by Jackson Lear
Relund didn’t need to. It was pretty obvious that Lieutenant was armed and that Relund wasn’t. At last he gave us something to work with. “She was old. Smiled a lot. Día had a lot of clothes with her, the woman helped her carry some in here.”
“You don’t know who she is?”
“No. She had a foreign accent.”
“Foreign language accent or foreign imperial accent?”
“Imperial,” said Relund. “I think she was from Ladora.”
I looked to Lieutenant to see if he knew anything about it.
“It’s in Gerera,” said Eldin.
The next province over. Got it. “What does the accent sound like?”
He tried. Badly, but he tried.
“I think she was rich.”
“How so?”
“Her clothes were nice. Black and gray robes. Good sandals.”
“How were her hands?”
“Old and wrinkly.”
“In good condition, though?” I asked. “Did they smell of any kind of fragrance? Lemon cocoa butter?”
Relund shrugged. “She smelled nice but I didn’t see much of her hands. She came in and only spent a minute in here.”
“How did Día meet her?”
“She knocked on her door. She didn’t tell me which one but I sent her out to Black Rock.”
That name filled my soul with a new burning, one that started to poison my blood. “How long was she gone for?”
“She left in the morning and came back at midday with the woman.”
I got a quick description of who we were looking for. Older than Relund’s mother but not ancient, which I guess put her at seventy years old or above, average height, slim – which is unusual for a rich person of her age, moved well despite probably being a grandma. I guess he’s seen his fair share of the elderly shuffling around and moving slowly, but this woman still had some life left in her.
I asked: “Does, ‘Her death will live on for decades’ mean anything to you?”
Relund shook his head. His kid as well. Twenty long years and Kiera has been forgotten. You would think that a disappearance like that would linger on everyone’s minds.
“How do we find Desten the Leaf?”
Relund squinted, unsure of the name.
I gambled. “You know him.”
Relund shook his head, the name drawing a complete blank.
I raised my voice. “Día was taken a hundred yards from here. She was brought to a place a few yards away, owned by Desten the Leaf. How do we find him?”
Relund spluttered his answer. “I don’t know any Desten.”
“The neighbors saw you two talking together. What did you talk about?”
“I swear, I don’t know any Desten!”
Lieutenant looked my way to ease me back down. I guess Relund really didn’t know any Desten. Lieutenant tried a new approach. “Did Día leave on time?”
The panic in Relund started to drown him. His usefulness was running out. “She did, yeah. There didn’t seem to be anything different yesterday. She was tired, a little worn out from crying because of the ghost story, but that was it.”
“Did Día talk about the Eyeless Ghost before or after seeing this woman?”
“Both.”
Lieutenant started to nod, hoping that I would see no other value in bothering Relund any further. “Well, thank you for your time. She did speak highly of you and she liked working here. If she returns, please let the orphanage know.”
I nodded back at Relund’s wife. “The general thanks you for your cooperation.”
Chapter Fourteen
Black Rock. The rock in question isn’t actually black but charcoal gray. It juts out of the ground like a giant had thrown a spear as wide as a house, imbedding it into the ground at a low angle, and left it there as a testament to his might. Kids climb all over it, parents tell them not to, and drunk sixteen year olds tend to fall and break their collar bones on the ground.
At the top of the hill lived the merchants in their prized homes offering a vista of fields and brown rooftops. Some tiled, some flat. Down the bottom, in a gully of dips and roads, lay the residential latrine of the merchant lords. The slums were built so close to each other that the whole area became a disease-ridden lake during the storm season. The older buildings bore the water marks from each flood. A wooden pole stood in the middle of the disjointed plaza. Locks of hair were nailed into the post above the easy reach of mischievous kids with no sense of respecting the drowned bodies recovered each year.
I turned my attention upward. Somewhere up the hill resided an old woman who had targeted Día. We came to a narrow boulevard running left to right, not quite at the lowest point of the gully but close enough. I stopped. Turned.
Lieutenant made a move to his sword. “What is it?”
My stomach tightened. I was already foggy from a lack of sleep but the view in front of me seemed to draw blood from my body, leaving me even weaker than I should’ve been. I headed west along the main road.
“What about Black Rock?” asked Lieutenant.
I didn’t answer. I pushed on, looking over the ancient buildings and their broken brick work. The weight of each foot step dragged me down until, at last, I stopped in front of a four story building. People passed us in the street. I ignored them. They didn’t ignore me but they didn’t make a scene.
Lieutenant stopped next me, drew in a deep breath, and gave me some time. “Yours or hers?”
“Hers,” I said.
Lieutenant cast a quick look around the gully, at the area Kiera lived in before coming to the orphanage. A pair of tomcats hissed and howled at each other. Their cries fell to a low growl, like the wind raging through the crags south of here. One cat pounced, the other ran. Around the corner they went, out of sight and out of ear shot.
Lieutenant clapped me on my back, pushing me towards the door. “It’s worth a shot.”
Lieutenant and I climbed the sloping stairs up to the fourth floor. A heavily pregnant woman opened the door, jolting back with surprise. “That was qui … sorry.” She looked us up and down, her face falling in an instant. A swift talker and a closer at her door. “My husband … he’s coming back.”
“We’re not here about that,” I said. “Twenty five years ago there lived a girl here, Kiera. Her parents died, she grew up in the orphanage at Red Hill. She disappeared from there when she was fourteen. I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything about it? If she came back? If someone took her in?”
The woman’s eyebrows formed into a single knot before she gently shook her head. “No, sorry.”
“What about the Eyeless Ghost?”
She gave us another blank look.
“How about an old woman from Black Rock? She moves well for her age, has an accent from Gerera. She might’ve walked around with incense.”
The woman gave us an apologetic shrug. “I haven’t seen anyone like that …”
I took one last glance over her shoulder, into the single room that Kiera once lived in. The room was silent inside. I looked to the woman’s belly. “Your first?”
She pulled back half a step, afraid of the turn in questioning. “My husband is on his way back.”
Lieutenant smiled at the woman like she was the most beautiful person he had ever seen. “Thank you for your time, ma’am. We’ll be on our way now. Good luck with the baby.”
We returned to the street where Lieutenant promptly rolled his eyes at me. “It wouldn’t hurt you to smile once in a while, you know?”
“I’m not paid to be the good looking one.”
“If you were, we’d be fucked. Women require a certain finesse which you seem to lack. I want you to try a new word: ma’am. Say it with me: ma’am. See how nice it sounds?”
“I’ll call her ‘ma’am’ if she calls me ‘sir’.”
Lieutenant let out a sharp sigh. “Anything else you want to do for the sake of nostalgia? Maybe even see your old place?”
“No.”
“Where’d you
grow up, anyway?”
“The orphanage.”
“Where were you born?”
“In my neighbor’s.”
“Where did you live from the time you were born to the time you went to the orphanage?”
I looked to the west, to the foul looking building on the corner.
“Really?” asked Lieutenant. “So you knew Kiera before the orphanage?”
“No. I got there when I was four. She arrived when she was nine.”
Lieutenant started walking west.
“That’s the wrong way to Black Rock.”
“You’re not the only one who gets curious from time to time.”
“There’s nothing to see over there.”
“Bet there is. You’re not afraid of ghosts from the past are you?”
I gritted my teeth and plodded after him. Among the leaning buildings hung lines of rope stretching from one window to another one opposite. A few were adorned with brown clothes and rags dancing in the breeze.
Lieutenant glanced my way. “I know we’re not supposed to have a life before the company but that doesn’t stop us from having a history.”
I remained silent.
“Four years old huh, and you still remember this place? How often did you run away from the orphanage?”
“More than once.”
“And you were found sleeping on your old doorstep with your neighbors trying to break the bad news to you?”
“Not every kid in an orphanage is an orphan,” I said.
Lieutenant slowed, glancing my way again. I stopped walking, willing myself to go no farther. Lieutenant looked to the building where I had learned to walk. He stared up at the many open windows facing him. “Which one was yours?”
I pointed him to the ground floor window with the lopsided brickwork. Lieutenant walked forward. A ragged curtain hung over the window, flapping in the gentle breeze. Candle light and the deep nasal rumble of someone snoring came from inside. Lieutenant peeled the curtain back an inch and peered inside. Something clearly held his interest as he stood there for at least a minute. He returned, nodded politely to me, and looked back the way we came. “Let’s go and find the old lady.”
I agreed. Whatever Lieutenant saw inside my old home, he kept to himself.
As we drifted away, our lack of conversation seemed to drive Lieutenant into one of his compulsions. “What are you thinking?”
“That the city watch didn’t care enough about Día to even question the guy she worked for, and that Kasera’s head of security didn’t care enough to get involved in the investigation either.”
“Thankfully, we care.”
“Maybe it’s not enough.” We walked on. I counted down from ten, convinced that Lieutenant would say something else before I reached the end.
“That wasn’t everything you were thinking about,” said Lieutenant.
“No.”
“And I don’t like that you mentioned the city watch or Kasera. It doesn’t matter if they don’t care. In Día’s eyes it won’t matter who saves her, only that she gets saved.”
I saw the city watch come the day after Kiera went missing. They were titans of men. Fierce with their body armor and spears. They would be generals one day, commanding legions of swords and mages across war-torn mountains, unyielding as they fought the barbarian hordes to the north and east.
I was fourteen. They were seventeen. I heard Sesta Silvia say that they were too young to be drunk on the job. I didn’t understand what that meant.
“We’re not here for revenge,” said Lieutenant.
I held my tongue.
“We are not here for revenge. We’re going to find the people who took Día, deal with them appropriately, and then be on our merry way. Whatever happened to Kiera is old news. We will certainly give you free reign on what happens to the kidnappers if we find out that they are also responsible, but at no point are we going to pick a fight with everyone around us simply because they don’t care.”
We made our way up the hill. There were something like two hundred homes up at the very top, all with some kind of view. The roads heading up were so steep that litter drivers refused to climb it. Lieutenant stopped talking. My heart wouldn’t stop thumping. If you tripped on your way down, there was no stopping you.
At the very top is the old fort with surrounding battlements. It was once the northern most edge of the empire. General Laius built the original fort in three days and held off an army of barbarians twenty thousand strong from that position. The interesting thing about history is how the other side remembers things a little differently to what officially happened. Laius had no choice in hunkering down because he had just provoked a war between two rival barbarian hordes. He killed what he thought was a raiding party from one tribe on the lands of another. It turned out it was a wedding party between two tribes to resolve their conflict. Laius probably thought that the raid would provoke another battle between the barbarians and he could march his army across their ravaged remains once they were done killing each other. Instead, the barbarians retaliated against Laius by calling upon every tribe they knew. What should’ve been a force of five thousand wild men and women turned into twenty thousand. Laius should’ve been completely fucked. Luckily for him, two months into the siege the barbarians started fighting amongst themselves and disbanded. Laius claimed victory.
Ahead of us were rows upon rows of two and three story buildings, some with an ivory rendered finish, some with black slate tiles visible from the ground below. We knocked on each door, saying we were collecting used clothes for the orphanage if anyone had some to spare.
“We’ve already made a donation,” was the typical answer.
The moon was high into the sky now. Lanterns had been alight for hours already. We had ducked into a dozen alleys and climbed a dozen more walls to avoid the locals patrolling the area. One by one, the lights inside the houses went out. The conversations drifting through the windows fell. The wealthy had gone to sleep. It was time to leave.
Lieutenant and I followed a couple of youngsters down the hill. Old enough to work, young enough to not do it well, rich enough to not do it all. They were heading out for a night of drink and gambling, probably to a Vanguard run establishment.
“So, no one saw an old woman helping a thirteen year old with a bundle of clothes,” I murmured.
“We can try again tomorrow,” said Lieutenant.
Of course we could, but we were adults doing a kid’s job. If a thirteen year old went door-knocking, we needed another thirteen year old to go door-knocking.
The rich kids in front of us glanced back every now and then, nervously checking us out. It didn’t stop their joking about but they were theatrical enough to try to shake us off, as though they weren’t really heading to a gambling den after all. They veered off to the west. Lieutenant and I should’ve headed east. Best to walk along the outskirts of the city at night time. Less chance of running into an asshole protecting his area. But we didn’t do that. We instead made our way through the center of town, treading along three miles of Vanguard plazas and laneways. We could’ve taken the rooftops but the amount of jumping you have to do invites one bad landing to ruin your night. Besides, Lieutenant was trying to blend in with the nightlife, which wasn’t easy when he had a long sword poking out from under his coat. Me? I wanted to know if Vanguard knew that they had foreigners operating in their part of the city. That meant being a little too obvious about the windows I stared into and the sneer I gave anyone who looked my way.
We were half way to the river when Lieutenant swore under his breath. “You hear that?”
“Stay cool,” I said.
There was a set of boots behind us. Heavy. Thumping. Like the owner was marking his territory. At first it was nothing. Then another set joined him. Lighter, as though this one was trying to attract as little attention as possible. If we were being followed by two lighter people, I would’ve tested their resolve by pausing at some building but the thumper seeme
d intent on making his presence known. He was ready for a fight and he wanted me to know it.
I was fully alive now, my ears trying to pull me into a backwards glance. They hadn’t attacked us yet but the moment I turned and they saw that I was not one of them, they’d certainly drop me to the ground.
A shrill whistle called out from behind. A signal to someone farther ahead. We came to a corner along the crooked road, one that allowed us to take a left or keep going straight ahead. Going left was narrower. Easier to be boxed in but less likely that the recipient of that whistle would be there. I nudged Lieutenant left, something that went against his own instincts. There was little chance he would be able to swing his long sword around in there.
Lieutenant whispered beside me. “If we start a war with Vanguard, the best we can hope for is death by tanking.”
“Then we don’t draw blood,” I said. I wasn’t entirely sure how long I’d stick to that plan, considering that they wouldn’t hesitate in killing me. The road kinked to the left then to the right. A plaza was coming up ahead. From the look of things it was barely ten yards across. That gave me hope. The odds of someone being stationed over something that small would work in our favor. If the plaza after that one was larger it would be a problem.
“Ready?” Lieutenant asked.
“We’re not running.”
A moment of silence followed. “Why the fuck not?”
“Because that will rain their whole company down upon us.”
“We don’t have enough to bribe these two.”
I glanced over my shoulder to see how bad this was going to be. Two men dressed in worn clothing with thick belts around their waists followed us. The crystalline stare in their eyes could’ve been seen for miles around. They weren’t concerned parents. They weren’t there to blend in. They had no problem letting me know that the best I could hope for was a beating I’d never forget. The uglier of the two lifted his chin towards me and whistled another double burst.
I gave my final warning to Lieutenant. “Keep your hands where they can see them and prepare yourself to do an accent.”
“Don’t even think about it.”
