by Anthony Huso
The day was young. There couldn’t be a better time.
Miriam turned southwest, quickening her pace, and headed directly for Menin’s Pass.
Sena darted through the field, making for higher ground, putting as much distance between herself and Miriam as she could in the time her glamour allowed.
After a sweaty and difficult climb she reached a second dirt road from which she could look down across striated crops and solitary farms. In vast breathless panorama she saw the Greencap Mountains reaching north, High Horn floating in a distant haze and Isca smoldering quietly at the edge of the sea.
The road she had reached wound among the foothills of the Healean Range. The mountain woods leaned out like scaffolding from the precipitous incline to the south, threatening to fall across her path. Above them the Healean Mountains soared next to vertical, a harsh savage escarpment of serrated stone.
Sena recognized an approach a quarter mile to the east where a rutted trail turned uphill into the woods. It was the same trail Caliph and she had ridden many weeks before: the trail to the ruined Howl Estate.
Still shaken from her confrontation, Sena glanced behind her. When she reached the shady tunnel it provided marginal relief. Dappled light floated over the disused path. The trees muttered, boughs creaking.
After little more than ten minutes she reached the yard. The house sat, pouting hatefully amid a riot of weeds.
Sena felt a powerful aversion to the windows. It seemed abnormal that children had not hiked up here, thrown stones and broken the innumerable panes. As she began her circuit of the property, from the corner of her eye, she imagined movement in the glass, at any given window, but every time she turned, there was nothing there.
The building was a motley, mortared, pitted mess. The walls heaved up with obeliscal angles that veered imperceptibly as they wrestled with the sky. Like a fortress or a gate, the hulking structure gave Sena a strong impression that it was holding back untold things, plugging a defect or a wound in space, bulging slightly from decades of strain.
Sena worked her way behind the house, passing through a rusted iron fence. Amid the elms, mourning cloaks fluttered near the statues in the vines. High-pitched, late summer insects echoed off the stones, screaming an alarm.
This is the spot, she decided. I’ll build the monument right here. She kicked at the weeds tentatively, gauging the amount of work it would take to clear a spot of ground. She emptied the few stones she had collected from her pack.
It would take many trips for her to be ready by the first of Thay.
Although she had no desire to enter the house, she spent the afternoon surveying the extensive property of the estate. She found several property markers in the trees a hundred yards behind the gazebo.
When the sky turned gold she headed back to Isca. Fantastic fears followed her all the way from the yard.
Only when she reached the tertiary road that dwindled through the foothills did her phantom pursuers leave off. They were invisible. But she could feel them staring at her from the shadows of Howl Lane.
Figments, she mused, tousling her hair.
Sena made it to the castle just before curfew as the gatehouse bells were ringing. She hurried across into the tunnel and took a coach to the keep where Gadriel admitted her at the foyer and offered to take her pack. He mentioned that Caliph had already gone to bed.
Tired and sticky from the day’s exertions, Sena headed upstairs, longing for a bath. She met Cameron on the steps.
“Evening.” He smiled.
“Evening.” Sena smiled back. “You look like you’re leaving.”
Cameron shrugged. “Yes. I think it’s time I went back to Nifol . . . to my wife. Autumn’s almost here. I don’t want to get trapped in the snow.”
“You could take a zeppelin . . . or . . . I guess not.” She had momentarily forgotten Saergaeth ruled the west.
“Hate flying.” He smiled.
“You’ll take breakfast with us in the morning?”
“Already said my good-byes to Caliph. I’ll be gone before dawn.”
She didn’t know why she wanted him to like her, but she did. She ridiculed herself for it but still, she wanted to meet whatever criteria he employed. Ever since eavesdropping on that first conversation, she had wanted fervently to be good enough for Caliph in Cameron’s eyes.
Cameron said good night and continued on his way.
Inexplicably dejected, Sena climbed the stairs to Caliph’s bedroom and drew herself a bath.
19 W.: “Mother frets over her girl.”
20 O.S.: Animal baby. A mild slur that flexes to a variety of contexts.
21 U.T. Approximate pronunciation: Dlimehnayi-oan dlore.
CHAPTER 26
Caliph found out about the metholinate lies on the eighteenth of Streale. Ever since seeing the bouquets of glowing gas at the opera house, he had been nervous.
Lodged deeply under Ironside, the city’s metholinate reserves resided in enormous pressurized metal caverns. Before Saergaeth cut the supply, zeppelins from the Memnaw had bellied up to spindles in Ironside and pumped the precious fuel down twenty stories’ worth of pipe, through nozzles and gauges into the reservoirs.
Based on readings taken from monitoring facilities in the nether basements of Glôssok Warehouse, Caliph received a weekly update on exactly how much gas was left.
Worried and too impatient to wait for the weekly report, Caliph went to Glôssok on the eighteenth in the company of two knights. He surprised the guards at the measuring station who looked positively terrified at seeing him there. They took him to the gauges so he could see for himself the dwindling supply.
But when Caliph reached the dials, to his confusion, he found the metholinate levels higher—much higher—than the numbers in his reports.
He interrogated the technicians, demanding to know how such an error could have been made.
Terrorized, they stood mutely, shuffling through sheets of figures and looking to one another for something meaningful to say.
“Are these gauges correct?”
“Y-yes, your majesty.”
“Has any metholinate been added to the tanks?”
“No, your majesty.”
“Then what in the crue-blistered memory of Burim is going on here?”
The technicians seemed to forget their eminent degrees. They fumbled for answers even when Caliph demanded their names.
“Arrest these men.”
The knights obeyed.
Furious and bewildered and at the same time relieved at the discovery of three more months’ worth of gas (even if the restrictions were lifted) Caliph had the technicians interrogated while he returned to Isca Castle to ponder what it could mean.
Why would someone falsify the readings on the reserves? To panic me? Trick me into a sudden ill-planned offensive against Saergaeth? Doubtful. It was too improbable to hope for. But if not, then why?
For weeks, the reports had been coming out of Ironside, each one carefully contrived. An appalling though plausible level of depletion had been meticulously depicted. An orchestrated plunge of critical numbers that cried out urgently: the city is starving!
Unless . . .
Unless someone knew about the blueprints!
The only reason Caliph had changed his mind and sanctioned the solvitriol project had been because he believed the city was on the brink of gobbling up the last remaining cubic feet of metholinate in its stores. Someone had duped him. Someone had known.
But who besides Sigmund . . . unless Sigmund had talked? Who could benefit—specifically—from solvitriol power?
He imagined Simon Stepney, the burgomaster over Growl Mort who had given him the statue of the factory.
No. That wasn’t the right question. The right question was: who might benefit from proof that the Iscan government was conducting solvitriol experiments? Someone who wanted to sell the other set of blueprints! Someone who would send government lab notes to a potential buyer as proof of product!
What about blackmail? Or, thought Caliph with sudden clarity, what about someone who was truly, honestly loyal to the Duchy? Someone who knew I didn’t want to give Sigmund the go-ahead . . . someone who knew a false crisis would prod me into a course of action that (even though I found distasteful) would ultimately save the Duchy?
Caliph felt sick. He paced around his room trying to figure out who might have been able to discover such sensitive information. The pile of names dwindled quickly. He sat down in a high-backed chair to think.
When Sena opened the bedroom door she could see instantly that something was wrong.
Caliph looked up. “Hi.” His voice was soft and expectant. “How’s your head?”
Sena touched her forehead where the pain of her familiar’s death still ached occasionally. “I’m fine.”
She could tell by the way he asked that he wanted something. At first she thought it was sex. They hadn’t made love in two weeks. But as she came into the room and shut the door, she could see by his expression that wasn’t it.
He whispered, “I have something . . . a favor to ask. I’m not sure if it’s the right thing to do. It could undermine . . . a lot of things.”
Sena said nothing. She walked over and sat down beside him, looking at him intently. She had never seen him so nervous.
Caliph reached out, as though to reassure himself, and touched her fingers.
“What?” she coaxed. “What do you want me to do?”
Caliph looked around the room as though paranoid of peepholes or vents capable of conducting sound.
“I—want you to . . .” He couldn’t seem to get it out. “I want you to find out everything there is to know about . . . Zane Vhortghast.”
The spymaster came to Caliph’s room the following evening looking paler than usual. He took a seat only when Caliph bid him to do so and adjusted the ascot beneath his vest.
“I heard there was a discrepancy in the metholinate reports.” As usual, Zane’s expression gave nothing away.
Caliph was standing at the windows, looking west into a colorless sky.
“Yes. I had some technicians arrested. I was hoping you could shed some light on this . . . what with your numerous connections.”
Zane remained cool.
“Unfortunately it’s news to me, your majesty.”
Caliph turned and met the spymaster’s fearless eyes.
“I was afraid of that. I have suspicions of my own.”
Zane grew genuinely interested. He leaned forward in his chair and asked who.
“Simon Stepney,” said Caliph with an air of strange mystique. “He and Ben Ngrüth would both have a vested interest.”
Zane nodded slowly, as though weighing several things on the side.
“That’s good thinking. I should check into them . . . both.”
“I want you to go tonight. Personally. I don’t want any blood or threats. Not until we know something for certain.”
Zane smiled. Caliph had to look away.
The lock to the spymaster’s quarters was much more difficult to pick than David Thacker’s had been. It didn’t have a master key and there were several serrated drivers that tended to false set.
Sena took her time, knowing that the spymaster had been sent across town. She managed to have it open in under a minute and a half.
The spymaster lived in an attic suite atop a cluster of town houses in the bailey’s western quarter. Because of this, Sena had the option of going in through one of many windows. But in the end she opted for the front door since it afforded her protection from the parapets and the eyes of several hundred sentinels on their rounds.
Sena found it difficult to tell why she was here—doing this again. Maybe there was a twinge of guilt. Maybe she enjoyed the danger. Her motives were like the obscure shapes that now surrounded her.
She shut the door behind her with a quiet clunk and set about her task. A chemiostatic torch flared in her hand. She flicked its lime-colored beam across walls devoid of personality. Shapes appeared in fractions, disembodied textures in a hollow tenantless abyss. Here the fabric of a chair. There a spot of wood or porcelain or the crooked shadow of a light fixture, flexing like a pedipalp.
She moved efficiently.
She sifted through the drawers of several desks, checked the closet and the space beneath the bed. There was plenty of room for just one man—most of which had gone to waste.
Dormer windows spilled Lewlym’s purple light like brandy across barren spacious sections of the floor. Knots in the wood made faces in the grain, grinning stupidly at her.
Three contiguous rooms comprised the suite, linked by six-paneled doors. Having searched the first two chambers thoroughly, Sena tried and found the last door locked.
She shot the beam of her torch into the keyway and saw something that disturbed her. A set of pressure-sensitive wards. Although the correct key wouldn’t disturb them, her torsion wrench and rake undoubtedly would. What the wards might trigger, Sena couldn’t tell.
She decided there were other ways to get around the door and opened a nearby window.
The ledge was tricky. Overhung and pinched by the dormer eaves, at first there seemed nowhere to go. Sena stepped out, boots scraping on pigeon shit and stone.
The wind was warm and full, like a membranous balloon against her body. She clicked her torch off and stowed it in a utility belt around her waist.
Gripping the sandwich of boards and shingles that composed the eave, she leaned out into the night, seven stories off the ground.
Nearly level with the castle walls, she could see faint black figures floating along the parapets across a gulf of moonlit air. Some carried flecks of light. All of them carried crossbows.
Looking more like a gruelock than a woman, Sena launched her body from the ledge. Her thighs and knees swung up like a grapnel and hit the steep shingles of the roof. Below the eave, her torso jackknifed. Her body held the edge of the roof like a vise between her belly and her legs.
She nearly lost her balance, went nose-first toward the ground, but her hips anchored her on the gable’s gritty slope.
Impossibly she clung, gasping. Her center of gravity skewed. She should have skidded down the shingles or plunged to her death. But her movement had been quick and for an acrobat, energy equaled mass: weight that pulled her through the rotation of the move.
Dark and indistinct, she unfolded along the gable’s edge, a blemish of blackness curling into stone and wood.
Once she had pushed herself to safety she drifted above the roof’s smooth lines toward the adjacent gable—the one whose window granted access to Zane Vhortghast’s final room.
Her silhouette balled, extruded and swung like taffy into the murky triangle of shadow beneath the second gable’s crest. The guards on the parapet trundled on, undisturbed.
Once more hidden from their sight, Sena knelt beside the pane. She couldn’t see inside the room. She had glass-cutting tools in her belt but she noticed something even more useful hanging like a mud wasp’s nest in the apex of the eave where a family of swallows had secured a little home.
She stretched and groped delicately about the warm gauzy interior until her fingers discovered life. She took two chicks from the nest, one she buckled gently into a pouch on her belt. The other she decapitated with her sickle knife, wincing slightly at the murder.
She squeezed. Blood poured from its open neck as from a tiny sponge. The holojoules sang and Sena whispered, hemofurtum, syllables that bent the fabric of the glass. She moved through the window, into the room, leaving only a vestigial blemish where the glazing closed behind her. Luck was on her side. Gr-ner Shie’s influence had not altered her formula in the least.
This was Vhortghast’s study.
She clicked her torch and found a cache of money stacked atop a desk. The drawers contained documents pertaining to various matters insignificant to her task.
After fifteen minutes she heaved a sigh and stopped to rest.
The room was
clean.
She clicked off her torch. Lights had come up in the other room, a sheet of fulgurate yellow shot under the door and across the floor.
She could hear muted voices and the distinct clunk of someone shutting the apartment’s front door.
“. . . not bad . . . better at the Crowing Bistro in Nevergreen . . .” A man’s voice percolated through the wood, muffled and nearly unintelligible.
A second man’s voice sounded spirited but tired.
“. . . that what . . . nobody . . . awful.”
Sena crept to the corner of Zane’s considerable desk. A pillar of darkness filled the center of the yellow light streaming under the door. Someone on the other side was fumbling with a set of keys.
“I . . . ever . . . profusion of ungodliness. It’s a fucking shame.” The lock turned, the door opened and a figure hewn from backlit darkness stood facing Sena’s hiding spot, talking as if to her. Sena heard the baby bird in her pouch make a faint tentative scratch.
“Anyway,” the man was saying, “with progeny like that what can you expect? He’s like a,” he paused, searching dramatically for words, “like a . . . libelous milk-livered cheese curd.”
The second voice came from behind the first man, out of Sena’s sight.
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Libelous?”
The first man spread his hands as though appalled by his companion’s stupidity. “Libelous . . . it means you talk shit about somebody. You know, like libel, like they take you to court over. You’re supposed to be a criminal!”
“Yeah, I don’t enjoy this aspect of the job . . . unlike you. I’ve got a wife—”
“My condolences.”
The man in the doorway reached inside and groped around the wall.
Sena heard a slow hiss and then a pop as a single gas lamp lit. Ensconced on the wall near the door, it cast enough light to jeopardize Sena’s position and she eased back into the dark, peering through a crack between a wastebasket and the desk. For the first time she could see most of the room as one unified tapestry of texture and shape.
Bookcases lined the walls. Several stuffed chairs and a potted plant occupied space on a tapestry rug before the windows. It was sparse like the outer rooms, lacking a certain believable quality, as though it had been staged.