The City of Lies (The Mira Brand Adventures Book 3)

by Robert J. Crane

  I jogged to catch up, the three of us in a loose triangle. “Whereabouts are these records?”

  “I think that raised section ahead.” Carson pointed, eyes flitting between his picture of the map and the unfolding city.

  “Will we be able to get up there?” Heidi asked.

  “There’ll be something.”

  “They might just have gluey feet or something. Don’t geckos have those?”

  I asked, “Are you sure you’re not thinking of spiders?”

  She fired a dark look at me, and I shut up.

  We passed more of the Mirrish workers, most of whom were busying themselves with shed skin. Several were moving them; more still were arranging them carefully on pedestals at the street’s edge, posing them like great warriors. All of them shouted and looked at us with disdain, but not one moved to stop us.

  We neared the raised section Carson directed us to. Ground level was at least thirty feet clear from us, the wall bordering the street carved with Mirrish text. Images of warriors armored for battle lined it, but there were also what looked like civilian leaders as we skirted its edge, no doubt important figures from Mirrish history.

  Eventually, we came to a thin ladder cut into the edge—almost perilously thin. Eyeing it, I wasn’t sure my body would slot into the gap cut out for it, let alone Carson with his slightly broader frame. Even Heidi would struggle.

  “Ladies first,” Carson said, waving us forward.

  “Mira?” Heidi offered.

  “Love to,” I lied, and took the rungs.

  They were cold, and although not rusted, their surfaces were imperfect.

  As I’d thought, it was a tight squeeze.

  “You next,” Heidi ordered Carson as I made my way up. “And no looking at her bum,” she added.

  Carson said, “Uh …”

  At the top, I gave the edge a wide berth (but not too wide, lest I need to reach out and grab Carson), and scoured the area behind us. The Mirrish workers, reduced to small streaks of green and red again, were still carrying on their business. No one appeared to be making their way down the bowl’s outside walkway. That meant either the Mirrish law enforcement were really damned slow, or somehow we’d missed them getting down here, and they were making their way down streets I couldn’t spy from this position.

  All the more reason to get moving then.

  I helped Carson up, then pulled him clear for Heidi.

  She climbed up much more gracefully.

  “Where to?” she asked.

  Carson dug around for his phone and squinted at it. “It’s kind of north. Ish.”

  “Which way is south?”

  “Um.” He frowned. “I don’t know? It’s just in a straight line. See?” And he brandished the picture of the map to Heidi.

  She glanced at it. “Not quite, but all right. Lead the way.”

  He got going, taking a momentary look behind—I assume for Mirrish pursuers—giving it a queasy glance.

  The streets were tighter here, the buildings taller, with thin openings cut through. Purely defensive, I was certain. And with the records room on this raised level, it made sense that perhaps buildings of importance were housed in the other higher areas of the old city, their local roadways narrower and the surrounding buildings positioned to impede and take down attackers.

  We passed over a short bridge without railings. I glanced beneath us for any of the Mirrish—still none. Law enforcement were certainly taking their time.

  Don’t complain, Mira.

  The hall of records was actually quite obvious. Grander than the other buildings, it sat atop a wide base of about a dozen steps. The bricks were carved with elaborate writings, interspersed with yet more Mirrish warriors and leaders decorating the building’s façade.

  “This is it,” said Carson, leading the way up the steps.

  “No way,” Heidi said flatly.

  “Yeah. I mean, it should be.” Carson hesitated. “Do you think it’s not?”

  “Mm. About fifty-fifty.” Shaking her head, Heidi stepped past and took the remaining steps two at a time. “Come on, Poindexter. Almost home.”

  The doors were heavy iron things, lined with sharp points.

  Heidi rested careful fingers on one, and pushed.

  Surprisingly, it swung open gently.

  “Beautiful security feature,” she mused, and we went inside.

  “I think it can be barricaded,” I pointed out. There were slots for beams—wood, steel, whatever—to hold it closed against whatever onslaught might have come this far.

  “Well, what a spectacular job they’ve done of keeping us out.” To Carson: “Where are we headed?”

  He was already moving, eyes scouring aisles of books. “Conquest records,” he said, disappearing around a corner.

  “Easy,” said Heidi. “We’ll just use the Mirrish equivalent of the Dewey Decimal system and find them in no time.”

  “This place needs signs,” I said. Unlike the libraries I was used to—mine notwithstanding—there were no plaques indicating Fiction or Nonfiction. Although, I guess there wouldn’t be a lot of fiction in here. Not unless they kept make-believe records too.

  “Fat lot of good it’d do,” said Heidi. “I don’t read Mirrish.”

  “Really? But you’re, like, queen linguist.”

  “I never bothered to learn salamander, interestingly enough.” Louder: “Carson, where are you?”

  “Here,” he called from somewhere behind us. “I found it.”

  “How did he …?”

  We doubled back, slightly baffled as to how Carson had slipped by us, and even more baffled by how he knew he’d discovered their war records.

  That confusion evaporated as we arrived. Shelves of near-black wood were arranged in a square around a pedestal. Perched on it was a shed Mirrish skin. It must’ve held some strength, because it had been clad in armor. A roaring face looked out over a curved blade, split into three barbs at the tip.

  “Cute,” said Heidi.

  Carson had his phone out. He muttered distractedly, “The Mirrish are great with paperwork. They actually documented every single thing they took from Ostiagard when they conquered and pillaged it. Cold-blooded record-keeping, I guess you could call it.”

  Heidi surveyed the shelves with an unimpressed pout. “Well, they certainly did enough of it. New question: how do you propose we read this stuff?”

  “I think there’s an app for that.”

  I spluttered, “What? You’re not seriously checking your app store for that.”

  Heidi peered. “He’s checking his app store for that.”

  “There is no app for translating Mirrish to English,” I blustered. “Who would buy that? Besides, we’re not even on our own internet, so how would—”

  “Found it,” Carson said.

  I stopped. “Wuh?”

  “I can connect to the Mirrish app store. ‘Universal translator,’” he read. “Here we go. Downloading.”

  Heidi raised her eyebrows at me, a gleeful smile lifting the corners of her mouth. “Boy, I bet you feel dumb now, thinking there was no way they’d design an app for human smartphones to translate their language to ours. I bet you feel very dumb indeed.”

  “Shut up.” Ignoring her smug look, I said to Carson, “So is there, err, a charge?”

  “It’s free,” he muttered. “There. Done.”

  He opened it, and we crowded around.

  “Like a QR code reader,” Heidi said.

  Carson scanned it slowly across shelves. Unlike reader apps back home, this one was instant. There was no moment of Mirrish text before the spine was replaced with an English overlay; the translation was just there the second the next book panned into view.

  We scoured two full bookcases like this, reading off names.

  Then Heidi said, “We could be doing this too,” to me.

  Oh yeah.

  “Found it,” said Carson at the same moment.

  Sure enough, a heavy red tome, which i
n real life had very angular lettering comprised of too many similar squares, promised Ostiagard.

  “Here,” Carson said, tugging the record book from the shelf. “Hold this,” he instructed Heidi, shoving it into her hands.

  “Uh …”

  “I need to point at the pages. Can you flip it open?”

  “I’ll just dance like a monkey for you too, shall I?” But she flipped to the first page of text.

  “Wrong year,” said Carson. “Keep going. Slower! Okay, that’s too slow.”

  “Dance, monkey,” I whispered to Heidi.

  She shot me a fiery look—

  “Human visitors,” called a voice from back at the door. “You stand guilty of trespassing!”

  Carson’s eyes went wide. “Uh!”

  Heidi’s glare turned to him. “Brilliant. Let them know exactly where we are, why don’t you?”

  In a second, the Mirrish were on us. Two of them, taller and broader than the others—and, surprisingly, in deep blue uniforms that reminded me of the NYPD.

  I backed up alongside Heidi and Carson, hand ready at my belt to loose Decidian’s Spear should this get dicey.

  One of the peacekeepers caught sight of the book in Heidi’s hands. “Just what are you doing?”

  I opened my mouth to lie—heavens knew what that lie might be—

  But Carson was in first. “We wanted to know what you found when your people conquered Ostiagard.”

  The Mirrish peacekeepers exchanged an open-mouthed look.

  “But … all that information is on our networks,” the second said. “You could have just looked it up online, on your phones.”

  “It is?” Carson asked.

  “It’s all digitized,” the first confirmed. Sounding at a loss, he said, “We gave you access to our networks.”

  Well.

  Now I felt stupid.

  A despondent shake of the head from one of the peacekeepers. “There’s nothing else for it. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to come with—”

  “Oh, hey, he’s right.” Carson wagged his phone at me and Heidi. “I’ve just downloaded the whole book.”

  “In English, right?” Heidi asked.

  “Looks like it, yeah.”

  “Great. I’ve learned one new language already this year.”

  Carson said to me, “We can go.”

  “Hold on just one moment,” interjected one of the peacekeepers. “You’re not going anywhere that’s not with us.”

  I plucked the compass from my belt, peered into its face. No void, thank goodness. Actually, it looked a lot like …

  “About that,” I said. “Prison doesn’t sound like much fun.” To my comrades: “Exit via Rome, anyone?”

  I clutched my talisman and swiped an opening in the floor.

  “Safe landings,” I bade Heidi and Carson.

  Carson jumped through first. Heidi dumped the book unceremoniously in the space it had come from, snapped a salute to the Mirrish peacekeepers, and leapt through.

  They both stared, spluttered.

  “This is—this is unprecedented,” the first said. “We—we asked you to stop and come with us.”

  “Sorry,” I said, actually kind of meaning it. “That’s not really our way.”

  And I jumped through the gate, leaving the Mirrish hall of records behind.

  11

  First thing I said was, “Oww.”

  Conservation of momentum meant I’d practically flown from the gateway’s antipode. It didn’t help that it had opened a good few feet clear of street level, so I fell in an arc like the line on a graph, curving to and from infinity.

  “Good job,” Heidi griped.

  “Damn,” Carson said. “My phone—”

  I froze. “Don’t tell me—”

  He thumbed the side button, and it switched on.

  “Phew.”

  I un-tensed. If all of that had been for nothing …

  “The screen cracked, though.”

  Ah. Floods of guilt now instead.

  I bowed forward. “Let me see?”

  The screen wasn’t badly broken. But a sliver, a hairline crack really, crossed the very edge of the screen.

  Still. Broken was broken. And I’d done that.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “It’s not your fault,” he said. “And it still works.” He tapped it for emphasis. “And I still have a translated copy of the record book, it looks like. So we can go through this at our leisure.” He looked up at me, grinned. “Mission successful!”

  I tried to match his enthusiasm. But it was a tough task: mission success here would still ultimately lead to a fruitless conclusion. And because of me, Carson’s phone was broken from the crash. How was I supposed to make that up to him? I wanted so bad to tell him that I’d buy him a new one, but … with what? Coup didn’t go far in Phones4U, and we didn’t even have much of that.

  I forced myself to nod, agreeing, “Yeah. Sure.”

  “It’ll take a while to go through, see if they actually did find anything …” He hoisted himself up, staring at the phone screen and not noticing the frown lines deepening on Heidi’s forehead. “But if they did, this will tell us.”

  I nodded. “Right.” And I held back the urge to ask, “And if you find that they didn’t discover anything?” Not even ‘if.’ When.

  He carried on reading, thumbing through slowly. “Where did you say we are?”

  “Try looking up,” said Heidi.

  He glanced up, and gasped. “Rome!”

  “More specifically, the Via Cavour,” Heidi said, gesturing.

  We’d come out by a tan building marked with a sign saying, Bandiera, and below that, Strumenti Musicali. I wasn’t fluent in Italian—I wasn’t even one hundred percent certain that ciao meant ‘hello’ here—but it didn’t take a genius to understand that sign. Rows of windows with quaint shutters lined the upper stories of the building, and there was a single balcony on the second floor—third, to Carson and his perhaps slightly more sensible system of numbering.

  As a matter of fact, there were shutters on windows everywhere. I suddenly wished we had more of them in England, then realized their presence was irrelevant; I lived in a windowless library in another world, for crying out loud. What did I need shutters for?

  Carson marveled—then frowned. “How are we supposed to get home?”

  “This way,” Heidi said, and led.

  I followed along, waving for Carson to watch where he was going rather than staring at his phone. He obliged unwillingly with an awkward smile, slipping it into a pocket and striding to keep up.

  “It’s kind of like London,” he mused.

  “A little,” I agreed. “But maybe that’s just what cities are like.”

  “Rome is prettier,” said Heidi from up front.

  Sunnier, too. Coming from a country so frequently overcast, I would never get tired of seeing an endlessly blue sky.

  Bypassing a gaggle of people moving in the opposite direction, I said, “Does anyone else feel cripplingly guilty over what happened back there?”

  “My phone is fine,” Carson started.

  “The Mirrish police,” I said. “They just seemed so … sad. Like they couldn’t believe we wouldn’t just obey them and come willingly. And then they pretty much just let us walk out of there.”

  “Makes you wonder how they conquered Ostiagard in the first place,” Heidi said.

  “Mm,” Carson agreed. “About that—hey,” he said suddenly. “Does this sort of thing happen often? Having to get home via another place, I mean.” When Heidi didn’t answer, he turned to me. “It hasn’t happened to us so far. And I’ve been around for a while.”

  “Sometimes. When you’re dodging lizard law, anything is possible.”

  “The Mirrish. Crazy.” Carson ran a hand across his head and through his hair. “Man, I can’t wait to read this. What do you think they found?” Excitement made his words a mite breathy.

  I hesitated.

 
; Apparently Heidi was up to the task I wasn’t. Slowing down so she and Carson could walk side by side, she said, “Say … this treasure hunt we’re on. It hasn’t gone … well, great so far.”

  “But it’s always been like this,” he said quickly. “With the Chalice and the Tide of Ages, we struggled, had some failures—”

  “But we always had something to show for it,” Heidi cut across. She was gentle—and it sounded like it took a great deal of effort to remain gentle, not to revert back to the snippy Heidi we were used to. “We had the orbs for the Tide of Ages. And the cutlass and spear en route to the Chalice Gloria.”

  “We found the note in the Vardinn general’s office—”

  “Which didn’t say much.”

  “—and now this book from the Mirrish hall of records—”

  “Which might also not say anything,” Heidi said.

  “But we’ve got something.”

  I pictured her snapping back, “We’ve got nothing, damn it.” But she held it back—just like I was holding back, keeping well out of the way of this conversation. Let Heidi bring him back to earth, not me, the phone-shatterer.

  “Besides,” Carson went on, “normally we’ve had to grapple with Borrick by now. I don’t hear you complaining that we haven’t seen him so far this time.”

  Well, I couldn’t disagree with that. My list of least favorite people was almost certainly topped by him right now, with Emmanuel a close second and my parents very near behind.

  “The point is,” Heidi said, “this isn’t a traditional Seeker quest—because—because—because there’s no treasure, Carson.”

  He was unperturbed. “This isn’t a traditional Seeker quest because those are set up like traps for a mouse. Like some kind of game.”

  “They might have the cheese, but there’s no snapper.”

  “Of course there is. You almost drowned last time we went on a quest. That’s a snapper right there. If you’re not bright enough to see it, that’s on you.” He huffed an exasperated breath, suddenly sounding frustrated. I wasn’t sure I’d ever really heard that from him—another first to add to the list.

  I braced for Heidi to snap back—

  “Look,” she said, a little tense, but calm enough. “I’m just trying to say that the way this is set up, the total lack of signs or indications you’d find in a traditional quest … I don’t want you to be disappointed if there’s no treasure at the end of this rainbow we’re following.”