Chapter 147: Fight Back VII
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All dressed like professionals who wanted to look like thugs. It was a common trick. Dress like street trash so witnesses assumed street trash.
Raka grunted softly.
He hooked his hands under the first man’s shoulders and dragged him deeper into the alley’s shadow, toward a section where the stone floor sloped into an old drainage mouth.
He did not rush. Rushing created noise. Noise created attention.
He lined the bodies up near the drainage mouth, stacked the way he had stacked sacks as a child. Unromantic. Efficient.
Then he pulled out a second tool.
A folded canvas sheet, thick and ugly.
He spread it on the ground.
He rolled the bodies onto it one by one.
He wrapped them tight.
Not out of respect.
Out of practicality.
The canvas kept blood from smearing across the route.
Blood trails were the easiest thing for city guards to follow when they pretended they cared.
Raka tied the canvas with cord, three knots each, the kind of knots you could undo quickly if you had to dump weight fast.
He paused and looked at the alley mouth again.
Still quiet.
Now the route.
He could not carry four bodies through main streets. Even in Null, that drew the wrong kind of curiosity. He needed his men.
But calling them directly here would also draw attention.
So he did what he did best.
He used the underground like it was his own organ system.
Raka reached into his pocket and took out a communicating stone. Small. Dull. Easy to hide. He whispered into it without moving his lips much.
"Bring the cart," he murmured. "Two men. No uniforms. Lower lane. Three turns from Lantern Stall. Now."
The stone warmed faintly.
Then cooled.
He did not say names. Names were liabilities.
He waited by working.
While the cart came, he erased the simplest traces.
He poured a small pouch of gray powder onto the stone where blood was thickest. The powder was not magic, not fully. It was lime mixed with ground ash and a cheap odor-killing herb. It soaked liquid fast.
Raka ground it into the stone with his boot.
The blood darkened, then dulled, then became a dirty stain like old market sludge.
He scattered a second powder after that.
This one was a common street trick.
Dirt from the main lane.
It had footprints already. Random patterns. It blended.
He threw it lightly over the area where the fight had happened.
Now the ground looked like a normal alley that had seen a hundred normal ugly things.
Then he dealt with the one trace he could not hide with powder.
The smell.
Blood had a smell. Fear had a smell. Predation had a smell.
And anything that smelled like a predator could make other predators curious.
Raka pulled a small bottle from his belt and uncorked it.
Fermented fish oil.
Disgusting. Cheap. Effective.
He splashed it near the alley mouth and along the walls.
Instantly, the air turned foul enough to make a normal person gag.
"Perfect."
No curious drunk would step into this alley now unless he was too drunk to care.
And a man too drunk to care was too drunk to remember details.
A soft wheel creak reached his ears.
Raka’s eyes narrowed slightly.
The cart.
It came from the lower lane, exactly where it should. A simple wooden pushcart, the kind used for hauling vegetables. Two men pushed it, faces half-hidden, posture casual.
Raka recognized them anyway.
Not by face.
By movement.
By discipline.
His men stopped at the alley mouth and wrinkled their noses at the fish stink.
One muttered, "That smell is...."
Raka’s gaze flicked to him.
The man shut up.
Raka spoke quietly.
"Load the bodies."
They did.
No questions.
They lifted the wrapped canvas bundles and stacked them under a layer of real vegetables. Wilted cabbage. Rotten turnips. Things that smelled worse than any blood.
The cart became a moving insult to the senses.
Perfect camouflage.
Raka placed the wrapped sword bundle under the vegetables too.
Then he walked alongside the cart as they pushed it away, not heading up toward the market, but down into the older service lanes.
Slik City had veins.
Old drainage tunnels. Merchant waste routes. Basement stairwells. Hidden doors that every gang used and every guard pretended not to know existed because everyone got paid.
Raka led them to a rusted iron door half-covered by stacked crates. The crates looked abandoned. They were not.
He tapped the door in a specific pattern.
A slot opened. A single eye looked out.
Raka’s men froze, ready.
Raka spoke calmly.
"Waste run," he said. "Four sacks."
The eye blinked once.
The door opened.
Inside, a cramped passage sloped downward.
Raka guided the cart through.
The air changed instantly. Damp. Old. Smelling of stone and stagnant water.
The passage widened into a tunnel where faint lanterns hung at intervals. This was not a sewer.
It was worse.
It was the city’s forgotten under-layer, the place where undesirables were moved when powerful people did not want paperwork.
At a junction, two more men waited.
Not Raka’s men.
Neutral handlers.
They wore plain clothes, faces blank, hands calloused.
They did not ask questions.
They did not want to know the story.
They only wanted payment.
Raka pulled a pouch of chaos stones and tossed it.
The handler caught it, weighed it by feel, and nodded.
"River drop," the handler said.
That meant the bodies would not be burned.
They would be dumped into the old runoff channel that fed into the outer river, weighted, carried away. The city would call it animal work or accident.
Raka nodded once.
"Do it clean," he said.
The handler gave him a look that said, clean costs extra.
Raka tossed a second smaller pouch.
The handler’s expression softened by half a degree.
"Clean," he agreed.
Raka watched the handlers take the cart bundles, strip away the vegetables, and lift the wrapped bodies onto a narrow sled.
No ceremony.
Just motion.
Raka turned away before the last bundle disappeared deeper into the tunnel.
He did not like watching disposal. It made him think too much.
Thinking too much made him remember he had been one of those bodies once, metaphorically, tossed away by people with better names.
Now he was the man paying for clean.
He returned up through the passage with his two men, leaving the cart behind. The neutral handlers would recycle it. Nothing linked back to him.
When they emerged into the night air, the city felt brighter, louder, more fake.
Raka stopped under a broken lantern and took off his gloves. He tossed them into a gutter and crushed them under his boot.
Leather held traces.
He did not keep traces.
One of his men hesitated, then asked carefully, "Should we tell the men what we saw."
Raka’s eyes flicked to him.
He did not say Sekhmet’s name out loud. Names echoed.
He answered with a rule instead.
"You saw nothing," Raka said. "You smelled rotten vegetables. You carried trash. You went home."
The man swallowed.
"Yes," he said.
Raka nodded once.
Then, alone, he turned his body toward a different lane.
Because the cleanup was not complete.
Bodies were one problem.
Information was another.
The broker had arranged those assassins. The broker had taken payment. The broker had thought he was safe behind deniability.
Raka’s lips curved slightly.
Deniability worked both ways.
He walked toward the lower lanes where gamblers drank and talked too much. He had a stone in his pocket that could find a mouth.
And now he had new orders. Continue the investigation.
"Iron House.
Dickon.
Everything."
Raka moved into the city like he belonged to its ugliness.
Because he did.
And because now, for the first time in his life, his ugliness served a master who actually mattered.