“I know the way, mate,” he said. He tried to sound formidable, but he just sounded tired. It seemed to work, anyway. The priest went back into the conference room. The door shut, then Sen heard the unmistakable sound of the latch sliding home. Lock-in. He didn’t stick around to hear the rest.
Sen hobbled out into the entrance foyer. Each step sent a lance of pain up his leg. The doors were wide open. He could see smoke rising in the distance, hear shouting. It was chaos, but it was better than whatever was happening inside. There were people out there willing to help; there was nobody inside the precinct who could say the same. He took another step forward, and Varazzo stepped out into the light. He had his hand on the hilt of his fucking sword. Totally against regulations, but it seemed like the place was going to the dogs anyway.
“You leaving?” said Varazzo.
“Yeah mate,” said Sen. “Just hitting the bundy aye. You wouldn’t believe the day I’ve had.” He put his coffee down on one of the side tables, and pulled out his punch-card. He slotted it in, and waited for the ka-chunk. It never came. He shrugged, left it in the machine, then picked his coffee back up and took a sip.
Varazzo drew his sword. It was almost soundless: the sheath must’ve cost a mint. It was the first time Sen’d got a good look at the blade—long and thin, but with a cutting edge. Espada ropera: he’d seen mercs carrying them while he was stationed up near the border. Seen the damage they could do as well. Primitive, but highly effective. Be really good, thought Sen, if Wajet had given me a bloody sword-stick aye.
“You’re funny, Sen,” said Varazzo. “It’s a pity you chose the wrong side. I’ll say a few zingers at your funeral.”
“Start writing ‘em now,” said Sen. “I reckon it might take you a while.”
Varazzo lunged. He held his sword high, in one hand, point-forward. Sen had one bung leg, a cane, and a cup of coffee. He could barely stand up straight. He was also the dirtiest fighter in the fucking force. He pushed off from his cane, pivoted on his good leg, torqued his body around and flicked his wrist. Scalding-hot coffee hit Varazzo in the face. He screamed. His thrust kept on its path, but Sen was no longer there. The blade clattered off the wall. Varazzo, still blinded, swung. Sen kicked forward with his bad leg, balanced on his good one, and let his whole body float backwards. The blade sailed over his chest as the same moment his foot crashed into Vazarro’s cock. Hurt like hell, but seemed to hurt Varazzo worse.
They broke apart: Sen leaning against the wall to stay upright, Varazzo blinking through coffee and a little bow-legged, but still clutching his sword.
“You could’ve been one of us, Kanq-Sen,” spat Varazzo. “You could’ve been somebody. Instead, you stand with them. And you’re gonna die with them.”
He raised his rapier, blade pointed at Sen’s throat. He pulled back his elbow, and struck. Sen twisted as much as he could, but he knew it wouldn’t be enough. With the last of his strength, he flicked his wrist again and brought the cup in front of the blade. It smashed through the cheap tin, but the shock of hitting metal twisted it, just enough. It cut across Sen’s jaw and went deep, hitting bone. Through a haze of pain, he twisted the coffee cup, snatched up his cane, and brought it down on the sword, right at the point where the blade met the hilt. The blade shattered with a wrenching of steel, then Sen brought the cane up into Varazzo’s chin. He swore he could hear teeth splintering. The big man went over backwards and cracked his head against the polished marble of the foyer.
“Yeah nah yeah,” said Sen. “I’m good. Tell Trezet I quit.”
Varazzo looked like he was ready to say something else, and Sen hit him in the face with the tip of his cane. He went still. Sen stepped over him, and left the police station.
Wajet paced the room. He was talking, but he wasn’t talking to her—he was talking at the air while she nodded and gave the the occasional supportive mhm. Her body was reknitting itself, but it was a painful process. They’d relocated to the foreman’s office on the top floor of a warehouse a few precincts away, with windows overlooking the Grand Canal. The building had its own small tributary built into the bottom floor, with a decrepit rowboat bobbing up and down inside. She barely remembered the trip. There was a broken sink in the bathrooms, and Yat had tried to clean the blood off her face in it, but only succeeded in spreading it around. She was now leaning against a wall, making sure that all her pieces were still attached. Fea hadn’t left her side, and the gentle music of his purr was helping to keep the panic at bay. It wasn’t entirely succeeding, but it was better than nothing. She gave him a pat, and winced as her nerves sent another shriek of pain through her arm.
“The university aren’t talking,” said Wajet. He twirled his hand for a moment, looking for the next thought. “They sent a man out to speak to me, but once he saw my face, he clammed up. The uniform wasn’t a problem, and that tells us something.”
Mhm, she thought she said. Her words didn’t feel like her own: like she was hearing an echo of herself. From somewhere outside, somebody blew a whistle, and the beggar’s trumpets responded. The sound moved away from them, and they stood in silence until it was gone.
“So,” Wajet carried on, “they’re not talking to anybody, but they’ll open the gate for a uniform. Our two lads had army uniforms. If they were following protocol, that would put them under police jurisdiction within the city walls, but I haven’t heard a thing about either of them. Might just be above my head, but mark it down as suspicious.”
“Two of them,” she muttered. How did he know there were two? The question was an anchor, holding her in the world. She clung to it.
“Yeah,” he said. “Haven’t seen the little guy all day, which means he’s somewhere around.”
“You know them?” she said. The words slipped out, and she tried to pull them back, but it was too late. He frowned at her.
“The Priests? I do,” he said. “They came back into town a few days ago. We’ve had an eye on them, but they’re hard men to catch if they don’t want to be caught.”
“Priests,” she said. It didn’t fit them at all.
Wajet sighed, and slumped down beside her. “You’ve been told what happens if you come back once too often, and that’s it,” he said. “They’re splintered men. They used to be heroes, you know. I’m told they killed a drake. The Brothers Tikmanak. They dropped that name a long time ago; they take new ones each time they come back.”
Even with all the impossibilities she’d had to deal with, this was too far. She shook her head. “That would make them thousands of years old,” she said. “Thousands and thousands.”
It wasn’t impossible, though. She’d felt it while she’d been inside Źao. So many lives: the force of millenia bearing down, chipping away at his soul like the wind turning a mountain to dust. There was something else: he thought he was protecting the city. It made no sense. Her body ached. Focus, go with the data you’ve got. She didn’t trust Wajet, but she trusted him more than anybody else in her immediate vicinity, and he knew things she didn’t—there were pieces of the puzzle missing, and he might be able to fill them in. If he’d needed her dead, he would’ve let Źao kill her. She took a deep breath.
“They were putting spores in the beer,” she said. “I walked in on it. That’s how this kicked off. There were spores on the missing ship, right? Something dangerous. Well, this fits the bill. And the ship jumped: not just anybody can do that. So they jumped the ship to Gostei, and took the cargo.”
“That’s half of it,” said Wajet. “The other half is—”
He stared at her, then shook his head, then sighed.
“They’re the Sparrows,” he said. “I didn’t know it was them until recently, but I knew the station existed. It’s hard to get promoted above a certain point without hearing about them. You can’t hide that sort of thing, so you don’t: you just say it like it’s a joke over and over again, and it gets picked up, and then nobo
dy can talk about it seriously. The un-secret police, what a laugh. If they’re involved in this, then the force are involved in this. That’s why the university sent a man out to see me: they know, and they know the watch know. I’m telling you this in confidence: if anybody found out I’d talked, I’d be a blank in a heartbeat. That’s part of how they’ve kept it under wraps: you talk too much, you’re a cow-eye.”
“The Sparrows,” she spat. “Great. You got any more myths you’ve been hiding? Because two feels like enough for today.”
She didn’t mean to sound so bitter. He’d been more open with her than she expected. It could be a lie, of course. It was a lot to take in, but if the last few days had done anything to her, they’d taught her to keep an open mind. At times it was so open, it was positively falling out. He was still staring at her, eyes filled with concern.
“I won’t talk,” she said. She paused. “Well, that’s a lie. I won’t talk about you. Something like this can’t stay a secret. If there’s a city left in the morning, then I’m going to shout it out to everyone who will listen. If that comes back on you then it’s what you get for staying quiet, but I won’t drop your name into it.”
His face went card-player empty, but his strings were agitated.
“I can live with that,” he said.
“What I don’t get,” she said, “is what the brass get out of this. They’re hurting people. They’re hurting themselves: how many men are they going to lose tonight? Even if the men at street-level don’t know, somebody must.”
“To get people scared,” Wajet said.
It hit her. The revolution had been all sorts of folks: students and bakers and sweepers and whores and cops and chemists. In the ten years since, a strange peace had held between them: the Pelagic Parliament. Oh they fought and argued, but the city moved forward. The police were only a small part of it, and she knew a lot of officers resented the fact; they thought things would be better if they were the only voices. Cops were heroes, after all—and who opposed heroes? How could clearing them out be anything other than good? The poisonous thought curled itself around her mind; it was seductive in its simplicity. If you were on the side of the law, then anybody who said ‘no’ was on the side of evil. You didn’t negotiate with evil: you beat it. You beat it with force or with cunning but either way, you beat it until it stopped moving. All the stories said so.
“Oh, Gods,” she moaned. “The election.”
“The election,” he said. “Provisional government, right? Meant to be temporary. It’s a wonder it’s lasted this long at all. So you want to break it apart and remake something more amenable to your goals. People get scared, whose star rises? The cops, the church, the old guard. That’s why the Lion haven’t attacked: they were never going to. It’s about making people think they could attack at any moment. If there’s bad guys over there then you send your own men over there, but if there’s bad guys everywhere then—”
“Cops everywhere,” finished Yat. “Shit. More patrols, more churches, more money.”
He was pacing, and it made her uncomfortable, but she kept going—she couldn’t let him know all her suspicions.
“More seats in parliament,” she said. “So you hire two very special men, and you have them make a mess. And then they do it again, and again, and you keep escalating until the people are mad with fear. Then you walk in and tell them you can make it stop, if only they give you all the little things that don’t matter, and you take all those little things and you crush them.”
They sat in silence for a while. She stood by the window and watched the city. It was an odd part of town: middle of the north side, along the canal. Foreign merchants used to stay here on trips, before the revolution and the apparently endless civil wars on the Eastern Shelf had made things too difficult.
The warehouse was part of a long chain of them running the length of the canal, but directly across from them were cafes, sweet shops, a run-down hotel in the old Ladowain style. A rough barricade had been erected at the hotel’s main doors, and the windows were boarded-over. She could see figures moving around inside. A broad, well-made bridge crossed the water between them: wide enough for market stalls to be set up along the sides. The mechanisms to lift the bridge had long-since jammed, and nobody had any reason to fix them. The stalls lay abandoned, and their produce strewn over the bridge. Beyond it, in front of the hotel, was a small square with a statue of the Brothers Tikmanak, bedecked in flowers. They looked different in copper, but she doubted the sculptor had based them off the real thing: nobody knew what they really looked like, after all. They were a myth.
“We stay here for now,” said Wajet. “It’s safe. Sibbi is swinging around in about three hours: we can take the rowboat up the canal to the docks, but I don’t think we want to linger there. We jumped ahead of the navy, but the vanguard’ll be in the harbour before midnight and then we’re fucked: another jump would be suicide.”
She reached out into the city, and felt the numbness spreading from the point where she’d ruined the Brothers’ party. Everywhere else was alive with threads, and energy, and emotion, but there was something swallowing the city, and it was—slowly, block-by-block, soul-by-soul—metastasizing. It was far enough away, for now. A little girl peered out at her from between the slats over the hotel window, and waved. She waved back, but the girl was already gone.
The warehouse was brick, and that made it hard to read the city. Even overgrown with vines, it seemed to dull and diminish any threads behind it. She sat in a small clutch of weeds that had spread up through the floor, and let her consciousness seep out into the city.
There was nothing at first: little fits and starts, but an overall order. A lot of anxiety, but no panic. As the afternoon wore on, that changed.
—Gods it’s just chairs and tables, what sort of a barricade is this—
—et got him the stick, we can trace it—
—oh Gods oh Gods oh Gods, Vara please it’s me—
—somewhere off the Grand Canal, haven’t got a lock—
—can’t even get into the docks now, they’ve pulled the bridges—
—unknown. They blew early—
—please I don’t want to die in here—
She pulled back. The flurry of voices was disorienting and difficult to navigate, but she thought back to her time in Ajat’s cabin: focus. One voice was different: still with a hint of panic, but not blind. She turned to it, and dived.
—”moving ahead as planned,” said Varazzo. The officer in front of him had no uniform, but there was something about his manner that said he was accustomed to being obeyed. Built like a brick shithouse, with chemical burns all over his hands and face. Another little man followed him around, taking notes. Dr Jakuda, on loan from the university. He had bags under his eyes, but he was smiling and bobbing up and down.
Despite all the chaos, Varazzo wasn’t nervous: he was excited. The city was a mess, but it refused to let him help—that was gonna change. They were gonna look at him and beg him to help and he’d magnanimously offer them his hand, and they’d be fucking grateful for once. They treated him like a joke, because he saw what a degenerate mess the place was. The cripple wouldn’t be laughing for long; his face was still raw from the coffee, and his teeth ached. More than ever, Hainak needed courage, and strength; Hainak needed heroes. It was gonna get some. He was grateful to the Sparrows, and to the Brass, and even to that little rat whore who’d almost gotten him killed. Sabotaged the borer nest somehow: must’ve planted something on him. Still, the stay in the infirmary had set him up to meet a very important benefactor, and be given a very important mission. They’d given him a few enhancements to get him back on his feet: toughened him up with some special injections and infusions. The burns on his face were half-healed already.
“It is imperative no spores cross the Wall,” said Jakuda. “Containment is our number one priority. If the wind changes, we�
�ll need to move the launch site. Are your officers ready?”
They were, but the hyperactive little shit could hang a little. He wasn’t the one giving orders, and he should’ve known better than to insult the Force like that. Civilians didn’t know what it was like, but always tried to push cops around anyway. He chewed the thought for a moment, and Mr. Źao cleared his throat.
“Sergeant Varazzo,” he said. Sergeant. It was a start. One day, it would be commissioner Varazzo, President Varazzo. He was finally getting the attention he deserved.
“Yessir, they’re ready. We already shut off the docks and all the main gates out of the city. Anybody slips the net, we’ve got riflemen on the roads. Anybody who tries to leave will be borer food.”
“And the wall?”
“We’ve got a man tracking the wind and I’ll alert you if anything changes.”
“No mistakes, Mister Varazzo,” he said. “This could be big for you. If you do well today, I’ll make sure they hear about it upstairs. If you do poorly today, I will make damn sure they hear about it upstairs.”
“Yessir,” he said. Mister Źao was a good man: he knew that a good cop couldn’t work with all that paperwork and oversight—he knew that you needed to break the rules sometimes in order to enforce them. He knew that a single person was clever, but people were stupid and panicky and needed a firm hand. The sheep needed stern shepherds, lest they fall to the wolves. The Brass didn’t see that yet, but they would. Tonight was the nigh—
Something hauled Yat out of Varazzo’s mind; Wajet was standing over her, shouting, shaking her by the collar. A bang of flesh on metal rang out, and the warehouse’s main door buckled. Yat jerked to her feet. Fea hissed and leapt out of her lap as she drew Dao’s revolver and pointed it. It made her wrist ache just thinking about firing it. She tried to reach out with her threads and see what was behind the door, but the iron wouldn’t let her through.
She didn’t need to wait long: a second impact punched a hole through the door, and a canine snout shoved itself through, snarling. It snapped its jaw and pushed, and the metal bent around it—sightless eyes, missing patches of fur, and patches of white fungus growing on its exposed skin.
The Dawnhounds Page 20