Wings of Justice (City of Light Book 1)

by Michael-Scott Earle

  "I see." I nodded and felt my cheeks heat. That was something that Fallon probably would have known if I had thought to ask her. It was another mistake I'd made.

  "Do you know the name Garon Mitus?" I asked

  "Isn't he a shipwright? I think I've seen him in the tavern. Maybe only once or twice," she answered after a few seconds of consideration.

  "Do you remember the last time he was in this room?" I asked.

  "Hmmmm." She looked up at the ceiling and moved her callused hands to her leathery face. "Maybe two weeks ago. Yes, I think that is correct. I remember now. I hadn't seen him in a year or so, but I recalled him because of the foul expression he always wore on his face."

  "Did he meet with your husband alone?"

  "No, but he came in during dinner, and I was busy working. He could have slunk down to the cellar with my Rafa for some moonshine. I wouldn't be surprised. Do you think Garon has anything to do with this? The man seemed like he was always in a bad mood, but I never thought of him as a danger."

  "I'm not sure. We are still investigating. How about the name Dust? Have you ever heard of anyone use that name?"

  "No, Potentia. I haven't." She answered quickly.

  "Are you sure?" I tilted my head a bit and stared into her eyes.

  "No. I've never heard of that name before." Her eyes darted away, and I guessed that she was lying.

  "Very well. Can you show me this moonshine cellar?" Fallon might have beaten the woman until she admitted who this Dust person was, but I didn't think any good would come of it. Most citizens already feared our power, and I guessed that this woman wanted to avenge her husband more than she wanted to protect someone's identity. I would find out who this Dust was, eventually.

  "This way." The woman stood and gestured to the back room of the tavern. I followed her through a kitchen, an abundance of packed storage shelves, and to a worn wooden door at the back of the restaurant.

  "Wooden door? That is uncommon," I said. Most doors were made of bamboo since it was more efficient to plant and harvest. The base five levels of Petrasada combined were around twenty square miles, but that space was carefully allocated for livestock, farm animals, and lumber. The land had to support almost two million citizens, and wood was very expensive.

  "It came with the place when we bought it twenty-five years ago. It is just poplar wood, but Rafa didn't like to show it to anyone lest they suspected we were secretly wealthy." The woman tugged open the door, and I saw steps leading down into a cellar. "Take that lantern over there. It is dark." She pointed to a lamp, and I lit it before heading down the stairs.

  The basement was filled with more shelves. These were stacked with root vegetables, pickling jars, and bags of flour, and salted meat hung in a corner. It was much cooler down in this room, and I turned around to find the part of the wall that Rafa's widow indicated would have the moonshine distillery.

  "Where did he make the moonshine?" I asked. I didn't see anything that looked like a boiler.

  Then I felt the air in the room shift.

  "No!" I shouted and jumped toward the closing door. My cloak turned to feathers, and the wings pushed me toward the top of the stairs at a ridiculous speed. I wasn't fast enough, though, and I almost slammed the top of my head into the thick door when it closed.

  "Hey! Open this door!" I slammed my palm onto the wood.

  "He told me you would come!" Rafa's widow screamed.

  "Who?" I yelled through the door. "Open this or you will face the punishment of the Potentia!" I realized that my threat didn't really have teeth. I didn't know how to use magic yet, and a quick glance around the room showed me that there was no tool I could use to break the wood.

  "Rafa said you would come asking about Dust. By the Priestesses, I didn't think it would be a Potentia." I heard the woman weep on the other side of the cellar door.

  "What are you talking about? Open this damn door!" I slammed my fist onto the wood again. My stomach knotted with anxiety. This was bad. How did I not see this coming? I knew the woman had lied about knowing who Dust was. I just hadn't suspected that she would want to trap me in her cellar.

  "You killed my husband! Damn you!" she shrieked. I heard something scrape across the floor. Shit, she was about to put a shelf against the door.

  "I didn't kill your husband! What are you talking about? Have you lost your mind? I am a Potentia. Open the damn door now!"

  "I'm going to go get him. He will take care of you. He will avenge my husband for me." The woman's voice sounded full of hate and bile.

  "Who are you going to get? Manus, open this door. My sisters will come looking for me!" I lied. They would send a search party in two days at the earliest. Fallon would probably just think that I had quit after she left me.

  "I will get Dust. He will know what to do with you. He can dispose of your body," the woman said through the thick wood. I heard footsteps walk away, and I banged on the door again.

  "No! Open the door! Shit!" I screamed and then jumped down the stairs.

  Anger welled up in my chest, and I tried to control my breathing. The walls felt as if they were closing in on me, and I forced myself to focus on the lantern. There wasn't much oil left in the device, maybe only a few hours' worth. I had to get out of here.

  Or else Dust would dispose of my body.

  Chapter 10

  I spun away from the cellar door and then forced myself to sit on the steps. Nothing would come of me losing my focus and letting my terror take control of my thoughts. I let my breath leave my mouth with a few ragged gasps, and I focused on the small light from the lamp. Was there something that the widow had said that could give me a clue about Dust? Did I miss something in the conversation? I pushed out a few more long breaths through tightened lips while I reviewed the conversation in my head.

  My memory was good, and I always placed high in the crime scene recollection tests. There had to be a way out of here. There had to of been something that the widow said by accident.

  The moonshine.

  She told me about Rafa's hobby well before any mention of Dust. It meant that she was either lying to me from the start of the conversation, or she had told me the truth about her husband's second source of income and had gotten scared when I mentioned the mysterious name.

  I stood up from the stairs and glanced around the room again with a new perception. I'd only been in the room for a couple of minutes, maybe less, and at first I hadn't seen the still. That didn't mean that there wasn't one down here. The furnace and boilers must be concealed somewhere. The walls were plain adobe brick the color of old blood, and I ran my hands over the one to the right of me.

  I didn't know what I was looking for exactly, but the bricks appeared uniform on this side. I tried prying a few off with my dagger and pushing some in with my strength. None of them seemed to budge or hint at a way that Rafa had concealed his distillery. Frustration crushed my chest, but I knew that there was going to be something hidden in the room, so I went to the back wall and repeated the same process. I couldn't find anything there that hinted at a secret area to the cellar, and terror started to rip at my nerves.

  I spared a glance at the single lamp while I searched the last wall. It could have just been my fear, but the lamp seemed to be slightly dimmer than when I first stepped into the cellar. How many minutes had it been? Five? Ten? Fifteen? Maybe the exact number didn't matter. What did matter was that I would soon be out of time.

  This wall looked the same as the others, but the sensation on my fingers was slightly different. The other bricks seemed to have more of a solid feel. These chunks of adobe felt soft when the tip of my knife probed their mortar joints. It was almost as if these bricks were newer and made of lower quality mud. A little spark of hope fluttered in my stomach, but I still didn't find any area on the wall that I could pry loose.

  "Shit," I cursed again when I reached the corner connecting that wall to the one with the door.

  I took a few steps back from the bricks and g
rabbed the lamp. Its light flickered dangerously when I held it high in my hand so that I could look in the corner where the wall met the ceiling. The cellar was about seven feet high, and I noticed that there was a black painted, mortar joint at the top corner nearest to where I stood. I raised the lamp closer, and my heart did a dance.

  It was a slot.

  I stood on my toes and angled my knife into the crevasse. It went in all the way, but nothing noticeable happened when I wiggled the blade. I thought about trying to pry with more force, but I didn't want to break the tool off in there. I gave one last tug before I pulled it out, and I felt something give in the wall.

  "Yes!" I whispered as I felt the bricks shift to my right, toward the wall opposite the door leading out of the cellar.

  It felt like the door sat on some sort of slippery slide, or bamboo rollers, but the angle of my dagger in the joint wasn't perfect, and I couldn't seem to get the correct leverage to move the wall more than a few inches.

  Rafa was probably taller than me, but I guessed that he also had a tool to make the wall move more easily. I checked on the shelves next to me, and sure enough, I spotted a long metal bar lying under some bags of rice.

  I yanked my knife from the wall, pulled the bar from the shelf, and then poked it into the slot. This was a much better fit, and the four-foot length inserted halfway into the bricks. I leaned against the bar, pushed my boot against the adjacent brick, and muscled the fake wall aside. When it had opened halfway, I saw a metal track, and wheels on the bottom of the brick allowed the entire wall to shift into an empty space of the opposite wall like a sliding window.

  The hidden space was one and a half times the size of the actual cellar. Inside I saw two large boilers, an assortment of expensive copper pipes, dozens of unlit hanging lamps filled with oil, a desk covered with thick leather books, stacks of grain, and forty jugs of what I guessed was moonshine.

  I didn't know much about distilling moonshine, but we had reviewed the process in our training classes, and I understood enough about the topic to guess that this was an operation much larger than one man's hobby. It was probable that Rafa made dozens of gold pieces a month from the sale of this alcohol, and I could understand why he hadn't wanted to pay taxes on it. He had gone too far with the project at this point, and even if he started to report the business, we would have wanted a significant amount of back taxes.

  Each unit looked as if it contained maybe two hundred gallons, and I noticed a strange formation of bricks under the base of each large drum. I pulled my dim lamp around the floor and found two holes filled with charcoal. It seemed like it was some sort of vertical stove design, and I wished that I had more time to study how it worked. Burning wood needed an exhaust, and I saw a small grate at the foot of the opposite wall, past the pair of stills. The smoke must have been drawn out of the room through a cleverly designed vent there and blended in with that from the large chimney of the tavern's kitchen.

  I ran to the vent and gave it a closer inspection. It was maybe a foot and a half wide and about as tall. My fingers hooked into the grate, and I was able to yank it off with little effort. I stuck the flickering lamp inside and saw that the square shaft went both up and down into darkness.

  A scrape sounded at the cellar door. It sounded as if there were feet walking on the wood. I pulled my head out of the exhaust shaft, but then realized that the noise actually came from the chimney, and I leaned forward into the dark tunnel.

  "She's in the cellar," I heard the widow's panicked voice.

  "Why?" a man questioned.

  "She knew about you. Rafa said that anyone who came in asking about you was an enemy and not to be trusted."

  "But she is Potentia?" he asked.

  "She had the blue cape, yes."

  "Damn it. You've jeopardized my entire operation." His voice was a growl.

  "My husband said--"

  "Your husband was a fool, and if he wasn't already dead, I'd kill him for getting you involved."

  "Please, I was just trying to protect you. Forgive me," I heard the widow sob.

  "You've put me in a difficult situation. If you had let the Potentia go, then I could have taken care of her when it was convenient for me. Now I have to kill her here, and I am doubtful that you will be able to keep your tongue in your mouth."

  "I can be trusted! Rafa didn't tell me anything about your operation. Please, I am just a simple woman. I don't want to be part of your--"

  "The stakes are high. Half a million people or more could be killed. I can't let you alert our enemies."

  "I won't say anything to the guards. Please forgive me," she whined.

  "Leave before I change my mind," the voice growled.

  "Leave? I'm confused," the woman said.

  "Get out!" he screamed, and I heard light feet run across the ceiling of the cellar.

  "Pull the shelf away from the cellar door." I heard him say once the widow had exited.

  "We really going to kill a Potentia? I knew we would have to eventually, but the plan was not for a few months." It was another man's voice, and he spoke in a whisper that I could only hear through the chimney shaft.

  "We have too. We'll throw her body to Keidas. It will buy us a few days."

  "Her wingmate will come looking for her," a third man's voice said.

  "Yes, but there will be little to go on without a body. Pull out your pistols."

  I knew my chances against three pistol-wielding men, and the only plan I could think of was to get the door to the distillery closed so that they might think I wasn't in here. I jumped to the other side of the stills and moved to the hidden door. I reached around to pull the bar out of the wall and pushed on the inside of the secret wall to move it back into place. A few seconds after I felt the brick settle into place, I heard the cellar open.

  I doubted that they could see the light from my lamp through the brick wall, but I also wondered whether this Dust person knew about Rafa's moonshine business. I guessed that he probably did, and I realized that closing the wall was only a temporary respite.

  I moved back to the open vent and stuck my head in again. I had no idea where the lower part of the shaft would end, but the upper section would take me to the main kitchen area. All Dust and his men would have to do was point their guns down the shaft and I'd be dead.

  I glanced at the grate, at the lamp, and then at the passage.

  Then I took a deep breath and turned the valve on the lamp to extinguish the flame.

  Darkness was strange. Most homes had thick blinds to keep out the twin suns, but other than the single night once a year, the world was always bathed in a pure brightness. Even with my shutters closed, some light always leaked through the coverings. I felt around with my hands and hooked my fingers into the grate again. I had a visual memory of where the shaft was, and I backed into the hole so that my legs could press against the sides of the tunnel. The grate hooked back into its spot with a small amount of blind maneuvering, and I exhaled the breath I had been holding.

  "She isn't here?" I thought I heard one of the men say from the other side of the wall. I wondered about just staying here for a few hours, and then climbing out when Dust gave up his search, but I dismissed the thought almost as soon as it came to me. They were going to find me if I didn't move.

  I relaxed my legs and inched my way down the shaft.

  The darkness was oppressive, deep, and I imagined that the walls of the tunnel were closing in around me like a vise. My legs soon ached with the effort of pressing into the shaft, and I tried using a combination of my hands, back, and knees to walk myself downward. That helped for a time, but then the palms of my hands began to feel as if they were blistering, and I had to put more weight on my legs. I had gloves in one of my pouches, but I didn't want to risk taking my hands away from the walls or dropping the gloves by accident.

  This was a terrible idea.

  Maybe not as bad as facing Dust and two other pistol-wielding criminals, but I should have gone up the
shaft instead of descending. I had no idea how much further this tunnel went, and I had no light since the lamp had been too awkward to bring along. I might end up diving into the bowels of the floating island, where the miners often claimed one could become lost and never find the surface.

  "Relax, Anelia," I whispered to myself. "You can always climb back up the shaft in a few hours if you can't find another way." I didn't see the grate, but I'd be able to feel it with my hands, and Dust would probably have given up by then.

  "I don't see her!" I froze in place when I heard the voice from high above.

  I glanced up and saw a distant light. It looked like a tiny star, and I realized that my descent must have carried me sixty feet down the shaft, but as I craned my neck toward the light, I knew the lamp was actually much closer than I had first thought. One of the men's heads poked into the shaft, and he held the lamp above him so that he could look upward. His head blocked the light from reaching me, and it made me think I was further away.

  "She might have gone up while we were down here," I heard him say, and hope filled my chest.

  "No, then Jotana would have seen her in the main room. If she escaped this cellar, then she must have gone down." I felt my stomach tumble down the shaft at Dust's deduction, and my brain tried to fumble with a new plan.

  The lamp above me flickered, and the shaft brightened significantly. My hair was long and brown, so I leaned forward in the slim hope that the light wouldn't reach me or reflect off any of the metal parts of my thin armor.

  "I don't see her down below," the voice said, and I felt a breath leave my body thankfully.

  "Did you throw a torch down?" I heard Dust ask.

  "Do you have a torch? I just have this lamp."

  "Throw some of the moonshine down and then toss the lamp," Dust said, and my heart's panicked beat sprinted out of control.

  "It would be a shame to waste a whole flask of 'shine," the voice faded with the light, and I guessed that the man had pulled his head out of the shaft to argue with Dust.