Zotikas: Episode 1: Clash of Heirs (6 page)

It might hurt her a little to see the dance she cared
about go awry, but in the long run, she further justified, Moshalli’s
self-esteem could really be elevated.
And this will look completely
accidental! Moshalli can’t be blamed.

At the end, Moshalli packed up her papers. “I have to
get these to the printers. Then I’m to hand-deliver to each family their copy
of which position they will start in. It’s going to be so exciting!”

“No doubt,” Velirith agreed.

“Did you know some of the dancers practice all year
just so this dance works perfectly?”

“Really?”

Moshalli nodded vigorously. “You probably don’t have
to because of your theater experience, but it’s true. Oh, I wish our family was
recognized for how important we really are. Then I could dance and be swept
around the floor by some handsome mystery man. This New Year’s Eve will be
glorious!”

After Moshalli had left on the private tram that spanned
the familial towers, Velirith had sat at her window feverishly writing out the
pairings she had arranged. Then she had forged notes from one partner to the
other, marveling at how devious her own mind could be.

Now, with the dance beginning in just a couple hours,
Velirith would execute her plans at the Executive Chair’s New Year’s gala. The
voice of Discernment in her head seemed to whisper that what she had planned
was wrong. But the louder voice of Mischief danced and laughed that this was
just what the Omeron needed, a little dramatic revelation of the hypocrisy
played out in a Family Harmony Dance. Velirith intentionally chose Mischief and
opened her eyes just as a knock at the door pulled her from the replay of
Moshalli’s visit.

“Velirith, your father says it’s time.”

“Thank you Anessa. Tell him that I am on my way.”
Anessa was not only her bodyguard, but a close friend as well.

Velirith adjusted the collar on her outfit and gently
arranged the stack of fake notes in her satchel of woven silver. She hung the
bag over her right shoulder and patted it with excitement.
Adding
s
pike
to the punch,
she thought.

She took a last look in the mirror, practiced her best
look of pure childish innocence, and headed to the private tram to meet her
father and go to the gala.

Kieler swore in his head, but his face remained
impassive, even nonchalant.

The last agent slid onto the tram as the begrimed
bronze doors slid closed with a heavy thump. Both the doors and the agent
impressed him as being old without showing it properly. The doors were artfully
and sturdily built, at least a couple hundred years ago. Three layers of bronze
trim arched gracefully over the portal, strong and solid but tarnished with
time.

While casually pretending to look at the tram doors,
Kieler peripherally studied the remaining agent. Kieler couldn’t pinpoint why
the man struck him as old. His face was youthfully unlined. Physically, the man
was below average height, dark haired, and had a pale, smooth complexion.
Perhaps the larger nose and ears, despite his clear complexion, made him look
like an older man. And his eyes, while not rheumy, were dull, as if the light
in them had waned.

The tram climbed slowly, rising from the Glums toward
the brighter, higher level of Plaza Floraneva. These trams were built with a
tasteful elegance in an era when efficiency wasn’t defined by cutting back on
materials or energy usage. The vehicles were beautifully designed, monstrous
and enduring. Once Kieler was done redesigning the government, the engineer in
him would love to streamline these trams. It was said of the ancient vehicles,
“They were proof that with enough magal, even a mountain can fly.” Since House
Ek’s rise to power some eighty years ago, the aphorism was irreverently edited to
“with enough magal, Ek can move mountains.”

But this man shadowing him did not work for Ek, Kieler
was intuitively sure.
Probably Cortatti.
But how did he know which
gate Kieler would use? Chance?

Lumbering up the track, the tram approached the
underside of Plaza Floraneva. The Plaza’s tram station encircled one of the
ancient pillars that supported the plaza itself and the upper levels of the
city. In the Glums, these pillars were either covered with grime or, near Plate
level, covered with tenements and shabby businesses like
The
Bottom
of the Barrel
.

Several packed trams approached and departed,
spiraling in and away from the station. The tracks hung suspended from the
column like curving branches from a tree trunk. This was one of the busiest
hubs in the city.

Consciously relaxing his jaw muscles, Kieler thought
about how he was going to lose his uninvited companion.

Something else made the man seem older too. He didn’t
move enough. He just stood there, not looking around. If he was pretending
disinterest in Kieler, he was expert at it.

The tram slowed as it sidled up to a curved platform
ringing the spire. When the doors opened, the man got off first and moved a few
feet onto the platform and stopped to wait for his charge. Kieler considered
just staying on and letting the tram take him to the next station farther west,
then doubling back. But he needed to climb the Grand Stair from Plaza Floraneva
northeast to Garrist Ring. So pretending to go on would just waste time. If he
hadn’t needed to get the sigil last night, he would have camped on top of the
Charlaise building and waited for the proper time to hop over to the party. But
now, he had to get there before full dark.

His tail was just standing there, completely at ease
it seemed, as if he knew Kieler would be coming along and he needn’t be
worried. It was a little unnerving. Was this guy that good? Maybe choosing such
a well-known gate from the under-city was a bad call. Perhaps the Cortattis put
their best man on it. The guy was sure to tip off a swarm of Cortatti thugs
once they got higher and closer to the palace. Kieler had to lose him now.

The platform was jammed with partygoers. Two more
crowded trams pulled up to adjacent platforms and unloaded as Kieler
disembarked and suddenly he saw a way.

Inelegant,
he
thought,
but effective.

As the throng from the other trams moved toward the
exits and pressed around him, Kieler waited until the flow of traffic had put
several bodies between him and his tail and then, in a moment where two taller
men blocked line of sight, he dropped down to all fours and crawled.

He wound his way through the legs of the crowd over to
another tram waiting with its doors open and scuttled onto it, keeping his head
below the window level. The empty tram seemed to be waiting for a set departure
time, which was fortunate.

After half a minute, Kieler poked an eye up from
behind a seat and looked across the platform. Most of the current wave of
people had passed and his stoic tail was easy to spot, standing, halfway up the
stairs, looking down and around the momentarily less busy platform. Kieler
imagined the man shrugging, thought he saw the agent smirk, then turned and
continued dispassionately up the stairs.

There were other exits from the platforms up through
the hub to Plaza Floraneva and Kieler found one. He climbed stairs through the
interior of the black tower. The line of station doors emptied onto the center
of the west side of the triangular plaza. Kieler hovered around the
northernmost door and looked across the other station doors and east over the
plaza. There was no sign of his enigmatic shadow.

Just to be sure, he climbed to the second tier of
shops, found a quiet alcove and scouted the plaza below. Plaza Floraneva was jammed
with people. In the corners of the triangular plaza were monumental buildings
constructed when Avertori was in its prime, flourishing both culturally and
economically. All three structures were of such architectural magnificence that
it was a marvel of complacency how well the throngs of partiers could ignore
them.

 South, and to his right, was the seldom-used
theater, the Oraflora, named by the house he would be assuming leadership of
this evening, House Ortessi.

The Oraflora was open tonight. Run by the Cortattis,
who had taken it over when the babe Orlazrus Ortessi went missing (presumed
burned to death), the once famous playhouse was now infamous. Anyone older than
the takeover assumed the Cortattis were purposely discrediting the usurped
property. The play tonight was “
The War Tribes of Ardan
”. Where once
House Ortessi had accurately dramatized historical events, the Cortatti plays
tended to butcher history—with the emphasis on butchery.

The theater itself still presented a dramatic façade;
its three vertical marquees stretched skyward with luzhril spotlights already
ablaze. When the sun went fully down, the bold marquees would cast stark
shadows into the sky, contrasting the brilliantly lit marquees with the
darkness beyond. But the performance itself would be little attended, Kieler
knew.

Even less attended, in fact,
deserted,
would be
the edifice directly across the tri from him in the southeast corner, the
cathedral. Kieler didn’t know much of its original purpose—Movus hadn’t taught
him anything about it—but of the three corner buildings, it was the most
magnificent. Ornate, double flying buttresses adorned each of the six corners
of the structure, each buttress and the corner itself topped with escalating
towers, eighteen in all. A latticework dome topped the main nave and glittered
with oranges and reds as the setting sun refracted through the crystalline
panels.

It had been sealed off for as long as Kieler had
known. One day, he would like to see the inside.

The final structure, burgeoning with people, was the
Arena to his left. House Cortatti ran this place too, but in contrast to
Oraflora, they ran the Arena extremely well—from a business perspective.
Originally, it was a place of sporting contests for feats of might and
strategy, built in the same century as its two companion structures in opposite
corners of the Plaza.

Contests were still held there, but losers left dead
and winners only lived to fight again. Supposedly only violent criminals
sentenced to death ended up in the Arena. But Kieler knew better.

In his operations with the Coin, Kieler had
occasionally used the services of the Lurani brothers, who ran a smuggling ring
of medicine and medical supplies from the Glums. The Merckles, who had the
state-sanctioned monopoly on health care, had traced the Lurani’s down through
their own industrial spy network.

The Lurani brothers had ended their lives in a
dramatic but sadistic contest held in the very same edifice that Kieler was now
surveying. The contraption designed for their demise consisted of two separate
tanks with one brother chained to the bottom of each tank. Each brother had a
bucket and each tank had water running into it. The men could bail the water
out, but the contraption was designed to carry the water one brother bailed,
into the tank of the other brother. Eventually one drowned the other trying to
survive. Wracked with guilt, the surviving brother was eventually pitted
against another criminal and killed.

Their crime was far from violent. But the
interpretation by the Omeron appointed courts was that it was violence against
the people of Avertori in general by undermining their health care.

Kieler caught himself gritting his teeth and stopped.
Slink Squad had bought from the Lurani brothers. They had been good men with good
intentions. The Omeron needed to be taken down.

The ageless shadow that Kieler had ditched undoubtedly
worked for one of the Omeron families. Thankfully, Kieler saw no sign of him in
the plaza below.

He looked due east to where the Grand Stair climbed at
least fifty stories from the edge of Plaza Floraneva up to Garrist Ring. It was
a long climb. But the block-wide stair, adorned with statuary and cafes and
tall buildings up the middle of it, was far more difficult to watch than the
trams that ascended under the Stair. House Cortatti would be his primary
opponent. They knew why he was coming and what he looked like. If they could
stop him before the gala, he—and any claim Orlazrus Ortessi might have
made—would soon be forgotten.

The Grand Stair curved gently and majestically up to
the northeast and ended at the promenade of Garrist Ring. Up the centerline of
the Stair ran a stately line of towering buildings, each grand unto itself,
owned by Omeron families with sufficient status. Connecting each of them near
their tops was an exclusive private tram (for ruling family members only). The
tram ran from the Arena, across Floraneva to the first family office building,
and then up the Stair to each successive tower until it finally ran above the
only bridge to the Palace of the Executive Chair.

The nearest of these family headquarters, Vel-Taradan,
overlooked Plaza Floreneva. It consisted of a complex of three graceful towers
and belonged to House Vel. Kieler thought it the most desirable location since
it was nearest the fading beauty and bustle of Plaza Floreneva.

Looking to the top of House Vel’s three towers, Kieler
saw the private, suspended tram car (nicknamed the FamTram) leaving the station
at the top of one tower, probably taking a load of self-important dignitaries
up the stairs to the gala.

I wonder if Velator himself is aboard that tram,
Kieler thought. The head of house Vel had been
reclusive in Kieler’s lifetime, spending most of his time in the mountainous
city of Velakun from which House Vel originated. When Kieler was very young, he
had learned from his father the tales and histories of Velik, Velator’s
ancestor and the founder of Avertori some thousand years ago. It was Velik and
Boreas who reclaimed the city from the decay and wild creatures that infested
the ruins of the Dead Ones on the Isle of Threes.

Satisfied that he had crudely but effectively shaken
off his tail, Kieler worked his way north on the second tier of shops. The
arched facades surrounding the Plaza Floreneva had been designed to house
retail stores. In the flourishing activity of the growing city, this was to be
the heart of culture and commerce. The plan had succeeded marvelously—for a
while.

Now, Kieler noted one shop in three boarded up, with
crumbling tiles and unrepaired chips falling from the arches. The shops were
busy tonight, but that was an aberration.

Specialty clothing shops seemed to have suffered the
most; their faded signs hung over empty display windows.

A sign over a busy shop entryway read “Cortatti Arms”
and in the window a sign touting, “Buy the weapon of tonight’s battle: the new
Barcleaver!” These shops seemed prolific, though why someone who belonged to a
sub-house would need a three-foot long battle-blade and what good it would be
against the Cortatti’s magguns… well, there was a reason for the term “ignorant
masses”.

Before he reached the Arena, Kieler turned right and
descended to the Plaza level, striding east across the open plaza in front of
it. Myriad fountains and statues adorned the Plaza, but all the fountains were
dry, even on this festive eve, save the massive centerpiece of Floraneva. This
fountain consisted of several characters. Three shungvaal, the giant, horned
creatures of the sea, circled the scene within and spouted huge streams of water
toward the center. Back to back in the middle were larger-than-life depictions
of Velik and Boreas: Boreas hefting his famed spear and Velik with his bow
drawn back. Between the jetting shungvaal and the two heroes were grotesquely
distorted creatures: a gnarled grevon, legions of oversized slinks, and a dozen
monsters that seemed to be part building or vehicle and part animal.