The City of Lies

by Robert J. Crane

  Flex. Please. You can be an umbrella. Give me some flex here.

  I slammed it down, leaping forward—

  The spear didn’t flex. But it did carry me up, up, a pole vaulter for whom life and death were the only prizes—

  I reached out one-handed as the lever came close—

  My fingers found it.

  I slammed it down.

  Instantaneously there was a whine from somewhere above. The locking mechanism released.

  I kicked off the wall, landing hard on my feet—

  The door to the last chamber exploded into splinters.

  Vardinn surged in, their eyes alighting on me immediately.

  The frontmost, with only one horn and clad in a scrap of blue cloth that left little to the imagination, opened his mouth and roared. The sound was deafening, and spittle flew from around yellowed teeth—

  I didn’t pause to say farewell. Just made one last panicked sprint for the exit.

  I yanked the door backward instead, looking out and up—

  The descending stone locking mechanism was barely six feet from the ground, occluding much of the door. Gravity pulled it closer every moment.

  I yelped, ducking down. I threw myself into a desperate roll as the wall groaned—

  I landed hard in a great layer of dust that did nothing to break my fall.

  For a moment, I had the frightful sight of a Vardinn ducking too, surging forward with naught but rage on its face—

  And then the locking wall slammed to earth. The Vardinn’s cry was muted, short. Its sole horn had snapped clean off. It rolled, leaving a trail in the dust before slowing to a stop.

  I stared, on my backside, unable to stand. We all stared.

  Carson was first to speak.

  “Did, err … did he just get crushed?”

  The only sound between us was the diminishing echo of the alarm system wailing in the next city sector.

  “Can’t they just reset the locking wall now?” Carson said nervously. “I mean, they’re right there with the controls. So maybe we should get moving.”

  “I doubt it can be reset that easily or quickly once it has been triggered,” Heidi said. But she did not brook an argument, and nor did I, so after a moment to catch a little of our breath, we set off.

  A few meters down the road, Carson turned back.

  “What are you—”

  I turned back to see he’d jogged to the Vardinn’s broken horn. Tapping it tentatively with his foot, he hesitated, then stooped to pick it up. Clutching it to his chest—the thing was almost the size of his torso—he rejoined Heidi and me.

  “Uh … Okay?”

  We carried on in silence, retracing our steps. Again, none of us needed to recheck the route. Heidi and I were on alert the whole way, and Decidian’s Spear stayed at full length in my grip.

  After what felt like an age, we crossed Tarrentius’s outer wall, and skulked back out to the battlefield. As we went and the sea of debris grew thicker, I wasn’t sure which I preferred navigating: a dust-covered city reduced to rubble, or enough broken and scrap metal to keep a recycling plant busy for the next eight years.

  As we drew near to the derelict war machine, Carson took a stumble, landing hard on his backside.

  Heidi gave him a flat look. “Watch where you’re going.”

  “Sorry.” He levered up using only his legs. It didn’t look easy.

  “What are you doing with that thing?” Heidi asked icily of the horn gripped to his chest.

  “It’s a souvenir.”

  She harrumphed, but didn’t reply.

  Our exit point was obvious against the war machine’s hull thanks to the dust my gateway had loosed from its soft etchings. I nevertheless checked the compass to ensure we were coming out in south London, then cut us through.

  I stepped through last. I neither looked back, nor did I shrink Decidian’s Spear to an umbrella again until I was flying through the firework show that was the space between worlds.

  6

  We’d set out early in the AM, when the increasingly characteristic summer heat was just starting to ramp up. (It was mid-May, for goodness sake. Why were the temperatures hitting twenty-five degrees? And that’s Celsius, as opposed to whatever fruit-loop system Carson’s people use. Savages.)

  By the time we got to my hideaway, it was early afternoon. The day was still getting hotter and would be until four, at which point I would feel like a rotisserie chicken.

  Though London was never lacking in foot traffic, the pre-summer heat wave had people out in force—so cutting an opening by Tortilla and slipping through was relatively easy; all we had to do was wait for the right crowd to pass, blocking us from the rest of the world, and disappear undetected.

  On the plus side: the library was cool. It was the sort of place where the floor was always cold. Right about now, I loved that about it.

  Carson disappeared into the study with his prized Vardinn horn, no doubt to plop it down on the round table in the room’s middle. Some centerpiece. Heidi and I, meanwhile, trudged into the kitchen.

  I opened the fridge, a strange contraption that was all brass gears like the inner workings of a wristwatch, or perhaps one of Lady Angelica’s butlers. We’d taken to refilling bottles and sticking them in here, and a whole shelf beckoned me. I retrieved two, handed one to Heidi, and took a third for Carson.

  Just before closing the door, I hesitated. What about Burbondrer?

  “Where’s the orc?” I asked Heidi over my shoulder.

  “First of all,” Heidi said, pausing to take a long swig, “I haven’t the foggiest. And second of all—” another long swallow “—I hope you’re aware that if I said that, you’d have told me that he has a name. And that name is …?”

  I frowned. “Hmm.”

  “Wrong,” Heidi said as I closed the fridge again. “It’s Burbondrer of Ockle-whatever.”

  “What about Bub?” Carson asked, stepping into the kitchen. Then, taking the water I handed him: “Thanks.”

  “Mira wants to know where he is.”

  Carson gulped half the bottle down. Heaved a breath. “Oh.” He sucked in another. “I found a note from him in the study. Here.”

  He handed it to me.

  I read. And re-read, because Burbondrer’s handwriting was not particularly neat.

  “And?” Heidi prompted.

  “Um. I don’t know.” I handed it to her. “You’re the language expert.”

  She peered at it. “That’s English. What you speak. And you,” she added to Carson, “theoretically.”

  “So where’d he go?” I asked.

  “Business to attend to. He doesn’t say what.”

  “In London?” Carson asked.

  “He doesn’t say, but I have a hard time imagining him roaming about Harrod’s without comment.”

  Carson thought for a long moment. Then he said, “I think we should go visit the Mirrish.”

  The sudden change in tack threw me for a loop, and I paused, bottle halfway to my lips. An eyebrow drifted up my forehead. “Now?”

  Carson hesitated. “Well, it’s only half past two.”

  I groaned.

  “That’s a no?” he said.

  “I’m tired, Carson. I'm famished beyond belief. We just got back. I’m caked in dust. And so are you,” I said, trying to sound kindly instead of put out. “We look like we’ve just come back from Mars, and I’m only slightly less breathless than were that actually the case. I need a shower.”

  And about a week’s worth of decompression time. Barely outrunning a herd of twelve-foot bull people who’d gore me in a heartbeat? I was lucky I didn’t have PTSD.

  “Tomorrow?” he said hopefully.

  I held back a huff of breath. Tiredness wasn’t an excuse for getting snippy at Carson. Heidi did that enough.

  “Can we work this out later?” I asked. “I need a burrito.”

  And before I could get an answer, I sidled past and out the doorway.

  “Sure
you do,” Heidi called after me. “Say hi to burrito boy for us, hmm?”

  I ignored her, already thinking of Clay.

  Tortilla was, as expected, pretty full when I arrived. But I managed to get served in a reasonable time, and also discovered that my favorite window seat upstairs was unoccupied.

  Sliding into it, I loosed a sigh that didn’t bring much relief at all.

  On my lonesome, I alternately people-watched and peered at the Strand, shading my eyes against the sun and making quick work of my burrito.

  I finished it without realizing. The hole had been filled, but I was just … quiet.

  Catching myself, I exhaled.

  Just what was I thinking?

  Nothing solid would come, so I picked over the emotions, trying to unravel the tangled mess inside my head from there.

  First: gratitude. Mainly for Carson for … I wasn’t sure what. Just being who he was, I guess. But there was more than a smidge of gratitude to Heidi as well. She hadn’t entirely warmed in the short time since we’d made amends outside the final temple in our quest for the Tide of Ages; she still disappeared beneath a veil of ice, distant and prickly. Yet she was softer now than she had been in the weeks before. Nicer. She’d agreed to go on this wild goose chase too, all to indulge Carson, and I was thankful for that.

  Second: resignation. Because this was a wild goose chase, no question about that. Our first big quest as a united team was destined to be fruitless. That it was Carson’s quest made me feel worse.

  I didn’t want to see his heart break. And yet I couldn’t stand in his way.

  And underlining it all was spent adrenaline, floating around the very bottom reaches of my inner lake like the frigid, blackest waters in the depths of the Mariana Trench. So much of it lingered, my body unable to filter it out. Only way I was shaking this off was through sleep—and a whole lot of it.

  I tapped the tabletop, closing my eyes.

  “Nice view, isn’t it?” came a voice from behind. A male voice.

  I scrabbled, turning around, expecting Clay—

  But though the voice had been familiar, it was not Clayton whose eyes I met now.

  It was Emmanuel.

  My brother.

  7

  I realize I don’t talk much about my family. So let me tell you a bit about us. About them.

  My parents were Seekers too. No idea how they came together, Jacob Brand of Essex, England, and Ileara Agbaje from Lagos, Nigeria. Maybe they met on some high-stakes quest, their own search for a personal Chalice Gloria or Tide of Ages. I never asked, and they never told me.

  They didn’t talk to me a whole lot. Emmanuel was the apple of their eye. He had just turned six when I was born, so while I was screaming and keeping them up all night long, Emmanuel was beginning to learn all about Seekers and our shared cultures. While I was clinging and whining as a baby, then stumbling around the house as a toddler—forcing my parents to squirrel their treasures away lest I topple and smash them—while I was scrawling on walls in crayon, and somehow finding my way into the family library the one time my dad forgot to close the door, coming back to find pages of their revered tomes scrunched up, dirtied, ripped—during all of this, Emmanuel was the perfect picture of a young Seeker.

  In a different world, I might have started school and followed in his footsteps.

  But Camille came along. My younger sister, just shy of four years younger than me. I missed her fourteenth birthday. And I appreciate I talk about her even less.

  But I spent my entire life bookended. The middle child for as long as I can consciously remember, I’ve always been in a kind of limbo between Emmanuel, the Seeker to follow in my parents’ footsteps, and my younger sister, the baby of the family, who for whatever reason wasn’t resented the way they seemed to resent me.

  Did I resent them?

  I don’t think so.

  Maybe.

  Probably.

  Not Camille. We got on well.

  But my parents? It was hard not to resent them for telling me that I couldn’t follow the path my brother was carving, when that was what I wanted more than anything in the world.

  It’s harder not to resent the object of your parents’ complete, undivided affection.

  And here he was, in Tortilla: my older brother, Emmanuel Brand—the king of the world as far as my parents were concerned. The sun might as well have risen and set in his arse.

  I thrust to my feet, spluttering. “What the—?”

  “Don’t pop your clogs. Come on and sit, sis.” Bypassing me in a long stride, he plonked himself down all too easily on the other side of my table. Just as casually, he reached for a piece of meat that remained in my burrito bowl. Popping it in his mouth, he chewed once and swallowed, and grinned. It was a carefree sideways lift of the lips, revealing very white teeth.

  I stared.

  He said, “Pop your backside down, hmm, Meer?” Only it wasn’t a request; this was pure instruction.

  “Don’t call me that,” I said.

  “Meer?” He drew it out, adding a few too many ‘e’s to the nickname I had despised every second it clung to me.

  “Yes,” I hissed. “You know I don’t like it.”

  “But we were so alliterative, the three of us. Manny, Meer, and Millie.”

  “Mira begins with an ‘m’ too.”

  Emmanuel rolled his eyes. “Just as impossible as ever, aren’t you? Gotta grow up sometime, kiddo.”

  I wanted to shout, I am grown up! But it seemed like one of those things you instantly invalidated by saying. Plus there was something infuriating about Emmanuel that choked me up in a way no one else could, strangling my words dead in my throat before they’d come out.

  So I stared, eyebrows knitted low.

  Another eye roll. Slouching backward, Emmanuel said, “Just sit, would you?”

  “Why?”

  “No one in the family has seen you since January. Can’t indulge one of us for even five minutes?”

  Camille, yes. Mum or Dad, maybe at a push. But Emmanuel? No. No way. I didn’t want to indulge him for even five seconds.

  I was about to turn on my ankle and just high tail it out of there, cutting a gateway back to my hideout before he could follow. Two problems with that though. One, Emmanuel was irritatingly tall, and with long loping legs like those, he’d have overtaken me before I hit the bottom of the stairs.

  And two, he leaned forward again and picked up another stray piece of meat fallen from my burrito, and just the sight of him popping it into his mouth, easy as you please, made my blood boil.

  I had to give him a piece of my mind.

  I sat, throwing myself down more than anything.

  Emmanuel smirked. “There we go—”

  “Shut up,” I told him. “Just shut up. And wipe that bloody smile off your face.”

  I had the opposite effect. Emmanuel’s grin widened. Eyebrows drifting, he leaned back, appraising me. “Some fire’s got into my baby sister. And there I was worrying you hadn’t inherited the Brand spark.”

  “You’re an arrogant—”

  “Ah ah ah,” Emmanuel cut off, wagging a finger. “No bad language, Meer. You know what Mum would say.”

  “Mum can—”

  “Ah ah ahhh.” More finger wags.

  My eyes bulged.

  I bit back my rage before it exploded in an expletive-filled tirade that would have the next ten generations of Brand children banned from Tortilla.

  “Always the favorite,” I muttered. “It made you smarmy, Manny.”

  “Nothing wrong with a bit of confidence.”

  “I’ve met confident people. You’re just an arse.”

  Manny just rolled his shoulders, reclining in his seat as though he were on a sun lounger at the beach. Probably a diamond-encrusted one, going by the grin on his face.

  Damn, how I’d come to hate that face. His teeth were too white. His nose was too perfect. His dark eyes were too gleeful, all the time. His hair was black, just long
enough that his fringe would sweep across his forehead if he shifted. Now and again he brushed it aside with easy, calloused fingers.

  Women would find him handsome. I knew that, and I wanted to shake every single one of them who got that idea in their head, and say, But he is a full-of-himself idiot!

  I’d thought time away would soften me. Instead, it had only driven the knife in another half-inch.

  “I hate you,” I told him.

  “No, you don’t.”

  True. But I didn’t correct him. “Are Mum and Dad happy with what they’ve made you?”

  Emmanuel cocked an eyebrow. “This should be interesting.”

  “If people knew you—”

  “They know me just fine.” Emmanuel flashed teeth, pocking a dimple in one cheek. “Jealous, Meer?” Before I could answer, he continued, sitting forward. “You always were.” The fringe shifted across his forehead. He ignored it for now. “But can you really blame them from discouraging you? It’s dangerous work, being a Seeker.” He leaned a little closer. “You don't even have the proper gear, do you?” He nodded at the chain around my neck. “Do you even have any other talismans?” He brandished a little keychain-looking device with a flourish. He had a dozen talismans on there, clinking against each other, each with a different pattern, indicating that they came from other worlds. His smirk was insufferable.

  “Didn't know I needed more than one,” I said, giving him a hollow, nasty grin, one I did not fully feel. “I've been doing just fine without talismans from other worlds. I found the Chalice Gloria, after all.” I allowed that a moment to sink in. “Not one of you should have ever questioned my capability.”

  “The Chalice Gloria. Hmm. Yes, I did hear.” The glittering of his eyes dimmed just for a moment as he asked, “Where are you keeping it?”

  “None of your business.”

  He was unperturbed; just carried on smiling in that infuriating way that made me want to hit him. Or wish that he’d shown up before I’d finished my burrito so I could smear the thing all over the stupid face of his.

  “Mum and Dad were discouraging for your own good,” he said. “And yes, I’ll concede that it sounds as though you’ve had a good run of things so far. But really, Meer. Can you blame them for wanting you to come home? I mean, their little girl endangering her life, loitering in London restaurants in her downtime …”