by Anthony Ryan
“Wherever it is, it’s gotta be better than here,” Clay said, casting a final glance up at the shaft before starting towards Kriz at a dead run. Loriabeth followed without demur, Clay looking over his shoulder to see Sigoral following suit, his caution perhaps overcome by a fresh tremor that shook the island.
Kriz maintained a swift and punishing pace along the bridge that Clay soon found hard to match. His leg might have been healed but it seemed to possess some residual weakness from the drake’s bite. He stumbled several times, coming close to pitching over the side of the bridge. Fortunately Loriabeth was there to steady him and he managed to keep going.
Kriz eventually slowed to a steady run, allowing them to catch up, then coming to a complete halt when they had covered perhaps three hundred paces. They all turned to regard the island, chests heaving. The tremors seemed to have stopped but the damage done to the structure was plainly irreversible. The upper half gave way completely, subsiding down to shatter the base, raising a thick cloud of dust that spread across the lake surface in a grey-brown fog. When it cleared Clay could see that the huge shaft had lost its base. It still hung there, impossibly huge as it seemed to float without any anchor to the earth. He turned to Kriz, finding her staring at the ruins with tears streaming down her cheeks. A sob rose in her breast and she turned away, lowering herself to her haunches and hugging herself tight. The despair had returned in full and she seemed resolved to surrender to it, at least for now.
He watched her sob for a time, motioning the others to silence when they couldn’t contain their questions. Kriz exhausted herself after several long minutes and he reached out a hand to hers, touching it briefly. She opened her eyes to regard him with a gaze of utter desolation, as grieving a soul as he had ever seen.
He jerked his head at the shaft dangling above the vanished island. “Guess that was your home for an awful long time, right?”
She blinked wet eyes at him and rose from her huddle, breathing deeply before starting along the bridge with a determined stride.
“Where are we going?” Clay called after her. She paused, turning back to speak a single word in her own tongue. He knew from Lizanne that a shared trance did not bring immediate understanding of a previously unknown language. Such proficiency required repeated trances, but even a brief mental connection could engender a small amount of comprehension. So when she spoke the word he found he knew its literal translation, though its meaning remained as baffling as everything else in this hidden world.
“Father,” she said before turning and striding off into the mist.
CHAPTER 29
Lizanne
“Spare me the performance, please,” Julesin said, wood scraping as he dragged something across the room. “I know you’re awake.”
Lizanne pondered the wisdom of ignoring him, keeping her head slumped forward and torso limp within the mesh of ropes securing her to the chair. In fact she had woken only a few moments before, having managed a brief, blurred glance at her surroundings before hearing his footfalls on the steps. Feigning senselessness was a crude but occasionally effective technique in resisting interrogation. Any kind of response counted as engagement, the cardinal sin of the captured agent. However, the urgency of her predicament left little option but to abandon standard doctrine.
She raised her head, opening her eyes to see him perched on a chair placed at a sensible remove, giving him ample time to react should she contrive to get loose. Taking no chances, she decided, the thought bringing an uncomfortable realisation. He’s done this before.
“I’ll just keep calling you Krista, if you don’t mind,” Julesin said. “Not a lot of point in extracting your real name at this juncture. I wish I could say the same for the other information you hold.”
Lizanne said nothing, eyes flicking around the room. It appeared to be an attic, possibly in one of the houses on Prop Lane, though something made her doubt it. There was no sound from downstairs and she felt sure the Coal King would have wanted to be present for her interrogation. Her cross-bow, knife and penknife were set out neatly on a table beside Julesin’s chair. The sole window had been boarded up but she could see a dim glimmer of light through the cracks. She had no way of knowing how long she had been unconscious, but given the general lack of noise bleeding in from outside, she knew the Ore Day Promenade hadn’t yet started. However, the most noteworthy feature of the room lay below the window, a huddled, slumped form she had initially taken for a bundle of rags but now saw, and smelled, it to be a corpse. The face was obscured by the rags that covered the body but she found herself annoyed by the worry that it might well be Makario.
“Three Cadre agents sent into this mire in such a short space of time,” Julesin mused. “I’m afraid your colleagues were somewhat amateurish compared to you, but what they lacked in ability they made up for in dedication. One forced me to kill him and the other swallowed poison before we could have a chat.” He reached into the pocket of his waistcoat and extracted a small white object. “This is fine work,” he said, holding her false tooth between finger and thumb. “I was somewhat surprised to find it empty. Or perhaps”—he leaned forward, eyes intent on her face—“it held something other than poison? Something you already used?”
Lizanne met his gaze, finding herself reminded of another man of professional demeanour she had met aboard ship not so long ago. But then the circumstances had been reversed. “If I am what you think I am,” she said, “don’t you think the wisest course would be to let me go? If you have any interest in a long life, that is.”
His brows rose in surprise as he leaned back in his chair. “Speaking so soon,” he murmured. “I expected to have to at least pluck out an eye before we got to this stage. Why abandon protocol so quickly, I wonder?”
Lizanne cast a pointed glance around the attic. “I take it the Coal King is otherwise occupied? Or, does he perhaps have no idea that I’m here?”
“Angry men are rarely truly dangerous,” Julesin replied with a shrug. “So easy to manipulate. I expect he’s probably off beating one of the younger Scuttlers into a bloody pulp for a minor offence. He always likes that. And no, he has no notion that I have you, nor will he up until the moment I twist his ugly head from his shoulders.”
Lizanne sighed, sagging a little in her ropes and using the gesture to conceal the act of testing the knots. In addition to the ropes binding her torso, her hands were bound together at the base of the chair-back and her ankles had been secured to the legs. Sadly, each knot felt too well tied to break without the assistance of product.
“You want information,” she said. “Very well. Here is the most important intelligence I can impart to you at this juncture. You don’t matter. Whatever you’re doing here doesn’t matter. Let me go and you might live. That’s the only promise I’ll make.”
He kept his face neutral, but she saw the faint twitch in his eye that told of an unexpected reaction. “People in your predicament usually have much more grandiose, not to say lucrative, promises to make.”
“Really?” She inclined her head, smiling a little. “I recently heard about a treasure to be found at the bottom of a lake in the Arradsian Interior. I’ll draw you a map if you like.”
The bland neutrality on his face darkened considerably. “It’s really not in your interests to mock me,” he said, rising and moving to the corpse lying below the window. “Take this fellow for instance.” Julesin dragged the corpse across the floor towards her, heaving it upright and pulling away the rags to reveal the face. Lizanne managed to conceal a wince at the sight of it, her alarm only slightly alleviated by the realisation that this wasn’t Makario. The face was missing both eyes, two dark empty sockets staring at her above a gaping and mostly toothless mouth. The lank grey hair and deep lines in the face told of a man in his fifties, but she had no notion who the unfortunate might be until her gaze slipped to his hands. The left was whole but the right was missing two fingers, and
it was an old injury.
“The bomb-maker, I take it,” she said.
“Very good,” Julesin conceded. “I never knew his true name either, so I called him Mr. Stubby on account of his fingers. I don’t think he liked it. A fellow of many mechanical gifts, particularly when applied to the design of cross-bows and bombs. Sadly, such largesse of talent made him over-estimate his importance and attempt a renegotiation of the terms of his employment, little realising that his contract had already been fulfilled. I consider it poor practice to leave an aggrieved bomb-maker alive.”
“Finding him in here couldn’t have been easy,” Lizanne commented.
“Ah.” Julesin grinned as he shoved Mr. Stubby’s corpse aside. “The point where you play for time by attempting to elicit information. Even though we both know how I found him.” He stamped a foot on the floor, calling out, “Time for you to say hello!”
There was a short pause then the sound of ascending footsteps, Lizanne’s experienced ears discerning the overlapping thuds which indicated two climbers. A creak of rusty hinges drew Lizanne’s gaze to a trap-door in the centre of the room, finding little surprise in the face that appeared as it rose. Makario studiously avoided looking at her as he ascended into the attic, keeping his gaze lowered as he shuffled to one side. The second figure to emerge was truly unexpected. A tall man in a long ragged cape, features hidden by the hood. No sack this time, Lizanne noted as the creeper slammed the trap-door shut and paused to regard her before turning to Julesin.
“We haven’t gotten to it yet,” Julesin said. “She’s Blood-blessed, right enough, but I’d wager she’s not Cadre. Meaning she’s either employed by private interests within the empire or . . . something far worse. A true appreciation of her circumstances might loosen her tongue.”
The hooded creeper stood in silence for a long moment then went to the table, a surprisingly strong and far from skeletal hand emerging from the cape to rest on her penknife. “I was sure you’d use this on yourself before you even made it through the grate,” Constable Darkanis said, drawing back his hood to reveal familiar, broad features. “Must be losing my touch,” he added with a humourless smile.
Lizanne replied with an equally bland smile of her own. “This, I gather, is your retirement plan?”
Darkanis shrugged. “Twenty years labour in the arsehole of the empire deserves more reward than a pittance of a pension.” He paused for a moment, his hand moving from the penknife to take hold of her other knife, the one she had taken from Dralky. Darkanis stepped closer, all semblance of the affable professional she had met at the gate vanished now. She could see a deep well of fear in his eyes, the kind of fear that tended to override restraint or pretension to morality.
“Something worse, you said.” Darkanis kept his eyes on Lizanne as he addressed Julesin. “What kind of something?”
“Ironship something,” the Blood-blessed replied, Lizanne hearing the uneasy sigh he tried to hide. “One of their Exceptional Initiatives agents. The kind of trouble you’re not paying me enough to deal with.”
“Seems to me you dealt with it well enough,” Darkanis observed.
Julesin moved into Lizanne’s eye-line, looking down at her with an air of grim contemplation. “Exceptional Initiatives doesn’t forget, or forgive. You can run for ten years, twenty even, and you’ll still one day find yourself staring into the eyes of a Blood-blessed they sent to kill you, and they won’t be quick about it.”
“All true,” Lizanne assured Darkanis.
“So you are Ironship,” the constable said, leaning down so his face was level with hers. “Why did they send you here? Was it for this?” His hand disappeared into the folds of his cape and came out with a small fragment of rock. “Do they know about this?” He held the rock up before her eyes, turning it so the light caught something in its surface, a thin vein of white metal.
Not white, Lizanne realised. Silver.
“So, that’s it,” she said. “You found silver in the mines. Or rather, one of your informants found it and you failed to report it to your superiors. That alone would earn you the firing squad, but you didn’t stop there, did you? Hiring Julesin here to run operations within the walls whilst you creep back and forth every night with your sack full of ore. Very clever. It does make me wonder why you’d go to the bother of trying to foment discord amongst the gangs. Getting Makario to find you a bomb-maker and so on. He’s been working for you since he arrived, I assume? Another scared new-comer you steered towards the Miner’s Repose.”
“And very useful he’s been.” Darkanis glanced over his shoulder at Makario, still standing with his head lowered. “I wouldn’t feel too bad,” Darkanis told him. “This bitch would happily rip your balls off if her masters told her there was a profit in it.” He turned back to Lizanne, looming closer. “It’s time for a new dawn in Scorazin. Time to sweep away the gangs, institute some real order, profitable order. To do that, this place has to burn for a time.”
“Leaving Julesin at the top of the heap when the fires die down.” Lizanne inclined her head in reluctant admiration. “And free to mine the silver without interference from the gangs or the constables.”
“Yes.” Darkanis stepped closer still, Lizanne wrinkling her nose at the stench arising from his filthy cape. “They know, don’t they?” he said. “Ironship. They know about the seams. That’s why you’re here.”
“My employer neither knows nor cares about your petty corruption. We have larger concerns at the moment.”
“You’re lying!” He clamped a meaty hand on her throat and began to squeeze. Lizanne clenched her jaw to keep her neck muscles tensed against the pressure, but he was a very strong man. “This city sits atop the richest seams of silver anywhere in the world.” Spittle flew from Darkanis’s lips as he snarled into her face. “And you claim they don’t care. I haven’t spilled so much blood and risked everything to see it stolen from me now!”
Lizanne dragged air in through her nostrils as the constable lifted her up, chair and all, squeezing harder. He raised his knife in his other hand, poised and ready to slash at her eyes.
“What do they know!”
Grey mist began to creep into the edge of Lizanne’s vision as Darkanis shook her, a rushing sound in her ears telling of an imminent loss of consciousness.
“You’re wasting your time,” came Julesin’s drawl, faint and barely audible through the haze. “They’re trained to resist such crude methods.”
Another final squeeze and Darkanis let her go, the chair thudding to the boards and coming close to tipping over. Lizanne allowed herself a few convulsive gasps before reasserting control, forcing her hammering heart into a steady rhythm with a breathing sequence learned in her student days.
“See?” Julesin said to Darkanis. “You could take that knife to her nethers and she still wouldn’t talk. I’m afraid a more invasive approach will be necessary. If you’re determined to extract what she knows.”
“You can do that?” the constable asked. “Get into her head?”
“Sadly no.” Lizanne blinked water from her streaming eyes, seeing the Blood-blessed once again resuming his seat. “A trance would be possible, certainly. But her inner defences will be far too formidable, even for me.” He offered Lizanne an apologetic smile as he reached into his jacket pocket and extracted a vial. “I’m afraid we’ve reached that point in the interrogation, Krista,” he said, raising the vial to his lips. “Ever closed a blood vessel with Black?” He leaned forward to focus his gaze on her forehead. “There’s a particular vein in the frontal lobe that, if pinched with the correct amount of pressure, produces a level of pain said to be truly unbearable. So unbearable in fact, the subject will do anything to ensure they never experience it again.”
For a second Lizanne felt panic threaten to overwhelm her as the Black closed in, fixing her head in place. Julesin’s control was impressive, allowing not the slightest move
ment in her skull, though her eyes were free to flick about as she tried to master her fear. Her gaze slid over Julesin’s face, set in a frown of concentration, Constable Darkanis’s bulky, filthy caped form and the spot where Makario had been standing only seconds before. Except now he was missing, and so, she noticed as her gaze flicked to the table, was her penknife.
Makario moved with a lithe economy of movement that made Lizanne conclude that he had also been tutored in dance as well as music. He leapt high, descending on Julesin and bringing the penknife’s small blade down in a blur, sinking it deep into the join between the Blood-blessed’s neck and shoulder. The grip of Julesin’s Black vanished, leaving Lizanne sagging in her bonds, gasping for air as she tried to clear the throb from her head. The sounds of a struggle forced her gaze up, finding Darkanis slashing at Makario with her other knife. The musician danced back, evading the blade, then whirled to deliver a cut to the constable’s hand, the resulting spasm of pain forcing him to drop the weapon. The bigger man roared and charged, head lowered and moving with bull-like ferocity. Makario tried to dance clear once more but the constable was too fast, his shoulder taking the slender musician in the chest and bearing him to the floor.
“I told you,” Darkanis grated, grabbing Makario’s hair in a meaty fist and slamming his head onto the floorboards. “Don’t ever try to fuck me over!” He repeated the process, punctuating every word with another jarring slam. “Don’t! Ever! Try! To! Fuck! Me! Over!”
Lizanne tore her gaze away, fixing it on Julesin who lay less than two feet away, gazing up at her with rapidly dimming eyes as blood pumped in rhythmic gouts from his wound. Makario might not have been the greatest of fighters, but clearly knew how to find the right vein.
Another slam as Darkanis vented his rage on a near-senseless Makario. Lizanne heaved herself back then forward, the chair legs squeaking on the boards as she built momentum. Three more heaves and it tottered so far that she feared it would send her onto her back. It hung there for a very long second then swung forward once more, Lizanne hurling her weight against the ropes to force it over. She toppled onto Julesin’s body, squirming to manoeuvre her head closer to his wound. The severed vein was still pumping but with less energy now, blood coming in small, thick squirts, blood still rich in the Black he had drunk.
