Blood Orbit_A Gattis File Novel

by K. R. Richardson

  The crowds thickened as the late afternoon wore on toward the promise of the Ice Parade—a strange celebration of the passing of winter that centered on building lavish sculptures from water fast-frozen onto a skeleton of volatile fuse creating complex, but brittle shells that were filled with treats and gifts. The sculptures—called “floes”—were carried with much pomp through the neighborhood, business, or shop that had sponsored or built each one and then set on an appropriate street corner atop augmented-thermoelectric chilling platforms to counteract the tropical heat. The artistic icebergs were then destroyed by Suvil—the Great Breath—personified by Suvilen: a crew of costumed dancers and acrobats who would tumble and caper through the area with live torches, setting fire to the fuses in each ice sculpture so that they shattered into sudden clouds of ice crystals and a rain of gifts. According to Dillal, it was all as made-up as a fairytale, but that lent it a sort of lunatic charm.

  Matheson had never experienced the event in person—he wasn’t sure of the attraction of being pelted with ice and cheap gewgaws and the distraction factor would be high—but if he weren’t on the job it might have been fun. The camaraderie of celebration, infectious excitement . . . he missed that. He hadn’t made many connections on Gattis yet and under the new-guy-on-duty workload his personal pursuits had dwindled down to the solitary habits of his pentathlon days. The downside to the parade was that the whole town would be in the streets, one way or another, and there’d be no chance of finding one specific Dreihle once the floes and their attendants appeared. But he had a window before that and he had to take it.

  He checked his information again. Gil Dohan had been a widower who seemed to have changed his attractive female companions as often as his clothes. The scanty Dreihleen media streams had hinted that he plucked his conquests from his employee pool, but no one had ever raised a fuss. But who would they complain to? The trade societies? Doesn’t seem likely.

  As he searched the eastern half of the Dreihleat for Dohan’s friends or family, crowds carrying drink bags and unlit fireworks were already forming on the sidewalks or creating knots around the floe platforms erected to hold the sculptures sponsored by the flashiest casinos and shops on the distant Quay. Matheson noticed that the large commercial platforms attracted few Dreihleen—only those with a sharp and hungry look to them. The pickpockets and street rats would attract SOs, who might be as unpleasant as Jora and Halfennig. The last thing Matheson needed was another run in that could give Pritchet or Belcourso an excuse to pull him out and interfere in the investigation.

  Hyper-vigilance slowed his progress and wore on his nerves, so it took longer than he liked to reach Dohan’s home: a tall, narrow stone house on Estrada Seda, as far from the musty, noisy environs of the fish market as anyone could get in the Dreihleat. He stood across the road and frowned at it. Detached, single-family houses were rare in the city and more so in the ghetto, and this one was elegantly tall and narrow—a far cry from the low, square, utilitarian construction in most of the Dreihleat. But none of that was what made his mind reject it.

  It doesn’t have a door. At the top of the steps from the street there was only a blank, black wall. Matheson went up and put his hand on it. Stiff paper, thick and rough-textured. An empty stone box as tall as his hip sat on the top of the stairs, but there was no sign of a door or opening that it might conceal. He retreated to the road and walked to the end of the block farthest from the major intersection—a floe platform had been erected there and he preferred to stay out of the crowd’s surge.

  Turning the quieter corner, he found a service alley that crossed behind the Dohan house, among others. He went up it warily, early evening filling the narrow space with purple shadow that rustled with lizards. A black-on-gray razor cat perched high atop a wall, watching intently. Matheson gave it and its lethally sharp talons a wide berth. One small cat wouldn’t kill a man his size, but pissing it off would still be painful.

  Further down the alley he found several service porches, all with doors locked tight. He knocked on the door at the rear of the graceful blue stone house, but no one came to open it, though he saw a movement in one of the upper windows. He tried using his ID override on the electronic security pad but it was an archaic one that barely acknowledged his existence. When the door clicked, something inside slammed it back into the locked position and he heard a metallic thunk, as if a steel bar had been dropped into heavy braces. He called out, “GISA Ofiçe! I need to speak to you about Gil Dohan,” but no one responded.

  A next-door neighbor stuck her head out of a window, but pulled back inside as soon as Matheson turned her way. He jogged to her door and knocked. He identified himself and called out, “I’d like to talk to you.”

  The door creaked open and a young man peered out. Dreihle, early twenties, athletic, and blank-faced. He said nothing, just stared at Matheson from the corner of his eye.

  “I’m trying to solve the murder of your neighbor and the others who were killed at the Paz da Sorte two nights ago. Do you know anything about Gil Dohan’s movements that night? Or how he was connected to Venn Robesh?”

  The man turned his head, but his expression didn’t change. He looked past Matheson and quietly shut the door.

  “Merry hell,” Matheson muttered, and pounded on the door again, fruitlessly.

  He tried each door down the alley and met with doors that never opened, and more that closed again without any questions answered. He returned to Estrada Seda and tried each door facing the road. Only a single Dreihle, a woman named Eshvelen Zehan, replied to his queries.

  He guessed her age at sixty. Her skin and hair were all the same honey blond color and it lent her a delicate, faded look. “For Gil’s marry we’re all hoped,” she said out of the blue. Her brown eyes were wide and wet under pinched brows as she stared at a bit of air just to the left of Matheson’s elbow. “His mother, his sisters are alone now.”

  “Are they in the house?”

  “In the house,” she agreed.

  “Do you know if he went around with a young woman named Venn Robesh? That night, or at all?”

  Eshvelen closed her eyes, washing a flood of withheld tears down her cheeks to drench the hint of a sad smile that twisted her mouth. He wasn’t sure if she nodded or if she merely bowed her head as she backed away and shut her door. She was the last piece of luck he had.

  He exhausted the neighbors for two streets in each direction, but got no more out of the few who were home or willing to speak to him. Most of the doors remained closed as the sun fell.

  Street lamps came on, their lights turned down to a low golden glow that shed no real illumination, the better to highlight the torches of the Suvilen when they arrived. Matheson shook his head—he was at the end of his chances for the day and he hadn’t learned one more useful thing. Damn it!

  He was tired—he’d been on his feet for fourteen hours—but leaving still felt like retreat. He’d have to cross most of the ghetto to get to the west bridge gate over the canal, which was the closest to his flat. Nothing for it. Matheson started walking, staying away from the thick crowds along the twisted route of the parade as much as possible, but still walking in the edges of the darkness, past alley mouths and doorways rank with drug smoke, sex, and piss.

  He moved away from the major thoroughfares when he could, shaking free of the already-liquor-lit holiday crowds and the rising noise punctuated with incidental firecrackers and barking dogs. He worked his way around the parade route, crossing only where he could dive into another road or alley on the far side without being swept up in the entourage of one floe or another as the sculptures began their illogical and noisy progresses from refrigerated warehouses and restaurant freezers to their short-lived glory at their assigned street corners. It was beautifully insane.

  He could have given up and fallen into the celebration, yet he found himself avoiding it. Instead, he saw more black-papered houses and boxes of stone. He frowned and made notes for tomorrow, mumbling to the mobile as h
e walked. He turned down Rua dos Peixes, wondering if Minje might still be behind the counter at the coffee house—if Aya might be there. They both knew more than they’d said.

  There was a crash of noise, cymbals, shouts, a scurry of startled cats, rats, and lizards, and a wheedling sort of piping as a band of costumed acrobats burst into the street from one of the alleys. Disoriented, Matheson spun to see where they’d come from and felt a moment of inappropriate panic as he was grabbed by his elbows.

  He was whirled wildly by a laughing pair of the revelers who dragged him back toward the road he’d just escaped. By their slender builds he knew they were Dreihleen beneath their face paint and bright clothing, but they had no reticence about touching him or looking at him and they gave full-throated, open-mouthed laughs more raucous and loud than he’d ever heard in the Dreihleat.

  For the slimmest of moments, their motley and makeup faded in his mind to grim faces streaked with blood. He stared, frozen in his unreasonable shock. The nearest Suvilen seemed to find him particularly amusing, spinning him like a top before they dashed away, passing him like a baton to other dancers and tumblers who poured out of nearby doorways and alleys. Torches flared as the noisy mob dragged him toward the nearest floe.

  The floe exploded in a burst of colored sparks that lit the ice shards as they tumbled into the air and then rained back down amid the clatter of deci-real tokens and cheap baubles wrapped in twists of colored foil. His horror broke, and Matheson stumbled backward into someone, nearly falling as the crowd surged away to snatch up the fallen treasures. He was put back onto his feet with a shove and an ungentle poke in the ribs.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Day 2: Night

  “Fool,” a Dreihleen voice spoke near his ear. “You’re not know to turn your back? You’re admire the floe before th’explosion.”

  The crowd was squealing and scrambling after the loot of the floe as the Suvilen moved on and another floe exploded with a crackling roar farther away.

  “No,” Matheson replied, jarred back to himself as the bizarre procession moved on.

  “Is no wonder you’re look as you do, then.”

  He shook his head clear and squinted as his eyes adjusted to the weird, moving light cast by the torches of the Suvilen between the dimmed street lamps. “I got caught in the Great Breath—who knew it had a childish sense of humor?” His voice trembled more than he liked to admit and he peered at the figure in front of him.

  It was a Dreihle woman and her loose hair swirled around her as she looked sideways at him, her face mostly in shadow. She cocked her head “Do not all zephyrs? Only children, after all.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand.” I know you . . .

  She gave him a more direct gaze, though she was still slightly turned away. She was within ten centimeters of his own height, which put her eyes surprisingly close to his in the sudden flow and crush of a crowd moving past them to follow the Suvilen. Those eyes seemed to spark and glitter. Must be the reflection of fireworks and torchlight.

  But it was her—Aya. He noticed a faint scent of spice and coffee, sparking inappropriate thoughts, and his breath hitched in his chest.

  The passing crowd shoved them together for a moment, then she stepped back as the crowd loosened around them. The awkward contact left a fleeting impression on Matheson’s skin through the sweat-moistened layers of his shirt and singlet that made the hairs on his body stand up as if magnetically attracted to her. Don’t. Don’t think it.

  She looked aside as if checking her own thoughts. Then she repeated, “Children.” Her voice was so low he had to lean toward her to hear the word, threaded with bitterness. “Suvilen crews,” she added. “But for z’torchmen, all children. We’re almost cancel th’parade, but how we’re do that to them now? Say, ‘this last thing you’re love, we’re take that away too’? ‘Yes, your uncle’s shot in the head, and your neighbor, your friend’s mother, so you’re go cry in the dark and we’re take away th’only thing’s give you hope. Spring’s canceled. No Great Breath, no hope, no rebirth. Sorry!’”

  Matheson blinked at her, trying to get words out straight. “You’re one of the few people I’ve met who’s angry about what happened.”

  She scoffed. “Then you’re not look very hard.” She glared at him, and then reared back, looking puzzled. “Why you’re bleed? They’re not so rough with you.”

  He wiped his eyebrow with the back of one finger. “No. Suvil’s not so rough—more of a rollick.” He glanced at his hand—even in the low light, he could see a dark smear of blood on his knuckle.

  “Rollick?” She chuckled. “Is sound like sollets’re doing. Now, come, or someone’s think I’m one who’s make you bleed.” She grabbed his forearm and tugged him along.

  He followed in her wake, bemused, as she dragged him across the dim road and down an alley to a door that she unlocked with a hurried code combination and a press of her palm against a scanner plate on the door itself. Sophisticated system for a back door. The portal made a clanking sound and cracked open, then she pushed it wide and pulled him through behind her.

  Inside, low lights along the floor and ceiling molding shone just bright enough to bring the largest objects out of the gloom. Aya locked the door behind them and led him deeper into the room, saying something he couldn’t understand.

  The illumination rose to a moderate glow, but no brighter. The revealed room was a small industrial space like a kitchen with two long work tables and a wrap-around counter holding a row of three identical machines beside a large device that looked like a washing machine with a bad attitude. The room smelled as she did, of coffee and spice and some exotic flower. Everything was scrubbed clean, put away, closed up, and wiped down for the night. Even the floor that was one smooth, continuous pour of angelstone was without a speck or stain. Speckless perfection was the nature of angelstone, but in this light and shut suddenly from the revelry outside, it seemed uncanny, like a computer model that verged on the surreal.

  “What is it about women in kitchens today?” he muttered, turning to look at her in the light. He stopped and blinked, shaking his head. “This is . . . the coffee house?”

  “Where else I’m take you? Public Health?” she said, drawing him to an old stone sink set down in the rolled steel counter. “You’re prefer, I’m send you.”

  “Umm.” He stumbled over his tongue as well as his feet. “I’m . . . ah, no. It’s dark in there.”

  She lifted an eyebrow and looked askance at him.

  Matheson shook his head and regretted it. “Never mind. I’m tired.”

  She took a cloth from a cabinet and moistened it at the faucet. Even the water had a scent—fresher and colder than what came out of the spigot in his dingy little flat. She put her hand on his chest and pushed him toward the counter. “Sit.”

  “On what?”

  “Stool behind you. What? You’re think I’m knock you down?”

  “I think you very well could,” he answered and sat, aware of the strength of her shove and the hard competence of her hands. She was poised and slender as a whip, with few curves that weren’t muscle. Light shone through her thin dress when she moved around the room, and he tried not to think too much about her shape and feel. And she could probably break my neck if she took a mind to.

  He shook the bizarre thought away. It might be true, but it was as unlikely as it was gruesome. He concentrated on her hair, instead. There were strands of copper in the blackness of it, and sparks of metallic red. Dye? Bits of foil flung by an exploding floe?

  She put one hand on his shoulder and applied a little force. “You’re lean back over the sink.” “Z’zink.” Sounds like Christa’s knife striking into the butcher block.

  “You’re not going to kill me, are you?” he blurted. “Because it’s been that kind of day.”

  She clicked her tongue and pushed him back. “Been enough killing here,” she said, and dabbed at his eyebrow with the wet towel. “That’s how you’re get this?”
<
br />   He liked listening to the pleasant lilt and buzz of her voice. Since he seemed to be capable of nothing but idiocy at the moment, he didn’t reply to her question.

  She nudged his hip with her knee and rubbed the swollen skin around his cut eyebrow enough to regain his attention. “Heh?”

  “I had a meeting with an immovable object.”

  “Kind that’s talk or kind that’s not? I’m not believe you’re clumsy—were perfect this morning.”

  Matheson gave a rueful chuckle. “Perfect is my least-favorite adjective, especially when applied to me.”

  “I’m not you.” She finished dabbing the blood off his brow and frowned at it for a moment before she went to another cabinet. She returned to his side with a small container. “You’re tilt your head more back. You’re not want this in your eye.”

  “What is it?” he asked, trying to let his head fall back without the rest of him tumbling off the stool.

  “Alum—stops bleeding.”

  “People bleed a lot in here?” He leaned too far and slipped off the stool, landing in a self-conscious, laughing heap on the floor. “You’re going to retract that not-clumsy comment. I’m a disaster.”

  Aya laughed, covering her mouth with her free hand. She helped him up and moved the stool so he could lean back against the counter without another collapse. “Is not disaster . . . a small pity, like a fallen cake.”

  “A cake? That is a pity. I’d like to be more interesting than cake.”

  “You’re lay your head back.” She didn’t laugh, her smile settling into a more serious expression as she pushed aside the damp hair clinging to the abraded skin of his brow. Her hand was cool and he resisted giving in to the shiver that started on his scalp and scurried down his neck and spine.