The Madness Project (The Madness Method) (37 page)

Chapter 15 — Tarik

I watched Hayli disappear down into the Hole, trying to
steady the nervous race of my heart.  My fingers felt sticky, and my stomach
cringed with the remembered smell of blood.  I had to find Derrin.  I couldn’t
tell any of the kids about it; I’d only scare them, and they wouldn’t be able
to do a thing about it anyway.  For all I knew, some animal had gotten killed
there…though I tried not to imagine the size it had to have been to leave so
much blood.

I shuddered and waited a few more minutes, until I was sure
Hayli had gotten well into the Hole.  Then I made my way in, creeping down the
steps like a burglar, my bloody hand wrapped lightly in my shirt and towel.  I
caught Anuk coming down the narrow corridor that led to the storage room, and
waved him over.

“Anuk, where’s Derrin?”

“Well,” Anuk said, glancing up and down both hallways. 
“Suppose he might be out with Kantian.  If not that, I’d guess he’d be in the
barracks.”

“Look, would you mind checking the barracks for me?”

He narrowed his eyes, curious.  “What for, so?  Aren’t you
going that way anyway?”

“It’s just, I need a word with him in private.”

“And you don’t want all the skitters knowing it?” he asked,
and nodded.  “Sure.  I’ll check.”

I sat down on the steps, but only had to wait about five
minutes before I caught sight of Derrin coming toward me.  I got to my feet and
started to unwind the shirt from around my hand.

“Anuk said you were looking for me,” Derrin said as he
joined me.  “What’s the trouble?”

“Thought I should mention this to someone, and you seemed
like the best option,” I said, and held out my hand.  The shirt had kept the
blood from drying; it shone a little in the erratic light of a gas lamp.

Derrin took one glance at it, then arched a brow at me. 
“What, did you cut yourself?  Why is this my problem?”

“It’s not mine.  I stuck my hand in it upstairs.  In the
factory.”

He let out all his breath.  “You went into the factory?  Was
it a thrill?”

“It was fantastic, until I stuck my hand in someone’s
blood.  I didn’t have a torch.  Couldn’t see if there was a body.”

He scrutinized me briefly.  “All right.  I’ll take a look.”

“I’ll come with you,” I said.

“What makes you think you’re invited?”

“Oh c’mon,” I said.  “You want to search that whole place,
or should I show you where it happened?  I’m not squeamish.”

And if there’s a body up there, I’m sure Kor is going to
want to know about it.

“Fine,” Derrin said.  “I’m going to get my torch.  Go wash
off that blood.”

I headed back up to the enclosure and turned on the spigot
at the trough, scrubbing my hand until I couldn’t see any traces of the blood. 
Somewhere…somewhere in the back of my thoughts…I thought I heard the singing
again.  One lone voice, low and sad…

God, I’m going insane.  There’s nothing there.  And why
did I say anything about it to Hayli?  She’ll just think I’m crazy.

I dug the heel of my hand against my head, willing away the
pain.  A few moments later, Derrin emerged from the Hole with a torch, and I
wiped my hand dry on my trousers as I went to join him.  When we reached the
factory door, I got the sudden image of Hayli’s terrified face in my mind, and
I fought back a laugh.  I still couldn’t believe I’d played such a prank on
her.  It was just the sort of thing Tarik would have done, and I was just glad
Hayli didn’t know Tarik well enough to recognize his stamp on it.

“All right,” Derrin said, ducking under the boards.  “Where
was it?”

I headed into the shadows, Derrin’s ring of torchlight
flicking at my feet.  I hadn’t gone too far into the shadows when I’d played my
trick on Hayli; this was the spot where I’d sat down.  And there was the blood,
tacky with age, with the imprint of my palm in the pool.

“There,” I said.

Derrin flashed the light on it.  In the mix of shadows from
the torch and the moonlight, I could barely see his mouth drawn in a thin line,
his eyes dark and hard.  He twitched the light away from the puddle to sweep
the area around it—the floor, the bench I’d leaned against, the charred ruins
of a work table behind it.  The light froze, and I took a step forward to see
what he’d seen.

“Oh God,” I gasped.

When I said I wasn’t squeamish, it was because I’d never
imagined the sort of carnage I saw on that table.  I’d never imagined the
smell, faint before, overpowering now that I saw the source.  I covered my
mouth with my arm and backed a step away from the table and the remains of the
body.

Who was it?
I remembered asking my father, shuddering
at his answer,
They couldn’t tell
.

Derrin shifted the torchlight over the body and cleared his
throat.  His face had turned rather grey.

“This is bad,” he said.  “We can’t leave this here.”

“Where’d it come from?  Who is it?”

“Stars, do you think I can tell that?  Folks meet all kinds
of terrible fates down in the south streets.  They just don’t usually meet them
on top of our home.”

“But who would do something like this to someone? 
It’s…gruesome.  Like an animal did it.”

“Some lunatic, someone who didn’t want anyone identifying
his victim…I don’t know.”  He flashed the torchlight in my eyes, so that I
winced and turned my head.  “Would you?”

“Would I what?”

“Do this to someone?”

I backed a step.  “What in hell?”

“Well, it looks fairly recent.  Maybe near as you’ve been
prowling about.  How exactly did you get the name of that supplier?”

“Ask Coins!  He was with me the whole time!” I cried, heart
pounding.

“I intend to.”

“I’m not a grobbing murderer.”

“And what are you, exactly?  Mercenary?  Sellsword?”

“I’m just a kid.  I’m just trying to find my way.”

Something about the way I said that must have convinced him,
because he lowered the torch and studied the table a while in silence.  I knew
what I had to ask, but the words died on my tongue three times before I managed
to swallow my cowardice enough to speak.

“I’ve heard talk on the streets,” I said.  “About the Clan. 
About…sacrifices.  D’you think someone there might’ve done this?”

Derrin spun toward me.  “No.  Not possible.  I know every
one of those mages.  None of them would’ve done something like this.  Rivano’s
a wild idealist and visionary, but he would never stoop to this kind
of…dissection.”

“You’re sure?”

He narrowed his eyes and I shrugged, realizing that pressing
the matter would only make me look suspicious.  Like I already knew too much.

“Just seems lots of folks around here have secrets,” I said.

“Don’t we, though,” he remarked, his gaze never leaving my
face.  When I didn’t react, he sighed and said, “Suppose we’ll need to get him
out of here.”

My stomach wavered just at the thought of moving the
corpse.  “How…how exactly do you mean to do that?”

“I’ll get a canvas from the supply crates.  We can wrap him
in that and carry him down to the river.  Maybe if anyone finds him they’ll
think some rabbies did it.  Can you handle that?”

“Sure,” I said.  “I didn’t eat anything for dinner I
couldn’t stand to boke.”

He laughed at that, and disappeared to get the canvas.  When
he finally got back, I’d steeled myself enough to walk up to the body, some
kind of perverse curiosity making me want to stare even while everything inside
me cringed away in revulsion, like Leon from the fables.  Derrin spread the
canvas next to the body, and holding my breath, I reached out to grab the battered
legs…

And swore, loudly, jerking my hands away.

“What’s wrong?”

I stared at the body, my hands prickling with static. 
“Stars,” I said.  “It was a mage.”

“You’re sure?” he asked, eyes narrowed.

“I can tell.”

“All right, let’s get this done.  I’ll tell Rivano about it
later.  Might be something he needs to know about.”

Somehow we managed to carry out the gruesome task without
catching anyone’s attention, and, more miraculously, without either of us
losing our supper.  I struggled blindly along, carrying our burden by the legs
while Derrin carried the shoulders.  Every once in a while I heard Derrin
drawing a short, ragged breath.  It reminded me to breathe, too, because I’d
been struggling not to ever since we’d started out.  Finally we reached the
river and laid the whole bundle down in the ferns on the embankment.  I stepped
back, shaking all over.  Derrin drew the back of his hand across his mouth and
bent over his knees.

“God, I never want to do that again,” he whispered, hoarse. 
“Wish I knew his name.”

“Why?” I asked.

“So we could send him to ride the stars in peace, of course,
so he doesn’t have to stay and haunt us here.  Don’t you farewell your dead in
Istia?”

I hesitated.  I’d never studied anything about Istian
funerary rites.  I only knew that in my world, Tarik’s world, death was a cold,
somber thing, where the families and acquaintances of the deceased wrote
farewells in a book that was closed and burned with the body.  And that was the
end.  Because no one in my world believed the dead would ever ride the stars…or
linger in the world in the place of their death to haunt those who remained
behind.

“Of course we do,” I said.  “But I’ve never seen a rite
where the dead man wasn’t known.”

He nodded and turned to the ferns, shifting uncertainly. 
“Nameless soul, find peace and leave the shores of this world for a better
place, and pity the one who did this to you.  We are not your enemies here, so
go and do not trouble us with your sorrow.”

“Be it so,” I murmured, because it seemed like the thing to
say.

It must have been near midnight when we’d finally gotten
back and cleaned up.  My nerves were gradually beginning to calm, but images of
that terrible murder kept flashing before my eyes.  The last thing I wanted was
to go to the barracks and try to sleep, so I wandered the dark halls a while in
silence, thinking, trying to work through what had happened.

Even more than the sight of the body, the notion that I’d
found it in the building over the Hole had me torn up.  I realized with some
surprise that I almost wanted my father to be wrong about the murders.  Somehow
I didn’t want to discover that anyone in the Hole, or even in Rivano’s Clan,
had been responsible for all those deaths.

And yet, I’d just stumbled on the sixth of the year, right
here at the heart of my father’s suspicions.

Did that mean someone here had done it?  Or had someone done
it here, never knowing about the Hole that existed underground, figuring that
they’d found a safe and hidden place where the crime would never be discovered?

And more than that…

Should I tell Kor?

I didn’t want to think about it.  That in the end was enough
motive for me to head back to the barracks and the  pathetically thin mattress
of my cot—I just wanted to sleep and forget about bodies and Kor and the price
of my betrayal.

*  *  *  *

By the time morning came, I’d decided not to tell Kor,
because he’d warned me once already about bringing him incomplete information. 
With some smug satisfaction, I mentally ticked off all the things I didn’t know
about the murder.  I didn’t know when it had happened.  I didn’t know the
victim, or even if it was a man or a woman.  I didn’t know who had done it. 
Stars, I didn’t even know how it had been done.  All I knew was that the person
had been a mage, but that could have been pure coincidence.  So, I really had
no information at all that would warrant a visit to Kor.

Instead I spent the day with Coins and Hayli.  Coins had
promised to teach us some of his tricks, but then he refused to show us
anything except how to roll when we landed from a jump.  But we practiced it
for hours, leaping off a bench in the middle of high society’s favored Wardin
Park, much to the scandal of the few people who were out braving the drizzle
and the cold.  By the time we got back to the Hole, we were all wet and bruised
and laughing, and I thought that somehow, strangely, I’d never enjoyed myself
quite so much.

Hayli disappeared as soon as we arrived, and suddenly I was
back to being the cold and quiet Shade that I’d almost let myself forget about in
the park.  I ate dinner alone in the mess, leaning against a wall with my plate
and watching the other kids as they shoveled in food with their fingers and
climbed over the tables and shouted at each other across the room, trying to
convince myself I loathed it all, trying to believe that I didn’t care how I
stood there by myself.

When Hayli finally came in, she took one look at me,
forehead all puckered up, and waved me toward the table she’d claimed.  I
hesitated.  I knew I should leave, that I should go without a word and not care
about her disappointment, but all I wanted was to go and sit with her, to laugh
about jumping off benches in the rain…to get her to smile, because her smile
was the most dazzling thing I’d ever seen.