She growled at me, but didn’t hesitate too long. “Fine.” She looked me right in the eyes as she held out her arm and sliced a small cut. She did her best to hide the fact it hurt.
I glanced back, but thankfully, the paladin hadn’t noticed the bloodletting. I didn’t know how the Saint of Loyalty felt aboutstrange deadlander girls cutting themselves in the street, and didn’t really care to find out.
“Satisfied, Carnavon? I’m not too proud to turn down the aid of one of the elite Squalo Hunter Killers before a battle.”
I’d forgotten she believed that about Trax, and I wasn’t about to correct her misconception while she was standing there with a bloody shard of glass in hand. “Now we can go.”
We set a brisk pace through the Cantor’s District. From all the singing coming from the various churches, now I understood how this place had gotten its name. My people sang on the barges, and even sang while we worked, but our songs were simple, honest, sometimes funny, often dirty, and always had a rhythm you could swing a pick to. The songs here were… uplifting. I wasn’t used to reverence. These people were singing in such a way their saints might listen.
“Where are we going?”
“They’re meeting on the lift platform that goes up to the Cathedral. I couldn’t make out all the details or with who, but Gerzog was crowing about how they were going to get so many Obols, they’d never need to work again. They’re probably selling it to some rich fool wizard, who’ll hide it in his treasure room, where all that precious Permanence will go unused. Just another wealthy man’s bauble, when instead it should be used for good.”
The way she said the last part, I could tell she was genuinely angry about that. “For good?Why do you care? Carcalla would do the same thing.”
“No, he wouldn’t,” she snapped.
“Trogshit. Don’t get all high and mighty with me. Your dad’s a crook. If things had gone according to plan, and we’d brought the lamp back to him, he’d be selling it to the highest bidder right now, same as Gerzog.”
“You know nothing.”
“How am I wrong? How are the Latrocinium who rob and murder and tax the Slumps going to use this bit of lost elementfor good? If Carcalla actually cared about doing good, he’d donate it to the Council so they could keep the Great Machine running that much longer.”
She sneered at me and remained silent. It was probably good we dropped the subject, as I was angry and running on almost no sleep, so was likely to say something offensive enough that would cause her to run back to Daddy, demanding to have me scalped.
When Dathka mentioned the meeting was on a lift, I’d expected something like the lifts we’d used for carrying Red up to the barges. Ours were just big enough to hold two men and a cart, and were hoisted by pulleys, rope, and muscle. This thing was thirty paces across, enclosed with clear glass walls, and rose smoothly even with two dozen people and a couple wagons aboard. It must have used the same kind of levitation enchantment as a barge or air cart, but it kept on rising, so it was capable of reaching much higher altitudes than either of those.
The base of the Cathedral was probably four hundred yards above. Living beneath the Slump, I was no stranger to seeing the undersides of sky islands, but our slowly descending and perpetually-threatening-to-crush-us-all roof was ugly, jagged rock, crumbling basements, and leaky pipes. For this one, the magically suspended rock was polished smooth beneath, and painted with religious murals. It was rather impressive.
There was also a great curling roadway and stairs up to the Cathedral, but it seemed everyone coming from the Cantor’s District preferred to wait for the magical lift. I couldn’t fault them that decision. My legs burned just looking at all those stairs.
With hundreds of people in the lift plaza, it wouldn’t be too hard for us to find a spot to sit and wait unseen to watch forGerzog. We didn’t even stand out with our hoods up, as most everyone who wasn’t originally from some freezing realm was dressed for the weather.
There were several carts here selling food. I was so tired that I’d nearly forgotten how famished I was, but now that I could smell the cooking meat and spices, my stomach reminded me with a violent rumble.
“You hungry?” I asked Dathka.
“I’ve not eaten in two days. What do you think?”
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
“No. Gerzog took my coin purse,” she muttered. She wasn’t too proud to get help stalking a bunch of mercenaries, but apparently, asking for food was a line too far. I thought Dathka was a horrible person, who worked for even worse people, but I was also a gentleman, and it was the tradition of the cadre folk to never let someone go hungry if we could help it.
“I’ll be right back.”
I found a stall selling roasted chicken parts, except when I checked my pockets, I didn’t have nearly enough. Food was pricy in this district. I couldn’t afford the next one either, but at the end of the line were some of the little frog-faced creatures, who were cooking mysterious kinds of meat on skewers over a burn barrel. It dripped oil that caused the fire to pop and spit, and it smelled weird, but I was too hungry to be proud. They didn’t speak the trade tongue, but by pointing and holding up fingers, we came to a deal that I could afford.
I returned to Dathka carrying two sticks full of some kind of cooked animal and held one out to her. “Here you go.”
She eyed the meat suspiciously. “Do I look like I would eat that?”
“You look like you’d eat corpse flesh straight from the coffin.” I took a bite from one. It was chewy. The flavor was… present. “It’s not that bad.”
“That’s a brave man, eating something prepared by filthy Kurbogs.”
I managed to swallow the greasy clump. “So that’s what those frog fellows are called?”
“Kurbogs are a scavenger race, so you’re likely eating ratlets they snared from the sewers.”
