Privately, he did, too, but he smiled again, putting a bold face on it, and said, “I’ll be fine. Sleep well, and sweet dreams.”

Shocking them both, he leaned over and kissed her, full on the lips, and she didn’t pull away. Her lips were very warm. Before she could say another word, he was out the door.

*   *   *

Laughter echoed about him as Avery shoved his way through the press of people in the Singing Snake. Half the taverns and clubs in the area had “snake” or “serpent” in their titles, and Avery wondered how precisely a snake was supposed to sing, or if perhaps it belonged to some old myth or fable. Maybe it was even an amusing phallic reference. Janx would know. Avery prayed that the whaler and Hildra were okay. I can’t do this without you.

At last arriving at the bar, he took a seat, the only vacant one, and turned to see what everyone was watching. All the noise and activity seemed to revolve around a certain event. It was a large, evidently popular establishment, and the disparate patrons were grouped around a fighting arena of a most unusual sort; instead of ropes hemming the combatants in there was instead, ranged around the arena in a sunken, watery moat, a collection of giant, predatory salamanders, all brilliantly colored and watching the pugilists with hungry black eyes as they lolled and snapped at each other in the water. One salamander opened its mouth wide, its jaws connected by streamers of saliva, as a fighter reeled backward, teetered on the brink of the raised arena and then flung himself forward again, swinging a wild punch at his foe. The amphibian closed its mouth and sank back in the water, but its eyes remained fixed on the action.

The fighters themselves were unusual. The taller one’s skin had hardened and thickened, becoming gray and almost bark-like, and the smaller one’s rapid fist-falls didn’t even make the dark flesh roll. The large fellow moved slowly and deliberately, and his swings carried so much force that Avery feared they might prove fatal. Fortunately they rarely landed, and then only glancing blows. The smaller one—by his sallow skin and narrow eyes a native of Gurzing far to the southeast—was, by contrast, light on his feet—too light. He moved at eye-blurring speeds, zipping around his large opponent like a hummingbird and landing lightning punches to kidneys and chin and thigh … to little effect.

They’d altered themselves with alchemical drugs, Avery knew. It didn’t surprise him. In the last three hours, he’d wandered up and down the narrow channels of the Maze, popping into many similar establishments, and seen fighters of all shapes and sizes, some human, some not, and almost all of them appeared to have injected themselves (or otherwise taken in) some form of alchemical compound (or compounds), perhaps over a span of time. The barkskin certainly hadn’t happened overnight. There were no laws against such things here, and indeed seeing such enhanced combat was the main draw of the fight clubs in the Maze—the sex clubs, too, though of course combat was not the attraction there; at least Avery hoped not. He had seen some things in the last few hours that he hadn’t been able to imagine before. A shame Layanna had been feeling so poorly. Some of it had been disgusting, yes, but some of it surely would have put her in a more amorous mood, provided she was well enough.

“I’ll take a glass of whiskey,” he told the bartender in Veklan, which he had learned many of the locals spoke and which he could utter passably.

“We’re out,” the man said. He was a hulking black fellow whose lips had been dyed purple. A yellow-glowing tattoo in the shape of a severed human head blazed on his forehead. “What with the fighting. We have beer.” He proceeded to list a few brands.

Avery picked one and poured himself a glass when it came. At least the glasses were kept cold—by alchemical means, he knew. Everything revolved around alchemy in the Maze.

“I’m looking for a man named Losg Coleel,” he said. “Do you know where he might be?”

“No.” The reply came immediately and without reflection.

Avery raised his eyebrows. He’d learned that Coleel was quite a storied person in Ezzez, the aging playboy who had controlled the monopoly on ghost flower nectar, a lucrative local export, for thirty years.

“Well, if you do hear of him,” Avery said, “you can be sure that I’ll be grateful.” He tapped his breast over the hidden pocket of his jacket, where he kept his cash.

The glowing severed head pulsed brighter as the bartender ground his jaw. “I said I don’t know him. Now drink your beer and go.”

Avery didn’t leave. He drank and moved among the gathering, as if watching the fight, but casually, out of the side of his mouth, he would say, “Do you know where Losg Coleel is?” or “Can you help me find Losg Coleel?” He’d been asking the same questions all night, but the bartender’s attitude had convinced him he was getting closer. In the arena, the barkskinned pugilist finally landed a full blow against his blur-speed antagonist, flattening one side of his rib cage and flinging him into the salamander pit. The amphibians fought each other over the right to eat him even as the man, in obvious agony, tried to scramble free. He was almost fast enough to make it. At the last second, one of the creatures bit his leg and held him while two others began to feed from either side, and then the one who’d grabbed him tore his leg free and devoured it. The man’s screams were brief.

Horrified but trying not to show it, Avery took a seat at a booth along the wall, ordered another drink and waited. Another fight began after a time, this one featuring a red-feathered Nisaar against a lizard-being from Toliga. The reptile’s bite was venomous, claimed the announcer, but the Nisaar was given permission to use its talons and beak. Despite himself, Avery found himself intrigued by the bout and was almost disappointed when a figure slid into the both opposite him and said, “You the one looking for Coleel?”

Avery regarded the man. The fellow was scarred and muscled, but his eyes were hidden by sunglasses, even in the gloom of the Singing Snake, and a cigarette hissed between his lips, which were pierced by no less than three golden rings.

“Do you know where he is?”

“I’m to bring you to him,” the man said.

“Who referred me to you?” Avery needed to know who to pay off.

The man shook his head, just once. “My boss pays people to keep tabs on anyone asking for him. He pays them, not you.”

“Very well.”

“Come with me.”

“Where?”

“You’ll see.” The cigarette smoldered between the man’s lips.

Avery smiled, or tried to. The truth was that he was suddenly sweating. It was hot in here, but that wasn’t why. “It wouldn’t be very wise of me to follow a stranger to an unknown location in a strange place, would it?”

“It wasn’t wise of you to be askin’ around about Losg Coleel like you have. You did it anyway. Gods know whose attention you’ve attracted.”

“That’s what concerns me.”

The man, with the hand not manipulating his cigarette, tugged his sunglasses lower so that he could stare at Avery directly, and Avery gasped at his yellow, bloodshot eyes. Something alchemical, Avery knew. The man was a user, but Avery wasn’t sure of what. Alchemical compounds could do all manner of things, especially here.

“Do you want to meet with him, or not?”

Avery hesitated. “Have him come here. I’m sure a backroom could be—”

“Do you want to meet with him or not?”

“Somewhere public would be—”

“Do you want to meet with him or not?”

Avery downed his beer. As calmly as he could, he said, “What will it cost me?”

The man grinned, revealing a tongue that had been inlaid with a glowing green tattoo: the forked tongue of a serpent. “That’s as yet to be determined.”

Avery threw down some cash and left with the fellow. As he slipped out the doors, he patted the pistol in his hip pocket, just beside the god-killing knife, reassuring himself that it was there. But, of course, if he were to need it, things would probably have gone irrevocably wrong by that point anyway. Still, its presence bolstered his confidence and he only hoped that his fingers didn’t tremble too badly to use it if the time did come.

Chapter 3

Night had lowered the temperature outside, but not enough, and as they began walking Avery started to sweat again, and his shirt stuck to his back between his shoulder blades. He was all too aware that he hadn’t been able to find any deodorant in the city. Luckily (or not), few of the locals seemed to be users of the substance, and various bodily odors assaulted him as he and the ring-lipped fellow slipped their way through the nighttime crowd.

Of course, there weren’t just locals here. Despite the fighting, there were more than a few foreigners come to enjoy the unique splendors of the Maze, though the tourists looked a seedy and hard-bitten lot to be sure. Is that what I look like now? Avery wondered. Have I become the disreputable world-traveler? It wouldn’t surprise him.

Not all of those they passed were human. Once Avery brushed up against something, then had to recoil in horror. It was a seven-foot-tall, vaguely human-shaped thing, and it seemed to be fashioned of dark mud and clay, at least upon closer inspection; Avery’s first shocked thought that it was a burnt human corpse somehow still alive. He couldn’t tell if any awareness stirred in the back of its deep-set, dark-as-pitch eye sockets, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

“That was a homunculus,” his guide said as they continued on. “You don’t see many of them around, not east of the Toresthi.”

“Homunculi,” Avery muttered. “Yes, I’ve heard of them. Aren’t they made by the Guild of Alchemists in the city of—what is it?—Lavorgna?” It was a place Avery had read about but knew little of, the capital of the Confederation of Wallach, located many thousands of miles away on the coast of Gostrath, the continent separated from Consur by the Toreshti Mountains. The War of Octung had yet to reach Gostrath, except along the coasts.

“I’m sure it belongs to one of the Guildsmen,” the ring-lipped man said. “Probably about some errand. Alchemists come from all over the world to study our secrets here—learn of some new technique or alchemical source element.”

“Like the ghost flower.”