4: What Happened on Iron Street

“Why did you do it?” Katterine asked.

She was wearing the same dress she had worn the last time he had seen her, that morning in late Semoj of 704 when he had announced that he was leaving and walked out of their house for the last time. She had watched him from the doorstep, confusion and anger clouding her face as tears dripped onto the dress’s collar.

“Do what?” Jon asked. He could smell burning balau wood. She must smell it too. Did she know that it was he who had lit the fire?

They were in a luxurious bed, in a luxurious hotel room. They were both fully dressed, as if they had come from the town and gone directly to bed without taking their shoes off. Jon pushed the sheets down and sat up. Katterine stared at him placidly, saying nothing.

The smell of fire grew stronger. Smoke began to seep under the room’s door.

“We have to get out!” Jon cried.

He leapt out of bed and ran to the window. Their room was only on the second floor: they could jump down and be saved! He seized a heavy wooden chair and heaved it at the window. The chair struck the glass hard in its center, but instead of the window, the chair shattered. Sharp splinters flew across the room. Some struck the bed, piercing the sheets, piercing Katterine so that she bled from a dozen cuts.

“You can’t get out,” Katterine said.

The smoke was thick now. Instead of rising, it roiled on the floor, like fog. It piled up and covered the bed, covered Katterine. She did not move. It filled her lungs. She did not cough.

“Katterine!”

But she was dead.

Jon ran to the door. The knob was hot. It burned his hands, but he gripped it and heaved the door open.

The hallway outside was filled with fire. Jon lurched and stumbled through it, somehow able to see in spite of the flames that leapt above his head and licked at the ceiling. He needed to get to the door at the end of the hall. There was the stairwell: a way out: escape!

The doors to his left and right opened to disgorge burning men and women. They wilted and fell with rasping exhalations as he passed. He stepped on a body, felt it crunch under his shoe. He reached the door.

“Why did you do it?” Anna’s voice asked. He turned and saw that it was she he had crushed. She was burning.

“Because I had to do something!” Jon screamed at her. “You don’t know what it’s like! You can’t judge me! You can’t understand!”

She stared at him placidly as her face scorched and peeled. He turned back to the stairwell door.

“You can’t get out,” Anna said.

Jon wrenched the door open. It led into his room at the inn in Norbus. He had slept for nine hours, and it was three o’clock in the afternoon.

Sluggish with sleep, Jon rolled to the right side of the bed, looking for a speaking tube in the wall. There was none. He rolled to the left, looking on the nightstand for a buzzer to push. There was no buzzer either. He rose and looked for a toilet, found none, then looked for a chamber pot, and was again disappointed.

He tried to remember the name of this inn. Some cliche nautical name, low-class. The building seemed old and cheap. Urban buildings from before the Technological Revolution often had only one lavatory per floor…

Jon cracked the door of his room open and poked his head out into the hallway. The inn was small, and the hall communicated with only six rooms, with stairs on one end, and (there it was!) a lavatory on the other. Jon stood still and listened, wondering if any of the other rooms were occupied. The rows of doors reminded him of his dream. He did not want any of them to open as he passed. When nothing stirred, he leapt out of his room and ran to the lavatory on tiptoes.

Once relieved, Jon descended to the lower floor, which was a tavern, ordered biscuits and a pot of coffee, and took these back up to his room. The barman spoke pleasantly to him, but he barked his order and tossed his coins on the counter without looking at the man. The dream had left Jon feeling embarrassed, and he did not want to talk to anyone.

Jon sat on the bed and tried to compose his thoughts. The room was drab, with one small window that faced a brick wall. It offered no distractions, but Jon could not concentrate.

The dream had been horrifying in the conventional way of nightmares, but he did not feel afraid or disgusted. He supposed that a normal man might have felt guilty, but Jon felt no guilt: he hadn’t really killed those people. Yes, he had burned down the Three Rests hotel in South Palmurba. He had destroyed it in a dozen different ways. It had been a game, trying to find a way to kill everyone in the hotel at the same time. He had played many such games during his vacation in Palmurba. But not really. He had fallen back and erased all of those crimes. All he had really done in Palmurba was exercise, to be in peak physical condition on his return to the Continent. He hadn’t even been to the Three Rests, much less burned it down.

His thoughts stalled on the image of a dead fish with bright scales, floating in gray sludge. There had been heavy rain the morning after he burned the Three Rests. Ashes had washed down into an ornamental pond and killed the fish there. Their gleam against the muck had made everything seem more dead, more pointless. They had no reason to be beautiful.

Jon hurled the coffee pot through the windowpane. He listened as it banged against the brick wall, then against the cobblestone below, bounced, banged again, the sound different now that the coffee had spilled out. The tinkle of falling glass outlasted the echoes.

“I had to do something,” Jon muttered.

* * *

The streets of Norbus were arranged like concentric wheels. Archer Street was a spoke that ran from the harbor inland. Iron Street was a rim that circled the harbor. The Iron Street trolley ran the entire curving length of the street, with one terminus on the West side of the harbor and the other on the East.

Jon realized with dismay that he did not know how many footbridges might cross Iron Street, or which direction Anniisa had ridden from. He wanted to locate the bridge where Anniisa de M. had been attacked before night fell, but all he knew was that it crossed Iron Street near a trolley stop near some sort of low-income housing. There might be more than one bridge that met those criteria, so he would need to ride the entire line before he could even determine where to start searching.

Jon entered the queue for the trolley. As he waited, another problem presented itself: he had no money. In his angry haste the previous day, he had left Nordaroso with only the coins that had been in his bureau. He had not ordered Bitali to fetch gold from his vault, and he had not ordered Anna to fetch coin from the bank. After what he had spent at the inn, he had just enough money to ride the trolley, and no more.

Trolley tickets were dispensed by a coffin-shaped machine that stood next to the stop. A prohibition ward was conspicuously bolted to its front, apparently to prevent the use of magic to cheat it. Jon dropped two aluminum tenth-gil coins into a hopper on the front of the machine and pulled the knob for a day pass. The machine ingested the coins then ticked and clanged for several seconds before disgorging a wooden card from a slot near the ground. The card was warm. A pattern of dark stripes had been burned into it, along with the date and the type of ticket in block letters.

The trolley arrived, and passengers began crowding onto it. Jon had expected to present his ticket to a conductor, but instead he saw passengers inserting tickets into a slot in a hatbox-sized machine just inside the trolley. The machine ingested the tickets, then spat them out again a moment later with an approving ding. There was a conductor, but his job seemed to be merely to watch that no one passed the machine without inserting a ticket.

Jon fed his wooden ticket in. The reader dinged and returned it. During the moment that the ticket had been inside, several small, precise notches had been cut into its short edge.

Jon met the eyes of the conductor, an older man with gray hair and a scar under one eye. He repelled Jon’s gaze with a scowl.

The trolley Jon had boarded was heading West. Making frequent stops, it took more than thirty minutes to reach the western terminus. That meant it would probably take a full hour to get from there to the eastern terminus. Jon saw no footbridges: there was no need for any, because the only hazard to pedestrians was the trolley itself, which moved slowly and rang its bell in continuous warning.

At the terminus, the track curved into a tight circle, turning around to head back the way it had come. There was a stop at the edge of this circle, at the point nearest the harbor. A crowd of people waited there to board, mostly passengers from a recently docked steamer. Jon watched them idly. The Great Detective, he thought, would be observing each one in detail, making deductions about their backgrounds and occupations, and systematically filing that information in his infalible memory. Instead Jon’s eye was caught by a shapely woman in a bright kimono.

Jon began to form a plan of seduction. The trolley was crowded: he could offer the woman his seat and use this as a pretense for conversation. He might learn her name, why she had come to Norbus, where she had come from, if she were married, if the marriage were happy: information he could use to meet her “by chance” in a future iteration, and to present himself as the sort of man she might desire to meet by chance. Of course this would be a distraction from the case, but if–

A thin man cut roughly in front of the woman just as she was stepping through the door. She staggered backward, and by the time she had regained her footing the door had closed. “Full!” the conductor called. He threw a lever and the trolley started forward. Jon sought the thin man with his eyes, hoping to glare his annoyance, but the man was standing at the front, facing forward, and Jon could not see his face.

The trolley ground along, stopping with what seemed to Jon excessive frequency. The clanging of its bell became increasingly annoying, and Jon became increasingly certain that it could go faster. By the time it returned to the intersection with Archer street where he had first boarded, the sun was brushing against the tops of the taller buildings, and Jon was beginning to feel hungry. This reminded him that he had no money.

He touched the one-shot pistol concealed in his sash, then hefted his backpack to feel its weight. Even without the dam, it was still heavy: it contained two automatic pistols and several full magazines. He only needed one bullet to fall back: perhaps he could pawn the automatics to buy some food…

He rode the trolley all the way to the eastern terminus. It passed under only two bridges. One of them–the one nearer the harbor–was an iron truss bridge connecting the docks with warehouses further inland. There was some foot traffic on this bridge, but there were no houses or apartments near it, only warehouses and machine shops. Jon discounted it: there was no reason for a waitress coming from the Joyful Hart to get off the trolley near here.

The second bridge was a dainty wooden structure, as much ornament as conveyance. It crossed Iron Street where the street bisected the park surrounding the Temple of Tartest.

Like all Pliigist temples, the Temple of Tartest had a low circular peristyle enclosing a courtyard, in the center of which stood a tall spiral pagoda. The Temple had already been ancient when the Empire had wrested Norbus from the Antua six centuries ago. It had stood while the city around it rose and fell and rose again, stoic as the Sage it memorialized. The park around the Temple was a recent addition, created seventy years ago on the order of the Emperor Vastus to soothe some bad feeling between himself and the Abbots. How the Abbots felt about Iron Street being cut through the park forty years later had not been publicized.

The trolley stop was West of the bridge. Jon got out and began walking East, toward it. Six o’clock had come and gone, and twilight was beginning to settle over Norbus. Most of the park was planted with small groves of fruit trees. Between the trees and the failing light, Jon could not see far in any direction, but he had seen the park’s edges from the trolley, and he knew the general layout. The North half of the park, nearer the harbor, was ringed by apartment buildings. The South half, where the Temple was located, was ringed by expensive new houses that had been built to look old.

Jon doubted that Anniisa had lived in one of the houses: no waitress could afford them, and no daughter of a rich family would be working as a waitress. Anniisa must have lived in one of the apartments. That was not good for Jon’s investigation, because there were at least twenty apartment buildings on the North side, which meant at least a thousand apartments. He would not discover which of them housed a woman with one foot simply by asking around, and it would be impossible for him to watch all of them to see her come out. If she even still lived there–it was likely that she had been compelled to move after her injury.

Jon turned his gaze up to the Temple’s pagoda, and an even more discouraging possibility dawned on him. Perhaps Anniisa was religious, and she came to the Temple for morning or evening prayers. If she had gotten off the trolley at this stop to go to temple, not to go home, then she might never have lived nearby at all.

Jon stopped walking. He fingered his suicide gun while he idly watched the evening crowds. They seemed to be moving equally in both directions: people leaving the park, and people going to the Temple. Hundreds of people. Thousands. Jon realized with a twinge of embarrassment that he did not know the population of Norbus.

This is pointless, Jon thought. It had been a mistake to torture Jorcyn. In his angry haste he had learned little, and he had left himself with no way to learn more. He would fall back and return better prepared. With what he knew now, he could easily pose as a relative of Anniisa’s. He could use that pretense to get more out of Jorcyn, and from the Hart’s other staff.

Jon reached into his sash and made a fist around the tiny gun. He drew it out, unnoticed by the people passing by. He sighed, annoyed at the prospect of making the journey to Norbus a third time. He raised the gun to his lips.

It was at that moment that the street lights came on. Directly across the street from Jon, the twilight was pushed away by a cone of yellow incandescence. In that cone stood the thin man who had taken the last spot on the trolley.

Jon lowered the gun. Was it the same man? Was that man following him? The man bolted West, out of the circle of light, and Jon knew with certainty that he had been following him. Jon turned to chase him up the street, but he found his path blocked by a woman in a gray tunic.

“Move!” Jon shouted. He shoved her to the ground and hurried past. But as she fell, Jon felt a pinch in his shoulder, just above the armpit. He looked down, and saw that the woman had stabbed him with a tiny syringe. It was empty: an internal spring had injected its contents. Jon jerked it out, but a cold numbness was already spreading down his arm.

He turned back to where the woman had fallen, but she had already regained her feet. She stood in a fighting stance, feet wide, firsts raised before her face. And Jon recognized her. She had been with Lowdous de Cynd in Nordaroso. She was one of Cynd’s bodyguards.

Jon lunged at her, aiming a punch at her head, but she dodged backwards. She knew that the syringe had hit home: she need not attack again, only wait for Jon to fall. And he would fall. He could feel the drug spreading into his chest, his heart. His balance faltered.

Jon was still clutching the one-shot pistol. He raised it. If he had been only afraid, he would have shot himself with it, and thus escaped. But he was angry. He was angry at being outsmarted, at being thwarted, at having his person violated. He aimed at the woman and pulled the trigger. Then he fell to his knees. He heard people around him screaming and running. Then all sounds faded. He slumped on his side as the world went black.

* * *

Jon became gradually aware of voices conversing, two men and a woman.

“I said I’m fine, Barnaby,” the woman said. “It just hurts. Stop asking.”

“You should still get it looked at,” said Barnaby. “Could be internal bleeding or something.”

“Yeah, sure. Tomorrow.”

“Isn’t it weird that he was holding that pistol?” said the other man. “I’m sure he didn’t draw it after Marle poked him. He already had it in his hand.”

“He must have drawn it,” Marle, said. “He was just fast.”

“Why would he draw on you with a one-shot when he had an automatic in his backpack?” Barnaby said. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“I swear he didn’t draw it,” said the second man. “He already had it in his hand. It looked like…”

“Like what?”

“I think he was gonna shoot himself.”

“That’s stupid, Delko.”

“That’s what it looked like.”

“The light was bad. Maybe you saw it wrong.”

Jon tried to assess his condition without moving. He was lying on his back, on a stone floor. He felt no pains except a soreness where the syringe had jabbed him, and an ache in his left arm. A chain around his left wrist pulled the arm uncomfortably upward, lifting the shoulder off the ground. The air was cool and damp.

He opened his eyes slowly. Sparse electric lights dimly illuminated rows of barrels stretching away in the direction of his feet: a wine cellar. Near his head was a stone wall with a wooden door. On his left was a huge barrel in a cradle. It was to this that he was chained.

He strained to see his captors without moving his head. Marle, the woman Jon recognized as Lowdous de Cynd’s bodyguard, sat on a small barrel by the door. She wore a frown of discomfort and was massaging her chest just below the right collarbone. Jon’s bullet must have hit her there. The carbon-silicon fabric of her tunic had stopped it from penetrating, but it could still have caused a painful bruise and possibly a fractured rib. Jon was impressed by the armor’s performance. He would have to get some for himself.

The two men stood with their backs to him, their attention for the moment on their conversation and not their prisoner. Unlike Marle, their garments did not appear to be armored. Jon recognized one of them, Delko, as the thin man from the trolley. The other, Barnaby, Jon had never seen before.

“Should you hit him with the dam again?” Barnaby asked.

“Hit him with the dam?” Delko scoffed.

“Use magic on him. Whatever. You know what I mean. He’s still asleep. We want him awake when the boss gets here, right?”

“Hit him with the dam!” Delko said, this time imitating Barnaby’s voice. Marle and Delko both laughed. Barnaby scowled and crossed his arms.

Delko walked over to Jon and prodded him with a foot, squinting at him in the dim light. “Hey, are you awake? Johannes de Alder! Can you hear me?”

Jon could hear perfectly well, and he was fairly certain that he could answer. Instead he groaned. He opened his eyes halfway and rolled them so the whites showed.

“He’s still got some in him,” Delko said. “Why don’t you try it, Marle? You mixed the tranq.”

“Yeah,” Marle said. “Give it to me.” She stood up, wincing as the movement put pressure on her right arm. Delko withdrew a spheroid dam from an inner pocket of his uwagi. Marle held out her left hand, and he placed the dam in it. Marle held the dam above her head theatrically and looked down at Jon with a glare of concentration.

Jon felt the last of the drowsiness suddenly leave his brain. The chain on his wrist became painful as full feeling returned to his body.

Delko took the dam from Marle and put it back in his pocket.

“You awake, Alder?” Barnaby asked.

Jon turned his head and looked around the room properly. He did not speak. His mind, now unencumbered by drugs, raced to analyze his situation.

His captors were waiting for “the boss” to arrive. That must mean someone who had authority over all of them, and since Marle worked under Lowdous de Cynd directly, they could only mean Cynd himself. Apparently Jon’s actions at the Joyful Hart had so alarmed Cynd that he had dispatched agents to locate and detain Jon so that Cynd could interrogate him personally.

Jon had not thought at all about how Cynd would react to him skipping their meeting in Nordarosso so that he could go torture infomration about Cynd’s wife out of the manager of his favorite resaurant instead. He had not expected Cynd’s reaction to be relevant, or that Cynd would even learn of the incident before Jon fell back and erased it. That Cynd had responded with such quick and decisive force showed that he was fearful of espionage, and was prepared to combat it.

Where was this place? His captors had a dam, so it could not be anywhere public. It was also not in any building that had been designed as a fortress or prison. It must be a building near where Jon had been captured, a building to which Cynd had private access, but which was not advertised as belonging to him.

Delko had a dam, but Jon could tell by their speech and mannerisms that both he and Marle were only amateur magicians. They had his backpack. His guns were probably still inside. The light was dim. Marle’s shooting arm was injured. I can work with this, Jon thought.

“What in the name of First Sage are you idiots doing?” Jon shouted.

The response was silence. Good, Jon thought, already off balance.

Jon made his voice indignant, offended: “Get this chain off me!”

“You’re not in a position to make demands,” Barnaby said.

“My position is working for Lowdous, idiot.”

“We’ll ask him about that when he gets here.”

“Lowdous isn’t coming!” Jon shouted. His captors looked at each other, then back at him with evident confusion. “Who did you talk to?” Jon continued, modifying his tone to sound earnest instead of demanding. “Did you talk to Lowdous himself? Or did you talk to Hanns?”

They said nothing, but Marle’s face bent into a frown. Hanns, Jon thought. Good.

“Marle, I’m sorry I shot you,” Jon said. “When you attacked me, I assumed you must be with Abrikota. I can see now you aren’t. I’d be dead if you were.”

“What do you mean ‘with Abrikota?’” Marle asked. “What are you talking about?”

“I can’t explain it all to you now. Just get this chain off me. Now! Please!”

“I’m not about to–”

“Ask Lowdous! He’ll explain.”

“Mr. Cynd will be here in–.”

“I told you, Lowdous isn’t coming. If you told Hanns that you captured me, then Hanns is coming, not Lowdous, and when he gets here he’s going to kill all of us.”

There was silence in the room for a long moment. Finally Barnaby said, “I could go check.”

“Yeah,” Marle said. “Go call Mr. Cynd. Just tell him that Alder was saying some nonsense about working for him, and we wanted to confirm it’s not true. Make sure it’s him you talk to.”

“What if I can’t reach him?”

“Then meet him out front.”

Barnaby opened the wooden door and hurried out. One down, Jon thought.

“Lowdous is going to be very unhappy that you did this,” Jon said, after Barnaby’s footsteps had faded.

“Why?” Delko asked.

“Don’t talk to him,” Marle said. “Just wait for Mr. Cynd.”

“Because I was trailing someone,” Jon said. “Why do you think I rode the trolley around in circles all afternoon?”

“Who were you trailing?”

“The spy from Abrikota. He’s gotten away now, because of you.”

“Why would Mr. Cynd have you trailing someone from Abrikota?” Marle asked. “Cynd Ceramics and Abrikota aren’t even in the same industries.”

“Hollow moon!” Jon swore. “I can’t– Do you have my backpack?”

Delko reached behind the barrel that Marle had been sitting on and brought out Jon’s backpack.

“Look inside it. There’s a false bottom.”

“What’s in there?” Delko asked.

“Proof!” Jon said.

Delko looked to Marle. She nodded. Delko removed Jon’s guns and magazines from the backpack and tossed them into the corner by the door, far out of Jon’s reach. He shook the backpack upside down to be sure that it was empty, then began probing around inside.

“There’s no false bottom in this,” Delko said. “It’s just canvas.”

“Yes there is!” Jon said. “Let me show you!”

“I’m not giving it to you,” Delko said.

“Then find it yourself!” Jon shouted.

Delko began turning the bag inside out, examining the seams. He took a step closer to Jon, then another, trying to get more light from the dim bulb in the middle of the ceiling. Jon was not certain of the distance, but it was now or never: once Delko confirmed that there was no false bottom, Jon’s ruse would be over.

Jon shoved downward and sideways with his right foot and right hand. His body rose, twisted, rotated. The chain on his left wrist became a fulcrum around which his body swung, an inch above the floor. Arm extended, body stretched, his feet reached the middle of the room. Jon kicked with his left foot, striking Delko in the knee. He stumbled. Jon hooked his right foot around Delko’s ankle and pulled the knee with his left, turning the stumble into a fall. Delko sprawled on top of Jon.

Delko screamed in pain and anger, but he did not panic. Dropping the backpack, he put one hand to his waist to secure his gun and made the other into a fist which he pounded into the side of Jon’s head. Jon saw stars.

Delko pushed himself up, straddling Jon. He drew his pistol and raised it above his head to smash the grip into Jon’s nose.

But Jon had accomplished his goal. When Delko fell on him, Jon had thrust his right hand into the man’s uwagi and found the inner pocket where the dam was kept. Jon made a fist around it–still in Delko’s pocket–and one of his fingers touched its surface. The dam was half full. Enough.

Jon looked past Delko and saw exactly what he had hoped to see: Marle, her gun drawn and aimed, hesitating, waiting for a clear shot. The hammer was cocked. Her hand was unsteady. Yes. Perfect.

Jon formed an intention and released the dam’s kao through it.

Marle’s finger slipped, touched the trigger too hard. The gun fired. For a moment the cellar was illuminated as with daylight. Marle’s bullet took the tip off Jon’s ear as it passed him, on its way to the chain that bound him to the barrel. A link of the chain shattered under the bullet’s impact, and Jon was free.

Jon threw his left arm forward to block Delko’s blow, then used his right hand’s grip on Delko’s uwagi to roll him sideways. He pushed off Delko’s chest and lurched toward the corner where Delko had tossed his guns.

Light flared. Marle had fired again. A deeper shot boomed out. Delko was firing now too.

Jon reached the corner in a crouch. His hand closed around the grip of a gun. He rolled sideways as he cocked it. He stabilized on his elbows, aimed from prone. He fired two bursts of three shots each, and the fight was over. Delko writhed as blood poured from three holes in his chest. Marle lay still, a red hole between her eyes. The barrel had been hit. Wine streamed from a hole in its bilge, masking the smell of blood with the smell of alcohol.

Jon grinned, elated. He could not recall the last time he had felt such genuine thrill, such a sense of victory. He laughed.

But he could not laugh. He could not draw a full breath. He felt an odd warmth in his belly. Probing with his fingers, he discovered that Delko or Marle–he did not know which–had had their revenge. A bullet had entered his body above his clavicle and hit no bones as it tore through his lung, liver, and intestines, and exiting below his navel.

Jon stood. Blood flowed from the hole in his abdomen in a thin, steady stream. The wound was certainly fatal. He would bleed out within thirty minutes, he guessed, and no surgeon would be able to seal a wound so extensive. But he could move.

He hesitated, debating what to do next. On the one hand, he had no desire to feel the pain that he knew would rage through his body once his adrenaline subsided, and he doubted he could accomplish anything useful in this condition. He should put a bullet in his own head and fall back. On the other hand, this was an opportunity to learn more about Cynd and his activities. Jon decided to at least find out where he was.

He pushed a fresh magazine into his gun and started up the stairs. He took them slowly. The pain had begun: an ache in his lung as it tried and failed to expand, dull at first, then sharper with each attempted breath. The stairs were shallow and not long, but he felt weary by the time he reached the top. A second wooden door opened into a broad stone hallway with a low, peaked ceiling. There were ten doors just like the one he had come through in each of the long walls, and larger doors on the ends that he assumed led outside. Above each of these large doors was a feeble electric light, the only illumination.

Jon stumbled to the nearer exit, found it unlocked, went out.

It opened onto a starlit courtyard. The ground was grassy, with paved paths leading amongst several low, squarish buildings. Against the sky to the North he recognized the round silhouette of a paristyle. Above it, a solitary flame perched atop a spiral pagoda. He must be on the grounds of the Temple, amongst the outbuildings behind the temple proper.

Jon tried to laugh, managed a wet snort. Lowdous de Cynd did not go to temple, but he had private access to one, so private that he felt comfortable holding prisoners there. Cynd was a more interesting person than Jon had thought…

Jon saw no one else. Either the temple monks had not heard the gunfire, or, more likely, they had been instructed to ignore such noises when Cynd’s agents were about.

He considered shooting himself then, but he could feel his strength failing: he would be back in his bed soon no matter what he did, and inevitability removed urgency. Instead he staggered to the outer wall of the Temple grounds. There he found a barred door. He tried to lift the bar, failed, took a moment to gather his strength, tried again. The door creaked open, and he stumbled through, out onto the streets of Norbus. He was becoming drowsy. He did not know how far he stumbled before he heard voices around him.

“Hey, mister, do you need help?”

“No,” Jon rasped. “Let me die. I’ll be fine.”

Jon felt himself lifted by a dozen hands and carried. Somewhere. Inside. Sharp scissors opened his clothes. Smell of herbs. Smell of soap. Soft light of oil lamps. Something was wrapped tightly around his belly, and he was propped up in a deep chair.

“Can you speak, sir?” a voice asked him.

“No,” Jon answered.

He was in a house, in what looked like an office, or a study. He was seated next to a metal table upon which surgical instruments and spools of gauze were spread. This must be a doctor’s house. There were people, men and women, crowded into the room. He could not count them. A man with a youthful face and a full beard was crouched down next to Jon’s chair, his eyes at Jon’s level.

“Can you tell me your name, sir?” the man asked. “I am Johannes de Koven. I am a doctor. You are in my house.”

“Johannes?” Jon guglred. “Me too. I’m Johannes.”

“Can you tell me what happened to you, Johannes?” Doctor Koven asked. “Can you tell me who attacked you?”

“It was probably on Salt Street,” said one of the other men. “It’s full of vagrants. People get robbed there all the time.”

“Don’t worry,” Jon said. “I killed ‘em. Took care of ‘em.”

“Killed who?” Koven asked. “Are you saying you killed the people who attacked you?”

“Don’t matter. I’m… When I die… Won’t matter… Erase everything.”

“I am sorry, but I must tell you, Johannes, there isn’t much I can do to help you. Your wounds are beyond my ability to treat here, and I don’t think you’ll survive being moved to my practice. You have lost a great deal of blood.”

“Let me die. I’ll be fine.”

Jon heard footsteps. A woman came into the room, bearing a tray with several flasks on it. She handed the tray to Koven, who thanked her and began pouring liquids from the flasks into a mug.

The woman had long dark hair and a round face that looked like it was used to smiling. She was visibly pregnant. And she had a wooden foot.

Jon tried to sit up, but his body was too heavy to move. “Anniisa!” he wheezed.

The woman looked at him quizzically, then replied: “My name is Anniisa.”

“You used to… Joy Hart… You worked there.”

“I worked at the Joyful Hart once,” Anniisa said.

“Here, drink this,” Koven interjected. He pressed the mug he had mixed to Jon’s lips, but Jon rolled his head away.

“Anniisa… Your foot… Tell me…”

Doctor Koven turned to Anniisa. “Dear, do you know this man?” he asked.

Jon looked from Anniisa to Koven, then at Anniisa’s pregnant belly. He smiled.

“Sern… Serpent…”

“What’s that?”

Jon tried to speak again, but his throat produced only a low hiss. Then the hiss stopped, and he was silent.