Blood and Money (2 page)

A tile slipped traitorously beneath his foot. The shift beneath him sent Isra skidding precariously close to the edge. He teetered there, arms windmilling wildly until he caught his balance. He cursed himself. He had been careless, and it had almost cost him dearly.

It had also saved his life. A single rooftop away, he saw the unmistakable shape of the damned captain charging like a bull across the tiles, bearing down on him.

Isra spat a curse, and in a heartbeat was running again. This time there was an element of fear in his blood. The captain was relentless. Isra was going to have kill him, but he had no intention of going toe-to-toe with the warrior. He needed to use the terrain to his advantage—after all, this was his city. The captain belonged in the world below, not up here.

He cast about, looking for somewhere narrow and preferably precarious. There were dozens of obvious locations that suited his purpose. Katapesh was littered with minarets and sharp-angled rooftops. Isra ran for the nearest, racing along the crest of a great hall, using the spine of the watershed as a path. The captain came crashing behind him, clay tiles crushing beneath his heavy boots.

“You really don’t have to do this,” Isra called, gasping for breath as he swung himself up onto another rooftop. He wanted the man to think he was running out of ideas as quickly as he was running out of breath. His plan depended upon it.

The captain planted his hands on his knees, doubling over as he battled to catch his own breath. When he looked up Isra was already on the move.

A wooden stair coiled around the outside of the minaret. Isra hit it running, the captain not far behind him. The captain didn’t waste his breath on words.

And then they were at the top, a few feet between them, the captain moving menacingly toward the assassin. It was a long way down. The platform was precarious, the wood rotten in places. It creaked and groaned beneath the big man’s weight, but it wasn’t about to break. Isra wasn’t going to be that lucky.

“We can go our separate ways, never see each other again,” Isra offered, doing his best to sound reasonable.

“I don’t think so,” the captain said. He drew his sword.

The sun was beginning to come up behind the captain, giving him wings of fire.

“Well, you can’t say I didn’t offer,” Isra said flippantly. “Shall we dance?” He extended a hand, goading the big man to come at him.

The big man did.

Isra waited until the very last possible moment, danced back, and then pretended to stumble. As the captain launched his attack, the assassin went to ground, crying out to mask the fact that the fall was an act. As the captain came in for the kill, Isra swept his right leg around in a tight arc and took the big man’s feet out from under him.

For one agonizingly long moment, the stretched-out silence between heartbeats, it looked as though the captain might save himself.

Then he was falling. Unfortunately for him, those wings of fire didn’t help him fly.

Isra turned his back. He had no desire to watch the man die. His secret was safe. That was all that mattered. He climbed slowly down the wooden stairs. It was time to go home, get some sleep, and in the morning go back to being the good-for-nothing merchant prince squandering his family fortune.

But first, time to do what the night’s dead men had failed to do: put the Nightwalker to sleep once and for all.

There was a drop box hidden away in a deserted part of the city. It was where Isra collected his assignments from Mirza, his agent, and when necessary left messages. The assassin worked blind. Mirza had no idea of his identity. He didn’t need to. He was there to filter hits and provide a layer of safety between Isra and his Nightwalker identity.

The pair had long ago established a signal to denote that the assassin was laying aside his knife: a black pearl. Isra wore one on a string around his wrist. As he reached the drop box, he snapped the string and opened the lid, ready to put an end to the game. He’d almost gotten himself killed tonight, and he was in no hurry to repeat the experience. What was the old adage? Go out on top before you go out in a box?

He dropped the pearl into the metal box and closed the lid.

Isra was three steps away before he realized that the pearl hadn’t made a sound as it hit the bottom—meaning that it had fallen on something soft. He took a deep breath and went back to the drop box. Isra opened the lid again and reached inside.

There was an envelope. Another job. It would be the last, Isra promised himself, tearing the envelope open.

Inside was a single slip of paper with a name written on it.

Isra Darzi.

It was an impossible assignment. No matter how legendary the Nightwalker was, there was no way he could complete the kill.

Isra Darzi just wasn’t the suicidal type.

The fact that someone wanted him dead was a bitter pill for Isra to swallow, but not a particularly surprising one. Act like an idiot long enough, splashing the cash and taking it as gospel that every woman in the city had been put there for your pleasure, and you were going to incur a certain amount of jealousy. That was just part of the image he had cultivated to hide the Nightwalker from prying eyes. And he was good at it. No one in their right mind would suspect Isra Darzi was capable of anything beyond getting drunk and making passes at the lithe, long-legged ladies.

Of course there was the risk that went along with the kind of women he chased—or rather the husbands of these beautiful creatures, who had the nasty habit of thinking they owned them. But that was all just part of the game.

And Isra was rather fond of the game.

No, the thing that disturbed him was the fact that, of all the assassins in the city, the Nightwalker had been hired to carry out the kill. The Nightwalker was by far the most sought-after killer in Katapesh. His contracts commanded vast sums of money because they were always completed. Always. Like death and taxes, the Nightwalker was one of the few things that could be relied upon. Which of course made this whole thing slightly farcical. How was he supposed to kill himself and uphold the legend of the Nightwalker without actually killing himself?

At least three people knew his services had been retained: the client, his agent Mirza, and him. Mirza wouldn’t talk—it wasn’t in his interest to slay the legend, not when he lived off the commissions it brought in. So that left the client.

When someone wanted a man dead, it usually went one of three ways: One, they blustered and shouted about it drunkenly in a tavern, making idle threats. Two, they made some half-assed attempt themselves and generally botched it. Or three, they got serious about it. And the Nightwalker was very much part of option three.

So the question was twofold: who wanted him dead, and of that long list of jilted lovers, cuckolded husbands, and bankrupted merchants he’d left trailing in his wake, who could afford the price?

He felt reasonably sure he could discount the traders, given that when he was through with them they were invariably too poor to rub two coins together.

Katapesh was a thriving city. Anything and everything could be and was traded, no matter how exotic or expensive. In any mercantile hub there were rich men—lots of them. Where one man could profit at the misfortune of another, it was assured that the rich and powerful would cluster around like vultures waiting to pick off the dead and dying. Isra had rivals. He wasn’t naive enough to think otherwise. Two or three were certainly wealthy enough, but they were also the closest things he had to friends. Not that friendship meant they could be ruled out. How many times had one friend stabbed another in the back?

Then there were the jealousies that went hand-in-hand with being family. His own brother-in-law, Faris, married to his sister, Sana, made no secret of his envy. But Faris was a coward. He was the kind of man who chose option one, getting drunk and blowing hot air, listing all of the tortures he’d visit on Isra’s skin. But once the drink had worn off Faris would crawl back under his stone. Isra had very little time for the man, but his sister seemed to be taken in by his “charms.” They had a young son, Munir, who thought his father could do no wrong, though the boy’s affection was not always returned. Invariably when Isra went round to play the favorite uncle, Munir would end up with his arms wrapped around the assassin’s legs, begging him not to go.

But if it was one of this select group of suspects—friends and family—then from what he knew of them, they were all more than capable of carrying out the killing themselves, and would quite probably have enjoyed it. They certainly weren’t afraid of getting their hands dirty. So that would have put them squarely in the option two category. It all came down to means, motive, and opportunity. He couldn’t control means, but the client certainly had them, as well as a motive. What he could control was the opportunity.

Isra already had the first inklings of a plan coming together in his mind. He needed to draw the knife for his would-be killer.

It would need to be carefully orchestrated. But if he could manipulate his enemy into attacking him, and make sure it happened in front of a whole host of witnesses who would willingly testify to the seemingly unprovoked assault, full of outrage and shock that one of their own could go bad, he could kill three birds with the one proverbial stone.

Well, kill one bird—the client. Safeguarding both his identity as the Nightwalker and the assassin’s untarnished reputation were more like protecting the other two birds, if you were going to be picky about it.

Of course it would have been a lot easier if he knew who wanted him dead.

∗ ∗ ∗

The social scene was such that two days was not considered to be too short notice for a party; exclusivity demanded a certain amount of secrecy, after all. Lavish banquets could be brought together in a matter of hours. But then, with the market stalls filled to overflowing with every treat imaginable—and many unimaginable—Katapesh was a gourmand’s paradise. The cost was of no concern. Wealth necessitated a certain extravagance as far as Isra’s carefully cultivated reputation was concerned.

Invitations had been dispatched to the great and the good, the rich, the devious, the powerful and the influential—in short, anyone who was anyone in the city received the enigmatic card with the time, the date, and Isra Darzi’s crest. He liked the simplicity of it, treating the invitation as a summons rather than a request. It appealed to his sense of importance in terms of the social structure of the city. He was fairly certain that whoever wanted him dead would be there, blindly oblivious to the fact that they were the guests of honor.

Knowing the way the mind worked, Isra was fairly safe in thinking that anyone who failed to attend could be ruled out. Hosting the party—and a masquerade at that—was effectively painting a target on his own back. The masks assured a level of anonymity that would make it so much more difficult for any would-be killer to resist the chance to wield the knife himself.

It all came down to managing the opportunity. Isra had to ensure that each of his suspects had equal chance, not only to slit his throat, but to get away with it—hence the masks. They offered the illusion of facelessness, and in his experience cowards were braver when they didn’t think people could see them.

The notion of a masked ball appealed to Isra’s sense of humor. On the morning of the masquerade he had a second package delivered to each of the four men he suspected of wanting him dead: animal masks. There was a different one for each of his would-be killers, each reflecting his own thoughts on the strengths and weaknesses of the recipient’s personality: a calopus, a jackal, a lizard-skinned razorscale, and a mongrel dhabba in turn. It amused Isra to take the joke a little further, and along with each mask was a note assuring the guest that his host would be donning an ass’s head.

In fact, Isra had no intention of actually being at the gala for more than a few minutes, and certainly not in the guise of an ass. Yet such was the expectation when it came to Isra Darzi, ever the joker, and the deception could only help with his shell game. In reality, Isra would be far up above the party, lurking among the rafters or in the shadows of the eaves. Watching. He had tethered his proverbial goat as bait, now all he had to do was wait and see who came for it.

∗ ∗ ∗

“An assassin cannot afford mercy—nor expect any for herself.”

Isra donned his mask. He had chosen to be a great black-feathered bird. Guests were still arriving, and the chatter as they mingled was at first muted, the music of the string orchestra swelling to fill the domed chamber, its echo giving the notes a haunting quality as they swam around the animals below.

Dragon danced with camelopard, lion with janni and sand eel. Robbed of their features, every woman was more beautiful simply by the grace of her movement, the curve of hip and thigh, and the suppleness of her limbs as she moved across the dance floor. Each man, on the other hand, seemed to take on the persona of his chosen mask, the bulls pushing through the crowd, the pugwampis skirting the edge and watching the women, the calopi prancing and the peacocks preening. Human behavior never ceased to amaze Isra, and here, playing out beneath him on the dance floor and around its skirts, was a perfect encapsulation of city life and the social strata of Katapesh. The pig and the boar, he saw, gravitated to the food, eating with their hands.

The music changed, the tempo picking up. It was reflected on the dance floor with the animals moving gracefully from partner to partner, taking hands, bowing heads, drawing bodies close in the anonymity of their masks so that they might push up against each other in ways they never would have dared without them.

The ass moved through the crowd, tossing his head back and braying every now and then, before leading a swan onto the dance floor. The ass assayed a bow, and then began a crudely amusing courtship dance. For five minutes he was very much the center of attention. Isra took the opportunity to slip down from the rafters, moving swiftly and surely to the balcony, then from the balcony down into the press of bodies below. The mask was snug. Sweat trickled down the back of his neck, mingling with the stitched feathers to make a heady musk.