The man raised his sword for the killing blow. For a moment it was as if he and Yama stood in a tableau pose. Then the man grunted and let out a long sighing breath that stank of onions and wine fumes, and fell to his knees. He dropped his sword and pawed at his ear, then fell on his face at Yama’s feet.
Yama’s right arm was numb from elbow to wrist; his left hand was shaking so much that it took him a whole minute to find the lantern and light it with his flint and steel. By its yellow glow he tore strips from the bedsheet and bound the shallow but bloody wound on his forearm and the smaller, self-inflicted gash on his palm. He sat still then, but heard only horses stepping about in the stables below. If anyone had heard the door crash open or the subsequent struggle, which was unlikely given that the other guests would be sleeping on the far side of the courtyard, they were not coming to investigate.
The dead man was the one-eyed cateran who had looked at Yama across the taproom of the inn. Apart from a trickle of dark, venous blood from his right ear he did not appear to be hurt. For a moment, Yama did not understand what had happened. Then the dead man’s lips parted and a machine slid out of his mouth and dropped to the floor.
The machine’s teardrop shape, was covered in blood, and it vibrated with a brisk buzz until it shone silver and clean.
Yama held out his left hand and the machine slid up the air and landed lightly on his palm. “I do not remember asking you for help,” Yama told it, “but I am grateful.”
The machine had been looking for him; there were many of its kind combing this part of Ys. Yama told it that it should look elsewhere, and that it should broadcast that idea to its fellows, then stepped to the window and held up his hand. The machine rose, circled his head once, and flew straight out into the night.
Yama pulled on his shirt and fastened his boots and set to the distasteful task of searching the dead cateran. The man had no money on him and carried only a dirk with a thin blade and a bone hilt, and a loop of wire with wooden pegs for handles. He supposed that the man would have been paid after he had done his job. The pot boy had been right after all. The landlord wanted both coins.
Yama sheathed his knife and tied the sheath to his belt, then picked up his satchel. He found it suddenly hard to turn his back on the dead man, who seemed to be watching him across the room, so he climbed out of the window sideways.
A stout beam jutted above the window frame; it might once have been a support for a hoist used to lift supplies from the street. Yama grasped the beam with both hands and swung himself once, twice, and on the third swing got his leg over the beam and pulled himself up so that he sat astride it. The wound on his forearm had parted a little, and he retied the bandage. Then it was easy enough to stand on the beam’s broad top and pull himself on to the ridge of the roof.
Chapter Seventeen
The Water Market
The vine was just where the pot boy had said it would be.
It was very large and very old—perhaps it had been planted when the inn had been built—and Yama climbed down its stout leafy branches as easily as down a ladder. He knew that he should run, but he also knew that Telmon would not have run. It was a matter of honor to get the coin back, and there in the darkness of the narrow alley at the back of the inn Yama remembered the landlord’s duplicitous smile and felt a slow flush of anger.
He was groping his way toward the orange lamplight at the end of the alley when he heard footsteps behind him. For a moment he feared that the cateran’s body had been found, and that his friends were searching for his killer. But no cry had been raised, and surely the city was not so wicked that murder would go unremarked. He forced himself not to look back, but walked around the corner and drew his knife and waited in the shadows by the inn’s gate, under the wide canopy of the avocado tree.
When the pot boy came out of the alley, Yama pushed him against the wall and held the knife at his throat. “I don’t mean any harm!” the boy squealed. Above them, a parrot echoed his frightened cry, modulating it into a screeching cackle.
Yama took away the knife. The thought came to him that if the one-eyed cateran had crept into the room to cut his throat or use the strangling wire, instead of bursting in with his sword swinging wildly, he, and not the cateran, would now be dead.
“He came for you,” the pot boy said. “I saw him.”
“He is dead.” Yama sheathed his knife. “I should have listened to you. As it is, I have killed a man, and your master still has my coin.”
The pot boy fussily straightened his ragged jerkin. He had regained his dignity. He looked up at Yama boldly and said, “You could call the magistrates.”
“I do not want to get you into trouble, but perhaps you could show me where your master sleeps. If I get back the coin, half of it is yours.”
The boy said, “Pandaras, at your service, master. For a tenth of it, I’ll skewer his heart for you. He beats me, and cheats his customers, and cheats his provisioners and wine merchants, too. You are a brave man, master, but a poor judge of inns. You’re on the run, aren’t you? That’s why you won’t call on the magistrates.”
“It is not the magistrates I fear most,” Yama said, thinking of Prefect Corin.
Pandaras nodded. “Families can be worse than any lockup, as I know too well.”
“As a matter of fact, I have come here to search for my family.”
“I thought you were from the wrong side of the walls—no one born in the city would openly carry a knife as old and as valuable as yours. I’ll bet that dead man in your room was more interested in the knife than your coins. I may not be much more than a street urchin, but I know my way around. If hunting down your family is what you want, why then I can help you in a hundred different ways. I’ll be glad to be quit of this place. It never was much of a job anyway, and I’m getting too old for it.”
Yama thought that this pitch was little more than a gentler form of robbery, but said that for the moment he would be glad of the boy’s help.
“My master sleeps as soundly as a sated seal,” Pandaras said. “He won’t wake until you put your blade to his throat.”
Pandaras let Yama into the inn through the kitchen door and led him upstairs. He put a finger to his black lips before delicately unlatching a door. Yama’s knife emitted a faint blue glow and he held it up like a candle as he stepped into the stuffy room.
The landlord snored under a disarrayed sheet on a huge canopied bed that took up most of the space; there was no other furniture. Yama shook him awake, and the man pushed Yama’s hand away and sat up. The sheet slipped down his smooth naked chest to the mound of his belly. When Yama aimed the point of the knife at his face, the man smiled and said, “Go ahead and kill me. If you don’t, I’ll probably set the magistrates on you.”
“Then you will have to explain that one of your guests was attacked in his room. There is a dead man up there, by the way.”
The landlord gave Yama a sly look. The knife’s blue glow was liquidly reflected in his round, black eyes and glimmered in his spiky white hair. He said, “Of course there is, or you wouldn’t be here. Cyg wasn’t working for me, and you can’t prove different.”
“Then how did you know his name?”
The landlord’s shrug was like a mountain moving. “Everyone knows Cyg.”
“Then everyone will probably know about the bargain he made with you. Give me my coin and I will leave at once.”
“And if I don’t, what will you do? If you kill me you won’t find it. Why don’t we sit down over a glass of brandy and talk about this sensibly? I could make use of a sharp young cock like you. There are ways to make that coin multiply, and I know most of them.”