He was polite but solitary, keeping mainly to his tiny room beside the library, and he died after dinner, in his sleep. As he had outlived his few friends, no particular ceremony was forthcoming. The King’s own doctor, who had stopped in by chance with a bottle of cactus spirits for the King’s lumbago, offered to prepare the corpse for burial at the Templar Clinic, where the poor of the city went to die.
A page was sent running; a coffin procured. At nine o’clock that evening, six palace guards bore the pine box into the shadowy courtyard and placed it on a donkey cart, driven by the doctor himself. The schoolmaster’s departure from the palace drew the attention of no one but a tailor bird, flitting excitedly about the ramparts.
The road to the clinic was in poor repair. The doctor leaned back and put a hand on the coffin, as though to steady it. His fingers drummed briefly on the planks, unconsciously it appeared. His face was studiously blank.
Three blocks from the clinic he turned the animals down a narrow side street. It was one of the harder moments of his life. The doctor had seen Arquali torture firsthand, and with that tug of the reins he had become Arqual’s enemy. He suppressed an urge to whip the donkeys into a trot.
The street ran south, into a decrepit quarter of the city near the port. Eventually it passed through a tunnel beneath a wider boulevard. It was a damp, shadowy stone tube, reeking of urine and mold. At its very center the doctor glanced quickly around, stopped the cart, whispered a prayer. He reached back and freed the coffin’s single latch.
The lid flew open, and Eberzam Isiq bolted upright. He wore a dark oilskin coat and black woolen cap: the outfit of a Simjan fisherman. Before the doctor could speak he squirmed free of the coffin and leaped to the ground. When his feet struck the cobbles, he snarled in pain.
“Careful, man!” hissed the doctor.
“Damn it all, my knee-never mind, never mind.” Isiq limped forward and shook the doctor’s hand. “I owe my survival to you as much as to Oshiram,” he said. “If we both live long enough I’ll try to repay that debt. Now be gone, my friend.”
“I knew you’d recover,” said the doctor. “I saw the fighter in your eyes. But Isiq, the gold-”
“Here,” said Isiq, patting a heavy pouch beneath his coat.
“And your medicine? The bloodroot tea?”
“I have everything. Go, go, Rin keep you.”
This time the man did whip the donkeys into a trot. Eberzam Isiq flattened himself against the slimy wall, watching them disappear. Two minutes, he told himself. Then the walk to the port, head down, eyes fixed. Neither too fast nor too slow. He felt for his weapons. Steel knuckles, hidden blades. This fight he would win for his murdered girl.
He rubbed his face and found it unfamiliar. Thick beard, no sideburns. Another layer of disguise. Oshiram was a good man, Isiq thought. He had done his best to grasp the danger to his island. But he was still an innocent, a civilian to his marrow. He could not imagine the extent to which the Secret Fist already controlled the streets of his capital. Ott’s men had been at work in Simja for forty years. They had surely bought everyone who could be bought, killed many who could not be. And any spy trained in Etherhorde would have known Isiq at a glance.
He thought of the old schoolmaster, old but very much alive, spirited away last night to the same tower chamber where Isiq himself had convalesced. How long would they have to keep the poor fellow there?
He left the tunnel, wetting his boots in puddles he couldn’t see. His knee still hurt, and he wondered if the jump had done it lasting harm. No more dramatics. You’re an old man, you fool.
Then the breeze struck his face, cold and clean off the harbor, and he smiled grimly. Not as old as they took me for.
He had memorized the route to the witch’s house. Two blocks south to Vinegar Street. Four blocks east to the abandoned theater, the Salty Lass, if one could believe it. Dismal, derelict streets, odors of bad wine and rancid cooking oil. Broken street-lamps, one still audibly leaking gas, loomed over him like the feelers of monstrous insects.
There were poor folk in the streets, but they barely spared him a glance. They rushed from door to door, bearing bundles, frowning and nodding to one another, exchanging a few whispered words. All so familiar. The Pellurids, before the Sugar War. The doomed settlers on Cape Coristel. Rukmast, before the Arquali retreat. The quiet of a people who have learned that disaster is coming, that they will not be spared.
It was because of this fugitive memory that he spotted the killer. A big fellow leaning in a doorway, too relaxed for the circumstances, and far too focused in the look he trained on Isiq. Twenty or twenty-five, and ox- strong to boot. Not one of Ott’s men-he was far too obvious, too large and surly-but that did not mean he was harmless.
The man stepped out of the doorway, grinning a whiplash grin. Oh no, he was not harmless. He took a last long drag on a cigarette, flicked the butt into the street. Deathsmoke! Isiq could smell it ten yards off. He felt the ghost of his own addiction, like jaws closing on his brain. The big man stepped into his path.
“Sir-” began Isiq.
“You shout, and I’ll cut a hole in you big enough to slide in a skillet,” said the man. “What’s in that pouch, eh? Nah, don’t tell: just give it to me, give it here.”
Isiq put a hand on the pouch. A cry for help would make him the center of attention, and that could prove as deadly as anything this man had in mind. The steel knuckles, he thought. Use them. Right now. But what he said was, “You’re bigger than me.”
“Bigger? Mucking right I am, you rotten-arsed old dog.” The man took a firm hold on Isiq’s shirt. “You’re about to bleed,” he said.
The reek of deathsmoke on the man! Isiq could almost taste it. He felt his blood responding, the sick happiness rising in his soul. “Let go of my shirt,” he said.
The man must have heard the intended threat. He backhanded Isiq with casual brutality, looking almost bored. Then he put a hand on his own belt. A glint of metal there, below a well-worn handle.
Isiq squirmed, an old man’s feeble struggle against the certainty of death. Then his elbow slashed up at the man’s neck and the stiletto did its work, burying itself to the hilt in the soft flesh below the jaw, and the man fell forward, eyes staring, lifeless. He kicked the corpse away, furious beyond reason. “You bastard, you bastard. You didn’t have to die.”
Then, like a bursting boil, the thought: He might have more cigarettes.
Isiq ran, fleeing the temptation more than the evidence of his deed. His elbow warm and sticky, his fingers cut trying to close the stiletto, his knee wrenched anew. Behind him, someone began to scream.
Go back. There’s still time. Go back and search his pockets.
Where was that mucking theater? Had they taken down the sign? He blundered on, limping, trying to keep to the shadows. People everywhere. The nearest recoiled, murmuring at his back. Already winded, he forced himself to run on. A second turn, a third. Why were there no empty streets?
Deathsmoke.
Put it out of your Deathsmoke.
He stopped, weak and wheezing, soaked with frigid sweat. If another addict passed him he would fight for the drug. Eyes on him everywhere. A shadow in a window, a mongrel dog across the street.
Isiq shuffled backward, collided with a rubbish bin. There were rats, probably, rats before him and behind. They would remember him from the dungeon. They would smell the blood.
Look, look! the street was sighing. The decorated soldier! The leader of men! The one who thinks he can stop the war!
“Admiral?”
The voice was soft and circumspect.
“This way, sir, quickly.”
Precious Pitfire, it was the dog.
Isiq stumbled across the street. “Don’t stare, please,” said the dirty, shaggy creature.
“You’re real?”
“Very much so. And we have a mutual friend.”
“I know you. Of course. You’re the dog.”
“I suppose I can’t argue with that.” The dog was looking left and right. “The bird lost you in that tunnel; someone should have told him what to expect. Well, we can’t stay here. Follow now, but not too close. And whatever you do, don’t stare. It’s your eyes that give us away to other men.”
