Chapter 30
The Dervish came out of the silver in mid-yell.
“—are you doing!?”
The brick wall in front of him was unperturbed. He spun around, daggers leaping into his hands, and saw … two young boys?
What just happened? Where am I?
The boys had the ragged look of street urchins. Despite their best attempts to look jaded, their eyes were huge. One’s mouth was hanging open.
He was the one holding the sword. The Dervish took a step forward. “Where is Edmund?”
“Holy hell,” said the one with the sword. His companion, less articulate but clearly a quicker thinker, grabbed the hilt of the sword and shoved it back into the sheath. Silver swirled.
It swirled again and he came out, hit the same brick wall, and turned around to see the urchins watching him with great intensity. The Dervish grabbed a dagger and roared.
“If you—”
Silver. Brick wall.
“—don’t stop—”
Silver. Different brick wall.
“—doing that—”
Silver. Some kind of building, probably a warehouse.
“—I’m going to—”
Silver. A very surprised-looking woman standing behind a counter.
“—get cross!”
The woman was plump, middle-aged, and wore the shocked expression of someone who had just drawn a sword and had a warrior appear in front of her.
This was an expression that the Dervish had a lot of experience deciphering.
She was not, however, his wielder. The weird little sense just left of his heart that told him who the wielder was hadn’t changed, which meant Edmund was still alive.
Relief left the Dervish weak in the knees. He spun in a circle, taking in shelves covered with eclectic merchandise, random objects, and more than a little dust. The two boys from the alley were backed against one of the shelves, watching him with great suspicion.
Ah. Pawnbroker. Of course.
As the Dervish had no intention of allowing himself to be pawned, he reached out and grabbed the sword. The woman held on, possibly out of reflex.
“Madam,” the Dervish said, and stopped because he had no idea how to finish that sentence. Explaining would take far too long. Killing her would upset Edmund and probably Zale and the rest.
Right. Time for desperate measures. He leaned in—the pawnbroker’s eyes went very wide—and kissed her on the cheek.
She said “Wuh?” or words to that effect, but more importantly, her grip on the sword loosened. The Dervish plucked it from the woman’s nerveless fingers, swept her his deepest and most elaborate bow, then spun and stalked out the door. A bell rang behind him as he went.
Silence reigned briefly in the pawnshop. It was broken when one of the boys turned to the other one and smacked him upside the head. “I tol’ you we should’ve got the money before she tried it!”
The second boy rubbed his ear. “Didn’t know she was gonna just hand it over to him, did I?”
The pawnbroker, who was named Iron Peg and was famous for her hard-headedness, stared at the door with an expression that neither boy would recognize until long after puberty. “Heh,” she said.
“Y’know,” the first boy said, “you ain’t wrong. She did let our merchandise just walk out of here. Peg, I figure you owe us—”
“Owe you!” Her expression snapped back to the usual one they expected from Iron Peg. “You try to pawn off a cursed bit of goods on me, call up some wicked spirit or whatever that was, and you think I owe you? You’re lucky I don’t tan both your hides!”
She picked up the broom behind the counter, which was known and feared wherever street urchins gathered. The two boys sprinted for the door and were through, setting the bell jangling wildly.
Iron Peg made a scoffing sound, went to the door, and flipped the CLOSED sign. Then she leaned against the doorframe for a minute, and smiled.
“Heh.”
The Dervish made it nearly half a block before he realized that he had no idea where he was.
It didn’t look like any part of the city he’d gone to before.
The street was narrow and winding and buildings leaned out over it, sometimes connecting over the top by means of clotheslines and makeshift planks.
Slum-weavers built their hanging nests underneath every available set of eaves.
Had he been less immortal and less in a hurry, he would have taken a more subtle approach, but given the circumstances, he simply reached out and grabbed the nearest person he saw, who happened to be a street urchin only slightly older than the previous pair.
“Hey, gettoff me!”
“You. Which way to Chime Street?”
The urchin’s gaze swept over him, clearly calculating his worth down to the price of individual organs. “Yeah? What’s it worth to you?”
The Dervish slapped his side and remembered that since he had been in and out of the sword, he was no longer carrying any coin. “How about I don’t use your skull to hold spare change, pins, and interesting bits of string?”
“Nah.” The urchin did a complicated shoulder wiggle and was suddenly free. He took off down an alley so narrow that the Dervish would have had to go through sideways to pursue.
The Dervish cursed and looked for another victim. This time fortune favored him. Coming down the street was a man wearing dark brown robes, and along each sleeve was embroidered a small, silver dancing rat.
Brother Merle was a healer in service to the temple, and after the Dervish dropped Zale’s name and blurted out a somewhat abridged story about Edmund being kidnapped, he did not ask foolish questions.
He led the Dervish to a street corner a block over and flagged down a two-wheeled cart being drawn by a strapping young man with thigh muscles like tree trunks.
“This is Gervase,” Merle said. “He won’t cheat you or try to dump you in an alley.
Gervase, this man is known to the temple.
Take him to Chime Street and wait for him. Time is of the essence.”
The Dervish expected coin to change hands, but Gervase simply nodded and gestured to the Dervish to climb into the seat.
“And how is your gran doing?” Merle asked, as the Dervish sat.
“Breathing much better, sir,” the young man said, dipping his head. “Auntie says it’s a miracle.”
“Very good. I’ll come by next week with more medicine. If she takes a turn for the worse, you come for me immediately, hear? No waiting to see if she feels better in the morning.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Get on with you, then. Good luck, Ser Dervish.”
Gervase picked up the cart’s poles and set off at a jog.
They took so many twists and turns that the Dervish knew he would have been lost within seconds, but Gervase never faltered.
In fact, he seemed to take time is of the essence as an order and went over sidewalks and down alleys to avoid snarls in traffic, occasionally scattering pedestrians like pigeons before him.
The Dervish didn’t complain. Even when the wheels bounced over cobbles and rattled his teeth, even when they skidded in horse droppings and briefly struck a wall, he merely gripped more tightly.
Once they had left the area where buildings met overhead, it became obvious that the sun was about to set, and that Edmund had been in the hands of their captors for hours.
Please let it only be hours. Please let it not be days. While the Dervish had a broad sense of time passing in the sword, anything over five minutes and under a week felt much the same.
The sky slowly turned orange, dyeing walls and rooftops.
The urchins had clearly covered a vast territory.
Fortunately Gervase was nearly as tireless as Greathoof, and just as agreeable.
From him, the Dervish learned that the White Rat’s temple provided both healers and legal counsel for the occupants of the city’s slums, as well as arranging jobs whenever possible.
“Got me my best contract,” Gervase said proudly.
Other than slight pauses between words, he didn’t even seem winded.
“Oh?” the Dervish said, desperate for anything to distract him from fretting over Edmund. “What’s that?”
“Used to haul groceries but now I work in the Scarlet Quarter most evenings. The ladies get a client who comes in drunk and passes out, they’ll pay me to carry him out and take him home.
” He nodded solemnly. “And sometimes if a fellow comes in mean, they’ll slip some poppy milk in his drink to hurry things along.
But either way, the clients are no good passed out.
In the gutter they’re bad for business, and in a bed, they’re taking up space.
So I take them home, or at least to an inn. ”
The Dervish, who had once spent a brief stretch as a bouncer in a brothel, nodded understanding. “Does it pay well?”
“Oh yeah, yeah. Scarlet Guild pays for it, so it’s guild rates. And the ladies are a lot nicer to work for than the grocers were. Though sometimes the drunks wake up mean and I have to thump them.”
“I would imagine that didn’t happen much with the groceries.”
Gervase grinned over his shoulder at the Dervish. “Not so much.”
By the time they arrived in Chime Street, the Dervish had learned that Gervase lived with his gran and his auntie and two sisters, all of whom were seamstresses.
Sometimes the “ladies” would give him torn clothes that his sisters could mend or take apart.
His youngest sister worked with two rag-and-bone gnoles, providing fabric to the gnole burrow in the city.
Apparently gnoles had very specific requirements in terms of color and texture for the complicated rags they wore, and most humans weren’t very good at discerning the differences, so Gervase was very proud of his sister.
“Gnoles’re good people,” the young man informed him, in a tone that indicated thumping would occur if the Dervish disagreed.
“A gnole saved my life once. You won’t hear an ill word about them from me.”
“Good.” Gervase slowed. “This is Chime Street. Whereabouts?”
The Dervish pointed. Gervase set the poles down when they reached the building. “You want me to wait or do you need someone thumped?”
“There’s a very good chance I’ll need someone thumped. Come with me.”