City of Lies

by Sam Hawke

  Tain stared at him, baffled, but my face grew hot as things fell together in my head. The powder in his room. Varina and Hassan’s apparently drunken demeanors. Varina in Council, wan, constantly sniffing, red-eyed.… I’d assumed it had been tiredness and stress. Just as we had assumed the foreigner bribing the sewer guard had been Batbayer. How many more false assumptions had we made?

  “Honor-down, Hasan,” I said, any remaining energy dropping from me. “What were you using?”

  He licked his lips, gaze darting between us. “It was a new cut,” he said. “Our supplier calls it mist. We had … stronger … stuff we were trying, but we were mixing it to make it milder.”

  Tain blew out his breath, catching up. “You were mixing hallucinogens?” He swore. “And your supplier?”

  “Batbayer,” Hasan said. He frowned. “You said you knew that.… Credo Jovan—and his sister—they saw us. The lunch. And Branno’s.”

  I rubbed my forehead, fighting the urge to pace, and shifted my weight between my feet, left and right, sets of eight. “The powder we took from Varina’s chest. It was the drug?”

  “Of course. Listen, please—”

  “For the love of … why, why did you not say something when we arrested you?” Tain kicked the wall, shouting. “We thought you were bloody poisoners! If you were only using drugs, why would you think we’d haul you to jail?”

  Hasan pulled at his hair. “For the selling. I thought you knew we were selling, it’s—”

  “It’s a crime.” It was, just not a common one. Decades ago, as trade was exploding in the city but the Guilds were not yet properly equipped to police imports, Silasta had been inundated by a range of narcotic substances from around the world: hallucinogenic smoke, powders, creams made from certain insect shells, even atrapis tinctures, which were medicinal in certain circumstances but toxic in large quantities. The medical and criminal consequences had been significant, and the Council had outlawed recreational drugs in an attempt to stop the problem. It had worked; in our lifetime, drugs had never been common in Silasta. I’d certainly never heard of anyone arrested for selling them, and I’d had no idea a new one had found its way to Silasta. “But Varina’s a Councilor. And a Credola. Did you not think it strange that we’d come storming in like that? Why didn’t you object?”

  “It’s not just that it’s a crime,” Tain said suddenly. “It’s your Guild, isn’t it?”

  Hasan nodded. “If word got out we’d been using, our music, our performances, my reputation, it would all be discredited. You can’t let people know, Honored Chancellor. Please. I never composed using it. It was just for fun. And then it got harder and harder to resist … and people want something to take their minds off things these days.”

  The stupidity of it almost made me laugh. All these two idiots had been worried about were their precious reputations in the Guild. They’d been frightened and incoherent when we arrested them and none of us had realized we were at cross-purposes. A new cut of some experimental hallucinogen; no wonder I hadn’t been able to identify the damn powder.

  Varina gave us the same story. Though less pathetic than her companion, she confessed to using the substance—though not to selling it—and admitted she’d been afraid it would affect her reputation and position. Even sniffling and red-eyed, her skin damp and face drawn, she retained her imperious air.

  “If I had not been affected by the mist—in a private home, no less—I would never have allowed you to treat me this way,” the Theater-Guilder said, chin high and voice hoarse but chilly. “I am a Councilor. You cannot throw us in these mangy holes and expect no repercussions.”

  Tain gave a humorless bark of a laugh. “The Chancellor was poisoned, Varina,” he said. “And we were attacked while our army is skirmishing with Doran. And here you were, cozying up to a Doranite man, accepting strange powders from him in dark corners. We confronted you, said you’d betrayed Silasta, and you didn’t disagree. What did you expect us to do? You’re lucky Marco or, fortune favor you, Aven, wasn’t there—you’ve heard what they think about crimes in time of war, and you’d have been lucky to get out of your room with your head.”

  “A meaningless threat, since justice in this country isn’t run by the military,” she retorted. “Much as their pathetic Guild might wish it were.”

  “Well, maybe if it was we wouldn’t be in the middle of a damn siege,” he snapped back.

  “I wouldn’t say that near dear Credola Aven,” Varina said, “or you’ll be giving up your chancellery before you know it. Violent, power-hungry creatures they are, I—”

  I couldn’t even participate in the conversation. It was all I could do to keep any of my attention focused on them; while my brain whirled with the new information and tried to sort and reconcile it, my feet carried me back and forth, back and forth, and the insistent rhythm played out in my head. The longer this situation went on, the more the compulsions built up, so by the time Tain was satisfied with his questioning, there were five different patterns: pacing, hands squeezing, toes scrunching, thighs tensing, and teeth clicking. Counting sets of eight for each muscle group took all my concentration. If I didn’t get a handle on it soon I’d end up stuck down here all day, trapped by my escalating madness. I hated myself for my lack of control, but I could no sooner stop the patterns now than grow wings and fly out of there.

  “Jov,” Tain said, touching both his hands to my shoulders in a firm, gentle grip. “Jov, come on.”

  He led me back down the corridor toward the main chamber. Walking, I concentrated hard on four of the patterns until my jaw could relax, then three, until my thighs went the same way, then two, until my poor crushed toes were able spread out in my shoes again. By the time we entered the main chamber, I was down to counting steps and hand squeezes, a manageable level.

  Used to my limitations, Tain waited, patient, as I circled the room. Getting frustrated didn’t help, but the compulsions had never before been so desperately inconvenient.

  Eventually the pacing urge abated. Without judgment, Tain spoke as if no time had passed. “I’ll get the guard to release those two,” he said. “Honor-down, we’re barely holding off the rebels. What are we going to do?”

  We headed up the long staircase, and the count in my head with each step lacked the frenzy from below. “I wonder,” I began, then stopped.

  The sight before us registered like a punch in the stomach.

  The guard’s body filled the staircase. Blood pooled beneath her and crept over the edge of the stairs. She lay backward as she’d fallen, her head hanging over the edge of one step, eyes staring wide and sightless like a grotesque doll. Tain sprang toward her, but I caught him.

  “Wait,” I whispered, my heart rate accelerating. “Look how she died.” I crouched, trying to source the blood. “Stabbed or struck from behind.” My voice sounded thin, squeezed past the tightness in my throat.

  “From downstairs,” Tain said, eyes wide. Whoever did this came from inside the jail, not outside. As one, we turned and raced down the stairs and back into the corridor. We’d passed by the Darfri prisoner’s cell on the way in and out without noticing anything. Surely he couldn’t have escaped. He had nothing in there to break out with. But dread gripped my chest.

  We reached the cell and stopped short. He hadn’t escaped. In fact, he’d never be leaving that cell, at least not the way he came in.

  He lay facedown in front of the pallet, as though he’d risen to meet whoever had opened the door. A lake of blood soaked the floor under his head, dark and glimmering. I felt numb as Tain pushed open the unlocked door. We picked our way over to the sprawling corpse and Tain crouched to check for signs of life. He tentatively moved the man’s head, exposing the massive, ugly wound across his throat. I turned away, my stomach roiling. His killer had nearly sliced his head off. Death had become a commonplace sight in the last few weeks, but somehow the savagery of this one, this murder of a nameless, unarmed prisoner, unsettled me more than all the rest.

&nb
sp; Tain dropped the man’s head back down and stood, fists clenching. By unspoken consent, we left the cell and moved out of sight of that horror, back to the main chamber. The empty desk and chair, which should have been filled by a warden, mocked us. It had seemed like such an obvious idea to pull the jail staff onto more important duties. That decision might have cost us critical information, and two people’s lives.

  We found the keys to the cells abandoned on the guard’s body on the stairs. Her killer must have dropped them there as they fled. The jail logbook she’d carried was gone—I’d expected nothing else, of course. Our enemy didn’t make mistakes. Indeed, our enemy could do whatever he or she wanted, without fear of us bumbling into their path. They had come in, stolen the keys, waited until we had gone to speak to Varina, then killed a prisoner and the guard on the way out, all without us hearing a thing.

  I sat in the empty warden’s chair, feeling more pathetic, more incompetent, than ever before.

  * * *

  Anger and frustration drove me as I headed to our apartment. We’d released Varina and Hasan—there hardly seemed any need to keep them locked up, and their fear of being exposed to their Guild had made them practically volunteer to keep the whole matter silent. A certain stiffness and pride had been missing when they had left the jail through the Manor exit.

  I rounded the last corner and saw a silhouette outlined against the light from our side window; just a glimpse as the figure slipped through our gardens. Heart thumping, I flattened myself around a corner and watched as the figure crossed the road and disappeared into the far side of the Ashes’ garden.

  As I’d hoped, he’d used the garden as a route back to the smaller lane that ran parallel to the road, lower down the hill. Having cut through there many times myself, even in the gray moonlight, I knew the best place to climb the wall and slide down the other side, and I was closer to that point than my quarry. I ducked behind the fair lady bush by the wall and waited.

  Beyond the fat, silvery leaves he flitted wraithlike across the overgrown lawn, a hooded shadow. I waited until he had two hands and one knee on top of the wall, then slipped out from behind the fair lady, grabbed his free leg, and pulled.

  With a grunt he fell backward, landing hard on his backside. I might have been stiff and exhausted but it took little energy to drop my knee down onto the base of his sternum, then twist an arm around behind him, forcing him to his side as I sat on his hips.

  He bucked and wriggled, but my knee had winded him and he wheezed feebly.

  “What were you doing at my house?” I used my free hand to pull the hood off his head, and was completely unprepared for what greeted me.

  “He” was a “she”—tall and wiry, with unruly hair half-obscuring a face twisted in a combination of scowl and pant.

  She gasped in pain, then abruptly stopped struggling. Between sucking breaths she spat her hair out of her mouth and glared up at me, still but for the unsteady rise and fall of her chest.

  “Who are you, and what were you doing at my house?”

  She muttered a curse.

  “Let’s try again,” I said. “I think you know my name. What’s yours?”

  “None of your concern,” she spat.

  I gave her arm a fresh twist and she arched her back, hissing in pain. This time I clearly understood the word she called me. “It rather seems like it is,” I told her. “Why were you at my house?”

  After a moment of meeting her scowl with silence, she unclenched her jaw and spoke, more civilly, but with apparent distaste. “I was delivering a message.” The long vowels and lilting cadence of her voice were similar to the Darfri prisoner’s.

  “You’re from the estates,” I guessed aloud, and relaxed my grip, a little. “You left your necklace at my house.” I looked at her more closely. “And I’ve seen you before. You’ve been watching me.”

  “So he is not as thick as he looks,” she replied, contemptuous. Her eyes raked over me. They were faintly green in the moonlight. “It would not be hard, I suppose.”

  “This isn’t the best time for insults, given your situation.”

  “Ha!” She blew another chunk of errant hair out of her mouth. “You think I do not know you need us? We have seen you floundering about trying to talk to Darfri in the city. I even followed your clumsy tracks through our catacombs.” She twisted to see my reaction, and laughed at my shock.

  “You? You were following me in the caves?” I thought back. The figure behind me had always been hidden by shadow. I had glimpsed the knife, but only my assumption had painted my assailant as male. “You tried to kill me?”

  “Kill you?” If possible, her contempt intensified. “I strolled after your lame-bird tracks to see where you went. Why would I try to kill you?”

  I stared at her, confusion rising. “You had a knife.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “I always have a knife. You would too if you were Darfri living in this city.” She smirked. “I did not realize how close behind you I was. You saw me and feared me, then? Good. Perhaps it felt like our people feel when they are hunted down through the streets of their own city like vermin.”

  There was satisfaction but no deception in her expression. Remembering my abject terror during that dark chase, humiliation flooded me. It had all been in my mind, fueled by my own fears and projections. “Suppose I believe you. What’s the message? You’re here, I’m here. Why don’t you deliver it?”

  “Let me up first.”

  I hesitated. But, honor-down, she wasn’t wrong—we did need the Darfri. Now more than ever, since we had been so wrong about Batbayer and Varina. Releasing her arm, I stepped back, wary. She rolled to a sitting position and rubbed her upper arm and shoulder. Now that I could see her properly, I wondered how I could have mistaken her for a man. She was as tall as me, or taller, and her shoulders were broad, but her scowling face, painted with shadows and swathes of dark hair, was undeniably feminine. The gray cloak had fallen open, revealing a red cotton blouse, stitched with bright contrasting colors.

  “You’re welcome,” I offered to her silence.

  Her mouth twitched, but whether she suppressed a smile or a further insult, I couldn’t tell. She raised her chin and crossed her legs, spine straight, watching me without apprehension.

  “Your message?” I tried again.

  “It is not mine,” she said, not hiding her resentment. “My mother’s. She was too afraid to come out, but she would not be talked out of this madness.”

  My heart beat faster, pumping in my ears like a drum. “What’s your mother’s message, then?”

  “She wants to meet with you,” she said, the set of her jaw making it clear how she felt about this idea. “She thinks you and the Chancellor might listen to her about why our people have risen against this broken city of lies.”

  “And you disagree.”

  “Yes!” Her eyes flashed. “The Council betrayed us. You all did. And now you are getting what you deserve. Ruin.”

  “So why deliver the message?”

  She shrugged. “I love my mother. Would you disrespect yours so?”

  My throat tightened. “I don’t even know if my mother’s still alive,” I told her. “We’re in a bloody siege, and she’s out there somewhere. And someone in here killed my Tashi, so frankly I don’t have that many people left to disrespect.”

  At that she did drop her gaze. “Spirits protect them.”

  We both fell silent, the momentary drop in hostility making it suddenly, intensely, uncomfortable. I took a step backward, gesturing for her to stand. She rose in a single, graceful movement, and covered her hair and clothes again. “I will take you to her,” she said.

  “I don’t think so.” Perhaps she didn’t intend to attack me herself, but I would not be so foolish as to put myself at the mercy of a people who viewed us as responsible for some great ill. “We can meet at my apartments.”

  “Ha! Do you know what would happen to my family if it was discovered we talked to you?” She folded
her arms and looked me over, her superior height allowing her an imperious air. “It was enough risk for me to leave you a message.”

  I nodded slowly. “We showed … Someone saw it, and they said whoever left it was a traitor.”

  “Many would regard us as traitors for seeking a peaceful meeting with you.” She tightened her arms across her chest. “Who did you show? That was a private message for you alone. Can we not even trust you not to—”

  “Well it wasn’t a terribly clear message, was it?” I snapped back. “You could have left a note.”

  She scoffed. “And what would I have put in it? My handprint?” She shook her head at my slow understanding. “You assume everyone has the luxuries you enjoy, or do you just not care to think about it?”

  My face grew hot. We knew the capital had ceased to oversee the regional schools, but honor-down, were there even schools anymore? Surely things couldn’t have gotten so bad that country children weren’t being taught to read and write?

  “You must have been here for weeks,” I said, suddenly wary. “And you’ve been watching me. Why haven’t you come forward before now?”

  “We came to see the Chancellor, not you.” She looked away. “My mother had met him, some time ago, and for some reason believed he could be trusted. She is very trusting, my mother. And we have my young brother to think of.” She gave me a fierce look, and I felt a sudden strange kinship with her. I knew too well what it was like to protect a person like that. “You and your friend are the men who seized power after he died so mysteriously. I did not want my mother approaching you until I had a sense of who you were. Now. Will you meet with her, or not?”

  I searched her defiant face, and found some comfort in her open hostility. “Not my house, then. But not the caves, either. If your people think your family are traitors for speaking to me, I’m not going in any dark spaces with them lurking about. We’ll meet somewhere we’re all safe.”

  * * *

  “I don’t think they’re coming.” My compulsions grew the longer we waited. I had let myself get too invested, too excited at the prospect of uncovering the missing parts of the puzzle. But now, here we were, waiting before dawn in a deserted old gazebo in a garden we’d once favored for games of Muse, running out of time and hope that this Darfri family would turn up, while also fearing we were being deceived yet again. Imaginative disastrous scenarios swam around my brain, over and over, until my head felt as if it would burst from the effort of keeping my thoughts straight.