Ercan frowns. The Kruk kneels down on it’s forelegs and begins to treat Fehris’ wounds with its long, antiseptic undertongue. Fehris looks and then looks away with a grimace. The smell is rather intense, but if Fehris is well enough to be disgusted, I think he’ll recover.
The knife at Ercan’s chest chimes. Ercan stands and quiets it, and then takes me over to one side of the garden. “He’ll be all right?”
“I think so. It looks like your Kruk knows what to do.” Out in the street, other Kruks are dispersing the crowd. “Look, I should go after her.”
He nods. “I assumed. Be careful. I’ll figure out how to tell this to the Council, if I can. Frankly, the last thing they will want to hear from me is something like this. I’ll do what I can—maybe I can get to Chair Shoi alone. You’ll make contact with your Earth patron, too?”
I nod. “The opening to the corpse road is down in the Old City. I’ll get there. It’ll take a few hours.” Yet another Kruk hands me a small bag of gold bars to pass along to Capone. I look over, and see that Fehris’ wounds are covered over with a glistening gel that’s beginning to dry. “Don’t give the ship back to Nadrune, all right?”
Ercan smiles, and I can see how tired he is in the lines around his eyes. “It’ll be hard, but I’ll try and resist the urge.”
• • •
I search through the night, by the light of all the moons. I get out of the residential area and down into the Old City. I reach out through Semper’s knife looking for power signatures, resonances, anything that would give me a sense of where she passed but I can’t find her trail. There are creatures moving under the ground that read strangely, large and strong and not quite sentient, maybe looking through the old sewer systems for replacements to the old power conduits they’d grown used to sucking on. I try and avoid the fights and the looting. I duck into alleys and take my fur black to dodge street patrols, both Akarii and random gangs of humans or Stona or Talovians looking for trouble. I get a rooftop view of the Talovian riots in the Stellar Downs, the place where Tamaranth’s famous World Market used to be held in Dekheret’s time, and I hear explosions in the distance that turn out to be the seawall being blown—by who I don’t know. Parts of the city start to fill with water from the tidal lagoons.
I come across the site of one fight that might have been Akarii and might not have—dead men are scattered over the long length of an alley, and a factory has collapsed and burned, setting fire to an entire block. A ragtag mix of people are drawing buckets of water out of the canal to stop the smoldering, and the cobblestones are cracked and throbbing with aetherial resonance. A blinded man speaks crazily about some terrible bird, which makes me think Akarii, and in fact there are these strange, black feathers being scattered across the road by the night breezes. Their edges are sharp, like the blades of knives. But I can’t know that is has anything to do with Kjat. Tamaranth is large and ancient, old walking cities have been settled down into the mud since far back in prehistory, long before Dekheret’s time, and there are many things here that we don’t understand.
As the sun begins to rise I duck into the opening of a corpse road I know, inside a trash can that’s back in an alley behind a noodle stand I frequent.
If you’re planning on using it, by the way, it helps if you dump the garbage out first.
I’ve brought a human with me, a man vaguely Capone’s size. I find him outside the gates of the Stellar Downs, unconscious and bleeding pretty significantly from the head and gut.
The fact that he’s dying makes me feel a little less guilty for what I’m planning to do to him. But not much.
The corpse road is dark tonight, dark and damp and it smells of rotting fish. Maybe that’s from the can, but it stays with me and gets worse as I go. There are more branches than ever, even from the last time I visited—I’m wondering if all of the connections with present-day Earth are pulling the two worlds even closer together. I have to sense my way carefully, carrying the bleeding human over my shoulder.
My secondfather told me that we navigate through the roads the way birds will navigate across continents and wind currents, and maybe that's true. Some branches of the roads just feel differently to me than others. Some feel welcoming, some make you feel like you’re being watched, and others raise up the hair on my back.
Something passes me in the dark, maybe a Buhr, maybe not. I hear whispers. Somewhere someone is crying.
There are a lot of choices at the edge of Capone’s cell. The road fractures into different slices of years—some of them have him in it, some of them don’t. Some of them open into times closer to present day, when this place becomes a tourist attraction. Some of them already have me in it, and I don’t need a conversation with myself—those are just frustrating.
I know all of my jokes. I can’t stand how stubborn I am.
I leave the human in the road and push through into Capone's cell. It’s night on the island prison. Everything is lit yellow with the dim glow of the old lights.
Capone is sitting up on his bunk. His hair sticks out from the sides of his head as though he’s been sleeping. “Beast,” he breathes. “You smell like the ocean. The real goddamn ocean. That’s not a compliment.”
“Mr. Capone.” I say.
“Did you deliver my ship, Beast? Or are you back here with another fucking excuse.” He talks through a stiff jaw, and one side of his face looks slack.
“It’s time, Al," I say. "Time to go."
He takes a deep breath. “That’s Mr. Capone to you, Blackie.”
I tell him the plan.
The corpse road near Sartosh’s home in San Francisco will be our pickup point, I say, after he's talked with his men. He has more resources in Chicago, but it’s the best I can do—the Bay area is some sort of nexus, and the next closest road I know about opens up in Singapore.
I give him a date, three months into his future. I lay out the gold bars on his bed so he can see them. He picks one up and hefts it, thinking.
He sighs. “All right, Beast. I got nothing to lose, I guess. I got a guard here who’ll get the word out. I don’t know if Nitti and Ricca are going to think I’m fucking nuts or what. You come back for me personally in what, a week?”
“A week.”
“I’ll tell them.”
I step out of the cell and onto the road, and I sift through the openings to one a week ahead—something you can only do when working with another world's past, by the way. I’ve never been able to do this for my own world. I pick up the guy I brought along and squeeze back in.
Night again. Capone’s asleep. I wake him, and he sits up, blearily. He stands, and I place the guy into his bed in his place.
“Who’s the poor schmuck?” Capone says. I shake my head.
I take Capone’s hand and step back through into the road, and then we turn to watch. I need to pull him out of the timeline before the shift will happen.
I told Ercan that the timeline is pretty resilient. That’s a bit of an understatement. You can hang around the margins of it if you like, the way Sartosh does, but for the big stuff there’s no changing major world events. I couldn’t, for example, go into Earth’s past and kill Hitler when he was a boy—someone inconsequential would step in, grow a little moustace, and take over.
As we look on, the body in the bed becomes Capone’s body, down to the scar on his lower back, the matted hair, and the syphilis rampaging through his brain. The existing wounds heal and the good news is that the human will live now, at least for a time.
The bad news is he won’t actually have much of a life. Capone leaves prison for the hospital, and the hospital for his house near Mhiahmi Beach.
He’ll be insane from the syphilis and dead from a heart attack within ten years, and he’ll never remember he actually had another name, and came from another world.
“Jesus H. Christ,” says Capone. “Jesus H. fucking Christ.”
• • •
I get Capone back to Ercan’s house by lunchtime and pass him to the Kruks. He’s freaked out and disoriented, and coming face to faces with a Kruk in his first Kirythian hour doesn’t help things, but he’ll calm down soon, I suspect. I find Ercan asleep in the chair under the raised communication cage. There were are dark circles under his eyes from a lack of sleep, blood spots high on his scalp from where the wig feeds, and a plate of some green mushrooms half-eaten on a small table beside him.
I wonder how long Humans are used to staying awake at a stretch, but don’t want to ask. It might make them feel fragile.
I put my hand on the man’s shoulder and he startles awake.
“How did it go?”
Ercan sighs, and then stands and stretches. “Nadrune has Chancellor Aart now. We heard the news in Council. Privately, Chair Shoi is with me, but the other Kerul Council members have voted to sanction me for the podship and the preliminary assault at sea, so what’s that Earth saying? I’m up a shit creek without a boat? They told me to give the podship back, to send you back to Nadrune, and I told them to go fuck themselves. I’ve been specifically instructed to lay low, to do nothing, to take no further action the Family concludes all deliberations and sets final policy on the matter.”
"Mircada said you were good at politics."
"I'm fucking brilliant at politics. So is Nadrune."
“So what do we do?”
Ercan picks a mushroom up off the plate and chews on it. “We keep to our plan, I think. I did make contact with one of the City Councilors, and she’s agreed to meet with us. Is your gangster with us? Can we get the rest of Earth men through today?”
I nod. “Assuming they’re there, yes. I can bring them through at the same spot I brought Capone.”
Ercan offers me a mushroom, and I realize I haven’t eaten for a day. Sometimes you forget with the aether. I take it. It’s pretty bad, but I’m starving. I'm reaching for another one when the knife at my chest chimes.
I draw it and let it the transmission shape around me.
What I see makes my fur stand on end.
It’s Nadrune, standing on the steps of the Chancellor’s Residence. Semper stands off to one side with a Buhr, looking vaguely embarrassed, and behind them is a group of marines in formation.
But it’s Mircada that gets my attention. She stands beside Nadrune with her hands bound.
She looks battered and exhausted, and my heart leaps in my chest.
“Hulgliev,” Nadrune sends. “You cannot hide from me and still carry my sage’s knife. I require your attendance. Kindly join me in my new residence. And come alone, without any of those Kerul people with you.”
Nadrune reaches over, grabs Mircada by the arm and draws her closer. Smoke rises from Mircada's clothes.
“I have spent enough time speaking with these Kerul already,” Nadrune says with a smile.
31: Mircada
“H
e’ll come? You’re sure of it?” Bakron asks.
“He’ll come. I don’t know how or when. But he’ll come,” she says.
“What makes you so sure?”
Mircada studies the man in the light that comes in through the tall, narrow windows in the tower room. Down below, she can hear the sounds of the Tel Kharan army, running through another tedious drill—the electric crackle of a matrix snapping into place, the hard calls from each of the sergeants or whatever they were berating people into formation. The hiss and clank of their armor.
What would it be like to control all of that, she wonders. What could she accomplish? She absently rubs her arm, where Nadrune’s burns are still sore. She’d like to find out.
“You came to me, Bakron. What makes
you
so sure?” In the room there isn’t much—a few small tables, some leather chairs. There’s a fire in the grand fireplace and there would be more light, if Bakron’s men hadn’t been overeager in shutting down all of the power grids. What did that buy them, anyway, except inconvenience? They are high up in a tall, spindly tower of the elaborate Chancellor’s Residence, and with the elevator out it’s reached only by a narrow, winding staircase.
Granted, the view is incredible.
If she turns a circle, she can see all the way out to the Mercy in the open sea outside the mouth of the lagoon, the gleaming Alabaster Tower, all of Hadron’s Bane and Hadron’s Lie, the Stellar Downs, the flooding Old City, and a view of the seven residential districts and the ridgeline beyond it where all the super-rich live.
She wonders if Ercan and Blackwell are watching her in return, from one of those telescopes Ercan keeps on his terrace.
The Akarii marine grimaces, and takes another drink of wine from an antique silver goblet. It bends in his grip, and Mircada wonders if he ever takes off that armor of his. He has a ring around his head from where the helmet plastered his long, dark hair to his skull.
He doesn’t reply.
“I’ll tell you what I told Nadrune, then. Talk to your sage—the Hulgliev culture is all about their women. They have very few of them. They’re matriarchal, their whole religion is based around symbols of women, their whole patrimony revolves around ways to protect the female.
"I’ve worked hard to bind that creature to me, physically and mentally. I’m his woman now, Bakron, and he will come to protect me.”
Bakron snorts. “If you call that work.”
“I won’t say it’s without its…benefits.” She hates the way her voice sounds now, and how easy the words come.
She is good at negotiating, manipulating, at politics and she knows is, and yet there is a part of her that isn’t so dispassionate, so calculating. Part of her that's still human. For such a large creature with so many sharp edges, Blackwell was a surprisingly careful and delicate man. If she is completely honest with herself, she has to admit that—despite her initial intentions—the binding, if that’s what she’s calling it, has gone a bit both ways.
Even now a part of her wonders where he is and what he is doing.
Was
he watching? Was he thinking about her?
She puts that line of thinking out of her mind. She’s still her mother’s daughter.