Of course, the night shift wasn’t a punishment, no; the report said she had a ‘gentle, feminine bearing’ that made her ‘unsuitable for certain environments’ and the night shift would be a more natural fit for her talents. Down the bottom of the Captain’s report, there was a quiet note about her ‘degeneracy’ almost as an afterthought. A less aggressive role was meant to help her deal with her delicate issue; it was all fine for a male officer to visit the brothels, of course. Boys with girls was how it had always been but girls with girls needed male supervision, to make sure the poor things didn’t fall into sin. Hainak wasn’t like godless Ahwara in the North, or like one of the cities on the Eastern Shelf where they just let anything happen. It was a mess over in the east: a warlord in each valley, a god on each street corner and, of course, no sense of decorum, or chivalry, or the right way to love. Kiada had been eastern, with pale skin and hair like fire. She’d had dark, sad eyes that were always searching for something. She’d loved to sing—she’d sit on the rooftops, belting out arias from home; they had a style of play over there called an opera, where the actors sang every single word, where each song was a story. They’d shared some time together, before the girl went missing and Yat had been in no place to find out why.
She’d just been unlucky: an undercover officer sitting at the bar. They didn’t fire her: she liked men too, and so she didn’t count. It wasn’t a broken soul to them—just a dalliance with sin, and a poor little thing capable of redemption. She could be with a man, and be happy; she had done it and enjoyed it, and even felt the stirrings in her heart that marked something deeper. After they caught her with a woman, there’d been a panel of senior officers, who decided she was half a problem, and worthy of half the punishment: demotion to the night shift, paperwork and passive-aggression and no hope of ever going anywhere.
Neither Ladowain nor Hainak had any tolerance for delicate issues: they shared a scripture, and the scripture was clear; Great Crane made men and women to carry out the great circle of birth and death. Those who did not fit the pattern did not count as people, and could be ignored until it came time to remove them entirely.
Yat was in a strange position. She could follow the scripture, if she needed to: she didn’t mind boys. She even rather liked some of them. It was the path of least resistance, and she enjoyed it enough, but sometimes—
Shrik shrik shrik went claws on glass.
The cat. Of course. She opened one eye. The moggy peered into her window. It was missing half an ear. Its fur had once been ginger, but now it was dull like rust. She hadn’t given it a name—she liked it enough, but she thought naming it would make it her cat and she wasn’t ready to let anybody into her life quite that much. It was just a nameless stray cat that came to her house sometimes.
“Cat,” she mumbled. It pawed at the window again.
“Go ‘way cat,” she said. It did not go ‘way. It went mrrrrrow?
“Mmmnnno food here, cat,” she said. She rolled onto her back, and opened her other eye.
“No food,” she muttered. She lay on her back and tried to ignore it for a while. The scratching stopped. After what could’ve been minutes or hours, she sat back up. The cat was still there, staring pensively into her house. She wondered what cats thought of human houses: did they understand what a house was, or did they think that humans were just sometimes found living inside giant fungal hollows, filled with their stuff? Not that there was much stuff in Yat’s house: two uniforms on the rack, one small bed, one book of stories, one dumbtech electric lamp sitting on the floor. She barely had enough things to be messy, but she was trying—the uniforms hung over the bed, because there was nowhere else for them to go. It was less of a house than a small room with a bathroom attached.
She picked up the book, and passed it gently from hand-to-hand. It smelled like fertilizer and alchemy acid; it smelled like dad. She flipped through the pages, but didn’t read them—she knew it back-to-front anyway. The stiff leather cover felt good in her hands. She stood for a moment, then put it down and smiled at the moggy. Dad had loved cats. Hated having them in the lab, but loved having them around. He’d said they were very tidy animals. His favourite story from the book was the one about the cat and the peanut—the same one she’d come to love. It ended with the cat returning the peanut, because stealing was naughty and the gods would set him on fire if he didn’t. Dad always did the voices: the sly cat, the haughty gods, the squeaky peanut. Nobody ever asked why the gods needed a golden peanut in the first place. It was a story, and it ran on story logic: magic flowed through the world, and kingdoms sat on clouds, and everything was simpler.
Her window looked out onto somebody else’s wall. Presumably, the cat bothered them too. It was fat, for an alleycat. Nothing like those south-of-wall alchemically-engineered housecats with six legs and jewels in their collars, but doing alright for itself. Modifying pets was very fashionable amongst the wealthy, but it had always struck her as cruel.
She pulled her sheet off herself, and wandered back over to the window. She opened it, and scratched the cat’s head. It purred. The wooden wall outside belonged to an alchemical tea shop. Somewhere beyond it, the city roiled and heaved. The nicer houses had gills that would expel moisture while keeping the place temperature-controlled. Yat didn’t have one of those houses: her sheets reeked of sweat.
“No food,” she said again. The cat didn’t seem to mind. It purred.
“Nice cat,” she said, “bye cat.”
She patted its head, then closed the window, slow enough for it to get out of the way, but quick enough that it couldn’t sneak on in. The cat pawed at the glass, then flicked its tail at her and jumped away and out of sight and onto better dinner prospects. Her stomach grumbled, and she sighed. She had to let it grumble; payday wasn’t for another two days. There were always generous officers in the station cafeteria, if you buttered them up right. Well, not buttered—butter was for rich folks. There weren’t enough cows in the world to make butter affordable, even with the new cultivars of grain keeping them fat and hormonal. Greased them up? Noodled them up? It didn’t have the same ring to it.
She showered in cold water, then toweled herself off and put her uniform on. Her shift didn’t start for hours, but it couldn’t hurt to go in. It would make her look keen and the brass loved keen. She might even get to see some of her old friends from the day shift. They hadn’t been in to see her on the night shift, but they were probably busy with their own lives.
Shower: done. Uniform: on. Food: not a hope in the heavens. She opened her front door, and stepped out into the street. An Erzau with an ibis mask stared at her. He had white feathers on his epaulettes. She made a quick sign of the sun at him and resisted the urge to call him bin chicken.
“Praises be,” he said. He gave her a hand sign she didn’t recognise.
“Yep,” she said, “you too.”
The Bird Cult made her uncomfortable, but she knew better than to challenge them. They held twenty-two seats in parliament—almost a quarter—and more than enough to make life difficult for folks they didn’t like. Fingers crossed, the election would change that. It was the day after the Anniversary: after the revolution, they’d sworn in a new government as quickly as they could, with the promise to find a more permanent solution when the war ended, with an annual safety-election to keep the provisional government on its toes. Every year, hung-over Hainak drifted their weary way to polling stations all over the city, and put in their votes before going home to sleep it off. It was hardly a perfect system, but it was better than The Lion. At least they had a say, even if it often felt like they didn’t. The Erzau Temple had always been able to push the levers of power, but the last decade had been something different—they’d gone from over half the parliament to under a quarter, bleeding a few seats every year until they were almost bled out. They’d gotten nastier in their rhetoric as they went down, and they particularly did not like folk with delica
te issues that disrupted the great prime circle: women were given the sacred trust to create life, and those who refused were barely considered human.
She couldn’t bring herself to finish the priest’s couplet—praises be/long live death. She’d seen it scrawled on walls as a child, while the city burned. They said they worshipped a metaphorical death but metaphors had a way of cutting their way into the world; men obsessed with metaphorical death had a habit of bringing literal death along for the ride.
She pushed past the priest as nicely as she could. She didn’t make eye contact, but she swore she could feel him moving to follow her as she left: something about the way the chill from his shadow played out across her back. She pretended that she didn’t notice, and did her best to get lost in the crowd.
The street was jam-packed with carts, all trying to sneak and jostle around each other. Some folks were heading home, and some folks were heading to work, and nobody had bothered to ask the other to clear the road. Same old beautiful mess as every evening.
She forced her way through the press of people, and tried to ignore the smells of food: sweet potato, smoked fish, new cultivars of alchemical fruit fresh from the Garden Cities. She almost knocked down a portly man carrying a barrel of fungal beer, and he glared at her. He had a good ten centimeters of height on her. She looked at her feet and ducked around him.
“Sorry sir,” she muttered, “police business.”
The journey to the station was busy, but she got there without falling asleep, so she counted it as a win. She arrived just before sundown. The station was pre-revolution: steel, stone and red brick. They’d done their best to grow some vines along the walls to make it look less intimidating, but not so many that it wouldn’t scare the shit out of any troublemakers. She’d never got used to the harsh glow of its halogen lamps. The day shift were hitting up the punch-clock—new tech for the same old jobs: proprietary enzyme in it that left a little blue stain on the card. She waved at Varazzo, and he shook his head at her and looked away; wouldn’t do for a good cop to chat with the faggot, nosir. He pushed the punch card into the machine, muttered something, then slapped the side of the punch-clock and smiled as the card came out with a little blue dot. Varazzo was from the east—Accenza? Degliano? She could never tell the cities apart—but he’d fit right in at the Station: the ninth son of some minor noble house, he knew how to stomp and shout and get his way. Tall, skin the colour of milk like all of them from out that way, a thatch of short, dark hair, a lantern jaw. She’d once seen him showing the other officers a rapier: a toy from the old country, he’d said, lets the plebs know you matter. Right there in the mess hall with a fucking sword and he hadn’t even gotten a caution. Brass liked him.
Varazzo was going places: he couldn’t afford to be seen with the wrong crowd.
Sen sat at one of the tables where the public were meant to wait for assistance. He was drinking coffee from a porcelain-and-shellac mug, and waved her over.
She sat down beside him. His coffee smelled rich and earthy—probably got some fancy spores mixed in to make the flavours really pop. It made Yat’s mouth water, but she knew better than to touch it: Sen was infamous for how hot he liked his coffee. A rookie had tried to steal a sip once and ended up unable to taste anything for a week. He saw the look in her eye, and pushed a small plate of rice and beans over to her.
“You sure?” she said. He shrugged.
“By total accident,” he said, “I got two. Already ate mine.”
She picked up the fork and ate as slowly as she could. She didn’t want to let anybody know how hungry she was.
Sen glared at Varazzo.
“Big white shark,” he said, just loud enough for the other officers to hear but quiet enough to have plausible deniability. “Small white cock.”
Yat tried to laugh while eating, and some rice went down the wrong pipe. She coughed, and the room went very quiet for about half a second. They weren’t meant to have food outside the cafeteria. Nobody followed that rule, but somebody with a grudge could probably get her an infraction.
The murmur returned. It didn’t mean it was over, but nobody wanted to make a scene in the foyer. Revenge would probably come in a blizzard of minor humiliations, spread out just enough to make them seem like normalcy. Cops were the pettiest people in the world, sometimes—less inclined to throw the book at you so much as kill you with papercuts.
She finished the plate, and pushed it back to Sen. The porcelain scraped across their little table.
“At some point,” he said, actually quietly now“I might not be able to cover for you, kid.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Your payslips coming through properly?” he said. “Brass can fuck you around, but only within reason. If you’re not getting paid on time, you’ve got a right to complain. We’ve got a union rep in parliament—if somebody tries to fuck you, we can fuck ‘em right back.”
“Just tired,” she said.
“Mhmm,” said Sen. His eyes said you didn’t answer my question.
She didn’t answer his question. The payslips were coming through fine, they just didn’t cover expenses. Rent, and food, and paying down her father’s debts, and paying down her own debts, and getting her uniform cleaned, and kiro, and—
A blizzard of papercuts.
“Sen,” a voice boomed.
The sergeant shrank back against the wall, like he was trying to push himself through the cracks and disappear. Yat did her best not to panic: she hadn’t seen the man rattled much. The source of the shouting soon made himself known: Sergeant Wajet.
To call Wajet fat would be true, but also a total bald-faced lie. He was big in the sort of way that looked like he’d once been pure muscle that had softened with age, but he still looked like he could punch through a door by accident. He did not so much walk into a room as launch an invasion of it. His grey hair was trimmed short, and his moustache was exquisitely waxed in the Ahwari style. Rumour had it he’d intentionally tanked every single performance review since his promotion to sergeant, to stop himself from being promoted into a desk job. He was a man of tremendous volume, in more ways than one.
“Sen, mate,” he expectorated, “I’ve a job for you!”
He stormed over, and the floorboards trembled.
“‘m busy,” said Sen. “Got paperwork.”
Wajet loomed over them now. His moustache twitched. It was like somebody had tied a cat to his upper lip.
“Sen me old chum,” he said, “are you saying that you’d rather sit at a desk and write about some drunk’s home life than come out into town with your old friend? I need a ride-along to assist me tonight.”
Sen did an excellent job of inspecting the tips of his shoes, and he shook his head. Wajet either didn’t notice, or didn’t care. He leaned in with a great big grin.
“Who’s your charming colleague?” he said. He snatched Yat’s hand, then bowed and kissed it. His moustache was scratchy against her skin. Sen looked at her; she couldn’t read his expression.
“This is Constable Yat,” he said. “She’s new to the night shift.”
“Yat, Yat, Yat,” said Wajet. He chewed the word like it was some new alchemical candy.
“Hmm,” he said, “yes. I read the report. Good to have you aboard. Good luck with your paperwork, Sen.”
“You don’t need somebody to come along?” he said.
“Well,” said Wajet, “I’ve got the constable here to assist me. It’s a very juicy case, Constable Yat; would look good to the lads up the chain. A snitch has been tragically stabbed very many times. The poor fellow seems to have been talking to all the wrong people. I would very much appreciate any help you could provide.”
Murders weren’t part of her remit. She mostly rounded up drunks, and occasionally stood around at state functions looking more important than she actually was. She had to agree, it sounded juicy.
She raised an eyebrow at Sen. He shook his head, ever-so-slightly. It could’ve almost been a random twitch of the head, but his eyes were showing some strange emotion she couldn’t read. Anger? Concern? She grimaced at him, then stood up. It was hardly regulation, but she needed something good on her record; she needed to prove she could work proper hours again; she needed a win. This man had seen the report about her delicate issue and didn’t care—he couldn’t be too bad. He was Ahwari, and they were fine with folk like her up there. Besides, if there were real danger, Sen would’ve let her know. He gave her one last plaintive look, and she turned away from him.
“Alright constable,” bellowed Wajet, “come along now.”
He charged away towards the foyer’s grand double-doors—steel frames, golden lintel, polished hardwood panels, an insult to modernity with a certain unspeakable ‘don’t fuck with us’ weight—and Yat found herself pulled along helplessly in his wake.
“You like heroes, Yat?”
“Heroes, sir?”
“Heroes,” drawled Wajet. “You know: sword, armor, fight a drake and all that.”
Wajet walked a lot more quickly than any of her other partners, though he wasn’t even sweating. It was hotter in Ahwara, though Yat could hardly imagine higher temperatures than the ones that had been keeping her up at night. She struggled to keep pace with him.
“I like them,” said Yat. “Drakes gotta be fought.”
“What if the drake’s nice?”
Yat was too puffed to deal with Wajet’s particular brand of pontifical bullshit. She stopped, and put her hands against her knees, and tried to get her breath back. After a few deep breaths, she straightened up.
The Dawnhounds Page 4