by Ed McDonald
Clean-ish and dressed again, I sat at my desk and swept yesterday’s paperwork from the table. Old rumours, half reports. It had been weeks since anything serious had come our way. Perhaps that was why the bag-heads had taken me by surprise.
I was tired, drained and had to keep spitting into a bucket but when two hours had passed and the coffee was cold I was starting to feel human again. A luxurious office with its dark wood panels, leather chairs and good traditional oil lamps helps the spirit. Or maybe it was the brandy. We surround ourselves in luxuries as though decadence and wealth will stave away the true concerns of the world for a time. Perhaps they do.
‘Looks like you had a rough night,’ I said when Tnota ambled in. For a man who could navigate the Misery better than nearly anyone, he had the worst discipline in the states. His shirt was untucked and he smelled like a brewery. He sagged down into his own overstuffed chair with the air of a man who was suffering from the deepest of self-inflicted misfortunes.
‘Looks like yours was worse,’ he said.
Explanations were made. I’d been out killing, he’d been out drinking. A regular state of affairs, though more often than not I was giving orders rather than swinging a sword myself these days. Tnota had transitioned smartly from navigator to being my right hand, which was ironic since he was lacking his own.
‘You haven’t slept again,’ he said. ‘Got that glazed look. You need a bed.’
‘I’ll sleep tonight,’ I said.
‘You say that every day, and half of those you’re a liar,’ Tnota said. ‘Big Dog says,’ he started, but he broke into a yawn himself and I was saved from any holy canine wisdom for the time being.
I shivered, though the fire was banked and blazing. If Death came for me through a chill I caught swimming, I was going to kick her in the bollocks.
Valiya arrived at the office, soaked and frozen. She was scowling as though the sky had given her some kind of personal affront, and if I’d been the sky, I’d have fled to the hills. She blew into the office as she blew through life: a force of nature, intolerant of ineptitude, fixing everything that lesser beings had buggered up. She even managed to drip with an air of refinement as she carefully hung her heavy raincoat on the stand in front of the fire. A sweep of auburn hair obscured half of her face, which was often useful, as it was a distracting face. She was making a better job of her thirties than most women did their twenties, or at least that’s how I saw it. When she turned up three years back, she’d said she’d run the place better than anyone else could, and she’d proved that every day since. Now she practically ran not only the offices, which she was supposed to, but my intelligence network, which she wasn’t. It wouldn’t have paid to try to stop her.
Valiya wrung water from her bedraggled hair.
‘This place,’ she said, frowning, ‘smells bloody awful.’
I told her what had happened, asked her to find out where Devlen Maille’s body had been tossed to rest the first time. If I could work out how he’d managed to walk out of his grave the first time, it might help me find out how he’d ended up in one for a second.
‘What a twat,’ she said. ‘How does someone manage to get killed twice by the same person? Leave it with me, Ryhalt.’ She wrote down the details and glowered the clouds into submission as she headed back out into the faltering rain.
‘First-name terms is it now?’ Tnota said.
‘You don’t call me “Captain” either,’ I said. But it was different, and we both knew it.
‘Is it too early for a drink?’ Tnota asked.
‘Yes,’ I said. It was half past eight. I was trying to push back against our worst habits. Drinking made me drowsy, and there was no time for sleep. ‘Here. What do you make of this?’
I took the remains of the flarelock that the bag-head had dropped and put it on his desk. It resembled a matchlock in shape, with a stock, a barrel and a firing lever, but it was a far more complex weapon. A phos canister fed into the ball chamber, where a small discharge of light would fire off the shot. The canister was largely missing and the stock had been badly damaged in the detonation, but the long, silver barrel was clear enough. It bore a maker’s mark, a stylised letter F imprinted into the steel.
‘These things should be left in the museums,’ Tnota said. ‘Too expensive and dangerous to be worth firing when we got powder arms instead. Phos isn’t cheap. Unstable, too.’ He looked it over, inspected the trigger mechanism and the residue along the barrel. ‘Don’t recognise the maker’s mark. Must be a new workshop,’ he said eventually.
‘Doesn’t make sense. Matchlock’s a better weapon all round. A lot less chance of blowing yourself to pieces.’
‘He was an idiot to use this thing,’ he said. ‘Phos should be left to the Spinners. And look what happens to them, covered in burns of their own making.’
‘I’m sure the man who blew himself apart with this would agree.’ I ran through what I remembered of the conversation I’d had with Ost in my mind. ‘Ost said his employers had met with a Darling. Out at Tiven’s Dale. Why meet there?’
Tnota rubbed at his morning stubble, winter-grey against the richness of his skin.
‘Tiven’s Dale ain’t an easy nav. It’s small, and the compass shifts around it like the hands of a clock. It’d be a good, private place to meet. You got to wonder what they’d be doing ranging that close, though, if they aren’t up to something.’
‘They don’t have the army to push the Range again,’ I said. ‘Nall’s Engine crippled their capability for that.’
Tnota did not look comforted.
‘Yeah. Doesn’t make you feel better though, does it?’
‘Morning courier’s been, Captain-Sir,’ Amaira said brightly as she skipped in and placed a stack of brown-paper envelopes onto my desk. She’d been orphaned during the battle for the walls, like a lot of kids around Valengrad. In the months after the Siege was broken, I’d felt a duty to put at least some of them to work. One by one they’d wandered off, died or proved incapable of honesty. Amaira was the last of them still working for Blackwing.
‘Anything I’m going to like?’
‘You got an invite from Major Nenn. She wants you to go to the theatre with her.’
‘She send anything for you this time?’
‘Not today.’ She sounded despondent. Nenn had taken a liking to the kid, kept bringing her something whenever she came back from the Misery. Amaira’s growing collection of oddities included a long, four-jointed finger that crawled about on its own, a stone that cried if you stroked it and an indestructible grasshopper perpetually frozen mid-jump. Misery shit. I didn’t see there was harm in it as long as the kid didn’t eat any of it.
‘Probably for the best.’ I began to leaf through the letters.
‘Can I come to the theatre with you, Captain-Sir?’ Amaira asked.
‘I don’t have time for theatre,’ I said. I could feel the night’s exertions and lack of sleep coming together as a pounding in my head. I needed more coffee. Too much work to do to rest now.
‘But it’s a play about the Siege,’ Amaira protested. ‘I heard they have this puppet that looks like Shavada, and it’s filled with men on stilts using poles to move it around.’
Tnota gave a mocking, staccato cackle. I put down the papers, gave him a level stare.
‘They got some nerve dragging that shit here. Doubt any of those fucking actors had even heard the sky howl before they got sent here.’
‘Fuckin’ actors!’ Amaira grinned.
‘Watch your language,’ I snapped.
‘Yes, Captain-Sir.’ She hesitated. ‘You all right, Captain-Sir? You don’t look so well. You want me to bring some eggs? Or wine?’
She was right. I didn’t feel right at all and it went deeper than just tiredness. I was used to being tired. I lived on four hours’ sleep most nights, and sometimes none at all.
&
nbsp; I blinked myself alert again as I realised someone was speaking.
‘Your son passed out drunk on the stairs again last night,’ Amaira said primly.
My son. Of course, he wasn’t my son. He was an old man in a child’s body, and his name was Gleck Maldon. He’d been the second greatest Spinner of his generation before Shavada had twisted him into the form of a Darling. Then I’d shot half of his face away, so it was fair to say that I felt somewhat responsible for him. He looked like a child, and people tended not to ask me too many questions, so false parenthood was a good enough reason for him to be hanging around.
‘Did someone take him to bed?’
‘No. He refused to move. Then he was sick on the carpet. I don’t know where he is now.’
I shrugged. He’d do what he’d do and buggered if I could make any real difference. Mollified by telling on him, Amaira strode away with the glad energy that only an uncorrupted child could have. She claimed she was fourteen, which meant she was probably twelve.
‘You don’t look good, boss,’ Tnota said. I was getting tired of hearing that. He looked down toward his own papers, as he always did when he wanted to say something I wouldn’t like. ‘Maybe you should get some sleep.’
He was right, but I wouldn’t. For the same reason I wouldn’t allow phos lights in the office. I knew what awaited me in the darkness. I knew that when I closed my eyes, I would see her in my dreams. Reaching for me, always reaching. Trapped in the light. Asking for my help. And I would reach out for her, and our fingers would slide through one another’s like smoke.
3
‘How much do they hurt?’ Amaira asked. She sat across the table from me, looking at my forearms as I ate a hunk of bread stuffed with pork belly.
‘What?’
‘Tattoos,’ she said. ‘How much do they hurt?’
‘It’s someone sticking a needle in you, over and over,’ I said, ‘it hurts as much as you’d think that would hurt. Don’t you have work to be doing?’
Amaira frowned at that.
‘Hm,’ she said, but made no move to get up.
‘Don’t even think about getting yourself inked,’ I said. ‘You’re too young. If I find someone’s inked you, I’ll beat their ears until they’re on the inside of their skull.’
‘Why?’ she asked. She was an annoying child, although in my experience that’s the only variety. She had the dusky skin and lightless-black hair of the oasis kingdoms, but her blue eyes argued for at least one ancestor of more northerly descent. Valengrad was a place where you’d find every colour, every mix of man that ever walked the earth and her mixed heritage was common as sparrows. Amaira never spoke about her parents. It was a silence that I could respect.
‘Because once you mark yourself up, it’s permanent,’ I said. ‘And I’ve seen a lot of people regret a lot of bad tattoos.’
‘I like that one,’ she said, pointing to the raven on my forearm, his talons curled around a longsword.
‘Trust me. That one hurts the most.’
I ate my way through half a loaf of bread, dunking it in cold gravy. The woman who cooked for me kept loading my plate until I refused more, and it turns out when you don’t sleep, you’re hungry all the time. Sometimes I ate six times a day. The food never takes away the blurriness, or helps your memory, which cracks and splits and lets you down. Things could get foggy.
‘I think I should get one the same. So people know where I work,’ Amaira said, with all the confidence of a kid who has never gone under the needle.
‘No.’
‘But I – ’
‘No,’ I said firmly. She lowered her eyes.
‘Yes, Captain-Sir.’
‘You’ve got work to do. Go and get on with it,’ I said. Amaira gave an overly dramatic sigh and flopped her way out of the room, ensuring that her displeasure at having to earn her keep was duly noted. I finished the last of the meat, stretched out, sank what remained of the coffee and set my minions to work.
I knocked on the door to Valiya’s office and entered. The neatness of her little world was almost a reprimand to the chaos of my own, and I found that I was tucking my shirt in to comply with the sense of order she’d created. Her dress was immaculately pressed, her hair as precisely ordered as her room. She was working through the payroll of our – my – employees but she put the ledger aside when I entered.
‘Levan Ost’s dead. I don’t know where he lived. I don’t know where to find his daughter. Think you can track her down?’
‘If she’s here, she can be found,’ Valiya said. She sipped from a delicate porcelain cup. She loved the mud-flavoured, terrible tea they brought in from the distant west.
‘You mind taking this one yourself?’ I asked. ‘Keep it quiet?’
‘Of course. Have you considered looking for the men who hired him instead?’
Valiya had a way of asking questions that felt like instructions, and she watched me over the rim of her cup. There was an admonishment in that tea. She disapproved of the rampant drinking that infested most of our operation, but then she didn’t have to go out in the Misery or do any of the killing work.
‘Ost said that there were thirty of them, and he figured two for Spinners. He didn’t even have their names. Not much to go on.’
‘You’re looking at it all wrong,’ Valiya said. ‘Soldiers might be hard to find, but navigators aren’t so common. How did they find Ost? Most navigators are on the citadel payroll. Not many go freelance. Maybe Ost wasn’t the first they approached.’
She was right. Should have thought of it myself. Had to wonder maybe whether I might have done if the fog would just lift from behind my eyes. Maybe there was value in drinking mud-flavoured tea after all.
We all have our vices. I preferred to stick to the ones I knew best.
‘Remind me to come to you first, next time I need to think of something,’ I said. ‘Thanks. I’ll be out the city until tomorrow.’
I got up and made to leave.
‘Ryhalt,’ Valiya called after me.
‘Yes?’
‘Take another bath. You still stink of canal,’ she said. She didn’t look up from the ledger as she spoke, but I swear she was trying to keep a smile from her face. I didn’t see her smile often. That was a shame.
I didn’t follow her advice, but I changed out of my uniform into old, rough clothes, the kind I’d spent the worse half of my life wearing and headed out of the city’s southern gate, following the supply road. I passed Station Two-Five and Station Two-Four, both of which looked well kept and manned. This close to Valengrad they were always wary of inspections and the commanders all sought to take a position as close to the city as possible. I overtook a couple of caravans as they creaked slowly down the Range, but there was a small amount of traffic in both directions. The road was in need of maintenance, but then, what road isn’t in winter?
My destination was a half day’s ride. The Range Stations occupied the Misery’s border, but a couple of miles from the desert’s edge a small town – if it could be called such – had grown up to house the diggers and scavengers who dared brave the Misery. Teak’s Alehouse had appeared there at some point, because men who’ve been into the Misery need liquorice and they need beer. It probably shouldn’t have been there, but the alehouse had an undeserved reputation for brewing the best beer in the states. It was rumoured that even Marshal Venzer had visited it on occasion. I tried to picture him, small, old and disguised, licking his lips as he rode in along the single, dusty street. The subterfuge would probably have appealed to the Iron Goat, and that made me smile.
I met travellers heading in the other direction too, up-Range toward Valengrad. Provincial types, farmers, labourers, craftsmen – ordinary folks with high-piled wagons and wide-eyed children. They seemed cheerful despite their proximity to the Misery and wore their yellow hoods proudly: pilgrims of the Bright Order.
I gave them a friendly nod as I passed but didn’t stop for conversation.
Teak’s Town had a ragged, unsavoury air to it. Other shops and stores had grown up around the alehouse – the usual trades you’d expect in a town founded on digging shit out of the Misery and alcohol. Gambling, whores, fighting and pawnbrokers. There was no phos network out here, and the buildings were all wooden except for Teak’s, which dressed in stone as if lording it over its neighbours. I didn’t like Teak’s Town. It attracted the wrong kinds of people, the kind that thought there had to be a way of turning a profit in the Misery. Levan Ost wasn’t the only man to think he could get rich digging up Misery shit and selling it to curiosity collectors in the west. The diggers didn’t usually delve far, the chance of getting turned around was way too high more than a few hours onto the sands. Gangs of them loitered in front of Teak’s. Although it was winter, a wave of heat had washed in from the Misery and it could have been high summer, driving the patrons outside. The scavengers were obvious by the shaking of their hands, the desperate expressions. Only three kinds of men enter the Misery willingly: the stupid, the greedy or the desperate. These men looked to be all three.
‘You looking for goods, mate? I got the rarest stuff you ever seen. You a buyer?’ one of them asked me as I hitched Falcon to a post. I’d dressed down into scuffed old leathers and a soft-brimmed hat that had been with me fifteen years, but the horse gave me away for a richer kind of man than these. The digger had a twitch in his cheek, a nervousness that would never go away. He’d seen something out there that he couldn’t forget. Happened, sometimes.
‘Not today,’ I said.
‘I’ve got something real special,’ he said. He reached into his coat, no doubt to bring out some kind of curio but I gripped him by the arm.
‘Not today,’ I said again.
I pushed through the swing doors into the bar, which was nothing special. Old rushes on the floor, the smell of spilled beer thick in the humidity. Eyes turned to me in the gloom and the woman working behind the bar gave me the once-over, figured me for just another desperate treasure hunter and went back to working her drop spindle. The few afternoon drinkers that had chosen to tolerate the heat in order to be closer to the bar ignored me. They had enough worries of their own.
