Wandering Star (The Quintana Trilogy Book 1)

by Michael Wallace

  “Put that back on or you’ll catch a chill.”

  “I’m hot—I came running. It’s my brother. He’s gone!”

  “Shh,” Carbón said. He took her hand and led her toward a corner of the balcony where there were fewer people. “Stay calm, speak as if nothing unusual is going on. This place is crawling with cabalists.”

  To her credit, she settled quickly. She put her cloak back on and leaned against the balcony as if engaged in casual conversation. Only the flush and the quick breath gave her away.

  “My brother was waiting for me on the lower wall. He said he’d stay until I got back, but he was gone when I returned.”

  “How long were you in the lower terraces?”

  “Not long. A couple of hours. Three, at most.”

  “He must have grown impatient. I’m sure he went off to drink and dance somewhere.”

  “I got turned around and lost—I didn’t think it would take that long. Anyway, Rafael said he was going to wait, no matter what.”

  “It is the Festival of Fools.”

  “You don’t know my brother—if he said he’d wait, he meant it. I searched up and down the wall, stopped at the house in the Forty, checked on the upper wall—nobody has seen him. He’s missing.”

  Her voice was rising again, so he took her shoulders and turned her back out toward the gardens below the balcony.

  “We’re not so high up here that a listener below can’t hear you, so keep your voice down.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s my brother . . .”

  “We’ll find him, don’t worry. He’s captain of the upper watch—nobody would harm him. I’ll bet he ducked into some party on the Thousand, put back too much hash or black apple, and forgot the time. Otherwise, he’d have been there.”

  “You think so?” Iliana still sounded doubtful. “I feel responsible. I left him alone, even after I thought someone might be watching us.”

  “You feel responsible for him? I thought he was supposed to be watching you. Never mind. Wherever he went, we’ll find him. I’ll put people on it. He’ll turn up by morning, don’t worry.”

  “All right.” Iliana still sounded doubtful.

  “Let’s talk about what happened down below. What did the boy’s mother say when you offered her the money? Tell me everything.”

  She explained how she’d found Santi’s mother in the Red House and made the offer. The woman had taken the smaller sum of money, but declined the larger one offered on condition that she abandon the city.

  “I thought she might,” Carbón said.

  “You did? Why? That’s a lot of money.”

  “For all we know, that woman has never set foot above the lower terraces, and she’s certainly never set foot outside Quintana. You asked her to get on a rail car and cross the Rift on the Great Span. I’ve seen mine workers throw themselves from the car the first time they approached the bridge rather than go over the edge. I’m more than a little terrified of it myself. Then, what? Go down the Quintana Way to the canals, to the river, all the way to the coast? Live among strange people speaking a strange dialect?”

  “It’s not that strange. There are people from the Quintana living there already. She’d be put to work among her own people, doesn’t she get that?”

  “None of that matters. Fear of the unknown is a powerful thing.”

  Something was working behind Iliana’s eyes. The wheels seemed to be turning.

  “Why did you send me if you knew she’d decline?”

  “I didn’t know for sure, I guessed. And you can figure out now why I sent you down.”

  “The Luminoso?”

  “Go on.”

  “You wanted them to watch me? To know what I was up to?”

  “I needed them to leave Mercado’s estate so I could have a private conversation with Torre. I was pretty sure that Salvatore would still be around, and a few other cabalists—but I also knew they’d see you leaving and send someone to follow. Probably multiple someones.”

  “I wish you’d told me that.”

  “This isn’t a game, Iliana. You’re a chancellor of the Quinta.”

  “And therefore deserving of respect. You should have told me.”

  “What do you think I’m doing here? This is respect. This is what it looks like. It’s you taking on the difficult tasks and executing them. It’s me testing you with responsibility so that, when the time comes, I can trust you with more. So that I can trust you, not just with my life, but with the life of the city, of our entire civilization.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “What do you think we’re digging out of the ground up there? It’s not rubies or silver or gold. It’s far more than that. Coal is a life force. It’s what elevated the ancients to the level of the Elders.”

  “Those people had flying machines,” Iliana said. “And furnaces that could burn pieces of the heavens that fell from the sky. With the magic they commanded, they didn’t need coal.”

  “Maybe they had those things, maybe they didn’t. I don’t know. But here’s something I do know.” Carbón leaned over the balcony. It was dark, no sky rockets going off at the moment. “What do you think is down there?”

  “The Great Span.”

  “Below that.”

  “The Rift, you mean? Nothing good is down there.”

  “Have you ever been to the bottom of the Rift?”

  “Of course not,” she said, and her tone made it clear that she’d never even considered such a thing. “You’d be killed in five minutes.”

  “I have. Lord Carbón—my father, I mean—took me down once.”

  “My God. Really? Weren’t you afraid?”

  “Terrified, and with good reason. The forest is full of evil spirits and strange beasts. Strangling vines and crumbling holes in the ground. One of my father’s servants stepped wrong and fell down a shaft. We heard him screaming down there, but couldn’t get him up.”

  “How does one even get into the Rift?” Iliana asked. “And why?”

  “You go to the bottom of the lower terraces and work your way down the cliff face. People used to live lower, and you can find the old steps carved in the stone. Here and there, rusting metal ladders, held in place by vegetation. Third Plenty stuff, I think. Someone has run ropes, too. People from the dumbre must go down to forage or hunt.”

  “You’d have to be desperate.”

  Carbón thought about some of the things he’d seen at the bottom, how his heart felt ready to burst out of his chest with fear. He’d been sixteen years old at the time.

  “Yes, you would. Or compelled, like I was.”

  “But why did he make you go?”

  “To show me the mines.”

  Iliana fell silent. He let her sit for a long moment to puzzle it out, waiting for her to come to the conclusion herself. But she was still too hidebound in her thinking, apparently, because the look of confusion only spread.

  “There were mines down there,” he told her. “Mines from the First Plenty, then later the Second Plenty and the Third.”

  “But all the coal is up on the plateau.”

  “All the coal we have left is up on the plateau. It used to be found right in front of you, between Quintana—or whatever was here at the time—and the far side of the Great Span.”

  “So they had to go down there to find it? And then haul it back up somehow? Why do that when it’s easier to simply mine the plateau?”

  “You still don’t understand. The Rift itself isn’t natural. It was the plateau at one time. Until humans dug and dug and dug. Eight hundred feet to the bottom, forty miles long—every bit of it hacked out of the earth by the ancients when they were digging for coal. When you go down, some parts of the rock face are too sheer for plants, and you can see the mark of ancient tools in the stone. When you get close to the bottom, you can see how the ground is gouged if you know what you’re looking for.

  “I don’t know why the ancients didn’t mine the plateau,” he continued. “Maybe they did
n’t know about it—even now, there are still new seams of coal to discover—but most likely there wasn’t enough to bother with.”

  “That seems hard to believe.”

  “There’s nothing about the ancients that we can easily understand,” Carbón said. “Anyway, my father took me down so I’d understand.”

  “How it all fell apart? How the plenties collapsed?”

  “No, nobody knows that. But to show me how Quintana is built on coal, and always has been. Nothing else matters, none of the other great families of the Quinta. You could sweep them all away, destroy the Forty, enslave the Thousand, and burn the lower terraces until the dumbre went extinct, and as long as the coal remained, Quintana would remain, too.

  “Maybe it would be abandoned for a stretch, home to a few families living among the ruins. That’s what my father thought happened after the Third Plenty collapsed. But so long as there is coal, people will return.”

  “Then as soon as the coal is gone, the city is gone, too,” Iliana said.

  “Now you understand.” He smiled. “And I didn’t even need to drag you to the bottom of the Rift to show you. Maybe you’re smarter than I was.” He hesitated. “Now do you understand why I wanted to send you down to the terraces? Why I needed you to draw their attention?”

  “I think so. Maybe. Is Lord Torre going to help us?”

  “Yes.” A glance around to make sure they were still alone on the balcony. “We’re going to extract the object from the mines. Probably move it to another shaft—a depleted shaft—and let Salvatore discover it there.”

  “And what do we have to do for Torre in return? Surely that old schemer isn’t going to help us out of the generosity of his heart.”

  Carbón thought about what Torre had hinted at in the baths. That he had worries of his own, a favor to ask. It must be significant to have brought it up under those circumstances.

  Time enough to worry Iliana about that later. For now, they had their own concerns.

  He took her arm. “Come on, there are still a few sober people here, including some guardsmen, and I saw Rafael’s wife, too. We’ll find your brother by dawn, mark my words.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  If not for Iliana’s missing brother, Carbón would have declared an end to the evening and gone home to sleep. Catch a few hours before dawn. The city would be bleary enough, hungover enough in the morning, without his contributing to the general misery.

  Anyway, he had hoped to put tomorrow morning to good use. Rouse Lord Torre and bring men up to the mines while the cabalists were still in bed. Find his top engineer—a clever young man named Eli Lozada—and put him to work getting the object out without touching it.

  But Rafael’s disappearance threw those plans into doubt. He guessed that when he found Patricia Diamante—the captain’s wife—she would roll her eyes and point to a low gathering in the Thousand where her husband was sure to be found, smoking hash in the company of some tart.

  But Patricia, even though drunk and wide-eyed with black apple, had greeted news of her husband’s disappearance with surprise. Rafael had mentioned something to her about guarding Iliana while she went to a party in the Thousand, and said he would return as soon as his sister had finished.

  Carbón and Iliana shared just enough of the truth to get her alarmed. Patricia hurried home to the Forty to make sure he wasn’t there and to track down her servants and put them on the lookout. One of Iliana’s cousins, a watchman himself, set off to locate some of the missing captain’s men to widen the search. They’d go all the way to the lower terraces, if needed.

  Still trying to hide what Iliana had been up to when Rafael Diamante disappeared, Carbón concocted a story for Lady Mercado about how his chancellor had been expecting her brother no later than midnight, and they had reason to believe that something might have happened to him in either the Thousand or down among the dumbre. Would she assist the search by lending some of her servants? Lady Mercado seemed bored of her own party by this late hour—nobody was ringing the temple gong, but it had to be three bells, already—and happily assisted.

  Carbón asked Lord Torre for help, too, as well as Torre’s son, who had come with several servants and family members. Daniel Torre was disinterested, but his wife entered during the conversation, and Naila was as solicitous as her husband was dismissive.

  She gave Iliana a sympathetic squeeze on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, we’ll find him. I’m sure it’s nothing.”

  They soon had more than forty men and women combing the upper terraces, and more than twenty from Rafael’s company who set off from the lower wall to search among the dumbre. The young man would turn up soon enough, Carbón assumed.

  But later, when the fireworks stopped and the guests began to stagger out of Mercado’s party, emptying the gardens and clearing the balconies, he began to worry that something had truly happened to the young captain. Iliana came and went, came and went, asking everyone she saw if there was any news. Iliana’s mother returned, as did Patricia Diamante, and the three women—sister, mother, and wife—huddled on Mercado’s uppermost balcony, looking down through gas-lit terraces to the winding cobblestone streets and stone staircases that would hopefully bring the missing man back to them.

  Time to get to the bottom of this. Carbón found Salvatore in the gardens, on the edge of one of the steep terraces, staring into his far-glass. Gray light began to suffuse the horizon to the east, on the far side of the Rift, but there were still stars visible in the sky.

  “Too much light,” Salvatore said without looking up. “If I’m right, a wandering star will be crossing forty-seven degrees above the horizon in about twenty minutes, but it will be too bright by then to spot it.”

  “It’s me, Lord Carbón.”

  “Yes, of course.” The cabalist still didn’t look up. “You don’t think I’d mention the stars to any old person, do you?”

  “It’s about the missing captain.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “Then you know something?”

  “Everyone has been talking about it.” Salvatore pulled away, but only to rub at his eye and bend once more to the eyepiece. “Two wanderers, maybe a third already. I’d have never guessed.”

  “Will you look at me while I’m talking?”

  At last Salvatore straightened, a hand massaging the small of his back, and fixed Carbón with his lizard-like gaze. “What do you want, Carbón?”

  “Some respect, for a start. I’m a lord of the Quinta, and I demand your attention while I’m speaking to you.”

  “It’s not dawn yet, which makes it still the Festival of Fools. You’re a lord of nothing at the moment.”

  “Dammit, Salvatore, do you know something about Rafael Diamante or not?”

  “I know that everyone is rushing around in a panic. I know that you sent your chancellor off on a mysterious errand, and she went to a lot of trouble to not be seen as she left. I know that her brother—that clumsy oaf—thought he would guard her back while she descended into the lower terraces.

  “He was the weak point in your attempted secrecy,” Salvatore continued. “I don’t know who brought him along, if that was your doing, or the fault of that girl who follows you around in such a disgusting, fawning way, but if you want to know how I discovered what you were up to, there’s your answer.”

  Carbón felt the blood rush to his face. “If I find out that you’re behind this, that you’ve done something to him . . .”

  “Then, what?” Salvatore asked. “Dawn will be here soon, and then you’ll be a lord of the Quinta again, won’t you? And I’ll be the Guardian of Secrets, won’t I? You may order about the Forty as if they were your personal staff, treat the Thousand like they were dumbre, but you have nothing over me. I, on the other hand, can declare you guilty of blasphemy. So go ahead, accuse me of wrongdoing. Let’s see what comes of it.”

  Carbón turned away, fuming, knowing he needed to get hold of his emotions. But his anger only grew as Salvatore det
ached his device from the tripod. The man sighed loudly, as if it had been Carbón’s presence that had ruined the stargazing, rather than the arrival of dawn.

  Carbón felt himself on the verge of saying something unwise. A threat or a declaration or some other foolish thing. Whatever first popped into his mind.

  He was saved by the arrival of Lady Mercado. She had changed out of a long dress and her confining corset into a shapeless gown that looked like it had been sewn together from potato sacks. No jewelry—she’d even removed the steel ring of office from her right middle finger. The flush of rouge was gone from her cheeks and the blue eye shadow cleaned off. Instead, she wore the makeup of the penance weeks: three spots of coal soot on her forehead and a general smear of ash down the cheeks that gave her a corpse-like complexion.

  “Ah, my lady,” Salvatore said. “Ever devout, getting an early start to your penance. You could take a lesson from her, Lord Carbón.”

  “I have no need for flattery,” Mercado said. Her earlier bonhomie was gone, and her voice seemed to have taken on the rattle of a lifelong hash smoker. “Anyway, dawn arrives earlier in the Quinta than below, and nowhere earlier than here, on my estate.”

  To punctuate her words, a line cut a golden streak on the rock face above them, moving visibly downward as the sun climbed above the eastern horizon. The sky overhead was brightening, the last stars gone, but the city below remained shrouded in shadow, and light had not yet penetrated the forests at the bottom of the Rift. A few late bats were still circling around below, but they’d been replaced in the sky up top by birds, many of which began chattering in the trees of Lady Mercado’s gardens. A pair of crows squawked loudly as they wheeled above the Rift.

  “Your chancellor is quite upset,” Mercado said to Carbón. “I’m surprised by the reaction. Last night a lot of people were in places they wouldn’t otherwise be found. Why should Captain Diamante be any different?”

  Salvatore gave a solemn nod. “Hysterical girl. That’s what she is.”