“Can we go now?” She stared at Aker, hands on her hips. “The day’s half over.”
“It’s barely midmorning,” he said.
“It’s time better spent finding Omar, or whatever’s left of him.”
Kenan sighed.
They were standing in the corner of the workers’ bunkhouse just next door to one of the new Eranian factories. Aker had slipped something to the fat man at the door last night and they’d been allowed to sleep on company property, safe among the exhausted factory workers who kept each other awake all night with their constant hacking coughs and phlegm-choked snores.
“All right.” Aker nodded at the door. “I suppose you want to see all the old haunts. Omar’s house, the office, the cafe, the lounge.”
“No. I want to talk to whoever is in charge these days,” Shifrah said. “Omar ran a whole network of freelancers. Someone must have taken over his business when he disappeared. And I’m betting you know who.”
Aker smiled. “I know who took over my business from him, at least. We can go there, but you’re not going to like it.”
“Why? Who is it?”
“You’ll see.”
Half an hour later they stood in the sun-baked street between two streams of Songhai pilgrims, Kanemi migrants, Puntish merchants, Eranian soldiers, and Bantu mercenaries. Above the crowd they could see a hand-painted sign above a bright red door.
“You’re right,” Shifrah said. “I don’t like it.”
“What’s it say?” Kenan nodded at the sign.
“The Cat’s Eye.” Shifrah adjusted her eye patch to flick some dust and grime away from her cheek. “It’s a dive.”
“It was a dive,” Aker corrected. “It’s a decent restaurant now. Almost up to Mazigh standards, I’m sure.”
Kenan didn’t respond.
“And it’s really her?” Shifrah asked, moving toward the red door.
“Oh yes. She’s moved up in the world. But don’t worry.” Aker grinned. “The success hasn’t improved her temper.”
“I’m just going to stop asking you to clarify these cryptic little chats of yours,” Kenan said. “You just let me know when I need to know something.”
“Zahra. Her name is Zahra El Ayat,” Shifrah said. “She was just starting to run little operations when I left Alexandria. Mostly local. Gambling, prostitution. Strictly small time.”
“And now?” Kenan pulled the red door open for her.
“Now?” Shifrah shrugged. “Keep your hand on your gun.” She led the way into The Cat’s Eye, and as she threaded through the crowded atrium she muttered over her shoulder, “Busy for this hour.”
Aker shrugged. “It’s not like they came for the food.”
Shifrah wondered what he meant as she approached the host. The man wore an immaculate white suit and an exhausted frown. “How many?”
“I’m looking for the owner,” she said. “I’d like to discuss a little business proposal with her.”
“Yes, I imagine so.” The host sighed. “How many in your party?”
Shifrah blinked. “Three.”
“Hm. Well, I can seat you near the piano, if you don’t mind the noise.”
Shifrah shrugged. “I don’t mind.”
“Very good.” The host led them into the dining room where she saw a maze of round tables under red cloths and brass candlesticks. There must have been a hundred patrons all huddled and nestled and leaning over their tables and talking in low voices. Little pieces of paper and coins were passed from hand to hand, and the occasional head rose to cast a wary eye around the room before sinking back down into the conversation.
The host seated them at a small round table like all the others. No plates, silverware, or napkins cluttered the table. Only the single brass candles stick and its flickering white candle stood between them. Behind them, an elderly man was struggling to play the gleaming new piano, which had not been tuned recently, if ever.
“You said this was a restaurant,” Kenan said. “What is it really?”
“A quiet place where people come to talk. It’s not very private, obviously, hence all the notes and hand signals,” Aker said. “But they’re not really here to talk to each other. They’re all here to see her.”
“Zahra?”
Aker nodded. “See the girls?” He nodded at one of the waitresses on the far side of the room. She was leaning over a table, listening to the seated men. “Zahra sends them down to scout out the proposals and contracts and whatever else people want to show her.”
“And then what?”
“And then you hope she picks you.” Aker leaned back in his chair.
“So how do I make sure I get picked?” Shifrah asked.
Aker shrugged. “You say something that gets her attention.”
“So this is just a big waiting room?” Kenan smirked and leaned back as well.
They sat and waited, and waited. Shifrah dragged her fingers lightly across the tablecloth. She barely remembered Zahra. Young, short, and pretty in the usual fashion. Willing to sleep with almost anyone for almost anything. She’d seemed rather common, back in the old days, but then, most people had looked common to Shifrah.
Weak. Vulnerable. Corrupt.
Eventually the waitress came over to their table. She was a serious-lipped and tired-eyed woman, middle aged, and dressed in a severe black dress with a high-necked collar. Shifrah noted the small Italian two-shot revolver holstered under the woman’s left arm and the small knife sheathed on the inside of her forearm.
The waitress looked at the man in green. “Aker. You’re back. Again.”
Aker shrugged. “Don’t sound so excited. It might go to my head.”
The waitress turned to Shifrah. “What is your business with my lady?”
Aker gestured to Shifrah with a grin, coaxing her to speak.
Shifrah exhaled slowly, choosing her words carefully. She said in Eranian, “Tell Zahra that Shifrah Dumah is back from Marrakesh with information about Omar Bakhoum.”
“What information?” the waitress asked dully.
Shifrah was about to say something snide when she realized the woman’s tone wasn’t one of stupidity or laziness. It was the extreme calm of an experienced fighter who simply didn’t care about the business at hand, only whether it needed to end in bloodshed. Shifrah said, “His location.”
The waitress nodded and left.
Aker leaned forward. “That was a dangerous play. If she calls you back there and you can’t deliver what you promised, she might just kill you for wasting her time.”
Shifrah nodded. “Then I’ll try to keep her entertained.”
Kenan gave her a questioning look, but she shook her head. She had no intention of translating every little scrap of conversation into Mazigh for him, so there was no point starting now. He could learn Eranian if he wanted to know so badly.
When the waitress came back only a few minutes later, Shifrah felt a cold lump in her chest.
The first gambit worked. Time to press my luck.
The waitress indicated Shifrah with a sharp jerk of her head. “You. Come with me.”
“What about my friends?” Shifrah stood up. “I’m not fond of being alone in strange rooms with strange people.”
The waitress glanced at the men. “You can bring one of them.”
Shifrah was about to say Aker’s name when she saw the brooding look in Kenan’s eyes. It was a glimmer of the old Kenan, the angry young man she had met in Espana, the one with the crazy plans and the barely contained rage at the idiots trying to control his life.
Better not to leave Kenan alone. And the waitress doesn’t seem to like Aker for some reason, so better not to bring him along.
“Kenan. You’re with me.”
The Mazigh narrowed his eyes a bit and paused, but then he stood and followed her.
They wound through the dining room with its muffled voices and shuffling papers and then ducked through a curtained doorway at the back stair. They passed two thick-necked men and Shifrah wondered if they would just ask for weapons or actually search for them, but neither man moved to stop them. The waitress led them on into the next room, which was a lounge similar to the dining room, only smaller and furnished with a single long table. Several men and women sat along the far side of the table like a panel of inquisitors, and the waitress indicated that Shifrah and Kenan were to stand before them. Then the woman in black left, closing the door behind her.
The seated people included a small elderly Puntish man with ink-stained fingers reading a letter, a fat Eranian woman picking at a plate of cheeses, a tall Songhai priest flipping through a large book lying open on the table to display a series of erotic illustrations, four youths scribbling figures madly in leather-bound ledgers, and Zahra El Ayat.
Zahra sat in the center, a few papers, pens, inkwells, and glasses of water and wine scattered in front of her. Unlike her compatriots, who were all amusing themselves with other pastimes, Zahra was leaning back in her tall chair and staring at her two new guests.
Shifrah stared back, unimpressed. Zahra was a little older and a little leaner, but otherwise unchanged. Long black hair tied back with a silver clasp, high cheek bones, huge hypnotic eyes, plump pouting lips, lapis lazuli necklaces from the near east, jade rings from the far east, and a dress cobbled together from the fashionable courts of both Aegyptus and Italia, Shifrah guessed. She looked wealthy. She looked confident. She did not look amused.
“No Aker? Pity. Well, to business then. Omar Bakhoum is dead.” Zahra flashed the briefest of fake smiles. “But you know that. I was beginning to think Shifrah Dumah was dead as well, but here you are.”
“Why would you think I was dead?” Shifrah glanced at the black-robed guards in the corners. There was no guessing what weapons they might have in the folds of their clothing. If the waitresses had guns, then anyone might, which was strange. Guns had always been rare in the Empire. “After all, you’ve been sending me jobs and collecting my commissions for the last eight years or so, haven’t you?”
Zahra nodded. “But as I recall, the last job you did for me was more than a year ago. Rui Faleiro, wasn’t it? And then you disappeared. I assumed the Espani had caught you and dropped you into a prison or a nunnery or whatever it is that people like them do with people like us.”
“I’ve been in Marrakesh.”
“Really? Because we still have a drop in Arafez, but I haven’t heard from you.”
“I’ve been in Tingis, keeping quiet and working local.”
Zahra raised an eyebrow. “Local work for local money? That’s not my Shifrah.”
“I was never your Shifrah. I was Omar’s. And I thought I still was until two days ago.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize it was my job to keep you up to date with the latest gossip. I’ve been a little busy running this city and half the Middle Sea.” Zahra picked up her wine, her rings clinking against the glass.
“Running this city?” Shifrah smiled. “I wonder what Master Rashaken would say if he heard that.”
Zahra rolled her eyes. “Don’t be thick. You know what I mean. You saw what I have to deal with out there in The Cat’s Eye. Over two hundred gangs and syndicates all looking for a piece of Alexandria and your precious Omar left me to keep it under control. It’s a madhouse on a good day.”
“And a war zone on a bad one. I remember,” Shifrah said. She glanced at Kenan. With the entire conversation in Eranian, the Mazigh wasn’t even trying to pay attention. He seemed to be having a staring contest with one of the guards. “So I suppose you were the one who set me up with the job for Lady Sade? What was the master plan there?”
“Oh nothing important, just a retirement plan, really,” Zahra said. “Topple the new government and put the old aristocracy back in charge. Maybe spark a war or two with the Songhai so the Mazighs would need a little support from Alexandria. Eventually I planned to ingratiate myself with Sade and the new Mazigh royal court so I could move to Orossa and live out my days in the palace. It’s a fortress on top of a mountain where they import luxuries by airship from all over the world. It sounded heavenly.” Zahra narrowed her eyes and flared her nostrils. “But that’s all gone now.”
“I heard Sade got herself killed by the palace guards.”
“I heard you got your eye gouged out by an old woman.” Zahra smiled. “And I see that part, at least, is true. But that’s all in the past now. Business is business, as Omar used to say.”
“Yes, he did. Speaking of Omar, I’m surprised that he turned over his responsibilities to you. I never knew you two were very close.”
“I didn’t say we were. Omar never wanted to run the bottom half of Alexandria, but he was the only person Rashaken could trust not to turn into a petty warlord and ruin the big plan. You know Omar. All he cared about was finding more sun-steel.”
Aetherium. It keeps coming back to aetherium.
“So is that why you came back?” Zahra sipped her wine. “You finally came back after all this time just to see why Omar hasn’t written you?”
“No. I came back because a friend of ours killed a famous Espani in downtown Tingis two days again and then had the brilliant idea of leading the police straight to my door.” Shifrah crossed her arms so that the tips of her fingers could just barely touch the butts of her knives inside her jacket.
“Aker?”
“Aker.”
The Aegyptian woman frowned into her empty glass. “Ever since he got that damn sword, he’s been a pain in all our sides. Even Master Khai is annoyed with him these days.”
“That I can believe. He came to Marrakesh to steal a bit of sun-steel for himself. The westerners have finally discovered it, by the way. They call it aetherium.”
Zahra laughed and set her glass down a bit clumsily. A warm flush crept up into her cheeks. “I bet their clever scientists are all scratching their heads and wondering why it’s so rare in their part of the world, too. Idiots.” She waved for the boy at the end of the table to pour her another glass of the red. “So, Aker ruined your fun in Marrakesh. This must be a souvenir, then. A Mazigh gunslinger. Is he any good? Can he shoot a coin out of the air?” She laughed and rested her full glass on her knee.
“He has his uses.” Shifrah glanced at Kenan and saw he had shifted his humorless gaze to Zahra herself.
Don’t antagonize her. This isn’t Tingis!
She turned back to the woman at the table. “I won’t take up much of your time. I can see you’re a busy woman these days. I just came to find out where Omar went.”
“Where he went? He went into the ground, Shifrah. Or he fell on his own sword, in which case that’s exactly where he still is, trapped in his own seireiken.”
For a moment, Shifrah wondered if that might be true.
Would he have killed himself? Would he really have chosen to become one with all the others he had claimed in his sword?
Like the others of his fraternity, Omar had been fascinated by his soul-stealing blade, but not with Aker’s desire for power over other men. Omar had been one of the inner circle, one of the mystics obsessed with understanding the soul and the nature of the sun-steel, and the meaning of life, and all sorts of high-minded mumbling that had sent a younger Shifrah running off into the streets to practice sneaking, surprising, and slaying.
Looking back, it almost seemed like a contradiction in the man. His passion for knowledge about immortality and his proficiency for killing. At the time, though, it had seemed so natural. They were, after all, one and the same thing. The study of life, the study of death, and the sudden transition from the one to the other. The younger Shifrah had never seen a conflict in her mentor’s nature. And the older Shifrah knew that now was not the time to contemplate it.
“Obviously he didn’t die here in the city, or you would know for certain,” Shifrah said. “So where did he go?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care.” Zahra closed her eyes and slipped her hand up into her thick black hair to gently massage the side of her head as the stone-faced waitress re-entered the room and circled around the table. She leaned down to whisper in Zahra’s ear, and suddenly the Aegyptian woman stopped massaging her scalp and she bared her teeth in a cruel snarl. She waved the waitress away and opened her eyes. “Shifrah, I can have my people ask around about Omar for you. But in return I’m going to need a small favor from you.”
“Such as?”
“Apparently, a few minutes ago, our dear friend Aker challenged a Bantu mercenary to a duel in my dining room. Caused a bit of a row, pulled a few bystanders into the fray, you know how it goes.” Zahra stood and hurled her wine glass at the wall. She stood very still for a long moment, and then slowly straightened up. “My people threw them out, but now there is a small street war in progress between our little circle, the Bantu, and an opium cartel that was sitting at the table next to the Bantu.” Her companions all looked up sharply from their various occupations, except for the priest who continued to peruse his illustrated manuscript. “I have to go deal with the Bantu and the cartel, but apparently Aker has scampered away. If you want to know where Omar is, bring me Aker’s head. Attached, if you like. And quickly please. It may help to smooth things over with the Bantu.”
Shifrah glanced at the door that led back to the dining room. “Are you sure? I didn’t hear anything.”
“The walls are insulated so no one can hear what is discussed in here,” Zahra snapped as she knocked her chair over and marched toward the door. “The offer expires when I leave this room.”
“I accept.” Shifrah blinked. There wasn’t time to think or consider. She needed help. She also needed to be in Zahra’s good graces, considering the casual display of power that was The Cat’s Eye. Shifrah nodded. “I’ll find him.”
“Just be quick about it.” And Zahra swept out of the room with her guards and clerks close behind.