Blightcross: A Novel (29 page)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The walls of Sevari's office loomed from all sides, now giving him the impression of a miserable cave. No longer did he gush over his traditional decor, the comforting artifacts on his shelves, or the expensive stonework of his monument.

Even his perfect chair was tainted. His workingman's throne, the perfect firmness of the seat, the perfect angle of the back... how he used to sit in it for hours and research the old texts or work into the early morning designing his new policies...

And now he stood beside his window, while the boy spun around on the chair as though it were a carnival ride. The chair squeaked and creaked.

“Careful, Rovan. That chair is expensive and meant for work, not spinning.”

“I am working, Till.”

He dug his fingernails into his palms and ground his teeth. Best ignore the little things. He had to remember that the shadows had chosen Rovan as their leader. He still could not determine if the boy had one of the shadows inside him, or if he were simply a rotten little shit.

“So what do you intend to do, hm? Will you just sit here while your friends ravage my city?”

“They are multiplying, Till. It's just a little upset for now, that's all. You'll see.” Rovan kicked the desk, propelling him across the room on squealing casters. “You're lucky I'm giving you this opportunity. The shadows will fix everything. We'll be rich.”

“Rich? Is that what you think this is about? You think they are genii who have come to grant your juvenile wishes?”

“You're spoiling it. Stop being such a downer.”

If he kept trying to reason with Rovan, he'd drive himself mad. Rovan was too young to understand the primordial force of the shadow men, of their mission to re-form heaven and earth according to their every whim.

He knew what to expect. First would come the depravity in the streets. If there existed any plant matter in Blightcross, it would also have been corrupted. Then a darkness would descend, and life would seem to disappear after everyone had destroyed themselves in their mad attempt to achieve order. Then the shadows would be made real again.

That was what the first people had written.

Without the fire giants, there would be no opposition to them.

Sevari went to his former desk and reached for the row of call studs.

“What are you doing, Till? That's my desk now.”

“I am just calling for some assistance.”

Rovan jumped out of his seat and jogged to the desk. “I can call. What do you need? Another pie? I can get us pie.”

“I do not want pie.” But, on second thought... “Actually, yes. Send for pie.”

“Ha. They told me that you like pie.”

“Did they?”

Rovan shut his eyes for a moment, then bounced back to the chair, where he began to spin again. “It'll be here in a minute. You know, I think I want some statues made. They should go up all along the main road leading to the refinery.”

“Is that so?”

Rovan began to describe the statue, which would depict himself in golden armour, holding the biggest hand-cannon they could make, his right foot resting on the severed head of a fire giant. Sevari simply nodded and scribbled behind the desk. With luck, the hasty note would be legible.

It choked him to accept that he had made such a grave error in dealing with Helverliss. But the situation could still be brought under control. Locking up Helverliss with his own work had been the stupidest mistake he could think of, but after he wrested control from Rovan and his shadow friends, he would return to leadership more powerful than ever. The silent weaving of the worldspirits perhaps worked in mysterious ways, and in the end, this turmoil may even have been necessary for further progress.

He crumpled the note in his hands and clasped them behind his back. When the servant arrived at the door with the pie, he darted across the room to meet him.

He took the pie, and slapped the note into the servant's hand. “Take this to the guard lieutenant.” The servant unfolded the note, and Sevari clapped the man's hand shut. “Go now, and ensure that he gets it.” He glanced back to Rovan. “Do you see?”

The servant's eyes widened, and he spun on his heel to leave.

As long as the servant could perform basic functions, Blightcross might still have hope at containing the shadow beings.

“Well? What are you waiting for, Till? Hand over the fucking pie.”

Ooh, you will regret choosing such a naive, ignorant clod as your anchor here, shadows.

He calmly set the pie on the desk—
his
desk—and took a slice.

Too much cinnamon, nothing like Mother's. If he were alone, he would toss it in the trash, but Rovan was a suspicious creature much like himself, and he thought he'd better choke it down for the sake of appearances.

“They say that you have this thing about pie, you know. I wonder if it's true.”

“Who says this?”

“My friends.”

“They are hardly friends, Rovan.” As soon as he finished the sentence, he winced. It had been reversed—Rovan was the Leader now, and he had to abandon his pedantic tone, or risk the wrath of the shadows.

“Hah! You'll learn, Till.” He ate half of the slice, tossed it across the room, and picked up another. “Hey, stop stressing. I won't turn on you. I'm like that guy you love so much. Iermo, that's his name, right? We're like a team of heroes, aren't we?”

The son of a bitch. Was Rovan serious, or just trying to goad him into a confrontation?

“Yes, Rovan.” He made a difficult swallow. “It's quite like that.”

Now he went back to his window to gaze at the armoury. A cloying spicy taste hovered in the back of his throat, and he wanted to throw the boy to the ground below, but his one bit of solace was the steel and canvas towering above the armoury. More accurately, what lay beneath the temporary covering.

The guard officer unfolded the paper, leaned into the light of the hallway lamp, and squinted at the hen scratch in watery faded ink.

Attn Guard Personnel please hurrb expadoto massc— gramma to defer cite and kill shallot mom
...

“I haven't any clue what this means,” the officer said to the servant.

“Sevari was under duress, I think. Whatever these phantoms are, they have corrupted one of the Ehzeri workers. It seems I now take dessert orders for the boy, instead of Sevari.”

The officer snorted. “That's ridiculous. The Leader must be bluffing or biding his time.”

“He looked desperate. Are you sure you can't read the note?”

He adjusted the paper's angle and tried again. This was not the firm hand of Till Sevari, and not the stern, impeccable penmanship of the many execution orders the officer had taken. It was a hasty cry for help, as if he had been unable to even look at his work. It was frantic and, like the servant suggested, desperate.

Attn Guard Personnel please hurry expedite deployment of mechanical golem to defend city and kill the shadow men and their pawns. Use any means to deploy. You have full authority to confiscate fuel necessary Section Three must be informed you may threaten execution if refuse to press into service please hurry.

The officer shoved the servant out of his way and ran for the nearest signalling station.

The damned thing wasn't ready. Were things really that bad? It was supposed to defend against a surprise attack from the Bhagovan Republic, or even Tamarck, should they decide that they wanted the district's fuel for themselves.

But would it really work against these phantoms?

Though she didn't want to admit it, Alim was right: by the time they reached the waterfront, they found only doors swinging on hinges and crates sitting in the middle of the road, waiting for the cranes above to lift them. A few times, she swore she caught glimpses of the shadow men, only to focus her eyes and find nothing out of the ordinary.

It wasn't completely deserted, though. Capra caught the flicker of a lamp in one of the windows as they made their way to Fasco's Road. After a short debate, she broke from the group and went inside.

The shelves were stocked with chains and rope and hooks. At the counter stood a woman close to her age with sunken cheeks and dry, frizzy hair.

“What happened here?”

“They all left. Them things came, started talking to everyone. Told them things I ain't ever heard before. They sounded like preachers or aldermen.”

“Did they talk to you?”

The woman coughed in a way Capra had only heard from lung-rot patients and phosphorous grenade victims. She backed away accordingly. “They won't come near me. One of them said something about the ethers or some such garbage. If you ask me, it's just a ploy by the government. Aw yeah, they just want us all to move out of here so they can build more pipes or whatever they want to do. That's the word out at the estates, anyway.”

Capra recalled overhearing conversations in the city about “the estates”, this spoken with a note of disdain. “The slums, you mean?”

The woman spread her hands in a defensive gesture. “Not my words, missy.”

The slums—the area off the south end of Fasco's Road. A whole population of people untouched by the shadows, but tainted by what, exactly?

“The owner here went along with the others. I don't know why, but I doubt he'll be back today. Maybe that Sevari's going to lock ‘em all up and cook them in his great ovens, who knows?”

“I think you should just close up and go home for the day.”

The woman made a noise that could have either been laughter or a retch. “You ain't from this area, are ye, missy? You got a job down here, you make the most of it and get yourself as much time in a clean space as you can. I ain't a going back unless I got to.”

On one shelf Capra spotted a bottle of oil. Never one to argue with a nagging in her gut, she bought it. She was, after all, going to climb through a running machine, and the last thing she needed was to be caught in a seized gear.

Back outside, she expected to find either Alim or Dannac cast into a gutter with a broken neck, but she found them strolling down the deserted cobblestones together. Perhaps it was the mediating presence of Vasi between them that stopped them from destroying each other. Dannac would never join a Valoii. Capra was the exception, and the first few months together had involved more than a few fistfights.

Something was bothering him.

“You decided to join us,” Alim said when she took position on Dannac's side of Vasi.

“She was alive. Barely alive, from the sound of her, and the shadows didn't want her. Apparently the slums have been untouched. Anything along this end of Fasco's Road.”

“So there is something in the air.”

Deathly cough, pale, peeling skin... “Something not entirely good for us either, I'm thinking.” She stared at one of the boats bobbing at the quay. “You know, we could sail out of here.”

“No,” Dannac said. “Rovan could still be alive. Besides, look out to sea. They are patrolling the delta.”

She shielded her eyes with her hand and glimpsed the shadows circling far in the distance, as though the world were inverted and they were leaves swirling in ocean currents. Whatever force kept them away from the Hex did not extend to the ocean.

“Helverliss was in a bad state, wasn't he? Don't you think he did this out of desperation? I can't imagine what Sevari must have done to him.”

“He has to be alive,” Vasi said. “I cannot fix this, and neither can any of the other researchers.”

Alim began to walk faster. “And we cannot leave if these things are not dealt with.”

Capra sighed.

“It's your own fault. None of this would have happened if you had just stayed with the army.”

“Shut up, Alim.”

In the space of a block, they passed from the cluttered colonial stone of the waterfront into the desert. It was as though they had travelled from Tamarck to the heart of Mizkov, all in a few strides. Here the old thoroughfare joined with Fasco's Road, which stretched into the distance, accompanied only by a splatter of huts and canvas tents along its south side. Capra could barely make out the bridge from where they stood at an abandoned guard post.

“It starts just a few minutes down the road, I think,” she said.

“The unnamed invisible thing that's supposed to protect us?” Alim asked.

Dannac cracked open his canteen and sat on the side of the road. “Better drink and rest, if we are to walk through a desert that will make us sick.”

She wasn't tired, and she stood under the shade of a palm. Damn it, they were getting closer to the tower. Never mind this stupid Hex, or even these shadows. All she could think about was the clock. Having never been inside a giant clock, she envisioned a grotesque contraption of swinging axes, misshapen cogs, and random plates of metal that pressed into any available space for no apparent reason. She dug in the sand with her toe, reminded herself that there were worse things to overcome before the clock would be a concern. But still...

The others didn't care about the tight spaces. What was so different about them that they could do the same thing without any of the anxiety she felt?

Maybe Helverliss knew the answer, with his mind-sciences.

“Here.” Alim handed her a canteen. “The heat doesn't seem to drop overnight very much, unlike back home. I don't quite understand why yet.”

She paused for a moment, then gingerly took the canteen. “So.”

“Hm?”

“I mean...” She could still do no more than stare at his boots. He was from home, both an oppressive force in her conscience and a source of comfort. “How are things back home, anyway?”

“What do you care?”

She turned away from him and wiped the sweat from her face. “Jasaf. Is she still in the service? She should be out by now, I would think. Unless she volunteered for more, but she never seemed like the type to make it a career.”