Marcel shook his head. “Not sure that’s possible. I mean, that’s more in the range of corporative espionage, breaking into private business offices, not exactly legal private investigation.”
“Well,” she said, “maybe there’s a copy floating around somewhere.” Like the one Kayip had said he’d left on this man’s desk.
Marcel stared at her, eyes sharp. “Seems unlikely. Who did you say you worked for?”
“The Times of Icaria.”
The man grunted in response. It was clear enough he didn’t believe her, thought her suspicious enough that he was willing to lie about the very existence of the schematics he owned. Sylvaine silently gritted her teeth. Talking anyone into anything was far from her expertise. She had only been able to convince people she was an engineer thanks to Roache’s damned drug. Why did Kayip think she stood a chance at this?
She turned her gaze out the window, trying to hide her anxiety, and nearly yelped. A policeman was walking outside. Kayip had warned her that Roache had eyes even within the police force. If they were following her here then perhaps they had been found out, though by what mistake she wasn’t sure.
She squinted closer and realized that her fearful imagination had gotten the better of her. This “policeman” was simply a man in a blue coat with some strange, most likely waste-scavenged, cap. Her immediate relief was then overcome by the realization she had been staring panicked out the window for several seconds. Marcel was already past wary of her, and odd behavior like this certainty wouldn’t alleviate his suspicions. Gear’s-grits! She hadn’t even gotten to show him the photographs and she was already blowing her cover. She quickly shifted her gaze around the room, looking for some excuse to change the tenor of the conversation…
“Oh!” Sylvaine said, in earnest. She reached down and grabbed a book from the shelf. “You have The Bladedancer of Unha’Khul?” On the browning cover was a fading image of a man, dressed in flowing linens, thrusting upwards a long, curved sword that shined in some unpainted sunlight.
“You know it?” Marcel’s tone changed instantly. He walked over and bent down to the shelf, eagerly perusing his own collection. “Yeah, I have the whole cycle, Swordsman of Unha’Khul, Prince, uh, well, except for Exile.”
“Exile of Unha’Khul was the weakest anyhow,” Sylvaine said, putting the book back and glancing over what she was now realizing was a small library of old pulps. “I didn’t even know they were still in print, I only read it because of my uncle’s old copies.”
“There’s some press down in Phenia,” Marcel said, “trying to save as many pre-Calamity pulps as they can, I think. Hard to get many more out here.”
“Well, I’m glad you at least brought The Æroships at Dawn,” she said, pointing to the elaborate copper-carved image pressed into leather binding.
“Actually that one was a gift,” Marcel said. “Could never get into it. Got too technical on the inner workings of the ships, felt almost like I was reading some engineering manual.”
“I think that was the point,” Sylvaine said, realizing suddenly why she had such a love for the series.
Marcel nodded. “So, what were you researching with Desct?”
“Yes,” Sylvaine said, “right.” She paused, and pulled the binder from her bag, placing it on the man’s desk. The man was now as receptive as she might ever get him, but she was still dreading the task at hand. There was no way to reveal what she needed to delicately, so she hoped shock would work.
“It might help if you take a look at these,” she said. “I was sent them by Desct.”
Marcel shrugged and opened the binder. He picked up a photo from it, and his eyes narrowed. He turned it slowly, as if that would change it somehow, then put it down, and picked up another. Then another.
Sylvaine glanced at the remaining photos. They were still as disturbing as when Kayip had first shown them to her out in the Wastes.
In one stood a young one-armed mutant man, working on a large piece of machinery, his other arm a poorly bandaged stump, his body covered in welts. In another photograph, eight mutants slept shoulder-to-shoulder in a shanty the size of a dining room table, made out of shards of sheet metal and some tattered cloth. There was one photo displaying a barely clothed mutant, his horned head leaning on a woodblock pillow, some sort of dark liquid dripping from his mouth. Then there was one of a bulbous mutant being helped to walk by two others, his belly twisted out and tumorous, thin oozing stalks running up his chest and the side of his head. He was covered in sores, and had legs that were entirely fused together, dragged behind him like a malfunctioning prosthetic.
“Where is this?” Marcel asked, staring at a photograph of sickly woman with a scab-cracked arm, at work pushing a load of barrels through a crowded refinery floor.
“Blackwood Row,” Sylvaine said.
“No,” Marcel said. “No, I’ve been around Lazacorp, it’s nothing like this.”
“You’ve been all around?” Sylvaine asked. “They let you explore freely?”
“Well no, but…” Marcel started, and then stopped. He looked up at her. “I know Mr. Roache. He wouldn’t allow anything like this.”
Naivety dripped from his words. She wanted to laugh at him, or rather, she wanted to want to laugh at him. But there was something desperate in his words, a hidden panic. If someone had told her, as she flew high in Icaria, that Roache, the source of all her success, the man who built her into the women she knew she was, was a liar, a monster, would she have believed them? Inferno, Kayip had tried as much. She couldn’t hate Marcel for this, even if she wanted to.
“Perhaps…” Sylvaine spoke slowly. “It’s happening without his knowledge. There was a man Desct mentioned,” she struggled to remember the names Kayip had drilled into her, “a foreman named Verus? Yeah, I think he was the focus of Desct’s investigation.”
“Oh,” Marcel said, the hesitation in his voice disappearing entirely. “Still, I’m not sure how he could possibly hide all of this.”
Sylvaine tapped the notes underneath the pile of photos. “Well, it might be time to do a little reading.”
Chapter 20
Marcel leaned against the wall of the alleyway, waiting for Sylvaine. The sun was starting to set, and the nearby streetlamp flickered into life. He glanced around for the ferral and double-checked the street signs. Sutgate Way, just a few blocks from the edge of town. It was the right place, the right time. The woman had claimed she was going to take him to meet another of her associates. He was starting to wish he asked more about who-in-Inferno this “associate” was, and why the man couldn’t come up to meet him in the office, but at the time all his thoughts had been on the photographs and the notes the woman had given him. Even now he could barely believe their contents. Marcel inched to the side and used the dim ætheric light to reread the notes again, hoping silently he could find some error, some proof of fabrication.
…Fourteen hour shifts the norm, beaten if they collapse and are taken away. Others that disappear: those caught speaking up, those who resist, those who are too heavily mutated. The latter seems an inevitable outcome given enough time. Interview subjects claim to have been injected with some unknown material, seems a greater cause of mutations than even the leaking machinery, though those are far from safe…
He riffled through the pages.
…food barely edible and in small quantities. Bathroom facilities nonexistent. Stench of body and feces fills every corner of sleeping camps, sanitary rules enforced by mutants themselves, but insufficient due to conditions. Disease rampant….
Some were written in full, others simple scribbles on crumpled paper.
…They seemed to have formed their own pseudo-government. Lazacorp guards avoid entering camps. Some injured, ill, or injection-sick hidden there. Lazacorp keeps tabs at mealtimes, those too sick to appear to work given no food, whole community on perpetual edge of starvation. Mealtimes apparently when they induce the “injections”…
…most seem sure dead just dumped somewhere. Less sure about others that disappear, those overly-mutated. Warmonk claims they are taken to the Wastes, but why? Interview with Lazacorp guard necessary, impossible. Unsure who to trust in City Hall…
Interspersed with these notes were other documents. Legalese with strict “silence clauses,” underlined in pen, often attach to strange payments forms written to Huile families. Records of purse-snatchers and vandals given reduce sentences in order to participate in “Labor Retraining,” a government program Marcel had not heard of. One crumbled paper was a form from City Hall, denying a request for formal investigations into the disappearance of a man named Alfred Nurzhen.
A sound of clattering metal and he nearly jumped, only to see a raccoon scamper from an open trashcan, old sores glittering off its back. Marcel rubbed his head. Desct had clearly written these notes for his personal use; they were vague on some subjects, seemed meant more as reminders than complete descriptions. Who was this warmonk? What were the injections that he mentioned? The only thing that was clear was the scale of suffering. How had Verus kept these conditions secret, and why hadn’t Desct ever mentioned his investigation to Marcel?
He glanced down again at the nauseating revelations in his hands. He half expected them to be blank paper, the images of agony just a waking fever dream, some mishmash of old memories brought on by… something. But in truth, he didn’t have the imagination to create those photographs.
Another creak. He squinted down the darkened alleyway. A sewer grate was pushed up, and a hand appeared. Then a whole body. Sylvaine walked a few steps forward then gestured. He glanced around and slunk towards her.
“You’re traveling through the sewer?” he asked.
“Well, the Huile Underway in general,” she said, pulling down a scarf she had around her mouth and nose.
“So, mostly sewer.”
She grimaced in answer. “How did you think we were going to check on the veracity of the notes? Just walk up to the gates of Blackwood Row, knock, and ask to poke around?”
The woman had a point. Though when she had claimed earlier that she had a way in to see the mutants, Marcel hadn’t quite realized what he was agreeing to. He stepped over and glanced down into dark of the Underway.
“Forgive me for being a little wary,” Marcel said.
“You’re forgiven,” she replied, glancing around the street. “But we should get going.”
“Who is this associate?” Marcel asked.
“Another investigator, of a type anyhow,” she said. “Listen, it was his idea to rope you into this. At this point I’ve dragged myself through enough sewers not to give a damn one way or another. I don’t have time to debate, you can come with me, or not, but if you back out, we’ll need the notes back.”
Marcel clenched his jaw and tried to not show his unease.
“I was told you had been a soldier,” she said, “that you had plenty of experience in Underway scouting, but if it’s too much...”
“I can handle myself,” he said quickly. It wasn’t like he was sneaking under a Principate camp, this was nothing worse than the sorts of exercises he did for training under Alba’s watch. Before he could think any more on the subject, he slid himself down into the opening.
“We weren’t called the Huile Sewer Rats for nothing,” Marcel called back, as he stepped carefully to avoid splashing in stagnant filth. Sylvaine crawled down beside him, and closed the grate.
“Glad you have a good attitude.” She wrapped her scarf tightly around her nose. “Come on, let’s move.”
She stepped quickly and carefully, down the piping and through a rusting opening. The stagnant air sat heavy as a wall, and as Marcel pushed through it, Sylvaine’s handtorch cut deep into the shadows. They crept slowly deeper into the labyrinthine mess, Marcel keeping his breathing slow, trying not to let old nightmares sneak from the back of his mind.
The city above had certainly changed in the last two and a half years. Huile had grown, developed, evolved. It had gone from a slapdash town recovering from war to a prosperous, modest-sized modern UCCR metropolis, but none of that was evident in the Underway. The tunnels were as Marcel remembered, cramped, wet, ceilings of leaking pipes and walls of abandoned machinery. Drops of something drizzled onto Marcel’s head from time to time, and he struggled to avoid imagining the droplets’ source. They passed by landmarks he had last seen through the lenses of a gas mask, half a decade ago. As horrific as the memories were, he started to wish he still had that mask; the smell of stagnant rot was everywhere.
“Are we meeting your associate in Blackwood Row?” he asked as they turned by the crumpled remains of some forgotten bunker and down a path that cut through a boarded-up, rust-decorated factory basement.
“No,” Sylvaine said, voice muffled. “He’ll lead you there. Knows the way better, and, gear’s-grits, I’m not staying down here any longer than I have to.”
A strange place for a rendezvous. He was glad he had brought his pistol with him; the situation was more than a little suspicious, as was the woman. Yet the photographs, the notes, he couldn’t ignore them, couldn’t head back home knowing there was some chance that they reflected a hidden reality. Still he listened for every echo, every strange noise and splash of water.
“And this associate, where is he from?” Marcel asked. “How’d he get caught up in this?”
“Ask him yourself,” Sylvaine answered, as a large man stepped out from behind a large pipe. The man was tanned, his clothes covered in a layer of waste-worn rags. He smiled as they approached and put out his hand, an azure bracelet dangling from his wrist.
“Hello Marcel,” he said. “It is a pleasure to finally meet you.”
Marcel took the man’s hand and shook it. It was hard to see in the dark, but he could make out a plain metal mask covering the stranger’s left eye. The mask seemed familiar, somehow, though he was quite sure he had never before met the man. Something from a pulp, maybe? He couldn’t recall.
“My name is Kayip,” the man said.
“Nice to meet you, Kayip,” Marcel responded, glancing down a hallway. “So how exactly do you know the way to…”
Kayip. He remembered the small snippet of Roache’s conversation, forgotten amidst the hubbub of the Gall case. In those early days after Desct’s funeral he had had his eye out for the man, the tall Torish madman, but he had never showed. Just another empty lead, easily forgotten.
Until, like an idiot, Marcel wandered into his ambush.
“Shit!” was the only thing Marcel could think to say, as he jumped back and reached down to his holster. Sylvaine responded with a similar explicative, shoving her hand into her coat pocket. Marcel pulled out his Frasco six-shooter and spun to aim at the man, but with sudden movement, Kayip’s large fingers had encircled Marcel’s wrist, aiming the gun away into empty space.
Marcel grunted and thrust out his other fist, which was caught just as easily. He found himself grappled. His kicking and struggling did nothing to loosen Kayip’s grip as the large man held him tight and close.
“You cog-loose maniac!’ Sylvaine said. Marcel could see she was lifting some overwrought glove at him. “You want to send bullets ricocheting in here?”
“We are friends, Mr. Talwar!” Kayip said. The man overpowered him completely. After slowing his breath some, Marcel realized that Kayip was making no effort to harm him. He simply held Marcel firmly in place. Then, with a swift, and only slight painful pull, the large man disarmed Marcel.
“I understand your fear,” Kayip said. “No doubt Lazarus Roache has told you about me.”
Marcel was held only by one arm now. Gunless, he considered his options. He could try to break free, take the
m on hand to hand, two against one, him versus a giant and a ferral. He could also try to sprout wings and fly away. It would likely have the same success rate.
So instead he simply nodded.
“Roache likely said horrible things about me,” Kayip said. “Perhaps he even believed them to be true, but they are not.”
The man let go of Marcel, who rubbed his wrists.
“You take him as muscle?” Marcel asked Sylvaine.
She shook her head and glanced at the man. “He took me. And if we’re throwing things on the table, I should admit I never worked for The Times of Icaria.”
“So where are you from then?” Marcel asked.
“Icaria!” She paused and lowered her voice. “I worked as an engineer.”
“An engi—?”
“Yes,” she said quickly.
“I was the one in contact with Desct,” Kayip said. “But I did not think it wise to see you myself considering…” He gestured to the gun in his hand. Then, with slow care, he handed Marcel his pistol back.
“Kayip, what in Inferno?” Sylvaine asked.
“We are friends here,” Kayip said. Marcel took the pistol grip, and, sheepishly, uncocked it. Kayip raised his arms.
“I am unarmed, Mr. Talwar. I was told that I could trust you, and I do. If you wish to leave you have it within your power.”
Marcel patted the large man down, to double-check his words. Sylvaine shook her head as she watched him, and he felt almost embarrassed by her stare. The man was as weaponless as he said, the only metal on him, besides his mask and his bracelet, was an odd necklace. Marcel pulled it out slowly, studying the blue-tinted metal. It was a small circle, fractured at several points around the edge, with strange symbols, church-writing if he had to guess by the form, encircling the hole in the center. A Cracked-Disc, the symbol of the Church of the Ascended, most likely an imitation, considering the rarity of the genuine artifacts.
“A simple reminder of the Demiurge,” the man said. “I know the Resurgence is not renowned for its general piety, but I should hope my sentiment does not worry you.”
The Sightless City Page 20
