Crucible Steele (Daggers & Steele Book 5)

by Alex P. Berg

  The librarian narrowed an eye. “And what would you need it for?”

  I reached into my jacket and produced my badge. “Official business.”

  The woman snorted, clearly displeased that her limited authority had been supplanted by my own. “Follow me.”

  She rose and led me on a journey, past overflowing stacks and sparsely populated aisles, through modern additions and into spaces that made my nose wrinkle with ancient dust, before eventually depositing me at the base of a three-story circular room in the restricted section, this one with a sign over the entrance marked ‘City Planning.’

  Some additional help on the part of the librarian and her eyeglass retainers wouldn’t have been unwelcome, but she scrammed with an alacrity that made me think she was either being paid too much or too little, depending on how I interpreted the gesture. Nonetheless, after a fair amount of searching I was able to find what I came for.

  I pulled the blueprints and associated reference materials from a stack and spread them on a wide table at the base of the room. Through the latter, I learned that the portion of the cistern east of the Earl was over four hundred years old, that it had initially been used for rainfall collection, and that it had been renovated a century and a half ago to change its purpose from runoff control to emergency overflow if the Earl overstepped its bounds. With that riveting knowledge in mind, I committed the blueprints to memory and headed out.

  After a long rickshaw ride across the Bridge and some hearty walking in my decidedly non-orthotic rain boots, I found myself in the western reaches of the industrial district, at the foot of a small shack tucked behind a carpentry supply shop. Brown paint peeled from the side of the shack in long strips, like bark from a hickory tree, and the roof looked ready to collapse if the sky came through on its threat of snow.

  I tested the door and, much to my surprise, found it unlocked. Even more to my surprise, I didn’t find the interior populated by cats, raccoons, or drunken mendicants, through some pungent whiffs indicated at least two of the three had made their beds here before. A small sign on the wall read ‘C.E. 11 East.’ A heavy, iron manhole cover dominated the center of the cold floor.

  Thankfully the transients who’d used the shack as a restroom hadn’t completely cleaned it out. I crossed to the far wall and liberated a lantern from a hook, lighting it with a tinderbox I found in its base. I set that on the ground as I lifted a heavy metal pole from a rack. I jammed the end into one of the pick holes on the manhole cover and tugged. The round metal disk slid to the side with a harsh grate.

  I replaced the tool and grabbed the lantern, then paused as I stared into the black hole that descended into the earth. Even with the lantern in hand, I could only see six rungs on the ladder within. I couldn’t help but think about the case and the Captain’s non-binding orders and Griggs’ mysterious involvement in it all. Apparently fate wasn’t content with offering me a mere metaphorical descent into darkness.

  I swallowed back the lump in my throat, hooked my lantern onto my belt to free my hands, and slid my feet into the abyss.

  The light of my lantern pierced the midnight shroud, but its rays couldn’t pass through stone. Brick and iron blurred inches from my face as I descended into the tube rung by rung. My boots squeaked and my lantern clacked as it bounced off the iron bars. I braced myself for a chill as I went ever deeper, but unlike the morgue, none came.

  The brick in front of me disappeared, and the light from my lantern shot out into the nether. I descended a few more rungs before my ladder unceremoniously ended. I dropped the rest of the way, and my boots plunged into three inches of water with a splash. I paused, letting my eyes adjust.

  As I glanced around me while I liberated my light source, three thoughts crossed my mind: that my lantern was woefully inadequate for the space, that my brain had better be up to the task of translating a blueprint into spatial coordinates without the markers of sun and sky, and that I was a fool for never having come down here before.

  Lavish Corinthian columns, pockmarked and weathered from age, held up vaulted ceilings of brick and mortar, all painted in brushstrokes of brown and orange and beige from the flame in my hand. They stretched in all directions, evenly spaced and perfectly aligned, fading into the darkness. As the ripples from my feet died, the floor became a mirror, so clear I could discern as much of the ceiling from looking down as up.

  I shook my head. Four hundred years ago the city could afford to build this, and now they couldn’t even offer me a competitive wage? Progress…

  I consulted with my mental map, checking it against the orientation of the ladder-bearing chute, and stomped off in a direction that seemed a little darker than the rest.

  My feet splashed as I walked, but I tried not to let the monotonous sound distract me from my goal. Coming in from the eleventh east entrance, I knew I had to head north and then bear west toward the river. That would put me on the main path towards the overflow chamber, which shouldn’t deviate until the banks of the Earl. I could traverse it, looking for Lazarus along the way without getting lost—hopefully—although how or why anyone would bother living in a cistern was a mystery that would have to wait to be solved. Apparently I should’ve asked the Captain a few more questions about his acquaintance before stomping off into the night.

  I entered the overflow passage, which featured a single row of columns on either side and a substantially higher ceiling than the first room, and got moving. Water rose along the side of my boots as I walked, but not quickly. Four inches, then five, as I wandered down the tunnel, my eyes straining into the darkness for signs of life.

  I made it to six before I spotted the first anomaly: a metal pole, stretching from the water to the bricks above. A heavy cable looped around the top faded into the darkness beyond.

  I followed it to another set of poles, three this time, all attached by cables to each other and to the first.

  A few more steps brought into light something even stranger. A metal cage, boxlike and surrounded by more poles dipping their toes into the water, suspended from the ceiling. Something blocked the light of my lantern on its sides, though a glint from directly below it caught my eye. What was that? A ladder? There shouldn’t have been surface access here, according to the blueprints.

  I took a step toward the structure, and a powerful, yellow glow erupted from it, momentarily blinding me. A voice as forceful as the light followed it.

  “Move, and you’re a dead man.”

  21

  I blinked and shaded my gaze with my free hand. As I adjusted to the glare, I noticed a pair of glowing yellow rectangles in the cage: a window and a door. Wooden panels set inside the cage—or residence, if that’s indeed what it was—blocked the rest of the light.

  Outside the cage, on a narrow balcony of sorts, stood a thin, wiry man with a scraggly beard birds might’ve once nested in. His hair, long, black, and streaked with gray, was held in a ponytail at the back of his head. He eyed me with a cool, steely gaze, but only with his right. His left eye sat recessed in his skull, open but milky white and unseeing—at least in the corporeal sense.

  I brought my hand down and squinted. “I take it you’re Left-eye.”

  “Figure that out all by yourself, did you?” said the man.

  “My mother always told me I was smart. S, m, r, double t.” I gestured to the guy’s face. “You know, if it were up to me, I would’ve gone with Right-eye. Might’ve helped draw attention away from that little problem area of yours.”

  The scowl grew. “I prefer Lazarus.”

  “Hey, as would I,” I said, “but I’d prefer a different name entirely. No offense, but Lazarus is pretty odd.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Don’t worry. My name’s Daggers. It’s a last name, but still. I get grief over it all the time.”

  Lazarus clamped his jaw and narrowed his good eye, and he seemed on the verge of striking, though unless he held a rock in one of his hands, I knew not w
ith what.

  After a moment, his shoulders eased. He snorted. “You know, as I heard you stomping and splashing your way over here, I figured you were either incredibly brave or incredibly dumb. When you first opened your mouth, I immediately decided upon the latter, but the more you talk, the more I trend back toward the former. Not to mention the fact that you’re wearing rubberized boots.”

  “Well it is a cistern,” I said. “In the winter. Speaking of which, why isn’t it colder down here?”

  “The water acts a heat sink,” said Lazarus. “And it’s brackish, so it doesn’t freeze easily. Now cut the crap and give me a reason not to fry you. Who are you, who sent you, and what do you want?”

  Unless Laz had boiling oil up there, I wasn’t sure what he meant by that threat, but out of respect for the Captain and a strengthening desire to get the hell out of the cistern, I kept my answer as snark-free as possible.

  “Name’s Jake Daggers,” I said. “The Captain sent me. I need some information on the Wyverns.”

  The man tensed again. “Say what? What captain?”

  I had to think for a moment. “Captain Abe Armstrong, 5th Street Precinct. He said you two go back a ways.”

  Lazarus paused, and his eye became distant. “Yes. In a sense, anyway… How the hell did he know where to find me?”

  He glanced at me. I didn’t answer.

  “So you’re a cop?”

  “A detective,” I said. “Homicide. Like Captain Armstrong was, back when you knew him. But I’m off duty—and here off the record.”

  “Go on.”

  “A friend of mine—my former partner—was murdered. I was suspended from the case. Put on administrative leave, to be precise. But Captain Armstrong met with me and told me a little more about my ex-partner. Said he was involved with the Wyverns back in the day, and that you had an in with them, or at least that you did. I was hoping you might be able to point me in a useful direction.”

  Lazarus gazed at me with his one good eye. Normally, I was good at reading people, but between the dim light of my lantern, the glare coming from his shack, and his decided lack of functional eyeballs, I couldn’t get a grasp on the look he gave me. Was he suspicious? Calculating? Sympathetic? Sad? Or maybe all of the above?

  Eventually he spoke. “You said you’re here off the record?”

  “The Captain knows where I am, in case you’re hiding a crossbow between your legs.”

  Laz snorted again. “S, m, r, double t is right.” He kicked the side of his balcony. A latch clanked, and a metal ladder plummeted down, slamming into the six inch water with a splash and a clang. “Come on up.”

  He retreated into his shack, leaving me no option other than to climb up after him.

  When I reached the top, I found Lazarus seated in a chair at a round table barely larger than one of my outstretched arms. A bed had been crammed into the space at the far wall, and shelves full of knickknacks—books and figurines and carvings of a mysterious blue stone—lined the other two walls. A small iron cook stove rubbed shoulders with the door, though I didn’t see any wood in its belly, nor an exhaust vent for the smoke.

  “I’d offer you a chair, but I only have one,” said Lazarus. “As you can imagine, I don’t get many visitors.”

  I pointed to a glass globe, perhaps four inches across—the source of the powerful yellow light that filled the room. After staring at it for a few seconds, I found my voice. “What is that?”

  Lazarus lifted an eyebrow. “Abe didn’t tell you?”

  Whatever bravado and self-assurance I’d felt upon confronting the old man melted away under his mysterious globe’s light. “To be honest, he said you were an oddball. He didn’t say anything about you being—”

  “An electromancer?”

  Thoughts that had been trending one direction now jerked back in another. Lazarus was a lightning mage? That would explain the metal poles distributed around his shack, all of them plunging into the cistern’s waters, as well as the man’s threats to fry me. How close had I come to death, exactly?

  I tried to keep calm, but I’m fairly sure my eyes widened, and my voice might’ve wavered a little. “How does electricity help you make a globe glow?”

  “It’s emerging technology,” said Lazarus. “You’ll see it gain widespread adoption soon enough, thanks to the rise of those Bock Industries generators, though it seems as if that Sherman upstart is poised to take over whatever market share they’ve already amassed.”

  I recalled my interactions with a brilliant young scientist by the name of Tanner Sherman from a few cases ago. I supposed if anyone would’ve been up to date on his accomplishments, it would’ve been an electromancer, although I couldn’t imagine the postal service delivered scientific periodicals to the cistern.

  Lazarus snapped his fingers. “Focus, princess. Let’s get down to brass tacks. You want something. Knowledge, I’m guessing. And seeing as I…owe Abe from a different time and a different place, I’ll see what I can do. Off the record, of course.”

  Honestly, I hadn’t expected to find Lazarus at all, much less a half-blind lightning mage living in a suspended metal cage, but I tried to shake off my shock and get to the point. Lacking a chair, I leaned against one of the bookshelves and tried to make myself comfortable. I failed. “The Wyverns. Do they still exist?”

  “Do the stars still shine bright in the night sky?” said Lazarus. “Of course the Wyverns still exist. They never went away. They just got better at hiding their tracks.”

  “Did they kill Griggs?” I asked.

  “That your ex-partner?”

  I nodded. “Someone strangled him in his apartment, with a garrote. The Captain said he used to take Wyvern hush money. And given another current case of ours…”

  That strange, indiscernible look came over Laz’s face again. “Look…Daggers, was it? I don’t know who you think I am—”

  “Captain said you were a police informant, among other things.”

  “You’ll notice he used the past tense,” said Lazarus. “And I never worked for the Wyverns. I was more of an independent contractor, if you will. My unique skill set came in handy sometimes. But that’s immaterial. The point is, I don’t know who killed your partner. I don’t have my fingers in that deep with the Wyverns, if indeed it was them. But…I do know names. Names who pass me scraps every now and then, and who I can pass messages to in exchange.”

  That felt like an unfinished thought. “And…?”

  A pause, and then another inscrutable look on the part of Lazarus. “Let me share a tidbit that crept into my ear recently. The Wyverns are in the middle of a ‘purge.’ Old blood out, new blood in. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know. But that rumor would help substantiate your suspicions about your ex-partner.”

  “So you think the Wyverns did kill him?”

  Lazarus tilted his head and raised an eyebrow.

  “Well, it’s a start,” I said. “But I’ll need more. Surely you can find out something else.”

  “Not without exposing myself,” said Lazarus. “And you missed the most important part of what I told you.”

  It was my turn to lift an eyebrow.

  “Old blood out, new blood in.”

  The bookshelf creaked as I shifted my weight against it. “Hold on. Are you suggesting I join the Wyverns?”

  “That depends,” he said. “How attached are you to your neck?”

  “Physically, quite,” I said. “In a metaphorical sense, I take calculated risks when justified. So you can get me in?”

  Laz barked out a short, harsh laugh. “No hesitation? That’s admirable. Dumb, but admirable. But you give me too much credit, gumshoe. I don’t have that kind of pull. No one I know does. But I can give you an in.”

  “And that is?”

  “An invitation to the crucible.”

  I gesticulated with my hands. “What is that? Some kind of trial?”

  “No, it’s a pot for heating metals
in,” said Lazarus. “What do you think?”

  I chewed on my lip and stared at the old guy. “I should get you up to the station some time. My fellow detectives will never believe there’s someone crankier and more sarcastic than me.”

  “Don’t even joke about that,” said Lazarus in an icy tone. “You said this was off record.”

  “Right. Sorry. So what’s involved in this crucible?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Laz. “It changes all the time. But you’ll need your wits, your brawn, and all the intuition you can muster. Which I suspect for you isn’t much.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence, sparkhands,” I said. “So how is this going to work? You tell them I’m cool and they invite me for a tryout?”

  “Not so fast, hotshot,” said Lazarus. “I told you I could give you an in, but you’ve got a part to play, too. You’ll need a believable back story—because trust me, the Wyverns will check you out. The question is, what?”

  “You don’t think I can pull off the ‘disgruntled cop gone bad’ role?”

  Lazarus narrowed his good eye and rapped his fingers on the table. “There it is again. I can’t tell if you’re dumb or just faking to screw with me. But yes, that’s basically what I had in mind. You stink of coffee and donuts. There’s no way the Wyverns’ll believe you’re anything but fuzz. But a cop kicked out of the force for, say…excessive violence and questionable ethics in regards to his sources of income? That could work.”

  “Perfect.” I thought back to my recent reading exploits and channeled my inner Colt Strongbow. “Drake Baggers, rogue cop, at your service.”

  “Drake Baggers? That’s what you’re going with?”

  I shrugged. “I need something I’ll respond to.”

  Laz rolled his eye. It was as disconcerting as it sounds. “Whatever. Your choice, I guess. But you’ll need a paper trail, because believe it or not, the Wyverns won’t take your or my word for it. You’ll need to forge a personnel file, one that outlines your expulsion from the police force, and you’ll have to plant it at work.”