The Raike Box Set

by Jackson Lear

  I played the timing of the day over and over in my head. The news of Castor’s daughter would travel quickly. Someone would’ve heard the similarity between her and Día. The two pipsqueaks who were here yesterday would be summoned, barked at, questioned as though their lives were in mortal peril. If it was the only lead they had, Castor would have someone of real authority at the orphanage soon enough. If it wasn’t the only lead he had then I would miss my chance at catching the bastards who had Día.

  I considered that I could close my eyes and remain alert enough to not fall asleep. A fool’s belief. I rolled onto my front, making it all the more difficult to find comfort.

  One of the sestas rose the kids from their slumber with a, “Good morning ladies. It’s time to get up.”

  “Is she back?” was the first question of the day.

  “Not yet.”

  In the next room: “Good morning gentlemen.”

  A lengthy pause. A sesta studying the situation.

  “Where’s Kel?”

  Another lengthy pause.

  “Where’s Kel?”

  “I think he ran away.”

  Movement. A sesta investigating. “Why is his pillow still here?”

  They didn’t have a great answer for her. There was the threat of no breakfast until they could get their story straight but my threat was still greater.

  A, “Tssk,” sounded over the road. I looked up. Greaser’s ugly mug stared back at me. I sent him a signal. He responded in kind. None of us were surprised that his gestures were the same as the army’s, considering our founding members were all ex-soldiers. They got the girl to the safe house. Qin was there. At least that’s what I could figure out from some nods, shakes, and rolls of the hands.

  The kids ate their gruel, cleaned up as best they could, washed their faces and under their arms with the only piece of soap the orphanage owned, and set off for work. They walked in groups with the older children guiding the youngest. Soon, the building fell quiet.

  The old man with his wispy beard hobbled towards the orphanage, wheezed to catch his breath, banged with feeble strength against the door, and was let in. His sermon to the youngsters would begin any moment now. I kept an ear out, curious to see if I remembered any of his stories.

  A snap from a pair of fingers drew my attention away. I looked back to where I last saw Greaser. He had ducked down from view. It didn’t take long to find out what he had seen. A dozen watchmen were on the approach. Behind them, two youngsters, maybe fifteen years old, carried a litter. The look of death dripped from their eyes, their foreheads drenched with sweat, the relief from lowering the litter to the ground greater than a cool drink in the middle of the desert.

  A curtain from the litter flicked to one side. A short man, balding, with a pregnant woman’s belly in place of his own stepped onto the street. He winced as he stood and waddled to the front of the honor guard.

  Two of his feet was wrapped in fresh bandages. Castor. Had to be.

  I was so curious to see what he looked like that I had forgotten to pull back to safety. The glares from Greaser might as well have been red hot pokers. I was trapped on the roof of the orphanage, surrounded by a dozen city watchmen and one explosive Castor. Greaser had the wisdom of hiding on the rooftop of the building across the street but even so, there wasn’t much relief for either of us.

  Normally I’d say that Castor had that terrier look about him; short and ferocious, able to bite at your calves and make you rue the day you dared to set foot on his turf. Today he came as a rabid bloodhound. Red nose. Red cheeks. Chubby sides. Hollow eyes. He grew up liking his wine and women, and they all liked him. It looks like one vice stuck around longer than the other, and now the wine was out of necessity.

  The watchman at the head of the pack, powerful and used to barking commands and staying at the front, pounded at the front door. A sergeant, I’d guess. Greaser and I kept our chests to the rooftop.

  A short introduction between Castor and Silvia followed.

  “Yes, we met two of your men yesterday,” said Sesta Silvia.

  “These two?” The voice sounded like the man’s jaw was fixed shut.

  “Yes, that’s them.”

  “Tell me everything that happened.” Definitely Castor. The fury in his voice, the desperation, the molten anger.

  The watchmen went inside. According to the signals from Greaser, two of them waited outside, looking across the buildings around them to judge if they saw anything unusual. Inside, Sesta Silvia went over the basics. Día. Taken in broad daylight. A note left behind.

  “Where is it now?” asked Castor.

  In your hand, as luck would have it.

  “I don’t know,” said Silvia.

  I craned my head around to the open atrium nearby. I couldn’t see Castor or Silvia but I was able to pick out enough words to piece together what they were saying.

  “You can read?” asked Castor.

  “Yes.”

  “Did it say the same as this?”

  Then came silence.

  “I’m sorry, have you found Día?” asked Silvia.

  It dawned on me that my life hung in the sesta’s hands. If she recognized the note, if she found out that one of Castor’s daughters had been kidnapped, then she could easily tell them that I had been there to investigate just yesterday. She could tell them about Lieutenant as well.

  “I don’t care about Día,” spat Castor. “I care about who took her. Was there any glass left behind? Broken glass?”

  “No, nothing like that.”

  “What about a man in an outfit? Gray clothes. Throws soot or ash into the air.”

  “I don’t think so. No one saw her being taken. You could ask the boy who found the note. Maybe he saw broken glass and soot.”

  “Where is he?”

  “At work in the dye house.”

  “Get him.”

  “Of course. Sesta Nevah, will you fetch Caen, please?”

  “Yes, Sesta.”

  Hurried sandals pitted and pattered from the doorway to the street outside.

  “Our other sesta, Sesta Joa, went out looking for Día.”

  “And?”

  “I didn’t see anything like that, sir,” said Joa.

  “What about a scream? A man shouting ‘tonight she dies’? Anything?”

  “No. I asked around the area, told them who I was looking for. There was nothing unusual about the day.”

  Castor grunted, pained that he was likely about to make a fool out of himself. “What about the children describing a ghost?”

  Silence.

  “Tell me,” he growled.

  “Some of the girls in Día’s room were talking about the Eyeless Ghost,” said Joa.

  “But it was nonsense,” said Sesta Silvia. “Children pass on stories, they get exaggerated …”

  “What does it look like?” asked Castor.

  “Tall and blue, I believe. It has no eyes but I think there’s skin covering the sockets. Sunken skin. It has long, jagged teeth.”

  “And the children saw this?”

  “One of them saw it in a nightmare but that’s all it was. The others started saying they saw it as well.”

  “Where did they see it?”

  The watchmen piled into each room just below me, searching Día’s room for clues. Greaser dropped out of view. The watchmen poked their heads out the windows, scanning the road beneath them and the buildings nearby. Considering Castor might have seen me jump up to his roof, that would be the next place in the orphanage he would search.

  I rolled over and dug out the olive oil. I scooted back to the edge of the roof, to Día’s room, just above the window.

  “This is her room, where they saw it,” said Sesta Silvia.

  I worked quickly, pouring the contents along the roof’s edge.

  A hand slammed up in front of me, grabbing onto the ledge and slipping away in an instant. A shuffle of cries and thunking armor erupted from the room below.

  “
Stop fucking around!” shouted Castor.

  I scrambled, abandoning all sense of remaining incognito. I jumped to the building next to me. I looked to Greaser. Maybe he had a better view point of where to go. He signaled to move farther away from him. Easier said than done considering I now faced a seven foot sheer wall. I jumped up. Missed. I tried again. The top of the roof curved downwards. Nothing to grab onto.

  I sent a look back to Greaser. He seemed to groan at whatever I was suggesting but I was running out of easy options. I had to find a way back closer to the orphanage so I could listen in and the only option I really had was to jump across the street and land on someone else’s roof. Since I didn’t have a death wish, that roof was going to belong to Greaser so that he could grab onto me and pull me in.

  It required a slight detour. The seven foot curved wall beside me was no good but the building behind the orphanage was doable. More or less. I had done it as a kid, so I should’ve been able to do it then. The walls were taller but they were cracked and uneven. Gaps had formed from the shitty mud bricks drooping away and the mortar had started to leak. I jammed my fingers in, tried to find something for my feet to rest against, and got halfway up the wall.

  One of the watchmen climbed onto the roof.

  “What’s up there?” asked Castor.

  “Nothing, sir.”

  “I don’t want nothing! I want answers!”

  I was still against the wall, in full view of the sergeant if he ever turned around. A thump came from his direction. I glanced back. I presumed that Greaser had encouraged him to fall over.

  I tried to find another finger hold. Couldn’t. No matter how hard I tried, climbing this wall just wasn’t going to happen.

  I released my grip and tried the ballsiest move I knew of. I returned to the orphanage, pressing myself against the side of the wall and waited. I was within spear range. Hell, I was in sword range. All it would take was for one watchman to jab me by surprise and I’d be dead, but that’s if he stood on the edge of the roof and looked straight down.

  “She’s not up here, sir,” said the lowly watchman.

  Sesta Silvia spoke. “As I said, she was taken from the street on her way home from work.”

  “Sir?”

  “What?”

  “It’s the general, sir.”

  That one stirred my curiosity so much that I had to see for myself. I crept to the edge of the roof and peered into the street. There was definitely some kind of commotion coming our way. The locals who had come to see the watchmen hurried out of the street as quickly as they could. Faces upon faces came to each of the windows. A spectacle was unfolding before the residents of Red Hill and no one wanted to miss out.

  The clop clop clop of horseshoes was as alien in these streets as the emperor himself. Until that moment I had only ever seen two horses in my life. One belonged to the city treasurer. I had seen him riding it back and forth with undue bafflement on my part. How anyone could tame a beast of that size and ride it without being flung ass over end was nothing short of magic itself. The second horse I saw was brought down in the Willows by a trio of werewolves. The horse had a saddle strapped to it and reins but no rider. It had become snagged against a low tree branch and was forced to kick and neigh with unbridled panic as the werewolves set into it, tearing it apart as it thrashed about.

  Donkeys, I’ve seen plenty of. A couple of mules. But a horse … a creature taller than anyone I know, bred for war … they have always been a rarity in Erast. Yet I recognized the sound of the horseshoes striking the muddied road towards the orphanage.

  Sitting astride the spotted horse was a man born into more wealth than everyone in the Governor’s Hand had ever amassed put together. He wore a fine crimson tunic and tan riding pants, carried a long sword by his side and wore a battle chest plate and helmet with a thick Mohawk of red riding on top. The silvered emblem on his breast plate and helmet was of a bear rising back on its rear legs.

  Behind the rider were eight soldiers and one woman. They had run while the general rode on horseback. The soldiers were in full war-mode. Curved tower shields, spears, short swords on their belts, breastplates with angled shoulder guards, and helmets that swept down like bearded mutton-chops. The woman was dressed in black.

  Greaser sent me another grimace. Whatever connections Castor had, whatever strings he had pulled, he hadn’t gone into this day lightly.

  I started to plan my way back to Qin, to release the girl, and to call the whole thing off in an instant. I was fine with picking a fight with the captain of the city watch but everyone has a limit, and if General Kasera was the sort of man who was here instead of swearing his allegiance to the new emperor thousands of miles away then he was clearly someone who had no problem starting a war and seeing it through to the end. So what the hell was he doing here?

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Four families have a bedrock in the area. The governor has a villa that he rarely attends. Senator Korix was born here and has been trying to erase that fact ever since. General Renair has a base in Solento, the largest city in Syuss. His troops are busy building roads to connect each of the cities in the province. Then there’s General Kasera, whose family apparently made their fortune by bringing silks and spices in from Kardel back when the empire had a blockade on each of their ports. Kasera had little more than a family compound and a couple of hundred troops with him at any one time. Yet for someone who should’ve been in Ispar right now, under penalty of death for not swearing allegiance to the emperor upon his coronation, he had come with only eight soldiers and one woman who was dressed a lot like me.

  “My Protector,” gasped Castor, stopping at the door. “You came?”

  Kasera dismounted. “My Captain. Have you found her?” He was a striking man, I admit. Shorter than I had expected but muscular. Years of practice in archery and swordplay had shaped him well. Even so it didn’t seem like he was a senator. Most generals become one, but not all. I’ve heard it is an archaic system even today, one that began as a means to quell the military and curb the power of their ever expanding armies. Once a general has a decent title and a position in Ispar, his ego needs to be kept in check by the emperor, usually through frequent assassinations. This tends to infuriate the senators who earned the title through diplomacy rather than the ones who were given it for killing their foes. It means both sides tend to drink and dine to excess. A senator without a gut can be viewed with suspicion; here be a man who refuses to sit down and listen to a delicate discussion. A general without a gut is still ready to fight to the death.

  Luqa Kasera had been a general and a protector of Syuss for three years now. His father may have owned an estate nearby but Kasera junior wasn’t given any land of his own by the empire. A home posting is often seen as an insult. Add to that the slight of not being made a senator and perhaps it was no coincidence that he was here instead of Ispar.

  Kasera shook Castor’s hand warmly, though it seemed like they barely knew each other. “What happened?”

  “Someone took Myalla. This morning.”

  So, I finally had a name for the girl.

  “He lifted her away as she slept, shouting, ‘tonight she dies!’ as he left. He climbed onto the roof and ran off with her.”

  Kasera looked across the orphanage walls. “He brought her here?”

  “No, My Protector. Another girl was kidnapped from here. Two nights ago. Both times the kidnapper left a note.” He padded himself down, finding the sheet of paper, and handed it across. “I don’t know what to make of it.”

  Kasera unfolded the note. For a man of reasonable education, he took longer to read it than I did. He stood on the street in one of the poorest corners of the city, as still as a scarecrow in winter.

  I glanced over to Greaser. His focus on the general had become unflinching.

  Kasera looked to the woman among his guards. She strode forward, her leather boots immaculate, shorts under her black tunic, a black sash used as a belt. No weapon, though. She
had long chestnut hair pulled back and hanging over one shoulder. Long enough to be sultry. Too long to be practical in a fight. She had been at the orphanage the day before.

  Kasera held the note out to her. She read it, handed it back. Neither of them commented on the matter. The problem was, the woman down there knew my name. She knew I had been asking about Día. She knew that Sesta Silvia had given me a note, the likes of which she had just read.

  Kasera looked back up to the orphanage, peering along the walls as though they contained messages written in some secret code. Everyone in the street was watching him.

  He stepped away from Castor. Whispered to the woman. She nodded and walked back the way they had come.

  Interesting. She knew I was involved, therefore Kasera knew I was involved. They probably suspected that I was watching them that very moment yet neither of them said anything to Castor.

  Greaser sent me a grimace. I gave him a quick nod. He had been in the army, served his fourteen years. He knew the significance of what was happening better than I did. He rose, climbed from one roof to the other, and followed the woman as best he could.

  Castor, meanwhile, stood by the orphanage doorway. “My Protector?”

  Kasera returned, still holding onto the sheet of paper. “I’m going to have someone look into this.” Without waiting for confirmation he pocketed Día’s note.

  “Of course,” muttered Castor. “Have you seen it before?”

  “Never. You said another girl was taken?”

  “Yes but not from here. She was taken while walking from work.”

  Inside I was a ball of nerves. Kasera needed to go inside the orphanage and ask around. Only then was he likely to hear that these kidnappings were rampant throughout the city.