Tarnished City

by Vic James

  She reserved her godfather’s favourite corner booth in the Members’ dining room. She thought of inviting Papa, so they could have a final meal together. But no, it would prove too difficult to disentangle the pair of them afterwards.

  She felt a twinge of something that couldn’t possibly have been pity and certainly wasn’t guilt as she poured her godfather another glass of champagne. And she listened to his droll descriptions of Far Carr’s slaves’ reactions, when told the estate had a new heir.

  But then Rix turned the conversation, and Bouda’s mood turned with it. He started asking light, mocking questions about the progress of the slavetown purges. But beneath the banter, he was probing. What had she discovered? Where were raids or further enquiries planned?

  The champagne soured in Bouda’s stomach. Faiers had been correct.

  She checked her watch. A quarter past nine. Time to finish this.

  ‘Come by my office,’ she said. ‘I can show you a map of the investigation’s progress. Only if you’re interested. You’re so sweet to let me natter on at you.’

  Bouda phoned ahead to Kessler, on the pretext of having coffee prepared, and the minute Rix walked through the office door all three tasers took him down. The surprise prevented his Skillful reflexes kicking in, and the combined force of it – enough to kill a commoner several times over – incapacitated him.

  Rix writhed on the carpet, barely conscious, foam flecking the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Bouda?’ he moaned. ‘What . . . ?’

  ‘You know what,’ she said. It was all she could do not to kick him as he lay there, this man who was practically family, who had betrayed her trust for so long. ‘Astrid, do what you have to do.’

  But before Astrid could begin her examination, Faiers stepped forward. Bouda had almost forgotten he would be there.

  He delivered the kick that Bouda had only considered. More of a stamp, actually. Hard, to Rix’s solar plexus. The man yelled out, curling up protectively. Faiers bent over the Equal and pulled back his dapper white hair, forcing Rix’s head up.

  ‘You imagine yourself a champion of the people, yet you discarded in a slavetown the common-born woman who loved you and was carrying your child?’ Faiers said, his face very close to Rix’s. His lip curled with contempt. ‘You let that child grow up in misery, knowing he’d have to spend another decade there as an adult, because the clock doesn’t start on your days till you’re ten?

  ‘And then you wooed her again, years later. You may have fooled my mother that you still cared for her, after everything. You may have fooled yourself that your halfhearted efforts on behalf of the common people made up for what you did. You may even think that your attempt on Jardine’s life was right and just, because what happened was his fault, not yours. But you’ve never fooled me.’

  Faiers stamped on him a second time. Rix groaned.

  ‘Jonathan.’ Rix spat froth from his mouth and tried again. ‘Jonathan, it was Jardine. Your mother knows this. I was led to believe that she had turned against me, had abandoned me. It’s why I never married. I still love her. I would love you, if only you’d let me.’

  ‘I’d be ashamed to call you “Father”. You deserve everything you get.’

  Faiers stepped away from the prone man, cracking his neck from side to side as if he’d finally set down a heavy load he had carried for a long time.

  ‘Heir Bouda,’ he said politely. ‘Thank you.’

  Rix’s head fell back onto the carpet. The fight had gone out of him. Astrid crouched down.

  ‘You understand what you’re here for?’ she asked. ‘You’re accused of causing the death of Chancellor Zelston when attempting to kill Lord Jardine, using a commoner boy as your instrument. We will be asking you questions to establish the truth of this allegation.’

  ‘No questions,’ Rix gasped. Plainly word had spread of Astrid’s techniques. ‘I admit it. I’m only sorry I never succeeded.’

  ‘I’m afraid you don’t get to avoid the questions.’

  Astrid took a syringe and small vial from her pocket. Bouda bent down to watch as she picked up Rix’s wrist and drove the needle in.

  ‘Incapacitates even an Equal,’ Astrid said. ‘It’s what the commoner scum who raped my sister used on her, for each of those nineteen days he had her.’

  ‘Bouda.’ Her godfather’s hand clawed at her wrist and it was all Bouda could do not to shriek. ‘Jardine is a monster. Take care.’

  Then his grip loosened and his hand fell away, as Lord Rix’s nattily dressed body went into violent convulsions.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Bouda stepped back from the thrashing body. ‘Astrid?’

  Astrid inspected the vial. ‘Correct dose. This shouldn’t be happening.’

  She knelt over Rix and pressed her fingertips to his chest.

  ‘His heart. Perhaps the drug so soon after using the stun guns . . . But I don’t think I can fix it. I’m not much good at healing.’

  The woman looked up, but all Bouda could do was shake her head. She wasn’t apt with healing, either. DiDi was better. Meilyr Tresco had been the best.

  A final catastrophic tremor racked Rix’s body, then he lay still on the carpet, beyond the help of anyone’s Skill at all.

  Bouda calmed herself. Let her breathing even out. Smoothed her skirt and sleeked her ponytail. Then she stood up straight.

  ‘This is only how it would have ended anyway. You all heard the confession?’

  Everyone present nodded.

  ‘Very well. Deaths in detention do happen, especially when subjects resist questioning. No one was to blame. And crucially, we established the detainee’s guilt prior to his decease. Astrid, please draw up an incident report, and we will all witness it.’

  When Kessler’s radio crackled into life, it was the last thing Bouda needed.

  ‘Answer it,’ she snapped.

  Through the buzz of static, Bouda recognized the voice of her other aide, the former Millmoor Overseer. What could the woman want at this time of night?

  ‘There’s a been a major incident,’ Kessler said, twisting off the device. ‘The Overseer’s on her way. You two’ – he snapped his fingers at his two Security companions – ‘give Heir Astrid every assistance in removing the late Lord Rix to an appropriate facility. Heir Bouda, we need to get to a helicopter immediately.’

  ‘I’ll arrange that,’ said Faiers. And when Kessler raised an eyebrow, ‘I’m staff now, just like you.’

  ‘What’s happened?’ Bouda asked, trying and failing to imagine what could be even more urgent than dealing with Rix’s demise.

  ‘Large-scale sabotage,’ said Kessler grimly. ‘In the Bore.’

  Two hours later, their chopper was circling above Sector C of the Northern Bore.

  The vast hay barns were burning.

  It was the fourth attack of the night. Each target – another barn, an equipment depot, and a fertilizer store that had caused a vast explosion – had been hit on the half hour, miles from the previous location. These outrages were wide-ranging and co-ordinated.

  Bouda watched through the windscreen. It was as if the sky itself was on fire, as incandescent strands of hay somehow became lighter than air and eddied upwards on thermals of their own making.

  The doors to the largest barn fell away, revealing giant stacked blocks of hay, blackened and glowing from within. Insubstantial flames shimmered across the mounds.

  All around, headlights lanced into the darkness. A cordon of Security jeeps fanned outward through the dark fields, bouncing along rough tracks meant for trucks that brought the workers out and back each day, and for massive harvesting machinery. From the back of each jeep, figures leapt at intervals. Lamps fastened to their helmets sliced the night as they turned this way and that. Hunting.

  Without a capture, there would be little usable evidence from this conflagration. Perhaps a distinctive form of accelerant that could be traced to a certain sector, or a specific workforce. Bouda doubted it would be enough.

>   The flames roared greedily. The barns were miles from any irrigation canal that might douse them. Bouda thought of her ancestor, Harding the Voyager – Harding the weatherworker, who had quelled storms and raised winds. He could have summoned a raincloud to extinguish this.

  Something prickled uneasily within her at the thought. Her Skill was strong, she knew. But all she ever used it for was bickering with her husband, or subtly reinforcing suggestions to her clique of parliamentary followers. Yet what was the point of being Equal, if not to do things that the commoners could not?

  If only she could call the wind and rain. Her fingers spasmed, as if to mock her.

  ‘Back,’ she barked into the headset. ‘Let’s go.’

  But as they circled back to the massive administration hub at the centre of the Bore, it seemed her Equal senses were good for something, after all.

  In the darkness: a man, running.

  ‘There. You see him? Five hundred metres at two o’clock. Kessler, get in a shot that won’t kill.’

  None of the commoners had sighted the man at first, but the pilot dutifully angled the chopper and soon after came cries of recognition.

  Air roared around Bouda’s neck as Kessler slammed open the vehicle door. His gun cracked once and the man went down.

  Not an entirely wasted night.

  Back at the administration detention centre, the man was brought before Bouda and her team, while the Bore’s own Security looked on.

  ‘Locations are not good enough,’ Bouda snapped. ‘I need names.’

  ‘I don’t know any names,’ he said.

  Her hand flashed out. His hands were cuffed behind his back and he couldn’t avoid the blow.

  ‘Well, guess some,’ she hissed. ‘Who is popular? Who is dissatisfied? Who talks back?’

  ‘Please, there are twenty thousand men doing days in the Bore. How could I know?’

  At a nod from Bouda, Kessler drove the butt of his rifle into the man’s gut. The prisoner screamed and doubled over.

  ‘What you did,’ she said, ‘was part of something bigger. So who told you to do it? And then I’ll find out who told them. And then who told that person. Whoever is behind all this, whatever they intend, I will unpick it one stitch at a time until it all unravels. And then I will cut off the thread. So let’s try again: I need names.’

  She worked through the small hours and into the following day. By the time Bouda took a break for a few hours’ sleep, she had unpicked seven stitches and had a location for what was planned that night.

  The barley of Sector J, Eastern Bore, was the autumn planting: near ripe, with stalks that stood almost shoulder-height. Its harvest this year would be fire and choking smoke.

  In the darkness, the flaming crops cast their own lurid light. From above, Bouda saw the fire advancing, a wavering but purposeful line. Behind it was a band of glowing embers. Further back, only the dead black of scorched earth.

  The fire was spreading faster than anyone had anticipated. The destruction would be immense. The Bore’s irrigation channels were also its firebreaks. This conflagration would destroy everything between those boundaries, and they’d have to hope that no sparks leapt the water to consume a new area of the fields.

  To permit such devastation would be a victory for these agitators – even though a calculated decision had been made to let the fires take, in the hope of catching the men setting them.

  Well, Security would take care of the perpetrators, but perhaps Bouda could be useful with the fire.

  She was an Equal, after all. She had been reluctant to use Skillful mindwork on Faiers. She had been unable to heal Rix. But surely there was something she could do here?

  Her mother-in-law, Thalia Jardine, liked to tell tales of her sister freezing Orpen’s moat. And what of Gorregan, when the Equal women of Great Britain rolled up the sea and wrecked Napoleon’s fleet? A large oil painting of the Grounding hung in the salon at Appledurham, and Bouda remembered the windows in Highwithel’s hall that depicted the same scene.

  Her fingers twitched again, just as they had last night. Then, she had thought it weakness. Tonight, she wasn’t so sure. A sense of anticipation was building inside her.

  ‘Get us as close as you can,’ Bouda barked over the headset. ‘Hover at ten metres.’

  The chopper shied like a horse as it approached the flames. It was an easy drop for an Equal. Bouda swung both feet out onto the skid and jumped.

  Coughing against the streaming black smoke, she ran along the smouldering stubble to the irrigation channel she’d sighted from above. Fell to her knees. Stretched down over the edge towards the water.

  She’d thought she’d have to reach for her Skill, but it was already there, tingling in her fingertips. Bouda closed her eyes. She could sense every cell in her fingers, feel the Skill that pulsed there, and the swirling water, cool and quivering.

  She felt the moment when, as if by osmosis, her Skill passed into the water and she knew it was at her command. It was dizzying. She reached out further. Felt the irrigation channel branch, and sensed beyond it the great inert mass of the canal.

  Inert, but expectant.

  Was this what Skill could do? Was this what she was capable of? It was almost unimaginable.

  She called the river – and it came. This was turbulent water, alternately pulled downstream from its source and pushed back by the tidal bore from the coast. Bouda’s Skill strove against the tide – then flowed out to the sea. She gasped, feeling the pull to dissolution by a power much vaster than her own. And called her Skill back again, drawing the water with it.

  It built, gushing, spilling over the wide channel banks, mounting up into a great onrushing wave. Bouda’s hands worked in the air, as if shaping the monstrous tide, and as it reached the flaming fields where she stood, she held it taut and dammed by nothing more than her own will.

  Then with a downward smash of her hands, she sent the great wave rushing past her, surging onto the land, flooding the fields and extinguishing the flames. Bouda heard the hiss and the sizzle and felt the rising steam.

  She was sopping wet and her hands shook, but something inside her roared and sang. She was very sure her heart was beating at twice its normal rate.

  What had she just done?

  What more could she do?

  How had she lived without this?

  18

  Luke

  ‘Hadley, I have news for you. See me at ten o’clock.’

  Crovan rose from the breakfast table, so the rest of them rose to their feet too, remaining standing until their master had left the room.

  ‘What’s that about, eh?’ Julian murmured once he was gone.

  ‘No idea,’ said Luke. ‘It’s “news”, remember.’

  What news might it be? A pardon for killing Zelston? A new investigation into that night’s events? He highly doubted it.

  ‘Well, you’ve got ages,’ said Jules. ‘Round of cards? Poker?’

  Julian produced a deck from his pocket. He carried them with him at all times, ready to while away a quiet moment. And there were so many quiet moments – whole days of them, stitched together and laid smothering over Luke’s life.

  Maybe something would happen today.

  ‘Luke, I need you for a moment.’

  Coira had materialized beside them, and she took Luke gently but firmly by the elbow. He cast an apologetic glance back at Julian as she steered him towards the kitchen.

  The castle’s servants, others of the Condemned, bustled around clearing up. Someone at one of the sinks dropped a large pan and Luke flinched. An image flashed through his brain: a man in black tie stubbing out a cigarette on a woman’s bare neck. A carving fork skewered through Luke’s hand. Coira shouting.

  What did it mean? He looked down at his hand. It was uninjured, unscarred. Had that been a memory? A nightmare given to him by Crovan? How could he not know which?

  Coira led him into a small pantry. She tucked up her skirts and crouched down, straining to rea
ch around a sack of potatoes. She tugged out a book and handed it to him.

  ‘You didn’t ask for it yesterday, so it must have become a black spot again.’

  ‘What is it?’ The spine proclaimed the book a history of heraldry. The edges of the pages were discoloured with age.

  ‘It’s your diary, sort of.’

  A diary? How could he keep one of those and not know about it?

  As if sensing his scepticism, Coira opened the cover and Luke was astonished to see the title page covered in his own abysmal handwriting.

  He makes you forget, it read. This is how you remember. This is what you need to know about how this place works and what he does.

  ‘Why do you have it?’ he asked, confused.

  ‘You kept it beneath your pillow, but then you worried that Crovan would take it from you, or that Blake or Devin might destroy it. And’ – she permitted herself a wry smile – ‘you said that sleeping on it gave you neck ache.’

  Luke turned the book over. A sheet of paper was folded around the back cover. He’d scribbled in emphatic capitals, as if anticipating his future scepticism: WRITE IN THIS EVERY DAY. THIS IS ALL REAL. TRUST WHAT’S IN HERE, NOT WHAT YOU REMEMBER.

  ‘What he does to you,’ Coira said, ‘it affects your memory. You lose a bit – sometimes a lot – from day to day. Sometimes the memories come back. Sometimes they don’t. So this book is your backup – except occasionally you forget about it, too. Have a read. I’ve got to get everything finished out there, but I’ll come back when I’m done.’

  Luke squatted against the shelves, and read.

  Jackson and Angel came to rescue me. Abi with them . . . Devin shot the Doc – defending Crovan. Coira & I put Doc through Last Door.

  There was more. Pages of it. The jottings, all dated, had been made by him over the past month. Some were detailed – a long passage of rumination about the collars they wore, which Luke glossed over. Skip: no point, he had printed above what looked like pages about a boat that brought food supplies to and from the island. There was a summary of what he was accused of – the murder of Chancellor Zelston – and what had happened at his trial and Condemnation. One page bore the header Devin, and he’d scrawled a sentence over the top and underlined it: Short version: not a nice man. A section titled Blake had been even more succinctly summarized: Monster.