Sworn in Steel (28 page)

“For someone new to el-Qaddice,” he said in Djanese, not bothering to look up from the piece of paper he was folding, “you’ve managed to achieve a great deal in a
surprisingly short amount of time. Tentative patronage? Housing at the padishah’s expense? I’m impressed.”

“I like to keep myself busy.”

“Yes, I can see that.” His thick fingers, surprising in their dexterity, never stopped moving across the paper. “I’m much the same myself, although I know I don’t
look it. My pastimes are more . . . sedentary.”

“I never would have guessed.”

A slight pursing of his lips beneath his thin mustache. “Yes, well. The hour’s late. I was wondering if I could interest you in a cup of tea, so that we might discuss our business in
a more comfortable setting?”

I crossed my arms. “Not thirsty.”

“Then a light meal, perhaps? I understand your people are fond of stuffed grape leaves. I know a cook who can—”

“Not hungry, either.”

I knew I was being rude, but I didn’t care. In offering to share his salt, the
Zakur
was also offering me his protection—at least for the duration of the meal. It was an old
Djanese custom, built on countless generations of life among the dunes, where simple hospitality could be the difference between life and death. By declining, I was saying I didn’t trust him
to keep his word. A slap in the face of his honor, I admit, but at this point I didn’t know if he had enough honor for my insult to leave a mark in the first place, and I wasn’t willing
to risk my life to find out.

“I see.” He raised one finger slightly in the process of folding the paper, and I suddenly felt cool steel at the side of the throat.

The man set the paper down on his broad lap and looked at me. “Since you insist on behaving like a barbarian,” he said, “we’ll proceed in the imperial manner.
Abul?”

A sharp, quick punch caught me above the kidney at precisely the same instant the knife vanished from my neck. I gasped and dropped to one knee.

“There,” said the man, picking up the paper again. “Now that we have the requisite violence out of the way, I can explain why I’m here.” He wiped a fleck of my spit
from the window edge. “I wanted to make something clear: The Imperial Quarter doesn’t belong to you. It will never belong to you. There are no great sheikhs of the Kin among your people
here. No Rufflers or ‘Standing Men’ or—”

“Upright Men,” I said from my knees.

“What?”

“They’re called Upright Men, you bastard. Get it right.”

Another flick of the finger, another punch. I winced and didn’t quite fall over.

“No
Upright
Men,” he said. The chair groaned as he leaned his head out the window. Several of the bearers started to stand, ready for a collapse that didn’t come.
“And no Gray Princes, either,” he added.

My eyes shot up to meet his.

“Yes,” he said, his eyes crinkling with a smile. “I think we understand each other.”

I nodded. No stirring up the local Kin. Fragmented and frustrated was how they liked them, and a Gray Prince stepping in to give a bit of order—or even worse, a sense of
purpose—wouldn’t sit well with the native crime bosses.

I didn’t bother asking how he’d figured out who I was. This was his—the
Zakur
’s—city: If anyone could gather up enough whispers and rumors and bits of
overheard conversation to piece it together, it would be them. Even if it was a guess, it was one I’d confirmed with my look.

No, I wasn’t overly surprised that they’d sussed me out; I just wanted to know how they’d done it so damn quickly.

The
Zakur
. . . Angle Master? Ruffler? Upright Man? . . . turned back to his folding. “You realize that I say this merely to avoid any misunderstandings between your esteemed
personage and my own people. We recognize and respect your position and your prestige.”

“Of course you do,” I said, looking back at the Cutters.

“Of course. Ah, there!” He made one last fold and held up what had become a paper reproduction of a desert wolf. It was damn good. “A frivolous pastime, I admit, but one that
requires great precision and planning.”

“Speaking of frivolous,” I said as I climbed to my feet, “you could’ve delivered this message any of a dozen different ways: by the street, via a messenger, through a
Prig or Beggar Boss . . . hell, you could have even written it on a folded fucking frog, for that matter.”

He looked at me through narrowed, puffy eyelids. “True.”

“Which means there’s more to this than just warning me off.”

Another twitch of his lips. “I can see why you’re an emir of your kind. Yes, there’s another reason.”

“And that reason is?”

He turned to more fully face me. The sedan chair creaked in protest, and I caught a renewed whiff of the damp peat and vinegar scent coming from his foot as the air shifted about him. Gout?
Worse?

“Why are you here?” he said.

I blinked. Smiled. Would have laughed in his face if I didn’t think it would’ve gotten me killed in that moment.

Why was I here? The very question I would have likely asked if a Grand Sheikh of the
Zakur
were to show up in Ildrecca. What did he want? What were his plans? Who was he working with?
Because, Angels knew, someone like that—someone like me—didn’t just show up this far from home for no particular reason, and certainly not without making contact with the local
powers that be if he didn’t want them to be nervous.

Only I had, because instead of thinking like a Prince, I’d been acting like a Nose. Again.

Dammit.

There was no good answer. Whatever I told him would be carved up and held to the light. Lies would be assumed, duplicity expected, misdirection anticipated.

Fuck it. I decided to tell him the truth.

“I’m here looking for someone.”

“And?”

“And what? That’s it.”

The corners of his mouth turned up, his heavy lips making the smile look like something between a smirk and a pout. “You could have searched in a dozen different ways,” he said.
“Through the Kin, an agent, a local boss—even by writing a note on a folded fucking frog; surely you don’t expect me to believe that a Gray Prince would come all the way to Djan
just to search for someone?”

“It’s not my problem what you decide to believe.”

“Ah, but it is.” He settled back into his seat and held up the paper figure, rotating it gently between his fingers. “Because what I believe can directly affect what you
accomplish here.”

“You don’t want to cross me,” I said. “Not in this. It doesn’t concern you.”

His eyes turned back to me. They were small, hard things now. “You threaten me?”

“I warn you.”

He stared at me for a long time—or what felt like a long time: It was hard to tell given the rapid pounding of my heart. When it became apparent that neither of us was about to back down,
he grunted and turned away. He snapped his fingers, and the bearers rushed forward to put their shoulders beneath the rails of his chair.

“It has come to my attention,” he said as the chair lurched upward, “that someone has been smuggling magic from the empire into el-Qaddice over the past few months. I believe
you used to smuggle relics into the Despotate not so long ago, yes?”

I kept my face blank, even as my guts rolled over inside me.
He
knew about the glimmer? Angels—just how much had Jelem sent down here? And more important, how many shipments had
he moved in the last few months?

“Dealing in relics and dealing in glimmer are two different things,” I said, my voice even.

“But smuggling is still smuggling, no matter what the nature of the goods. And in my city, I oversee the smuggling of all things magical.” He looked down at me from his enclosed
perch. “Don’t think us such the fools that we can’t see why you’re truly here, Shadow Prince. You would do well to think about handing the magic over, as well as disbanding
whatever organization you’re putting together. As I said, the Old City is ours: You don’t want to challenge us.”

“And if I say I don’t have anything to do with any smuggled glimmer?” I said. I decided not to mention anything about my not having an organization.

“I would say only a foolish man denies a truth that’s obvious to all.”

I crossed my arms. “You have no idea how foolish I can be when I put my mind to it.”

He smiled. “Truly, this answer pleases me to no end.” The screen to the chair slid up.

It wasn’t until after he and his Cutters were gone that I noticed a folded bit of paper lying at my feet: the wolf. Only, I realized when I picked it up, it wasn’t a wolf; rather, it
was a hyena. A hyena with hunched shoulders and an open mouth and a lolling tongue: laughing. At me.

I walked away, leaving his message torn and crumpled in the street.

A
fter that, I threw myself at the street for the rest of that night and the following day. Where before I’d been lingering in the backs of
low taverns and roosting kens, buying drinks to loosen other people’s tongues, now I took the more direct route. When steel wasn’t bared, it was shown, and my silver now carried the
occasional smudge of red when it changed hands. I brandished my name like a blade, cowing those who knew better, and buying off or educating those who didn’t. These were Kin: Even here, under
the thumb of the
Zakur
, I knew how to read them, how to talk to them—and how to scare the hell out of them when necessary.

Nothing happened in the Imperial Quarter without the
Zakur’s
say-so? I couldn’t find Degan without their protection? I was a Gray Prince, dammit: Fuck them.

Still, that didn’t mean I had to be stupid about it. Where I dropped my name, I did it in such a way that it wasn’t attached to me. I was an agent, a front man, a sounder sent ahead
to prepare the ground or ask the questions. I was both interested and disinterested in el-Qaddice, solidifying my position in Ildrecca or expanding outward. I was presence and ghost, a fact and a
rumor. Anything to muddy the waters for Fat Chair—yes, that was the cove in the sedan’s name—and make him wonder just what the hell was going on.

Anything, in short, to gain me some time.

As for Degan, he was proving as hard to pin down as ever. Even with him being a tall, fair-haired westerner in a land of dusky, dark-eyed Djanese, few people recalled having heard of him, let
alone seen him. The best I was able to collect was a handful of stale memories about a man who might have been Degan wandering into the Imperial Quarter for a few days, and then wandering back out.
That had been a month ago, and from what I could gather he’d spent most of his time strolling the bazaars and sampling street food. No word about a foreign blade selling his sword; no rumors
of him signing on with a local noble or steel house. No trail of bodies or coins to follow.

All of which meant I was going to have to widen my search beyond the Imperial Quarter. Not a surprise, but part of me had been hoping Degan would stick close to what he knew. Working the Old
City would require more time, money, and muscle than I had. It would require me to operate low to the ground, finding informers and sorting rumors as I went. That meant a lot of dirty Mumblers and
questionable Ears, more than half of whom would either feed me a crooked line of patter or sell me to the
Zakur
if they could manage it. Plus, thanks to both Heron and Wolf, I was going to
be doing all of this on a tight timeline.

No, this wasn’t going to be easy at all.

By the time I made it back to the Angel’s Shadow, it was well past noon on the day after I’d left. My feet were dragging and my head was pounding. I only had one
ahrami
seed
left from the stash Heron had given me, and I was saving that for when I woke up, hopefully sometime tomorrow morning. Late tomorrow morning.

I found Tobin and his people in the courtyard, hard at work on the new play. Those not reading lines were fitting together the framing for the backdrops.

The moment he saw me, Tobin turned and started forward, displeasure writ large on his face. Fortunately for the troupe leader, Ezak caught the look in my eye and took his cousin by the elbow,
steering him to another corner of the yard. Sounds of a brief but heated discussion drifted over as the rest of the troupe—even Muiress—gave me a wide berth. I made it to the
inn’s door without incident and went inside.

Fowler was sitting in the window nearest the door, one leg propped up in the sunlight, watching the rehearsal. Her hair was loose and falling over her left shoulder, the light of the sun turning
it to gold. I blinked, surprised to see it down. It took me a moment longer to realize she wasn’t in her street clothes—or, at least, not her normal street clothes. The well-worn travel
shirt and coat had been replaced by finer stuff: a high-necked linen doublet of ivy green, its front only partially laced, with the shirt underneath likewise at ease across her collarbone. Her
breeches were new, and tailored noticeably more for a woman than a man, which I found . . . distracting. The lines hugged her legs closely, until, just above the knee, the pants stopped. Below were
her usual hose and low shoes. Even those looked freshly brushed.

Fowler shifted slightly in the window and ran a critical eye over me. “I’m guessing you didn’t sleep.”

“That would have required me to stop moving.”

“Well, as long as you had a good reason . . .”

I pointed at her clothes. “What’s this?”

“What’s what?”

“The outfit. Is it for the play?”

Fowler stared at me for a moment, then turned back toward the courtyard.

“I borrowed it from the troupe,” she said. “Sent my drapes to be laundered. After this long on the road, they could use it.” She sniffed meaningfully and wiped at her
nose. “Wouldn’t hurt you any, either.”

I scratched at my chest, suddenly self-conscious. “When I have time.”

“You could always ask Muiress.”

“I’d prefer they come back in one piece.”

“There is that.”

I watched her watch the players for a moment, then turned my gaze toward the troupe.