It would have been easier for Marcel if the inner wall of the city separating Blackwood Row from the rest of Huile had a few gates itself, but safety regulations blocked it, meaning the only way to get to the Lazacorp refineries was to leave the city proper and re-enter from outside. This circuitous system was to protect the people of Huile from sangleum fumes, and Lazacorp’s mutant workers from the possibility of violent human bigotry. Lazarus had recounted dozens of unfortunate incidents that had plagued Blackwood Row before the Resurgence took over. His decision to hire Mutants had satisfied all humanitarian inclinations, and no doubt saved lives considering Mutants’ natural resistance to sangleum poisoning, but the influx of such workers had sparked bitter words, thrown rocks, and even a few riots.
It was an unfortunate reality that while the people of Huile might be comfortable with Kortonians and even the occasional salvi, Mutants were a step too far. Considering the grim fact that most mutants were born of the ætheric storms of the Calamity, combined with their kind’s general… look, Marcel could understand these misgivings, even though he couldn’t, in all Resurgence righteousness, endorse them. Conflicts between non-mutated wastefolk and independent mutants clans were so commonplace that it had even become a cliché in Phenian cinegraph shows, with mutants usually playing the villains, worshiping ætheric aberrations like gods and committing every sort of atrocity. Marcel had been out here long enough to know that the reality was a bit more complicated, that the horned men and women were just as often the victims as perpetrators.
The trolley rolled into the edges of town, where some buildings were still not yet fully occupied, and a few had even been left ruined by generations of scavengers; husks of brick or concrete, where scraggy grass now grew. Those that were filled tended to be the cheapest of overnight inns, small bars, scrap-houses, and other petty business to sate the needs of wastefolk merchants. Still, Lambert’s men kept even these areas clean and safe, so that even the closest thing Huile had to slums were innocuous enough. One could walk even these streets safely at night, could speak freely without fear of paranoid ears leading Principate shadows to your door, could sleep comfortable, belly full, behind walls that kept out the raiders and troglyns and all the barbarism of the Wastes. How many cities in the Border States, or in the whole of the world even, could offer that?
It seemed madness to recall how Alba had been willing to throw this city by the wayside, just weeks after saving it. He remembered arguing with her at a café, Desct playing an uncomfortable third wheel. Her plan, so she explained, was to head into the Wastes, to take up the bounty hunter’s trade, to fight for herself for once, and leave this, what did she call it, “mudlion’s shit-pit.”
Marcel had asked how she could think of leaving just as the town was about to become something, a bastion of UCCR freedom, a bulwark against Principate imperialism, a place worth the blood spilled on it. She had suffered as he had, and yet hadn’t the guts to stay and steer the city on, to make sure what they had sacrificed, what they had had to do, was worth it in the end.
Alba had said that life wasn’t like the pulps, and if he was a damn enough fool to believe any of Roache or City Hall’s promises then she had a griffon in Vastium to sell him.
Yet here the city was, everything that had been promised to him.
The trolleyman cranked a lever, and a recording crackled from the brass speaker of the automated dictaphone at the end of the car.
“Last Stop. Renaud Street,” a feminine voice said.
Marcel satchelled his notes and hopped off, jogging through the gate and past a small crowd around a Wastes-bound caravan, and an even smaller crowd waiting for the armed autobuses that traveled between the more civilized cities of the Border States.
Outside the walls, Huile’s history was written clear in stone and dirt. The ruins of the older districts of the city had been leveled into a wide field, marked in spots by the graffiti-decorated ruins of long-collapsed buildings, sinkholes of stinking muck, recently sprouted groves of thick-barked saplings, patches of finger-cutting shrubs, and small splotches of red ooze: overeager veins of sangleum that hadn’t the patience to wait for Lazacorp pumps. Beyond that the landscape shifted into sharp hills marked in strange whites and blacks, dried rivers decorated with swaying grasses, groves of wild, æther-tainted olive trees, and overgrown skeletons of settlements whose names existed only on out-of-date maps.
The deciding conflict out there was not the recent Battle for Huile, but the now centuries-past Calamity, and its wounds healed slowly into scars. Much had died, but what remained, from the agri-factories to the taur herds to the flocks of skraggers searching for an afternoon meal, trudged on after their own manner. In a way Marcel was almost thankful for the Wastes, harsh, wild and even sickening as they could be. At least they kept at bay the Principate, who even in their recent invasion had had to take the long way around.
Still, as Marcel glanced around in the midday sun, he could not find what he was looking for. There sat not a single independent autotaxi idling, nor even a scrapper-folk clunker looking for city-folk cash. He could wait around, but the fresh new case raised in Marcel a restive impatience.
He’d normally gone to Blackwood Row in the back of a Lazacorp taxi, a necessity since the road that left Huile’s main gate didn’t directly connect to the road leading to Blackwood Row, except at a crossroads by an agri-farm complex a good two kilometres south. His eyes followed the city’s wall west, through the brush, piles of old bullet shells, and dense rustgrass towards Blackwood Row’s main gate. He didn’t intend to take the long route, and the gate didn’t look all that far.
* * *
Half an hour later Marcel emerged from the grasp of razortwig bushes and rustgrass, covered in dust and half-sunstroked, fantasizing about the petition he would send to City Hall demanding a more direct, paved, road.
“Hey, who in Inferno are you?” came a shout.
Marcel found himself faced with a firing squad’s worth of armed men. Lazacorp men, rifles raised, wearing blue-tinted metal helmets, some with sun visors covering their eyes.
“Marcel,” Marcel said, a bit quicker and in a far higher register than he’d meant, “Marcel Talwar.”
“Who?” shouted one of the men in the back, near the opening of the large gate. Several autotrucks loitered near the entrance, backs covered, and those guards who weren’t holding up Marcel were caught up in an argument with some metal-armed man leaning on the side of an autotruck. Marcel had seen plenty of Lazacorp guards before, but usually in the company of Lazarus himself, where they tended to be more amicable and professional. The man in front of him wasn’t even wearing a shirt, and his tanned chest was a canvas for long tattoos of naked women and stone-faced trolls.
“Marcel Talwar,” he repeated, annoyance overtaking his initial fear. “War hero?” he offered. “Fought in Huile Sewer Rats. I was in a fucking parade with Lazarus.”
“Oh!” said the closer man, fully dressed. “I know you, you’re that—uh, you’re Mr. Roache’s friend.”
“Yes, sure. Just put those down. Please.”
The man waved away the other guards, and business continued as the nearest guard checked through Marcel’s identification papers, investigator’s license, and even the warrant Lambert had written up. A tanker-truck rolled out of the gate, hauling gallons of æther-oil, likely to Resurgence friendly city-states nearby, perhaps Quorgon or Dechetville. Marcel knew he shouldn’t be annoyed at the guards’ failure to recognize him—he hadn’t joined the army for the fame. Still, it had only been two years. Had the sacrifices of his friends been forgotten already?
“What is it you need, Mr. Talwar?” the guard asked, gun slung over his shoulder, staring at the warrant as if it were in El’Helmaudi script.
“I’m investigating the death of Mr. Fareau.”
“Fareau?” The guard scrunched his forehead. Marcel nodded. “You know any Fareau, Remus?”
Another guard walked over, helmet hang
ing on his belt. “Yeah. He’s uh, accident. Collapsed walkway.” Remus stared at Marcel. “Didn’t think he had family or friends or nothing.”
“Investigator,” Marcel said.
“Invest…” Remus scratched the bald of his head. “Police already came through.”
“Private investigator. I’m just here to look around, talk to a few people. If you know anything…”
The man shook his head, then grabbed the shoulder of the other guard and the two whispered out some nervous conference, glancing back every few seconds. Marcel put his papers back in his satchel and began walking towards the gate.
“Wait!” Remus said, “You can’t just…”
Marcel stopped and stared. This had never been a problem when Lazarus was around, but without their boss, even simple tasks seemed like legendary feats of logistics. Or perhaps this was Verus’s hand, Marcel mused.
Remus gestured, “I’ll contact Verus. You can talk to him, okay?”
Marcel nodded. He had planned to speak to the foreman at some point, anyhow.
As he waited, he tried to interrogate the first guard, but got little out of him, only that he “didn’t share a shift with Fareau,” “didn’t see much,” “didn’t hear much,” and “never really talked to the man.” Marcel tried a few others, but they could give nothing more than the first, often less, though with more swearing.
Twenty minutes passed and an autocar drove through the front gate. The ever-haggard visage of Verus stared from the driver’s window. The mesh of scars on his face reminded Marcel of cracked waste-dirt, and his black leather eyepatch only further accentuated his scowl. The foreman got out and stared death through his one good eye at Marcel.
“Roache send you?”
Marcel crossed his arms and shook his head. “What makes you say that?”
Verus laughed a growl. “Doesn’t trust me? Thinks he can’t leave Blackwood Row for a few damned weeks. Is that it? Needs to have his dog thrust its nose into my behind, smell where I’ve been sitting?”
“Inferno are you talking about, Verus? I haven’t talked to Lazarus since he left.”
The man chewed on his tongue. “What you here for then?”
“Gileon Fareau.”
“Eh, him?” Verus said. “Fell.”
“So I’ve been told. What’s this about Lazarus Roache and spying?”
Verus narrowed his eye. “Workplace disagreement.” The words seemed ill-placed in his mouth.
“What, you don’t agree with his choice of going off to Icaria or something?”
Verus turned his head, seeming to pick at Marcel’s face with his gaze. “He doesn’t need to be mucking around up there. And you don’t need to be mucking around here neither.”
“It’s my job and my right,” Marcel flashed the warrant, and Verus grabbed it, muttering furious nothings as he read. “If you keep me from my work, that’s as good a reason as any to bring in a few officers with me. I’ll get in one way or another.”
Verus scowled, tossing the warrant back. “I’m not keeping you. What is it you want?”
Marcel gestured past the gate. “To see where it happened.”
“That it?”
Marcel nodded.
“I’m not keeping you from that.” Verus threw his arm to the car. “Well, what’s keeping you?”
* * *
Verus drove him through the gate, into Blackwood Row. It struck Marcel, whenever he visited, how the neighborhood looked far more pleasant than the looming smokestacks would suggest. The buildings were well-maintained, old brick things with only a thin layer of soot. The streets were clean asphalt compared to the inconsistently maintained cobblestone of Huile, and it even boasted something of a park, the wide-open Liberation Square, re-named and re-dedicated after the liberation of Huile. It boasted geometric paths interspersed with small plots of plant life: flowers, bushes, and trees, not one of them a waste-touched breed, though even these arboreal imports could not escape being colored black by the smoke. In its center stood a de-commissioned tread-driller, a fat tank of a machine, with several long mechanical arms, drill bits polished to gleam. Marcel had some notion the Guild-imported machines were used in digging new sangleum wells, but the last he had seen them in action was clearing up the battle rubble outside Huile.
Mutant workers, dressed in denim uniforms and reddened skin, pushed dollies of machine bits and carried crates throughout the neighborhood. Others worked repainting the outside of a pale-white building, or repairing a sunken pothole. A few blocks in a large fence cut off the route, manned by several guards, making languid rounds, rifles strapped to their backs.
“High security,” Marcel mused.
“For the workers’ sake,” Verus said in a disinterested monotone. “You weren’t there for the riots, when we built up this place.” An almost smirk worked up his face. “Back with the old taurshit mayor. I doubt you can imagine what the Huile folk can do, when worked up to it. Out to purge the skinsick. Their words, Talwar, not mine.”
They turned down a small road, passing refinery towers ensconced in scaffolds. Marcel tried to ignore the growing acrid taste of the air as Verus slowed his ‘car in front of a massive concrete block of a building.
“That was a long time ago,” Marcel said.
“Depends on your measuring stick,” Verus got out, and Marcel opened his door. “Not even seven years, fully.”
“Well, we have UCCR rule of law now.”
Verus pulled out a snake’s-length rope of keys and after a few seconds picked out the right one. “So they tell me.” He waved Marcel over without looking up, “Come on now, it’s right through here.”
Chapter 8
‘Right through here’ meant over twenty minutes of wandering down hallways, into basements, through underground passageways, and up and down a series of lifts and narrow stairwells, and that didn’t even count the ten minutes Verus left him waiting in a hallway while the man ducked into a side office to make some vocaphone calls.
“I was in the middle of quite a few things,” he snarled.
Marcel was not eager to linger long down in some subbasement of Lazacorp. In fact, even the thought nauseated him. The cramped, dimly lit hallways still had a burning hint of sangleum wafting through. They were as labyrinthine as his war memories recalled, and he kept jumping at shadows, though he knew there was nothing to fear.
An investigation, an investigation, he had to keep reminding himself why he was there. He sucked in his breath, and tried to keep away memories of that final grim battle. It was hard not to imagine the grasp of the gas mask, hear the muffled gunshots through it, the whizz of the gas, feel the burning in the leg he no longer had. He caught himself wishing Alba was here, to pull him out again, but he held his breath a moment and suffocated the thought.
He was becoming more than half-sure that Verus was wasting his time, had taken detours, to disorient and enrage him. Marcel bit his tongue and tried not to show his discomfort. He couldn’t afford to appear weak.
Mutants passed by every minute or so, some hauling, some just walking. They eyed him, moving forward quickly, responding to his weak waves and smiles with vague mirrored facsimiles. Marcel tried to converse with them, but most were busy, or possibly, made themselves busy. Perhaps if he pushed harder he might get more than a sentence, but he wasn’t sure he had the strength down here to do anything more than keep his wits in some loose order.
The mutants who passed by bore the marks of sangleum mutation across their whole bodies: red chitinous skin, patches of scabs, yellowed eyes, and very often small, or not so small, horns, jutting at odd angles from their head. Some had more idiosyncratic mutations, elongated or twisted limbs, hard knife-edged ridges, long back-stalks that oozed bile, nails that sharpened into claws, and great boney growths on their joints that gave the impressions of giant gears.
One hunchbacked mutant bumped into his shoulder. Marcel stumbled, nearly falling, catching himself on the wall. Th
e mutant didn’t stop, but hurried on, mumbling something, though if it was an apology it was a vague one.
Marcel rubbed his forehead, and tried to press away a headache, now entirely certain that Verus was wasting time. He pressed his hands into his pockets to force a nonchalant air and brushed his hand against paper.
He took out the crumpled scrap of newsprint, which he had certainly not put there. His mouth opened to shout to the mutant, but decided against it, instead uncrumpling the message. What he found was a piece of an old issue of The Huile Gazette. It was unmarked, aside from a stain that suggested it was recently trash. One side was a blank crossword puzzle, the other a snippet from an old issue.
“…when completed the new Lazacorp facility should be able to provide the whole of Huile with water as clean as that which pipes in Phenia, according to the words of Mr. Roache. The operation, beginning next week is expected to…”
The door slammed open, and Marcel thrust the newsprint back into his pocket. Verus stumbled out, glared at Marcel, and thrust his thumb up.
“A couple floors that way,” he said. “Come on, now, don’t waste my time.”
* * *
Marcel inspected the catwalks that weaved between half a dozen other catwalks among the towers of machinery in the windowless block of a building. He could see a faint line along the railing and part of the walkway where it had collapsed and been re-attached.
Sweat dripped from his forehead and splattered down, hissing into steam on the machinery. It was easy to see how rust could build up here, or how someone could become dehydrated and disoriented, trip and plummet. He leaned his head over the rail and glanced below. Four floors to the bottom—a clean fall, straight into some dense growth of grinding mechanisms that Marcel couldn’t hope to identify.
The Sightless City Page 8
