The Sightless City

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The Sightless City Page 19

by Noah Lemelson


  It made some sense, Marcel had to admit. “If Verus is causing you so much trouble, why do you even keep him around?”

  “I could give you legal reasons, contracts and the like, but that is only surface-level.” Lazarus gestured backwards towards the party. “Is each person in that building a noble spirit, Marcel? Is each one likeable and pleasant? I have dealt with more of them than you, and I can respond with an emphatic no. But understand, Marcel, that it is only because of them that this city functions. Whether through their labor, or patronage, or political connections, it is because of them this city can remain free and functional. Verus can be a troglyn’s shit-and-a-half, but he keeps the pumps running, æthericity flowing. Valor and justice can only ever be half of the equation, we must keep the lights on, and, despite his mannerisms, there is no man with better skill for that than our foreman.”

  The city glowed soft beneath them, and Marcel could still see the smoke of Blackwood Row floating in the moonlight. “He was very insistent that he get the schematics,” Marcel said. “Even after Gall was implicated, he demanded them.”

  Lazarus sighed. “Useless pieces of paper. He thought he could still glean something from the scribbles of a criminal. Listen, Marcel,” Lazarus gently grasped his shoulder, “if you’re worried about these schematics, well, perhaps I can soothe your nerves. Those documents are still with Lambert. I can show them to you if you wish. I have no need for useless notes, nor need for Verus to be wasting our time with them. I have new engineers on staff, competent ones, straight and on the level. So even if Verus was some conspiratorial whatever, he has no access to anything. All right, Marcel?”

  Marcel nodded. “That is good to hear, I just think—”

  “Trust me, I know my company, I know what goes on in Blackwood Row. Things are safe.” His eyes caught Marcel, and held not frustration, but a sympathetic glint. “You’re used to being the hero, Marcel. Do you still feel one?”

  “I mean…” Marcel stammered, unsure how to answer.

  “You should,” Lazarus said, grabbing his hand. “But not for the reasons they tell you to. Not just for your achievements, not just for saving the city, not just for cleaning the streets of Principate traitors. You’re a hero for your sacrifices, Marcel, don’t think I haven’t noticed.”

  Lazarus’s grasp was firm, but his gaze was gentle.

  “I’ve seen your apartment,” he continued. “You could be making the salary of Lambert, you could be walking on two legs of muscle and bone, but you gave those up for this city. And because of that, Huile is safe.”

  There was a warmth to Lazarus’s words. When he talked about Marcel’s past the memories no longer felt painful, nor claustrophobic or infected with doubt.

  “You’re used to being the hero, but not all victories end with parades, not all triumphs are as grand as they were in wartime,” Lazarus said, letting go of his grip. “It’s hard to know when you need to take a break from heroism.”

  “I’m just trying to do my job,” Marcel said. But perhaps the man was right. Perhaps it was his own insistence that something had to be wrong that had been bothering him.

  “And you have done your job. Many times over.” Lazarus turned again to the city. “You’re one of the few willing to do what’s needed, to make the necessary sacrifices. That’s why I knew Huile would be safe under your eyes, that it will continue to be safe. So give yourself credit, Marcel. You did your duty and then some. All is finally as it should be.”

  Marcel took in the words. He wished he could have heard them from Alba, but he supposed the source didn’t matter. Lazarus was right. The man caught his smile, which Marcel had tried to hide, and slapped him on the shoulder.

  “Listen,” Lazarus said, “I have to keep some of the fancy suits entertained. But take this pressure off yourself Marcel, enjoy your successes without all these unnecessary worries. You’ve done the right thing, I trust you always will.” The man winked as he left.

  Marcel leaned on the balustrade. He sighed and nodded to no one, before turning to look over the city. His city. The real city.

  Huile was beautiful in its own way. The dim lampposts flickered dancing shadows, and the occasional dots of Huilian houses still awake matched, in a loose pattern, the stars above. Here was something worth fighting for, worth suffering for. His vigilance had paid off; his long days of nothing were meaningless compared to the few moments when he had rescued the city. Perhaps for one night at least he would allow himself to accept that, to take the pride he knew he deserved.

  He stretched and caught a glimpse of something. A figure on a roof, lit only by the slight glow of midnight. It was a tiled roof, with no terraces or clear stairway entrances. Strange enough for one to be wandering about on such a rooftop, but at such an hour? He couldn’t make the figure out, but thought for a second he noticed a glow off its eyes.

  Had he drunk more than he realized? He rubbed his eyes and turned to see if there was another to corroborate his vision, but by then the figure was gone.

  Marcel shook his head and walked back into the party.

  Chapter 19

  “Well Roache was definitely present,” Sylvaine said, as she crawled through the window back into the old garret. “I mean, it’s his party, so no surprises there.”

  “And the man?” Kayip asked, glancing through a hole in a curtain, which had seemingly gestated several generations of moths.

  Sylvaine glanced again at the photo Kayip had given her. Compared to the rest of his grim collection this one was fairly tame, showing a young, sharp-chinned man in uniform sitting in a parade autocar beside Lazarus Roache. Roache looked as he always looked, though paler in the black-and-white photograph. The darker-skinned man resembled, fairly exactly, the figure who she had seen chatting with Lazarus outside.

  “It seems to be this Talwar guy,” she said. “Is your friend reliable? I have a hard time trusting his faith in this private investigator.”

  Kayip took the photo of Marcel and examined it under blinding handtorch light. The moonlight seemed plenty bright to Sylvaine; it was easy to forget that normal peoples’ sight was far more limited.

  “He knows this man well,” Kayip said, “I trust his judgment.”

  “I’m just saying this Marcel seems pretty friendly with Roache.”

  “So were you at one point,” Kayip said. He caught Sylvaine’s scowl before she realized she was making one. “I am sorry,” the monk said quickly. “I didn’t mean…” He glanced at the photo again, then after a moment shook his head. “You are not alone. I have fallen for Roache’s words. So have many others. And, regardless, Mr. Talwar is the only one who has the full set of schematics the mutants stole.”

  There was little argument with that. Sylvaine had never visited Huile, hadn’t even heard of this backwater Wastes-edge city until Kayip mentioned it, but the monk apparently knew the city quite well. The rewards of his last trip had been schematics of Lazacorp’s recent project, some of which had made their way to Gearswit, and then to her. Those vital notes had been, unfortunately, left in Roache’s apartment. Neither she nor the monk had thrown blame onto each other, if he had been able to sneak a meeting with Gearswit, or if she had had the wit to understand the meaning of the schematics, then perhaps they wouldn’t currently be hiding out in an abandoned attic in Huile.

  Kayip now returned to his customary silence, as he crossed his legs, and closed his eye in thought. This, she had gathered from their trip down from Icaria, was his usual state. The monk was polite, even oddly gentle at times, but he seemed either unused to company such as hers, or, more likely, company of any sort.

  The journey to Huile itself had been a strange one. Sylvaine had only traveled once before in her life, and that had been up from her parents’ home in Taliers to Icaria itself. That trip hadn’t been in luxury—no Phenian æroship for the daughter of a middle-class clerk—but it had been safe. She had managed to book train tickets up through most of Bastillia, and then bought he
r way into, if not entirely comfortable, at least relatively safe caravans, whose paths hugged the more civilized eastern edge of the Border States, near the foot of the Skyknife Mountains. She hadn’t seen much of the Border States proper, outside of the occasional motor-inn, and she hadn’t time to stay long in any one city.

  Kayip, however, did not move through the networks of the most reputable Border State cities; instead his path skirted west, through the more waste-touched lands. Here the men and women were rougher, their styles scavenged, the food strange tasting, and the environment stranger still. The deeper they got—and Kayip assured her they had not gone truly deep—the more altered the animals and plant-life. Trees grew twisted, some oozing red sap that smelled like sangleum, others were armed with leaves like barbed wire or flaunted nuts that resembled rusting bolts. Taur herds were a common sight, and farmers bred spikefowl, complaining to any who would listen about the constant pestilence of needlecats or opportunistic strixes. Kayip would nod, and ask for directions to the nearest fuel-up station, where men would pour poorly filtered æther-oil from leaking jugs down a funnel into Kayip’s autotruck. Of course, this was only after Kayip negotiated the ludicrous prices the men offered. It had felt odd to see such value placed on fuel that in Icaria was burned routinely, but if the men determined that Kayip played the pauper too heavily, they were quick to display their holster and demand payment ¬now.

  Luckily the monk had been skilled with his words, and had only had to display force once, when an ill-dressed, half-mutated hulk of a man asked if Sylvaine (“that beastwoman thing” were his exact words) was for sale, and, ignoring Kayip's answer, started listing prices. As the situation grew heated Kayip unfurled his blade, that long slender azure sword which morphed by ancient and arcane mechanisms unparalleled even by modern engineering, and used it to cut through three stacked cinderblocks the man had just seconds before used as seating. This seemed enough to terrify the man’s mouth shut.

  It was also the first sign, besides from his pious musing, that Kayip was in fact the hieromonk he claimed to be. Sylvaine knew well that the devotees of the Demiurge wielded their own form of æthermantics, a poorly-understood, superstition-infected branch of æther manipulation kept in the dark by centuries of rigid rituals and inquisitorial censorship, but still. Kayip displayed no such supernatural abilities, and the few times the topic had been raised, he had given her only a solemn silence.

  She didn’t push it. Priest or not, Sylvaine didn’t much care, and she felt in no position to judge someone for the presence or lack of æthermantics. For the terror of the Wastes had not been Sylvaine’s main haunting. A silent fear had stalked her along her trip down, one that she had not been willing to put into words with the monk. He must have known, he had seen her groan and moan, heard complaints of the headaches, the sudden nausea. The slickdust withdrawal had not been nearly as severe as it had been in Icaria, Roache’s injection had served some of its official purpose, and now her head felt near clear most days. Yet in Icaria she had been confident her symptoms were just a temporary malady, to be cured by hidden pinch of the narcotic.

  She had been separated permanently from the man’s poison; it should have felt like a lifting of a burden. Yet without it would her Knack last? The injection had changed something inside her, but how much or for how long, she wasn’t sure. Even Roache was vague about the details, perhaps out of deceit, but perhaps out of genuine ignorance. No one had even awaked the Knack in a ferral; the effect could be permanent or utterly ephemeral.

  If she only understood the drug’s mechanism, but there was no clear analogue in any engineering text she had read. Unstable æther did supposedly have influence on the mechanical workings of the body, but it was also, well, unstable, chaotic, erratic, utterly uncontrollable, producing nothing more than random mutations. It would remove some of the humiliation if Sylvaine could just reduce her experiences to formulas on a page. It sickened her knowing that Roache’s lies flowed through her veins, yet more than anything else she was more horrified by the idea that she might lose her Knack forever.

  Kayip snorted softly and re-crossed his legs in a new permutation. Deep in thought, evidently. The monk wasn’t particularly entertaining company, nor a man with much concern for creature comfort, but after the insanity with Roache, after her life in Icaria, her career as an engineer, her everything had collapsed, there was some solace to be found in the monk.

  It was not an intimate solace, admittedly. Kayip was private with his thoughts, and as flat with his emotions as the mask he wore over his left eye. He had talked little about himself during their travels, divulging nothing of any depth about his past. Their few conversations had tended to be focused on the here and now of survival, occasionally broken up by the monk’s unrequested sermons, which were often esoteric and yet somehow still utterly jejune.

  The few exceptions were the handful of nights when, the campfire fading, Kayip had decided to explain to Sylvaine the magnitude of Roache’s crimes. The monk had collected a long list of vices and atrocities, told with a dour slowness, as if each word took a great effort. Though Sylvaine was usually suspicious of church-folks accusations, Kayip’s details fit exactly with what she had already seen first hand, and she didn’t doubt a word.

  Sylvaine took a moment to look again through the photos the monk had shown her. Mutants, men and women, in states of utter anguish, bodies bent, bruises oozing, corpses lying flat on the floor, all in blurred monochrome. It was grimmer even than what had lain hidden in Roache’s penthouse. Sylvaine was not the only one to have good reasons to want the sangleum tycoon dead, but she still held her own anger tight to her chest.

  “Very well,” Kayip said, Sylvaine jumping slightly from the sudden noise. “I have a plan.”

  * * *

  The sign on the side of the blotched wooden door was clear enough: “Marcel Talwar, Private Investigator.” Earlier that afternoon Kayip had led Sylvaine through the Underway up to the sewer entrance near the front door of the three-story apartment building, before leaving her on her own, with awkward words of encouragement. She did not feel much encouraged. Sure, it made sense that out of the two of them Roache was more likely to have warned Marcel about the monk, but that still didn’t make her chances all that great.

  She held her bag close and fidgeted with the ætherglove hidden in her coat pocket. If Marcel wasn’t as trustworthy as Kayip’s friend thought he was, then it was good to have some self-defense. Admittedly, if she got caught close up then she wouldn’t have the time to slip it on, but then her claws… No, no, that was worse. She wasn’t going to let herself descend into beasthood, not again.

  Sylvaine closed her eyes, breathed in, and raised her hand to knock, before noticing a small hanging chain. She pulled that instead, and a bell clanged from behind the misty glass.

  “It’s open.”

  She walked into a small office. It was lightly furnished and poorly decorated, with a few photos and a large bookshelf. Sylvaine would have thought a long-time friend of Roache’s would have been set up nicely, but by the look of the open screen door behind the desk, it appeared that Marcel both slept and worked in a unit that was half the size of the apartment Roache had given her. Marcel didn’t seem to live in squalor exactly, but the cramped spartan office was a far cry from luxury.

  “You have a good time inspecting my door?” the man asked. The tone was joking, but Sylvaine wanted to curse. The office had looked a blur through the glass from her side; she didn’t realize how obvious it had been from the other side that someone was standing outside, nervous. She wondered who he had expected would come through the door. Based on the décor, and the excessive numbers of pulps she had read as a kid, the man had been probably waiting for some ‘dame with legs to kill for’.

  “Wanted to, uh, make sure I was at the right place,” Sylvaine said, trying to laugh.

  “Only private eye in Huile,” Marcel offered. He wore an old beat-up coat and faint stubble on his chin. His rig
ht leg was resting on the table, scrunched up a bit, and she could see the glimmer of a cogleg, by the looks of it, military design. Functional and heavy, factory-made, no artistry or vision.

  “I take it you’re new in town,” he said. She tried to keep the shock from her face. How did he know? The answer hit her a moment after. Ferral, right. It was doubtful that a single woman looking remotely like her lived within the city limits.

  “Yes,” she said, “I was coming in because you knew a colleague of mine.” She focused to make sure she would pronounce the name right. “A Mr. Heitor Desct.”

  “You knew Desct?” This got Marcel to finally pull his leg down, and sit up straight. He stared at her. “I don’t think he ever mentioned you.”

  “He talked about everyone he worked with?” she asked, perhaps too defensively. It was obvious why he would have mentioned her.

  “Well, no,” Marcel admitted.

  “He’s a friend of a friend,” she said. “We never met directly.” This seemed to satisfy Marcel somewhat. “Desct and I were in collaboration on a story. I write for The Times of Icaria.”

  “Icaria?” Marcel asked, suspicious of the one detail of her story that was actually true.

  “Yes,” she said quickly. “We were making good progress, until I stopped receiving letters.”

  Marcel slumped. “Yeah. Well no mystery there. You probably heard about the wastelung.”

  “Sure,” Sylvaine said, which she realized quickly was probably not the most tactful response. “Well,” she continued, “part of our investigation involved Lazacorp. There were diagrams Desct had mentioned in his letter, ones he thought would be vital to our investigations.”

  “Diagrams?” Marcel asked.

  “Schematics,” Sylvaine explained, “of a central building in Blackwood Row, and its machinery. I was hoping you might know a way to get a copy.”

 

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