Red Tide (27 page)

The Spider looked at her. “I must say, you seem much more comfortable in condemning her now than you were when we last spoke.”

“The woman's a monster!”

“Because she disposed of one of her enemies?”

“She didn't just dispose of her, she tortured her!”

“Whereas a knife thrust to the heart would have been entirrrely ethical.”

Romany sniffed. The Spider's sermonizing was becoming as tiresome as Artagina's. “Do you disagree with my conclusion, then, about the danger she poses? Are you going to wait until she starts pulling legs off spiders to act?”

The goddess was a while in replying, and that pause left Romany feeling strangely uneasy. The Spider
never
had to think about a question. “No, I don't disagree,” she said at last. “But as to the precise time that we move against her, I will leave that to you. The effect of Fume's spirit should be slow to build, and it seems a shame to remove one of my own pieces from the board before I've had a chance to extract full value from it.” She smiled. “But we can discuss that in more detail another time. Don't let me keep you any longer. Wouldn't want you to miss that ship to Gilgamar, now, would we?”

*   *   *

Ebon followed Peg Foot down a mud track scarred by wagon ruts. Moments ago, they'd left the tree-lined main avenue running east to west through Gilgamar with its orderly traffic and its armed patrols. The stone buildings had been replaced by ones made from wood and mud bricks. Everywhere Ebon looked, there were men and women sprawled in the shadows, drunk or drugged, while redbeaks watched from the rooftops, waiting to see which of the sleepers did not wake.

Peg Foot took a right turn into a road half blocked by the debris of a collapsed building. From the opposite direction came two women pulling a handcart piled with bodies as if the plague were in town. Beyond, an old man crooned to himself as he stirred up the dust with a broom of twigs. Ebon had to raise a sleeve to cover his nose and mouth. The smell of charcoal filled the air, along with the ever-present burned-sweet scent that Peg Foot had identified to him as tollen.

The Gilgamarian halted outside a wooden building with a door studded with metal bolts. Inside, a dog yapped.

“Here we are,” Peg Foot said, gesturing to the door.

Ebon approached without hesitation. Perhaps he should have been more cautious, but overconfidence was the curse of the power he'd inherited—as dangerous, most likely, as whatever awaited him within. Besides, would nervousness serve him any better when he confronted “the man” Peg Foot had arranged this audience with?

The door had a scuffed sill a handspan tall, and Ebon stepped over it. He found himself in a room with a bar to his left manned by a barman wearing a bloodstained apron. Three men stood at the bar hunched over their cups, while another man sat against the wall opposite, stroking a one-eared mongrel dog. Half a dozen battered tables were scattered about the room. At one sat a young woman in a corset, plaiting her hair into pigtails. At another was a huge man with a bald, egg-shaped head, wearing a waistcoat with bulging buttons. He was eating a slice of bread and butter with a knife and fork.

Ebon drew up. Vale had entered behind him, but not Peg Foot, and no one inside the bar acknowledged his presence. So what next? He didn't have a name or even a description to work with. He hesitated before crossing to the bald man's table. The stranger's fork stopped halfway to his lips. He stared at Ebon, then gave a half smile and opened his mouth to reveal a set of pristine white teeth … and no tongue.

Great. This should be fun, trying to hold a conversation with a man who couldn't talk.

“Over here,” a female voice said, and it took Ebon a moment to register that the speaker was the woman in the corset. So she was his contact? Not what he'd been expecting, but perhaps that was the point.

He sat across from her, putting his back to the bar. The woman had a heart-shaped face and wide brown eyes. Attractive in a way, though there was nothing of Lamella about her. She was young—maybe just a girl in truth—and the pigtails made her look younger still, yet there was a weariness to her expression that her makeup could not conceal.

“So you're ‘the man,' are you?” Ebon said.

The woman giggled. “Silly. Don't you know what these are?” And she put her hands under her breasts and pushed them up.

Ebon shifted in his chair. “I believe so. My escort may need educating, though.”

Under the table the woman's foot touched Ebon's leg. “My name is Tia. And yours is?”

There seemed no reason to withhold it. “Ebon.”

“Ebon,” she repeated. “You're a stranger to Gilgamar, yes? Your accent gives you away.”

The prince kept his silence.

The woman's foot crept higher up his leg. “Our voices say so much about us,” she said. “Not just our accents, but also the way we use words, the precision of our diction. Our hands, too.” She took his right hand in hers and turned it to inspect the palm. “See? Your hand tells me you are accustomed to holding a sword, but that you've never pulled a plow or loosed a sail.”

“Neither have you.”

Tia's foot stroked his thigh. “Ah, but that is where the similarities between us end. For you are a man of breeding, aren't you? A man of refinement.”

“So I keep trying to tell people.” Time to move the conversation on. “I need to get into the Upper City. I was told you could help.”

Tia paid him no mind, still gazing at his palm. She traced the path of a barely perceptible line that ran down from his middle finger. “This is the fate line,” she said. “It tells me more about your life than all the other lines combined. A straight line is rare, for it shows someone who follows the course that fate has set for him. Boring. Where the line breaks up toward the top of the hand, as yours does, it shows a person who struggles against his destiny.”

Ebon held her gaze, waiting. Her right hand had dropped beneath the table.

“Your left hand will tell me more, of course”—she reached for it—“for while the right shows how your reality differs from your desires, the left shows—”

Her right hand suddenly reappeared from under the table, driving something silver toward Ebon's exposed left palm. There had been no tensing of her body, no tell in her eyes to reveal her intent. But the prince had been expecting the move, all the same. His right hand snapped out to seize her wrist. The knife she was holding stopped a short distance from his palm. Tia struggled against him for an instant, her teeth bared, the muscles in her forearm standing proud.

Ebon's strength was greater than hers, though, and he held her fast.

From behind him came the whisper of steel as Tia's men drew their swords. The tongueless man pushed himself to his feet. Vale moved up to flank Ebon.

Ebon ignored them all. He tightened his grip on Tia's wrist, digging his fingers into her flesh until she surrendered her hold on the knife. It clattered to the table. Ebon released the woman and scooped it up.

He pushed his chair back from the table and made to rise. Then stopped himself. The sensible thing to do would be to get up and walk out, but some instinct made him hold. Had Peg Foot intended all along to lead him into trouble? Or had Tia simply mistaken Ebon for easy prey, and thought to empty his pockets now rather than work for the privilege? He needed to know which it was. Because if the woman
was
able to get him into the Upper City, he couldn't afford to give up on her so quickly. What guarantee did he have that there'd be someone else out there who could help? Or that he'd be able to track them down? And even if he
could
find them, who was to say they would be more trustworthy than Tia?

The woman watched him with a hint of a smile, her gaze shifting back and forth between Ebon and the knife. There was no unease in her expression, but doubtless she thought her henchmen standing by would give her the edge in a confrontation. Ebon would have to disabuse her of that notion if he was to get her to take him seriously.

Lowering the point of the knife, he cut a stinging line across his palm and watched the blood well up. A moment to let Tia take in what she was seeing, then he healed the wound and wiped the blood away to reveal a pale pink scar.

“And what does
this
line on my hand tell you about me?” he said.

Tia smiled in delight, and it made her look like the girl Ebon had first taken her for. “Nice trick,” she said. “Does it work as well with a crossbow bolt through your eye?”

Ebon stabbed the knife into the table. “Are we done playing games?”

“If you insist.” She motioned for the tongueless man to sit down.

“I need to get into the Upper City,” he said again. “Can you help?”

“I don't like that word ‘help.' You make it sound like you expect me to do it out of charity. But yes, I can get you into the Upper City. The question is, why do you want to go?”

“I don't see that that's any of your business.”

“It is if you want me to help you.”

Ebon leaned back in his chair. Most likely Tia wanted a sense of his need so she could judge how much to charge for her services. But she might equally be trying to find out whether she stood to gain by turning him in. Either way, he was not inclined to share more of his purpose than he had to. “I'm looking for someone.”

“A survivor of the Hunt?”

Ebon raised an eyebrow, but it was a fair guess considering the timing of his arrival. “Yes.”

“You've seen their ship in the harbor?”

He nodded.

“Then why not send them a message through one of the guards?”

“Perhaps I don't want them to know I'm coming.”

Tia giggled. “An assassin, are you? I think not. Have you been to the Upper City before?”

“No.”

“Then how are you going to track down whoever it is you're looking for?”

“With the map you're going to give me.”

“A map, eh? That certainly narrows down your list of possible targets. No private houses on a map. There's the Alcazar, of course, but you don't need a map to find that. So … one of the courthouses? An embassy? Am I getting warm?”

Not a muscle in Ebon's face moved. “How soon can we go?”

“That depends. How many of you are there?”

“Two.”

Tia's gaze flickered to Vale. “Tonight, then.”

Ebon pursed his lips. He'd been hoping she would have false papers that could get him into the Upper City straightaway. “No chance of anything sooner?”

When the girl shook her head, it set her pigtails bouncing.

“When tonight?”

“I'll have to get back to you on that. Whenever it is, though, you should have enough of the night left to finish whatever it is you're planning to do.”

“How will we get inside?”

“I don't see that that's any of your business.”

“It is if you want my money,” Ebon said. “If your help is just going to consist of a ladder to lean against the wall, I may need to look elsewhere.”

Tia stroked her foot against his right leg again, and he lifted the leg and crossed it over his left. “I have a man on the inside,” she said. “One of the guards. He'll look the other way when you climb his section of wall.”

One man?
“That leaves a lot of other sets of eyes to see me.”

“Not if my man tells them to look the other way too.”

Ebon frowned. It wasn't the people
in
on the scam he was worried about. “And you've got others into the Upper City this way before?”

“Yes. Well, a couple. The fact is, it only takes one person”—and she held up an illustrative finger as if she thought he might not be able to count that far—“to see something they shouldn't for my man to lose his head. That's not a risk you run every day … or without suitable compensation.”

So they came to it at last. “How much?”

Tia regarded him appraisingly, no doubt trying to gauge how much money she could wring from him. He braced himself.

“Five thousand sovereigns.”

Ebon gave a strangled choke. He might be able to raise that sum by selling the two rings he'd taken off before coming here, but he wasn't about to let Tia know that. “Five thousand sovereigns?” he repeated. A small price to pay if it reunited him with Lamella and Rendale, yet he had to go through the motions of haggling. “
Five
thousand?”

“Oh no, wait, you wanted a map as well. Five thousand and one.”

“You are wasting my time. You said yourself, I am not from Gilgamar. No one travels with that kind of money. And it's not as if I've got friends here whom I can borrow it from.”

Tia gave an innocent smile. “I'm sure you'll think of something. You could use that trick with the knife. There must be people who would pay good money to see that.”

“One thousand,” Ebon countered. “And I'll need directions to a moneylender fool enough to lend it to me.”

“Four thousand.”

“Two.”

Tia's grin was growing broader by the moment. “Will you need help getting out of the Upper City as well as getting in?”

“No,” Ebon said. With luck he'd be able just to walk through the Harbor Gate when morning came. And if not, well, breaking
out
should be a good deal easier than breaking
in
.

“Three thousand, then,” Tia said. “And that's my best offer. Half payable in advance, half to be deposited with a countinghouse of your choice. Unless of course you've got something you can give me as surety for the second payment.”

“Something like my good word, you mean?”

The girl snorted. “The countinghouse it is. First payment due by the ninth bell tonight, shall we say?” She reached for the knife wedged in the table and wiggled it free.