by Ed McDonald
I don’t know where she’d got the stool from. My apartment was the only one along this hall and it wasn’t my stool. Made me think she’d been there a while. I couldn’t exactly recognise her on account of the mask and hood over her face, but I recognised those all right. Egglebat? Ezalda? Something like that. Her name wasn’t forthcoming through my fog of booze.
‘Why are you sitting there?’ I asked. A slight puddle had formed beneath her as the water slid from the double thick rain cloak around her shoulders. Dark eyes watched me in the pale tube-light. ‘I don’t have your carriage.’
The woman stood up.
‘You’re drunk,’ she said.
‘And you’re in the way,’ I said, my inability to easily find words indicating that she was entirely right. I staggered across to the door and tried to find my key in my pockets, which proved much harder than I’d anticipated.
‘It’s open already,’ Ezzraberta or Enerva said. ‘Perhaps you forgot to lock up.’ She turned the handle and showed me that this was indeed the case.
‘Don’t you go opening my door,’ I said. Even to me it sounded ridiculous, and I was the drunk one. I walked hard into the door frame as I blundered into the depressing little kingdom of crap that I’d accumulated over the years.
My apartment wasn’t much to look at, or be in, or live in for that matter. Bedroom, kitchen, reception room – they all roll together into one, but at least the privy had its own room. I was aware of the smell as I stepped inside, of old wet clothes and unwashed crockery, the bitter odour of damp on the walls. I didn’t spend much time here, truth be told. A leak in the roof was dripping water onto the stained wooden floor, but I had too much of a drunk on me to care. It was probably like that every night. Fuckin’ leaks ev’rywhere these days.
‘A nice place,’ Eggleton said.
‘Pro’lly not what you’re used to,’ I said. I had forgotten why she was there. Had she told me why she was there? Probably? Hard to tell. Maybe it was for sex. I doubted I’d be any use to her. Maybe she’d brought me some more brandy.
‘I need to talk to you,’ she said curtly, stepping into the apartment and trying not to touch anything.
‘You can talk, just so long as you don’t mind me sleeping,’ I said. I staggered over to the bed, sat down and started trying to get one of my boots off.
‘This is important,’ she said. ‘Vitally important.’
‘Sleep’s important,’ I said. Bloody boots, why do they make them so hard to remove?
‘I can’t abide a drunk,’ the short woman said with a voice that snapped at me like a whip. Why was this boot so difficult to get off? I was sure I’d taken boots off before without so much trouble.
‘Best piss off then,’ I said. Rude of me. Wait, had I invited her in? Beneath that veil she was prettier than all the hells. I was being rude. Tried to think of some words that would set things right, but she was coming towards me. She moved slowly, like I was some kind of skittish animal that might snap at her. Didn’t say a whole lot for me, I guess. My boots had got tangled in my sword belt as I took it off. Why had I only taken it half off at first? I pressed my fingers against my eyes, feeling the full unpleasantness of being too drunk to function. Small, gentle fingers pressed against my forehead.
‘This might sting a bit.’
It probably would have stung a damn sight more if I hadn’t been so out of my skull, and since a moment later I was sober as day, it did hurt a damn sight more. I saw a brilliant white-gold light, as if a six-spun light tube had been illuminated right before my eyes, brilliant even through closed eyelids. A fire seemed to pass through me, a venom of heat that rushed down and then back up, and then I shuddered and fell back onto the bed. Caught my head on the wall as well, and it was the sharp pain of that which made me realise that Ezabeth Tanza had just sobered me up completely.
‘What the fuck did you just do?’ I said. My mouth was coated with the flavour of brandy, but somehow it tasted like vomit.
‘Good. Thinking straight again now?’ Ezabeth took a step back, hands planted on her hips. No more than five feet tall but somehow she filled the room with her presence. Beneath the heavy rain cloak I saw she wore a blue dress. Suddenly dry-brained as a holy sister, I wanted to take her veil off so that I could see her face.
‘You just made me sober?’ I asked. Ezabeth was checking a small steel device strapped to her belt. It looked a lot like a drinking canteen, but I knew it as a phos canister, home to a portable battery coil.
‘It will take me two nights of spinning to replenish all the phos I just wasted getting your brain working.’ She sounded annoyed, but I hadn’t asked her to do it. I had no idea that a Spinner could use light to do that. Always surprising what Spinners can do, though. I estimated the amount of phos she’d just burned on me to be worth a little over two thousand marks. Spun light wasn’t cheap. She had my attention.
It must have been a while since I’d seen this place sober. If I hadn’t known better I’d have figured I felt suddenly ashamed of the shit-sty I lived in. The sink held a series of unwashed dishes and old scraps of food – inedible pie crusts, mouldering heels of bread, a bowl of what was either unwanted soup or something else reproduced as vomit – littered the surfaces. The bed linen probably hadn’t been changed in a year. Maybe more. It all stank.
‘Why are you here?’
‘I need your help. Are you sober enough to talk, now?’
‘I think you’ve seen to that,’ I said. I got up from the bed, crossed to the tap and pumped it a couple of times. Up on the roof the barrel was getting filled by all the rain and I got a good stream of it into a cup. Seemed a strange thing to be drinking water at this time of the night. ‘Why don’t you take off that veil? It can’t be all that comfortable,’ I suggested. I was thinking of her comfort. Nothing to do with my desire to see her face again. Nothing at all.
She hesitated.
‘I might not look as you remember me,’ she said.
‘It’s not like I memorised your face,’ I said, though the reverse was true. Briefly as I’d seen it, I’d have been able to paint her in oils if I’d needed to. If I could paint, which I couldn’t. I wanted to see her again. As she reached up to unclasp it I thought I detected a brief trembling in her fingers. She drew it back, and looked precisely as she had back at Station Twelve. As she had twenty-four years ago. A vision, the sweetness of perfect youth and elegance combined. I had to hold down the sound that fought to rise in my throat, fight the longing that welled in me. I swallowed it. She was close to my age but could have passed for the sixteen-year-old who had sat across the table from me all those years ago. For a moment she seemed concerned, and then she relaxed.
‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘it is nice to be able to remove it once in a while.’ She pushed back her hood as well revealing flowing chestnut waves of hair, shining with vitality. No wonder she’d captured my heart so completely when we were just kids. It was as if the years hadn’t touched her in the slightest, not a single grey hair, not a line. She took a seat at my table after pushing a sweat-stained old shirt onto the floor.
‘Why do you wear it at all?’
She hesitated again.
‘A courtly fashion. Modesty is preferred in high society.’A courtly fashion thirty years out of date, maybe. My grandmother had worn one, but I hadn’t been paying much attention to corsets and codpieces lately.
‘What do you need?’
‘I’m looking for Gleck Maldon. I’m told you knew him.’ She didn’t beat around the bush. That surprised me.
‘I knew him,’ I said.
‘Know, or knew?’
‘Knew,’ I said. ‘He’s dead.’
Ezabeth’s expression, tightly controlled until now, gave the tiniest sag.
‘You know that for certain?’
‘When he first got loose they sent me after him. Offered a lot of money if I coul
d get him back and I was looking anyway. But, he isn’t here and he didn’t travel in any direction that has a road, so that only leaves east. And if he went east then he’s dead. What are you, some kind of lunatic-hunter sent to try to bring him back to the Maud? Send a Spinner to catch a Spinner?’
‘No,’ she said. She paused, frowning. ‘I was assisting him with his research. I need to find him.’
‘Well good luck with that,’ I said. ‘They asked me to find him, and I turned over every brick and rock I could think of. You want my opinion? He probably blasted himself to ash trying to escape the Maud.’ I took long, hardening gulps of water. It tasted metallic, chemical, the taint of the purifiers.
‘He was your friend?’
I sighed, leaned back. My head was starting to stab. The light burn she’d effected on me had taken away the intoxication and left me with the damned hangover.
‘Out here, on the frontier, sometimes people are more than just friends. Gleck was the Battle Spinner assigned to my battalion when I served under the marshal. He was a cocky, snub-nosed git. Older than me, and he didn’t like that I’d been put in charge. But you get a respect for someone once they save your arse a few times, and we did that. I left the army and became Blackwing and sometimes you need a Spinner. Gleck was like living artillery for hire, but he didn’t need the money. Just liked to blow shit up. Best Battle Spinner in Valengrad. Or was, before his mind went. I could see the cracks forming, over the last two years. Saw him less and less.’
‘I’m sorry for your friend,’ Ezabeth said. She was one of those rare people able to express sympathy and genuinely feel it.
‘We’re all sorry for something,’ I said. ‘What were you helping him with?’
Ezabeth knuckled her lips with her three-fingered glove. She looked over at me and her eyes were asking whether I could be trusted. I wanted that trust. Needed it.
‘You don’t have to tell me,’ I said.
‘I understand that you’re a Blackwing captain, for whatever that’s worth,’ she said. ‘You were a soldier before that. Your whole life is dedicated to defending the Range.’
‘It’s how my cards fell,’ I said. ‘I just play the hand.’
She snorted at that.
‘I have information vital to the defence of the Range. Or the lack of it. Or I did, before I lost it. Months of work. The calculations alone took me half a year.’ She began muttering to herself, counting things off on her fingers. I let her ramble a few moments. She no longer seemed aware of where she was or who she was with. It had been this way with Gleck. If she wasn’t cracked already, she wasn’t an ocean away from it.
‘What if I were to tell you that Nall’s Engine no longer functions?’ she asked abruptly.
The cold of the apartment suddenly felt deeper, harder. My whole body went rigid and all I could do was stare at her. She waited, brows drawn seriously. I sat back in my chair.
‘I’d say that you were a heretic,’ I said. ‘And if I heard it on the street I’d send you to the white cells on sedition charges.’
‘Maldon discovered it first. He came to me because he’d read some of my early work, my thesis on light refractors. Mine and my brothers,’ she said. She stood and walked to the dirt-caked window. Looked out at the city lights glowing blue and red through the darkness. ‘Do you know how many battery coils it takes to activate something like Nall’s Engine?’
‘You’d have to ask someone in the Order of Aetherial Engineers,’ I said.
‘I did, and they lied. Gleck had managed to get his hands on the original schematics. It takes seven hundred and twelve thousand fully charged coils. Making those calculations alone took us half a year. I lost them all at Station Twelve.’ It was her turn to scowl. ‘I cannot recreate them alone.’
I shrugged.
‘So what?’
‘For the last six years the Order was only supplied with one hundred and twelve thousand battery coils. A fraction of the power required to activate it.’
I didn’t like where she was going with this. I hadn’t been joking when I’d mentioned cells. This was the kind of prime treason that Doomsayer cults came out with. Valengrad was a fragile colony, beset by a wailing sky and the smell of the tainted sands. It bred pessimism and conspiracy. But my mind was dragged back to the empty looms at Herono’s mill. I recalled the chain across the operating room door at Station Twelve and the dim corridors. I rubbed at dry, stinging eyes. I was too tired for this. I had enough problems just now.
‘And why do you think they’d be doing that?’ I said.
‘Why does anyone do anything?’ Ezabeth said. ‘Profit? Greed? The princes work the mill Talents until their minds shatter like glass. And for what? For light tubes? For ovens? For water purifiers? They justify it by claiming that it’s all for the Engine. That only a tiny fraction of the phos goes into the public services. But they’re producing it, across the states, and it’s not coming here.’
‘You have proof, or is this just speculation?’
She faltered. Squared her shoulders.
‘Before he disappeared, Gleck sent me a message. Incomprehensible, nonsensical in places, babble about disproving a paradox. He’d uncovered something about the Engine but refused to put it in writing. He disappeared the day after he wrote it. I have to find him.’
I was at war with myself.
I remembered this woman as a young girl, carefree, light on her toes. Only an echo of her remained, but the young man that had dreamed of her was still somewhere within me. At the same time a greater shadow bent its wings over me. I was Blackwing, or I was nothing. It was the choice I had made. I’d sent men to the gallows for less treasonous claims than Ezabeth was making.
To be Blackwing didn’t mean wearing a uniform and following someone else’s rules. Blackwing meant following my instinct. My instinct was telling me to listen.
If she was right then it went far beyond abuse of a few thousand Talents. If she was right then Nall’s Engine itself was unarmed, unpowered and useless. It meant that we were defenceless and the Deep Kings had nothing to fear. It meant that Dortmark’s Grand Alliance was well and truly gracked if the enemy ever chose to look in our direction. Crowfoot and the Lady of Waves could not stand against six Deep Kings, not alone.
‘Who else knows about this?’
‘When Range Marshal Venzer arrives back in the city tomorrow, a meeting of the Council of Masters of the Order of Aetherial Engineers will be held. We shall see what they say then.’ She shook her head. ‘It has taken this long just to get them to agree to meet us. A moat of bureaucracy denies me.’
A treacherous voice rose from my gut, demanded that I help her. The more reasoned part of my brain came down on it hard, insisting that she was spouting sedition and indulging her wasn’t going to make it any better. I asked myself how I would have responded had anyone else turned up making the same wild, dangerous claims.
‘You will get yourself hanged,’ I said. ‘I didn’t drag you all the way here so that I could be the one to do it. I owe you for what you did back at Station Twelve but that’s not a licence for heresy.’
Ezabeth dismissed that as only an idealist can. She’d been hiding it well but I sensed then that she was still frantic, simmering with energy and a desire to act.
‘The mill Talents are suffering. Even while we talk, they bleed and wither and die,’ Ezabeth said. She began buttoning her cloak closed with sharp little movements, ready to face the rain again. ‘I must find Maldon. If you learn anything, if you find anything out, please, contact me. You will find me at Willows.’
She left me. I dimmed the light tubes and lay back on my revolting bed. I’d kept calm on the outside but my heart was thumping louder than a broadside beneath my ribs. The chain. Every time I closed my eyes, there was that damned chain across the operating room door. Gleck hadn’t been the same for months, even before they’d declared he was
mad. Even before he’d set fire to that tailor’s shop. What had he learned? What did he know?
Then there was the second problem. How in the name of the spirits of mercy did you go to sleep when you were sober?
10
A thumping at my door told me why I was no longer asleep. I hate the sound of a fist against the door. I figure that one day Death herself is going to come wake me up that way, just to make me go through the torment of waking up before I die. I figure she’d be that kind of arsehole.
A message runner dropped me a note and then scarpered. Range Marshal Venzer was back and wanted to see me. About bloody time. I pulled on my best clothes, which wasn’t to say that they were good but the shirt was mostly white, the leather waistcoat didn’t have too many holes and the breeches almost matched the stockings. Nothing the court would call fashionable. Even a mercenary has to have standards.
The citadel is an immense structure that dominates the city, part of the great curtain wall that encompasses slums, wealth and parade grounds alike and shields us from the edge of the Misery. Venzer’s citadel is the heart of the Range, and beneath it lies the crackling heart of Nall’s Engine. The citadel is a symbol of defiance, of ingenuity, of magic twisted into machinery, and there are far too many steps on the way to Venzer’s offices.
‘You don’t want to go in there.’ Venzer’s bodyguard stopped me at the door. He was a Battle Spinner, heavy light canisters strapped to his belt.
‘Do I look like I’m paying a social call?’
‘You look like shit,’ the guard said. Venzer’s Spinners fell outside the normal chain of command. Being able to draw power from moonlight was a pretty big deal, but to be honest being a well-regarded baker was a bigger deal than being Captain of Nobodies.
‘Can’t argue with that. Who’s in there?’
The Spinner curled his lip.
‘Lady of Waves is who.’
