The train was slowing now and a soft conversation between cows and goats and pigs and chickens filled the quiet platform all the way down the line. Syfax said, “So it’s carrying food then? This is a freight train?”
“Freight, yes.” The men nodded.
Syfax breathed a little easier. “No passengers?”
“Passengers? Oh, sure. Hundreds of them.” The men nodded.
The major felt every muscle in his back tighten. The train shuddered to a hard stop amidst a great squealing of brakes, hissing of valves, and the familiar dull roar of people, hundreds of people, all crammed together in little wood and iron boxes, eager to spill out all over the platform, the streets, the buildings. So many people.
The passenger cars were strung out far past the platform, up the street most of the way between him and the coach, their open windows dark with the shadowy press of bodies. Car after car full of people, each one a little louder and rowdier than the last. The doors opened just as Syfax kicked the exhausted horse and shouted, “Hya!”
People were spilling out of the cars onto the platform and down onto the road. Hundreds of people. Thousands of people. Women and men and children, bearing bags and sacks and boxes and baskets, all poured through the doors with a vast murmuring, scolding children, shouting directions, and asking questions.
“Where’s my bag?”
“Which way to the warehouse?”
“Well, where did you put it?”
The crowd grew larger with each passing second until the road was nothing but a sea of heads and hair and hats for as far as the major could see. He drove his horse in a mad dash halfway up the street before the press became an immovable sludge of bodies and luggage, forcing him to rein up and begin the laborious business of shouting at each and every person to turn around, look where they were going, and get the hell out of his way.
Over a thousand bobbing heads, Syfax saw the coach roll back a few feet into view, and then roll forward around the corner. “Damn it.” He glared in every direction, searching for some way out of the mass of bodies. “Marshal! Everybody out of the way! Make a hole! Move, move, move! Marshal!”
A few nervous faces looked up at him, and perhaps they tried to shuffle out of his way, but there were always three more people ready to slide into any gaps in the crowd. Syfax ground his teeth, wishing for once that he still had his sidearm. “Hya!” He kicked his poor horse again and again, forcing the exhausted animal to stumble into person after person, and the major’s frustration gave way to a sudden fear that there would be a child somewhere down in that sea of bodies.
“Damn it!” He leapt out of the saddle and charged through the crowd. The coach is leaving. Heading east on the next street. Need to head it off. Need to talk to the driver.
There were no side streets, no alleys, no way to get off the street until he reached the intersection, which was still twenty yards away. And then he noticed the half-open window of the old warehouse on his right. Shoving aside one last man, Syfax got to the window, pushed it up, and dove into the dark room.
The warehouse was one long dusty chamber with a handful of broken barrels and crates along one wall. Syfax raced to the back of the building, his footsteps echoing across the empty space. He spotted a door in the back wall outlined by a few feeble rays of sunlight, and he crashed his shoulder through it. Half the door clung to the hinges and the other half clung to the lock, but the center burst apart and spilled the major out onto another street. An empty street.
He swung left and pounded up the lane to the next intersection where he stumbled to a halt, his head swiveling every which way, searching, searching. There was no coach. It was gone. The driver was gone. Chaou was gone.
“Yaaaa!” Syfax put his fist through an old rain barrel standing at the corner behind him. The boards shattered, the bands bent, and several gallons of worm-infested mud slid out onto the ground at his feet.
There. At least I can do that right.
Chest heaving and legs shaking, he straightened up and glared at the people staring at him, and they hastily looked away. “What are you looking at?”
He studied the crowd for a minute.
All right. Arafez. Half a million people. Thirty square miles. One old hag.
How hard can it be?
Chapter 31. Taziri
Taziri stood in the street behind a makeshift barricade of sawhorses and fire brigade ropes and watched women and men in yellow coats carefully picking their way through the smoking debris of what had been Medina’s prosthetics shop the night before. It was a colorless morning and she scanned the cloud-spattered sky. It would rain soon.
Menna loves the rain.
She rolled her shoulders about in her heavy orange jacket as she sauntered along the line of sawhorses and ropes down the middle of the street. There were quite a few people gathered to watch, and after a few moments walking through the crowd Taziri began noticing the peg-legs, the hook-hands, and even the odd discolored glass eye among them. She hesitated, suddenly feeling rather out of place, as she realized that nearly two-thirds of the onlookers were wearing some sort of prosthetic. She felt a sudden urge to be included or to show her solidarity with them so she took her left hand out of her pocket and rolled up her sleeve to reveal her new arm brace and glove.
She listened to the undercurrent of shock and dismay in their voices, occasionally punctuated by an angry curse, a loud promise to help the doctor rebuild her shop, or a vow to hunt down the people responsible. Taziri flashed back to the previous night and the dark rage of the wedding guests, and the words of the song they had shouted into the darkness. She quickly moved to the edge of the crowd.
The firefighters dragged smoldering furniture and boxes out of the ruin to dump buckets of water on them, and then kick them back toward the remains of the building. A few stubborn, skeletal beams still stood high above the wreckage. A lone window frame clung to one beam up in the air, an empty eye socket in empty space. Taziri winced at the scene, at the thought of an entire building burning, of people stumbling about inside, of evil men with knives prowling the inferno looking for women to stab in the face. She wondered if she was developing a fear of fire. Or at least, a more irrational one than the fear of fire she had cultivated while flying on the Halcyon.
Kenan returned from his brief talk with the fire chief. “What is that?” He pointed at her arm. “And when did you get it?”
“It’s from the fire in Tingis. I got burned a little worse than I thought,” Taziri said. “I came down here last night and one of the medical techs fixed me up with this.”
“You were here last night? Alone? Why didn’t you tell me? Did you see the doctor?”
“No, everyone was gone except the tech. So what’s the word from the chief?” Taziri stared into the smoking black rubble, but she couldn’t identify anything at all. All the walls and floors and doors and tables, all the things, were gone and only dirty lumps and vague black shapes remained.
Kenan frowned at her as though he had more to say about her arm. He said, “The fire started early this morning. Witnesses say they heard a bang, like a cannon or thunder, and the building collapsed before the fire started. They’ve got no idea how or why.” The marshal ran his thumb along his unshaven jaw. “Total loss. The building was over a hundred years old. Dry enough, fragile enough. Woof. Gone.”
“Everything was destroyed?” Taziri glanced up at him. “If Medina was building electrical batteries and doing medical experiments here, then there should have been a lot of machines. Metal parts, at least.”
“Oh, there were. In that back room where the fire started, they found piles of brass and aluminum rods and joints. This whole place was a prosthetics shop. Although, I guess you figured that out last night, didn’t you? They made peg-legs and glass eyes, things like that. But apparently nothing complicated. The only machines were drills and a sheet press.”
“Can we see?”
“No, they won’t let us inside. Not safe. Most of the building fel
l into the basement, and everything else is about to collapse on top of that. They need to pull down those beams up there by the end of the day and get a crane to start clearing out the foundation.” Kenan pointed up at the rickety window frame still hanging off the side of one of the beams. “Never seen anything like that before.”
“So that’s it? The same day we come to town to find this doctor, her shop burns down?” Taziri glared at the rubble. “You don’t honestly think this was an accident?”
“No, I don’t.” Kenan frowned. “There’s a witness. A police detective named Massi. They found her in the alley behind the shop, all cut up with a knife in her chest, right here.” Kenan tapped his chest just inside his left shoulder. “She’s at a hospital a few blocks from here. No word on whether she’s awake yet. Or if she died.”
“She was stabbed?” For a cold instant, Taziri couldn’t remember where Medur Hamuy was and she could only remember that the killer was no longer in their custody. Then she remembered Kenan calling the police to take Hamuy away. “You don’t think Hamuy got free and did this?”
Kenan blinked, eyebrows raised. “No. No, he couldn’t. He’d have to break out of jail and get past twenty officers, run halfway across town, and then still have the strength to fight the detective. No, it couldn’t be him. I don’t think. No.” The marshal swallowed and waved to Ghanima, who was chatting with a pair of reporters hovering near the scene. The young pilot waved and walked back over to them.
“They didn’t know much.” She shrugged. “The fire chief gave them some canned statement about getting their investigation started. They did get some quotes from a few kids who were here early this morning who said there was a fight in the street, but that was in another neighborhood. Nothing about the doctor. No one’s seen her yet.”
Taziri sniffed the dead air. “So, no idea whether anyone died in the fire?”
“Nope. Not yet anyway. The chief will put out an official report in a few days, but since there hasn’t been a hospital wagon to pick up any bodies, there probably aren’t any. Yet.” Ghanima chewed her lip. “I wish we’d brought Evander. He might know something about medical buildings and equipment.”
“He’s safer back at the inn.” Taziri leaned against a sawhorse, feeling the wet grit stuck to the wood. “And I doubt he knows more about fires than the fire chief.”
“So what now?”
Kenan scratched his head. “I say we find this detective Massi and see what she can tell us. Assuming she’s alive. Maybe she knows what happened to Medina. Maybe she was investigating Medina!” His eyes lit up. “What if she stumbled onto the same people we’re looking for! What if they tried to kill her because she learned what they were doing?”
Taziri couldn’t help but grin at the marshal’s enthusiasm. “Yeah, maybe.”
“Actually,” Ghanima half raised her hand. “Taziri, can I have a word?”
Kenan shrugged and paced away to watch the firefighters.
“What is it?” Taziri asked.
“Look, one of the reporters mentioned that the trains to Tingis are running again. There’s a nine o’clock leaving the North Station. I’m going to hoof it over there and head on home. Okay?”
“You’re leaving?” Taziri blinked, unsure of what to say. “You know, I could really use your help here. And not just with this Medina business. You’re leaving me to fly Halcyon alone. You’re a good pilot and I could really use you right now.”
“I know, and I’m sorry. But my sister needs me more. And with the Crake out of commission, it means I have an excuse to spend more time home with her.”
“I’m sure your sister can manage without you,” Taziri said, letting her frustration show in her face and voice.
“Actually, she can’t,” Ghanima said curtly. “She was in the White Jacana fire.”
Taziri felt a cold flutter in her belly. The White Jacana had just been one more steamer cruising up and down the coast with one cargo or another, a ship of no particular importance until it arrived in Tingis last month late at night during a storm, with five thousand barrels of Songhai oil on board. No one was sure how the fire started, but it spread through half the harbor, consuming tiny fishing boats and heavy trawlers, destroying piers and warehouses along Water Street. They’d pulled bodies from the sea for days and days. Burned bodies, drowned bodies, and bodies half eaten by the fish.
“She was a harbor pilot. She was in her bunk when it happened.” Ghanima swallowed. “She only has a few days left now, they think.”
“I’m sorry,” Taziri said hoarsely, suddenly desperate for the conversation to end before Ghanima explained her sister’s condition in any detail. “I didn’t know. I didn’t think. I’m sorry. Of course you should go home to her.”
Ghanima nodded, shoved her hands in her pockets, and walked away.
Kenan came back over. “Where’s she going?”
“Home.”
“What? Home? Now? Are you kidding me?”
“Let it go, Kenan. Just let her go.” Taziri locked eyes with the marshal for a moment. “Now let’s go see this detective of yours.”
One of the firefighters gave them directions to the hospital and they found the gleaming new medical facility just a few blocks from the remains of the prosthetics shop. The man at the front desk directed them to the second floor where they found a dozen police officers wearing gray coats and grim faces outside Detective Massi’s room. No one was speaking or even moving. Those in chairs stared at their hands while those standing up stared down the halls at nothing in particular. Every now and again, someone cleared their throat.
Taziri caught a nurse’s attention and the young man confirmed that this was the detective’s room and that the patient was still unconscious. Three hours of surgery had closed up the cuts and stitched together the hole in her shoulder, but the blood loss had been considerable. Taziri let the nurse go and felt her legs turning to cold tin and her chest constricting.
Isoke had been cut. Maybe badly, maybe not. Near a fire. Taken to a hospital.
But she knew there weren’t a dozen figures in orange jackets clustered outside her door. There was no one left to worry over her. There was only her husband and their two little boys who liked to hide behind their mother’s legs when Taziri came to visit.
Kenan found a bench just down the hall and they sat on it, staring silently at their hands and at the wall and the doctors and nurses quietly going about their work. None of the police officers asked them who they were or why they were there, but all of them took turns casting cold stares at the intruders wearing orange and red.
After half an hour, Taziri leaned forward. “You know, we could be waiting here all day, all week, and this detective might never wake up. Even if she does wake up, she might not be able to tell us anything. I think we need another plan.”
“That’s what I’ve been thinking.” Kenan sniffed. “I mean, I still want to try to talk to Massi here, but there’s got to be something else we could be doing to find Medina, or Chaou, or the major.”
Taziri shrugged. “Any ideas?”
Kenan stood. “I’m going back to the marshal’s office. I reported the major as missing and the ambassador as a fugitive last night, but who knows what they’re doing about it. I’ll get the whole force moving on this. At least, I’ll try to.”
“What about the whole conspiracy problem?” Taziri asked. “Remember, they’ve got people everywhere. They had a police captain in Chellah. They might have someone in the marshals. You can’t trust anyone to help. In fact, if you talk to the wrong person you could end up like this detective by the end of the day.”
“Well, what do you suggest?” Kenan massaged his injured shoulder. “We don’t know enough. Hell, we don’t know anything! All we know is that an ambassador went crazy and stole an airship and killed some people, and she’s got friends all over the place, and there’s some doctor putting metal plates and electrical devices in people. What does that add up to? What? Tell me what it means, tell me what to
do!”
“Calm down.” She stood beside him and placed her hand against his arm to make the young man stand still. She glanced at the police officers, but they seemed to have closed ranks and were ignoring everyone else. “We can figure this out, one thing at a time. Now, there’s no obvious way to find the major. We don’t even know for sure if he was on the ferry, and even if he was, he could be anywhere by now. Same goes for Chaou. The only lead we have right now is Medina. So I’ll stay here a little while and see if I can learn anything from the detective if she wakes up. Meanwhile, you can try to track down the doctor. She’s obviously popular, judging from the crowd this morning. I’m sure someone can tell you where she lives. Maybe even someone in this hospital. If you can find her, maybe you can sort out if she’s a part of Chaou’s little circle of mayhem or not.”
“What if she’s not?” Kenan looked puzzled.
“I don’t know. We’ll figure it out when we get there. Plan to meet back at the B-and-B tonight around six, okay?”
He nodded and retreated down the hall toward the stairs. When he was gone, Taziri stood up and shuffled through the police officers until she was standing by the open doorway to the detective’s room and she stared at the woman on the bed. All she saw were brown arms on white sheets. It wasn’t a person, not to Taziri, not yet. She couldn’t find the energy to care about this detective. She was full. Full of fires and knives and blood, full of worried families and frightened strangers, full of fear and anxiety for too many people already. There was no room in her for another victim. Not yet.
“How do you know the detective?”
Taziri was about to turn away when she realized the question was directed at her. She looked into the weary face of a young man in a gray coat sitting just beside the open door. He was staring quite sternly at her.
“I don’t. Sorry. I don’t know her at all.”
“Then…why?”
“Why am I here?” Taziri absorbed the question for a moment. “I wanted to ask her what happened. What she saw. Who was there.”
Halcyon (The Complete Trilogy) Page 26