The Imbued Lockblade (Sol's Harvest Book 2)

by M. D. Presley

  During one of his morning sessions with his sister, Lela surprised him by speaking around a subject for once:

  “I see Bo has still not taken a wife.”

  “And?”

  “And it’s not gone amiss that you have not taken one, either.”

  Secrets rarer than real gold in the wolari, all were aware of Bo’s predilections, but Luca did not care for her insinuation as he mustered all his available sarcasm.

  “What am I ever to do now that Saiera is off the table?”

  “And with child,” Lela replied, spilling a secret from her midwifery work into Luca’s lap. Some weeks ago, she broke away from her mentor, Dorenia, and had already secured her own clientele. Over the last two years, Simza’s influence increased daily, their wolari’s numbers swelling with defectors from other Ikus camps to the point they required two midwives. But Luca’s goals could not have been further from the idea of a wife as he shrugged.

  “I haven’t found a woman worth my while.”

  “But not one worth sharing your bed?” Lela pronounced the last word pointedly, and Luca realized she was right. Since he had given up on Jaelle, she was always the furthest thing from his mind, and not an hour went by that he did not congratulate himself for not thinking on her. But his sister was correct: he had still not taken a woman into his vurd since giving up on the girl, and the endless possibilities made him grin.

  “Well, there’s no night like tonight.”

  Unfortunately, Luca drew chaperone duty, but what was once a tortuous ordeal had devolved into a niggling annoyance as Luca waited until Jaelle finished her dates to retire. Upon the removal of his attention, Jaelle’s flirtations diminished as well, the girl perfunctorily going through the motions with no real verve. This night proved no exception, her besotted beau from the Rax tribe. Not much to look at, the lad seemed sweet enough, and Luca felt a twinge of pity. Such a blushing boy would not be nearly strong-willed enough to handle Jaelle.

  His duty finally discharged, Luca walked Jaelle back to her vurd.

  “Quite the Hammat catch, don’t you think?”

  “Rax.” Jaelle blinked her confusion, and Luca lazily scratched his beard before explaining. “Hammat wear the gray striped with black. Better food too. In fact, there was a stand on Fifth and Easton that sold the best fish pies. Crust so flaky I thought they’d fall apart if I looked at them too long.”

  He saw the flicker of recognition in her eyes as she touched her lip. “I remember them. They—”

  Luca strode away before she could finish.

  ***

  Simza’s mission sent them to the Karlwych city of Rutledge, which fairly buzzed with electricity from the nearby Cache Line of ley. Bo took the lead as they wove through the cobbled streets to find the infamous metallurgist Erma Parcel. Once the toast of Polis with her invention steelglys, the Tinker fled the city after an explosion during her demonstration at the Exposition Fair. There was only one casualty, but she was a scion of the Lepray family, and so Parcel hastily beat a retreat east rather than face the Polis police.

  Judging by the neighborhood, her fortunes had fallen precipitously. Bo rapped on the door and a gray-haired woman in a leather apron finally peeked out. After appraising them, she pushed the door open enough for them to slip through, Luca noticing the blast-blackened musket she carried. Her workshop crawled with clutter, papers, and molding foodstuffs intermingled with unfinished inventions. The place stank, and he was thankful for it since he suspected it disguised the stink of their hostess. Brushing up against her Mind, Luca quickly retreated. Her brain buzzed like a jostled wasps’ nest, and he feared intruding lest he be stung by her madness.

  Bo finally broke the silence. “The steelglys?”

  Without a word, Parcel led them to the corner of the workshop where a cage presented a padlock. Setting her musket aside and turning her back to them, she produced a hidden key to unlock the cage and haul out a sheet of steel. It was two feet wide and nearly as tall as she, but the woman hoisted it without any struggle.

  “Strong as steel, light as glass. Hook it up right and set a few Breaths inside and you’ve got endless electricity, no ley required. Utterly portable. Three hundred per sheet, and you’ll need six.”

  Luca was too gobsmacked by her claims to initially catch the cost, and so Bo answered for him. “We were told fifty per sheet.”

  It was a bold-faced lie. Simza and Parcel had agreed to one hundred dollars per sheet, but her bietas were to take it as cheaply as they could, going as high as one hundred and twenty dollars per sheet if need be. That would be the marrow-true value, and by opening over double the amount, Parcel demonstrated her ignorance in Dobra trades. After the requisite pretense of discussing with Bo, Luca put his silver tongue to work:

  “We… I think we could go as high as seventy-five per sheet. But you’ll have to allow us the afternoon to get the money. I’m afraid we’ll have to sell one of our horses, you see.”

  “To make it here in the time you did, you took a train, not horses. The cost is now three twenty-five for the lie.”

  With Parcel eschewing the tenants of traditional trading by increasing her price, Luca broke the unsaid rules as well with the truth:

  “We were told you agreed upon the price of one hundred per sheet.”

  She studied his face for hint of a Dobra lie and finally shrugged. “The price has risen, simple as that. Talk to your mistress again if you want, but I know she’ll pay it, because I know what she needs it for.”

  Luca opened his mouth to bargain, but Bo beat him to it. “We’ll be back in two days with what you ask.”

  Ushering Luca to the exit, Bo pushed out into the street. There, they listened to Parcel slam the door behind them, numerous bolts then thrown into place.

  “What is it Simza needs so bad that she’ll pay this poxy outrage?”

  “Don’t know, and I do not care,” Bo responded. “Because we’re not paying it.”

  ***

  Like the old tale of “The Two Dobra Thieves,” they stole into Parcel’s workshop that night, Luca the Cousin while Bo resembled the Wanderer. The head bieta provided the means, bypassing the troublesome door by jimmying a window with a prybar. Despite the gaji rumors, outright theft was considered a cardinal crime among the Dobra, so both Bo’s tool and his skill to wield it took Luca aback. More surprising was that Bo had not taught Luca to ply the prybar before. Bo graced him with a thin smile as Luca touched his Mind to realize Simza’s right hand wanted at least one skill her left hand did not possess; only two months past, Luca surpassed him in their mock lockblade matches and did not begrudge his bieta the desire to remain indispensable to their matriarch.

  Her lights had been out for several hours, but Bo still listened at the window before finally slipping through. Luca followed, his nose again assailed by the stink. For a moment, it conjured the pig carcasses from his training in Polis, but Luca shoved the memory away, and followed Bo’s dark outline through the gauntlet of inordinate objects ready to snag their clothing and give them away.

  At the cage, Bo produced a set of picks and set to work, and Luca wondered what other skills Bo hid as he kept lookout. Several minutes trickled by, sweat dribbling down Luca’s neck when Bo finally returned the picks to his pocket. Luca readied to remove the steelglys sheets, but Bo hefted his crowbar again.

  =gettothewindowhavetojimmy.

  Luca stepped back as if shoved by Bo’s thought.

  Listening was considered a passive trait by those not Blessed in this manner, the Listener plucking thoughts from the air like a child catching Breath in a luz jar, but the truth was that Listeners required focus to peer into another’s head. Unless the Listener specifically focused attention on another, their thoughts droned like a far-away orchestra. From a distance, the ensemble sounded like a single entity, and only when really concentrating was it possible for one to pick out an individual instrument. There were tales of Listeners growing close enough to their spouses that their mates could send
their unbidden thoughts directly to the Listener, but these instances were rare and always between lovers.

  Frozen in place, Luca earned a scowl from Bo.

  =gettothewindowmustbequick

  Shoving the idea from his head, Luca knew Bo was right. Prying the lock would make a lot of noise, and he would need Luca at the window to receive the sheets pressed through. Slipping into the shadows, Luca was just reaching for the window when the bang came.

  Wheeling, he saw Bo stumbling even as the tang of gunpowder stung his nostrils. His bieta made it two steps, hands slapping at his vest as if to remove it, before collapsing into the cage headfirst.

  “Pilferer!”

  Luca tore his eyes from Bo to find Parcel, smoking musket in hand, watching his felled partner. She paid Luca no mind, perhaps unaware of his presence in the shadows. The freedom of the window calling him, Luca discovered his open lockblade in hand. Eyes never leaving his target, he slipped as easily through the workshop as his blade did into her side, twice, fear invading her eyes as he drove the blows home. All she managed was a guttural choke, his training ensuring his blade penetrated each lung. Though a cruel death, it was not the worst he knew, Luca leaving the woman to drown in her own blood as he checked on Bo.

  Bo’s chest made a sucking sound with each breath. But the man still managed to speak between strangled inhales.

  “Steel. Get glass. Simza.”

  In his shock, Luca could not process his partner’s words, Bo finally closing his eyes.

  =getitnow

  The order from his bieta echoing in his head, Luca grabbed the prybar and set to work on the lock. It gave no ground no matter how much effort he put into it.

  =keyshehas

  He was right, the Tinker’s corpse surely hiding the key. But Bo’s intruding voice grew noticeably weaker, and Luca ignored his bieta’s orders as he scooped him up and rushed out into the night.

  ***

  He was lucky to find the Cousin enclave so quickly. Bo limp in his arms, as soon as Luca crossed into their territory, he called out in the Dobra tongue:

  “Two travelers in need of aid.”

  Few lights came on in the windows, but he felt their eyes. The cry for succor was known by all Dobra, and though they all belonged to the same line of Dobradab, it did not guarantee immediate aid. It would be up to a rabe, a Cousin elder, to decide if these wayward relatives would be given aid or forced to flee through silent streets full of watching eyes.

  To his relief, an older man appeared, flanked by two bigger boys wearing red sashes on their arms. All were clearly irate, but still led him on into an alley and then into a backroom of a bakery to tend to Bo.

  The bandage they provided soon soaked through, as did the next two. Bo’s caretakers said it meant nothing, but Luca rifled through their Minds to learn Bo’s Breath would depart before the hour was out. Bo knew it too.

  =sendthemawaydone

  Luca’s face fell, his mouth unable to speak. He shook his head “no.”

  =please

  His bieta’s entreaty hurt the worst. Bo never gave requests, only orders. Without looking away from Bo’s pale face, Luca sent their attendants away.

  =smokeroll

  Another knife twisted in Luca’s heart. The two of them had shared countless cigarettes, each unfailingly rolled by Bo’s own hand. Though his mind knew the motion and his fingers nimble, Luca muddle his way through the process with the intention on giving Bo a fitting final smoke. He had nearly shaped the mess into the semblance of a cigarette when the lights came.

  Luca looked up in time to catch the three Breaths departing Bo’s body. They halted a moment, Luca hoping against hope that they might form a gast and his friend would not depart him. But then they split, three dead bits of debris floating away on Sol’s unseen current.

  The Cousins heard Luca’s cry, rushing in to assure him they would dispose of the body both properly and quietly. Luca demanded to take Bo’s remains home with him, but they rudely reminded him he was now a murderer and Cousin enclaves were always the first investigated. Too wretched to resist them, Luca was quickly shuffled from the room and the body of Bo.

  ***

  He did not remember the early morning race through the streets of Rutledge in clean clothes that did not belong to him or any of the train journey back east with Bo’s lockblade and watch weighing heavy in his pockets. The Cousins of Rutledge having sent word of the tragedy along the ley ahead of him, he spied Marko’s shaggy hair flapping in the propellers’ wake when the train came to a stop. Luca quietly disembarked from the opposite side of the car and disappeared into the woods.

  He arrived alone and unseen, slipping into first his vurd and then his bed. Even just passing through the concentric circles of the wolari, it was apparent the news had already coursed through the camp long before him. The site simply did not feel alive anymore as he pulled the covers up over his eyes. But sleep did not come for many hours, Bo’s belongings continually drawing Luca’s eyes to them as sure as a Breath to a nodus.

  Flanked by Jaelle, Simza finally disturbed his restless reverie well after dark. After but a few words, Simza plied him with liquor soaked in her secretive herbs, assuring him it would help him sleep. With her sympathies and promise to speak again in the morning, she departed.

  Simza’s herbs rapidly taking effect, Luca grew so weary he did not initially notice the remaining Jaelle. Her gentle touch brushing his hair back from his forehead forced his eyes open to behold her face shimmering inches away. He thought it nothing more than a fever dream brought on by drink and grief until she pressed her lips to his.

  Too shocked to respond and still sure this was an illusion, it was all Luca could do to focus on the hazy form whispering her words into his mouth.

  “Didn’t say which one. Luca, I thought it was… I’m glad it wasn’t you. It was always you.”

  His mind disintegrating in ever-increasing increments, he might have imagined the second kiss before he went under, but Luca knew one thing as sure as his name: his grief was by no means gone, but he could no longer feel it. It had been washed away with but two kisses. Bo deserved better than that, deserved all of Luca’s pain and misery at his loss, but for a moment, Luca did not remember him as he held his heart’s desire in his hands.

  And all it cost him was his bieta.

  Chapter 19

  Blotmonad 20, 567

  Marta awoke to her hangover wrestling for supremacy with the pounding ley headache. Caddie was curled up like a cat beside her chair on the floor while the squinting Luca and Isabelle struggled with a tin of crackers. Holding court again behind the bar, Cyrus squeezed oranges to mix with either sparkling wine or a sweet tea and whiskey concoction favored for relieving regret. Even tortured by her body, Marta’s mind noted the change in the train’s speed.

  Staggering against the sway of the train and her own roiling head, Marta made her way to the window. Just beginning its morning stretch over the horizon, the sun still could not quite overcome the shine of the nodus Brimstone, but Marta’s eyes focused on the silhouette of the airship many miles away. Marta remembered the ships’ forms well from witnessing them pass overhead in formation during the Battle of Fieldhollow, but this was a new sensation. The devastation Hendrix’s airships had wrought upon the East was previously only words in the paper, the ships’ shelling of the Eastern cities crumbling the Covenant rebellion within two days. Even at this distance, she could see some remains of their attack: the skyline of Oreana markedly different than her memory. It was a sprawling city, always edging away from the massive nodus not far off, but what had once been the factory district drawing eternal energy from the ley was now a crater. The center of the city itself had also changed, buildings ranging several stories still in process and surrounded by scaffolding as they reached up and up instead of outwards.

  But hovering above them all, a thick chain dangling down to its anchor driven into the hole that had once been City Hall, the airship dominated the skyline. Other E
astern cities also had their own airships lording over them, but this one seemed to swell over the former heart of the Covenant with each disappearing mile. As a Cildra, Marta was meant to have no loyalty except to the clan, but witnessing this behemoth lording above a city still struggling to rebuild made the Easterner in her angry.

  Averting her eyes, Marta found Luca beside her, the man pressing a welcomed drink into her hands. He too avoided the airship as he nodded towards the massive nodus Brimstone.

  “You ever catch it at night?”

  She had, numerous times in her youth, but chose instead to gulp her drink. He went on as if she had answered. “I remember the first time I saw it, every bit of it. What I was wearing, what I ate that evening, everything. Never seen something that wasn’t alive that screamed with such life, like the seas roiling, swarming with creatures underneath that want to make themselves known. It spewed more colors than I ever knew existed, and that was just the first moment. By the time the hour was out, I knew I knew nothing. That there, that’s the center of Ayr.”

  “You have a poet’s Soul.” Cyrus sidled beside them to observe the dwindling lights of Brimstone.

  “No,” Luca sighed. “It would have been better if I had though. Easier.”

  “Home.”

  The word made Marta jump. Looking down, she found Caddie peering out the window at the nodus.

  “What’s that?” Marta asked, but the girl said no more as she gazed at Brimstone or perhaps Oreana behind it. The train slowing to a crawl and the lights of the nodus disappearing like dew beneath the rising sun, Marta wondered if Caddie once called the city home. Picking through her memory, she did not recollect where Hendrix hailed from. Perhaps he was indeed an Eastern son, and that the reason he now aided the Covenant Sons despite destroying their Covenant government.

  As the hour drew to a close, the Oreana train station loomed, each line of ley feeding into the nodus acting as a new train line. Its center was a hub of activity as Shaper stevedores, working in shifts, separated the floating train cars to reattach them along the proper lines towards their destinations as denoted by the chalkboards on the cars’ sides. Their own train winding its way towards the center, Cyrus gulped the last of his drink.