Joseph had ushered Clae away to introduce him to various bigwigs, leaving Laura stranded. She wandered the dance floor and picked at the dinner buffet, but ultimately arrived on one of the branching paths, leaning against the railing. She didn’t know anyone and this wasn’t an atmosphere she felt comfortable in. She watched the dancers across the water as they broke into a fox-trot. She half wondered what it would be like to be one of those girls, laughing as they swirled in their partners’ arms. She tried to imagine one of those dresses, her hand clasped in another, but the face that came to mind was Charlie’s. She balked at the idea, and the whole dream seemed tainted again. If she ever did a fox-trot, she decided, she’d have to make sure to have a proper partner. Clae fit the description, but substituting him in the dream made her snort. Okane would probably work, if he ever got over his dislike of touching.
“Having fun?”
Apparently Clae had escaped, because he was striding toward her. Only took him two hours.
“Not really,” she sighed, tossing a chicken bone into the water. A large spotted fish darted forth to nibble on it, but finding it not to be fish food, swam away again. “How was the meet and greet?”
“I don’t remember any of their names and I don’t care to.”
“As always.” She rolled her eyes.
“It matters even less here. It’s not like I’ll be running into them again.”
“There are always other Gin trades, aren’t there?”
“Not here there’s not.”
“I thought you came here before to trade Gin, when you met Melody.”
“That was a completely different situation; there wasn’t Gin involved. As far as it’s been planned, there are no Gin trades between us and Puer for another twenty years.”
“Then what were you doing in Puer?”
“Chasing a vain hope.” He glanced back at the main platform. “Didn’t appreciate the dancing?”
“Nah, I can’t dance worth anything. I don’t understand why people like it either.”
“And of course, there are no posters to vandalize.”
“I only go after the old ones,” Laura defended, glaring at him.
“Hey, it’s the bat and his sidekick.”
Laura gave a frustrated sigh as she saw Leo coming up the path. She wasn’t in a particularly good mood, and didn’t want to deal with his taunting about Amicae’s problems or insulting Clae. If he was brave enough to do that to Clae’s face anyway. Leo stopped alongside them.
“I figured out where I heard of you,” he announced, looking at Clae. “People talk about you sometimes, but it’s usually just that you’re a nutcase.”
“And you’ve come to tell me this why?”
“Because you’re the one who killed his brother, aren’t you?”
Laura froze. Not only was that blunt, it was unbelievable. Clae’s expression didn’t change, but his eyes hardened and his hands slipped into his pockets, presumably for the watch. When neither said anything to the contrary, Leo grinned wider.
“I heard that when you were six, you dragged your little brother out and slaughtered him. Fed his body to an infestation to cover it up. After that the rest of your family started dropping like flies. I bet you got rid of them too, didn’t you? At the very least you did the fratricide.”
All of that had to be lies. Those gossipy women at the Sweeper shop filled his brain with fiction so Helen’s dislike could be justified. But even while Laura knew that, memories of Clae’s home came to mind. Specifically the children’s toys, left out and untouched for years.
“What kind of proof do you have for any of that?” Clae leaned back against the railing.
“Everybody knows.”
“And everybody knows that pigs can fly.”
“Doesn’t change facts.”
“You seriously think I’m bent on fratricide?”
“I bet you enjoyed it, too. You really are twisted, aren’t you?” Leo sneered.
That was a really idiotic thing to say to a would-be murderer, Laura thought. Or at least, that was the thought in the back of her mind. Most of it was preoccupied with stalking toward him, growling, “You little brat! How dare you go accusing people of things like that?”
Leo’s smile faltered and he backed up. Smart, because Laura seriously considered pushing him into the lake.
“If that story was true,” Clae began, and Laura stopped, “then I’d watch myself if I were you. It just so happens that my deadbeat mother is the same as yours.”
Leo’s face went pale, then angry red. “Don’t talk about my mom like that, she’s got nothing to do with—”
“Helen Sinclair abandoned us. She decided she didn’t want to deal with reality and ran off to crawl into another man’s bed, and you’re the result. What was that you were saying about fratricide, brother?”
Leo spluttered indignantly.
“You really are crazy!” he hissed. “We’ll see how well my dad treats you when he hears how you talked about her!”
“Go ahead. He already knows.”
“Freak!” Leo blurted. Laura took a menacing step forward and he ran off, shrieking, “You’re both freaks!”
In the following silence, a few fish thrashed in the water.
“You do a good impression of a guard dog,” Clae mused, watching Leo’s retreating form.
Laura’s shoulders slumped. Her head was in a whirl, and she didn’t quite know what to think. She’d heard that vague story of the Sinclairs, but she hadn’t connected them to actual people. Now those characters were suddenly breathing, the people suddenly coming out of the woodwork. But really, Helen? Leo? Could that be true?
“Was that true?”
“Hm?”
“That Helen’s your mother?”
“She used to be. But as I said, she ran off.”
Seriously? She felt weirdly betrayed, but it made too much sense. Some say her face looks like mine? Of course it did, it was family resemblance!
This was probably a bad idea, but … “Why is that?”
Clae sighed.
“To begin with, my brother did die. I didn’t kill him, though. When we were nine, we decided we wanted to be Sweepers when we grew up, like our father. I’m sure I mentioned it before, but he was head Sweeper at the time.” He paused a moment, staring off into the gathering darkness for a while before continuing, “We tracked down an infestation, but we weren’t prepared. It got him and I couldn’t do anything about it. So I was the only one who came home. Between that and the fact I was the older one, never mind that it was only by ten damn minutes, Helen decided I had to be responsible. She shoved all her troubles on me, and never let me forget it. When my father died a year later on the job, she decided she couldn’t stand me anymore and left in the night. No warning. No note. We had no idea where she’d gone. So it was just me and Rosemarie for a while.”
The nightstand with the carved ROSEMARIE came to mind again.
“Who’s Rosemarie?”
“Great-grandmother on father’s side. She died too. Old age with her, though. That’s how the family business fell apart. Happy?”
“That’s not exactly a happy story,” Laura muttered. “And that time you came to Puer and met Melody … that was when you heard about Helen being here?”
“The Sweeper who came to visit us that year told us. Once Rosemarie died, I decided I had nothing to lose. Thought I could try to get my mother back. Didn’t work, obviously.”
The story filled in a lot of gaps. The amount of space in that home above the Sweeper shop, the carving in the nightstand, the toys … and everyone here in Puer only heard Helen’s side of the story. There’s something wrong with them. The whole lot of them. How could she say something like that about her own family? Her own child? Laura looked back over at the other partygoers and felt sick.
“Do you want to leave?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I didn’t like this party in the first place, and knowing about
Helen … I don’t want to be with these people anymore.”
“We can’t get a trolley back. Not for free, anyway.”
“We can walk though, right? I haven’t seen much of Puer yet.”
Clae regarded her for a moment. “There is one area where Puer is superior to Amicae. They have posted town maps.” With that he leaned over the railing and waved, calling, “You in the boat! Bring us back to shore.”
The boat was paddled over, and they clambered over the railing into the vessel. After being rowed back to land, they got out and began wandering.
It was early in the night, and with this being a secure Quarter they weren’t afraid of muggers. The buildings in this part of town were big and ornamental, with statues and carvings and electric lights to illuminate them. Laura was quietly impressed by it all. Maybe Amicae’s First Quarter was similar, but in the Quarters she frequented the buildings had always seemed worn or faded in some way; here they shone as if newly built, though some plaques on walls indicated that a few of these locations had been around for almost a century. The whole city seemed clean and aglow, almost like a film. Like something divorced from reality. They bantered about some décor and meandered through the thin crowds. There were small, freestanding pillars with maps of the city wrapped around them, and Clae used these to guide them in the general direction of the Sweeper shop. They took their time, though. It wasn’t like they were in any rush.
“So you kept in contact with Melody. For gratitude or for business?” Laura asked, as they passed a lit pub topped with a mechanical horse; the metal creature trotted smoothly along a circular track above the door, gliding so naturally it might as well have been real. The sound of singing inside rang in her ears.
“I told you before, I keep in contact with a lot of Sweepers through mail.”
“Are they all lovely young ladies?” she teased.
“They tend to be, yes.”
Laura stumbled on the cobblestone. “Wait … seriously? And you’re saying Melody is, uh, lovely?”
Laura had never heard him mention anything nearing the realm of romance before. For a while she’d thought him incapable of it. Romantically stunted.
“She is,” Clae agreed, echoed a moment later by the click of that goddamn pocket watch.
“And you … get along.”
“I’d say so.”
“So are you, um, interested?”
“We ‘courted’ at one point.” He actually pulled out the watch to observe the time with a bored expression.
“And it didn’t work out?”
“For being curious, you’re also being very hesitant. I thought I got it through your skull already. Be a pain.”
“Fine! So you dated. How long and who dumped who?”
“Six months, mutual dumping. Neither of us are particularly amiable, and she found someone better.”
“Ouch.”
“If we built a home, it would be rather bleak.” He showed no sign of bruised ego or regret. “Besides, seeing her new partner, I don’t blame her. That woman’s a beauty.”
“She’s dating a woman now?”
“Name’s Priscilla. Good woman, though her bust’s outrageous.”
“My god, you do have a libido.”
He gave her a pointed glare. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know, it’s just, I always thought you seemed to have all the romantic capability of a brick.”
“A brick?” He mulled on it for a while. “Bricks can be a pain. I can live with that.”
“You’re really hung up on that, aren’t you?”
“It’s what you need to survive in the world.”
Laura pondered this for a while before deciding to act on it again. “So why aren’t you being a pain to Helen?”
Clae blinked, expression twitching toward some mix of surprise and revulsion. The watch clicked again. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“I mean I think that if she ran out on you when you needed her, she deserves some rudeness from you. She was trash-talking you before, why don’t you trash-talk back? You do it all the time back in Amicae! But here you just … you just don’t look at her. Does it have something to do with the networking, is that why you don’t do anything?”
“Riddle me this,” he snapped. “What’s the point? What do I gain by doing that?”
“She deserves it!”
“But what does it do for me?”
“What does being a pain ever do for you?”
“When you’re a pain, it means people will pay attention to you. No one forgets a thorn in their side for very long, and the more you kick at them the more they’ll have to take you seriously to get you out of their hair. If I weren’t a pain when it came to Amicae, the Sweeper guild would’ve been looked over and abandoned already. I demand recognition.”
“But not from her.”
“What do I need recognition from her for? You think I need her to take me seriously? Forget it. I’ve taken enough shit from her, I don’t need any more. She could die for all I care. That—” He shut his mouth, warring with his thoughts as he brought his bitterness under control. The watch clicked incessantly. Eventually he gave her a spiteful look from the corner of his eye and said, “What about you? Don’t think I don’t know about your own mother. She left you. Why aren’t you a pain to her?”
“That’s different.”
“How so?”
“My parents never cared enough for me to even feel abandoned.”
She pointedly avoided looking at him. She’d had years to get over the feeling of not being worth the air she breathed, and it wasn’t as if her parents were the only ones enforcing those thoughts. She was in a different city now, a Sweeper, and a good one at that. Everyone in Amicae could eat crow.
Clae didn’t seem to know how to reply to that, and simply grumbled “Left” when they reached an intersection. Laura waited for him to say something more, but when it became clear he wouldn’t, she went ahead.
“What about your father? How did he offend her, if you were the scapegoat? Stand by you?” She hoped he had; Clae seemed attached to the memory of his father, so thinking that had been ripped away too …
“He didn’t give her any warning, I suppose.” The watch clicked. “He told her why I was able to get away, and she didn’t take it well.”
That sounded like he’d thrown his brother to the lions. “How did you escape?”
“I’m a Magi.”
Laura gave him an incredulous look. “A Magi? Like Okane?” But they looked nothing alike. Besides, Clae very clearly pronounced his “you,” there was no getting around that.
“My blood’s too diluted to show any of the usual signs,” he acknowledged. “The true Magi was Rosemarie. She came out of the wilds to snoop on the regular cities, and in the process she came across the Sweepers. My great-grandfather fell head over heels for her. She thought he was amusing, so she stayed around. My grandfather, even my father had some difficulties with the ‘you’ thing. They were able to use their magic on the job. I ended up with some weak instinct, but that’s it. I have no ability like Okane’s. Any kaibutsu has to be huge for me to notice it. But useful as the abilities can be, they make us a target. I told you before that people hunted Magi, thought they were witches or demons. Helen thinks something like that. Or maybe she thinks Magi is more like a disease. Magi are very secretive, they have to be. My father never shared that secret with her until after the death. She never forgave him for it. Never looked at any of us the same way again.”
“Stupid,” Laura muttered. “Magi, or whatever. Why should it matter so much?”
“People always pick at little things. Sometimes it seems that’s all they’re good for.”
“It’s stupid.”
“Most people are.”
He tugged on her sleeve to steer her left again. She followed without thinking, but stopped short. The conversation flew out of her mind. They were on the edge of a wide plaza lined with small decorative trees.
From the middle rose a massive tower, soaring from bulky arches at the bottom to an elaborate clock face and spires at the top; the clock glowed like a second moon while glittering lights shone on the lattices of its many windows and trailed up its corners. She’d seen it before but never expected it to have this kind of presence.
“It’s the tower from the poster,” she whispered.
“They call it Gustave’s Moon, after the architect,” said Clae. “It used to be prominent in Puer’s films, but there are bigger, newer buildings they’ve latched on to.”
“But it’s—You—Why didn’t you tell me we were going here?”
“It was a whim. I saw it on the map.”
“It’s fantastic!” She craned her neck to make out the top spires. It looked like it belonged in her Coronae book. No, better. “Is that an observation deck? Can we go up?”
“We can try.”
She made an embarrassingly excited noise and rushed for the open door. The bottom floor housed a small café and gift shop. Laura was immediately drawn in by a display of illustrated postcards of the tower and other Puer landmarks. After a moment she realized she was alone. Clae had stopped outside, looking up at the clock with a pensive expression.
“Is something wrong?” she called, going out to join him.
“Nine o’clock,” he said, pointing. “Gustave’s Moon chimes different songs every year.”
Above them, the minute hand ticked into place. A song rang through the air, simple but somehow familiar. A fragment of a lullaby.
“Thank you,” said Clae.
Laura sent him a puzzled look. “For what? You’re the one who brought me here.”
“Not this,” he grumbled. “I’m aware that I’m not easy to work with. I’m abrasive. I’m bitter. I’m secretive. It’s not a good combination.”
Laura frowned, unsure what he was getting at. Clae looked intensely frustrated, but at least he was aiming that scowl at the tower.
“You didn’t have to put up with that, or with the amount of danger we go through on the job. But you still do, and you’re still … bright at the end of it. Hardworking despite the laws of Amicae, still supportive of Magi even though you recognize we’re not normal, still…” He breathed in deep. “Still going back for other people.”
City of Broken Magic Page 34