Eleven
Pader gurgles and sags, gently depositing Ky on her feet as he kneels in front of her.
His mouth is twisting, trying to speak, but I can’t make out the words.
The weakening spray slicks the rest of Ky’s body, turning her breasts and stomach gory.
Pader’s hand stays locked around her throat for a long moment, until at last he topples sideways and his fingers slip away.
Ky takes shuddering, convulsive breaths, her hands clutching her neck.
I worm my way out from behind the sofa. Fuck if I know what to do now, but I have to do something. Ky doesn’t notice me, doesn’t seem to be seeing anything, her eyes staring blankly into the middle distance. I try touching two fingers to her bare, bloody shoulder.
That was not the right thing to do, apparently.
She twists with all the sudden violence I remember from last time, fist swinging for my face.
I try to duck away, lose my footing in the blood, and end up sprawled on the gory carpet.
She freezes there, arm outstretched, gasping for breath.
Her eyes meet mine and abruptly they regain focus.
You, she mouths.
“Me,” I say weakly.
Her voice is a rasp. “Did you…?”
She looks over her shoulder and spots Star, standing outside the spreading pool of blood and fastidiously wiping his manipulator clean.
“It’s okay,” I venture, as though speaking to one of the kids. “He’s dead. He’s not going to hurt you.”
The transformation that comes over Ky’s face is astonishing. All the stunned shock vanishes from her eyes and they sharpen into diamonds. Her brow creases in thought, as though she’s already planning five moves ahead.
“Of course he’s dead,” she says. “That’s what happens when you get your throat slit. We have to get out of here.”
I roll out of her way as she strides across the room, dripping trails of blood across the carpet as she goes. She falls to her knees beside the bed and grabs a stuffed leather satchel from underneath.
“Can your runic take out four armed guards?” she snaps.
I’m feeling a little left behind. “Uh, no. Definitely not.”
“Then we need another way out, fast. We’ve got until they think that fucker would be done raping me. How long does a rape normally take, do you think?” She looks thoughtful for a moment, then shakes her head. “Never mind, don’t answer that. How did you get in?”
“Window,” I say, barely keeping up. “You said it wasn’t locked.”
“It’s a ten-meter drop.”
“I climbed the wall.” I display my sigwork gloves.
“I don’t suppose you have an extra set. Can you carry me with those?”
“Probably. Maybe.”
“Have to risk it. Let’s go.”
I take a deep breath. I want to say, Hold on a second. I haven’t agreed to any of this. I don’t have any idea what’s going on. I told Star to kill someone, fucking stars, and sky above that is a fucking lot of blood. I’ve seen people die messy before, but I’ve never been directly responsible.
But she’s right. There are guards in the hall. There are Arbiters everywhere. This is a really bad place to be. And having come this far, I’m not going to leave her here, either.
So instead I say, “You should probably clean yourself up first.” I give an uncomfortable cough. “And, um, put on some clothes.”
Ky looks puzzled, then glances down at herself. Her expression turns thoughtful.
“Hmm.”
A thorough cleaning will have to wait, but she towels most of the blood off and washes her face and hands.
When she goes to the closet and yanks off her gore-soaked underwear, I hastily turn away.
After a few seconds of rustling there’s a tap on my shoulder, and I look back to see her dressed in well-fitted trousers and a dark shirt and vest, with her hair bound up and stuffed under a shapeless cap.
“Better?” she says. “If you were an Arbiter, would you scream bloody murder?”
“Not immediately.”
“It’ll have to do.” She tugs uncomfortably at her cap and grimaces. “It’s going to take ages to get it out of my hair. Okay. Out the window.”
I slide the pane open and Star skitters outside.
[Assessment: clear. Addendum: what exactly are we doing?]
Kinda figuring that out as I go along.
I pull off my pack and toss it to Ky, and she slips it over one shoulder beside her own.
I kneel by the window and she clambers onto me, wrapping her arms around my chest and her legs around my waist. I stand up with considerable difficulty.
Somehow, beautiful as she is, I expected her to be ethereally weightless, but of course she’s nearly as big as I am.
I can feel the warmth of her, and her breath tickles my neck.
“Ow,” she says. “Something’s digging into my hip.”
“Oh.” I slip my hand between us, trying not to grab her anywhere untoward. “Here. It’s your sword.”
She frees one arm to take it, legs tightening around my midsection. The sigwork blade folds up into a gold-edged baton with a finger-grip hole at one end, about twenty centimeters long. Ky stares at it for a moment.
“You brought it back.” Her voice is very quiet.
Unaccountably I start to blush. “Yeah.”
“You…” There’s a sound from beyond the door, booted footsteps, someone yawning. She hastily tucks the sword into her pack and wraps her arms around me again. “Go go go.”
I stagger forward. Her weight makes me ungainly, but I manage to slip my leg over the windowsill and get the BIND sigil in my kneepad against the wall.
One hand next, then the other knee. I can feel the sigwork straining.
It was designed to hold me and a full pack; there’s some safety margin, but a whole second person is pushing the limits.
“This is going to be a slow climb,” I mutter.
“All hell is going to break loose when those guards find their boss dead,” she says.
“If it’s not a slow climb, it’s going to be an unpleasantly fast one.” Star, close the window.
With a deep breath, I pull one hand away from the wall and start to work it down. I feel the sag where the weight starts to overwhelm the remaining BINDS, and I hurriedly plant my palm again and work on my knee. One limb at a time, bit by bit, we descend. Thank the stars I’m going down.
We make it to a couple of meters off the ground before something gives way. There’s a crunch and a spray of red sparks from my right glove, one of the sigils reinforcing the BIND giving way. I feel the force connecting me to the wall waning.
“Jump,” I hiss urgently.
“What?”
“Jump!”
Ky lets go of me and drops the rest of the way, absorbing the fall with a stumbling crouch.
Relieved of the extra burden, I scramble down after her.
The damaged glove isn’t completely dead, but it’s definitely lost capacity.
Putting too much weight on it could easily pop the remaining sigils.
Getting back home is going to be a mess.
“This way,” Ky snaps.
She scurries off down a crossing alley, and I follow. After a few rapid turnings she slows to a halt at a street corner. I pull her back a little way into the shadows. She meets my eye, and we both speak simultaneously.
“Now what?”
There’s an awkward beat as we process the overlap. I clear my throat.
“I can’t stay on Yesod,” I say. In the light of day, the Arbiters will spot me easily.
“Neither can I,” Ky says absently, brow creased in thought.
That’s unexpected. “Why not? Can’t you just go to the authorities?”
“And tell them I killed the heir to the Cavcante family?”
“He was trying to kill you. It’s self-defense.” I hesitate. “Besides, it wasn’t you who killed him, was it?”
“They’re not going to care about the details.” She waves a hand. “Besides, it’s irrelevant. If the Arbiters take me I’m as good as dead.”
“Who are you?”
“Kycilea Tranto. Does that mean anything to you?”
“Not really.”
“Then it’s too long a story to tell here.” She goes to brush hair back from her ear and seems irritated to find it still confined under her cap. “What about you? How did you get here from the undercity?”
I hold up my gloves. “Climbed.”
“You climbed? Like, climbed up the inner wall?”
I give a modest shrug. “There’s lots of crossbeams lower down. It’s only a challenge for the last fifty meters or so.”
“But—if there was a junk delivery from Above while you were coming up, it’d scrape you off the wall like a bug!”
“It’s a risk, yeah.” I give a sheepish grin. “Hasn’t happened yet, though.”
“Skies Above,” she says, shaking her head. “Okay, you’re insane, let’s file that away. You’d go back the same way?”
“That was the plan.” I look down at the glove and wiggle my fingers.
“I may need to fix this first.” Though where I’m going to get a STRONG sigil on Yesod in the middle of the night, I have no idea.
I might be able to cannibalize one from Star, but he’d never let me hear the end of it.
“And there’s no way I could take both of us. ”
“I have easier ways to commit suicide, thanks. I’ve got a better idea. It’ll get us down to Malkuth, and we can hide out there for a bit. You coming?”
Star speaks up. [Query: do you trust her?]
Not really.
I consider. I could cut my losses, retreat to the sewers and deal with the damaged glove, then climb back down on my own.
But that would leave me back where I started, with Clawmark enforcers breathing down my neck, only without any leads.
While nothing about tonight has gone as I intended, I have at least managed to meet up with Ky again.
I should stay with her at least long enough to hear this mysterious job offer.
But we’ll stick with her for now, I tell Star.
[Assessment: uncertain.]
No kidding.
“Yeah,” I say aloud. “Lead the way.”
To enter Yesod, one has to use the heavily guarded main stairways, where polite but insistent Arbiters check passes and inspect bags.
Leaving, on the other hand, ought to be comparatively simple; anyone on Yesod, by definition, has permission to go to Malkuth, so it’s just a matter of finding the right door.
In our case, however, there are additional complications.
While the ways down aren’t as fortified as the ways up, they’re still watched, in case anybody from down below tries to circumvent the one-way gates and razor wire.
Arbiters can grab you and demand to see your pass on any vague suspicion; you’d have to be lucky indeed to avoid them entirely.
Our luck runs out when we’re nearly there, passing through a park lined with leafy green trees.
(Trees! My mind still boggles sometimes.) At the other end, Ky tells me, is a barely used passage to the lower tier.
Before we can reach it, a woman in a dark blue uniform strolls nonchalantly out from behind a hedge and smiles humorlessly.
“Shit,” Ky hisses. “Okay. Just hold still and let me talk to her.”
My backpack squirms. Star is tucked away in there, annoyed about not being able to see properly. [Query: what is happening?]
Arbiter.
[Suggestion: if you let me out quietly, I can take them by surprise.]
Ky says she can handle it.
[Reminder: you said you did not trust her.]
Entirely fair. But if we were to kill an Arbiter, I can’t even imagine the consequences. Better to let Ky take her shot. She puts on a haughty smile and strides forward to meet the woman as though she has every right in the world to be exactly where she pleases.
“Miss,” the Arbiter says curtly. “Mind telling me where you’re going? And identifying your… companion?”
She looks me over with obvious suspicion. Ky isn’t exactly well-dressed at the moment, but her clothes are still of a cut and quality suitable for Yesod, while my own attire makes me look like, well, a thief, and a bloodstained thief at that.
“I do, in fact,” she says. “And my companion is my own responsibility. Come along.”
She takes a step forward, but the Arbiter puts out a hand to block her path.
“Pass?” the woman says.
“I’m sorry?” Ky sounds genuinely offended. “Are you serious?”
“Pass. Now.”
Fuck. So much for that idea. At least Ky is close enough to grab the Arbiter—their uniforms supposedly have sigwork that’s proof against knives, but that won’t help against a punch to the throat—
Slowly, Ky reaches into her pack. I tense. To my surprise, her hand emerges holding not a weapon but a small leather folder, which she hands to the Arbiter.
Our interrogator flips it open, and very abruptly everything changes. The woman takes a step back to make room for a bow, handing Ky’s folder back with both hands like an obsequious servant.
“Apologies, miss. Proceed, please.”
“This never happened,” Ky says dismissively. “We were never here.”
“Of course, miss. I will tell no one.”
“Tell no one of what?”
“Of… nothing, miss. Because nothing occurred.”
“Very good.” Ky beckons me imperiously. “Come along.”
I shuffle past the stunned Arbiter, who remains bent low. Ky strides out of the park and starts down a switchbacking stairway surrounded by fences and wire.
“What did you give her?” I ask in a whisper. I’ve never seen an Arbiter act like that. Normally they treat all civilians with barely veiled contempt.
“A Hod pass,” Ky says nonchalantly.
“A Hod pass?”
“And a couple of stripes.” She waves a hand. “She probably would have let us through without the bribe, but she would have told everyone she meets what happened, and that would have gotten back to the Cavcante. This way she’ll stay quiet.” Ky frowns. “Probably, anyway. I hope I gave her enough.”
There are too many absurd things in this remarkable sentence for me to handle.
Stripes are the currency of the upper tiers; one stripe is worth something like ten thousand bits.
Ky has just given this guard enough money to keep my family eating for years.
But mind-boggling as that is, it pales in comparison to the information that this girl has documents entitling her to pass into the highest tier of all.
Nobody is allowed on Hod. Money goes up, and orders and Arbiters come down.
“Why,” I manage, once I get my voice under control, “do you have a Hod pass?” If it’s stolen, it must be the single most valuable piece of contraband in the world.
“Because I’m from Hod,” she says, brushing at nonexistent hair again. “The Trantos are a Council family. Or we were, at least.”
“Then why—”
“I’ll explain everything, I promise,” she says. “But can we get under cover first?”
I give a shaky nod, and we descend the rest of the stairs into the red-tinged streets of Malkuth. I watch Ky and find myself wondering, with only a slight twinge of guilt, how many stripes she has left in that satchel.