“There you are, mister. Number is the count of doors down from the right, then up.”
The kid ran off while Detan was still staring open-mouthed at the makeshift map. It was a genius system, the counting pattern, and he was certain it was code amongst the urchin’s fellows. For once, he didn’t feel like he’d overpaid.
“Clever kid.”
“You got that right.”
Detan picked up the map, careful not to smudge the lines. “Well, let’s start with 6-3 here.”
“Lead the way.”
Detan gave the first door a rapid one-two-three thump, and it opened almost before he could take his hand back. Bushy brows peered out at him, granite-grey ridges over black-brown eyes.
“What?” the man grunted, pipe smoke heavy on his breath.
“Hullo, good sir! We’re visiting with the honored sensitives of the city to inquire about their–”
“Are you from the Watch?”
“Er, well, no.”
“The Hub?”
“I’m afraid we’re not acquainted with the specifics of–”
The man spat at Detan’s feet and slammed the door shut. A little wuff of dust wafted onto his face, shaken from the lintel by the man’s over-exuberant use of his portal. Detan coughed.
“Well, couldn’t have been him anyway.” He brushed dust from his shirt, found it already mingling with his sweat and well on its way transforming into mud.
“Really? You convinced he doesn’t dress up as the lady watch captain in his off hours?”
“Mightin’ be that he does, old friend, but he’s still not our creature. I remain convinced that the doppel is a woman. And taller.”
“As you say.”
He scratched out 6-3, and they moved on to the next.
The second door wouldn’t even open for them despite the light in the window and the alluring scent of cooking spices seeping from within. The third produced a perfectly pleasant woman who offered them a rather terrifying mug of hot tea, her hands trembling so that the clay cup clanked against its saucer. Detan sensed sel in that woman’s house, but he was beginning to realize such secret caches were far from unusual in this neighborhood. Sensitives felt comfort in being close to a source of sel. It wasn’t a compulsion, but he certainly understood the appeal.
At the fourth door, a hunched woman with grey-green eyes and a slump to her shoulders opened the door a crack, her gaze narrowed in suspicion. Sweet spices drifted on the air, they must have interrupted her baking. His stomach gave a hopeful rumble.
“May I help you?”
“I hope so.” He beamed and thrust out a hand. She just looked at it. “We’re here conducting a small review of the retired sel workers in the area, ma’am. I was wondering how being retired is treating you?”
“It was rather quiet and pleasant until a few moments ago.”
“Oh… ah. Do you mind if we come in?”
“Yes.”
She closed the door, leaving Tibs and Detan locked out of yet another home of Aransa.
“This is going great, sirra.”
“Oh, shut up. That woman had a sel supply somewhere in her house. She’s a candidate.”
“So? The last one did too. You said yourself almost all of them have. And this one had a limp, anyway.”
“Could have been an act.”
Tibs sighed and looked down at the map. “Come on then, six more houses we have yet to get banned from.”
They dragged themselves back that night exhausted, with stubbed toes and an annoyingly persistent lack of leads. Detan threw himself down on the bed and groaned as the tired muscles of his back stretched.
“Happy with yourself, sirra?”
Tibs was, he noted with no small amount of irritation, looking quite vibrant. Detan chalked it up to him having had the luxury of their rented room to himself the night before.
“Shove it, Tibs. You just don’t understand what it’s like to spend the night in jail and find your plans all thwarted in the morning.”
“Thought you didn’t make plans.” There was bitterness to Tibs’s voice, a sharp edge that raked thorns over Detan’s consciousness. They’d failed to find the doppel. Now they had a choice to make, and the unspoken weight of it hung between them, heavier than any sel ship’s ballast. Leave town and risk pursuit, or dance on the doppel’s strings. Neither option was appealing.
He grimaced and flopped over onto his side, staring out into the little goat pen that housed their flier.
It was gone.
“Tibs, did you take the flier somewhere last night?”
“No. I spent the evening fixing it up. Why? Oh.”
Detan sprang to his feet, but wiry old Tibs still beat him to the door. There was a fierce ache in his legs, but he didn’t let that stop him from pounding down the dusty hallway with Tibs at his side. They reached the rickety desk their proprietor sat behind at the same time, both whoomping as their stomachs and hands smacked into the edge of it.
A little puff of dust wafted up. The proprietor didn’t seem to notice.
“Excuse me.” Detan cleared his throat and the proprietor looked up from his accounts. He was a man of middling years with hair gone all to ash and his cheeks gaunt from a steady diet of spicewine and more spicewine, judging by the smell of him. He peered up at them from his little alcove, squinting against the low lamplight so that his brow and cheeks wrinkled right up and covered his eyes.
“What?” he said.
“Upon careful purview my companion and I have discovered that the contents of our acquired place of rest have gone missing.”
“What?”
“Our flier’s gone.” Detan sighed and slapped the ticket stub for the pen on the desk. “And our account is paid in full, I assure you.”
The proprietor squinted over the desk at the stub and smacked his lips. “Number eight-six, eh. Yeah, your man came and picked that wreck up earlier today, round lunch hour. Said to thank you kindly fer it and give you this.”
Gnarled and smoke-stained fingers passed a folded slip of paper across the desk. Detan snatched it up and danced away from the proprietor, turning the paper over to make out the droopy wax seal. Despite an overabundance of wax muddying the details, the family crest was clear enough in the crimson globule. It was just too bad he hadn’t a clue what it meant. Despite the intense education of his youth, Detan found all the iconography of the sigil a mystery to his eyes. He suspected Auntie Honding would turn her nose up at it as a gaudy example of the peacocky nature of the new-rich.
“Go on,” Tibs urged.
Detan broke the seal and flipped the thick, cream-hued paper open. Tibs crowded him, peering over his shoulder to get a better look.
Dear idiots,
I have taken your heap of a flier in trade for the clothes you wrongfully acquired this evening. The thing is such a wreck that I hardly think the trade fair, but I suspect you possess nothing of equal or greater value in all the world. I suppose after some much needed repair it will make a suitable gift for my daughter’s birthday.
Regards,
Renold Grandon
A cold shiver of rage added a tremble to Detan’s fingers, and he was annoyed to see the paper shake with it. As his anger mounted, his senses widened. Awareness of all local sources of sel bled into his mind. A little stash behind the proprietor’s counter – probably infused in alcohol – a great pool of it in a nearby buoyancy sack, no doubt a part of a neighbor’s flier. Their presence called to him, cloying and hot, an inviting outlet for his fury. Detan closed his eyes, willed cool sense into the blood pounding through his body.