by Patty Jansen
"Do the best you can, and that will have to do."
"No, it won't. I was contracted to keep you safe. That will have to do is not in my job description." What the hell was she even doing here?
These people weren't going to listen to her, a lowly guard. Maybe Braedon would, but he wasn't here and that showed how much he cared.
"Then we hire more security staff," Rehan said. "I'm very reluctant to let them win." But for the first time, he sounded rattled.
Good. He should be. This was a fucking mess.
Mikandra frowned at Izramith. "You said that these people you found have gone missing from the streets of Barresh?"
"Barresh and Hedron, and some other places. On the second day I was here, I found a man stabbed to death in the street. Eris said that he remembered this man as a boy who had gone missing many years ago. Apparently, the Mirani also hold Pengali prisoners. It's strange that no one has ever complained about this."
"People have," Mikandra said, her voice low. "But the council has never done anything. Mostly it was because they were too busy, but also because the Pengali that went missing were mostly people off the streets who didn't have family in the city, or people whose families live in Far Atok and who barely speak keihu, let alone have the confidence to report the disappearance to the council. The other group where young people have gone missing are keihu girls. There are rumours that their fathers sold these girls as whores to the Mirani army. Some even said that the men joke about how their girls would end up killing high-profile soldiers in Miran they're forced to sleep with, because they were mad. But in reality, none of the disappearances ever attracted much attention because the either the disappeared people don't make sympathetic subjects or the keihu established society feels shameful about having received money for them. It's awful."
Now that sounded familiar.
"How do you know all this?"
"I learned most if it when I lived in the big guesthouse in Market Street."
Wait— "You lived there?"
"Yes, I'd come to Barresh alone, but I was robbed. I had no money and no way to leave the place. Jocassa and his friends gave me somewhere to live." Her expression went distant with memories. "Anyway, one night a group of men came into the guesthouse, stationed guards at the exits. They took all the Pengali and keihu people out of the crowd and shone a light in their face. If a light flashed back, they would take the person."
Shit. This had been going on and no one had told her? "Who were these people?"
"Hired thugs. Some local, some Mirani ex-soldiers. No one knew where the people went. We've suspected that they went to Miran for a long time, but there was never any proof. I kind of… made it a personal project, with my mother… You know in Miran, women are taught to care for the sick, the poor and fallen. It's how my mother feels most comfortable. But so far, we haven't had much success, because none of the abducted or sold people ever came back."
"The man we captured said they were held in a wing of an old building. He said it was an old building, in the middle of town. He said there was a courtyard where they were made to stand in the snow. They didn't have contact with other people."
Mikandra's eyes went wide. "The building next to the council hall?"
"He said there were pretty coloured windows and little towers everywhere."
"That's it. How many people?"
"Something like thirty."
Her expression went distant. "I know where they are." Her voice was soft. "I've seen them. You can look into the council compound from the top floor of the Trader Guild building. I was there, in one of the guest rooms and I saw these people in a building I'd thought was abandoned. There was a fire burning in a room and people standing in front of a window looking out. The courtyard with the towers is on the other side of that wing."
"You didn't recognise any of the people?"
"The window isn't close enough to see detail of faces. All I saw were silhouettes."
"My uncle is with them."
"From Hedron?"
Izramith nodded.
In the silence that followed, she met Mikandra's eyes over the table. Here was another person whose personality she had completely mis-judged.
The boy had gotten up from the table and now stood quietly next to the table, a little back from the conversation.
"Yes, Vayra?" Isandra said. "You wanted to say something?"
"I've finished," he said in a clear voice in perfect Hedron Coldi.
"All right then, run along home. Come back again in the morning."
"Can I tell Daddy about carrying the box?"
"Sure, go ahead. Hurry. Your mother will be wondering where you are." She stroked his head, her face tender.
"Bye, grandma." The boy hugged her and ran out the door. She smiled after him.
Izramith let a silence lapse.
"About that boy," she said.
They all looked at her, but no one spoke.
"He is your official family heir, isn't he? This oldest son of the oldest son?"
"He is," Isandra said.
"And he will be walking in the parade?"
"He'll be carrying the box with the arm bands."
"Don't you think he'll be at risk? They will be targeting him."
"We know. That's why we keep quiet about him. He's got enough on his shoulders for his age. We do what we can to protect him."
"He doesn't live with you?"
"No, he lives nextdoor. Anmi, Daya's wife, is his mother."
Izramith didn't ask where the oldest son was. The family was so complicated that it made her head hurt.
Other than Rehan and his bride, this child would be a main target.
Wonderful.
* * *
Izramith walked back from the house seething in anger.
What was the point of hiring people and then undermining them in every way possible? Or giving them only half the information required to do their job?
Daya would have known about the boy, but he was a Hedron person through and through. Like others on Hedron, he didn't care about family in the same way other people did.
Family didn't matter on Hedron. Little else mattered either, except the company, and being polite to each other, and worker's rights. People were all selfish and horrible. Emotion was bad. Too much emotion and you were considered unhinged. Everyone shut their doors at night. The way these people sat around the table and actually talked to each other would never happen at her house. It made her feel cranky and lonely. Seriously, how much effort would it take Mother to send her a message asking how she was?
She felt like kicking something.
And how the hell was she going to solve this security situation with a family that was too stubborn for their own good, without a huge force to lock down the city, without trustworthy support from the Barresh council and with Daya off in politics?
She had almost arrived at the guesthouse when she noticed that a dark figure behind her. To be honest, someone had walked behind her most of the way down Market Street, but she had assumed this person to be just another shopper or someone returning home.
It was not.
She turned around and watched the street. The shops on one side, the apartments above the shops.
A man had stopped under a tree not far back. He was keihu, typically coarsely-built, with a pudgy belly, big arms, dark hair tied back in a ponytail. He glanced aside, and his eyes met hers briefly. Then he took his unit from a pocket and turned sideways, too obviously studying his comm while still keeping an eye on her.
Wow, someone needed to get a lesson in shadowing people.
Izramith continued walking, casually picking up her reader. Her infrared sensor showed him just behind her. She slowed, and he came closer, then ducked behind a tree. She stopped and pretended to study something on the screen. He stopped as well, but not before coming even closer behind her.
Then, when she was almost at the guesthouse gate, she turned around and charged for him. He was so surprised t
hat he didn't move, just watched, open-mouthed. Izramith pinned him to the trunk of the tree.
He squealed like an animal.
"Shut the fuck up." She pressed a hand over his mouth. He tried to bite her fingers so she clamped harder.
"Mmmmmmm!" His face went dark red.
"I'll kill you if you don't shut up. I'm serious."
He fell quiet.
"I'll take my hand away, but one shout and you're dead."
His eyes showed whites on all sides, but he nodded.
She removed her hand. His face was red where she'd clamped him.
"That's better. Now, what do you want?"
"Nothing."
"You were following me for nothing? I'll tell you, Mister. Nobody follows me for nothing."
He swallowed visibly.
He opened his mouth, but said nothing and closed it again. His gaze darted sideways.
Too late, Izramith realised that he wasn't alone. Two more men appeared to her right side, and three to her left. They were all keihu, in dark clothing and no jewellery, but looked clean. One of the men pointed a gun at her from between the folds of his robe.
Shit.
"Put your hands down. If you raise them as far as your waist, you're dead."
Chapter 25
The men led Izramith back down Market Street. They surrounded her on all sides, solemn and silent like walking statues. A few nightly passersby gave the group odd glances, but most people took little notice, although Izramith by now knew that the Barresh rumour machine would be working overtime. The citizens pretended not to notice, but they saw everything. She had perhaps a day, maybe less, to get to the bottom of this before all the townsfolk knew of this excursion. She might not know the men, but those passersby all knew who they were and what they stood for. They drew their own conclusions about her being in their presence.
The commercial building had already come into view when the men turned off the main street into an alley that curved around and then ran behind the larger and more lavish houses of Market Street. One of the men pushed open a back gate and they went into a yard where bushes grew un-clipped into a wild tangle of vegetation. A fountain in the middle of the path was empty and paving broken and uneven. The house loomed on the other side of a pergola, dark, with all windows like gaping holes.
In the corner of the yard, under the pergola was a square stone structure about knee-high, with a lid made from wooden planks. The first man to reach it heaved the wood off to reveal a deep hole in the ground. Some sort of underground passage or drain. The first man climbed down.
Crap. That wasn't in the agreement. Up until now she'd felt that she could escape if the right moment presented itself, but a dark tunnel was not her thing. She couldn't see in the dark as well as they did, and if it came to a fight down there, she would be very much at a disadvantage.
The first men disappeared into the hole. Izramith followed down a rusty ladder, finding the rungs by touch. The air that wafted through smelled of mould and algae. At the bottom of the ladder, she stepped onto solid ground slippery with slime. Some sort of stormwater drainage system. Probably highly dangerous in wet weather.
A man held up a comm unit light. Its bluish glow reflected in walls glistening with slippery algae. They were in a tunnel that disappeared out of sight in both directions. A stream of water moved sluggishly through the lowest part of the tunnel.
They waited while the others came down. The last man pulled the wooden lid over the opening again.
The group set off along the tunnel, all without speaking. The man in front of Izramith carried a light, but in the shadow of his broad back, it was pitch dark to her shitty night vision. Izramith did her best not to show how little she saw. Without her infrared scanner, she was nothing in the dark.
They walked like this for a good while. The man with the light first, then Izramith and then all the others in single file. The only sound was the splashing of footsteps in puddles. The air in the tunnel was stale and smelled of rot and other disgusting things. Izramith tried very hard not to think of the corridors in the second level of the old settlement. Or huge eels.
Most of the time, the group moved in pitch darkness, but every now and then, an opening in the tunnel's roof would let in fresh air and a smattering of light if there happened to be a street light or a house above.
Izramith attempted to remember the turns they took, in case she had to get out in a hurry, but had no particular faith in her memory. If she had to flee, she'd be in big trouble.
Then the man in front of her turned right, up a set of stairs and through a narrow passage. The ground became dry here, and smelled of stone. He stopped at a door and knocked.
The door opened a crack. A warm glow and a smell of food spilled out, and the sound of a male voice. There was a short exchange of words in keihu and then the door opened further.
The first man went inside. The man behind Izramith said in a low voice, "Any funny business, and you're dead." As if to illustrate his words, the low light glinted off the surface of his gun's barrel.
She went through the door and came out into a large cellar room furnished as bar. Rows of stone pillars held up the low ceiling. Some of these pillars held wall brackets with light pearls. The feeble greenish glow from the pearls showed tables and chairs, many with bowls and plates, bottles and cups. At a quick count, she guessed there were at least fifty men in the room. The air was heavy with the scent of food, liquor and sweat.
When the group came in, conversations stopped, men turned in their seats.
At the far end of the room was a larger table with about eight men around it. The first of her captors spoke with one of the men. He was a rotund, grey-haired fellow and Izramith was going to assume that the younger man was his son.
The older man eyed her past the younger man's shoulder with downright hostile beady eyes. He didn't look familiar to her. Neither did the younger man look familiar now that he was in the light and she could see his face properly.
"Sit down," he said.
Two others at the table vacated their spots and retreated to the wide circle of onlookers—men only—that formed.
Izramith sat down, trying to take in the faces of those around the table. They were all keihu men, well-to-do heads of families in tent-like robes, wearing glittering jewellery and beads and plaits in their hair. It was a pity that their noses were so ugly.
The young men with the guns took up position behind her and for a while no one said anything.
Then a man with grey-flecked hair said, "We're waiting."
And there was another silence.
Waiting was fine with her. She stared at each man in turn. None could meet her eyes for very long. A low level of talk had returned to the other parts of the room.
There was a sound of a door opening. A pair of feet in sandals appeared on the stairs in the corner of the room. Then a wide robe, dark red, held out of the way by a pudgy, be-ringed hand.
Two men at the bottom of the stairs made a greeting.
The newcomer emerged fully from the stairs. With his bushy and curly hair, his broad face and shiny, pore-riddled skin, she had definitely seen him before: it was the councillor Jisson Semisu.
He strode across the room and sat down across the table from Izramith with a tinkle of arm bands. He tucked a curly strand of hair behind his ear. A smile played on his face, but his red cheeks made him look flustered.
"Surprised, huh?"
"Well, yes." What did his presence here mean? That he was trying to undermine his own council? He was supposed to be Daya's advisor, not a supporter of men who kidnapped her.
He reached over the table and pulled a carafe and two glasses closer.
"Drink?"
"No, thanks."
"Suit yourself. It's safe." He poured one glass of pale orange liquid.
Izramith folded her arms over her chest. The uneasy silence lingered.
He took a sip from the glass, put it down on the table and met her eyes with a gri
n. "See? Not poisoned, huh?"
Izramith said nothing and let his attempt at levity hang there.
"What am I doing here?"
He put his hands on the table and joined the fingertips. He was trembling. "Well, it's like this—understand that Daya knows none of this, but since you captured Ridan—" He glanced aside. "And Ridan will probably have told you some of the story—and it's important that you understand our version of it—"
Just tell me the fucking story. I don't have all day.
He flinched at her glare. "Well, it's like this. You probably don't agree with any of it, but a keihu custom is that we—no I should say we used to—marry many times. Each time we married, a man would pay the woman's family an agreed amount of money. Which meant that having girls was valuable for parents. This meant that there were a lot of girls born. You know there are methods to… determine the sex before birth. There are methods so that each man only has one son and many daughters. This happened for years.
"Then one day, poof." He spread his hands. "Not allowed to marry more than once anymore. Not allowed to pay for it either. Many families had to rip up contracts and there was nowhere for all their daughters to go."
"I see in your face that you think it serves us right, but tell that to the mothers who hoped to marry their daughters off well and use the money to live comfortably in their old age. Tell them that. Tell that to the people who were respected in this town and whose many years of work has been thoughtlessly shoved aside. Tell that to the people who constantly have to hear that their fat and lazy and only out for the money, who, for years made sure that the town didn't slide into outright war. Tell it to the fathers whose children are unhappy because everything they were promised they could be is no longer. The sons who can't find work, the daughters who can't find husbands. Tell them that."