The Thieves of Nottica

by Ash Gray

  “Yes, Rigg, I do,” Lisa said quietly. “I understand completely.”

  Rigg scowled. “Then why --!?”

  “Because you were in danger,” Lisa said simply. “In light of that, nothing else mattered.”

  Chapter 8

  Etcetera

  They spent yet another night in the forest, and Hari sent Rivet to strip down the broken mechanical frog, that she might save parts of it as scrap for future use. At first light, they set out again, quiet and tired and wary of more proto-frogs, though Lisa assured them there wasn’t another in range for several miles. As the trees began to thin, they could see a great wall taking shape, until at last, they found themselves outside the wall of Coghurst. They stepped from the trees into a wide field of colorless, tall grass. Great metal windmills spread in a row in front of the wall, and in the wall itself were sewage pipes, mouth after mouth coughing up bile.

  Morganith sighed and folded up her shotgun. “Here we go again.”

  “But this time we’ve gotta swim,” Hari said, folding up her staff. She pulled her welding goggles down over her eyes and buttoned her coat up over her mouth. “Can you swim, Lisa?” she asked, wading through the grass toward the nearest pipe.

  “You should be asking if she’ll sink,” said Morganith. “All that hardware’s gotta weigh something.”

  “I can swim just fine,” Lisa said serenely, and to everyone’s shock, mechanical fins abruptly snapped from her forearms and calves.

  “Well,” muttered Morganith, staggering on through the grass, “that answers that.”

  Unlike the drainpipe back in Hardsmith, the ones leading from Coghurst all ran perpendicular, reaching at a right angle through the bottom of the lake and to the city above. Lisa blinked, and twin jets of light snapped from her gaze, beaming through the pitch darkness and glittering across the surface of the murky water. Guided by Lisa’s literal headlights, they trudged through the dark pipe, panting and sloshing in the silence, Morganith complaining every now and then about “shitty water” in her boots. When they reached the point where the pipe turned vertically at a right angle, Rigg and Morganith leaned against the wall and watched as Hari pulled out her staff and extended it.

  “Lisa,” Hari called cheerfully, “I could sure use some light over here.”

  “Not a problem,” said Lisa pleasantly, and with her eyes beaming, she came to Hari’s side.

  Posed as ever on Hari’s shoulder, Rivet clicked indignantly and blinked its tiny pinlights in protest.

  “Sorry, Rivie,” Hari said, “but Lisa’s lights are brighter.”

  Lisa drew near, and the little spidery robot clicked its gears and rocked back and forth in a flirtatious dance. Lisa put a hand to her lips and giggled.

  Rigg frowned. “Hey!” she cried indignantly, and the two robots looked her way. Like Lisa, Rivet’s pinlight eyes were cutting through the dark in twin beams that reflected in distorted ripples on the water. “You back off Lisa, Rivet,” Rigg warned with a laugh. “I saw ‘er first!”

  Lisa gave Rivet a pecking kiss on the head, and the miniature robot clicked excitedly in response, swaying back and forth as if it might swoon. Lisa giggled again at the tiny robot’s antics.

  “Uh oh, Rigg,” Hari teased. “Looks like you’ve got competition.”

  Rigg snorted. “Not really. Rivet doesn’t even have lips!”

  Laughter echoed through the pipe, and Rigg was glad to see everyone at ease. She wished she could be at ease herself. In reality, she was terrified, and she was using humor to pretend otherwise. She could feel her heart pumping harder as she thought with dread of having to swim through the dark lake. A million different scenarios played out in her mind. What if she was separated from the others, lost in that cold darkness? What if they never found her and she was left to drown alone? Her bones would dwell at the bottom of the lake until the end of time. She couldn’t stand the thought of her body being trapped down there with fish swimming through her eye sockets.

  Hari gave her staff a jerk, and the buzz saws on the end started whirling. Adjusting her welding goggles over her eyes, she very slowly applied the buzz saws to the side of the pipe. The sound of metal cutting was horrifying to Rigg, though it didn’t seem to perturb Lisa, who stood content and indifferent as ever beside Hari as she worked, shining her beams on her efforts.

  “You alright, Riggy?” Morganith asked, frowning in concern.

  Rigg’s hands were shaking as she pulled on her gasmask. Once it was on, it was even harder to see. Water had splashed on the mask, and the droplets obscured her vision. The buzz saws were getting louder and harsher, and when Hari made a triumphant nose, Rigg knew she had cut through. Hari dragged the buzz saws down, drawing a square that – any second now – would be knocked free by a sudden burst of water. Water would fill Rigg’s nose and mouth, water would drag her clothes down, fill her boots, chill her bones, pull her into its unrelenting embrace. She would be floating, helpless, nothing beneath her feet but the darkness --

  “Rigg!” Morganith cried.

  Rigg snapped out of her terrified trance and looked at Morganith. The halfling was watching her anxiously. She reached over and touched Rigg’s cheek – or rather, the cheek of her mask. “It’ll be alright,” she said gently.

  Rigg blinked and nodded, but she didn’t think she could breathe. Then it happened: the last clinging piece of metal cut free. Hari jerked her staff into retracting and tucked it away in her satchel with a proud nod. She glanced back at the others, but her eyes lingered on Rigg. “Ready, Riggy?”

  Rigg’s mouth felt like cotton. She didn’t think she could answer, so she nodded.

  Morganith took Rigg’s hand and squeezed it. “We’re ready. Kick that bitch in, Hari.”

  Hari laughed. Glancing at Lisa once to see if she, too, was ready, she took a step back and kicked the loose square of metal. It came free with a creak and a groan, and icy water rushed inside at once to embrace them.

  Rigg took a deep breath and tightened her lips as the water swelled inside the pipe like a pair of opening wings and swept them out into the lake itself. The water was so dark, Rigg could see nothing except the flash of Lisa’s headlights cutting through the flurries of bubbles. The darkness sent her into a mild panic, and she fought the instinct to take a breath. Morganith was still holding her hand. Rigg could feel Morganith swimming hard toward the surface, pulling on her hand, squeezing to wake her. Shaking her silent horror, Rigg swallowed hard and started kicking her boots, waving her arm, almost in desperation to reach the surface, trying to ignore the fact that her boots were flailing against the bottomless nothing. She clung to Morganith’s strong hand and was silently grateful when Morganith never let go: the last thing she wanted was to be lost and alone in that dark water.

  Far above, Rigg could see the green water shimmering as streetlights cast their beams across it. She could see the large ticking clocks, the tram tracks that twisted across the sickly green sky, the black birds that circled through the rising smog. As they drew higher, the water grew brighter, and she could see Lisa swimming not five feet away. The pretty robot looked almost angelic, her hair floating around her in a loose cascade, her gray dress billowing to reveal her slender legs, as if she were fluttering her way through some lucid dream.

  They finally broke the surface, emerging directly beneath a stilted building. Hari and Lisa had reached the surface before Rigg and Morganith, and they were hovering there listening and treading water when the other two appeared. Rivet broke the surface last and scuttled immediately up Hari’s neck and on top of her hair, where it shook itself dry and perched like a hen on a nest.

  Shaking and wide-eyed, Rigg pushed her gasmask back with a fumbling hand and took a great, sucking breath. She hated that Lisa was watching her with concern. She didn’t like showing fear in front of her. It made her feel weak.

  “Glorious, filthy, smoggy air, eh, Rigg?” said Morganith, snorting water from her nose.

  “Shh,” Hari whispered, peering up, as o
n her head, Rivet peered up as well.

  On the walkway above, shadowy figures tramped back and forth, carrying tin lunch pails and shovels on their shoulders. It took Rigg a moment to recognize them as demons from the boilers, likely on their way to lunch. They would have emerged beneath the Low Quarter, after all, which was the bottommost tier of the city.

  When the demons had gone, Hari swam toward a maintenance ladder that was hanging into the water. “Hurry,” she hissed. “Someone will notice that pipe’s broken, and we’d better be on the second tier when they do.” As she started up, Rivet scurried with a whistle down the back of her coat.

  Rigg pulled her gasmask back down and miserably pushed herself toward the ladder. By breaking a pipe to enter the city, they had caused trouble for their own people. The city had underwater cameras that would have recorded a blurry someone entering the city through the lake. Crows would come to the Low Quarter with guns, and demons would be blamed for the infraction, if not as vandals then as loafers who were lazily allowing the city to fall apart. There would only be whippings, if they were lucky. Rigg could tell by Hari and Morganith’s solemn faces that they felt guilty as well. As Keymasters, they had taken an oath to always, always inconvenience their human oppressors and never bring harm to their fellow suffering demons. But as she climbed the ladder behind Lisa, Rigg reminded herself that it was a human who’d driven them to such lengths in the first place: Pirayo had scared them all so royally, they were afraid to approach old contacts who would have let them into the city in other ways. And if they could successfully reach Governor Evrard and accept the job from him, they could not only take vengeance on Pirayo but also ensure that he never again hurt other demons. In the end, the ends justified the means, though Rigg cringed at the very thought of justifying the brutal whipping of her own people.

  They hurried across the walkways of the Low Quarter, past the squalid hovels squeezed beneath the larger buildings, intent on reaching the higher walkways of the Common Quarter. The very highest walkways were suspended between the buildings above, beyond the clouds of smog, where upper class humans alone walked, absorbing clean air and sunlight. They were known as the High Quarter and were the entire reason the tram was elevated. Meanwhile, the people below who needed access to the tram had to take a special elevator and ride in second class cars, in order to avoid inconveniencing their “betters.”

  In the Common Quarter, humans and demons alike slouched in the shadows, smoking, reading papers, leaning against walls under tattered propaganda posters. The streetlights were rigged with cameras that turned, whizzing and buzzing as they followed the progress of every passerby. Dingy white posters with a black handprint warned against rebellion and resistance to the Hand. Public lists of people with warning marks against them sapped all hope and joy from the air. When a name had been scratched off such lists in black ink, it meant the person had finally been imprisoned; if in red ink, it meant the person had finally been executed. Rigg scowled when she saw one child had been listed for flying a kite after six and was ordered to be shot on sight, by decree of Governor Evrard himself.

  At the center of the city’s tangle of walkways and gangways was the town square, a dreary place full of litter and smog on top of smog, with a great clock tower in the center of the park. A clunky robot on wheels rolled slowly along, puffing steam from the funnel on its head, its bottom compartment open as its broom-arm swept trash inside. Cranky demons slept under piles of newspapers or drank from flasks with dull eyes. Every now and then, a battered drone bot hovered by, cranking out a recording of Governor Evrard, who warned in a haughty voice against resistance in his realm.

  As they were passing through the square, Lisa sorrowfully drew Rigg’s attention to a hunched human man, who sat on the edge of the sidewalk in filthy rags, holding up a sign that was scrawled in such a terrible hand, the words were barely legible. He was missing one arm, as well as several fingers, his fingerless gloves revealing irregular nails that were lined with dirt. His black hair was a mess in his bleary eye, for he only had one, and it stared unseeing and without hope. The place where his other eye should have been was a shriveled mass of skin bare to any disgusted passersby, as he didn’t have an eyepatch. On the ground near his worn boot sat a tin can with one riggit in it. Rigg wasn’t surprised. Not many impoverished humans would draw sympathy in the Common Quarter, where demons were legally assaulted, slaughtered, and brutalized on a regular basis by humans.

  “What does it say?” Lisa asked, staring forlornly at the man’s sign. “I can not decipher it. It is written in a mangled form of Coglish. I do not know it.”

  “That’s because it’s northern Coglish,” Rigg answered, “far north, so it’s probably not in your translator. He musta come here from Azkia or some other place up north. Sign says . . .” Rigg frowned as she read. “Governor Evrard had his tongue cut out and the rest of ‘im mutilated. Somethin’ about gettin’ punished for helpin’ demons.”

  “I doubt he even has ah dick now,” said Morganith, and Hari gave her an admonishing look. Morganith shrugged. “It’s true. The Hand comes down real brutal on humans who help our kind. He’s lucky he’s not eatin’ through ah straw right now. You keep forgettin’ I used to work for those bastards.” She nodded at the mutilated man. “I saw stuff like this everyday.”

  “Oh my,” Lisa whispered sadly. “Can we not do something for him?” She looked at Rigg with large sad eyes, and Rigg got the feeling Lisa thought she could wrestle the moon down from the sky if only she was asked.

  “I could put ah bullet in ‘is head,” Morganith said grimly. “Would be ah damn mercy at this point.”

  “Come on, you three,” Hari hissed, glancing left and right. “We have to keep moving.”

  Rivet peeped in frightened paranoia from Hari’s coat. Because tinkering homemade automatons was illegal – especially for demons – the tiny robot had to keep hidden in public. If Hari were caught with Rivet, it would be dismantled.

  The others started away, but Rigg hung back. She reached in her pocket and dropped twenty riggits in the man’s tin can. The man snapped out of his miserable reverie. His eye blinked, and for a moment, he came back to reality long enough to twist his lips in the faintest of smiles. “Thank you, child,” he whispered hoarsely. His eye locked with Rigg’s, bright and grateful and echoing pain. “Thank you,” he whispered again. Rigg nodded and jogged to catch up with the others.

  “Let’s get to a hotel fast,” Morganith was saying to Hari when Rigg had caught up. Rigg saw her covertly pass her coin purse to Hari, who slipped it in her satchel. “Coghurst always gives me the creeps,” she muttered.

  “Why?” snorted Hari, wringing out the sopping tail of her coat. “It’s just like any other city.”

  Morganith shrugged. “I dunno. I always step in gum whenever I come here.”

  They had made it six feet across the square when they were approached by a creepy little man in a trench coat. The human was very short and very slender, to the point that he looked like a wooden puppet, with rusty brown skin and a long, crooked smile that stretched like a shark’s grin beneath his curly mustache. He was wearing a top hat that was incredibly tall and narrow, with papers and pencils buckled behind the many straps that wound around its cylindrical form. His small, bright eyes danced over them greedily as he pulled a writing slope and a pen from inside his coat. “Let’s see,” he said without preamble and started scribbling, “four drenched women, newly arrived through a drainage pipe. . . .”

  The Keymasters tensed. Rigg glanced around, hoping no one had heard. She could feel Lisa nervously cowering behind her.

  “. . . likely hiding from the Hand,” the man went on. His eyes mechanically clicked and light snapped from them in twin beams as he scanned their bodies: he was an automaton. “And carrying a great deal of riggits,” he said, scanning Hari, who covered her breasts and sex on reflex. “If they want their secret kept, they will pay . . .” The man’s eyes clicked, then started spinning like the beads of an a
bacus. His eyes abruptly stopped, and the pupils were dollar signs. “One hundred riggits.”

  Morganith sneered. “Who the hell are you?” she demanded.

  Hari folded her arms. “I wasn’t aware of any tax collectors in Coghurst,” she said sarcastically.

  “I keep all the secrets,” was the little man’s reply, his voice like silk, his eyes sly. “For this small fee, I will keep yours. If someone comes to collect you, I will collect them. If someone is close to finding you, I will make them far again.” He abruptly grinned, his smile snapping open as if released by springs. “It is good to have a friend in Coghurst,” he said and offered his long hand, empty palm waiting.

  “There’s no such thing as friends in this town,” Morganith retorted. Her eyes grew large when Hari started counting out riggits. “Hari!”

  “I think he’s right,” Hari said calmly, and Morganith watched in horror as she dropped one hundred coins in the little man’s waiting hand. “He wants to get paid to watch our backs, let him watch,” she said, folding her arms. “Even robots gotta make ah livin’.”

  Morganith looked at Hari with her mouth hanging open.

  The little man bit his tongue and counted the riggits in delight. Satisfied with the amount, he bowed graciously to Hari, and with a tip of his hat, crumpled down, rapidly retracting into the shape of a mechanical mouse. They watched in silent shock as he scurried away.

  “ . . . what in hell?” Morganith said when the man had gone.

  “No way he was standard factory,” said Rigg, sliding her hands in her pockets.

  “An illegal automaton,” Hari said, leading the way again. “Someone created him in their basement.”

  “And you thought it would be a great idea to get involved with him?” said Morganith, shaking her head. “Wait, what am I saying? You once bought magic jellybeans.”

  Hari glanced at Morganith irritably. “You know, I’ve been around ah long time, Mor. I didn’t survive this world with a lucky coin.”