The Sightless City

by Noah Lemelson

  THE SIGHTLESS CITY

  By

  Noah Lemelson

  A Tiny Fox Press Book

  © 2020 Noah Lemelson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by U.S.A. copyright law. For information address: Tiny Fox Press, North Port, FL.

  This is a work of fiction: Names, places, characters, and events are a product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, locales, or events is purely coincidental.

  Cover design by Damonza.

  ISBN: 9781946501332

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2020951240

  Tiny Fox Press and the book fox logo are all registered trademarks of Tiny Fox Press LLC

  Tiny Fox Press LLC

  North Port, FL

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Before he had come out here, before he had traded in his bespoke leather brogues for military boots and marched out to the edge of civilization, Marcel had never known how strong the wind could taste. In its whipping midnight gales, the wind carried the flavors of the Wastes, rust and dust and æther-oil. But it brought more to the palette this grim night, the scent of blood, smoke, and humiliating defeat. The remains of a battle Marcel had survived only through luck and circumstance.

  “A gift,” came Heitor Desct’s whisper. The soldier handed Marcel a gas mask, his sardonic smirk disappearing as he slipped on his own. Marcel holstered his Frasco six-shooter and studied the mask. It looked not unlike a skull, bug-eyed and painted black.

  “It shall banish all melodious odors,” Desct said, as if a salesman. Behind him two more masked soldiers, members of their squad, worked to cut open the bars of a large sewer pipe, taking care to step over the blue-uniformed corpse of the lone Principate scout they had had to eliminate. The pipe, just large enough to squeeze into, dug into the side of the hill, and deeper still, sloughing out the industrial muck of the city beyond.

  Huile. Bright in the night, a beacon at the edge of the Wastes, girded with ancient walls and split in two. At the far side was the city-proper, its civilians cowering under the oppression of the occupying army. Peaking up from the closer half stood the smokestacks of the æther-oil refineries, where the Principate now camped, sleeping in their victory, unperturbed by the blood they had spent the day spilling.

  “Remember,” their captain whispered, “we’re here to plant our explosives and run, not trade bullets with imperial idiots.” It was strange to see Captain Alba like this, her golden hair covered by black leather, the cerulean gleam of her eyes hidden by dark glass, her voice, boisterous and cocksure, muffled by mask and caution. She glanced Marcel’s way. Not at him, he realized, but at the satchel hanging from his arm. Silently, he opened it, the clockbomb still clicking inside, its payload the last hope for their beleaguered cause.

  Marcel had never thought his military service would come to this. The stories he had been raised on were those of front-line gallantry and noble last stands. Not sneaking through sewers to plant bombs under sleeping soldiers. This was the part of the story often left out, the less glorious side of military heroism.

  With a slight clunk, the gate to the sewer fell. One by one, the squad started to crawl into the cramped dark, Alba leading.

  “I can still take the bomb,” Desct whispered. “This is not what you enlisted to do, no one would judge you for returning to camp.”

  Marcel realized the mask was still in his hands. Somehow, putting it on felt an immense challenge. Once he tightened the leather straps he knew he would not loosen them until the Principate army was dead, or he was.

  One last breath. He let the acrid taste of the wind settle on his tongue. It was somehow now comforting, as familiar as the sea-salt breeze of his home. Yet there could be no waiting, not anymore. Not if Huile was to be liberated, not if his fellow soldiers were to be avenged.

  He lifted up the gas mask and slipped it on. It was a natural fit, tight, the air stiff and sterile. Desct stepped forward, over the corpse of the soldier whose expression was mercifully hidden by the night, into the maw of the pipe. There was a cost to being a hero, Marcel knew, but as he followed his squad into the dark, he was determined to pay it.

  …Wedged, as it is, between the wild, Ferral-haunted forests of the north, and the shattered Wastes to its west, an ignorant person might well discount the Border States as just another rural backcountry, unworthy of tour or travel. Yet, it takes only a few hours strolling the streets of any of the independent cities of the Border States to understand why they remain the most popular travel destinations for Bastillian tourists on a budget. They are the perfect compromise for adventurers eager for the frontier excitement of the Wastes, but who still demand the comforts of civilization. From the lively Bell Day festivities of Ordone, to the rich old-Vastium cuisine of Tascula, to the perfectly preserved pre-Calamity architecture of Anres, each city offers it own unique gifts, wonders hidden behind wind-worn walls or within scrap-ornamented market halls. Even the lesser States, such as Petram, Vatil, and Huile, bear a unique Waste-rustic charm, and are worthy of a few days’ detour.

  Yet, I’d be remiss to leave my recommendation as fully glowing, for the smart traveler must also strive to be a wary one. War is no foreigner to these ravaged lands, and the wounds of the past century fester still. For every marvel and bedazzling sight these cities offer, they also shelter hidden perils, bitter mercenaries and errant raiders wandering the roads, hungry mudlions and toxic cockatrices resting under untended ruins. This close to the Wastes, there is always something dark and dreadful hiding just beneath one’s sight…

  —Introduction to “A Tourist’s Guide to the Border States” By Matas Joubert

  Chapter 1

  “It was a scraprat.”

  Marcel Talwar sat, real leg on the floor, mechanical leg on his desk, sharing the details of his investigation with the middle-aged Miss Dobis.

  She furrowed her brows. “A scraprat?”

  “Yes,” Marcel said. “Scraprats often like to eat trash. That’s sort of their thing. No one is spying on you, you just have scraprats.”

  Miss Dobis mulled this over. “But Miss Paquet is always shoving her nose in other people’s business. It would be just like her to go through my trash.”

  Marcel had known from the beginning that the life of a private investigator would be different from how it was depicted in the pulps. Fewer shootouts for one, though he considered that a mercy after his short military career. Marcel had expected some drudgery, some misunderstandings, even occasional stupidity. Still, he had not expected Miss Dobis.

  “Why don’t you run me through what you saw?” she asked, a slight accusation in her voice.

  Marcel shrugged. “I waited up all night in the alley behind your apartment, hidden, watching your trash, as instructed. By three in the morning I saw movement. I tiptoed closer and found a small, scabbed, fuzzy form. A scraprat. On the second night, same deal, a scraprat. And on the third night?”

  “Miss Paquet?”

  “No, Demiurge-be-damned, a scraprat!”

  The woman shifted her gaze around the small office. It was a shabby thing, Marcel had to admit, chipped walls threatening to splinter, bookshelves overflowing with useless guidebooks and browning novellas, a pre-war voxbox with a broken speaker, a single plain desk, and a pair of even plainer chairs. The only decoration of note was a crinkled photograph framed on the wall: Marcel marching with the other surviving members of his squad in Lazarus Roache’s post-battle parad
e. There he was, waving as he stumbled forward on his new, æther-fueled leg, frozen mid-stride alongside Heitor Desct, whose impish grin was lost in the blur, Lambert Henra, whose rotundity had somehow survived the austerity of war, and Alba Rosair.

  Alba Rosair. Her image was faded and distant, but he could still make out the look of disquiet on her sharp face. He often wondered if it was that moment, after the battle, after his hospital stay, Huile aglow in a Resurgence victory, if that was when their relationship began to sour. Alba was a woman of war, and in peace her smiles had become sneers. He could imagine her now, shaking her head as he wasted his time with civilians’ inane blabber, asking if this was the future they had traded their friends’ blood for.

  “I would have expected more from you, young man,” Dobis said, interrupting his thoughts.

  Marcel sighed. It was true that the common stereotype of a private investigator was someone middle-aged and gruff, not a man in their mid-twenties with an awkwardly genteel accent they couldn’t quite kick and faint, lazy stubble. Still, most people respected results in the end; Miss Dobis seemed determined to ignore anything that threatened her sturdily built preconceptions.

  “I did what you paid me for,” he said with weariness. “I spied and puzzled out the mystery of your stolen trash. What else do you want?”

  “How do you know that it wasn’t Miss Paquet looking through my trash before I hired you, and scraprats only now?”

  “I mean…” He tapped his desk and sighed again. “Look, it’s just common sense. I can’t prove it, I don’t have a time machine.”

  “A time machine?”

  Why was he making this harder on himself?

  “Just something from a pulp I read, never mind. The point is, it was scraprats. Now stop worrying about it.”

  She crossed her arms. “Reading books instead of doing your job! You know if the Principate were still here, they would have interrogated Miss Paquet and gotten to the bottom of this.”

  Marcel considered himself a reasonable person, not prone to shouting and tossing papers. But there was a time and a place for everything, so he chucked the surprisingly thick file on the Dobis case at its namesake’s feet.

  “If the Imperial Principate were fucking here, they’d line everyone up with a suspicious name and shoot them in the back of the head! Is that what you want? To lick the Imperator’s boot?”

  “How dare you!” she said, her large, unscarred cheeks shining red.

  “How dare you!” Marcel shouted, cogleg clanking to the floor. “Look out the window! You ever take a walk outside this city? See the cracked land, the ruins, the oozing trees, the Demiurge-damned Wastes? Whose fault is that?”

  “What?” she shouted, throwing up her hands. “Who cares?”

  Marcel sputtered on his words, temporarily stunned by the woman’s boneheadedness. The Calamity wasn’t even a century gone, living memory if you found someone’s great grandparent, and yet people like her treated it with a shrug. “The Principate’s fault!” Marcel finally shouted.

  The woman scowled. “The trolleys ran just as timely with them in charge,” she said.

  “Good men and women of the Resurgence died to keep the Imperator’s hand off this city,” Marcel said. “They died to free Huile!”

  She scoffed. “Not sure why that’s such a fuss. I heard all they did was open the pipes in Lazacorp and let the gas do the rest.”

  Marcel took the banded clump of four-hundred-and-fifty frascs that the woman had given him just minutes before and threw it back at her with all the force he could muster.

  “Get out!” he said. She stumbled, then picked up the crumbled wad, seemingly unsure of what to do with it. “I don’t want the cash of some Principate sympathizer! Were you a collaborator? Is that it? Do you miss the blood you could suck from good Citizens, like some sort of autocratic ghul?”

  “I do-don’t need to take this!” she said. “I’ll report… I’ll report!”

  “Say whatever you like,” Marcel said. “It’s your right! One we fought for! Get your Inferno-cursed ass out of my office, or I’ll maybe investigate you, see if any of the skeletons in your closet wear Principate blue.”

  Ms. Dobis tried to say several things at once, but gave up and made a snort of contempt. She stood and started to walk, nearly tripping in her too-tall shoes. As she opened the door, she turned.

  “You’re nothing more than a gunman for cash,” she snapped.

  Marcel opened his mouth, but the woman hurried out, eager for her words to be the last. He swallowed his insults as the door slammed, and started to pace around the perimeter of his office, fuming.

  The gall some folk had, the complete apathy for the sacrifices of others. The city was not even three full years free and still some were eager to spit on the graves of those who had paid for that freedom. Marcel hadn’t needed to take the job; it was below the dignity of a war hero. But he had taken it anyway.

  What Marcel did, he knew he did for the average citizen, the sort of folk the United Confederacy of the Citizens’ Resurgence was supposed to stand for. He could have made mountains of cash selling his war hero’s reputation, or by working a cushy job in City Hall, but what good would that do? A hero didn’t stop, couldn’t stop, just when the battle was won, when the oppressors were slain. Marcel had lost his damn leg freeing this city, lost most of his squad, had served Huile for two years rooting out the last Principate collaborators, and yet for some troglyn-headed idiots that wasn’t enough.

  He pulled his canteen from his hip and took a long sip. If this were some cinegraph show, Marcel mused, the canteen would have been filled with whiskey or rum, but alcohol never dulled much for him. If anything, booze darkened Marcel’s dreams and made his nights more fitful, so instead he sipped twice-boiled and three-times-filtered water. He wiped his lips, the acrid taste still stinging his tongue. Life in Huile wasn’t all that much worse than in more developed cities, but he missed the simple joy of clean water untainted by the Wastes.

  He sat down and slowed his breath to calm his temper. It had been stupid to threaten her. Not that her complaints would reach anyone’s ears. City Hall knew what sort of man Marcel was, and the gripes of a civilian busybody wouldn’t sway them. Still, his outburst had been unbecoming of a Citizen of the UCCR, betrayed, in its own small way, the values of the Resurgence. His Confederacy had been founded to protect the rights of average folk, even rude ones, from those who would wield power as a cudgel. Let the idiots be idiots. As long as they didn’t turn Principate, their thoughts were their own.

  Marcel picked up the notes he had scattered and tossed them in the bin. A distraction was in order, perhaps a pulp. He glanced over his disorganized collection. Though he had some tolerance for the fantastical tales that seemed the popular fare these days, ridiculous fables about dragons and sorcerers, he preferred those older pulps which were more grounded in reality, stories about men and women, autocars and æroships, scraprats and griffons. Real things. Yet he didn’t always have a choice in the matter, he had already read most of pre-Calamity pulps that had been scavenged from around Huile, and merchants from more civilized lands beyond the Border States rarely carried novels of any kind.

  He studied instead the tower of unopened mail that occupied the far corner of his desk. Not greatly entertaining, but he supposed it had to be dealt with at some point.

  The pile was a familiar mix: bills, ads, the new issue of The Huile Gazette, a missorted letter for a “Marcus Talbert,” and then a large envelope.

  This last one was strange. Quite fat, with no stamp or return address. It had his name in quick-scrawled letters on its front, and beneath it were the instructions:

  Show To An Engineer!

  The package was heavier than it looked, and when Marcel cut it open, a flurry of paper cascaded onto his desk. His picked up one document, then another, then more. Each was a convolution of organized lines and abstract symbols that to Marcel’s eye might have well have been the
chaotic scribbles of a madman. These were technical drawings clear enough, and written on the margin or on free-floating scraps were dense, minute notes, whose words Marcel could only recognize as some form of highly technical mumbo-jumbo.

  The instructions had been prescient; Marcel had no hope of making out what these dozens of drawings of cylinders and linework represented without the aid of a Guild-trained ætheric engineer. In truth, he could only make out one clear fact. These papers were from Lazacorp. This he deduced from the simple observation that each page had Property of Lazacorp printed in mechanical typeface on its bottom corner.

  He sat down and organized the mess, both on his desk and in his head. Someone had clearly stolen technical documents from the company that was the beating economic heart of Huile and tossed them at his doorway. Why hadn’t they taken them to an engineer themselves? That was easy to answer: because if there was even a single engineer in all of Huile they were certainly on Lazacorp’s payroll.

  His thoughts ran in ten different directions, but after a minute he shook them out of his head. As intrigued as Marcel was, this stranger, who had not even bothered to knock, was not his client. Even if he was, it wouldn’t make these schematics any less stolen. If Alba were here, perhaps she’d search for an angle, a way to use the pilfered papers as leverage or blackmail. Such was her mercenary instincts, but Marcel had taken his career path to mend tears in law and order, not poke more holes in them.

  He tapped his desk, stared at the papers a minute, and then shrugged and continued to dig through his mail.

  The next letter from his stack was an æthericity bill, from Lazacorp itself. Beneath that he found a menu for some newly open bistro serving “Exotic Meals From The Verdant Fields of Utarra.” Then there was a note with a job offer to spy on some rich bastard’s wayward son. Pitiful work. Below that sat a decorated letter that invited him to the funeral of—