Kai shouldered her bag, and walked fast, looking for a cab.
Chapter Eight
A ZOMBIE IN A sharkskin suit and a small red hat found Zeddig at the Cavern Diver, when she was already four drinks into the night and the stars—no, those weren’t stars, just lights, little recessed fake diamond motherfuckers constellating the ceiling, which Marygray thought added to the ambiance, though her sense of the Cavern Diver’s ambiance always having been a bit left of center of the clientele’s—well anyway the starlike light things twinkled. The zombie set a hand on Zeddig’s shoulder, and his touch chilled her, though not so much as the dead city had. “You owe me, Zeddig.”
Burn and tear. Some people lacked the decency to let a woman stew after doing the right thing. “Vogel.” She slammed sorghum whiskey and slid her shot glass across the bar for another pour. Shouldn’t be drinking now, here, but it had been a long day. “Is that how you say hi to all your business partners?”
“Business partners!” Vogel’s face could convey a great deal of surprise, given that the right half of it wasn’t there anymore. He’d paid someone to wire his jaw together with gold to keep it from falling off, but his wormy left side was still too stiff for human expressions. Some people let themselves die when their time came. Some grappled to a reasonable facsimile of life, sustained by insurance contracts, phylacteric trusts, and premortem exercises. Others were Vogel. He just died, decayed, and stuck around. “Business partner, boys, you hear that?” The boys in question chuckled, two big dockhand types; one wore a Zurish mask, the other bore crude mining colony glyphs, like someone had remodeled him with a cleaver. “Business partners”—he still hadn’t let go of Zeddig’s shoulder—“work together. They don’t run out on jobs. They pay back loans.”
She’d expected this—but had hoped for a night’s grace to get good and drunk before the shark smelled blood. “We got a bad tip. There was a library marker.”
“You confuse me for someone who cares. I advanced you funds for the job. You were supposed to do the damn thing, get paid, and pay me back, not run around playing Reynardine.” She tried to turn back to her drink, but Vogel spun her on her barstool to face him. She wanted to sit up, to take this situation seriously. Unfortunately, slamming four shots in under an hour seemed to have increased local gravity. Maybe someone smarter or more sober could have explained. Zeddig stayed slumped, and Vogel looked sideways and furious.
She pushed herself almost vertical, which fixed the sideways, if not the furious. “We just need coverage until the next job, that’s all.”
“There’s no score big enough,” he said. “Not in Agdel Lex.”
“Alikand,” she said, automatically, because she was drunk.
“Agdel Lex,” he repeated through teeth his wires didn’t leave him any choice but to clench. “You won’t work your way out of this by delving on your own. But there’s another option.”
“No.”
“Come work for me. You got skills I need. One train job will cancel out the debt.” He patted her shoulder and to her surprise, no doubt because she was very, very drunk, she did not hit him.
“Delvers you hire for big jobs have a nasty tendency to turn up dead, or stuck in a squid. Wonder why that might be.”
“No idea,” he said. “Wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact you people seem to think I’m the kind of punk you can screw with.”
“Aw, Vogel. We know exactly what kind of punk you are.” She grinned, sloppy. “Now, let go of my shoulder.”
He released her, leaving wet tracks on her skin.
“I’m good for it,” she said. “Give me a week.”
“A week? I can do a week.” He slid one hand into his sharkskin suit, and withdrew a vial traced with gold wire, a drop of blood inside. Zeddig’s gut clenched. She’d known this was coming, but that didn’t help. “Let’s talk about interest.”
“Ahem,” Gal said.
Gal hadn’t cleared her throat. She actually said, “Ahem.” Not loud, either—but her tone of voice made the bar go quiet. Gal hadn’t drawn her sword. She just stood behind Vogel and his bully-boys, arms loose at her sides. Fake starlight caught in her golden hair, and her eyes glittered their weird alien blue, utterly calm.
That calm didn’t break when Zur-boy and Cleaverface spun around, Zur with a knife, Cleaverface leveling a crossbow at Gal’s forehead.
She smiled, like he’d told a bad joke. “Try.”
“I don’t want trouble,” Marygray said from behind the bar. Zeddig glanced right. Easy to mistake Marygray. She looked like, because she was, one of those crunchy antiestablishment foreign types who drifted Alikand way, seeking a place outside their empires: pale and soft even after two decades of Glebland sun, gray hair dyed psychedelic neon stripes. But she kept a blasting rod behind the bar, and spent every weekend at the range. Dear heart, she said when Zeddig needled her about the contradiction: ask any imperialist. It’s best to speak softly and carry a small stick that makes people’s bones explode.
Zur-boy drew a rod of his own, but before he could point it toward Marygray, chairs ground against floorboards and a disquieting number of the dockfolk who frequented the Cavern Diver rose to their feet.
With all the wire holding Vogel’s face together, Zeddig couldn’t tell whether his smile was placating, nervous, or triumphant. “No need to get excited. You say a week, Zeddig, I can let you have a week. I’m a generous guy. But I need a down payment. Half a soul.”
“I can’t afford that.”
“Not a problem,” he said. “I’ll take it in pain. Right here.”
Gal met Zeddig’s gaze, as if nobody else in the bar held weapons, as if there weren’t two pointed at her, as if Zeddig’s choice here was all that mattered. “Ms. Hala?”
“It’s fine,” she said to Gal, and then, to Vogel, “Go ahead.”
He touched the vial.
Zeddig felt a knife enter her arm and peel slowly up.
She twitched. She kept her feet. She watched him. She did not puke.
Then it really started.
* * *
Gal cleaned her up and walked her home down narrow dark alleys up to the Wings. Laundry lines crisscrossed the starless sky. Their path wound into her city, the city where she was born; streets narrowed and colors brightened, the air grew wet and soft. Iskari street signs disappeared. “I don’t need,” she said, pushed off Gal’s arm, tried to stand on her own, then stumbled into a trash can.
“Of course you don’t.” Gal took her arm anyway. Zeddig felt the other woman’s shoulders—soft, supple, smooth. No knots, no clicks, no unnecessary tension. Gal cared for her body like a weapon, because it was. “Why did you borrow from Vogel?”
She’d gargled three times in the alley behind the Cavern Diver, but her teeth still felt gritty with vomit. “He limited my debt. No matter how much I owe him, he can’t touch my family, can’t touch their library. The Wreckers work with banks these days—each loan’s a chance to get their claws on the collection.”
“Surely there were other options.”
“We needed the soulstuff.” Idiot. “And—a full On Comedy? We could have paid off Vogel with room to spare. Seemed like a good idea at the time. Besides, he’s a pushover. By loan shark standards.”
“Ah.”
“I didn’t beg,” she said. “And I only screamed that once.”
“I wish you had let me intervene.”
“It’s just a debt.”
“You should have told us.”
“You would have told me it was a bad idea. And if I told you, you would have told Raymet, and the two of you would have found some way to stop me. It was a big score. I took a risk.”
“You have a week to pay him back.”
She nodded. Far up, a father sang a lullaby to his baby at an open window.
“You don’t have the soulstuff.”
“I’ll figure out something.”
“I could kill him.”
“You could,” she said. “But you d
on’t want Raymet to see you as a killer.”
Gal blinked. “I have no idea what you mean.”
“Oh, come on.”
“You are changing the subject.”
“Damn right.”
They walked together in silence for a while. Zeddig noticed how much she was leaning against Gal, and didn’t stop. At last, after a sort of leftish right and a rightish left, they reached a three-story house with a baked tile roof and a thick wooden door carved with vines. Home. Gal helped her up the steps, and knocked.
The door opened, and Zeddig tried her best smile, which had, admittedly, seen better days. “Hi, Grandma.”
Chapter Nine
THE CAB LET KAI off three blocks from Ley’s apartment. “I’ll get you close as I can,” he’d said when she showed him the return address on the letter she brought from home: Ley’s last note, three smeared lines congratulating Kai on her promotion—the ink must have been wet when she folded the paper into the envelope. “Downtown streets, you know.”
She didn’t argue, but neither did she understand until she saw. Hearing “downtown,” she pictured the kind of swank foreigner enclave she’d never deign visit in Kavekana, home to the kind of people Ley wanted her to think she was. But as the carriage climbed away from Gavreaux Junction, they left ghostlight modernity behind. Unfinished plaster buildings flanked dusty alleys cluttered with garbage and broken furniture. Billowing cursive script rippled on the walls, pulling at the eye in quarterlight. The art made the world less stable.
Kai tensed with fear and reached for her passport, expecting that cold sharp snap of the dead city—but though the city changed as they left Iskari streets behind, it did not die. Air moistened, tensed with ozone and orange. Out of the corner of her eye, Kai saw narrow streets between the shops and homes, people milling there: three old men played music on drums and something like a banjo, while a girl kicked a shuttlecock with the insides of her feet, tap, tap, tap. When Kai tried to look at them directly, they vanished.
The cabbie let her off at “East Wind Lane,” which existed even when she looked at it head-on. “Up there,” he said, “and in.”
“What if I get lost?”
“Ask for directions.”
She didn’t have to. Gathering heels and purse and assembling her jacket into a reasonable approximation of professional order, she proceeded uphill, ignoring the protests of legs and calves. Scar tissue bunched in her back.
The mind makes distance weird. The three-mile walk from Kai’s house to the Priesthood’s offices back home passed in an unconscious blur; she’d climbed the dormant volcano of Kavekana’ai so many times she’d built a callus against the sky and distant tang of surf and the touch of small gods. But three blocks down a side street in Agdel Lex felt raw.
Four women played cards on a folding table. A storyteller at a fountain square worked a crowd of young men and women drinking dark beer. A baby cried through an open window and a cat, yowling, answered from a rooftop. Crowded coffee bars glowed beside shuttered groceries. A dense crowd watched a masked poetry slam:
flit feint fierce
a tongue trials down
to crease a joint
of leg and hip
and in the audience a man hooted and the crowd caught the laugh from him and the masked poet raised her hand, flourishing diaphanous silk sleeves, to grip that laugh by the throat until silence returned.
Observations on her own observation: the unfamiliar drew her eye, so she noticed life-ways she didn’t know, this storyteller, that blue wine, the mask, that unrecognizable card game like a sort of four-way solitaire. She didn’t note samenesses: fathers and children, boys holding hands, a kiss in shadows. Some part of her kept insisting this was a dirty place, but it wasn’t, any more than any given Kavekana side street.
Most of the foreigners here, if foreigners they were, looked young, wearing garish checks and stripes, hair unkempt. Some sported mustaches Kai had only ever seen on old cigarette ads. A pre-wars Zurish flag draped over a fourth-floor balcony; she smelled weed-skunk and sour beer as she passed beneath. Not all foreigners came to Agdel Lex for crystal towers. Were these castaways Ley’s people?
Kai passed her sister’s building on the first try. In her defense, the numbers were noncontiguous, and mostly concealed by decoration. Whoever designed Ley’s door hid her 117 in a carved bird’s nest in a wooden tree whose branches advertised the bookshop underneath. The bookshop’s name translated to “Tale Forest,” punning on a trick of Talbeg grammar in which the word for “forest” meant what “horde” or “swarm” might in Kathic, say—a terrifyingly large assembly, so many of a thing one suspected evil influence.
Yes, fine, she was putting things off, pondering the meaning of bookshop names. Yes, she’d lingered. Years of separation, the first meeting goes horribly, and now what? Just climb the stairs and apologize?
Easier to leave, forget this ever happened, and get on with her life. Ley could sort out her problems, and the next time their paths crossed they could handle each other civilly. They did just fine alone.
But she’d come this far. And the fourth-floor lights were on.
Gods.
Kai opened the door, and climbed.
Music pulsed in the stairwell. Men laughed. Two women fought. Another woman, who Kai hoped (for her own sanity’s sake) was not her sister, shrieked toward orgasm.
First floor: bookshop. Second floor: astronomers who drank too much, judging from the broken telescope stand and beer bottle pyramid on the landing. (The music loudest here.) Third floor: either several painters, or a single painter with a style that encompassed abstract soul-gouging shapes, impressionist sunrises, and stunningly beautiful naked young men. (The climax came. Cheers from the astronomers below.) And the fourth floor.
Nothing on the landing. The door, simple dark wood.
Behind that door, the argument.
“—your godsdamn hidebound pathetic loyalism to the same bullshit sentimentality that’s strangling this planet—” Imperious soprano, precise, clipped, a slight Camlaander accent.
“—no idea what the fuck you’ve done—” Ley.
“—will be good for us, good for the city, you lack imagination—”
“—almost fixed everything—”
“—ruining us all—”
Kai raised her hand. Gods. Knock, or leave?
She knocked.
“Lady and Lords.” Ley again. “You brought backup. Not enough to steal—”
“Steal? We’re partners, dammit. If anything, you stole from us. And we’re moving forward. One way or another.”
A muffled word. A curse? A promise?
She heard flesh strike flesh. A cry. Wood broke.
The bottom dropped out of Kai’s stomach.
“Ley!” She tried the doorknob. Locked. Slammed her shoulder into the wood, which didn’t budge. That bruise would hurt come morning. A roar from the other side: anger, pain, adrenaline released. Her sister’s voice. More wood shattered, and glass.
Kai fumbled in her jacket pocket for a fresh needle, her hands shook, there wasn’t time. She tore the paper, jabbed the needle into her finger, blood welled, a scream, the Lady burst through her
Unlock the doors that bar
The door popped open.
Kai stumbled into Ley’s room, and saw:
Her sister first. (Center of the room, center of everything, the still and panicked core around which the rest revolved, staring everywhere at once, at Kai, at the door, holding—)
The knife. (More the outline of a knife, a ray-traced prism of mottled red-blue-green roiling light, wound in silver, wet with—)
Blood. (Which did not drip, but rolled from the blade’s flat to its edge and slid inside somehow, into the roil, while more blood pooled on the floor, gushing from—)
The body. (Gods, the body, a golden dancer’s frame, a face some Lowlands master might have painted, haughty, shocked, dead, a crimson stain spreading over her gray blouse and skirt, her eyes gl
assy, her face slack, one hand groping at her wound, for the knife, for—)
Ley, again, first last and forever. Ley holding the knife, which dripped blood. Ley, stepping back.
“Kai,” she said.
Words, yes, words happened sometimes. “Ley. What are you—what is—what—”
Ley drew back another step, keeping her hand between them, the knife away. The window behind her stood open. Wind billowed the curtains.
“This isn’t what it looks like.”
“Ley. Put the knife down. Come here. I can fix this.” Fucking how, she didn’t know. She’d work it out. There would be, okay, they’d need to find a Craftswoman, get something on that wound before the woman bled out, maybe (hah!) if they could settle the whole thing fast there wouldn’t be a murder charge, and depending on who this woman was, she might not see death as an inconvenience. Maybe she had insurance, or a trust. Young for that, but maybe. “We can save her.”
And Ley laughed. Laughed! Not hysterically—as if Kai’d made some accidental joke, a slip of the tongue. “I already have.”
“It doesn’t look that way.” Her voice shook. She made it stop. “I don’t know what’s going on here. Put that knife down and let me help you.”
“You can’t,” she said. “I asked you earlier. It’s too late.” She took another step toward the window. Four stories up. “I’ll do what I can myself.”
“Listen to me!”
Ley shook her head. Tears glittered on her cheeks. Kai hadn’t realized she was crying. Her voice sounded so steady.
She caught Ley before she could dive out the window. Kai had always been faster, even in heels. Ley lurched back through the curtains onto the balcony, keeping the knife away from Kai, who clutched her sister’s other wrist with both hands.
Stars spread over them and the city beneath, and the Authority tower cast the dark in sunset rose. Light glinted off Ley’s teeth. “Let me go!”
“No.”
Ley tugged against Kai’s thumbs, but she wasn’t fast or strong enough to break her sister’s grip. She gave up and moved inside, trying to bury her elbow in Kai’s stomach, but Kai pulled back, tripped her, scrambled on top. She clawed for the knife. Ley writhed and growled, but couldn’t pull away.
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