The Sightless City

by Noah Lemelson

  Mutants continued to work below, their footsteps muffled by the constant clang of metal and screams of steam. He glanced around for the hunchbacked mutant, but he was nowhere in sight. That the paper snippet was a message was clear enough, but of what?

  “You done?” Verus was leaning on the opposite handrail.

  “How’d it happen?” Marcel asked.

  “Man was drunk,” Verus said. “We had the section roped off, but he wandered into it on shift. Crack, smash, you get it.”

  “So you knew there was a structural problem?”

  Verus walked over and slammed his foot down. The catwalk shook but didn’t give. “Yes, these things happen, which is why we had it roped off until we could fix it.”

  “So, no fault of yours?”

  Verus gave his impression of a smile, “None.”

  “But you had a drunk man on staff.”

  Verus shrugged and crossed his arms, “Roache’s hire, not mine.”

  “Any witnesses?” Marcel asked, wiping his forehead with his sleeves. “Seems busy.”

  “Late at night,” Verus said simply. “We keep a strict curfew.”

  “One which Gileon broke.”

  Verus rolled his single eye and stretched his shoulders. Marcel kept up his stare. Finally Verus snarled: “The man was wasted, what about that confuses you?”

  Marcel flipped through his notebook and tapped his pen. “Were there any signs something was wrong before the accident, unusual behavior, unexplained requests?”

  Verus shook his head.

  “He didn’t ask to be reassigned to a new shift, anything like that?”

  Verus freed one arm to wave the question away. “No, nothing like that. Just some drunk idiot. Maybe you desk-job folk don’t realize it, but when men are doing real work, sometimes accidents happen.”

  The letter claimed Gileon had asked Verus specifically for a change in shift. Why would the foreman lie about that? A misremembrance? Possible, but Marcel doubted it. Still, despite his detestable airs, Verus was not the primary suspect.

  “I have some questions about the structural integrity,” Marcel tapped the guardrail with his pen. “You have an ætheric engineer on staff?”

  “I can get you a mechanic,” Verus said simply.

  “That’s not what I asked,” Marcel replied.

  “It’s rust. I can find you a child to explain the concept.”

  “But you must have an ætheric engineer on staff.” Marcel dragged his foot along the line where the section of walkway had been attached. “Smooth work here, this doesn’t look like welder’s, strikes me as æthermantics.”

  Verus shrugged.

  “It might help if I had some other parts of the refineries to compare to,” Marcel said, thinking back on the mutant’s note. “Places a little more stable, maybe somewhere else Gileon worked around. Perhaps the water filtration plant?”

  “No,” Verus said.

  “It’s an easy request, Verus. I don’t even need you to come with me if you’re so damn tired of my company.”

  “I said no.” Verus stepped forward, and Marcel could feel the sharpness of his stare. It occurred to Marcel that it had been several minutes since he had last noticed the man blink. “That project is a private Lazacorp venture. There’s dozens of buildings here. Why in Inferno do you want to shove your nose in that one?”

  Marcel gripped the railing as the man pushed towards him, gaze cutting. He steadied himself, sucked in his chest. He wouldn’t allow the brute to simply intimidate his way out.

  “Schematics were stolen, were they not?” Marcel said. “Of that facility. I don’t know what exactly happened here, Verus, but if it wasn’t just an accident, I need to see all that I can.”

  Verus soften his stare but didn’t relent, anger morphing into a wary curiosity. “How do you know about that?”

  Lazarus never told him. Odd, but it seemed whatever feud the two were having now spread to intelligence breaches. A topic he would need to discuss with Roache. Perhaps this explained some of Verus’s paranoia, if he was not even aware that the documents had been returned.

  “Lazarus mentioned it before he left,” Marcel said, the simplest explanation, not even a lie, technically.

  Verus nodded. “Figured as much. So he has you sniffing around, is that it? Using whatever excuse he can pull up? Listen, tell Roache that everything is how he left it.”

  Marcel slammed the rail. “Last time, Verus. I haven’t spoken to Roache any more than you have. I don’t know what kind of spat you two are having, but this is a simple investigation into Gileon’s accident.” He pulled out his warrant and shook it in the man’s face. “Does this have Lazarus Roache’s name on it? Anywhere?”

  “Everything in this damn city has that man’s name on it.”

  The enmity was complete. Or perhaps that was an excuse. Either way Marcel shook his head and thrust the warrant back into his bag. “Fine. I’ll tell Lambert you’re preventing a simple investigation and get some badges to rummage through here.”

  He turned to walk away, and as he did so, Verus grabbed the edge of his coat. “I’ll get your engineer,” Verus muttered.

  “What?” Marcel said, pulling himself free.

  “I’ll get you your damned engineer,” Verus snarled.

  “I thought you didn’t have one.” Marcel couldn’t help himself from grinning. It was clear enough that in whatever list of secrets Verus kept, the filtration plant ranked higher than Gall, but he didn’t mind starting with the engineer.

  “I never said that.” Verus snorted disgust and waved over a guard. “Grab Gall, I need some gunk cleared out of here.”

  * * *

  “It fell, then I put it back.” Corvin Gall ended his description of the accident in the same sentence that started it. The man resembled a bulky golem, not just in size and girth but also in material. His legs were metal prosthetics, his arms mechanical, his face marred by a great metal plate over what had once been his left ear and forehead. His back bore a long metal pole that appeared to be grafted into him, a work light and several tools hanging off its end. Layers of oil-stained leather covered his chest, but Marcel was willing to guess there was some metal in there somewhere too.

  Verus leaned back on the sprawl of piping. Marcel had hoped that the man would now take the excuse to get back to work, but despite his complaints, the foreman stood and stared.

  “And… do things often fall here?” Marcel asked spinning his pen on a blank notepad.

  “Decay. Time. Accidents. Everything breaks. Here less than outside, but everything breaks. This was easy to fix. Boring.”

  “And what did you know about Mr. Fareau?” Marcel asked.

  The engineer raised an eyebrow and scratched his chin.

  “Gileon. The man who died,” Marcel said.

  Gall turned towards Verus, who avoided his gaze and waved him on from the perpetual lock of his crossed arms.

  “I just fix machines,” Gall said.

  “He brought you machinery bits. You must have talked to him at some point.”

  “Don’t like conversation,” Gall said.

  “How about before this job?” Marcel said. “You’re from out west, so was Mr. Fareau. Any chance you two met up? Knew people in common? I’m just trying to get some sense of why he might have been drinking.”

  “The Wastes,” Gall said.

  Marcel nodded. For a moment it seemed like some memory or insight had bloomed behind Gall’s eyes.

  Then the engineer shook his head. “Didn’t like conversation back then neither.”

  “So what, you just work all the time?”

  Below, two mutants lugged a large metal cylinder. The second one slipped, and the cylinder clanged onto the catwalk, shaking the entire structure as the first cursed out his scrambling partner, sending furtive looks upwards.

  “I like machines more.” Corvin Gall smiled. Not a single one of his teeth was natural. “The
y don’t talk.”

  Marcel jabbed his pen. “I want a yes or no, flat out. Did you have any contact with the deceased?”

  “No,” the man said. Marcel scribbled out the simple answer. Gileon was taken by enough fear of this engineer to send a letter to Roache, but by the man’s telling he barely knew Gileon existed.

  Verus rubbed his head, and started to scratch at a scab on his arm. Marcel stepped closer to Gall.

  “On another note,” Marcel said, lowering his voice. “I heard some schematic notes of yours went missing a few weeks back. Is that true?”

  He gauged the man’s face for surprise or guilt. Instead he found rage.

  “Damned thing to steal! Damned! Weeks of notes, progress, all gone! Was making my way on the modulation, just needed to get the resonance right, could have had it by now!” The dully-sedate man now paced back and forth, fingers flicking rapidly. Verus took quick notice and rushed over. “Damn skinsick mutants,” Gall continued, “could have been any of them! Thieving bastards, sneaking around, you see them!”

  Verus grabbed his arm and pulled the engineer back behind him. “All right Gall, you can shut up now.” Surprisingly the man did, though he kept up his fidgeting. “You, Talwar,” Verus shoved forward his finger, “Inferno do you think you are doing, setting off my employees, causing a damn mess?”

  “Conducting my investigation,” Marcel said. “And I would like to continue it.”

  “Continue with what?” Verus shouted. “There’s nothing, you’ve found nothing. I don’t know how many hours I’m going have to waste to explain that the man fell. That people fall sometimes. I could show you what happens to a body that falls from that height.”

  Marcel stiffened up. “Was that a threat?”

  Verus face didn’t change a twitch. “Just offering anything that could help with your investigation.”

  “Well,” Marcel leaned back, hand resting by his holster, a gesture he was sure was due to overactive nerves, but not sure enough. “Since you asked, I would like to see Mr. Fareau’s room.”

  “Didn’t,” Verus said.

  “What?”

  “He didn’t live in Blackwood Row,” Verus said. “Never enough taur-fucking space here. Had a place in Huile, on one of Roache’s properties.” As he finished his sentence his eye flickered back and forth, and his smile faded a bit, as if he had not fully remembered that bit of trivia until just that moment. He stared down, and quickly muttered some complaint about the mutant workers who had just now begun to again haul the cylinder below.

  …Sister, do pity me, for day by day the grim reality of my miserable reassignment strikes me with greater and greater force. I recant my complaints on the barbarity of the Wastes, oh fool I was for thinking those dead lands the grimmest corner of our Principate. Nay, Videk alone is the most miserable of all provinces, and the Vidish, the most perfidious lot. There are some in the East Vidish Extraction Co. that can be trusted (Kaimark and Anklav born for the most), but there are twice as many who are happy to sneak behind our back and sell our sweat-earned lumber to the highest bidder, Principate blue or Resurgence red!

  I hate this land, sister, I hate the grasping shrubs and the miserable rain. I hate the endless forestlines and the thieving provincials. But most of all, I despise those damn Ferrals. Think of the fool I was just weeks ago, glad to be away from the open Wastes. Yet there were fewer places to hide in the openness of desolation, fewer holes for beasts to slumber. There ambush was a rare danger, not a constant nuisance! Raiders can be bribed, but these beastmen? Ah, the idiot I was, glad to be away from the stink of the skinsick, the misery of those mutated souls. Yet with them at least I can squint to see the humanity, polluted by oozing skin and twisting horns. What humanity do these Ferrals have? I do not care much for claims of common ancestry, these things have more in common with a rabid dog than anything that that should walk on two legs. They huddle amongst themselves, filthy, hiding between tree branches, or in muddy creek beds, arrows notched, eager to let them fly at my workers, barking and hooting all the while.

  It sickens me to see how the Resurgence traitors try to use these animals, allow them to pollute their cities, to live among them. It is not love that guides their hands, a joke of a claim I can promise you, they detest the beasts as much as we, I can see it in their eyes. No, they suffer the Ferral presence just so they might have some foul ally amongst the forestlands with which to vex and nettle us. I do not know when the Imperator’s victory will claim fully Videk. It is clear to me that such a blessed day is far further than those in Kaimark claim. Yet still I await it eagerly, when the last of the beastmen are hunted down…

  ¬¬—Excerpt from a letter bearing the signature of a “Darya Wagmer.” Found during a Resurgence-funded lumber raid, deemed of no strategic import.

  Chapter 9

  Sylvaine sat leaning on the curved wall of rust, schematics in hand. The open mountain wind flowed past her, fluttering her hair and papers as it whipped through the inert engine that hung off the side of Icaria. She glanced up to watch a skragger fly by and land in its nest, a tangle of shrub branches poking out of caved-in section of Icaria’s hull. She pulled her toolbox closer, away from the edge of the long drop, and wondered where in Inferno her partner was.

  Javad had still not shown for a single day’s work since the quarter began, and she had reached the end of the tasks that she could cover alone. Wheelston’s Repair Inc. had assigned their combined morning to repair duty on one of the great engines that had once propelled Icaria through the clouds. A great browning cylinder it was, with sets of blades the width of a house that creaked behind her.

  She knew it was a pointless project; even if the engines were restored to complete functionality they’d still be mere orna-mentation. Most of the internal machinery of Icaria, even that which had not been destroyed by the ætheric waves of the Calamity, had been hollowed out for storage space, or else melted down and recycled. Still it was a common Icaria creed, spread by political slogans and grandiose speeches, that one day the city of engineers would grace the sky again. Damn the Calamity, damn the near century of rust, damn the mountainside suburbs that relied on the city, damn logic and damn common decency, Icaria would fly again!

  This nonsense never bothered Sylvaine much, pointless jobs paid as well as vital ones, but without the spark of æther she had no chance of replacing the, admittedly functionally decorative, æther-circuitry that lay deep within. She could lie and claim the job done, it would hurt no one, but whenever the next repair team clocked in they’d report the failure, and she had no doubt fingers would be quickly pointed at the ‘layabout ferral.’

  She played with thumb of her glove; it would be so simple if could just slip it on, point, and poof! Then she could be out of here and at workshop where she could…

  Panic gripped her a moment, replaced quickly by a now mundane despair. Don’t think about it. There was no reason to ruin herself with dread, but she couldn’t avoid it.

  That night was to be the final night of workshop. Tomorrow she was scheduled to present Gearswit her negative-density generator in its complete, intricate, beautiful, and entirely nonfunctional glory. No doubt Gearswit would try to be kind about her project, as tactful as a kortonian could manage, maybe he would even hold off a full flunk and mark her as an “incomplete,” with a polite but firm suggestion to finally give up on her fool’s excuse for a dream. She dreaded looking into his eyes and seeing the thoughts behind them, those I-Told-You-So’s, those meandering theories on why a ferral would try to be an engineer, try to act human.

  The thought of Lazarus’s drug came back, the painful possibility that the path to her happiness had been handed to her and that she had smacked it away, to live in fear and failure.

  She turned back to her current distraction; some schematics Gearswit had given her. “Extra credit” was the official term, a reason to keep her on the class roll even as her project remained inert. An excuse to make her feel like a real engi
neer for just a little while longer, all while clearing out his slush pile. And these notes were clearly pulled from deep within said slush pile, Gearswit himself wasn’t entirely sure who had sent the schematics, nor what they were supposed to represent. He had just said that he got it in some envelope dropped off at his desk with the simple instructions: Show To An Engineer.

  These schematics were certainly intricate, pipework inter-woven with precise care, a multitude of tanks fused within and about a massive central cylinder, each component sketched with exacting specifications. The components ranged from standard, but high-quality, Icaria imports to custom in-house machinery. The gargantuan device looked expensive, it looked sophisticated. It also looked like nonsense.

  On the whole, the machineworks vaguely resembled the outlines for some sort of large-scale water filtration plant, perhaps for some massive military instillation or small metropolis, but any inspection of its internal design showed parts that seemed to lack a purpose within any sort of water filtration system. Extraneous modules filled every extra metre of space, piping twisted in strange patterns, dumping what should be clean water effluent into the influent tubes, and some of the pipelines had specifications she had only ever seen used in sangleum transport.

  It was a mess, made worse by the fact that, by mistake or design, much of the schematic was mislabeled, with many of the stranger mechanisms designated as mundane filtration machinery that should have been half, or twice, the measured size and an entirely different shape. Then there was this strange module near the mid-point, which seemed to have even baffled the sketcher. Pages were focused on it, with abundant use of question marks. A good section of the module was drawn in only the vaguest of stretches, the author either unwilling to make a guess on its functions, or else having ran out of time.

  The clangs of footsteps on rungs reverberated down. Sylvaine bagged her notes and thoughts to stare up and watch as a figure crawled down the long ladder from the city’s surface. She was a malva, slender-built, copper-haired. Sylvaine recognized her as a fellow student from lecture hall.