Soulcatcher shrieked, outraged. The people of Taglios did not have that kind of nerve. She drove the carpet to one side, avoiding the black globe. And well she moved when she did.
Her luck had served her yet again. A screaming fireball ripped right through the space she had vacated, the same kind of fireball that had eaten all those holes in the Palace wall and had set the bodies of so many men burning like bad fat candles. She continued to dive. Two more fireballs barely missed her. She put a tenement between herself and the sharpshooters. She was extremely angry but did not let rage cloud her thinking.
Above her, her crows began bursting like soundless fireworks. Blood, flesh and feathers rained down.
In seconds she figured it out, conversing with herself in a committee of voices.
They had not been hiding inside Chor Bagan after all. She could not have caught anyone trying to slip away like this if they had not come in to retrieve something they did not want found. “They’re here in the city. But we haven’t found them. We haven’t seen a trace or heard a rumor that they didn’t want to reach our ears. Until now. That takes wizardry. That bold little one. That was the toad man. Goblin. Though the Great General of the Armies Mogaba assures us that he saw the body himself. Who else is alive? Could the Great General himself be less trustworthy than he would like us to believe?”
That was not possible. Mogaba had no other friends. He was committed in perpetuity.
Soulcatcher brought her carpet to earth, stepped off, folded its light bamboo frame, rolled the carpet around that, surveyed the street. They had come down this way. From up there. What could they have wanted desperately enough to have exposed themselves so thoroughly? Anything they thought that important would be something she was bound to find very interesting herself.
It took just one whispered word of power to illuminate the cellar. The squalor was appalling. Soulcatcher turned slowly. A man and his daughter, apparently. An old man and a young woman, anyway. One lamp. Discarded clothing. A few handfuls of rice. Some fish meal. Why the writing instruments and ink? What was this? A book. Somebody had just begun writing in it in an unfamiliar alphabet. She caught a spot of black movement in the corner of her eye. She whirled, crouching, fearing an attack by a rogue shadow. The
A rat fled, dropping the object of its curiosity. Soul-catcher knelt, picked up a long strip of black silk with an antique silver coin sewn into one corner. “Oh. I see.” She began to laugh like a young girl catching on late to the meaning of an off-color joke. She collected the book, surveyed the scene once more before leaving. “Dedication sure doesn’t pay.”
Once in the street again, she reassembled her carpet, unconcerned about snipers. Those people would be long gone and far away. They knew their business. But crows should be tracking them.
She froze, staring upward but not really seeing the white crow on the peak of the tenement roof. “How did they find out where those two were?”
19
“What happened?” Sahra demanded as soon as she came in, before she began shedding Minh Subredil’s rags.
I was still Dorabee Dey Banerjae myself. “We lost Murgen somehow. Goblin thought they had him anchored, but he went away while we were all out and I don’t know how to get him back.”
“I meant what happened in the Thieves’ Garden. Soulcatcher was out there. Whatever she tried to pull didn’t work out but she came back a different person. I didn’t get to hear everything she told the Radisha but I do know she found something or figured out something that changed her whole attitude. Like everything suddenly stopped being fun.”
I said, “Oh. I don’t know. Maybe Murgen can tell us. If we can get him back here.”
Goblin joined us. He was pushing a sleeping One-Eye in Banh Do Trang’s spare wheelchair. He announced, “They’re resting peacefully. Drugged. Narayan was distraught. The girl took it pretty calmly. We need to worry about her.”
“What’s wrong with him?” I asked, indicating One-Eye.
“He’s worn out. He’s an old man. I want to see you have half the energy he does when you get to be half his age.”
Sahra asked, “Why do we need to worry about the girl?”
“Because she’s her mother’s daughter. She doesn’t have much skill with it yet because she hasn’t had anybody to teach her, but she’s got the natural ability to become a substantial sorceress. Maybe even as powerful as her mother but without Lady’s rudimentary sense of ethics. It reeks off her-”
“Tain’t the only thing she reeks of, neither,” One-Eye chirped. “First thing you do with that little honey, you throw her in a vat of hot water. Then throw in a couple, four lumps of lye soap and let her soak for a week.”
Sahra and I exchanged glances. If she was bad enough to offend One-Eye, she had to be ripe indeed.
Goblin grinned from ear to ear but eschewed temptation.
I said, “I hear you ran into the Protector.”
“She was on a roof or somewhere waiting for something to happen. She didn’t get what she expected. A couple of fireballs and she ducked and stayed ducked.”
“You made it home without being followed?” I knew the answer because I knew they knew the stakes. They would not have come anywhere near here had they had the slightest doubt that that was safe.
I had to ask, even knowing that if they had failed, the warehouse would be buried in Greys already.
“We were ready to deal with the crows.”
“All but one,” One-Eye grumbled.
“What?”
“I saw a white one up there. It didn’t try to follow us, though.”
Once again Sahra and I exchanged glances. Sahra said, “I’m going to change and relax and get something to eat. Let’s meet in an hour. If you could find it in your heart, Goblin, you might try to get Murgen back here.”
“You’re the necromancer.”
“You’re the one who claimed he anchored him. One hour.”
Goblin began grumbling to himself. One-Eye chuckled and made no offer to help. He asked me, “You ready to kill your librarian yet?”
I did not tell him so but I was slightly more open to the suggestion tonight. Surendranath Santaraksita seemed to suspect that Dorabee Dey Banerjae was something more than he pretended. Or maybe I was just paranoid enough to hear things Santaraksita never intended to say. “You don’t worry about Master Santaraksita. He’s being very good to me. Today he told me I can look at any book I want. Unless it’s in the restricted stacks.”
“Woo!” One-Eye breathed. “Somebody finally found the way to her heart. Who’d’a thunk a book would do it? Name the first one after me, Little Girl.”
I waved a fist under his nose. “I’d knock out your last tooth and call you Mushy but I was brought up to respect my elders-even if they’re rambling, demented and senile.” For all its One True God focus, my religion contains a strong taint of ancestor worship. Every Vehdna believes his forefathers can hear his prayers and can intercede with God and his saints. If he feels he has been properly treated. “I’m going to follow Sahra’s example.”
“You holler if you want to get in practice for your new boyfriend.” His cackle ended abruptly as Gota limped around me. When I glanced back, One-Eye appeared to be sound asleep again. Must have been some other old fool running his mouth.
During the siege of Jaicur, I announced that never again would I be picky about what I ate. That I would respond to anything offered me with a smile of gratitude and a spoken “Thank you.” But time has a way of wearing away at such vows. I was nearly as sick of rice and smoked fish as Goblin and One-Eye were. Breaking the tedium with the occasional supper of rice and fish meal did not seem to help. I am confident that it is their diet that makes the Nyueng Bao such a humorless people.
I ran into Sahra, who had bathed and let her hair down and relaxed, looking a decade younger, so that it was easy to see how, a decade earlier still, she could have been every young man’s fantasy. “I still have a little money I
