Two armored constables slouched in the doorway, looking like they thought a little violence would relieve their boredom.
Kyrioc said nothing.
“We know that woman was alive when you skinned her,” he said. “We can tell by the way she bled. You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to ask to be excused from my shift on the day you appear before the magistrates. They are going to be so very eager to sentence you. They burn murderers, you know. Pitch and flame.”
Kyrioc said nothing.
“It’s a sight. They don’t set up big wooden pyres anymore, because that’s how the Katr like to send off their heroes. Too honorable. Now they just coat your balls with this sticky, oily jelly and jab you with a lit torch. It takes a while, too. Yeah, I’d like to see that. I like to see condemneds’ expression the first time they breathe in raw flame.” He leaned in and lowered his voice. “But it doesn’t have to be that way.”
Kyrioc said nothing.
“I bet you didn’t kill that woman on your own, right? Probably someone ordered you to do it. I’ll bet it didn’t even seem real at the time. I’m willing to give up my afternoon’s entertainment—watching you burn alive in front of a jeering crowd—if it means catching the real criminal. Your cooperation could help you, too. Magistrates have been known to send low-level guys to the work crews.”
Kyrioc said nothing.
“But you can’t wait. You need to help us now, while we can still catch the person who made you do it in the first place.”
You can’t just treat a person like they’re real one day and then later act like they’re not. That’s too mean. You have to pick one and stick with it.
Kyrioc closed his eyes. This interrogator had done this patter too many times. Like an actor who had played a part for too long, he was going through the motions, and when Kyrioc was finally ushered out of the room and the next ushered in, he’d go through it again. Probably word for word.
Because Kyrioc wasn’t real to him. Kyrioc didn’t matter.
“I could help you,” the constable said. “You’re not the one we’re after. You’re an errand boy. We’re aiming for your boss. You…” He let his voice trail off, but that sounded well rehearsed, too. “My brother used to work for Harl. I don’t tell people this, but my older brother ran errands, beat guys up, threatened their kids… Selsarim Lost, I loved him, but he was bad all the way through. I tried to convince him to get out, but even when things were going wrong, he couldn’t. ‘Pinochin,’ he said, ‘there’s no getting out for guys like me.’
“You don’t have to burn like a fucking spectacle for a jeering crowd the way my brother did. Tell us what we want to know about Harl, and I’ll see that you’re sent to work in a camp far away where no one will know you. New name, everything. Wouldn’t you rather trim grapevines in the warm sun than burn alive?”
Kyrioc said nothing.
Riliska was dead.
“You think Harl is loyal to you? He’d knife you to get out of a dull conversation. Be smart. Take the chance now, while you can. Because if you’re anything like my brother, you’ll beg for it when it’s too late.”
She had to be dead. Didn’t she?
The interrogator leaned close, his voice low. “I couldn’t help him, but I can help you.”
Kyrioc looked him in the eyes. Help wasn’t a terrible idea. If Kyrioc told his interrogator everything he knew, would the constables go after the Pails, whoever they were, and hit them with the pitch and flame?
He doubted it. No one was going to tell this investigator what he wanted to know, because if the man himself wasn’t on Harl’s payroll, one of the other constables would be. Anyone who talked wouldn’t live through the night, and then what would get done?
Nothing.
If these Pails were going to get payback, he was going to have to do it himself.
“You’re still alive now, but the magistrates are going to turn you into a pile of ash in front of a jeering crowd of drunks. Is that what you want? To die soft? To die humiliated?”
You can’t just treat a person like they’re real one day and then later act like they’re not.
“Harl Sota List Im,” Kyrioc said. His voice was raw because he hadn’t spoken in hours. “That’s what you care about.”
“That’s right,” the interrogator said, startled. “He’s the only one we care about. He could die in your place.”
Kyrioc closed his eyes again. For so long, his only goal had been to survive. That was the task. That was the promise. Survive.
But everything had changed. He’d returned home, and what he’d found was a different city from the one he left. A city that ground up little girls to nothing. This city—his city—threw them away like they were worthless.
He realized then that he’d assumed Riliska and her mother had been killed together. He’d pictured it in his mind: Riliska’s face still and gray, eyelids sunken over empty sockets, her tiny body flayed. But he hadn’t seen it. He didn’t know for sure.
“Alive,” Kyrioc said to himself, quietly. “Alive.”
“That’s right,” the interrogator urged.
Kyrioc had assumed Riliska was dead, and that was just another way of pretending she wasn’t real.
For so many years, survival had been his only purpose. He’d dragged his grief through the long hours of the day like heavy chains, and what good had it done? What good had it done for anyone?
That little girl needed him. She was real, and he was not ready to give up on her. Not yet. He would find her, alive or dead, survival be damned.
He moved slightly, rattling the chain binding his wrist. “I swore never to tell anyone,” Kyrioc lied. “Can I write it down?” He lifted the manacle.
The interrogator hesitated, then glanced at the two ironshirts in the doorway. Both were young fellows with thick necks and heavy shoulders. The interrogator stood. He was ten years older than the constables at the door, but he had the same imposing build. Kyrioc did not.
He smiled and took out the manacle key.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Haliyal moved through Low Market carefully. Not that Low Market was especially dangerous, but like any place, if you weren’t careful, you weren’t alive. The way he saw it, that was the magic spell the dead gods laid on Koh-Salash. That was its special enchantment—it turned living humans into dead ones, and all it needed was a desperate addict with a rusty blade to work its spell.
But he knew his way around. As a kid, he’d hung out on the plankways with his cousins. Like every kid, they were as dumb as freshly carved tombstones. They used to run everywhere, fight with their fists, and filch stuff from food stalls. Petty bullshit, but it made them feel fast and free and clever.
Then they got old enough to notice girls. Suddenly, it wasn’t enough to steal a few plums. They needed coin. That was the best time of Haliyal’s life. Stealing shit. A little dealing. They were barely fifteen years old and they were on their way up. Red Apricot herself had said she was watching their little gang. He’d had hope.
Then Haliyal had gotten sick. In a tiny room at the back of his mother’s building, he woke only long enough to drink broth. It took three whole weeks for his fever to break, and it was more than a year before he was strong enough to go out.
By then, his cousins were all dead. They’d come to him while he was bedridden, all excited about their plan to rob a neighborhood tar dealer. Haliyal wished he had tried to talk them out of it, not because they would have listened but because he felt so guilty about his enthusiasm for their stupid plan.
He thought about his cousins every day.
When he was well enough, his mother found him a job and he took it. There was no point in going back to the plankways all alone.
And now there was this thing with the Package. He’d thought Rulenya would be a little bit of fun—someone to pour brandy into until she was ready to come back to his place—but they had stumbled across the biggest score ever.
It made him nervous, to be honest.
It made him feel vulnerable. Where could a thief fence a piece of glitterkind? Magistrates branded white tar dealers weekly, which was petty bullshit compared to this. This was magic. It was worth a fucking fortune.
He had one problem and it couldn’t be solved. How to convert that ear into coin. He’d hit on the idea of asking around for a black-market transplant for himself, to identify potential buyers, but no one would admit to knowing a way to get one. He’d asked after Red Apricot, but she’d taken the point three years before. He’d even gone all the way up to High Slope to find a noble family with ward in their names, to see if there would be a reward or finder’s fee for recovering the piece, but he couldn’t get past the guards at the wall.
In fact, the whole thing had turned into a mess, and Haliyal was ready to go back to his job sharpening saw blades. Probably the best thing to do would be to walk into the nearest hospital, find the bureaucrat in charge, and say he found it. Maybe he could get ten sails as a finder’s fee. Maybe—
“Pardon me, good sir, but would you help me, please?”
Haliyal was startled out of his reverie. An elderly woman stood at the intersection of three plankways, and yeah, she was addressing him. “Me?” he asked, feeling foolish. The street-smart kid he’d once been was long gone.
“If you would, good sir,” she said, perfectly polite. “My nephew wrote me a note, but I can’t see as well as I used to.” She held up a sheet of cheap paper.
Although it was past sunset, Low Market was well lit by Suloh’s hip bones. The old woman stood far from the shadows on a well-traveled street. She was dressed nicely, like a merchant’s wife, with the makeup, painted hands, and jewelry of a girl fifty years younger. Haliyal guessed she’d been beautiful once and refused to stop putting in the effort to maintain herself. Her every movement was stiff, as though she was in pain.
And she was all alone.
Haliyal thought briefly of his grandmother, who had sat with him for many hours while he was bedridden. This woman had nothing in common with his gran except age and infirmity, but he could spare her a moment in this open public place.
He approached. She held up the sheet of paper. No wonder she couldn’t read it. He could barely see it himself. As he squinted down at the curving lines that didn’t look much like Selsarim script, he heard a carriage pass behind him on the road, and a door unlatch.
Before he could turn around, Haliyal, child of Hyordis, felt a heavy blow strike the back of his head. The last thing he saw before darkness took him was the little old woman’s face, which did not betray a trace of surprise or concern.
* * *
It turned out that the constables in the south tower only worked sections of Woodgarden. The woman who recognized the corpse knew her as a pickpocket who’d been thrown out of several platform halls in High Apricot. Another ironshirt had called her “Woodgarden trash.” No one recognized her, so she must have come from the northern parts of that deck.
Onderishta led Fay to Woodgarden to find locals who could help. They crossed the imaginary border between south and east tower jurisdictions, where the constables needed only the barest description before they could provide her name and the building where she lived.
The hall outside her apartment was cleaner than expected. There were three shops on the center mezzanine but they were all shuttered and padlocked. Fay tried the gate on the pawnshop window, but it wouldn’t budge. He followed the landlady to the victim’s apartment.
Rulenya, child of Rashila, lived in a pig’s sty. Onderishta had smelled worse places, but usually they included a rotting corpse. The floor was covered with discarded clothes, stained bedsheets, and broken crockery. A hand-painting set leaned against the wall in the corner. It seemed their victim had a day job, too.
“By the fallen gods, I had no idea things were this bad!” the landlady cried, but she wasn’t very convincing.
“Stay in the hall,” Onderishta told her. Fay strode fearlessly inside, and Onderishta followed. The ironshirts moved into the doorway and did nothing but look disgusted. “This is going to take all day. I should have kept my new apprentices handy so they could manage this for us.”
“If you’d have brought those two here, they wouldn’t be your apprentices anymore.” Onderishta was about to concede the point when Fay picked up a set of tiny shoes from beneath the table. Children’s shoes. The victim had a kid.
“Put the kid on the list of people to find.”
* * *
Riliska sat in the dark and did as she was told. She kept quiet. She kept still.
She may not have learned her letters from the tutor her mother hired, but she’d learned something from her mother’s guests: never test a stranger’s patience. It was impossible to tell when they would suddenly have none, and sometimes they didn’t punish kids the way a parent would. Sometimes, they beat her the way they’d beat an adult.
Riliska couldn’t bear that, not when she was so far from home with no idea where her mother had gone.
She’d been loaded into the carriage like a crate, and she tried to be as still as one, even as she was bumped and shaken by the carriage’s noisy springs. She didn’t even look up at the shadowy figures around her.
Then the carriage slowed and two of the men lunged through the door. Riliska shut her eyes, but she heard the sound of leather hitting flesh, and a man’s awful grunt of pain.
Footsteps rushed toward her and she had to peek. The two short, well-muscled men were half-shoving, half-carrying a third toward the carriage. At the same moment that Riliska saw his nightmarish expression—tongue lolling, eyes rolled back—she recognized him. He was the fuddled man who had beaten up her mother.
He was tossed into the box, almost falling directly onto her. She wondered if she should feel happy to see him receiving some of what he’d given out, but she didn’t. She couldn’t. He looked helpless and ruined.
A moment later, she felt herself shoved out of the carriage. She fell onto the hard skywood deck, blinking in the sudden orange light of Suloh’s bones as the carriage rolled away.
Opposite her stood an old woman with no expression at all. The smell of perfume hung about her, and the painted designs on her hair and nails were clumsy and smudged. A moment passed. Then another. The woman’s expression never changed.
Goosebumps ran down Riliska’s back. She didn’t know where she was, but she wanted to be somewhere else. Surely, she could outrun an old woman wearing too many clothes.
She had to chance it.
“Do you want me to take you to your mother?”
Riliska froze in place. Her mother? She felt the lie in the woman’s words, but she decided to believe it anyway. It only made sense that they would return her to her mother. Who else would bother to look after a Long Hangover? Besides, Riliska could run away from this woman anytime, which meant she wasn’t a captive anymore, which meant she didn’t really have anything to be afraid of. Maybe.
The woman turned away and started walking. If she had tried to grab Riliska, or had ordered her to come along, Riliska would have run away. But she didn’t. It was Riliska’s choice to follow or not, and that surely meant that this smelly old woman would bring her to her mom.
They walked along the broad road to a set of circular stairs. The old woman lumbered up into the darkness and Riliska followed. Shadows lay everywhere. The glow from Suloh’s bones was blocked by the decks, plankways, and avenues of Low Market. The smell of overturned chamber pots grew stronger, and when the breeze shifted, she caught a whiff of rotting fish.
But this was where she needed to go. But the old woman knew where the man with the steel chain and the crazy smile had taken her mother, and of course it would not be someplace respectable.
The woman left the stairs and led Riliska across plankways between old, disused warehouses. In the spaces between the buildings, intermittent streams of filthy water flowed from the deck above, but whether it was spilled sewage or just a shopkeeper mopping their floors, Riliska couldn’t tell. Drums
thrummed from above.
The old woman suddenly turned to a door and drew out a key. There were no markings on the building except an engraved panel showing two buckets hung from the same hook. Riliska followed her inside.
The room looked like a tiny shop. One side had a counter, but the other walls were covered with shelves. On the shelves were hundreds of tiny, unpainted wooden dolls. They had oversized bubble-heads and hollow recesses for eyes, and their tiny arms were outstretched as though barring the way. Riliska thought they looked oddly threatening. She hurried around the counter to catch up with the old woman.
The next room was dark and full of workbenches set with different sorts of saws and drills. They were ominous in the dim light.
The woman climbed a flight of cramped stairs. Riliska didn’t like the look of it. Not at all.
“If you don’t come up, you won’t see your mommy.”
It was a lie. Riliska knew it was a lie, but she couldn’t stop herself. She climbed the stairs.
She had been separated from her mother most of the day, and that felt wrong. It was past time to see her again. Besides, who was she to second-guess a grownup? She was just a kid. What did she know about where the man with the crazy smile might take her mom?
Once she’d reached the top of the stairs, Riliska could see that the room beyond was dark. There was a single window at the far end, with the faint yellow-orange glow of Suloh’s bones filtering through the dirty glass. Was her mother sleeping? She crept into the doorway, and the awful smell…
Just as Riliska was about to back away, the old woman shoved her. She stumbled into the room and the door slammed behind her. She heard a bolt being thrown.
“Let me out!” she shouted. She threw her weight against the door and pounded at it with her tiny fists. “Let me out! Let me out!” But the door didn’t even rattle.
She’d known her mother wasn’t here, but she’d come anyway.
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