Wandering Star (The Quintana Trilogy Book 1)

by Michael Wallace

  The search redoubled. It moved to the mines, to the bridge, to the Quintana Way, and descended more aggressively into the lower terraces. Carbón announced that the reward had increased to twenty silver escudos. Torre added twenty escudos of his own at noon, and Mercado upped that by thirty more escudos shortly thereafter.

  The rich bounty brought packs of roving freelancers to the lower terraces who kicked in doors and pulled up floorboards. With a reward that could be summed now in gold quintas, every young man in the city seemed to find motivation to join the search. Soon, reports of brawling, dueling gangs trickled into the upper terraces.

  Lord de Armas offered to bring in troops to help in the search and put down potential unrest. Of course that violated the code, so his men would need to temporarily leave the army and take on the gray and gold of the city watch instead. That itself was problematic, and the other members of the Quinta hastily declined the offer.

  Enterprising young men descended by rope and bucket into the Rift to look for Captain Diamante’s body, and someone excitedly reported that he’d been found. The battered corpse was not Diamante’s, of course, but the boy Mercado had ordered thrown off her balcony at dawn.

  A woman’s body was found, too—or part of it anyway, that not eaten by animals in the Rift—the victim of a murder or accident, and more heartbreaking, a young child who had gone missing in the night. A girl, three years old, who, when hauled up from the Rift to the lower terraces, was stared at by a gathering crowd, and some would-be prophet declared that the child was only sleeping, and could be awakened by the Luminoso.

  A crowd of four hundred, led by the child’s hysterical parents, breached the undermanned lower wall, crossed the Thousand Terrace in a singing, cheering mob, forced their way past the upper wall, and approached the temple, demanding to see the Master of Whispers.

  Said person did not materialize, but the Guardian of Secrets appeared. Salvatore addressed the crowd from the top of the marble stairs leading up to the temple, ringed by watchmen with pikes and muskets. His appearance brought a great cheer from the crowd, now swollen to six hundred. They passed the child’s body up to the marble stairs, chanting for Salvatore to use his ancient magic and awaken her.

  Salvatore refused to let the body through.

  “This child is dead!” he said, shouting to be heard above the crowd. “If you wake her, you will call up the spirit of a lemure. Indeed, I expect lemures have already followed her up from the Rift. They will devour the souls of any who try to animate this dead body. It must be burned at once.”

  The crowd began to shrink back. Many of them were covered with ash already, and the more devout trembled at the pronouncement.

  But others were shouting for a miracle, demanding it and making their own claims about magic and ancient wisdom and evil spirits, until the situation grew confused. A paving stone whipped through the air, aimed directly at Salvatore’s head.

  He ducked in time, and it slammed into the wall of the temple. The watchmen surged down from the steps and drove the crowd back with their muskets wielded as clubs. Other watchmen had been lingering around the edge of the mob, and came in swinging pikes.

  A man had pried up another paving stone and tried to brain a watchman with it. A pike skewered him to a lamppost. One of the man’s companions took a sword gash across the arm when he tried to come to the first man’s aid.

  By the time the mob was driven back to the lower terraces, three dumbre were dead and dozens injured. Four of the more violent ones had been taken prisoner, and would be broken on the wheel and cast into the Rift as a lesson for the others. Gates closed, and towers were manned as the watchmen suddenly took their duties on the walls more seriously than they did the search for their missing captain.

  There was still no sign of Diamante by nightfall, and Mercado, de Armas, and Torre thought it was time to call off the large-scale search and continue more quietly before the excitable dumbre erupted into full-scale rioting. Carbón reluctantly agreed. If Rafael hadn’t turned up by now, something had obviously happened to him, he told Iliana, and further upheaval wouldn’t help matters.

  Meanwhile, cabalists continued their search throughout the night. The missing captain was a good excuse to knock on doors and move quietly through houses in the lower terraces, peering into cupboards and overturning beds while the occupants stood by in fear.

  They didn’t find Rafael Diamante, but the results of these searches were not unsatisfactory to the Luminoso.

  Meanwhile, the tanks collecting excrement at the bottom of the Thousand Wall backed up during the night, and a wave of foul-smelling liquid crept out of the alleyway, ran down a stone staircase, and dripped onto the roof of nearby tenement building like a rain of filth.

  This was not an unusual occurrence, and the ranks of weary night soil collectors who arrived at dawn settled in for a long, unpleasant chore as they waded through the overflow.

  They got the surface filth cleaned up shortly, filling baskets, then wheelbarrows. Then they lowered the skinniest of them into the tanks to fill baskets from below, which were hauled up by others.

  Normally, only the solids collected in the tanks, while the lighter runoff continued in a pipe that dumped over the edge of the cliff and into a patch of especially lush black apple brush. You had to have a strong stomach or a weak sense of smell to harvest there, but the black apples were unusually sweet. But today one of the tanks wasn’t emptying well, and that’s where the excess liquid had been coming from.

  Unable to see in the darkness of the tank, the man who’d been emptying it from below struck the exit pipe with his shovel to clear it of the blockage. That didn’t work, and so he set aside his shovel, grimaced, and reached out to claw through the filth by hand.

  And grabbed a foot.

  He fell back with a cry. Then, realizing what he had surely found, he called up in excitement to his companions. More men dropped into the tank, and working together, they dislodged the body from the pipe between the two holding tanks, where it had become stuck.

  Once the men got the body up to the surface, they cleared enough filth from its face to confirm. They had found the corpse of Rafael Diamante.

  The band of night soil collectors—there were fourteen of them in all—were a poor, miserable bunch. Almost by definition, they were unsuited for other labor. If they’d been more clever or ambitious, they might have found a way out of their terrible calling in life before now.

  Even so, they were wise enough to realize that a prize amounting to five gold quintas was enough to make all of them rich—by dumbre terms, anyway—if they were able to divide it equitably, able to stand together as a band to ensure that nobody tried to rob them of their prize.

  It only took a few moments to come to a consensus, and then they elected a spokesman to approach the wall, announce their discovery, and claim their reward. The rest waited in elation, knowing they would never have to shovel shit again.

  Chapter Twenty

  It was seven bells, and nearly dusk, when Iliana approached her parents’ house, together with a pair of porters bent under heavy baskets, held in place by straps around their foreheads. They grunted and heaved with every step, but there was no slacking; they were too eager to deliver their loads and retreat to the safety of their own homes before dark.

  A gaslighter moved down the street opposite them, turning on the coal gas and igniting the lamps one by one with his lighted pole. It was a good twenty or thirty minutes early, but the city was on edge with the arrival of darkness. The gaslighter would either do the task early or not at all.

  Quintana had never really settled since that first penance day, a week ago. First, the frantic search—kicked off by herself, Iliana thought guiltily—culminating with the riot at the temple. The next day marked the grisly discovery of her brother’s body in the sewage tanks. And now, this. A rumor, starting in the lower terraces among the superstitious rabble and spreading upward until it had the families of the Forty in a panic.

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nbsp; The porters waddled ahead of her when she reached the final staircase hewn into the rock that led to her parents’ home, but they slowed under their heavy loads as they descended, careful with their footing. With Iliana still trailing, they emerged into a short alley that led to her family’s two-story stone manor where it snugged into a hollow against the hillside.

  The Diamante house was well positioned to catch the sun’s rays at their lowest point in the year, while the hollow sheltered it from both summer heat and the biting winds of winter. Her father’s gardens terraced the hillside, with dwarf plum trees on one side, and ornamental displays on the other. At one time, they’d been the most beautiful gardens in the Forty, and certainly the most orderly, with no branch left un-pruned, no weed allowed to sprout unchallenged, but since her father suffered a fit of apoplexy two years earlier, he’d found the work too taxing to maintain. They now had that overgrown, semi-wild look that Lord de Armas’s wife purposefully cultivated in her pond-side gardens, but here it was entirely unintentional.

  The porters quick-stepped to the porch, lowered their burdens with a collective groan of relief, straightened their backs, and turned to Iliana with hands outstretched. She gave them each a black coin, and they hustled back up the stairs.

  Patricia Diamante stood on the porch wringing her hands. Tears streaked the ash on her face, though she wasn’t crying now. Her hair was matted and unwashed, and her sack-like shift hung dirty and torn from one shoulder. Here was one woman who didn’t need to feign sorrow and contrition during the penance weeks. Despair radiated from her like the heat shimmering above the gas lamps to either side of her.

  Iliana put a hand on her sister-in-law’s shoulder for comfort, and soon found herself wrapped in an embrace. Patricia trembled in her arms, and it seemed as though she’d burst into fresh tears. She stopped just short of crying, took a deep, shuddering breath, and pulled away.

  “Where have you been?” Patricia asked. “It’s almost dark.”

  “It’s okay, there’s nothing to worry about. Where are my parents? Inside?”

  “Your father is not well again—his breathing is labored, and the doctor gave him a soporific. Your mother is with the little ones, trying to calm them. They’re quite terrified.”

  “Then Mother must be doing better, if you trust her with your children.”

  “She’s well enough to hector and scold.”

  “Where’s the urn?” Iliana asked.

  Patricia pointed behind her. “There, next to the door.”

  “Let’s bring it out front,” Iliana said. “The more visible, the better.”

  Rafael’s body had been washed of filth and exposed on a slab overlooking the Rift until the bones were picked clean by crows, a process that took several days. The bones had then been wrapped in linen and tucked into a brass urn, which the women now hauled out and placed above the steps leading to the porch.

  Iliana turned her attention to the wicker sacks hauled down by the porters. She opened the first, took out heads of garlic and set them aside, then pulled out a fistful of lead coins. She dumped them clanking into Patricia’s outstretched hands and grabbed a second handful for herself.

  The lead discs were somewhat larger than actual coins, and weren’t stamped with the bridge and tower, but smooth, with holes punched in the middle. The women moved to the two lampposts, which bristled with nails half-driven into the wood. The women threaded lead coins onto the nails, five or six deep, then took a head of garlic and rammed it onto the end of each of them.

  A few nails held prayers, written on paper and skewered in place, blessings for the Elders to speed Rafael’s soul to the next world, and the women removed these before placing the lead coins and garlic. Working quickly, they had the first post covered with lead and garlic and had started on the second before either spoke again.

  “I’m returning to live with my father,” Patricia said suddenly, “and I’m taking my children with me.”

  “Is your father ill?”

  “No, he’s in good health. Still laboring as a hellier in the Thousand. There is work for him there—some of the leading families are building again, and the price of slate is low. I’m going to help him with his figures.”

  “My mother won’t be happy to see you take her grandchildren out of the Forty.”

  “It was your mother who suggested it.”

  Iliana stopped, a head of garlic in each hand. By now, they’d impaled enough heads that the smell of it was all around them, hovering in the stagnant evening air, sharp and pungent. With luck, the wind would stay away, and the whole alley leading up to the house would hold the garlic smell until dawn.

  “She’d never say that,” Iliana protested. “She loves you, loves the children. She never held it against you that you came up from below. It’s her grief talking, it must be.”

  Patricia gave a wry smile. “She always hoped I would reform your brother. I hoped I would, too. But a debt collector came yesterday. He wanted thirty escudos.”

  “The debt of a dead man cannot be collected. That is the code.”

  “It can be taken from his widow’s pension.”

  “How much was the pension?”

  “Thirty-seven.”

  Iliana frowned. “Is that all? A dead mine worker gets twenty. So you were left with seven?”

  “No, I had already spent eleven to settle his other accounts. I’m still in debt, and you can bet the men who loaned Rafael money don’t care about little things like the code.”

  “Surely my parents—”

  “Your parents are part of the reason Rafael was in trouble. He spent what he earned—I won’t deny that he had his tastes in drink and . . . well, women—but he was generous, too. He gave your mother money every month to settle her own debts.”

  Iliana cast a glance toward the manor. Candles glowed in every window, which made sense, given the portents in the air, but they were always burning, weren’t they? Plus many other expenses beyond the family’s income, which had dwindled over the years, thanks to two blows suffered by Iliana’s father. The first blow struck when a new, more brilliant blue dye came into the city from Scoti traders, undermining Father’s operations in the Thousand workshops. The second came when he suffered his apoplexy.

  Father had never fully recovered from the health crisis, physically or mentally. He moved sluggishly, and he seemed caught in a mental fog. Dalia was the oldest of the children still at home, and Mother was scheming for a good marriage. Iliana’s brother Davios was only sixteen, and not yet capable of taking over Father’s business, although that was the ultimate plan. Their other brother was even younger than that.

  “I always thought they had something set aside,” Iliana said.

  “And I thought I was marrying into a rich family,” Patricia said. “Not one on the verge of being sent down.”

  Iliana shoved a head of garlic onto a nail. “It’s not going to come to that.”

  “You could hand over your wage. That would help.”

  “My wage is five brass pennies a week, and will be for the next six months. And then it’s only two and fifteen for the next year.”

  “But . . . but you’re a chancellor of the Quinta.” Patricia sounded stunned.

  “That’s the whole point. It’s code. It ensures that the lord’s chancellor is someone from the wealthier classes, someone who has his or her own means. I’ll be paid well eventually—twenty escudos a week—but that will take a few years.”

  “Your parents won’t last that long. They might not hold up until winter. I told your mother to sell her candlesticks, or maybe that painting of the flying contraption that Lady Mercado is so fond of. Your mother will not part with it. Don’t you think that would bring in some coin?”

  “Mercado likes anything religious,” Iliana said. “She’d pay good money for a painting of the Third Plenty. But there’s no way out once you go down that path. Once it’s discovered she’s selling possessions to maintain the family position, it will all collapse. Nob
ody will buy from Father, and the house will be taken from them. Probably given to the Rojas. They have money now, and status, thanks to Naila’s marriage, and would love to take a second position in the Forty.” Iliana glanced at her sister-in-law as the young widow collected another handful of lead coins. “You couldn’t help?”

  “I am helping,” Patricia said. “I’m taking myself and my children down a terrace so your parents have fewer mouths to feed.”

  “But your father . . . you said he had plenty of work. And he must have some silver at hand. If he could only loan you a little, a year or two until my wage rises.”

  Patricia gave a short, bitter laugh. “There is no sum of money from the Thousand that could prop up a family in the Forty. And Father is only one fall, one injury, from sending the whole family down to the dumbre. I couldn’t ask him to hand over what little coin he has set aside. Iliana, don’t be blind. Families like yours and mine can only descend, they can never rise. And I would never risk my family’s position in the Thousand to save your family’s position in the Forty even if I could.”

  “My family is your family, too.”

  “Not anymore, it’s not.” Patricia sounded weary, defeated. “And now I have to protect my children, and wish you and yours all the best.”

  “There has to be something I can do.”

  “Only what your mother has already suggested on several occasions.”

  “That I marry Lord Carbón?”

  “Have you tried?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s a man. He’s unattached. Seduce him, convince him to love you. Have you even tried?”

  “No,” Iliana admitted. “That seems . . . wrong. Marry Carbón to save my parents from falling out of the Forty?”

  “There are worse reasons to marry. Anyway, I don’t see why you couldn’t love him for real. Make an attempt. It will happen.”

  “I’m not marrying Lord Carbón.”

  “Then borrow money from him. Explain the situation, and let him advance you your future wage. Rafael told me you were paying off an injured coal boy. If Carbón would help someone from the dumbre, surely he would help you.”