by Carrie Patel
But none of that life was here now.
Malone stopped in front of the bodies. They were lined up against the wall, bloodstains like skid marks showing where they’d been dragged. Someone had left them here. Hoping they’d be found.
She squatted, knees popping as she balanced her buttocks on her heels. How had she gotten so much older in the months she’d been away from this work?
And how had the victims gotten so young?
Malone peered into their faces. None of them could have been more than twenty-five. And here they were, one with his throat slit, another with her head bashed in, and the last weeping from a dozen different gashes.
All three victims were wearing the loose, crisp uniforms of Madina.
All three were wearing empty holsters.
Malone patted down the bodies and checked the ground around them, even though she knew it was futile. Someone had taken the weapons, though whether it was a statement or simple opportunism, she couldn’t yet say.
But perhaps the victims could.
She inspected the bodies, lifting their hands and probing their limbs as carefully as if they’d been alive. She found twisted limbs, raw knuckles, lacerations along the forearms. They’d fought, all except the first man, who’d had his throat slit before any of them knew what was happening.
And the others had been disarmed shortly after that.
Odd, the three of them venturing this deep into town. Odder still for them all to have left their guard down, especially after two of their fellows had been caught looting – Malone had heard that bit of gossip a dozen times over.
Movement flickered at the far end of the tunnel. Someone passing by and hurrying on. The two guards watching that direction looked from Malone to the tunnel mouth and back again, nervous.
“Almost done?” Farrah asked. Malone could hear her speaking between her teeth.
“Still checking,” she said.
Blood spattered and trailed for several yards, dragged along by a few partial boot prints. Only two or three different pairs of shoes as far as she could tell, but smaller than she expected.
No, not smaller. Finer.
One print narrowed where the sole tapered into a pointed toe. Another vanished in a high arch and reappeared in the stamp of a heel. A third, similar to the first, was mottled with something like a cordwainer’s mark. Only expensive shoemakers bothered with that.
Malone stood back and regarded the tracks and streaks of blood. There had likely been more than three assailants from the way the corpses looked, but she couldn’t get a read from the prints.
All this for a tea shop. The Qadi’s people must be getting just as desperate as Recolettans.
Malone took a lantern from the carriage, lit it, and pushed the door. It swung open with the slightest pressure.
The room smelled of dust, wood, and the musky and floral aromas of tea. Most of the shelves were empty even though the scent lingered. Dust motes floated in the glow from Malone’s lantern.
She scanned the grimy floor, searching for footprints.
What she found instead was a two-inch length of fingernail, jagged where it had snapped off.
“Malone, we should hurry,” Farrah said.
She left the shop and turned back to the tunnel where Farrah waited, her face ashen in the gray light filtering in from the skylight. The woman kept glancing to either end of the tunnel as if she expected someone to materialize there at any moment.
Let her stew. Malone had a job, and for now, it was one she knew how to do.
She regarded the smeared blood, the bodies propped up against the wall. The scene was beginning to take shape in her mind, almost as if she could see the whole thing play out in reverse. Three Madinan guards had come to the market district – off duty, most likely – for tea? For something else? At the invitation of a third party?
They were taken by surprise. Caught off guard not only because they were young and inexperienced, but also because the attack had come from an unlikely source.
“Whitenails,” Malone said, half to herself and half to Farrah. “Or one at least, but definitely the fancy crowd.”
Farrah whistled through her teeth. Out of the corner of her eye, Malone saw the waiting guards converge on the bodies, unfolding canvas sheets.
“They murdered them here, and they knew they were coming.” If they were still wearing fancy shoes and keeping their nails long, then they weren’t living on the street yet. “Might have even lured them here.” Sato’s coup had not been kind to Recoletta’s privileged whitenails, and some had taken up arms in response. But this was an odd time to go hunting for trouble, especially when the old guard – Lachesse and her peers – was returning to power and the leadership was reinstating the Council.
Which had always been run by whitenails.
The guards rolled the corpses into the canvas sheets.
“Who would gain from angering the Qadi?” Malone asked.
“Ponder that one later,” Farrah said. “We need to go.” By now, she was stamping and fidgeting as much as the horses.
The guards were loading the bodies into the cargo compartment of the carriage.
“Tell Dr Brin to see if the same blade was used on the two men,” Malone said. “And ask him–”
“They’re not going to the morgue. And Brin’s been missing a month,” Farrah said sharply.
Malone felt a sting of guilt. “Then where–”
“It’s better you don’t know, Malone. Officially, you’re not here. None of us are. I’m going to handle this as quietly as possible, and with a little luck none of this gets back to the Qadi, or Lady Lachesse, or anyone else who might raise a stink.”
A couple of the guards kicked garbage over the bloodstains. Malone wanted to stop them, but what was the point now?
“Pay off whoever you want, but I need to ask around.”
Farrah scowled at her in disbelief. “Your job is to keep Recoletta from another breakdown, not chase killers.”
Frustration and disappointment swelled in Malone’s chest. “Hard to keep the city stable with murderers running around.”
“They’ve been here a long time. And they will be until the shops are open, the railcars running, and the markets full of food.”
Malone knew Farrah was right, but that didn’t make any of this easier to hear.
“You need to keep the peace between the Qadi and local forces, and you need to make sure that Recolettans accept the Qadi’s people. That they know they’re peacekeepers, not occupiers.”
Farrah pointed to the cargo compartment, which the guards were shutting and latching on the three wrapped bodies.
“That is what we’re up against,” Farrah said. “And we’re not going to beat it by lining up the facts, because the facts don’t matter. The story does. That’s why you need to make deals. Compromises. Speeches.”
Skies above. Malone’s mouth tasted sour.
“And you’re going to smile and shake hands with the politicians you hate, and you’re going to show up early every day to do it, because that’s what it will take to keep the peace we all bled for.”
Malone just had a chance to see the color in Farrah’s cheeks before the other woman turned away.
She sighed. She’d known that it was too good to be true, that she couldn’t put off the job she’d never wanted for the one she still loved. But it had felt good to pretend for a little while that she would be able to solve her problems the one way she knew how.
She would have loved to thrust this responsibility onto Farrah. The other woman certainly understood what was required. But she was the one who had inherited it. More importantly, she thought as she watched Farrah issue orders, Farrah was the one who could move bodies without asking questions.
Chapter 6
Disorientation
Jane’s backside was numb, her throat was dry again, and her nausea had only gotten worse. The little room, which had been fairly calm since the interrogator arrived, rocked and swayed.
She wanted a meal, even though she knew she’d probably only vomit it back up. She wanted to gulp pitchers of water and sleep in a nice, steady bed where she could forget about Recoletta and Ruthers and the rest of it for just a few hours.
Mostly, she wanted to see the sky. She was sure that a breath of fresh air and a long, steadying look at the stars – or the horizon, if it was still day – would do her good.
But she was stuck here, telling stories about things she’d rather forget, and trying to keep straight in her own mind what she’d revealed and what she’d kept to herself. She hadn’t mentioned Roman’s surname or the vault, that much she knew.
The interrogator shook his head and sighed. The room was small enough that she could smell the fish and pepper on his breath.
“You conosse the problem?” he asked. “Of your buried cities?”
Jane could think of plenty, but she was reasonably sure the interrogator had something else in mind.
“You inhabit sujeira,” he said.
This one was beyond Jane. “What?”
The interrogator spread his hands toward the floor. “Basura. Sordor.”
“Filth?”
His white teeth gleamed. “Ess. You escave holes ee live there, in proxima your own filth.”
Despite the way she’d described Recoletta, she wanted to explain that it hadn’t always been that way. But her years as a laundress for Recoletta’s elites had taught her the difference between a debate and an assertion.
“You seem to know an awful lot about the buried cities,” Jane said.
If he recognized sarcasm, he gave no indication. “Always they’ve been asi. Place of corruption. Equal to the Continent.” He sat straight and forward, his voice forceful with passion.
“Then it’s a good thing you figured out how to avoid them both,” Jane said. She could tell she’d hit a sensitive subject, and she was working around it as carefully as she could.
“No ess civilized to live interred by filth. O acircled by the dead. Repugnant, equally. People must clean away the corruption. Every dia, every generation.” He sat back and relaxed a little. “What did you encounter next? After the whiskey man?”
“Corruption,” Jane said.
* * *
The morning after Petrosian’s, Jane had awoken to a roaring hangover.
She felt something wrong as soon as she opened her eyes. She ached with hunger, thirst, and nausea, but every twitch and movement sent pain rattling through her body.
It was not a good day to have urgent errands waiting.
Jane wondered if this wasn’t the real price of the information she’d bought the previous night.
She also wondered where exactly she’d found herself. When she could move her head without tipping the world on its side, she rolled over and looked around.
She was in a bedroom. She didn’t recognize it.
But the sheets beneath her were soft and thick, and there were pillows all around her – under her head, on top of it, and nestled in the crook of her body.
Jane remembered leaving the bar. She thought she remembered heading towards her old apartment. But that was on the other side of town, near the factory districts, likely with a couple of miles of blockaded or gang-run streets in between. And who knew who had claimed it in the months she’d been away from Recoletta?
Much like she’d claimed this place. Wherever it was.
“Hello?” she called. “Anybody there?”
Silence. Maybe she really had just stumbled upon this place by herself.
And now that she was fully awake, she realized that her bladder was bursting and her mouth was dry as cotton. Time to figure out where she was.
She sat up, still wearing the previous day’s clothes, and closed her eyes against the sudden reeling of the world. She opened them only when she was certain she’d contained the worst of the nausea.
The bedroom was large and colorful in a tasteful way. Tapestries, baroque in their intricacy, hung from the walls. They looked mostly faded, though – a pale sky hung over rippling hills and waves of grass that had turned a deep blue. She glanced away when her head started swimming again. An odd decoration for a city-dweller to have.
There wasn’t much else of note in the bedroom. One door led to a bathroom, another to a messy storage room, and a third to the hall. The walls were smooth and high. Someone with money lived here – or had, once. Strewn around the floor and among the blankets and pillows next to her were a man’s clothes. Dark trousers, a dark jacket, and a few rumpled white shirts. All dirty. Something about them was familiar, but she’d probably seen and washed dozens of other similarly nondescript articles before.
Her throat was burning now. She pushed herself up from the bed and spread her feet wide, wobbling like a foal to keep her balance. At least the rug under her feet was thick and soft. Luxurious like the tapestries, she guessed. She wasn’t going to risk looking down.
She made her way to the bathroom, and after she’d relieved herself and vomited, she felt better. Well enough to do something about the old whiskey taste in her mouth, for sure.
Jane stumbled back through the bedroom and out into the parlor, and that was when she recognized the place.
She was in Roman Arnault’s apartment.
Another wave of unsteadiness washed over her again.
She must have made her way here on instinct last night and found the door unlocked. She was relieved to note that she’d had the sense to lock it behind her, at least. It didn’t seem like the place had been looted. Roman, of course, had probably still been living here until his final trip to Madina. Either he’d left in a hurry or he’d left it open for someone else.
Jane made her way to the kitchen in hopes of finding something to drink. She felt a little guilty searching through his cabinets and cupboards, even though she was sure he wouldn’t have minded. Her stomach heaved at the sight of a few half-empty whiskey bottles. Eventually, she found a carton of black pine tea and set a kettle to boil. At least his place still had gas.
She gulped three glasses of water while she waited. By the time she’d suppressed the urge to vomit (again), the tea was ready. She held a cup of it under her nose, breathing in the bitter vapors while she thought.
That had been stupid, getting drunk the previous night. She only had four days to save Roman; she couldn’t afford to waste any of them feeling sick.
Jane played back through the events of the previous night. After Burgevich had left, she’d talked to the proprietor of the whiskey shop, Petrosian. He’d claimed to be an old acquaintance of Roman’s, and for a price, he’d offered to give her something that might help their mutual friend.
In return, she’d confessed that she knew the code to the vault. She hadn’t told him the code itself, and he hadn’t asked – that much she remembered. Perhaps he thought her information was valuable enough as it was. More likely, he didn’t want to risk finding himself in the same position as her and Roman. After all, Roman had been running from that sequence his whole life.
The tea had a kind of aromatic astringency that left her mouth feeling dry but cool. She gazed around the living room as her senses came alive. The first time she’d come here, Roman had caught her rummaging through his files, searching for clues about the whitenail murders. He’d caught her, of course, and thrown her out. She hadn’t known at that time whether he was a killer or a victim.
But he’d had information, and it had led Liesl Malone to the Library. If his blood was the key to the vault, he might have something on that, too. All she’d heard was that it was a cache of powerful weapons from the Catastrophe. If they were both linked to the place, she might as well learn what she could about it.
She picked through the shelves crowded with books. Nothing remarkable here, even among the hidden files and papers where she’d found the map to the Library. She considered the mantel, the cabinets, the exotic bric-a-brac. She didn’t know what she was looking for, but she didn’t think it was here.
J
ane returned to the bedroom, thinking of the storage room.
No, she realized when she’d crossed the bedroom and dialed up the gas lamps. Not storage. A study.
An oversized escritoire stood against one wall. Papers and books were clumped in careful heaps about the room, and a trail of notes led a merry chase from one corner and pile to the next. Jane had seen this kind of deliberate chaos in the homes of certain clients once upon a time, enough to recognize that this was the room in which Roman had really lived.
For people like him, disorder was merely another form of organization. She just had to figure out the pattern. Unfortunately, the irregular and secretive work he’d done as the Council’s hatchet man and Sato’s spymaster would make that difficult.
She skimmed the nearest stack. Something to do with a whitenail’s scandalous affair. She tried the next. Chronicles of another whitenail’s embezzlement of the Bureau of the Treasury.
She tried to remember what Roman had told her about the vault. Unfortunately, he’d claimed to know little about it, said that he’d refused to learn the code she now knew…
Of course. Roman had wanted nothing to do with the vault. Anything he might have about it would be in the place he was least likely to search.
Jane scanned the office, the escritoire against one wall, a fireplace against another, bookshelves next to the door, and papers scattered throughout.
It was all a careful mess. Every flat surface was covered in papers, parcels, or envelopes. The escritoire groaned as she rifled through its drawers, and she reflected that she didn’t even know what she was really looking for. She sighed, and a draft whispered from the fireplace.
The top page on the nearest stack rustled, but Roman had kept the space around the hearth clear, luckily. Something about the tidy little fireplace seemed odd, and it took Jane a minute to register what it was.
No cinders had blown over the hearth. In fact, there didn’t appear to be any ashes in the firebox, and barely a specter of soot on the lintel. Just logs as thick as a grown man’s thigh, stacked neatly on the grate. Entirely too tidy.