Blightcross: A Novel (15 page)

Every fibre of her being wanted to say yes, to be able to transpose her people's collective angst onto this one rogue Valoii and cleanse them by slaughtering her.

Or was this the archon's influence? Where did her justified anger end and her family's horrible working of hatred begin?

Damn them, did they really think their troubles could be solved so easily? In times like this, she tried to picture the ceremony. The gathering of family members, the ritual, the sky—it must have lit up like the Day of Creation with all the power it would take to create their own archon. Their own weapon.

No, she was lucky to suffer this kind of amnesia. It was enough that she felt the archon within, that she had not truly cast off its bloodlust. It was enough that she wanted to rip from Capra's chest her still-beating heart and expose its charred corruption and blackness.

But, unlike the Blacksmith's eternal labour to sustain the earthly plane, it would not be a divine sacrifice. It would be petty murder.

Focus, damn you. There were more important things. Like this painting. She owed Sevari a solution to the painting's bound energies, and this would always take precedence over capturing the Valoii. Once she completed it, removed the power, mastered it, the notoriety would eclipse the promise of a cash bonus.

But the damned thing was so complicated. Every time she shut her eyes to envision the tapestry of
vihs
living inside the frame, it was even more dark and alien. The few times she mustered enough concentration to follow a single thread, it split into another, and that branched again. The red and black twine continued into infinity. She could not manipulate them—they had no beginning and no end.

It was a void.

There was the feeling of utter otherness, of something foreign. She wanted both to turn away from it and ask it for its desire.

What do you want?

What do you want from me?

Why do you not answer?

There was nothing there, but there had to be...

She opened her eyes, tried to banish her connection to the working. Breaths came shorter and shorter, panting... a shaky hand pressed to her throat.

If this void existed, where was her God?

Darkness, dark like the Golroot river, dark like the thick poison pumped into the refinery.

Maybe some kind of holy illumination could unravel this conundrum, but it would take time. Any longer in this chamber and she worried that her body would disintegrate and her soul would fall to the ground in a cloud of poisoned sand.

She hurried back to her own lab, where she began to pick up the hose and tunics and petticoats strewn across the floor. Weeks had passed with her tripping over junk and nearly destroying valuable pieces, and cleaning would help ground her after the encounter with the painting.

Each item she tossed into a gunnysack. When she took one last look inside, there was a Koratian artifact sitting atop her unmentionables, along with two other random objects. She hardly remembered picking up her clothes—the banal act had failed to distract her from her troubles.

After returning the misplaced things to their shelves, she headed down to the clock tower's laundry.

Past the stained glass angels and into the elevator, its brass gleaming like the day it had first been installed. It was probably polished every night by people she had known back home.

The machine started its descent, and she clutched the brass handholds. As with every foray into the complex bowels, she closed her eyes during the descent.

When the rumbling ceased, and the telltale bump signalled that the elevator had arrived, Vasi opened her eyes. She swung the laundry bag over her shoulder and grasped the door handle.

And, as though she had taken a ride into an underworld of unseen horrors, like in the painting, Vasi's arm became paralysed and her throat tightened and a sense of dread urged her to run.

Her hand twitched. It felt as though the void had followed her, as if it were watching her and waiting for her to do something... but what?

Paranoia. Paranoia and that is all. Paranoia started the war, paranoia decimated our people. Calm yourself.

A relaxed breath, and she opened the door. It slid soundlessly on its bearings, and all she saw ahead was the harsh blue corridors of the basement, lit by bare gas. She sighed and smiled to herself. How stupid—

As she moved to take her first step, an arm dropped down from the shaft above. She dropped the bag. Jumped back, once more grasping the railing. “Hello?” It could be a maintenance worker, after all.

“Hello?”

She took one step forward. Above, there came the sound of a loaded sack scraping against metal.

At first, it was a blur of darkness—a disruption, like a large bird flitting across a window. Then came the thud, the sound of a side of beef cut from its hanging. A body, twisted in a cruel pose, jammed against the elevator exit. The eyes showed no pupils or iris. There was a perfect hole between them, and from this a line of dried blood ran down his face. The mouth gaped, cheeks hollow like a victim of the consumption.

Only, it was not the consumption. It could not have been; only days ago, this same middle-aged Ehzeri had knocked on her laboratory door, arms loaded with the reams of paper and jars of ink she had requested from the office. They had chatted about a refinery committee tasked with organizing this year's Festival of the Divine Furnace. She had politely declined, citing her workload. He had nodded understandingly, and they exchanged pleasantries for a few minutes until she had dismissed him and forgotten his name in the time it took him to reach the elevator.

Another male, dead the same way as the others. Why? This man had crossed no one.

She dropped the bag and carefully stepped over the body. The sight of a corpse itself did not faze her. Her hard swallowing, sandy mouth, and wobbly knees came from the fact that someone else would die, and then another, and another, and she could not see any reason for it to stop. It was all too familiar. The archon had started the same way— taking a person here and there, not making too much trouble. Would this killer find the same bloodlust?

What if it were her? The archon...

Impossible.

A hundred different theories offered a simpler, more sensible solution. Worker solidarity was gone. This was not an event, but just part of a process. It happened with the militias back home, it happened everywhere: the degeneration into violence. While when she had arrived at the refinery, all the labourers bonded by way of their universal suffering, hope, conditions, and aspirations. She should have known that could never last forever.

Was it worth it to stay?

She hurried through the basement, asking if anyone had seen Rovan. Each time a worker claimed to have not seen him, her heart sank. He could be rotting in a waste pipe...

When she found him, he could argue all he wanted. They were going home.

Provided, of course, that her brother still lived.

Capra, having inherited her father's tendency to categorize things, had long ago assigned different stages to her current career. These categories, or levels of proficiency and experience, elevated what in vulgar terms was called “thief” to a respectable vocation.

Though she had only been in the business for about two years, her current self-appointed title was “security consultant.”

She had started as an apprentice.

An apprentice in this business—of being an outcast, a malcontent, a scoundrel—partly paid his dues by the time honoured practice of sleeping in ditches when necessary. “When necessary” was usually most of the time, barring any contingent success in actually stealing anything valuable enough to pay for a room.

And this glorious morning, when Capra awoke with a stiff neck and dirt in her nostrils, she reminded herself that she was still a security consultant, even though she had spent the night in a ditch.

It was not really a ditch, but a space under a small foot bridge. She had wandered the streets past the Damwall area, with its perfect walls and houses that could never be robbed by the seething mass of cretins who lived on the outside, and ended up down here when she had run into a squad of soldiers.

She stood, made sure she had collected her things. At once she scrunched her face at the metallic, bitter taste in her mouth. She spat several times, and when it persisted, vowed to find a pub and burn it out with a few shots of plum liquor.

She climbed up the embankment and crossed the bridge. Why had she pointed herself in this direction in the first place? They had split up, running... Vasi had left them before they could glean a fraction of what had happened...

It was no use trying to make sense of it. But it wasn't as if there were anywhere better, so she continued to walk south. No giant towers loomed here—those were now at the skyline to her back. This area was eerily deserted, yet the air still vibrated with noise. Rails ran parallel to the disused road, and she felt the rumbling of a locomotive in her feet.

Only once before did she remember riding in a train, and it was one of the failed steam-driven ones. Luckily, it had not exploded during their journey—

The journey. Out of the mountains and into Mizkov. Like cattle.

Later she would learn that her family had held out in the years after the war and tried to keep their place in the mountains, but Yahrein was serious about keeping the mountains clear of Valoii, since the treaty had awarded the ancestral lands to them.

She shivered as the iron beast gained on her. Two lamps shone at the engine's front, and out of twin smokestacks jets of pure black trailed. She braced for the strange hiss of the steam-drive, but when it came, it was even louder and more aggressive—a banging, a growling, and the whole thing was like a mountain ram mad from winter starvation, breath steaming from its nostrils.

But instead of snow-capped mountains and trees, she walked among scorched earth. Here, in the empty lots, heaps of red sand sat in rows. There was no winter here, and surely no sheep, and the smoke was not the innocent breath of an animal, but an expression of extreme heat and dirt.

Now farther into the area, her denim coat became a soggy oven. She shrugged out of it, and the sun broadsided her shoulders with a pleasant warmth. Only minutes later, it seared her shoulders and neck. Except, of course, the scarred patch on her left shoulder, which felt nothing.

Would the danger really dissipate in two days? What if waiting only allowed Alim and his allies to gather their strength? And what about Vasi?

An hour later, her once tight plait now a frizzy, damp sketch of her military neatness, she found the factories. Tall barbed fencing cut the desert into giant squares, with industrial castles rising out of the sand. Plumes of vapour joined the city's haze.

Ahead, there stood several strips of low buildings. One of them had to be a pub or a café. There were men in rough brown overalls coming in and out of them. Something was different, though. They were taller, and she found not a single Ehzeri cloak among them.

She stopped to gaze at the different businesses. Any concerns about Alim and escaping Blightcross drowned in Capra's thirst. Damn, one of these places had to sell a good drink—

There was a bell tone behind her, but she ignored it. A rumbling. A skidding sound, screeching. When at last she turned to find the commotion, she sprang to dodge the carriage speeding towards her. Too late.

Capra rolled onto her back. Whatever she lay on, it was reasonably soft.

Noise, impact... the last thing she remembered.

She sat up, rubbed her head. A cutting pain seared the left side of her head with each touch. When her vision cleared, she found herself in a small room, planted on a medical bench. There was a pong of ether and the odour of alcoholic plant tinctures.

The door squeaked open. Was it a prison surgery? Bloody hell...

She rubbed her eyes, gritted her teeth, prepared for the worst. The man who walked in wore brown coveralls and a flat cap. He looked out into the hall before shutting the door.

Capra stood. Wobbled a bit, steadied herself on the bench.

“The surgeon says you're fine. Said your knockout was more from shock than the impact of the transport.”

The man's biceps rippled through a dingy undershirt. Capra didn't want to find out whether or not she could take him in a fistfight, and slipped her hand behind her to the tray of implements lying beside the bench. There—a scalpel. Plenty sharp. It would be over in two seconds.

She shifted aside to cover the action. “Is that so?”

He stepped forward and reached out to her. Capra failed to react when he snaked his hand round her back and grasped her wrist. He took the knife from her hand. “Relax. Everything is fine. It was just an accident.” He dropped the knife onto the tray. “You shouldn't walk in the middle of the road.”

The road... now she remembered. How stupid she had been, now that she recalled the heavy iron machines that rolled through the streets in Blightcross. She eyed the man for any clue about who he was. He didn't look like a prison guard, but one could never be too sure.

“I'll get to the point,” he said. “I'll forget about the knife. I think I can understand where you're coming from.”

At the same time, she both felt somewhat eased and more tense at this frankness. “Where am I?”

“A machine parts factory in Redsands. When the driver hit you, he assumed you were one of the workers here, so he loaded you into the corporate wagon and took you back. When I came to investigate the problem, I realized that you had no identification.”

She backed away.

“Relax.”

She'd relax when she left the place and found Dannac. There wasn't much point in staying at this factory. She moved to leave.

The man barred her with his arm. “Whoa, wait a second, honey.” Now he leered at her. “Where do you think you're going?”

She bit her lip and held back the urge to flatten him. “As you said, I'm not one of your employees. I shouldn't keep you any longer. Sir.”