “That curtain seems awfully thin and I could hear a lot of people talking on the way here.”

“Did you actually hear any words?”

“No, but Vala wasn’t listening that closely.”

“Wouldn’t have made any difference. Erk protects his clients’ privacy. This whole area is protected by anti-eavesdropping magic. Though it has no effect on other sounds.” Footsteps could be heard coming toward us from beyond the curtains as if to illustrate my point—distinct but not obtrusive. “Take a really close look at the curtains.”

She did. “The shimmer’s actually a bit of spell light.”

I nodded. “Yep, if you’ve no magesight, they look like dull cut-rate velvet, which is what they’re made of. That’s why the booths back here are so expensive.”

The footsteps stopped and Stel pulled the curtain aside. “How expensive are they?” Her voice was sour as she slipped into the booth, pushing Vala around the curve of the table so that her knee pressed tightly into the side of my thigh.

I laughed. “Expensive enough that there’s no point in economizing on the fish.”

A frown touched both faces. “Stel was being extra careful to be quiet on her way here. I tried to make her even more so when I heard her coming through Vala’s ears, but it seemed to have no effect. Another part of the magic?”

“Yes,” Triss said from behind me. “The chances of someone trying a raid in the Spinnerfish are very low. Erk knows where too many bodies are buried. But the clientele here tends to the paranoid and violent, so Erk made sure they’d have plenty of warning if anything untoward started out in the halls. The curtains block sound going one way and amplify it going the other.”

“I think we’re going to be very glad we took the mission
purse with us when we came south after the Kothmerk,” said Stel.

Just then another set of footsteps announced the approach of our waiter, who tapped on the wall beside the curtain before pulling it aside. He had my Kyle’s and Vala’s wine as well as a small chalkboard listing the day’s fare. After he took Stel’s request for a second wine glass, he vanished.

“What do you recommend?” Stel asked rather resignedly. “We don’t get a lot of sea fish in Kodamia, and none that isn’t packed in salt.”

“If you’re all right with spicy, you’ll want the grilled spinnerfish with salamanda sauce. It’s the house specialty.”

“I adore hot, Aral,” Vala said while giving me a look that smoldered more than a little itself.

Stel rolled her eyes at her bond-mate. “Don’t you think you’re laying it on a little thick?”

“We’re on a compressed schedule for everything else while we’re here. Why not the flirting?”

Stel ignored her and turned to me. “What’s in the sauce?”

“No idea, it’s one of Manny’s secret recipes, though I feel confident in saying that no actual salamanders were harmed in the production of the stuff.”

“Oh, just get it, Stel,” said Vala. “I’m sure you’ll love it.” She turned my way again. “Don’t let that gruff exterior fool you. She’s at least as adventurous as I am. She just feels she has to play things serious now that we’re in the field.”

“Well, you’re certainly never going to do it,” countered Stel.

“I figure it’s VoS’s job. That’s what Melds are for, right?”

VoS sighed but let it pass. When the waiter came back we ordered up three plates of the spinnerfish for dinner and a small bucket of unicorn scallops for an appetizer. We had just started to dig into the main course—a lovely flaky white fish lightly kissed with a spicy-sweet green sauce—when a distinctly bootlike tromp sounded in the hall outside. In response I drew a dagger from my own boot, an action that instantly drew Vala’s attention since the proximity of her
leg to mine meant the back of my hand slid along her calf in the process.

“What’s happening?” she whispered as she pulled out her battle wands and laid them in her lap.

“Not sure,” I responded. “But the only people who wear those sorts of boots in this weather all work for the Crown.”

The clomping stopped right outside our booth and a knock sounded on the wall. If there was going to be an assault it was certainly shaping up to be a polite one. I held up a hand to signal the Dyad to wait. The knock sounded again and a hand pushed the edge of the curtain aside.

“Aral, you in there?” The voice was low, barely above a whisper, but it sounded familiar.

I reached out and tugged the curtain fully out of the way. A man in the yellow and gold of the city watch stood in the hall. He had a sergeant’s triple sword insignia on his shoulder patches.

“Hello, Zishin.” I nodded the faintest of bows. “What does Captain Fei want?”

“A meet.” He set a folded slip of paper on the table, then turned and walked away without another word.

I reclosed the curtain, then picked up the slip. It had two words on it, a place and a time.

Stel raised an eyebrow at me and I handed it across. “Nonesuch?”

“It’s an alley-knocker.” The eyebrow went up again.

“An illegal tavern,” interjected Triss. “It’s on the western edge of the neighborhood we call Uln North or the Magelander’s Quarter, right where it bumps into Little Varya.”

Uln North centered on the wedge where the Channary Canal met the Highside Canal, a mile and a half or so east of the Palace Quarter. I knew the alley-knocker well because they’d started to sell efik there, and even though I had no intention of ever going back to the stuff, I kind of kept an eye on the trade. I wasn’t sure whether Fei had discovered that I went there, and was trying to send me some sort of message, or if it was just unfortunate coincidence, though I
suspected the former. Not much gets past Fei, and why else would she expect me to know where the place was?

“How far away is it?” asked Stel, tapping the paper.

“If we take the chimney road, something over an hour. We could get there faster by taking a boat and using the canals, but if we ran into a customs cutter we’d have to fight our way out.”

“Are we going?” asked VoS.

“I don’t know about you, but I’d better. Fei’s …well, not quite a friend, but more than an ally of convenience. She’s important to this city.” And I really really hoped my business with her wasn’t going to get in the way of my business with the Dyad.

“That matters to you?” The Meld sounded casual, but I noticed Vala had a forkful of fish hanging halfway to her mouth and had for some time.

I paused to ponder the question. I hadn’t really thought about it that way before. I’d originally come back to Tien in search of my own death. I could admit that now. After the destruction of the temple, there wasn’t any place in the eleven kingdoms that I could have gone where there wasn’t a price on my head simply for having been a Blade. But here in Tien there was a second, much larger reward because I was the Kingslayer. The current king hadn’t cared for his half-brother any more than anyone else did, but he also didn’t much like the
way
I’d opened the throne for him to take the seat.

“Tien does matter to me,” I finally said.

“You sound surprised.” Vala’s fork still hung in the air.

“I am. I hadn’t expected to be here half so long as I have. I guess that somewhere along the line it turned into home.”

I turned and looked over my shoulder to see what Triss thought of that, but all I saw was my own shadow. If Triss had an opinion, he wasn’t in the mood to share it just then.

“So we need to go meet this Fei,” said Stel.

“I do, but you’re free to meet me at the fallback if you’d prefer. I owe Fei a major favor or two,
and
she’s got a ton of
leverage on me if she chooses to use it. I can’t ignore this meet.” I didn’t mention that I could get there faster without them, though whether that was because I wanted the company, or just because I didn’t feel comfortable with them out of my sight, I couldn’t have said.

Vala sighed. “Guess we’d better eat fast then. It’s a shame, because this is really delicious.”

The
closer we came to the Nonesuch, the unhappier I got about the whole thing. The Magelander’s Quarter was well outside my normal haunting grounds. I’d made a point to learn the streets, and this particular alley-knocker was a place I’d visited before, but that wasn’t the same as really knowing the place. For that matter, I didn’t think Fei spent much time in the neighborhood either.

Unlike her beat-bound fellows, the captain’s assignment covered the whole of Tien. But it focused on the trouble spots, and I’d never heard of the local contingent of Magelanders causing anyone any problems. The rest of the watch was supposed to stop and investigate crimes—that whole protect and serve thing. But Fei and her comparatively tiny force had a different job. She was supposed to keep the peace using whatever means were necessary.

In her case, that meant keeping a piece of every major illegal operation in town. If you worked the shadowside of the street, Fei knew your name. If you worked the wrong play in the wrong place, or made a ruckus in a rich neighborhood, she put your name on her list. Then you’d get a visit from Fei’s Mufflers—so called because they kept things quiet. If the play was a minor one, you might only get a couple of broken fingers out of the deal. If it was a big one of the sort that drew noble attention or killed the more upright type of citizen in any numbers, you could end up floating out to sea in a nailed-shut barrel.

The Magelander’s Quarter wasn’t Fei’s kind of place any more than it was mine, and it was a damned sight closer to Highside and the palace beyond than I wanted to be while
I had the Elite out looking for me. It was nearly five bells when we finally set eyes on the Nonesuch, and the coming sun had painted the scattered clouds over the ocean a pale shade of coral. It was certainly not cool out, but not yet hot either—the best you could hope for at this season. We’d made our way to the top of a tower on a temple to Shan about two blocks down the street from the Nonesuch. I wanted to give the whole area a look over before heading in and Shan’s timekeepers built high towers.

Down in the narrow streets, the last of the night people were wending their way home, marked out by the lights they still carried slowly along like ten thousand exhausted will-o’-wisps. But the first of the morning people had come out as well. Carters and deliverymen brought in the country milk and a bewildering variety of fresh produce for the city’s breakfast. Laborers and craftspeople hurried to get to work. The day watch were in the process of replacing the freaks and ne’er-do-wells who populated the night shift. Most of the newcomers hadn’t bothered with lights, relying on the early sunrise of summer to see them on their way.

I watched for patterns in the moving crowds around the Nonesuch, voids that could mark out hidden Elite or other frightening individuals, places where the human current moved faster to get away from something that spooked them, or slowed down too much because of a choke point. Like most of Tien’s neighborhoods, the Quarter got steadily more residential as you moved deeper into its heart. Traffic reflected that, with more big oxcarts circulating around the edges on the large thoroughfares while the in and out mostly happened on foot.

The Nonesuch lay in the borderland between the Quarter and Little Varya, about a block from the main road that ran between them, where the two types of traffic mixed most heavily. There were plenty of little voids and eddies in the turbulence that created, but no more so than anywhere else in sight of our position and I had to conclude that my misgivings had no evidence to support them.

“Looks like we go in,” I said.