Chapter Eight
The synthetic raged.
It looked just like Adunummu, though it roared a lot and spoke in simple sentences. “Robbers!” it howled. “Give back what you have stolen!”
The interior of Adunummu’s tower had a marked lack of doors, so Indrajit and his companions had returned to the door to the thylacodon pit. Indrajit had pulled the door shut and was now spreading the flexible brass bar across the bottom, pressing its tacks and clamps into the heavy wood. They sank in easily; magic?
The synthetic, wrapped in a blue robe that hid its sexlessness, roared. The real Adunummu stood crouched behind it, his non-flipper hand wrapped in a smooth white ceramic knuckleduster.
“Louder,” Adunummu said softly.
But was he, after all, the real Adunummu? How would Indrajit even know that this Adunummu was not also a simulacrum of some kind? Or a projection, as Bolt had turned out to be? Magicians seemed to have the knack for presenting false reality.
Which probably made this plan to capture a wizard, and apparently a powerful one, a terrible idea.
“Ready,” Indrajit murmured.
He wore the flask hanging around his own neck and carried the golden bracer in his kilt pocket.
“Thief!” the synthetic bellowed.
Indrajit pulled the door open. A crackling sheet of light hung in the doorway. Beyond, his memory told him, should lie a narrow landing and then a long fall into the thylacodon pit. His senses detected neither, but he planned to move cautiously, just in case.
Adunummu raised his ceramic-wrapped fist and pumped his elbow. A beam of red light shot past Indrajit, narrowly missing his head and striking the sheet of light. His cheek felt scorched by the heat of the passing ray. The light in the door briefly turned red and a wave radiated out from the point of impact.
“Run!” Fix yelled.
Indrajit stepped through the light curtain. His step was careful, because he half-expected to step into darkness and a potential fall, but Munahim, Adakles, and Fix crashed through immediately after him, piling onto him and knocking him down.
He braced himself for a fatal fall, but tumbled onto a stone floor in a well-lit room at the bottom of a pile of Protagonists. Another red beam passed overhead. He smelled burning wood and heard a sizzling sound.
“Shut the door!” The voice belonged to Theophilus Bolt. Booted feet thudded on stone, hands grabbed Indrajit and dragged him across the floor, scraping skin off his knees and elbows. A door banged against his ankle as it was slammed shut. Indrajit rolled away from the legs of manic men as they slammed a brass bar across the inside of the door, a bar much like the one Indrajit had put onto the door’s other side.
“Clear!” one of them shouted.
The men wore heavy boots and were covered from head to toe. They looked something like the powder priests of Thûl, except the Thûlians were wrapped in scarves, shawls, and cloaks, to protect themselves from profane gazes; these men wore single garments that covered them entirely. They lacked even holes for eyes, and Indrajit saw no buttons or clasps for closing the garments. For all he could tell, the clothing had been woven directly onto the men.
“Wait,” he said. “I pulled the door open from the other side, and then you pushed it shut from this side.”
Theophilus Bolt laughed. The magician stood beside Indrajit, hovering in the air—which probably meant that this Bolt was a mere projection. “Yes.”
“That makes no logical sense.” Fix disentangled himself from the pile of men, climbing to his feet and straightening his kilt.
Munahim grunted and rolled into a sitting position. His instruction from Adunummu had been to keep his mouth shut and do as he was told.
“It makes all the logical sense in the world,” Bolt said. “It’s just a logic with which you are not perfectly acquainted.”
“Yet,” Fix said.
Bolt bowed as if conceding a point; he looked amused. “Not yet acquainted.”
“What’s burning?” Munahim asked.
“The building.” Bolt shrugged. “The men will handle it.”
The men in featureless suits rushed the other way across the room. Indrajit now saw a heavy timber, one of several matching beams running across the roof, on fire. The men aimed a hose at the flames and gray powder sprayed all over the fire, quenching it instantly.
“Come,” Bolt said. “Breathing will be unpleasant in here for a time. Let’s go upstairs.”
Bolt pointed at a green-painted door, but he himself walked to a rectangular window and clasped his hands behind his back. He smiled at the Protagonists as they passed through the door into a stairwell. Munahim carried Adakles on his shoulder; the Wixit was lucid, if not especially conversational. At Adunummu’s suggestion, he was pretending to be dazed and dumb still.
“Make sure to close the door behind you,” Bolt called.
Indrajit wanted to comment on their surroundings, but his experience with Adunummu made him fear he was being observed. He shut the door behind his companions, then duly trudged up a flight of stairs behind them to a second green door.
On the other side of this door, they found another plaster-walled room with heavy rafters and a single window. Bolt stood beside this window as well, with his hands behind his back and a smile on his face. In the wall to their right was set a door that looked familiar.
Munahim made a low growling sound in his throat and shook his head.
“I know, noble Kyone,” Bolt said. “You are weary of the strangeness of magicians. But you are nearly at the road’s end.”
Indrajit didn’t like the way that sounded. “We just want our client back.”
“The Wixit Thoat,” Bolt said. “Yes, as soon as you’ve overthrown the tyrant Megistos.”
“‘Overthrown the tyrant’ sounds like a lot of work,” Indrajit said. “We’re going to assassinate one wizard and be finished. Whatever’s left of the overthrowing business is your problem.”
Bolt bowed and smiled again.
“And we want Thoat back now,” Fix said.
Indrajit hesitated. This was not the plan.
Bolt smiled. “Well, that’s not going to happen.”
“We’ll trade,” Fix said.
Bolt frowned. “You think you can just put your foot down and refuse to go forward? You’ve obtained the flask, why would I not simply take it from you?”
“Because you need someone to assassinate Megistos,” Indrajit said. “The flask is just the way in. But we’re men of honor, we’ll do what we agreed to do. We’re offering you something else.”
Bolt’s eyes narrowed. “Go on.”
“We’ve obtained a treasure from Adunummu’s tower,” Fix said. “Beyond just the flask, of course.”
“Interesting,” Bolt said. “And why would I not just take it from you?”
“Well,” Indrajit said, “for several reasons, I suppose. One, Munahim might shoot you. And this time, not choose to miss. Two, Fix might stab you with the Dagger of Slaying. We’d have to run down the slope to get to you, but unless you can fly, that won’t take long. And three, we might just opt out of this whole assassination thing. I don’t like it very much in any case, to be honest. We’re fighters, but we’re not killers.”
Bolt chewed his lower lip. “What’s the treasure?”
Indrajit removed the golden bracer from his kilt pocket.
“Why not keep it for yourself?” Bolt asked.
“And risk a wizard’s curse?” Indrajit shuddered, a genuine reaction.
“I will think about it,” Bolt said. “You make an interesting offer.”
“No,” Indrajit said. “We’ll go out your door, wherever it leads, and carry out our appointed task. But we take Thoat with us. You can produce him, just as easily as you produced Adakles.”
“I produced Adakles outside the tower,” Bolt pointed out.
“Fine,” Indrajit said. “So we go through that door, and if Thoat’s on the other side, great, we’ll give you the bracer. Hand it to you in person, deliver it to your instruction, whatever you like. If he’s not, then we take the bracer and sell it, before we go carry out your plan.”
“I’m sure the Lord Chamberlain would pay us for the artifact,” Fix said. “Or the Hall of Guesses.”
“Or the Vin Dalu,” Indrajit said. “Or one of the temples.”
“Stop,” Bolt said. “I agree. Go through the door and you’ll find yourselves in Kish.”
“I knew it looked familiar,” Indrajit muttered.
“I’ll see that Thoat is returned to the plaza of the Headless Took,” Bolt continued. “He will be in a stupor like his son’s. A messenger will be there to take delivery of what you offer. The messenger will also tell you where to meet and slay the tyrant. Once the slaying is accomplished, we will restore both Wixits to their full minds. Is that agreeable to you?”
Indrajit looked at Fix, and his partner nodded.
“Agreed,” Indrajit said.
“Will the messenger be wearing red?” Fix asked.
Bolt nodded.
Fix passed through the door first, followed by Munahim, and Indrajit came last. They emerged onto the Avenue of Golden Chariots, in the darkness of night. Light from windows in the upper stories of the Crown’s palaces and towers threw golden puddles here and there, and travelers in togas were preceded by servants with torches and followed by armed guards.
Indrajit looked over his shoulder. The door by which they had come had vanished.
“The Headless Took?” he suggested.
They walked for a minute before Fix spoke, and then in a low voice. “What possessed you to negotiate for Thoat? We hadn’t discussed that.”
“I hate the feeling of passivity,” Indrajit said. “I want to be the hero, not the hapless fool in the grip of fate. We couldn’t have discussed it in Adunummu’s presence without involving him in the planning. And I don’t want to be Adunummu’s puppet any more than I want to be Bolt’s.”
“It was a good move,” Fix said. “They might have withheld Thoat and tried to force us to do more, or to betray Adunummu.”
“And if Bolt’s party refuses to remove the stupor from Thoat, we know that Adunummu can do it just as easily.” Indrajit sighed. “Though we may find ourselves negotiating with the two parties to get one of them to do it.”
“You can set me down now,” Adakles said.
“I don’t think we can,” Fix said. “And you need to continue to play dumb, as long as anyone might be watching.”
Indrajit thought about Adunummu’s viewing device. “Which might be a long time.”
They were nearing the alley to the plaza of the Headless Took. “What do you think the odds are that any of this is real?” Fix asked.
“What? Kish?” Indrajit asked. “Kish is real. Kish has caused me far too much pain to be anything but real.”
“Hmm. In fact, I could be persuaded that Kish was an illusion, too.” Fix shook his head. “No, I mean everything else. The tower by the sea, the sunshine. The tower on the plain of ash, the thylacodons. I don’t believe in being instantaneously transported from one land to another, across hundreds of leagues.”
“And yet we were transported,” Indrajit said.
Munahim made a low growling sound in his throat.
“We perceived that we were,” Fix said. “That’s my point. What if instead we were lying in a room off the Avenue of Golden Chariots the entire time? Under the influence of some drug, say. Or the odd power of some unknown race of man. And we believed we were transported to faraway places, and instead Adakles was simply returned to us along with the dagger and the bracer and the bottle.”
“You resist the idea of magic.”
“Yes. Of course, I do.”
“Why could it not have been craft that moved us?” Indrajit suggested. “I mean a technique, a device. Druvash sorcery, or something similar.”
“It could have been, I suppose,” Fix said. “But what difference is there between saying, ‘oh, by magic I was transported to a faraway realm,’ and saying, ‘oh, by means of mysterious technology I was transported’?”
They turned down the alley.
“That’s exactly my point,” Indrajit said.
“Shh,” Fix said. “Look for a messenger dressed in red.”
“And Thoat,” Indrajit added.