“You’re Tori, aren’t you,” she says. Her voice is the harsh rasp I remember from outside. “The sister.” She smiles. One of her teeth is missing. “You don’t look much like your picture.”
“You were looking for me,” I say. “In the raid. Why?”
The captain barks a laugh. “Does it matter?”
“Tell me.”
“Or what? You’ll kill me?” She makes an effort to shrug, which only jingles her chains. “You’ll have to do that sooner or later.”
“We could … hurt you.”
“You?” She laughs again.
“There are plenty of people who would welcome the opportunity.”
“Then give it to them,” she says. “I’m getting bored. But it won’t get you anywhere.”
I let my Kindre senses open, feel her mind. There’s fear there, but less than I expected. Determination, contempt, hatred, rage. It’s like looking into a sewer.
“Isoka,” I say. “What have you done with her?”
“You’d like to know, wouldn’t you?” The captain’s grin widens. “Go rut yourself with a hot poker.”
“Then you did have her.”
The captain just shakes her head.
She knows. I can feel it, the satisfaction in her mind, the shape of the knowledge. I can’t read it. But I could reach out, take hold of her with my power, and squeeze. Eventually, she would tell me of her own accord. She’d want to.
Monster, Isoka whispers, slashed puppet-string dangling. Monster, monster, monster.
I take a deep breath, and ask a different question.
* * *
Back upstairs, Garo and the others are still going around in circles. They pause as I enter the room, waiting politely as I retake my seat at the table. Hasaka is about to start telling everyone for the dozenth time how pointless an assault on the gates would be, but I interrupt him.
“I know how to get past the walls,” I say. They go silent again, and I look at Garo. “That’s what we need, isn’t it? A way out of the lower wards, into the rest of the city?”
Garo nods cautiously. “You have an idea?”
“I think so.” I force a smile. “We’re going to go visit an old friend of ours.”
18
ISOKA
“There’s that look again,” Meroe says.
I stop pacing and turn to her. “What look?”
“The look where you’re thinking about something you ought to be telling me.”
We’re back home, inasmuch as “home” has any meaning anymore. Meroe, Jack, and I hurried to return to the crew’s ziggurat before nightfall, with Shiara promising doubtfully to try and work on Catoria. Now I’m waiting for the light to finally bleed from the sky. One more day gone. That makes a week since we’d arrived. Soliton could leave any time.
“I’m just…” I shrug, trying not to show my tension. “If our guess about the time-shift is right, it’s been more than half a year for Tori already. Anything could have happened.”
“It’s possible,” Meroe says calmly. “But I have a strong suspicion Tori is more capable than you’re giving her credit for.”
I snort. “You’ve never even met her.”
“I’ve listened to your stories,” Meroe says, then smiles. “And she is your sister. She can’t be that different.”
“She is different,” I say. “She’s better. It’s—” I shake my head. “It’s hard to explain.”
“Try.” Meroe sits down on our sleeping mat, looks up at me. “Better than wearing a hole in the carpet.”
She’s trying to keep my mind off my nerves, Blessed save her. I take a deep breath.
“She’s just … good,” I say. “She helps people. She doesn’t even think about it.”
“So do you.”
“That’s a recent development,” I grate. “Back in Kahnzoka, on the streets … it was an easy way to get killed. I’d watch Tori giving away our last crust of bread to some poor bastard in a gutter, or begging me to let an old man in out of the rain. I’d try to explain that, sometimes, people lied about what they wanted, especially to a pair of skinny little girls without anyone to care if they disappeared. But I hated myself for having to do it. She doesn’t deserve to be kicked in the teeth by the world.” I shrug again. “Once I could, I put her somewhere she wouldn’t have to be.”
“Was she grateful for that?”
“Of course she was grateful. You should have seen her, after a few months in that house. Clean, well-dressed, perfect. She was so happy.” Until I had to leave. Then she cried her eyes out. I start pacing again, feeling Meroe’s gaze on me. “What?”
“Nothing,” she says, with one of her beautiful, unreadable smiles. “I’m looking forward to meeting her.”
Blessed One willing. I take a deep breath. “It’s probably dark enough by now.”
“Probably.” Meroe gets up. For a moment I think she’s going to insist on coming with me, and my heart lurches, but she only crosses the room to kiss me, gently. “You’ll be careful.”
“Of course.” I stare at her. There’s something in her expression. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” She kisses me again. “Just thinking about things.”
“That sounds promising,” I mutter.
She makes a face at me, and I laugh. Strange princess.
* * *
The guards let me out onto the roof of the ziggurat, beneath the wheeling stars.
It’s another clear night. I can see the bulk of Soliton, still in its dock in the harbor, the flow of Eddica power unabated. The obelisks of the city are visible as knife-edged absences, outlined in flickering points of light.
I don’t know if this is going to work. But it’s the only thing I can think of.
I reach out, with Eddica, letting the strange ghost-gray power flow out of me. It merges with the streams that crisscross the Harbor, the network that underlies everything, and carries with it my message. Just one word: Hagan.
Prime will be aware of it—I’m sure of that, from our brief encounter in the access chamber. I just hope he won’t know what it means.
It’s the better part of an hour before I spot movement, down at the base of the ziggurat. I tense, expecting walking corpses, but eventually it’s the dog-headed angel that emerges from the shadows. I breathe a sigh of relief and start jogging down the ramp toward it.
“I wasn’t sure you’d be able to hear me,” I say, slightly winded by the time I get to the base. The dog-angel shakes its head, silently, and lopes off into the forest.
I follow, staying alert, this time knowing what to expect. We travel a short distance, and then the angel stops at a shallow trench. It’s not the deep pit it dug last time, and I look at it questioningly, but it puts one foot delicately in the hole. I lean over and see the dull gleam of a conduit at the bottom.
“—found one that runs closer to the surface,” Hagan says, when I put my hand on it. His ghostly features materialize in front of the angel. “And Silvoa says it’s deeper in the network, or something like that, and it’ll take longer for Prime to find us.”
“Not that much longer.” Silvoa shimmers into existence beside Hagan, a slender iceling girl made entirely of gray light. “This is a low-level run, a few more branches from the primaries, but he’s still going to catch on eventually.” She cocks her head. “Good job not mentioning my name in your broadcast, though. I wasn’t sure you’d catch on to that.”
That the two of them came when I called—that they’re real, and not figments of my imagination—fills me with a deep relief. On the other hand, Silvoa’s brusque, patronizing manner can be almost immediately annoying. I take a deep breath.
“I won’t waste time, then,” I tell them. “I need help.”
“With what?” Silvoa snaps. “How far have you gotten?”
“I talked Gragant into letting me use his access point.”
“Well done.” Silvoa peers at me. “I’m surprised he trusted you so easily.”
“Ther
e may have been a naked snow meditation challenge involved,” I mutter. Hagan raises an interested eyebrow, and Silvoa laughs out loud. “But Catoria and the Cresos turned me down flat.” I glance in the direction of Soliton. “And I don’t know how much time I have left. If time is really passing faster outside—”
“Time doesn’t pass faster outside,” Silvoa says. “What gave you that idea?”
I frown. Could she not know? It seems unlikely. Her post-mortal perspective has given her a lot of time to study the Harbor.
“We know the Cresos clan were exiled from the Empire around a hundred years ago,” I say, cautiously. “But you and Catoria have only been here for five. So—”
“Oh, no question of that,” Silvoa says. “But it’s not that time passes at different rates, it’s that there’s not enough energy to run the Harbor.”
Apparently I looked baffled, because she heaves a sigh.
“If it helps,” Hagan says, “I’m lost, too.”
“Look,” Silvoa says. “Both Soliton and the Harbor are powered by Eddica energy. That’s the energy of life and death. It’s everywhere in the world where animals, especially humans, are living and dying. But you’ve seen what it’s like outside the dome—not much life here. So the Harbor needs to get its energy from somewhere.”
“It gets it from Soliton?” I think of the huge, steady flow of power I’ve been feeling from the ship. “So it’s like a … a fishing trawler, that goes out and comes back with a big catch?”
“Something like that,” Silvoa says. “Except there were supposed to be more ships—you’ve seen the wrecks. And Soliton doesn’t work as well as it used to. So there’s not enough energy.”
“What happens when it runs out?” Hagan says.
“The Harbor shuts down. Everything sort of … stops.” She gives a ghostly shrug. “From the outside, the dome becomes impenetrable until Soliton shows up again. From the inside, of course, nobody notices that years have gone by in the time it takes to snap your fingers.”
“So,” I say slowly, “right now, there’s no difference between the inside and the outside?”
“Other than the temperature,” Silvoa says, smirking a little.
“How do you know all this?” Hagan says.
“I’ve been locked inside the Harbor system for five years with nothing to do but occasionally get tortured by a lunatic,” Silvoa says. “Obviously I’m going to poke around as much as I can. There’s a lot of information in there if you know how to ask.”
My mind is running along a different track. There’s no time difference yet. That meant that a week here was only a week in the outside. Which means only a week for Tori.
In one sense, it doesn’t matter. If Soliton leaves before I can get onboard, it won’t return for twenty years, and Tori will still fall into Kuon Naga’s hands. My deadline hasn’t changed.
But I realize I still feel an enormous relief. The thought that six months had passed already has been weighing on my mind more than I realized. If I can get onboard the ship, turn it around and get back to Kahnzoka—
Tori will be waiting. It’s easier to convince myself of that, now. She will be. I just have to get there.
“In any event,” Silvoa is saying, “you’re right that you don’t have long if you want to take control of Soliton. When it finishes emptying its reserve into the Harbor, it’ll leave to get more, and then you’re stuck. Another couple of days at most.”
“Right.” I nod, but I’m grinning now, and it seems to confuse her. “That means we have to change Catoria’s mind.”
“That was never easy,” Silvoa says. She smiles, too. “Stubborn girl.”
“I have an idea.” I look between the two of them. “But I’m going to need your help.”
* * *
I never learned to ride a horse.
Meroe finds this odd—in Nimar, riding is as basic a skill as dressing yourself, especially for a princess. But in Kahnzoka, riding horses are the toys of the very rich, ill-suited to the cramped, cluttered streets. The horses I grew up with were draft animals, big, shaggy beasts bred to pull heavy loads. In the Sixteenth Ward, even these were rare, and mules and donkeys were more common, with a few ox-teams working at cargo winches on the docks.
Even if I had somehow found the time to learn to ride, however, I don’t think it would have helped. I don’t know what riding a horse is like, but I can’t imagine it’s very similar to riding an angel.
I sit on Hagan’s back, trying to find something to hold on to. The angel doesn’t have any fur, let alone reins, so I’m reduced to grabbing at its thick, stony neck. There’s no rock or sway to its gait, each foot placed precisely and with effortless strength, leaving its back as flat and steady as a cobbled square. But around us, the landscape blurs, and my stomach lurches as Hagan shifts back and forth, smoothly avoiding the trees.
Why did I think this was a good idea?
I’d rushed back into the ziggurat to tell Meroe I’d be gone a while longer, and to consult Jack about what she’d seen in the Cresos stronghold. Armed with this information, Hagan and I set out, crossing the ground between our building and theirs at what turns out to be a blistering pace.
I can’t communicate with Hagan like this, but I explained the plan before we set out. He veers to the left as soon as the Cresos ziggurat comes into view, circling around it through the jungle, away from the main entrance. The sheer size of the thing makes it hard to keep watch, especially at night. Away from the main ramps, there are no prying eyes.
Nor should there be, of course. The Cresos are on the lookout for Prime’s monsters, or possibly a sneak attack from the Minders. Neither would assail an empty side of the step-pyramid, which would mean a long, exhausting climb up the man-sized blocks. For Hagan, however, the great steps of the ziggurat are an easy stride, and he ascends the building without even slowing down.
The way in at the very top of the pyramid is unguarded, just as Jack reported. Hagan skids to a halt on the flat platform, and I slide gratefully off his back, clutching my satchel under my arm. The entrance is blocked by a barred trapdoor, secure enough against Prime’s creatures, but no match for a Melos blade. I saw through the bar in a few moments and haul the thing open, then drop down into darkness.
This is the most dangerous part, while I’m creeping around alone. Any wandering guard will, quite rightly, assume I’m up to no good and sound the alarm. I really don’t want that to happen, and I also really don’t want to have to kill anyone.
Fortunately, both Jack’s tour and the information she got from Shiara indicate that the Cresos are stretched thin. Their non-Imperial servants sleep in barracks down below, and the Cresos nobility in the small chambers up above, with guards on the main entrances and outside a few of the rooms. Guest quarters, however, are on the next level up, and patrols are limited to an occasional check of the main stairway. I arrive during one of these, and flatten myself against the wall until the lantern-light below fades away. Then I pad down, moving as quietly as I can, and turn into the web of passages.
Finding Shiara’s door is easy, since it’s the only one showing a light beneath the curtain. I pause outside it, then rap my knuckles against the stone. It doesn’t produce much sound, but the light flickers, as though someone has moved in front of it.
“Is someone there?” Shiara says, quietly.
“It’s Isoka,” I whisper back.
“Isoka?”
“Can I come in without you screaming?”
She doesn’t answer, and I push the curtain aside. Shiara is standing on the other side of a sparsely furnished room, wearing a silk nightgown and looking perplexed. I move inside and out of view of the doorway, just in case.
“I take it,” Shiara says, “you’re not supposed to be here.”
“I broke in through the roof,” I tell her cheerfully. “You should tell our hosts it’s a flaw in their security.”
“Through the roof? How did—never mind.” She shakes her head, long hair swaying. I�
�ve rarely seen Shiara with her hair unbound and face unpainted. She looks almost like an entirely different person—less poised, more human. “What are you doing here?”
“I need you to help me get to Catoria.”
“Get to—” Her eyes narrow. “If you’re planning to hurt her…”
I shake my head quickly. “Nothing like that, I swear it. I have something to show her, and it has to be alone. I don’t want her uncle Toranaka interfering.”
She lets out a breath. “I can see that. But what are you going to do when she screams for the guards?”
“I’ll deal with that when we get to it.” Actually, I have no plan for that, other than hoping like rot it doesn’t happen. “Can you get me into her room?”
Shiara visibly composes herself for a moment. “Probably. But are you sure about this? If they find out you broke in, you’ll never get them to trust you.”
“Have you made any progress on that front?”
“Not much,” she admits.
“We’re out of time to try things the subtle way.” I’m out of time. “So I’m going to roll the dice.”
“Okay.” She shakes her head, grimly. “Give me a moment.”
She throws a more substantial robe over her nightgown and gestures for me to follow her. We creep back to the main staircase. Shiara moves with the catlike tread of someone with long practice keeping silent, which is a surprise. We wait through another patrol, a lonely lantern spiraling up the stairs and out of sight, before descending to the level below Shiara’s quarters. She leads me through silent halls, and stops at a corner. I peek round and see a curtained doorway, with an Imperial man in archaic Cresos armor standing in front of it.
“Oh, good. Toshoda is on watch.” Shiara apparently recognizes the guard. “He’s not the brightest sort, and he’s had eyes for me since I got here.” She gestures to an empty doorway nearby. “Wait there until we go past. You’ll have a quarter of an hour at most, though.”
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