“We should move quickly, though,” Varo said. “I want to be in position to deflect him when he comes back.”
Beq led them to the laundry, a floor down from their rooms. Maya had to fight a smile as the arcanist skulked suspiciously down the corridor, trying to look in all directions at once like the most stereotypical burglar imaginable, while she and Varo strolled casually behind her. Fortunately for all concerned, the place was unoccupied, with big hampers of things to be washed lined up against one wall opposite vats of soapy water. A few minutes’ search produced servants’ uniforms in approximately the right sizes that weren’t too dirty to wear, and they grabbed a few and hurried back upstairs.
“This feels strange,” Beq said, turning back and forth in front of the mirror in the bedroom. “Have I got it on right?”
Palace uniform for common servants was a long, dark skirt and undertunic with a white blouse and cap. It was plain enough that Maya hoped they wouldn’t stand out once they got into the city proper. She gestured, and Beq spun in a circle.
“Pull your socks up,” Maya said. “They don’t look quite right, but that’ll be closer.” They hadn’t found any footwear in the laundry, so they were stuck with their own boots. “I’ll change; give me a minute.”
Beq knelt to tug at her socks, inadvertently exposing quite a lot of well-toned leg in the process. Maya averted her eyes and went into the bathroom, hurriedly putting on her borrowed uniform. Her panoply belt fit snugly underneath, silver mesh pressed against the skin of her midsection, and a strap held her haken against the small of her back. The fit was a little tighter than she would have liked, but she didn’t think the weapon’s bulge was too obvious.
The most dangerous part was leaving their own rooms. Maya opened the door a crack and made sure the hallway was empty before she stepped outside.
“Try not to look like you’re sneaking around,” she told Beq. “Remember, as far as anyone knows, we belong here.”
“Right,” Beq said, swallowing hard. “I can do this.”
Maya led the way to the nearest corner at a brisk walk, turned at random, and hurried through another couple of hallways before slowing. She gave a casual nod to a pair of footmen as they passed, and as she’d hoped they paid her no attention whatsoever. After a few wrong turns, Maya found a staircase that led to the ground floor, and from there she and Beq could thread their way through the other servants to a door opening onto a gravel drive.
The Spike must have a grand entrance, Maya guessed, but this wasn’t it. Several doors opened onto a broad turnaround, liberally dotted with loadbird droppings, and teams of men were unloading wagons and hauling the crates and sacks inside. To Maya’s relief, there were a few smaller carriages labeled as cabs. She went up to one of these and found the driver resting with his hat tipped down over his eyes, his loadbird pecking irritably at the gravel.
“Excuse me,” Maya said. “How much for a ride into town?”
“Depends where you’re going,” the driver said, without raising his hat. “One thaler thirty to the West Central.”
“I don’t… exactly know where I’m going,” Maya said, improvising. “Truth be told, I’m new to the city. But my grandmother is ill, and now that I’ve got an evening off I wanted to see if I could find something that could help her. Do you… have any idea where I might—”
“Tunnel market,” the driver said, still not sitting up. “Two thalers ten.”
“Oh,” Maya said, deflating. The only kind of help a common servant could afford to buy would be dhak medicine, so she’d expected a little more reticence. Maybe he didn’t understand me. “Well, we’d like to go there, then.”
“All right.” The man pushed his hat up, revealing a craggy, weathered face, and smiled. “Get in.”
“So why the sick grandmother story?” Beq said quietly as the carriage rattled along.
“If anyone’s going to know anything about the Core Analytica, it’s going to be scavengers and dhak merchants,” Maya said, equally quietly. “I figured this would get us to the right neighborhood, and then we could ask about it.” She fingered a leather pouch in her pocket. “Baselanthus gave us plenty of travel money, so we can spread some coins around. That generally makes people friendly.”
“Good thinking,” Beq said. She shook her head. “I’m hopeless at this stuff. Is this how your master taught you to get information?”
“More or less,” Maya said. She didn’t add that Jaedia had mostly demonstrated the technique in small towns and villages, and that here Maya was largely making things up as she went along. Beq’s nervous enough as it is.
Beq, suddenly, was not paying attention. She peered out one window, motioning frantically to Maya. Curious, Maya slid over and looked out, but it took a moment before she understood what she was seeing.
She’d known the palace was called the Spike, but until now she hadn’t seen it from the outside. It rose into the air, a spire of dark unmetal, so thin and featureless it was hard to guess at its scale. Only by tracking upward from the base, where merely human architecture gathered around it, did it become obvious that the tip of the spire had to be hundreds of meters in the air. The more mundane palace had accreted around this Elder thing, like barnacles clinging to a wave-battered rock.
“One of the best-preserved and latest examples of Chosen architecture, obviously,” Beq said, rapidly dialing through the lenses on her spectacles. “Though the haste of its construction makes it less interesting artistically, it’s a fascinating study in Chosen methodology under pressure—”
“Why?” Maya asked.
“Why what?” Beq said.
“Why build something like that?” Maya said. “What’s it for?”
“It went up at the same time as the Gate here,” the arcanist said excitedly, “but obviously the spire isn’t necessary just to connect to the Gate network. There’s a theory that it’s tied somehow to the weapon that made the crater, or else that it’s some kind of sensor they used during the first purges of what was left of the ghouls. But—”
“We don’t know,” Maya translated.
The reference point of the Spike made it easy to trace their path around the city. The carriage swung south and west, clear of the sullen glow of the Pit—disappointing Beq, who’d hoped for a better look—and trundled through street after street of square, solid-looking brick buildings. To the north, long rows of smokestacks belched black columns into the pale blue sky.
As they continued west, the mountain above them loomed larger and larger, a slab-sided cliff dwarfing the human construction at its base. Just when it seemed they couldn’t go any farther without running into a wall of rock, the road took on a downward slope, passing under a broad stone archway and merging seamlessly into a wide, high-ceilinged tunnel. Maya caught sight of a line of Auxiliaries guarding the arch, but they seemed to be checking traffic only in one direction, from the tunnel into the city, and ignored the cab. The light took on the blue tinge of glowstones, alternating with the flicker of torches and bonfires, and the buildings grew more colorful and haphazard.
“These are real ghoul tunnels.” Beq was glued to the window again. “The whole mountain is riddled with them.”
“And people live down here?” Maya said. Having spent so much of her life in the open, she found it hard to imagine. “Why?”
“You have to be a Republic citizen to live on the surface, or else have a permit, I think,” Beq said. “Everything belowground is technically across the border.”
Maya felt something twist in her stomach. She’d never left the Republic before, and her first impression of the world outside it was not a happy one. Once her eyes had adjusted to the dimmer light of the underground, she’d started taking in the people, who milled on either side of the street in a steady stream. Most of them were as pale as mushrooms, even their hair white or gray, hunched over as though holding up their heads was too much effort. Men and women in workmen’s coveralls moved in large groups, some filthy from a shift just fi
nished at a manufactory, others heading in to replace them.
In and among the workers were the beggars, who were so numerous they’d claimed the entire strip of ground in front of the buildings on either side. A few stood, hurrying up to likely prospects, but most simply sat in sullen silence, a bowl or a hat placed in front of them to catch a few centithalers. They were filthy, and some so horrifyingly thin that their bones stood out from their skin in sharp relief.
Maya had always thought she’d seen poverty. She and Jaedia had spent much of their time in villages where owning more than one metal pot was considered a sign of wealth, or towns where one failed harvest might mean disaster. Places like Bastion had their slums, where the poorest citizens were packed cheek by jowl into tiny apartments and the human waste overwhelmed their rudimentary sanitation. But this was something else entirely.
“This is as far as I can take you,” the driver called back. “No carriages from here on in. But the market’s just another block up—see the colored tents? Walk that way and you’ll find what you’re looking for.”
“Thank you,” Maya said, tearing her eyes away from the press of humanity.
She got down from the carriage and handed the man three thaler notes. Beq alighted beside her, and the cabbie whistled to his bird, which somehow managed to get turned around in spite of the crowd. They were in a sort of square, a junction of two tunnels crowded with small booths hawking food or liquor. Beq shuffled in close to Maya’s side, nervously, and Maya bent to whisper in her ear.
“You all right?”
“It’s just… a lot of people.” Beq took a deep breath. “I’ll be okay.”
At least no one seemed to be paying them special attention. Maya started moving in the direction the cabbie had indicated and immediately found she could only make progress by shoving. The locals didn’t seem to mind this, and before long she abandoned any pretense at dignity and simply bumped and elbowed her way through the press, checking over her shoulder to make sure Beq stayed with her.
The colored tents the cabbie had mentioned quickly came into sight. They were wedges of tattered cloth that fluttered gaily, like flags, marking the positions of various merchants. Men and women sat on a spread carpet, their wares laid out in front of them, while the crowd milled around and shouted questions.
Maya had seen a similar scene at town fairs across the Republic, but as they neared the first of the sellers she did a double take at the items on display. There were bits of unmetal, crystalline devices both shattered and intact, small globes that pulsed with weird, organic veins, and packets of mysterious powders. Dhak, in other words, a carpet full of dhak, dangerous relics from the Elder world. In the Republic, any one of the items on display would have been enough to justify arrest by the Auxiliaries. Here, it was just one merchant’s wares among many.
Maya had heard that dhak was traded openly in the Splinter Kingdoms—Grace was a notorious hub and base for smugglers—but she hadn’t expected to find a market for it here, on the doorstep of a Republic outpost. She’d been thinking in terms of a back-alley exchange, not a bazaar. No wonder the cabbie didn’t bat an eye when I asked him.
“Look!” Beq said. “That’s a piece of a linear motivator. And I think that one is a lightning conduit, but someone has bent it the wrong way round. And—”
“There’s so much of it,” Maya muttered.
“Even after four hundred years, this area is one of the richest scavenger sites around,” Beq said. “Especially for ghoul arcana, but there’s plenty of Chosen relics, too.”
“Isn’t Raskos supposed to put a stop to all this?”
“We’re outside his jurisdiction,” Beq said. “I suppose he just has to keep watch at the border.” She cocked her head. “My master back at the Forge told me that most of the components we use come from Deepfire. I didn’t understand why until now.”
Of course. The Order needed scavenged components so its arcanists could maintain the weapons and armor of the Legions and create sanctioned arcana. I suppose it has to come from somewhere. Still, the sight of the bustling market left Maya feeling shaken. If Tanax were here, he’d pull out his haken right now and try to detain everyone.
She touched the Thing, feeling its hard, familiar shape, and let out a breath. Stay on task. We need to find out if anyone knows anything about the Core Analytica. Her initial plan of just asking around seemed hopelessly naïve now. But someone must know something—
“—found it up by Green Crag,” the merchant was saying. “There’s a skyship wreck there, though it’s stripped pretty clean, and some tunnel entrances.”
“This definitely isn’t from a skyship,” Beq said. “I think it’s from a hexapod walker. Look, see how heavy the filament is? This had to move some serious weight. And the articulation is wrong for a crane-lift.”
Maya blinked and looked down. Left on her own for a moment, Beq had bent to examine the wares on display more closely and apparently fallen naturally into conversation with the proprietor. That merchant, an older woman with silver hair coiled in tight dreadlocks and elaborate earrings, was looking up at the arcanist with a mixture of puzzlement and respect.
“You know your stuff,” she said, grabbing another hunk of unmetal and crystal. “What about this? I’ve never been able to figure that out.”
Beq laughed. “Now that one is from a skyship. I recognize the design.”
“A weapon?” The merchant sounded eager. “Something to make it fly?”
“No, it’s part of a toilet.” Beq took the piece and turned it upside down. “See the tubes? This is a piece of a water filter.”
The merchant looked disappointed for a moment, then grinned. “Keep that to yourself, hey? I still might be able to find a buyer.”
“Of course,” Beq said. She started and looked back as Maya touched her shoulder. “Oh. Sorry, were you asking me something? I got distracted—”
Maya raised her eyebrows suggestively, jerking her head toward the merchant. Beq frowned in incomprehension, and Maya sighed and took her arm, bending low so the seller could hear.
“My friend had a question for you,” she said. “We’re looking for something.”
“What you see is what I have,” the merchant said. “Come back next week; there’s a few expeditions due in.”
“Have you ever heard of something called a Core Analytica?” Maya said. She pulled a couple of thalers out of her pocket. “I’d be interested in any information you’ve got.”
“A Core Analytica?” The woman frowned. “Just the name. But—” She held out her hand, and Maya handed her the money. “Gero Forktongue was talking about it. He’ll be at his stall just up the street, the green tent. Pay him a visit; maybe he’ll tell you what you need to know.”
“Thank you very much.”
“Thank you,” the merchant said to Beq, with a broad smile. She stared down at the thing in her hands and laughed. “A piece of toilet, eh?”
That conversation started a pattern that began to feel very familiar over the next hour. Maya pushed from one stall to the next, with Beq in tow, then let the arcanist start talking shop. Not every merchant was as fascinated as Beq by arcana, but with quite a few she formed the instant bond of fellow enthusiasts, which let Maya cut in to ask about the Core Analytica.
“You’re really good at this, you know?” Maya said as they left behind yet another vendor. “For someone who says they aren’t good with people.”
Beq’s face was flushed. “I’m just… Talking about arcana is easy.”
“Try it next time we’re at a party.”
“I doubt anyone would be interested.”
“You never know.”
Maya grinned. Her own skin was feeling a bit warm, partly from the press of the crowd but partly because the two of them had remained arm in arm for some time now. It was just to keep them from being pulled apart, of course, but she couldn’t help but feel a thrill whenever Beq’s hip bumped hers. Focus, Maya, or you won’t get anywhere.
; “Time for a break,” she said, spotting a tavern sign on a building jutting between stalls. “Come on.”
There wasn’t much to the tavern, once they’d pushed their way inside. A bartender served up cheap clay mugs of wine and beer to patrons at a scattering of tables and chairs. Business was light this early in the day, which was a welcome respite from the crowds outside. Maya ordered two cups of watered wine, tossed down a couple of decithaler coins, and led Beq to the nearest table.
Beq looked down at the mug mistrustfully. “After last night, I’m not sure I’m up for more alcohol.”
“Wine’s safer than water if you don’t know the water’s clean,” Maya said, sipping from her own cup. “That’s what Jaedia taught me. And down here…”
“True.” Beq took a drink and made a face. “Eugh.”
“Honestly I just needed to get off my feet.” Maya shook her head. “And maybe rethink our approach. I’m not sure we’re getting anywhere.”
“We’ve only covered about half the stalls,” Beq said. “Give it time.”
Maya grinned at the arcanist’s transparent eagerness to finish examining what the market had to offer. She sipped again and scanned the crowd. Conversation filtered in from neighboring tables, mostly mundane, but a familiar pair of names focused her attention.
“—Yora and Halfmask got raided last night.”
“A hundred Auxies, I heard.”
“But they got away clean!”
“How do you know?”
“Don’t be an idiot. If Rottentooth had caught them, you don’t think he’d have told everyone by now?”
The rebels. Or just bandits, depending on whom you asked. Are they tied to this, or—
“Do you mind if I sit down?”
Maya blinked and looked around. A short, plump woman in a long coat stood by their table, waiting politely in front of an empty chair. Beq peered at her, twisting dials on the spectacles. The lenses clicked and shifted, and the woman leaned closer.
Ashes of the Sun Page 24
