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“I expected it to be harder to get in,” murmured Caliban. “Why would it?” asked Slate. “They want you to come in and spend as much money as possible.” “They’re at war.” “Which means the other city needs to worry about keeping them out. The war’s happening miles away and there are no human soldiers from this side. Most of the citizens probably don’t even notice it’s happening.”
All over the square, the other statues were repeating variations on this statement, with various mechanical movements. A griffin raised and lowered its crest, a horse pawed at the air, and something went badly wrong with a statue of a mermaid, causing her to slap herself across the face with her own tail. Clunking noises and a badly chipped nose indicated that this probably wasn’t the first time.
The paladin barked a laugh. “Typical! I no longer know what is typical of anyone. But I have generally found that women are capable of great heroism. At least as great as men.” He thought of the nuns who had raised him and added, “And they frequently make less fuss over it.”
Brenner was smoking a post-dinner cigarette with the intense concentration he usually reserved for killing people.
“Everyone’s fed?” said Slate. “Nobody’s starving or filthy or has bugs in their socks?” “You’re not wearing socks,” Caliban pointed out. Slate wiggled her bare toes at him. “I have one pair that is not more hole than sock. They are taking a well-deserved rest. They are heroes of the sock world.” Caliban put his fist over his heart in tribute.
I’d have jumped his bones weeks ago if he looked like a human and not a damn piece of statuary.
The strong do not take advantage of the weak. Or the…errm…the equally strong who happen to be having a moment of weakness. As the case may be. …and if I’d said any of that out loud, she’d probably have shoved me out a window in full armor.
Slate was used to, “Can we help you?” translating as, “If you make me get up, I will have you drawn and quartered.” She’d never heard it mean, “I will throw myself off a building if it will make your day better, sir.”
“Maybe the fact that we don’t know how to do it?” “Details. Somebody will have written it down. If the Senate’s in on this—and they’d have to be, wouldn’t they?—surely they’ll have at least three or four guys who know how to do it, in case one falls down a privy shaft in the middle of the night. Bureaucracy thrives on redundancy.”
So many artificers do not keep good notes, and Master Magnus writes everything down. And indexes it correctly, too. A good index is a thing to treasure.”
The scholar took a deep breath and squared his shoulders. “Indexes,” he said determinedly, “are essential to the proper functioning of a civilized society.”
“I’m told genuine Chadori think it’s hilarious. Apparently only old women dress like this, so you get assassins wandering around dressed up as somebody’s spinster aunt.”
“My dear paladin, you won’t find anyone who cares more about a country than its underworld. If the wolves eat all our sheep, where are we going to get mutton?”
Caliban would have laid down his life for Slate, probably with a sense of relief, but a man’s socks…that was asking a lot.
She went up the broad steps with Brenner behind her, and she touched the door with one gloved hand. The gatekeeper opened the door. There were no passwords, no counter-signs, no secret knocks. If you knew the Shadow Market existed, you were allowed in. It was as simple as that.
In many cities, there are places where the underworld elements gather together. Business is transacted. Questionable services are offered for sale. In many cities, these places are raided and shut down as soon as they are discovered. In Anuket City, where all things are for sale, the Shadow Market was protected by unwritten truce. The guards did not go there. The Senate was officially unaware of its existence. (It was rumored that the rulers of the Shadow Market paid a great deal for this consideration.) In return, the Shadow Market stayed where it was. Neighborhoods did not become dens of
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Not now. Later. Slate pushed down the panic and the memory, aware that she would pay for it later. That was fine. Once she was safely back in the hotel, she could do anything she had to do—weep, scream, throw a chair at Caliban’s head. He’d probably even bring me the chair. She laughed soundlessly behind the veil, teeth bared. It felt almost like screaming and the panic retreated.
“Do you think I don’t know how to act around thieves and ruffians?” “The fact that you even use a word like ‘ruffians’ is not filling me with confidence, no.”
There was a crowd swirling across the floor, between the stalls, but it was like no crowd he had ever encountered. It didn’t move right. It didn’t sound right. It hissed when it should have roared, and this bothered him a great deal, because he had previously thought that all crowds behaved more or less the same way.
Caliban had always believed that he had been in some very shady establishments, particularly for a Knight-Champion. Even paladins go slumming occasionally. Surely nothing in the Shadow Market could surprise him. The magnitude of his former naiveté astonished him.
“It’s been a while, darlin’. My friend’s new in town. Thought I’d bring him around…show him the sights...” The downward direction of his eyes left no doubt as to what sights he’d meant. Caliban stared into the middle distance and prayed for death. The prostitute leaned forward across the table. “Really?” Anyone’s death. Brenner’s would do.
her pace around the room, explaining the heist, he couldn’t help but admire the expressiveness of her gestures. She told the story with both hands. She’s still not beautiful. I think I may be half in love with her, and I still wouldn’t call her beautiful. And it doesn’t seem to matter at all. He had known a fair number of beauties, and he could not remember enjoying the way one told a story half so much.
Among the many skills paladins required was the ability to convince people to evacuate dangerous areas. This was sometimes difficult. People were reluctant to admit that, say, the ancestral family farm was now an open portal to hell. There were phrases you used and phrases you very much learned to avoid. Saying “It’s for your own good” pretty much guaranteed that no one was going anywhere. “Really, it’s for your own good,” said Brenner.
Slate sighed. She was tired and her feet hurt and she was about to learn something that was undoubtedly going to be unpleasant. She couldn’t do the voice, but there were still things a decent person could do. Even if I’m not a paladin. She moved her aching feet to one side and said, “Sit down.”
That was the trouble with genuinely honorable people. You just couldn’t get any traction at all.
“Prayer is for the one who prays. It would be a monstrous arrogance to think that my prayers might sway the heart of a god.”
The way he looks at you has no love in it, and too much hunger.”
Being invisible nearly drove me mad, until I learned to use it to rob people blind. I wonder how the gnoles manage. Do they ever wish that they weren’t invisible?
Nobody’s paying attention, because they’re grave-gnoles and people don’t look at them. They look at the other gnoles and don’t see them. They see the grave-gnoles so they don’t look at them. This was troubling, as much for what it said about humans as about the fact that corpses were regularly being dragged into the Clockwork District and no one was paying attention.
“Take—oh—crazy. You know he says that a lot?” “I’d noticed,” said Slate dryly. “Yes, well. The thing is that in gnolespeech, he’d be saying twenty different words. The vocal component is only part of it. The rest is in the ears and the whiskers and the posture and maybe some other things I don’t know how to ask about. But because we only recognize the spoken word, we don’t understand all the nuance.” He picked up a sheet of parchment from the table. “I started trying to write down all the meanings the other night. He told me as many as he could. Actually, he told me I was crazy trying to write
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“Stealing from a library?” said Learned Edmund in horror. “It’s a living,” echoed Slate.
I am thirty years old, for god’s sake. I should kick his feet out from under him and sit on his chest and tell him “Look, I saved your armor-plated ass from the rune so don’t give me any crap about the strong and the weak. I don’t see you getting any better offers.”
There are no demons in Anuket City.
Fearing neither pain nor farm animals, as it turned out, went a long way towards making one useful as a demonslayer.
But if the demons aren’t here, where are they?
“Politics,” she said. “It doesn’t make any sense. People do the stupidest shit and you want to scream that it’s against their own interests and you never know if they’re playing some deep game you don’t know about or if they’re really just that stupid. Right now, I think we’re having a war because we’ve already got a war, so we might as well keep it.”
“Wars are harder to stop than to start,” said Learned Edmund cautiously.
Anuket City looked old, as if it had grown up on the ruins of a dozen other cities, which it had picked apart and built with or occasionally carted off for scrap.
Humble tenement buildings sported monstrous gargoyles from earlier incarnations as churches and cathedrals.
the Temple of the White Rat.
She had heavy eyelids, but the eyes under them were sharp as adder’s tongues.
If he’d been about ten years younger and not half out of his mind over Slate, he would have been rather attracted to her. A woman like that would drink you down to the dregs and leave you half-dead in the gutter with a smile on your face. There was a great deal to be said for that. As it was, even if he had been completely available, he was a little afraid she might break him in two. So he simply enjoyed the warmth of the divine that radiated off her. Even if it was not his god, it had been a long time since he felt such a power. Certainly no priest in the city that he had yet met had it.
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She was an old, fierce thing, a thing of high places and the hearts of beasts. Her children would walk sure-footed in the dark. Her priests knew the taste of loneliness, and, knowing it, had put their boots on its neck.
Her eyes were full of wolves and shadows, snow and thornlight. She would have him go to empty places and hold them against those who would destroy them. When he fell at last, ravens would carry bits of his flesh away on black wings and make one final use of his sacrifice.
He was not one of those people who believed that there were no coincidences. There were plenty of coincidences. They frequently worked out badly, but they happened. But you did not grow up in a temple without learning to see the hands of the gods at work.
All he had ever been was a sword in the hands of a god. He knew no other way. If a god would not wield him, then very well, he would have to wield himself and hope to do Their will regardless.
It felt as if the goddess had reached inside and touched a hollow place underneath his breastbone. He could still feel Her fingers on his heart.
“I still can’t believe we’re breaking into a library,” said Learned Edmund. “You make it sound like we’re robbing graves,” said Slate. “It’s not like we’re stealing for the fun of it. We’re taking notes that they should have given you anyway.”
A good index is a thing of beauty.
“That is an understatement so vast as to border on inaccuracy.”
