City of Ruin lotrs-2

by Mark Charan Newton

Lupus appeared in awe of her ability to carve a path through empty space. It wasn't anything she considered particularly skilful, just the result of dedicated study. All it entailed was manipulating the relic technology that the elder races had created all those aeons ago. This was not essentially her doing, nor was anything else relic-based; and that was something she hated about other cultists, their assumed arrogance at possessing this knowledge. All they did was monopolize the relics, and had been doing so for thousands of years.

  'So this is where you get your tan,' Lupus observed. 'I wondered what kept you looking so nice and brown.'

  She laughed, then threw her arms around him again, safe in the knowledge that now they could not be discovered. They knelt together in the humid grass, and kissed passionately, with the deep sunlight warming her back and all her troubles out of sight. This was pure escapism, a fantasy – hiding from her sense of guilt.

  Avoiding the cold realities waiting in Villiren, she didn't want to think about a future or even a past. She desired only to taste his skin, as she undressed him, and he undressed her. Clothes soon heaped beside them, he noticed a silver tribal necklace she still wore – the one he'd placed around her neck all those years ago. He kissed it first, then her collarbone, then her chest. He moved across her bare skin with familiarity, like a hunting wolf. She let him push her back and ease her legs apart, and in the alien heat of this hidden world they escaped into the rediscovery of each other's bodies.

  *

  Later she showed him more of this world of hers, aware of somague symbolism in the gesture. It wasn't so easy, however, to do this, to permit him back into her life.

  Did she still love Malum? That wasn't a simple question. She had affection for him, but she didn't like being with him any more, and certainly she didn't care for his absolute rages where he could almost turn into a monster. When did he ask her about progress in her work any more? The last time was probably their conversation about golems, but when she admitted it wasn't her area of expertise, he had lost all interest. The time she was now spending with Lupus replaced months, even years, of Malum's empty substitute for conversation. How had she and Malum drifted apart? When was the moment that he ceased to provide for any of her emotional needs?

  Beami and Lupus talked of the gap that had developed in their understanding of each other, the missing years of shared acquaintances, the onslaught of the Freeze – the slow ice age that had now taken a grip of the Boreal Archipelago and how it was changing their lives and the lives of others all around them. More than anything else, she felt the impending ice had forced a sense of urgency for things to happen. Perhaps this was in the back of her mind when she reopened herself to Lupus.

  She possessed some undetermined fear that Malum would hurt her if he discovered what was going on, but while she and Lupus were here, in this otherworld, they were quite safe and she knew they would return to the Boreal Archipelago at the precise instant they had left it.

  There was an aching perfection to the landscape, now that they were a part of it. Light began to add new textures to the surroundings, refracting off each substance – grass, water, tree – as if the landscape itself possessed some ethereal quality. Newer creatures passed by, their body shapes seeming unlikely – four-legged oddities that shifted along under a diamond-shaped spine, and pink fist-sized insects with choppy patterns of flight.

  Now and then a garuda would skim past just above the ground, its downdraught rippling through the sedges. She had tried communicating with them before, through voice and sign, but they never responded, perhaps not recognizing the Jamur shapes she made, or perhaps merely ignoring her as, impassive, they soared ever upward.

  There were some ruins of a civilization around them which she did not recognize. Structures that were dense and elaborate, mixing unusual shapes and materials. Monuments that were crippled by time; vines and lichen had long ago begun reclaiming them, wiping out any cultural residue carved into the stone. For some time the two of them hesitated on coloured tiles that blended effortlessly with grass, as they peered through a window arch towards the vista beyond.

  The deep sense of long-past time was humbling.

  *

  Beami told her lover of the names she had assigned to certain placehere, simple names so that she had something easy with which tamiliarize herself over the year or so she had been visiting the hiddeorld. Lupus wanted to name something there after himself, teaseer until she gave way by re-titling some ugly fish in his honour.

  Silences in their conversation were not in any way awkward – much was revealed in them by the tender gesture of a hand, a searching look. They sat in the shade of a salix tree, its graceful weeping form astir in the wind. Still she could not get over the unaccustomed warmth.

  The discussion of their intervening lives continued until they met up with the present. As soon as he mentioned the coming war, and the perilous situation that the city faced, the mood blackened. He told her of his duty as a Night Guard soldier, the honour, the pride and commitment entailed, even described the ritual of enhancement he had received as a new recruit. When he told her of the cultist-doctored fluids involved he could provide little explanation of the process, only the surge of pain running through his body, the rapid recovery times from injuries thereafter. He lay on her shoulder when he told her of the recent attacks on Tineag'l, describing as best he could the bizarre alien race that they had fought against.

  'Aren't you afraid that you might die?' she asked, concerned.

  He gave a wry smile that could have meant anything. 'I'm a Night Guard. I'm an enhanced soldier. I'm one of the best fighters amongst them. Yes, I might die – we all might – but I therefore stand a better chance of survival than most of our soldiers. And if I'm killed it will be while protecting others – that's what I trained for, that's who I am. I'm used to the idea of my own death.'

  To her silence he said, 'I don't expect you to understand, but you've got to accept it.'

  She was increasingly afraid of losing him to the army once again. They talked thus for hours, might have gone on for days as if that didn't matter. Eventually, both felt they should return. Guilt had ultimately caught up with them.

  *

  After producing the Heimr, she closed her eyes to sense the subtle drifts in current beneath the surface of its metal. When they both reappeared together back in her study the coldness of the room hit them, causing both to gasp as if they'd risen from underwater.

  'The exact same moment as when we left,' she assured him, as he looked around incredulously. 'You should maybe go now. I don't want him to find out.'

  'Of course,' he said, then kissed her softly on the lips, passion having given way to a tenderness she knew she would soon miss.

  She showed him to the door, provided him with some spurious documents to make his visit look semi-official, so that there wouldn't be any reason for Malum's men to worry. From an upstairs window she watched Lupus depart without looking back, striding with purpose through the snow, heading back into the city.

  After he had gone, there was a concentrated stillness throughout the house.

  NINE

  A new city required finding a new place in which to drink. Jeryd had always enjoyed his favourite bistros in Villjamur, where he could sit with his notebook and sip some flavoured tea, whilst poring over cases and watching the world go by. As he crossed the irens, he noticed there was still a surprising amount of food in this city – he had assumed that the ice age would mean a lack of fresh meat. Certainly, at home, agricultural industry had all but collapsed, and only those wealthy enough to employ cultist assistance could supply meat. Yet, all around this city, there were chefs who could consistently rustle up a quality meal, using all sorts of rich fusions of old tribal origins as well as contemporary recipes and subtle, Villjamur-style concoctions.

  On his quest to establish for himself a brand-new routine, he was struck by just how long he had spent in the Inquisition, nearly one hundred and eighty years, not a day of it ever
the same. He wondered if they did things differently in this community.

  The Ancient Quarter offered the most interesting-looking bistros, some were baroque structures lurking in the shadows of the Wings. He entered one, a warm if not overpowering place with red and white chequered floors and some wealthy-looking customers. Incense burners stood on the counter, behind which two young blonde girls hovered idly, one with arms folded, the other slowly wiping a plate. It was a large room, with little natural light, and the shiny wooden tables reflected the flickering candles that rested on top. About ten customers in all were sitting in there, the average number you saw in any bistro anywhere in the world, at this time of the morning. They all stared hard at Jeryd, mainly men, and in those not wearing masks, their eyes were cold and distant. He had heard rumours of such hostility towards his kind from another rumel back in the Inquisition.

  'Morning.' Jeryd slung his outer garments on a chair by a corner table, then took off his hat.

  They were certainly not a particularly friendly bunch, this lot, but he didn't know whether this was normal behaviour in a city so far north.

  'Morning.' Eventually, a grey-bearded man with tiny eyes spoke to him. 'Rumel, I see?'

  'You see right,' Jeryd muttered in response, then to one of the serving girls, 'Black tea and a pastry, please.'

  'We don't get many rumels visiting this place,' grey beard remarked coldly.

  'That right?' Jeryd lowered himself onto the chair with a groan. Still not getting any younger.

  Grey beard stood up, and his companion, a blue-masked woman wrapped in a matching cloak, looked away, probably embarrassed. 'Not sure you understand me, friend.'

  Jeryd stared back at him, conscious now of his coarse dark skin, of his tail, of his glossy black eyes. He hadn't dealt with any of this kind of shit for a long, long time. 'You'll have to forgive me.' He undid the top buttons on his jerkin to reveal his Inquisition medallion, featuring its iconic angular image of a crucible. 'Investigator Rumex Jeryd, pleased to meet you. New to the city, you see, so I'm not yet sure which of these places are full of bastards – or not. I'm still finding my way around.'

  'Oh,' grey beard replied, backtracking desperately. 'Well… I can see…'

  'All you can see is a rumel, right? I understand. And if you don't like that, you can just wait half an hour until I've finished one of these delicious pastries, or I can haul your arse into a cell overnight, where you might or might not get beaten unconscious by one of the inmates. Now, then – is that enough to impress your fancy woman, friend?'

  The waitress brought over Jeryd's order, just then, with a cheeky smile on her face that said she was enjoying the show. He winked at her.

  Grey beard sat back down, to commence a terse and angry argument with his female companion. Sure rumels constituted a minority across the Archipelago, so Jeryd had had to deal with racism before, a while ago, but Villjamur was enlightened now, so he just didn't expect to encounter it in any major city elsewhere. At home they'd closed down the last humans-only tavern before he was even born. Perhaps things really were different, this far north.

  As he chomped into his pastry – a wonderfully sweet creation with honey bleeding from the middle – and sipped his tea, he found the mood in the room becoming much more amicable.

  *

  Arriving at his desk by eight each morning, he found his groove quickly, getting some of the good tea available, then chatting to the few enthusiastic Inquisition staff, and getting stuck into things. They began to respect him – and he knew it. It wasn't tough to work out why, because Jeryd seemed the only one to actually care about solving crimes – a fact that somewhat surprised himself.

  He asked for some unsolved crimes, and files soon piled up on his desk.

  He scanned the papers for anything that might help with the Haust case. There were the usual cases you got in any big city: theft, rape, assault, murder. Yet more people had been reported as missing recently, though no one had found the time to pursue the fact. There'd also been an interesting increase in the number of porno golems being distributed – cultists were manufacturing these doll-women via gangs as an alternative for the desperate males of Villiren, so that prostitutes would not die of pneumonia from having to stand outside in the chilling temperatures. Jeryd was sickened, though not surprised, when someone hinted that this trade might have been sanctioned by the portreeve, and the Inquisition were advised to ignore the seedy industry.

  The previous evening's murders: there had been four reports of dead bodies found with puncture wounds in the neck, the corpses shrivelled, but they had never gone missing for long – and were usually found round the back of whichever tavern they'd been drinking in the night before – and no one was too surprised at them ending up dead. Anyway, such cases tended to be allocated to a special department within the Inquisition, and passed out of Jeryd's hands after that.

  An hour later, after skimming over all the cases, Jeryd found himself seated at a meeting table with three of his superiors, all grey-skinned rumel much older than himself, and who seemed drunk even before midday.

  He briefed them on the new case, to ensure that he could pursue it legitimately, and found they put up no objections. No one else in the Inquisition seemed all that bothered about what he was doing, which both annoyed and gratified him. No distractions, no one pushing administrative duties his way, no one tying him up in red tape.

  *

  Jeryd began the process of interviewing all those who had reported missing persons. He went about things in a thoroughly organized manner, touring the streets with Nanzi, the girl proving as diligent as ever in her assistance.

  Jeryd liked her. She brought some much-needed stability and an enquiring mind to their partnership. She also brought him tea regularly. She kept fuel for the fire well stocked. She organized his notes, fetched in a map – he didn't even have to ask for it. On top of helping him she saw to the needs of the women and children who thronged the lobby of the Inquisition headquarters, reporting sickening deeds of one kind or another. Good aides were hard to come by.

  As they plodded through the streets they soon found that those who had vanished from the streets of Villiren were a varied range of individuals. Jeryd had numerous bereaved families to interview, but he was especially keen on locating any similarities to the disappearance of the missing Night Guard soldier. By concentrating on that, the probabilities of discovering him or what had happened to him were greater.

  Some of the houses in the city showed evidence of extreme poverty; hastily built constructions with no flair for design. People were crowded into cuboid rooms that adjoined exactly similar rooms – in buildings run up because they were claimed to be the future in modernity and clean living. This was progress, Lutto had declared, as he pocketed their rent money, but somewhere over the course of the years the soul of the entire street had died.

  Thus he persevered: family after family, door after door, face after face.

  Jeryd knew, without understanding how, that some of the missing were never going to be found again. He saw the homes that they'd vanished from, and there was something about these decrepit places that suggested they were probably better off now, wherever they were.

  Jeryd was surveying lives that no one in authority had ever bothered to check on. Lives that had capsized years ago: women who looked constantly on the verge of tears, men beyond desperation, young girls holding younger girls he hoped weren't their own, the elderly afflicted with diseases he didn't know how to describe. Forgotten people rotting inside their homes, conscious that they were not wanted in the city proper. Jeryd knew he could have been the first investigator to ask these families about the person who had vanished from their existence. Mothers who had lost their eldest children, on whom they depended. Husbands who had lost their wives of thirty years. Families of children with no parents.

  You will find them, won't you? You will help us?

  Many said they couldn't find a job, yet couldn't survive out in the ice. Some
claimed the portreeve had crippled or bribed the unions, and encouraged such an influx of cheap tribal labour that it meant they were paid next to nothing. Some described how he had issued regular pamphlets declaring that benefits had to be limited to pay for the cost of mounting a defence against the threat of attack from the north – which was merely a variation on earlier years when he said the money was needed to fund preparations against terror attacks from the tribes of Varltung. Thus Lutto created an air of danger to keep these people in their place.

  If these families knew that a war was imminent, they didn't show it.

  How can you destroy people who are already broken?

  But he and Nanzi found out one crucially interesting fact: those who had disappeared in larger numbers were the citizens with better-quality jobs – traders and tavern owners and smiths. Jeryd was frustrated with how the Inquisition could have overlooked such reports.

  They strode from the houses back to the Inquisition headquarters in the ambience of the falling snow.

  'It's not a pretty picture, is it?' Jeryd's mood had been so contemplative, he had momentarily forgotten Nanzi was next to him. He supposed today's task had not been easy on her.

  'I had no idea how bad things were in this city,' she confessed. 'It doesn't look like we can do much for them though, does it?'

  'The good investigator', Jeryd replied, 'always has choices before him, even when it seems there are none. He instinctively knows what's right. He knows he has the option to do something.'

  'Sounds as if you're the only good investigator left,' Nanzi remarked.

  'I feel like I'm holding the fort all by myself.'

  *

  Another long day till his legs ached and sentences were drying up in his throat. After Nanzi departed for the night, he sat and contemplated the day's findings in his chamber, a cup of tea in one hand, a biscuit in the other.

  Patterns materialized.

  Give or take half an hour's walk, the majority of disappearances had taken place between the Ancient Quarter and the seafront, or concentrated in Deeping, around the Citadel and the barracks.