The Blood Debt (7 page)

For that much he was very grateful. ‘So you mine elsewhere, away from the city?’

‘Look up,’ she had said. The usual patchwork of drying clothes and banners briefly allowed a glimpse of the sky. ‘What do you see?’

‘Birds,’ he’d replied, noting numerous gliding shapes against the bright pale blue, circling and looping in mathematical spirals. ‘Were you expecting something else?’

She’d laughed again and told him to stop dragging his heels. ‘You’re about to see something stone-boys like you only dream of.’

He bit his tongue. Since then, he’d seen little more than her backside as she preceded him up the stairwell. Attractive it might be, but that wasn’t what he had come to Laure for.

Just as his patience reached its limit, she stopped. A creak of wood and inrush of air followed. He breathed deeply, not realising just how close it had become in the narrow stairwell. She moved again, climbing two more steps then suddenly lifting her legs upwards, out of sight. A trapdoor. Her hand thrust down at him. He brushed it aside and hauled himself through the square hole without assistance, ending up on his hands and knees on a roof high above the city. The sky was brilliant around him. A steady wind blew, as fresh as a draught of clear water.

‘Almost there,’ she whispered in his ear. One hand pressed him down when he tried to stand. She crouched next to him, peering around a nearby chimney. Her full lips were so close to his ear that he could feel her hair brushing his neck. ‘You have to be quiet for this last bit. Can you manage that?’

He nodded stiffly.

‘Good. Follow me.’

She scurried off, moving in an awkward crouch from chimney to chimney, keeping her head low. He followed her lead, noting that they were atop one of several tall thin buildings at the heart of the New City. Just visible in an intersection two blocks across was a yadachi perched on the top of a pole, red robes trailing beneath him like a flag. To the north, east and west, sprinkled with the yellowing remains of the Old City, sloped the sides of the depression Laure occupied; to the south was the smooth blankness of the Wall, as brooding as a thundercloud. Beyond that, invisible, lay the eerie chasm of the Divide.

He noted that birds flew over the Divide as well as the city, circling all along the length of the mighty chasm to either horizon. What they hunted and ate was a mystery to him ...

Except they couldn’t be mere birds. For them to be visible at such a distance, their wingspan had to be
huge.

‘Down.’ Chu squeezed him beside her in a niche between attic wall and ventilation shaft. She peered through a hole made by a missing brick, then, moving aside, gestured that he should look too. What he saw left him breathless.

On the next building across a young man stood strapped to a crescent-shaped canvas wing spread out above him. Several others in various stages of preparation waited nearby, adjusting buckles or checking struts, dressed in brightly coloured uniforms bearing stark geometric patterns, none of them identical. They congregated on five separate platforms stacked one on top of the other, each one sticking out further than the last. They were close enough that Skender could hear their voices coming to him in snatches on the wind. Their words, diced with the chopping blade of the wind, were meaningless.

As Skender watched, the boy wearing the wing took a running jump for the edge of the platform and, with a cry, plunged headlong into empty air.

Skender gasped, then mentally kicked himself. He’d read about gliders and balloons in the
Book of Towers
and other texts — books he doubted his guide had heard of. He should have had some inkling of what was coming; now he looked like a hick from the deep desert.

As the boy fell, the wind caught his wing and twisted it. Skender admired the skill it took to bring it into line, to angle his glide into a tight swoop so he wouldn’t crash headlong into the unforgiving face of a nearby building. Gusts tugged him to and fro until he managed to ascend above the nearest towers, then his flight levelled out. From below, Skender could see that the wing was covered with hand-drawn charms that rippled and flowed like shadow clouds in fast motion. The wing tilted, and the boy swept away over the city.

What Skender had seen from street level — and from a distance, while approaching the city — weren’t birds at all. Neither were the things over the Divide. They were all people, gliding aloft on wings and will.

‘Amazing.’

If Chu was amused by his surprise, she didn’t rub his face in it. ‘It
is
pretty cool.’ She pressed in close to peer through the hole with him. Her leather outfit creaked. ‘You should try it up there. The air is clear and fresh. There’s no smoke, no stink. You can see forever.’

‘You —?’ He turned to look at her, startled for the second time. ‘You’re one of them?’

Her face twisted. ‘Used to be. Crashed my wing. Couldn’t afford to pay for repairs, or for my licence when renewal fell due. Now I’m stuck here on the ground, just like you. I’d give anything to be back out there.’

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘So
that’s
what you meant by freedom.’

‘Yes. And you’re going to help me get it.’

‘How?’

‘We’ll work on that. I have a few ideas.’

I bet you do,
Skender thought. ‘You have to keep your side of the bargain first.’

‘Haven’t I already?’ Chu shook her head. Her deep brown eyes held immense reservoirs of amusement. ‘I assumed you would have worked it out by now. Oh well. See those gliders over there?’ She pointed to the Divide. He nodded. ‘Watch them for a while and you’ll find your answer.’

He did as he was told, simmering at her tone. He wasn’t an idiot — far from it. He was just a long way from everything he took for granted. The time would come, he swore, when he would turn the tables on her, and then she’d know how it felt. She’d be the one to feel embarrassed and stupid. She —

He stopped in mid-thought when something about the distant gliders penetrated the thick mire of his anger.

They were swooping like gulls snatching fish from the ocean. But there was no ocean, no fish. There was just the Divide, a deep wound gaping in the surface of the world, from which all manner of strangeness had been observed to emerge ...

Suddenly, in a flash, it all made sense. It was insane, but it did fit the facts.

‘The people in the gliders,’ he said, choosing his words with care as he thought it through, ‘they’re scavenging for artefacts in the Divide.’

‘And?’ Her nod was purely probationary.

‘And when they find something, they dive down to check it out.’ His mind reeled at the skill required for such missions. First, the pilots had to spot items of interest on the surface of the valley floor, far below. Then they had to negotiate unreliable air currents and approach closer to see if it was something genuinely valuable. Finally, since voyaging out into the Divide on foot was generally considered foolish, the most daring might try to snatch the bounty off the ground and whisk back up into the air. ‘I can’t believe so many people would be willing to risk their lives like this!’

‘It’s a matter of economics,’ Chu said. ‘This area has always been rich in artefacts. The foundations of Laure were laid a thousand years ago, and the city was once full of metal and ceramics and other trinkets. Long since picked clean, of course, but there are deposits outside the city. And the Divide is full of such things if you know where to look. Now, I know you haven’t been in Laure for long, but I’m sure you’ve noticed that we don’t have much of anything else here. We can’t grow crops because the water table is too low and what the yadachi can summon doesn’t leave enough for irrigation. The ground is empty of any metals that weren’t left behind by the ancients. Cattle live barely long enough to breed outside. So our only export is what we can find in buried ruins and the Divide. That means the people out there —’ she indicated the flyers with a thumb, ‘— the
miners
— they’re very well paid for what they do, and they play an important part in keeping the city alive. You see, now? It’s not just for kicks, Skender, if that’s what you’re thinking. Next time you’re using a fork or admiring a jewel, consider that it probably came from the Divide or somewhere similar, and ask yourself if you wouldn’t do the same thing, in our shoes.’

Her speech was impassioned. He could see that this really mattered to her, that she wasn’t showing it to him just to make an out-of-towner feel small.

But he still couldn’t see the relevance. ‘What does this have to do with my mother?’

‘It’s all to do with timing. Rogue man’kin and other creatures too weird to name are often sighted along the Divide, moving back and forth as the will takes them. We leave them well alone; some of them can be extremely dangerous. Just lately, though, there’s been an increase in foot traffic along the Divide from the Hanging Mountains. What they’re doing here, I don’t know, but they’re mean and they’re in a hurry. And they’re dropping things as they go.’ She indicated the flyers again. ‘Normally there’d be just a half-dozen of them out there at this time of day. Not now. Every able flyer has been called in to take advantage of the situation. There’s lots of stuff out there just waiting to be harvested. All you have to do is pick it up.’

She sighed. ‘Of all the times to lose my wing, it’d have to be now.’

There was a look of yearning in her eyes that reminded Skender of how frustrated and stifled he had been before his adventures outside the Keep. He felt for her, but his mind was simultaneously working on his own problem. He’d assumed that his mother’s party had headed for the tunnels of Laure to look for the thing they sought. But if the tunnels were mined out, that was exactly the wrong place to look.

A dark smudge on the far edge of the Divide drew his gaze and held it. Laure was half a city. Before the Divide had come along, it had been whole. Therefore, the tunnels that now gaped into empty air once connected to matching tunnels on the other side — under the forbidden Ruin called the Aad.

Right idea,
he told himself;
wrong place.
All he had to do was get across the Divide and under the Aad to see if he was right.

However, Chu’s description of the Ruin was still vivid in his mind.
Disease; bad luck; inhabited by creatures of the Divide ...

‘Judging by your face,’ she said, ‘you’ve just worked out where your mother is.’

He nodded despondently. ‘And a fat lot of good it does me. How in the Goddess’s name am I going to get over there?’

‘There is a way, but it’s going to be tricky. When a miner finds something big in the Divide, too big for her to carry herself, she flashes for a heavy lifter from the city.’

‘Flashes?’

‘By mirror.’ She waved that explanation away. ‘The heavy lifters are dirigibles with ropes and hooks designed to pick up just about anything from above. They’re slow but reliable. Although they don’t usually go that far, we could get across the Divide and return with your mother, and whoever she has with her.’

‘That sounds good,’ he said. ‘How do I go about organising it?’

‘That depends on whether you have enough money to charter a lifter.’

‘I might have, depending on how much it costs.’

She named a figure that made his head spin. For a brief moment he considered selling the buggy, which was locked securely in an empty camel stall under the hostel he’d booked into. But that was a mad idea; he had to get home somehow, once all this was over.

‘Okay, so that’s out.’ She looked through the gap at her peers hurling themselves boldly into the sky. ‘There are only two other ways to go about it. The first and most obvious is to petition the Magister.’

Skender nodded. The Magister was the head of the yadachi, and had ruled Laure for thirty thirsty years.

‘Do you think she’ll help us?’

‘That old vampire? Given my record and where you’re from, she’s more likely to throw us in the brig just for asking.’

‘Great. So what’s the second way?’

‘We steal what we need and worry about the consequences later.’

‘Are you joking?’

She shook her head. ‘I’m renowned for two things: the ability to fly and the inability to stay out of trouble. Neither requires much of a sense of humour.’

‘You could’ve fooled me,’ he muttered. ‘Looks like you’re having a great time at my expense.’

‘Hard though it might be to believe, watching you squirm isn’t what I was put on the Earth for. It’s just a consolation prize.’

He had to admit that she’d stopped smiling some time ago.

‘Okay,’ he said, resigning himself to the situation. ‘We try the Magister first. Whether you say it’ll work or not, we have to give it a go. And if she doesn’t see it our way —’

‘We renegotiate. Right.’ She took one last look at the other miners and their wings before making moves to leave the niche.

‘Wait,’ he said, gripping her forearm. ‘I can’t believe you’re seriously thinking of doing this — stealing a balloon and helping me rescue my mother. Aren’t you in enough trouble already?’

Her eyes moved restlessly as they focused first on his left pupil, then the right, then back again. ‘You don’t get it yet, do you? This isn’t about you. I expect to be compensated. Handsomely, too. Otherwise you’re right: there’s nothing in it for me but more hot water.’

He didn’t know what he’d expected, but her words disappointed him. ‘I’ll make sure you get what you deserve,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about that.’

‘Good. Then let’s get going. The air is thin up here. It’s making me thirsty.’

* * * *

Street-level frontage in Laure was at such a premium that most shops performed two or more functions simultaneously. Food vendors also sold coffee and tightly rolled cigarettes, and provided venues for wiry old people to play complicated-looking games involving tiles and dice. They served alcohol as well, as Skender discovered half an hour later — although he received the distinct impression that most of the business in the narrow bar Chu had taken him to was conducted out the back behind the kitchen, where money changed hands over flat paper packets whose contents he didn’t want to know anything about, beyond a quick glimpse as they passed through. The black market thrived in Laure, which had laboured under strict rationing for as long as anyone could remember. Traders visited regularly, but never frequently enough to satisfy the populace.