Sen couldn’t take it any more. They were both wrong, and he knew it: Trezet and his mealy-mouthed half-defence and the bin chicken with his bloody cliches. They’d both taken on faith that she was broken and the only folks he’d seen trying to break her was folks like them. Sen tried to stand, but his leg wouldn’t allow it. He tottered a little, then stabilised himself against the table. His leg screamed in agony, and he spoke through gritted teeth.
“Look, mate—”
“Ah yes,” said the priest. “Officer Kanq-Sen. I was wondering when we’d hear your contribution. Perhaps we should be looking into your records. Sin begets sin, does it not? You are forty-five next year, and yet you live without a wife. Very suspicious.”
It wasn’t that, it was just that the job had no time for family. He was working all day, then hanging around late to look out for the rookies. He’d had women in his life, but they never stuck around—always got tired of him not being around. He was married to the job, and his rookies were his kids, and he’d come to terms with that. The pain from his leg made his head spin. He spat a riposte.
“Nah mate I don’t need a missus,” he said, “what when I’ve got yours.”
It wasn’t a smart thing to say, but he was done playing nice with bin chickens. They didn’t run this place. Or, at least, he hoped they didn’t. He turned to Captain Trezet, who sighed.
“I think it is probably better if Sergeant Kanq-Sen is placed on some light duty. Macaque’s Furrow is quiet: nowhere in the south was attacked last night. I hear there’s some lovely gardens out that way. It’ll be good for you, Sergeant.”
“Is this a censure, Captain?” said Sen.
“It is not a censure, Sergeant,” said Trezet.
The bin chicken said nothing. He’d retreated back into his corner and gone a little too still, as though he were a waxwork. Sen took a peanut out of one of the bowls and chucked it at his head. It dinked off his mask and the room went very quiet. Sen turned back to the captain.
“Is it a censure now, mate?” he said.
“Sergeant,” said Trezet, hissing through clenched teeth, “I think it’s best if you remove yourself from this room and spend the next few days keeping your name from coming across my desk. The train from the north will be arriving shortly with our reinforcements, and it’s best you be on the other side of town when it gets here. Are we understood?”
“Yes, sah,” said Sen. “Of course sah, staying out of trouble’s my middle name sah; mum was a bit funny like that, sah. Will gladly remove myself from the present company sah.”
Despite the pain, he stood up straight and snapped off a drill-parade-perfect salute, then picked up his coffee and limped out of the room as fast as his wounded leg would carry him. Something stank, and it wasn’t the piss. He was gonna find Yat if it killed him and then, well, he had a few bloody questions.
Yat noticed the changes immediately. The streets would normally be filled with merchants by this time, but they were near-empty. Some of the banners were torn, and she passed a man with a broom sweeping up glass from a broken window. Armed officers roamed the streets, and more than once she had to step around a fully-loaded paddy wagon. The last time she’d seen this many guns in the street, she’d been a child; the last time she’d seen this many guns in the street, the city had burned. Between the bars of the paddy wagon, she saw a face peering out, and recognised the soup-seller she’d almost bumped into the day before: Mr Ot. He lived somewhere near her, and she’d seen him out with his daughter from time to time. He looked very tired.
Folk were avoiding eye contact, and moving out of her way a little too quickly. The man with the broom stumbled to get out of her path. She tried to act casual, but her hands were shaking. Despite everything, this was her home. This was a place of good food, and kind faces, and bars with white-painted doors. It was a place she served, in her own way. She was proud of it, even when it hurt.
“Morning, Sir,” she said.
He was already gone: disappeared off down some alley. She sensed his trail of gold as he left: jittery, electric.
Shit. They know. Wajet called it in. There’s been a blast on the Horns.
She was so wrapped up in her anxious thoughts that she nearly walked into Varazzo. His eyes went wide.
“Yat,” he said. Her hand flew to her cnida, and she was halfway to hitting the button before she realised he wasn’t attacking her. There was a fresh cut on his face—not life-threatening, but definitely something they’d want the medics to look at. The blood was dry and crusty: it had probably been unattended for a few hours at least. Where were the medics? If they could regrow a limb, they could heal a cut.
“You’re out of your zone,” he said. “You’re—What’s—what’s your zone? You’re Sen’s, right? He’s over in Macaque’s Furrow. They set off a bomb in a cafe over there, but it was mostly empty. The lads are mostly just sweeping up debris out that way. You w-want me to walk you?”
He didn’t normally stutter. Hell, he didn’t normally do much except sneer. She could sense the golden threads inside him: red-hot, whipped into a frenzy, striking out in all directions.
“They?” she said. It seemed like an important thing to know.
“Gods Yat, have you been under a rock all night? You queer and thick? Ladowain. The fucking Lion. It’s gonna be war: everybody says. Real war: blood in the streets. They’re coming back.”
Alright well, brushing off the Varazzo-ness of Varazzo, there was a second point she needed to know about. “Just how many attacks are we looking at?” she said.
Varazzo just shook his head. “Too many,” he said, “but we’ll get ‘em back. We’ll make ten dead of theirs for every one of ours’. We’ll get ‘em back, won’t we?”
His breath was shallow, and his words had a nasal whine to them. She’d never heard a single patriotic thing come from his mouth. He only ever mentioned Hainak to complain about how the women were too dusky and all the food tasted like shit. He talked about Degliano like it was heaven on earth, and about Hainak like it was a pile of mud and sticks.
She realised then that—by touching his threads as they thrashed around him—she could feel a little of what he felt. She didn’t fully understand it: white noise, chaos. Buried beneath all that, something else: a little seed of contentment, like he thought he was upset but really he was vindicated, and the cogs in his head were turning. He didn’t care about what had happened, but caring about it was useful to him; he cared, in that moment, with all his heart, because caring was a weapon and he loved new weapons. He had barely been scratched, but he would take this pain and magnify it and find a way to pass it on. He would twist her pain into his own, and go out and inflict it on people like her. She had never hated him more than she did in that moment; he wanted an excuse to lash out, and he’d found one in her death.
“Varazzo,” she said, trying to keep her voice under control, “how many are we looking at?”
It was hardly the most inspiring show of control, but it seemed to bring him down to earth. He’d always been a servile little shit, who kicked those below him and kissed the shoes of those above. Backbone like a piece of straw. She didn’t feel like she was in control of anything at all, but it didn’t surprise her how quickly he folded.
“Uh,” he said, “about twenty bombs. It was mostly grenades, maybe a few shaped charges. A couple of folk got shot, mostly if they got in the way, it looks like. We don’t have a pattern yet. I heard about this shit from Sen: they did it during the war. There’s no pattern and that’s the point: they get you working to figure out a puzzle that doesn’t have an answer. They keep you busy so you don’t see them getting ready to hit you again. They’re—we’ll—the bastards.”
One last detail stuck out at her: Sen was alive. That could mean a lot of things, but at the very least, a weight was taken from her shoulders. Macaque’s Furrow was a nice district, up near Heron Hill: all swell
s in fancy silk cloaks and boutique biowork. Other side of the wall: she wasn’t getting through security alone, especially if the city was in lockdown. Varazzo was a fucking worm, but he was just the man she needed. She could lose him once they’d cleared the checkpoint. Maybe find a way to blame it on him. She needed to see Sen; Sen did not need to see her. Not until she knew where she stood.
There was something very wrong with her home. It had been brewing for a long time, and she’d chosen to ignore it—because she was too tired, because she was too busy, because she was so hungry it made her stomach hurt. She kept telling herself she was going to do something about it, and she did little things around the edges over and over again while things got worse and now the wrongness had asserted itself in a way she couldn’t ignore. She could run: she could get on a boat and change her name and be a merchant in Accenza and never have to worry about any of this. She couldn’t run, though: not while a cancer grew inside her home. Dad had died piece-by-piece, pretending it was fine until the little holes added up and killed him. He’d been breathing funny in the days before he died: too much fluid in his speech, too little air in his cough. She’d noticed it, but she’d chosen not to notice it, until he’d gone out into his little greenhouse laboratory and never come out. She rubbed her wrist, out of habit. The scar she’d given herself that night had never quite healed. The sickness was about to turn her home into another bloody wound, and she wasn’t about to sit and let it. Not again.
“Let’s go see the sergeant,” she said. She motioned with her free hand towards the Arnak Vonaj, and tried not to let her fear and anger show.
The kid was lurking around the Janekhai Market when Sen found him. Thieves were rarely creative. Cops all over the show, watching with wary eyes. The locals had cleaned up the alley remarkably quickly: if not for the temporary membranes stretched over some of the windows, you’d never know anything had happened.
The standard watchman’s approach would be to clap the kid in irons, drag him around a bit, dangle freedom in front of him if he talked, actually let him go if you’d met your quota. Nobody cared about street kids. He’d done it before, and couldn’t deny it got results. He’d told himself it kept them off the streets, and it was true: he sure as shit never saw any of them again. He didn’t know what had changed, but he couldn’t do it anymore. He leaned against a wall behind the kid, happy to have a reprieve from walking.
“Psst,” he said.
The kid turned, and sniffed.
“You sure did, mister.”
Sen sniffed his own uniform, and realised how ripe he smelled. He hadn’t changed it in days. He only had two, and the medics had cut the first one to pieces getting him out of it. He shrugged. Fair cop.
“Would you believe a big kid did it and ran away?” he said.
The kid gave him an incredibly world-weary look for an eleven year-old, then nodded.
Sen pulled out a silver ox and held it up. “You wanna make a half-yan?” he said.
The kid crossed his arms and puffed out his chest.
“I don’t snitch,” he said. He’d obviously never said the word out loud before.
“I’m not asking you to snitch,” said Sen. He paused. “Well,” he said, “not on your mates. I’m looking for the lady I was with a few nights ago. The cop. Short, fast. You remember her?”
The kid screwed up his face, making patterns in the grime.
“You her husband or something?” he said.
“Nah mate, just a worried friend. I think she’s in trouble.”
“Full yan or nothing.”
“I did say my friend was in trouble, right?”
“Yep. You’re police, she’s police. It’s a police tax.”
Sen sighed. It was more fair than most of his taxes. At least he knew this one would actually make it to somebody who needed it. He bounced the tip of his cane off the cobbles and regretted it instantly as his leg sang out in pain. An Erzau walked past them. He wasn’t looking at them, but Sen knew better than to trust that. He let the bin chicken sweep by in his dusty red robes, then turned back to the kid.
“Sure,” he said. His leg gave him another jab, and he winced and leaned back against the wall. “But half now, half on delivery.”
The kid nodded, then stuck out his hand.
“Deal, mister.”
Sen shook it with as much vigor as he could muster. Gods, he needed to sleep. It was barely midday and he felt like he was about to pass out.
“You gonna tell me your name?” he said.
“Nah mate, I’m not telling a copper nothing.”
Smart kid. Reminded Sen of another roof rat, in a way.
“Except what I pay you for, right?” he said.
“Yeah,” said the kid without a name, “except that. Permission to sod off, copper?”
“Permission granted, ya fuckin sprog.”
He watched the kid go, and wondered—not for the first time—whether he was doing right by the city. Not for the politicians or priests and certainly not for the police, but for the city. He’d spent a lot of his life in muddy wars, patrolling marches and walls that belonged to nobody, standing at the end of the world and giving it a shrug. The force had offered him an opportunity to change that: to be somebody, to do something. ‘Course, the army had offered the same. He leaned against the wall as the market rolled on around him—even with the world in pieces, bread needed selling before it went stale, fish needed eating before they went off. People were people: you could built as many bloody walls around them as you wanted, and it didn’t make them less as people.
He waved at another cop, a man he didn’t recognise. Pockmarked skin and military enhancements: probably one of the new lads. He scowled at Sen. He couldn’t have been older than twenty: he wasn’t even born when the war started. They got ‘em young, of course. They were more malleable. He’d been a mad young thing himself once, desperate for order in a world that refused to provide any. Now he was a tired old man, and he wasn’t even that bloody old. He just kept getting hurt, and each time he got hurt it added to the pile and one day it was gonna crush him. He was gonna be one of those old men who hung around in bars with swollen knuckles and a lifetime of bad dreams.
The soldier-cop started chatting to a bin chicken, smiling and doing all the hand signs. Of-bloody-course. It had seemed, as little as a year ago, that the Bird Cult were on the way out. Losing ground in parliament, losing favour in the streets. You could go days without seeing a red robe. Now, they were everywhere, like real ibises: rooting around in the garbage, spilling shit everywhere. At least with the election coming up, he could put the boot into them, even if only a little. The priest gave the cop a hand signal that didn’t seem right: not part of the usual liturgy. Then he noticed the little smudge on the priest’s mask: a little dark scrape in the midst of all that nice white fabric, like somebody had bounced a peanut off it. Could be that he was just at a bad angle, but Sen hadn’t gotten to somewhere-just-north-of-the-middle by letting things slide. He heaved himself off the wall, and limped after the priest.
It didn’t take long for Yat to realise they were being followed. Whoever it was, they were good at moving unnoticed—she wouldn’t have known they were there at all if the golden threads in them didn’t glow white-hot: so bright she could follow them through walls. Everybody she’d met had the same glow, but this was something else: the threads were dense, thick, bright. It was like being stalked by a lighthouse.
They were a climber, too: they weren’t just moving along the ground. She wasn’t sure how they were moving that fast, though. She thought she knew this part of town, and they were transitioning too quickly between floors, onto rooftops. Somebody fast, and quiet. She tried not to let her fear show. She knew she was doing a bad job of it, but Varazzo didn’t seem to notice: he was talking to himself; his eyes darted back and forth across alleyways.
Varazzo chattered awa
y and she tried not to let it in: I reckon it’s because we’re degenerates, ‘cos we let our standards slip; they hit that fag bar of yours, pity it was a weeknight. It was only a few blocks away, but if she went to check, he’d know something was wrong. She pushed the thought down, even though it made her throat tighten. He’d never been a talker, but now he couldn’t shut up. The shadow of Arnak fell over them: they were probably about five minutes away, but it could darken half the city when the sun hit it wrong. It was immense. Of course, it was the north that often found itself in darkness: something about the bends and angles of it that had been an intentional part of the design, to make sure the south didn’t have to deal with stolen daylight. Only the very shabbiest parts of the south ever found themselves in darkness.
They stopped while Varazzo had a chat with the gate guards. Yat loitered around maybe a hundred feet away, trying to keep their stalker within her periphery. It had stopped moving, though its threads spread out from it—they were taking gold from the world and pulling it into the host. Hells, another, well—another one like me.
She turned back to the wall. Varazzo was looking at her, but he was too far away for her to read his expression properly. He turned back to the guards, said a few more words, then wandered back and put a hand on her shoulder. His grip was a little too tight and friendly. The threads in him had calmed down: gone golden like everybody else’s. They still twitched and writhed, seemed to tug him towards her. She smiled at him, and hoped her disgust showed in her eyes.
“We can go through,” he said. “The sergeant wants to talk to you.”
He had a shit-eating grin on his face, and she knew that they had her. They sent a runner to report she’d showed up: of course they had. Standard protocol if an officer went missing on patrol: they probably had eyes everywhere, if the night was even half as bad as Varazzo seemed to think it was. They must’ve sent somebody as soon as they saw her coming. She should’ve known, but the last 24 hours had thrown a lot at her, and she was lucky she’d caught even half of it.
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