Cities and Thrones

by Carrie Patel

  Cities and Thrones

  Carrie Patel

  For Richard and Jackie Lytle.

  For Pravinchandra and Sonal Patel.

  Prologue

  Jane Lin and Fredrick Anders had been on the run for two weeks when they reached Meyerston. They fled not only the revolt in Recoletta, but also the news that would surely follow it. It was a vague and amorphous thing, but Jane had seen well enough how it sowed panic, suspicion, and violence in its wake. She was not certain what form it would take in the communes, but she knew they would do well to stay ahead of it.

  As difficult as it was to gauge the progress of an invisible and impersonal antagonist, in their journey between the communes, they’d encountered nothing more than courteous – if deliberate – remoteness. Footpaths and farmers guided them from one commune to the next, where they were received and dispatched with polite disinterest.

  Until they reached Meyerston.

  By then, Jane and Fredrick were over a hundred miles away from Recoletta, the only city they’d ever known. Untethered from this single fixed point, it felt as if they were floating through an alien and featureless landscape. They could have passed the same stretches of field and forest between the farming communes a dozen times and never known it. Counting the days had become a practice and a chore.

  It hadn’t started out that way. Reaching Shepherd’s Hollow, the first commune they’d come across some two weeks ago, it had felt as if they’d emerged from the fire to gasp their first lungful of fresh air. They had been too focused on survival – on healing Fredrick’s bullet wound and on knowing that they’d escaped Sato for the time being – to truly appreciate where they’d found themselves. Surrounded as they were by the glare of sunlight, the smell of evergreens, and the raw cold of winter, they only experienced these things on the periphery. Their focus was too narrow to encompass them.

  But two weeks later, they had noticed this and more. Jane had grabbed a few changes of clothes for each of them before she’d left her apartment, but even all of them layered together was little match for winter aboveground. Their cotton shirts and trousers, and Jane’s long skirts, had been made for the steadier subterranean temperatures. Here, the wind bit through the seams and the chill took hold of their bones.

  The biggest shock, however, wasn’t the brutality of the elements, nor was it the capricious and unpredictable motion of the surface world, stirred as it was by sudden breezes and unseen animals. It was the farming communes. Strange, small settlements that survived aboveground. That had, if legend was to be believed, existed in that way almost as long as Recoletta and the other underground cities had been inhabited.

  Shepherd’s Hollow, the first, had been a place of rest and recovery. A couple of the commune’s trappers had found Jane and Fredrick on the outskirts of Recoletta and taken them in. Fredrick’s bullet wound had been healed, and they had taken a week to recover and prepare for the journey ahead.

  At the end of the week, once they were looking hearty enough to travel, their hosts had started to get nervous. Wondering, no doubt, why their guests had fled the city in such a hurry and whether the cause would find its way to their doorstep. Jane couldn’t hold it against them. Goodwill only went so far.

  Their scouts had guided them to their next destination, traveling north, they said, though neither Fredrick nor Jane would have known one way or the other. They avoided the railway where trains shuttled between the communes and the cities, and stuck to bridle paths through the woods. They were headed for a place called Logan’s Valley, another commune on the way to Madina, the next city. It seemed to have been understood without saying that Jane and Fredrick were unable to stay in the communes. Jane had not had the luxury of selecting a destination when they’d first set out, but Madina seemed reasonable enough.

  In Logan’s Valley, their hosts, expressionless men and women who were said to oversee activity in the commune, had looked at them once and decided almost as quickly to send them further north at the earliest opportunity. That opportunity came, conveniently enough, the next morning, when a suspiciously underequipped hunting party gathered to venture into the woods.

  It was easy to feel the welcome wearing thin, to sense the aftershocks of Sato’s revolution in the shifting climate.

  Still, the guides from Logan’s Valley put on a polite enough fiction. The hunters didn’t ask why the travelers were on the run, and neither Jane nor Fredrick asked why the hunters never ventured from the footpaths to follow the animal tracks that peppered the snow. Anyway, the hunters were gracious enough to provide the duo with rough spun but warm wool coats and trousers. Whether it was out of genuine kindness or out of a calculation that the unwelcome but mysterious visitors should not die on their watch, it didn’t much matter. Jane was grateful. Even Fredrick, normally full of brotherly peevishness, seemed content.

  But things were different when they reached Meyerston.

  Their previous guides had needed to seek out the local authorities upon arriving in Shepherd’s Hollow and Logan’s Valley. Those men and women had been embroiled in the day-to-day tasks of operating acres of farmland, whatever that involved. Not so in Meyerston.

  Upon their arrival, Jane and Fredrick found someone waiting at the edge of town. His arms were crossed and his expression grim behind his thick beard and hood. Jane realized that news of their journey, and of the revolt in Recoletta that had prompted it, must have finally outpaced them on their way through the communes.

  She was beyond hoping that this would prove a good thing.

  As they approached, the Meyerston man addressed not Jane and Fredrick, but their escorts from Logan’s Valley, in the coarse pidgin that had become familiar to Jane over the last two weeks.

  “Come along the way?” he asked. He had a thick, dark beard that hid his age.

  “Just up from the Valley,” said one of the hunters.

  “These the ones’ve come up from the city?” the bearded man asked, jerking his chin at Jane and Fredrick.

  “The same.” It wasn’t clear to Jane whether their interlocutors assumed she and Fredrick couldn’t understand them or whether it was irrelevant. It didn’t seem to matter, and she was too exhausted to care.

  The farmers’ impenetrable frowns seemed to bring them to some kind of mutually understood conclusion.

  The bearded man nodded at the hunters. “There’s pottage at the Sheaf and open beds, too.”

  The hunters nodded and grunted and continued toward town without a backwards glance, their heads down against the wind.

  Alone with the grave, bearded stranger, Jane wondered what kind of news had filtered out from Recoletta and the other communes to leave him standing out in the cold like this, the tracks behind him almost filled in with snow. More importantly, she wondered whether it was the kind of news that painted her and Fredrick as liabilities to be disposed of, assets to be traded back to Sato, or something else entirely.

  He turned to them. “Breeze tells you left Recoletta fourteen days past.”

  Fredrick was panting, his breath pluming in the cold. Even he had grown numb to their vulnerability. “Well, we were looking for a vacation. We’d heard the surface is lovely this time of year.”

  Jane couldn’t tell if the bearded man was smiling beneath his thick whiskers, but she doubted it.

  “And your leaving happened at the same time as another arriving,” said the bearded man. “A great army moved into Recoletta, led by a man claiming to be kin of one of your councilors.”

  “Good news travels fast,” Freddie said.

  “We’re not the only ones leaving,” Jane said. “I’d bet you’ve seen exiles in the hundreds by now. Maybe more.”

  It was a gamble and a guess, but it seemed to be a good one.

/>   This time, the bearded man did laugh. “Sure, but none of them were avoiding the trains.”

  Fredrick gave Jane a look. They’d debated hitching a ride from one of the communes. Fredrick had been in favor of it, but Jane had wanted to avoid any chance of running into one of Sato’s enforcers, or into anyone else rounding up errant citizens. Besides, their hosts in the communes hadn’t seemed willing to wait for a steam engine to roll through town.

  However, it seemed as if their efforts at stealth had made them conspicuous. As a rule, Recoletta’s city-dwellers generally only ventured to the surface to avoid underground traffic or when the surface otherwise provided a more convenient route. But visiting the communes, or any of the wilderness above and outside the city, was all but unheard of.

  That they had run, and that they had taken special pains to do so quietly, was a dangerous thing to admit. And yet the bearded man was still smiling – broadly enough to spread his whiskers – and watching them with interest.

  If nothing else, it reassured Jane that they would not be shot and left in the snow, at least not yet. That was comfort enough.

  “Come on,” he said. “You can trade your tale when we’re someplace warm.”

  They trudged through the snow, quietly grateful for another haven on the horizon, no matter how brief.

  Their escort led them to a town that was much like the last two they’d visited: cobbled streets a little rougher than Recoletta’s, but lined with trees and patches of grass; a thin dusting of snow, scraped bare by foot and horse traffic; and, most strikingly, houses, shops, and meeting halls, all built aboveground like piles of stones and timber. It still seemed beyond comprehension, to gather and lay materials, many of which had to be dug out of the soil anyway, when a space hollowed out of the earth offered better comfort and protection from the elements. But Jane was beyond worrying that the brick and wood buildings would collapse on her head with the slightest gust of a surface breeze, and she was well beyond seeing the men and women who built and dwelt in them as unskilled primitives.

  As they passed through the town, the men and women stopped with their wagons of potatoes, bags of seed stock, and barrels of ferment to watch them. Even though Jane and Fredrick were now clad in the same warm, practical clothes as the farmers, they didn’t quite blend in. And Jane could see in their curious and suspicious stares that news of their arrival had already reached these people.

  They reached a cobblestone plaza and followed their host up a porch and into a long, narrow building. It was filled with long tables and benches, and while Freddie plopped himself onto the nearest of these, Jane was most grateful for the stove at the other end of the room. She crossed to it and warmed her numb hands, her ears still ringing from the wind outside.

  A large cast iron pot sat atop the stove, and sweet, spicy aromas emanated from within. Jane was pleased to see their host appear at her side with three mugs, ladling the steaming liquid into each of them.

  She followed him back to the table, where Fredrick had already perked up at the scent of the warm beverage. She sat next to him while the bearded man slid onto the bench across from them.

  “Cider,” he said, distributing three sturdy but chipped earthenware mugs. He took a flask from his side and tipped a splash of amber liquid into his own beverage. He looked to Jane and Fredrick, his eyebrows raised.

  Jane shook her head, but Fredrick slid his mug closer, nodding eagerly. When the bearded man had doctored Fredrick’s drink, the three clinked their mugs together and sipped their steaming cider.

  Jane was so lost to the sensation of the moment, the warming aches beneath her cold flesh, the sweetness of the apple and the spice of cinnamon and nutmeg, that she almost didn’t hear the bearded man finally introducing himself.

  “Salazar,” he said. “Now that we’re sharing a drink.”

  Fredrick hesitated, looking at Jane. They’d been careful to remain anonymous and to avoid giving out any more details about themselves than necessary, something their previous hosts had seemed perfectly content with. But this Salazar had already pieced together enough about them to know that they were at risk. Giving him a name couldn’t make much more of a difference.

  “Jane Lin,” she said.

  Fredrick shrugged. “Fredrick Anders.”

  “We’ve seen a lot of your people on the move,” Salazar explained. “Traveling the railways, headed north toward Madina. We hear it’s the same down towards South Haven, too. But these folk certainly haven’t set foot on our hearths, and as for the men and women in the cargo section, taking our shipments and offloading supplies from Recoletta... well, we couldn’t help but notice that a few of them are new to the job. And of the ones who’ll talk, we get some colorful stories about what’s going on down in that city of yours. But they’re different stories. And seeing as you seem to know something about events down yonder, I was hoping you could clear up a few points of confusion for me.”

  Fredrick wrapped both hands around his mug. “Unfortunately, we’ve been out of the loop for a few weeks.”

  “Haven’t we all,” Salazar said. “I’m not holding you to any special prescience. But among us, it’s common for travelers to share the news on where they’re coming from. Especially when they’re relying on hospitality.”

  Jane remembered a story she’d been told weeks ago, at a party to which she never should have been invited by people who were, likely as not, dead by now. It had concerned Roman Arnault and his uncanny ability to survive by remaining relevant.

  She was lucky to have made it this far on the goodwill of the farmers. But she needed something more. And on the other side of Salazar’s threat, she perceived an opportunity – the ability to survive and, perhaps, thrive by remaining relevant.

  If only she had something he needed.

  And that was when she noticed it. She’d seen it many times, but she didn’t recognize it at first because she’d only witnessed it obliquely, in interactions happening around but beyond her.

  It was hunger. In the way Salazar pinched the handle of his mug, in the way his lips were slightly parted. He wanted, very badly, to know what had happened in Recoletta.

  And then something else occurred to her for the first time.

  She could use that hunger.

  Jane was suddenly conscious of the way her own hands traced the irregularities in the mug, tiny craters where the bubbles in the glaze had burst, subtle ridges in the surface of hardened clay. Salazar seemed to feel them all, as if her clipped thumbnail scratched and picked at him while he waited for her to answer.

  “Well,” Jane said, hearing herself draw the syllable out. “I suppose it would help me if you could tell me what you already know.”

  His smile looked more like a wince. “As I said, Miss Lin, I’ve heard many stories but little context. A foreign army that’s been executing the citizens, a returning savior who’s restored the city’s peace. Some say the problem began with murders among your whitenails, and others say that was merely a distraction. I am hoping you can sort this out.”

  “I suppose they’re all true to a degree,” Jane said. And she began with the story as she knew it, an incident that started as an increasingly alarming series of murders among Recoletta’s allegedly untouchable whitenails. It had piqued first curiosity, then horror as the killings and their consequences began to shift and erase people’s long-held notions of privilege and vulnerability in Recoletta.

  Salazar listened without interruption, his breaths quiet and shallow.

  Telling the story began to feel like a careful choreography, an exchange of phrased gestures and carefully modulated reflexes that was not unlike the silent dialogues she’d witnessed between the upper-class whitenails in Recoletta. She was beginning to see her unique situation – and her unique knowledge of what had happened in the city – as a kind of asset.

  “And then they finally killed a councilor,” she said. “After that, I suppose the bigger changes seemed inevitable. If even a councilor was vulnerable, then
everything else was, too.”

  “Then this is where Sato shows up?” Salazar asked.

  “Yes,” she said, although in a way, he’d been there the whole time, directing events. Or perhaps it was truer to say that he’d already wound the pieces up and set them in motion, and he’d returned once they’d fallen into place. “Sato’s people arranged for a catastrophe in the city. Once they’d set it off, they took advantage of the chaos to move into place. They isolated and overpowered the City Guard and took care of the remaining councilors.”

  Salazar’s eyes widened. “They assassinated them? All of them?”

  Jane paused, but she saw no reason not to tell him. “I didn’t stick around long enough to find out. But I know at least one of them got away.”

  “Which?”

  She wasn’t sure whether or not it surprised her that this farmer would be familiar with Recoletta’s leaders. The farmers were, after all, under the Council’s thumb as much as any citizen. Or at least they had been.

  “Does it matter?” she asked.

  His mouth stretched into something that wasn’t quite a smile. “It seemed to matter to somebody.”

  He was right, but perhaps not in the way he imagined.

  Jane remembered letting Councilor Ruthers go, remembered the look of astonishment on the old man’s face. It wasn’t that she’d wanted him to live, rather that she hadn’t seen the purpose of adding yet another death to the toll, particularly knowing what it would cost her, or Roman, had she allowed him to pull the trigger.

  “Ruthers,” she said.

  His eyebrows telegraphed his surprise. Even if he’d only known the name of one member of the Council, it would have been Ruthers.

  She looked at the mug between her hands. She’d drunk it down to the dregs, and now only a puddle remained, pale and flecked with cinnamon.

  Salazar took her mug and Fredrick’s. “Catch your breath. I’ll fill these up.”

  As Salazar left for the cider pot, Jane turned to Fredrick. Neither said a word, but his half shrug and blank expression suggested that he was resigned to letting her tell as much of their story as she chose. That, or the whiskey was doing its work.