The Fire Cage

by Scott Hungerford

  “Go to hell!” Davin hissed.

  “Suit yourself,” Rajon said, even as he took his thumb and viciously streaked off the paint covering Davin’s blue cog tattoo. Too amazed by the turn of events to even struggle, Davin could only watch with horror as the dealer called foul and all of the Fates’ players surged to their feet to see what the hubbub was about. But despite the chaos of shouting and laughter that surged through the room, all that Davin could hear was his own blood rushing in his ears as the dealer demanded that the Knives turn the ruffian out of the House of Fates this very instant.

  Moments later, the two guards threw him out the front door and down the length of the marble steps into the dusty street, leaving him sprawled like a broken toy at the bottom of the stairs. Through despondent eyes, Davin looked up hopelessly at the charcoal-colored clouds high above, wishing that the cards had turned differently this time around.

  Chapter Two

  For a few minutes, Davin just lay on his back in the street, staring up at the sky, letting rich people walk past and around him on their way to the nearby upscale shops and clubs. A few cheeky bastards even threw him a penny or two, thinking him a disheveled beggar down on his luck, having no idea just how close they were to the truth.

  After a little while, once his heart calmed down and the enormity of his loss settled over him like a damp funeral shroud, Davin lay there listening to the distant repetitive tick-tock of the Bell Tower, the centerpiece of the rich Marble District, as it made its way through the day one clicking gear-cog at a time. All the money he had raised from his meager earnings, the invitation he’d stolen from a noble’s box at the risk of getting his hand cut off, all of it was for naught.

  After a little while, just as he had decided that he probably wasn’t going to die, and that the City Guard hadn’t been summoned to take him to the dungeons as a menace to the peace, Davin heard something that pleased him, the sound of beautiful singing coming from just up the street. Turning his head a little to the side, he watched as a young woman in a matching emerald green skirt, corset and slippers turn the corner, with a hulking eleven-foot high steaming brass automaton lumbering behind her, matching her song step for step.

  As she came down towards him, dancing and pirouetting along with her little tune, he admired her for her petite buxom beauty, her bouncing blonde curls and for the series of striking arpeggio notes that she sang in order to guide the clunking machine behind her.

  Davin had heard of actors on stage in the Statue district singing a dueling balcony duet while their automatons reacted to the paired notes beneath them, dancing and dueling against one another like marionettes bound on invisible strings. But here, out in the real world, a person blessed with a perfect voice could convey a load of carpets and tapestries from one shop to another without need for cart or horse or bodyguard, but just the power of a beautiful song.

  By the time the metallic monster had stomped by, the sight and sound of such dainty beauty had rekindled Davin’s will to live. Sitting up with a sigh, he dusted off his sleeves, nodded to the pair of Knives still watching over him from the top of the Fates’ marble steps, and then got up on a tender knee. He had to get back home, to meet Yori and pay him the wage he owed him for covering the day at Florin’s. But after twenty hours of card play, time had gained a surreal quality for him. The enormity of the real world seemed strange after the flip and click of so many cards and chips, where he’d won and lost a factory-worker’s fortune in the space of a single string of hands.

  After waving to the Knives, to let the well-paid bullies know he was all right, Davin put his hands in his empty pockets and headed for home, kicking at a loose stone or a crumpled, printed flyer here and there to relieve his spirits. After walking only a few blocks, he cut down through a low stone gate and came out on a hill with a majestic view of the River district. Here he stopped, taking in the sights and the sounds of the district below. With its smokestacks and markets, bobbing fishing boats and moored brassy cannon-ships, flapping banners and shouting hawkers, the entire scene combined with the smell of murky water, bitter steam and grilling onions made the River district Davin’s favorite place to visit.

  As the River district acted as the central market for Agora, the capitol city of the Brass Empire, good and supplies found their way up-river and down-river to the other eleven cities allied to the Emperor’s cause. As result, the River district was a melting pot of merchants, sailors, makers and tailors from throughout the Empire, and the brisk trade done on the shores of the River Dob fueled the coffers of every merchant, farmer, miner and thief within a ten-day ride of the capitol city.

  Towering just up the way was the Emperor’s Palace, built on the foundations of the old Castle Stoneheart. A towering edifice of white marble and connected towers facing in each of the four cardinal directions, the ten story structure served as the Emperor’s center of government. Constructed some twenty years ago, the edifice served as a constant reminder to the citizens of Agora that the superstitious, brutal reign of the Stonehearted Kings was over, and the Brass Empire, with all its inventions and technologies was here to stay.

  Just across the bridged waters of the Dob, beyond the brick buildings and piers and high-ceilinged warehouses that clustered along the eastern bank like greedy old men panning for gold, lay the Height, a cluster of buildings and homes as old as the Factories that dominated the top of the hill above them. Within that tumble of mortar, brick, poverty and petty theft lay his mother’s two-bedroom shamble and the home he would now likely reside in for the rest of his days.

  Davin didn’t see anyone he knew on the way down the hill, even as he crossed the wide bridge that stretched across the river in an ingenious arc of metal and stone. Pushing his way through the crowds of wives and servants shopping for the evening meal, as he approached Painter’s Row he ran across Old Thom, a rabbit vendor he knew, selling sticks of meat from a brightly-colored cart in front of the Fisherman’s Mercantile. Old Thom had always been kind to him when Davin was just a boy, and it was worth giving the old man a wave even in his current mood. But when the wrinkled old coot ushered him over emphatically with a meat stick in hand, Davin came over to visit, doing his best to conceal any trace of this morning’s terrible loss.

  “You’re all dressed up today!” Old Thom shouted at him, even though Davin only stood a few steps away.

  “It was my father’s,” Davin said, fingering the slightly yellowed collar. “I thought I’d take a walk up through Marble and see if I could attract the attentions of any pretty girls.”

  “Did you catch any?” Old Thom asked, as he tried to shove a stick of greasy, dripping rabbit in Davin’s hand. After drinking gin and eating rich food at the Fates, Davin couldn’t imagine a more terrible way to end the day than mixing day-old rabbit with the finest the city had to offer.

  “A couple,” Davin said, waving off the man’s friendly offering. “But I had to throw them back. There was a beautiful singer in a green skirt, but she sadly wouldn’t pay me the time of day.” He stepped back as a couple of dirty street urchins in torn pants and dirty hats approached Old Thom’s cart, pennies in hand. While Davin appreciated a good pick-pocketing as much as any other boy or girl that grew up in the Height, he wanted to make sure that the two of them didn’t try and pickpocket him for practice. While he had nothing worth stealing, if one of the Guard caught one of the urchins making the light-fingered attempt, Davin would feel responsible for the two of them taking a thrashing.

  “Hey, Davin,” one of them said, recognizing him even in his gentleman’s clothes.

  “Hey, Weasel,” Davin said after a moment, when he recognized the ten-year old as the dead baker’s son. The other one with the tangled hair and little brown cap he didn’t know. While Davin had run in the Height with packs of other kids for years, now that he was almost grown, the youngers shied away from him, and the olders had their own lives in the factories or had turned to more serious kinds of crime that Davin didn’t want to engage in. While
only two years ago he’d been at the center of a sizable social circle, now that he was eighteen he was almost alone, with Yori as his only true friend.

  “You’re all fancy,” Weasel said, eyeing him up and down. “You got anything to spare?”

  “I’m cleaned out,” Davin said. “But maybe Old Thom here will put a couple of sticks on my tab. Won’t you Thom?”

  “I most certainly will,” the old man said with a twinkle in his eye, even as he handed each of the urchins a meat stick for free.

  “Thank you,” said Weasel’s friend. Bowing repeatedly enough that he nearly lost his little brown cap, he finally stopped when Weasel elbowed him hard in the ribs.

  “That’s enough sucking up. Come on. We’ve got places to be.”

  As the two took off to their own trouble, Davin nodded acknowledgement to Old Thom, then headed off in his own direction, already missing the rambunctious freedom of youth.

  Heading through the merchant district, he soon reached the end of River, to where the brick and mortar buildings turned a bit more run-a-down, and the carefully laid cobblestone streets started to show cracked or missing stones every few steps, like a bully’s missing teeth. While the Height was his home, and had been his home all of his life, after spending the night playing cards in Marble, the Height seemed seedier to him than usual. With brick chimneys held up with lengths of rusting wire, and every other house sporting a broken window, barrels of garbage out front, or streaks of soot blemishing faded house paint , Davin felt out of place and conspicuous wearing his father’s clothes.

  When passing by Clockers, a clock-fixer’s store that had served as a cornerstone of the Height since the Great Fire some hundred years before he’d been born, he noted amongst the dozens of clocks, timepieces, and bird-singers placed in the windows that it was almost noon. In a couple of hours Yori would be getting off of Davin’s factory shift, and Davin was supposed to meet him by the front gates to pay him a day’s wages for sitting on his stool for a shift. His pocket box beneath his bed didn’t have a lot left in it, as the shoes he’d bought second-hand from a tanner had nearly cleaned him out. But he knew that he had enough to pay Yori for sitting in for him and risking the Foreman’s lash.

  Heading up the steep street, occasionally climbing pitted limestone stairs up the steepest parts, Davin headed into a part of town that smelled strongly of lye and soap, where a fair number of washerwomen like his mother made their trade doing laundry for locals and visitors from the River. As a mark that he was close to home, the dark stones along the gutters were long bleached white from the runoff from the washerwomen’s tubs.

  The people that passed him on the street, from old men to young wives, all showed the same signs of poverty from working in the harsh conditions of the Factories on the hill. But with his noble coat, even though he was one of them, barely any of them even gave him eye contact, not wanting to get involved in any business that could draw the Emperor’s Guard down upon them out of a simple slight or misunderstanding.

  When he saw old Mrs. Mercher up ahead, staring at him goggle-eyed from the front door of her shop, he knew something was up. Wearing her usual tied-back apron with the sleeves of her worn blue floral dress pushed him up over her bony elbows, Mrs. Mercher had been a washerwoman for nearly thirty years, with her hands and elbows soaked and boiled day in and day out for every day of her adult life. Davin first intended to ignore her, but when she continued to stare, he nearly stopped walking at the odd look that she was giving him.

  “Hey!” she hissed as she waved him over, frantically wind-milling her arm even as she tried to keep inside the door to her little home and shop. Not knowing what was up, he came over to her door at a jog.

  “Yes? What is it?”

  “Sweet Saints, boy, get in the house if you know what’s good for you.” Astonished, even when the old woman grabbed him by the arm and pulled him into her shop, he didn’t resist. He was even more shocked when she slammed the door behind him and locked it with a quick turn of the bolt. The inside of her place smelled like perfumed lye, enough that he actually choked a little bit on the frilly scent.

  “Mrs. Mercher, I don’t understand.”

  “I almost didn’t recognize you with that fancy coat on, but I’m glad I did.” She barred the door with a paddle from the fireplace, and then set about closing the drapes over the front pair of dirty windows. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this in such a fashion,” she told him, her eyes crazy with fright, “but I don’t think you have much time.”

  “What do you mean?” he said slowly, not sure what she was getting on about.

  “Your mother, dearie. I just heard the news. She was found an hour ago, strangled to death in the stairway of your home.”

  The news struck Davin like a blow from a sledge. Reaching out, he held himself up by the back of a ratty chair.

  “What? You can’t be serious!”

  “I’m dead serious, Davin. Your mother and I, we had our problems, I won’t deny that. But I wouldn’t lie about this.”

  “Who did it?” Davin said, nearly shouting at her. “Who killed my mother?”

  “Shhhh…” she shushed, waving at him to keep his voice down. “Nobody knows. Half the Guard are up investigating Beatrice’s place and everyone’s all up in a tizzy about it. But that’s only the half of it. I heard word from one of my customers that works as a Foreman down at Florin’s that there was a death down there as well.”

  Davin blinked, trying to put the two facts together in his muddled head. People died at the Factories all the time. “What does that have to do with my mother being killed?”

  “Davin,” Mrs. Mercher replied, as softly as he’d ever heard her speak, “I heard from my niece that the boy that was killed at Florin’s was you. Somebody killed your mother, and some other boy that they thought was you, in the same dark day.”

  “Yori?” he said disbelievingly. “But he’d never hurt a fly.”

  “That didn’t stop whoever did this to him, or your poor mother.”

  “ Yori…” he said, now shocked enough by the news that he let himself fall into the ratty chair, clinging to the armrests for dear life. Yori had been his best friend in the world since he was seven. The two of them had executed their own daring and largely harmless crime spree all around the Height for years, much to both of their mothers’ amusement. While both of the boys had entered Factory service when they turned eleven, Davin had always wanted to get out and see the world, to experience adventure, while Yori was comfortable chasing girls, drinking spirits and making his leisurely way from one day to the next. Now, his mother was gone, killed by some fiend, and Davin’s closest friend had met a terrible end in Davin’s place.

  “I’m sorry to be cruel,” Mrs. Mercher continued, “but has anyone seen you today?”

  “I saw Old Thom on the way up here,” Davin said numbly.

  “Then we’ll get you off, and I’ll go talk with Old Thom and make sure he knows he hasn’t seen you.”

  “Get me off?” Davin said, looking up at her with astonishment, with tears in his eyes. “To where? I want to see my mother. There’s things I have to do.”

  “The word I got is from my niece at Florin’s,” Mrs. Mercher continued, “is that you died by violence just as much as your mother did. Poisoned by a bite of something unnatural. Somebody went to lengths to kill the both of you, one at home, and one at work, both in broad daylight. It would be a lot easier to just come at night and kill you in the dark, but whoever did this wanted it public. Now your mother is gone, and you’re in the furnace, and nobody knows the wiser.”

  The enormity of the situation finally struck him head-on, when Davin realized he would never see his mother again, and that his life in the Height had abruptly come to an end. “What am I to do?”

  “Get away from here. The Guard are conducting a house-to-house search for the murderer, and it’s only a matter of time before they come to my shop. Word has it that the murderer couldn’t have gotten far and they hav
e to be holed up somewhere in the Height. With your mother and I sharing work, I’m surprised that they haven’t come here sooner to rack me for questions.”

  “I still can’t believe it,” Davin said, before breaking down entirely, sobbing into a handkerchief that Mrs. Mercher gave him. For long minutes, he quietly keened, tears running down his face. But when the sobs subsided, he clung to the folds of her skirt with one hand, while holding the back of his neck with the other.

  “But do you know why?” she finally asked.

  “I think so,” Davin confessed, after he blew his nose. “I looked into my birth records a few weeks ago, into the DeLorenzo family line.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?” she asked. “Does this have anything to do with your scoundrel of a father?”

  Davin paused for a moment, realizing that he’d already said too much. “Something like that,” he said sadly. Even with Mrs. Mercher’s kindness, he didn’t trust her, especially with the Guard coming soon to ask her some questions. For all he knew, he was putting her into danger just by being here, and telling her more than she needed to know would put her in harm’s way.

  She waited a few moments longer, but quickly got the gist he wasn’t going to talk anymore about it. “Well, you should get going, then, before the Guard comes. You should go anywhere you can for a few days, until the kettle boils down. Come.” She reached down a hand and pulled him up out of the chair. Wiping away the tears from the corners of his damp eyes with a bleachy-smelling handkerchief she gave him, she gave him a wrinkled smile as she tucked a fresh one into the jacket pocket of his father’s coat. “You’ll be all right. But just don’t go home.”

  “Right,” he replied numbly. “Don’t go home.” He was already thinking of twenty places he could hole up, but he’d rather be at home than anywhere else right now. He’d rather be at home rather than anywhere else in the whole world.