“What will Quema be doing?”
“Quema gets promoted to Burggraf and handles food, housing, and logistics. She’ll be pulling staff away, too.”
“Damn. Is Siberhaus taking his best people? Forget that. Of course he is. Damn.”
Gamstadt shrugged. “You’ll find someone.”
“Lots of someones, you mean. In the meantime, we’re still broke. Fine. I’ll just piss everyone off. I’m declaring an emergency appointment, which means I get to insult anybody that I want. I want the best brain that money can buy. Maran, run and get Altyn Tag. I want her as my Treasurer. Get her up here, schnell.”
“But Altyn ...”
“SCHNELL!”
Minding the Money
The air in Altyn’s house smelled sweetly of old wood. Maran loved that smell. That was a smell of home. Altyn’s was a good house, assembled well. Every joint fit correctly, locking themselves together in a structure without nails. Even after so many years of neglect, the house still stood solid. Strangely, despite the blazing sun outside, the house still felt cool on this hot day. Even a Loam house should have heated up by now.
Wearing only a flowing linen shift, Altyn sat in her kitchen reading.
“Ma’am,” said Maran, “There’s been some shuffling at the guild. The Kurfurstin needs a temporary treasurer. She wants you to report to her.”
Altyn seem to analyze the offer of employment in her head. “Is she serious? Or is my employment some sort of ill-executed political maneuver? I’ll do this either way; I just want to know the environment.”
Maran hesitated in her answer. “She seems to think that you can sort money things out.”
“I am sure that I can sort things out, too, but that does not answer my question. Is she serious?”
“Yes, she has full faith in you, and I think that she will do what you propose.”
“Good. Let me get dressed and I will talk to Strikke. Excuse me, I should say ‘the Kurfurstin.’ She is no longer my seamstress.” Altyn picked up her dress from the floor and began buttoning it on.
Maran had a question. “Ma’am, how exactly can the Ironmongers hire you to be their treasurer? Isn’t that guild work?”
“I’m an Astrean. Once upon a time, Astreans helped the Ironmongers kill a dragon, so Astreans have an honorary status with them. Their guild rules are older than the Union, so their guild rules supersede more recent laws. Thus, I am an Astrean, and so I am an Ironmonger, even though I am not an Ironmonger. That, and Svero hired me, so he set the modern precedent. Strange but true.”
“What about Osei? He’s a human, but not an Astrean. How come he can work for them?”
“Protecting isn’t guilded. At least, that’s what I understand. You can be a protector without really understanding what’s going on.
“In practice, protectors are usually promoted internally because you really do need to know what you’re doing. Sometimes, things happen unusually. Osei only took the job because he wanted Jasper to lose the election and Strikke promised him a new set of clothes, which only landed him in this whirlwind. He’s sworn an oath of nonviolence, and sooner or later, that oath will come to haunt him.
“I feel responsible. I should never have told him to. I’m sure that he’s ready to leave by now. The problem is not replacing him. The problem is getting the Kurfurstin to accept the replacement.”
Altyn walked to her door and picked up her fan and parasol, both made of paper. “Come. We have work to do.”
Maran escorted Altyn directly to Kurfurstin Strikke. Altyn avoided the front gate, walking all the way down to the human entrance. She could have used the main gate, Maran was sure, but she chose not to. From there, they dodged several companies drilling, entered the guildhall, and soon reached the apartments to find an inebriated Kurfurstin.
Strikke swayed happily in her chair, her decanter empty. She wasted no time when Altyn arrived. “Good day, Miss Altyn. Are you familiar with our money problems?”
“I am, but I am not. How do you see this situation?”
“We are Ironmongers, Miss Altyn. We sell steel and iron products. In fact, we sell the best steel and iron products in the world, bar none. That is, we ought to sell these things.
“To the west is the remnants of the Griffon Empire. They’re lots of different countries now. It’s a mess, kinda like my meeting room. They’ve been losing to the Feral Nation so long that they’ve run out of gold to pay for steel. They owe us a mint. Their people are fleeing the violence and coming here instead.
“To the southeast is the Malachite Empire. We fought a long war with them, and we lost. We may be in a hostile peace, but we still aren’t trading. Most especially, we are not trading steel. It’s our weapon, not theirs. We know how to make it and we make it fast. They make it, but they make poorly and slowly. We make guns out of iron while they make theirs out of copper and tin. You can guess who makes the better guns.
“Then there’s the Phoenix Empire. They stabbed us in the back. We don’t trade much with them, either, especially not steel. Thus, no steel to sell, and no cash flow.”
Altyn nodded. “That is, indeed, a dire situation.”
“My Burggraf just resigned and he took all his assistants with him. I can replace him, but that will take time. I can’t do that until after the holiday. In the meantime, I need someone who can manage the books and figure things out fast.”
“What are my primary responsibilities?”
“Pay people who need getting paid. Put off paying everyone else. Scrape up enough money for taxes. Find loopholes in the laws. Maybe find some sort of revenue. Most importantly, figure out where my mother’s household money went. Easy stuff for you.”
Altyn put her arms behind herself. “That is tolerable if unimaginative work. However, I doubt the work will be easy. Pay me what you paid your Burggraf, and I will staff the position until you find a suitable replacement.”
“I am not sure that we can afford that. You aren’t a dwarf.”
“If you need me, then you will compensate me correctly. This is a matter of respect. We should all be respectful. My salary is more than fair. I guarantee you that your investment shall reap you great rewards. If nothing else, I have every motivation to figure out how to pay myself as this guild still owes me considerable backpay.”
“Fine, that’s fair. Let’s walk you downstairs and introduce you to folks.”
“Where shall I work?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t think about that. Siberhaus is still occupying his office. The conference room is full of seamstresses. Why don’t you use here? This was my mother’s apartment. It used to have furniture. We’ll find you some tables and chairs. You can sleep here, too. There’s three servant’s rooms behind the kitchen. Maran has one. I have another. You can have the third.”
“You sleep with the servants, ma’am?”
“The real Kurfurstin suite isn’t ready yet. My brother still has it packed full of his worthless antiques. All that stuff and no gold. Can you believe it? Weird. Anyway, I can’t redecorate the Kurfurst suite at all until he’s out of there. In the meantime, I do have my mother’s bed, but I won’t sleep in anything that ugly. It’s also bad luck. People will talk, you know. Of course, they talk already, but I don’t have to bribe them to shut up.”
Strikke looked into her decanter for a bit, eventually deciding that it was empty.
“This was really lousy. I hate my mother. She paid a fortune to smuggle in garbage. Altyn, what’s your answer?”
“I will take the job. Things are quiet in town, and I could use a little challenge. I will sleep in my own house, though. When do I report?”
“Start when you will and dress up next time. I’m a Kurfurstin, damn it. Show some respect.”
“I will begin tomorrow. May I be excused?”
Strikke waved her off, so Altyn bowed, then left the room.
With Altyn gone, and no one else in the room, this was an opportunity for Maran. She wanted to know about the other
Astrean, and if anyone knew about another Astrean, it would be Strikke. She had run a seamstress business in Irontown for over twenty years.
“Ma’am, you’ve lived in Irontown for a while. People talk about two Astreans. I know Altyn, but who’s the other one? Is there somebody that I don’t know?”
“You mean Imeni? Yes, she used to come to my dress shop. She certainly loved her outfits. Her color seemed blue at first, but I made her more red as time went by. I eventually made her a wonderful kaftan, head to toe, just perfect, with gold embroidery. A nice veil, too, with lots of little gold beads that framed her face very nicely. Astreans look so good with veils. It makes them look quite alluring and mysterious. The embroidery on that veil took a month. We froze our fingers on that job. The bitch promised to pay me the next day and I never saw her after that.
“Good riddance, I say. Imeni was a bad cookie. Altyn was a bad cookie back then, too, but Imeni was worse. I dreamed of throwing her out of my shop, but I feared for my life. Seriously. I really did fear for my life. I have never seen anyone that hair-trigger nasty before. She threw a snit every time that she found the any mistake. I swear, my mother was more charming and less lethal.
“Imeni changed her mind constantly, then insisted that I remembered wrong. Insane. Let me tell you, hon, I don’t remember clothing wrong. I’m a professional. I can tell you the details of every dress that I ever made, down to the number of stitches in the hem. It’s in my head. I make dresses. I know how to make you look good. I’ll make you look good even if you are a walking, talking Astrean death machine and disagree with me.
“Anyhow, that winter both those Asteans skipped town. Was that twenty years ago? Somewhere around then. It wasn’t long after the war. Both of them were gone for a while. Eventually Altyn showed back up again. Something had changed with her. She was far more tolerable after coming back. She used to look like death warmed over, but she had gained back some weight. She paid for Imeni’s dress and actually spoke politely to me. She even paid for Weber’s apprenticeship back when Weber was a street girl. I started inviting her over to the shop after hours, and she became a regular in our tile games. Although, try as I might, I never could get her to buy an outfit for herself. In my head, she really wants to be in whites and blacks and grays, but she always refused when I offered. I would have even done it for cheap as she payed for Imeni’s dress. Now I get to rue her stubbornness. Tomorrow, she’ll show up in those ghastly peacock feathers and that awful parasol. She might be smart, but she’s not fashionable.
“Which reminds me, I need to redesign the guard uniforms. Top priority. They’re ghastly, just ghastly.”
Dogs Barking in the Night
Despite her utter exhaustion and days without rest, Maran could not sleep. She lay in her bed so tired that her mind ground like a windmill. All the events of the last few weeks came to the surface, like bags of barley, and she took each of those events apart again and again. After all that thinking, they still made no sense and still her mind stones kept turning.
Eventually, in her tossing and turning, she did find a fitful sleep. In her dream, Maran walked about the Steel City, a place of dreams built by the Iron Duke, a paradise of steel and glass. The streets seemed battered. The shops stood empty, their glass windows shattered like salt scattered over the floor. Roaches crawled under the doors in long, unending lines. They made no sound.
Ahead of her, buildings hunched over, broken, their faces blown off. Some had only lost their fronts. Many were little more than rubble. Bricks and stones and glass and wood mingled on the pavement like entrails. Crowds gathered there, like the roaches, moving silently across the piles. They milled about busily yet serenely.
The people picked up stones from the piles. They passed the stones along, one person to the next, hurriedly. The rocks revealed a flash of red and a twitching hand.
“She’s alive!” screamed a man.
The barking started there. With no warning, no whining, no yapping, all the dogs barked at the same time. They barked outside. They barked inside. They slammed into springy fences. They pulled against chains. They clawed against doors. All through her head, she heard barking.
Slowly, ever so slowly, Maran realized that the dog sounds came from her own hearing and not from the dream.
Maran woke up. Something was licking her hand. She pulled her hand back to see Kepi desperately licking her hand, tail down, ears back. Something clearly had her agitated.
Maran had no idea what could agitate a soul hound. They were literally death incarnate. Their job was to pull the souls from your body and carry them to the afterworld. This particular one, Kepi, had made friends with Maran a few weeks ago and now showed up at odd intervals. What could make a soul hound upset? The only thing that Maran had ever seen perturb Kepi was other soul hounds, and the implications of that frightened Maran. Soul hounds meant death.
Maran slipped out of bed, grabbed her frock, and followed Kepi. “I’m coming. Wait, you silly beast.”
The lanky and long Kepi bounded out of the suite, out of the guildhall, and across the yard to Gate Number One. The night felt hot and sticky, with gray smoke hugging the ground. The sweating guards gave Maran an odd look, but opened for her without a word. Once Maran was through, Kepi dashed down Forge Street, then turned onto Groppekunta Street where the din of barking dogs was centered. She led Maran straight to Altyn’s house where a crowd had gathered.
The street women and the house girls, all half-dressed, chatted among themselves and with their customers. A few men poked at a corpse on the ground, apparently fallen from the house. Blood flowed from the corpse’s eyes and ears. Finally convinced that the corpse was truly dead, one man began searching the corpse for valuables.
Some of the bouncers had gathered outside of Altyn’s door, acting like guards, letting no one in. They recognized Maran and stepped aside.
Maran dashed by them, through the door, then upstairs. On the stairs, she passed another corpse, splayed like a wind shaped tree. His limbs pointed in unlikely directions as his eyed did nothing, showing empty. He, too, bled from the eyes and ears. The stairwell smelled of his feces and urine.
In Altyn’s bedroom, Maran found Altyn sitting among a massacre. She sat there in her chair by the window, staring at the room full of bodies, each corpse splayed as disjointedly as the corpse on the stairs, and likewise bleeding from the eyes and ears. In their deaths, they looked more like deadwood than people.
Maran held down her stomach. The whole scene offended all her senses. She could feel the corpses there. She knew that they were dead, not just by knowledge, but by sight. It was as if they had a light inside them, lighting them up, then someone came along and blew out the light. Their lifeless limbs seemed duller, more so than the light should explain. It was like the color had been wiped from them, like a fresco without the paint.
So many things raced through Maran’s mind at that point, and they all tried to come out at once. It was like the windmill grinding again, this time in a storm. Maran blurted her heart out.
“Did you have to kill all of them? It’s the Feast of All Gods. It’s the PEACE of all gods. How could you do this?”
Altyn shrugged distantly. “I will throw myself upon the mercy of Justice. I do not doubt that my self defense was justified.”
Maran forced herself to look at the bodies, open-eyed and empty. They were all drifters. Maran corrected herself. They were all humans. A few looked familiar. She knew them.
One was a Demmarian criminal whose life they had saved just a few days ago. He had smoked bad opium and Maran had driven away the soul hounds that had come to kill him.
Altyn explained. “They came to execute me. Look on them. They bear the mark of the Red Lady.”
Maran forced herself to look closely at the dead men. She picked up one arm, still warm. The arm should have been light, but Maran found it unexpectedly heavy, like lead wrapped around bone. A tattoo wrapped about the arm depicted a dragon-like bird, or a bird-like dragon. G
rowing through the tattoos were little red vines, freshly sprouted.
“Ma’am, they have vines. Little ones, hard to see. Seedlings.”
“Interesting. Do you remember those vines from last time?”
“No, they were clean then.”
Maran put the arm down, then wiped her hands on her dress hoping to get them clean. They did not feel clean.
Altyn waved her hand casually. “Instruct the bouncers to relocate the corpses. Their relatives need to bury them. The bouncers know what to do. Have some girls, the dryad girls, come up to clean the room.”
The implication that Altyn had done such things before gave Maran a moment of pause. How true were those stories about Altyn? How many more stories were there? What else did she not know?
Maran remembered a few weeks ago when Altyn had stood before these men and shown no fear. Now Maran truly understood that Altyn simply had no possible fear of these men.
If Maran valued her own safety, she needed to find out about her friend.
Maran spoke to the bouncers. They and a few of the working boys carried the bodies out. They worked quickly. Maran had them lay the corpses out across the street, on a porch.
The girls were already prepared for cleaning.
“You’ve done this before,” commented Maran.
“Of course,” answered one of the dryads. “This is Groppekunta Street. This is Irontown.”
Another dryad giggled. “It might be a nice gutter, but it’s still a gutter.”
“We gotta get outta here one day. One day. Maybe get married and get legit. Have a real house. Be respectable.”
As the girls were working, Maran walked Altyn downstairs. They took chairs into the garden and sat together in the sticky predawn. Maran hoped that it would give them some peace. The flowers and the vegetables did their best to mask out the smell of the rotting garbage, but ultimately failed. From somewhere, Maran smelled opium on the wind, and her heart ached. She would not touch that stuff again, but her body still missed it.
Standing Between Earth and Heaven Page 5