Blightcross: A Novel (10 page)

She hurried into one of the elevators, and emerged back in the cool darkness of the clock tower. Once she returned to her pile of Helverliss' works, her shoulders dropped and the piles of books and sculptures and paintings loomed like an unclimbable peak.

Bloody distractions. The greatest challenge of her life, this strange painting, and it had to be mired by contingencies and distraction. She could unlock its secrets, she knew she could. Given enough time, anyway...

Rovan was the reason for doing this mindless research. She did it so that they would all have something for the future. Her mind flickered with images of Rovan lying in a pool of blood, barely visible to the rest of the staff. A bleeding ghost.

Perhaps someone in the city would have heard something about this killer. Most of the people involved with the city's underbelly would never cooperate with Sevari. Only an Ehzeri could stand a chance at coaxing information from the underclass. And besides, she had stayed locked in this tower for how long, three months? All without a single trip into town. There were old friends to speak with, pubs crawling with bits of questionable facts, and of course, most of the newspapers never made it into the refinery. Were there others dying in the streets, or did the killer only strike at the refinery?

What if she could find the answer? If she couldn't unlock Noro Helverliss' painting at the moment, she could at least find this killer, since all Sevari would do was cover it up and allow it to continue.

“We should not be staying at that shop, Capra. If the law here has already raided his place, they will come again.”

Capra led him around the market, gazed at the gimcracks and utensils for sale. “I see what you mean, but I almost think a good night's sleep is worth it.” She grinned at him.

“Spoiled brat.”

She rolled her eyes at him. “Well, I'm no good to you tired. Somehow I doubt you were having a good time in that ghetto we slept in.”

As she predicted, he didn't argue. With the coins Helverliss had provided weighing her down, she turned her eyes back to the merchant stalls. She picked up several trinkets, only to set them down after realizing how useless they were.

“Bastardized Ehzeri items,” Dannac finally said. “They look nothing like the real thing.”

But there were hundreds of Ehzeri clogging the dirt streets and shoving the same objects into their black-stained bags, so maybe they were good enough.

Capra looked at her white blouse and saw the same vague smudges. There also was a grittiness between her teeth. By now she had conceded to living with it and stopped spitting to rid her mouth of it.

Towering above the market was a triangular metal structure—a crane, she decided—that began to creak and whine. There was a tiny cabin at one end, and a plume of black smoke issued from a pipe.

“Is there a man inside that?”

Dannac nodded. “I sat next to a man who was an owner under the industry corporation here, whose concern built these machines. There is a man inside who controls it.”

She shivered, visions of being cramped inside a tiny metal barrel on top of a giant tower. Then again, the fact of its height hardly mattered. The worst part was the small space. It might as well have been a closet or one of the raid shelters in which she had spent countless hours of her youth hiding with her parents.

Explosions. Dad with his hand over her mouth. Days inside, darkness, three people sharing a few slabs of unleavened bread. The dirt walls closed in, men shouted outside—

“We need one of these.”

Dannac's voice snapped her back into the crowded street. In his hand he held a length of rope.

She paused for a few seconds while her heart slowed to normal. “I don't even know where we'll end up with this job.” She glanced at the crane. “But as long as it doesn't involve one of those, I think I'll be fine.”

Dannac gave her a puzzled look and dropped the coil into her arms. She glanced away, into the desert beyond the market, where a lone ox stood on the cracked earth. In a moment of utter serendipity, the animal's horns formed a perfect circular frame around the sun. If only she could look at it directly—it would be a rare sight of beauty in this otherwise ugly land.

Dannac could look straight into the sun without harming himself. What would it be like? Would it be the same as if a person with normal vision were able to glimpse it? Or would his strange sight miss something? Or would it see something natural sight could not?

“Powder for the hand-cannon,” he said, and took the lead. “Though I wonder if it is widely available here.”

They passed a group of Ehzeri, huddled and making the low intonations of a collective working. She began to guess what they were doing—healing, cursing, fixing, sharpening. It was nice to see them not conjuring war spirits or turning themselves into bombs.

She handed him the bag of coins. “You do the shopping. We need to find out where this bloody painting is. I want to get out of this place.”

With that, she pushed through the dirty robes and boil-pitted faces that eyed her with suspicion. She checked her cravat to keep her tattoo covered. For her entire adult life, that ink had defined her. It didn't matter what lived beneath the ink; people would see the tattoo and that would be all they saw. Just another olive-skinned warrior-fanatic from Mizkov, just another piece of meat to hold a crossbow because those stupid Valoii could not properly crush or negotiate with their enemies. And a woman, no less.

She left the market area and went through the quieter streets around Orvis Dunes—the old, crumbling buildings that still showed a hint of classical design. If only this were Tamarck, where the corruption ran so deep that she could simply pull aside a government official at random and pry from him where the paintings might be held. The guards in the streets here maintained an impossible posture, a cold expression, and sneered when anyone even appeared to approach them.

Stoicism, duty, virtue—she could very well be back in Mizkov. Given that, pulling aside one of these guards to bribe would only work if she wanted to end up dead or in prison.

A whistle cut through the air, and she stopped mid-stride. There was a man across the street, and he was gazing at her. She tucked her amulet down her undershirt, and touched her arm for the reassuring bulge of her switchblade, and jogged to meet him.

He had bloodshot eyes, and his hands were jammed into his dirty coat. His lower lip was swollen and showed a scabby gash that extended down his face. “You want some?”

Capra stepped back, brought herself out of his reach. “Do I want some what?”

“Korganum. You want it?”

“Depends. What is it?” Judging by the man they had killed earlier, it didn't seem like the kind of thing she'd like.

“I got cheap plugs of cavo root. You want that? No tax on it, no tax. Cheaper than in the store. Or buy the korganum. You look like you would like it. Oh, try it. So good.”

Cavo, sure. But this korganum stuff sounded like it might be that acrid smelling garbage everyone was cooking in the alleys, and that was far from the harmless, aromatic stimulant she enjoyed. “Tax free cavo?”

“Oh yes. Yes.”

Cavo... at once her mouth watered, and she began to fidget. Because of the Baron's old fashioned curmudgeon views, she had not chewed any for days because it was unladylike.

But could a person trust this broken man? Maybe he was selling something else entirely. Then again, tax free... and they did not exactly have their fortune yet...

“You there!” Both startled and glanced down the street. It was one of the men in blue leather. He reached to his side, and Capra wasn't fazed—

A hand-cannon. Not a club or short sword, but a hand-cannon.

“Halt! Stop!”

Another tall, rectangular building, and almost as high as the clock tower. It must have been new. Vasi could hardly believe it. Had she been locked inside for that long? The skyline no longer stretched into the desert, broken only by the refinery's trail of pipes extending far into the outlands. Now, blocky structures chopped the horizon into a strangely ordered field of orange sky and ominous black rectangles.

Had Sevari tacitly discouraged her from leaving? Nobody had explicitly said it was forbidden, but there was always an excuse. This project needs to be completed, that report must be completed and delivered to the administrator, oh, you could go but you might miss the special meeting we had arranged and you are a good team member, so...

But she was out now, in the streets she used to prowl during her days as a mere refinery labourer. She skirted the worker camps at the edge of the Orvis Dunes, and smiled at a restaurant that smelled of the roasting skewered meat she remembered. One would think that by now, they would serve the Ehzeri food at the refinery.

The owner always gave her extra, because he said she reminded him of his niece back in Mizkov. Yes—and he did possess the
vihs-draaf
, because she saw flashes of it when he assumed nobody was watching. Whenever she asked him why he was selling spiced meat byproducts instead of practising his skills, he had shifted the conversation back to which condiments she wanted with her order, or how her little brother was doing.

She rounded the corner to find an upper-class lady speaking with one of the korganum pushers. The rich succumb to the same hell as the workers...

Too much money around, no direction for it. Where does it end up? In that man's pockets.

Then the martial shout of the guardsman came like thunder, and the withered man bolted into the alley. She leaned into a lamppost and watched.

The guardsman raised his weapon, and a boom shook the block and hammered her ears. The rich lady took off as well, but in the other direction—towards her.

A red cravat. Such vanity. And here she was, dashing across the street, her silly red fabric flapping in the wind. Did she really think that the guardsman had any interest in her? Newcomers. Must be just getting started on her addiction.

Vasi scowled at the woman as she ran past. The cravat now hung loose at her shoulders, like a priest. A comical sight—

What's that on her neck?

—if it weren't for the Valoii army tattoo.

Vasi's heart thudded, both from her memories of what those symbols represented and her theories about the refinery killings. Sevari was actually right for once—here was a narcotic-addicted runaway from the Valoii army.

Vasi broke into a run. She narrowed her eyes and took after the woman. When her legs slowed and began to cramp, she clenched her jaw, grasped the amulet around her neck, and called upon the ancestral powers to propel her legs faster and erase her fatigue. Waves of heat flowed through her, each current gathering in the amulet at her chest and catapulting into her muscles.

The woman ran all the way down Orvis Dunes to the Palms. Probably an attempt to lose her non-existent pursuers in the buzz of the market.

Once the woman slowed to a walk, Vasi eased around, through her fellow expatriates, and bumped into the woman she had followed.

“Excuse me!” Vasi said.

The woman was panting and clutching her chest. “Yes?” she asked, in between heavy breaths.

“I could not help but see what happened back there.” What was she doing? If the woman were guilty, she ought to just smite her there and go back to her job. But could she be sure?

“Yes? Well, good for you. I did not know that there was a policy here against... speaking with men on the street.”

Vasi extended her hand and guided the woman away from the busy stall. “You look lost.”

The woman flashed a quick smile and adjusted her cravat. “I just was looking for some information. And some cavo would be nice.”

Vasi shuddered. Valoii were different, yes, but were their women really crass enough to chew cavo? “What sort of information?”

“I am new here, you see. I was told that Leader Sevari possessed an extensive art collection, and was interested in viewing it.” She coughed. “I am a professor. Of... art. An art professor from Prasdim.”

Vasi widened her eyes. “An art professor. Impressive.”

The woman's demeanour suddenly shifted. “Why thank you. Now, we all know how Sevari obtained his works. I am uninterested in his politics, and am here strictly in the interest of high culture.”

Now the Valoii flipped her tight braid from her shoulder, crossed her arms, and sank into the wall behind her. Could she be telling the truth? But the tattoo... then again, she could have escaped, or served her term uneventfully and become an academic elsewhere. Could she forgive the woman, were that the case?

“So, I wonder, is there any chance of viewing them? Do you know of anyone I can talk to to arrange a special viewing? Does he have a publicity coordinator or someone else I can speak to?” The woman tapped her chin for a moment and glared at Vasi. “Or, maybe if you just pointed me in the collection's general direction, I could figure the rest out myself.”

“I do know about the collection...” Maybe this wasn't the killer she had wanted to find.

“Good. You can call me Capra.” She uncrossed her arms, and there was a golden glare at her chest. Once Capra shifted so that the glare ceased, Vasi saw the amulet at her chest. As Capra talked more about herself, Vasi heard none of it and became transfixed by the amulet dangling from the other's neck.

Bronze and gold, sapphires, all in a complex knot meant to signify a certain family bond.

An Ehzeri clan.

An emblem specific and exclusive to a single clan.

An emblem specific and exclusive to Vasi's clan.

Who did you kill to obtain that, Valoii whore
?

Vasi cursed herself for empathizing with the woman. Capra did not deserve the kind of death Vasi had planned on dealing to her. Only Sevari was capable of plunging her into a hell that could approximate what animals like her had done to Vasi's people.

The archon within her stirred. As imperfectly as it had been conjured and grafted to her soul, her family had at least imbued a healthy appetite for vengeance. No matter how she hated it, it was still there, and clearly she could never truly run away from her past.