Break the Chains

Chapter Twenty-Four

“Nouli’s name?” Ripka asked, taking a half-step backward.

The muscles of Kisser’s neck jumped and she closed the distance Ripka had put between them. “Yes. Tell me how you know of my uncle.”

Ripka licked her lips, resisting an urge to glance to Enard for guidance. She knew Detan’s story of Nouli’s exploits as well as he did. “Detan Honding told me of his inventions. Of his time spent in Valathea, and with Thratia Ganal when she took over the Saldive Isles.”

A soft sound escaped Nouli’s lips, something between a moan and a curse, and he shuffled away from them, covering half his face with one hand as he eased himself onto a bench with the other. He knocked piles of clothes to the ground, and didn’t seem to notice. Ripka’s stomach fell. This was the great Nouli Bern?

Kisser stepped to Ripka’s side and dropped her voice, nearly pressing her lips against Ripka’s ear as she whispered, “Do you have any idea what you’re doing to him?”

Ripka’s back stiffened at the insinuation that she meant Nouli harm. Enard placed his hand on Kisser’s arm and turned her, gently, toward him, his voice soft as silk. “Tell us.”

She snorted and shook him off. “Why would I talk to you, Glasseater?” She shooed them away. “Get out. Leave him in peace.”

Ripka locked her gaze on Nouli, on every deep line of his wizened face, trying to judge what he’d say, what he’d do. She wished Detan were here. He was better at reading people and adjusting schemes on the fly than she was.

Skies above, until a year ago she’d never needed to have schemes outside of the petty politics of the watch.

“We don’t mean any harm,” she said.

“It’s all right,” Nouli spoke to Kisser without looking at her. His shock had faded, his face slack. He appeared calm to her now, though she couldn’t tell if it was his strength or his panic that had fled him. “Let her speak her piece.”

Kisser huffed and crossed her arms. It was as much permission as Ripka could ever hope to get. Stifling an urge to shove Kisser aside and drop to her knees before Nouli, she cleared her throat and said, “I know you’ve been here a long time, Master Bern. Have you heard of Thratia Ganal’s seizure of Aransa?”

He wiped his hands on a clean cloth thrown over his shoulder and glanced at Kisser.

“Tell her what you want, Uncle, you’re the one who wanted to hear what she has to say.”

With a sigh he stood, shaky, and settled onto a stool behind the table, making a shield of his instruments. He gestured to a few crates scattered nearby. “Please, sit. I suspect this conversation will take longer than anticipated. Yes, I am aware of Ganal’s dictatorship in Aransa. What does it matter to you?”

“Aransa was my city… my home. Though I knew her rule would be with a firm hand, I had not guessed that she would go so far as to buck all imperial influence. She’s created a city-state for herself, independent of the governance of Valathea.”

“So she thinks,” Kisser scoffed.

“Hush,” Nouli said. “Please continue, Miss…?”

“Leshe,” she reminded him. Ripka took the proffered seat on an old crate, and Enard dragged over its twin to sit beside her.

Enard cleared his throat. “Forgive me, Master Bern, but before we continue it would be a comfort to know your mindset in regards to the exiled commodore. Were you friends?”

Nouli snorted. “Your comfort does not concern me. I will hear what you have to say, and I make no other consolations.”

Ripka narrowed her eyes upon the aging engineer. His fingers drummed incessantly on the top of his table, their movement blurring the hint of a tremble in his long limbs. His spectacles had slid down his nose, the tip of which was quite red, the vessels all around it burst near the surface. His swinging emotional state – his physical presentation – she’d seen those symptoms many times before. Kisser hovered close to him, fidgeting as if unsure what to do with her hands.

“Are you well?” Ripka asked.

“If I am ill, it is because I am sick of having my time wasted.”

The clearsky. The air heavy with mudleaf. Ripka couldn’t help but press. “I see. Perhaps you should be more careful in the sampling of your own wares?”

His eyes bulged. “Enough! My health is not for you to remark upon. Tell me why you’ve come or I will have Kisser toss you back in the well.”

Kisser flinched, a minute movement, but enough to cement Ripka’s suspicions. “You’re not really prisoners, are you?” She stood and leaned toward them, falling into her old role as investigator as easily as slipping on a favorite glove. “Both of you.” She tipped her head toward Kisser. “Your special privileges, your fear of real names.” She pointed to Nouli. “Your workshop, tucked away amongst the guards’ quarters and yet hidden from them still. This grating–” she gestured toward the metal mesh laid over the place where a window should be, a multitude of pipe mouths angling toward it to vent their fumes to the outdoors, “–it’s camouflaged on the outside, isn’t it? Not all the guards know you’re here – Warden Baset certainly doesn’t. So how? Who’s sheltering you, Nouli? Who’s funding your sordid concoctions? And why are you making them here?”

He’d gone pale as chalk dust. Even the red marring his nose had faded.

“That’s enough.” Kisser grabbed her arm. Ripka let the woman’s fingers bite down into the muscle beneath her flesh, but planted her feet when Kisser started to drag her toward the door. “Back to your cell, captain, and I better not see you at my breakfast table, understand?”

“The others don’t know, do they? Forge and Honey and Clink – pits below, I’d thought Clink was your ringleader. But they’re puppets for you, aren’t they? You’re jerking their strings to provide you protection, to shield you from suspicion. I wonder what they’d say, if they knew their leader wasn’t even a convict?”

Kisser struck her, a burning streak of pain lancing across her jaw. Ripka jerked back, twisted her arm free, and brought her hands up to shield her face from further attack. Enard slipped to his feet, falling in alongside her, his presence a silent threat. Kisser’s chest heaved with angry breaths, hair hiding half her face.

“Tell her,” Nouli said.

“No.”

“She’s gotten this far.” Nouli rubbed his cheeks with both hands, as if he could massage the blood back into them. “You’ll either have to tell her, or kill her, and I for one could use another ally. Especially one as observant as Miss Leshe.”

Ripka watched in morbid fascination as Kisser mulled over the decision, subconsciously rolling her shoulders to loosen them for a fight if it came to that. After a breathless pause, Kisser’s posture deflated.

“If I’d known what trouble you’d be, I’d have encouraged that songbird to shank you. Sit.” Kisser pointed to the crate. Ripka obliged. The woman was ready to talk, and she wasn’t about to be quarrelsome until she’d heard what she’d had to say. Enard settled in alongside her.

Nouli said, “Allow me to explain. I am the one insisting, after all.”

“Go on then, you fool old man.” Kisser crossed her arms and slouched with her back against the wall, angling herself to keep all three of them in her line of sight.

“If you are here to ask my help, then I assume you know of my… reputation.”

Ripka inclined her head. “The Century Gates.”

His eyes closed, a brief fluttering, as if recalling the name brought the image so strongly to the forefront of his mind that he could not resist basking in it for a moment. “Yes. My Gates. Great soaring walls of granite filled in with weaker stone, buttressed so high the tops of them scraped the empress’s floating palace. I built them to keep Valathea’s inner heart strong and safe for a hundred years, sheltered from monsoon winds and invasion alike. Until that skies-cursed Honding blew a hole in the side of one, precisely where a key support leaned its weight.”

Conversations she’d had with Detan, late at night when maybe the liquor had flowed a little too freely, came to mind. How he’d described his escape from the Bone Tower. How he’d run in blind fear, full of nothing but animal panic to escape. He hadn’t found out until much later that the wall he’d destroyed was a part of the famous Century Gates. Hadn’t found out until later that innocents had died in that conflagration. She knew what was coming. Tried to keep her face neutral as he pressed on.

His fingers curled into fists upon his lap, his lips drew thin. “A large section of the wall came down, crushing noble houses that had been built too close for my liking. Hundreds died. I’d seen the firebombs we used in war, of course, had designed many myself, and the Gates had been constructed to withstand them, but the rending strength of that explosion… I saw pieces of the rubble, later. Twisted. The very grain of the rock metamorphose into some other stone. I could never have planned for such a force. And yet I was responsible for it.”

“It was not your fault–” Kisser began, but Nouli held up a hand, silencing her.

“Maybe. But it was my fault I could not see how to rebuild it.”

Kisser looked away, bunching the loose cloth of her jumpsuit in both fists. Nouli’s gaze drifted, snagged on the tools spread across his desk as if he hadn’t seen them before.

“Your age…” Ripka murmured. He only nodded.

“I see. But the walls were rebuilt–”

“Yes,” he reached out and pat Kisser’s arm. “She was always my finest apprentice.”

“I’m no engineer.” Kisser shook her head. “My specialty is chemistry.”

“You give yourself too little credit,” Nouli said. “After the wall was repaired, rumors of my absence from the project spread. The empress grew worried. How could she publicly hire a man with a reputation for failure? How could she hire a man when her courtiers whispered that his mind had been demolished along with his finest creation? It helped not at all that I began forgetting names publicly. And so she ignored me.”

“Until she sent you away to rot.”

“Kanaea, please–”

Kisser’s rounded cheeks flamed red. “No names!”

Nouli waved a dismissive hand. “Calm yourself, girl, we are beyond such concerns now.”

“He is your real uncle?” Ripka asked, weathering Kisser’s glare.

“I am that.” Nouli rose from his seat and fussed with the instruments strewn across his table. “My empress sent Kanaea with me into exile to keep an eye on me, and to assist me in my efforts to cure my mind. And to remind me that she could do anything at all she liked with my family.”

“I insisted,” Kisser retorted.

“My dear, she expected you to.”

She snorted and turned away from him, crossing her arms so tightly the force dragged taut lines into the material of her jumpsuit. Ripka wondered at her intentions – at her need for both independence for herself, and to look after her uncle. Ripka could not even recall the names of her aunts and uncles, so brief her time living near her family had been. What life had led Kisser – Kanaea – into such loyalty for her family? Ripka decided she’d do well to try and keep the woman on her good side. They might need her expertise.

“And so all of this,” Ripka prompted, extending her arm to encompass the accoutrements scattered over the table, “is the result of your research? But why distribute the clearsky? What does the empress want with a petty street-drug? Aside from annoying Radu Baset, which is an endeavor I heartily approve of.”

Nouli grunted a laugh. “Baset is a gnat, not worth the wave of my hand. This… keeps me lucid, for a while, a step toward clarity. And the empress believes it will help her deal with the Scorched problem.”

Ripka exchanged an anxious glance with Enard. “And just what problem would that be?”

“Can you not guess? The empress is tired of her colonies acting up. The loss of Aransa’s selium mines annoyed her greatly, and she fears the other cities of the Scorched may take Thratia’s cue. She cares little for the middling cities, of course, but to lose control of the selium-producing cities? She won’t have it. Selium is the trade-blood of Valathea. A few uppity city states will not stand in her way.”

Ripka swallowed, the dryness in her throat as rough as sand. “And how does this substance of yours fit into this?”

Nouli passed his hand over the air above his contraption, as if caressing a lover’s back. “Imagine a Fleetman who needs half the sleep of a normal man. A Fleetman with sight keen beyond normal reckoning, and energy that never fails when he calls upon it. That’s clearsky. That is the future of all of this.”

“You’re experimenting. On the prisoners.” Her skin grew cold and clammy. Visions of Detan’s sparse tales from his time spent in the Bone Tower danced behind her eyes.

“Nothing as heinous as all that.” He brushed aside her concerns with a wave of his hand. “These people ask for my formulations. They come here without having had the chance to properly come down from their previous preferred methods of… deterring reality, I suppose you could say. Certainly some of them find solace in that mind-numbing barbarism Baset peddles, but I offer them a better alternative. I mean no harm, Miss Leshe. I mean only to enhance their minds and bodies.”

Despite herself, her lip curled in disgust. “At the risk of addiction. At the risk of… of skies know what. You say it grants clarity of mind, but how long does that last? What is the down slope like? I’ve scraped many a man off the street twitching and drooling, scratching themselves raw because they can’t afford another hit of whatever back alley apothik got them hooked in the first place.”

Enard squeezed her arm, hard. She cut herself off, swallowing anger.

“Have you now?” Kisser said, her round eyes locked upon Ripka.

“Have I what?”

“Scraped many an addicted man off the street.”

“I cared for Aransa. I helped where I could,” she said, hoping her anger would cover her anxiety. She’d given them her name, she was not yet sure she wanted to offer up her old profession as well.

“Such a good little citizen.” Kisser tapped her lips with one finger, thinking. “I wonder what it was you stole to end up here, hmm?”

“You said no details.”

“Hah,” Nouli cut it, his hoary brows lifted with curiosity. “I think we’ve been pretty free with details thus far. You know our business. What did an upstanding woman like yourself do to get locked in with the likes of us?”

“Or are you really a prisoner?” Kisser’s hand dropped to her hip, an instinctual grab for a weapon she no longer carried.

“Tell them,” Enard said, his voice strangely resigned.

“Shipment details,” she admitted, glancing down as she spoke, the way Detan had taught her to hide any tension that might creep across her face. What she was telling them now was only a half-truth, and she knew from long experience that she was poor at disguising her expression. “An imperial manifest for a Fleet cargo vessel – the precise locations and nature of that cargo.”

“The manifest alone?” Nouli asked, leaning toward her. “To what purpose? I suppose you must have passed it along to some of those men you swept out of gutters to do the real thieving work.”

“The cargo was people, Master Bern. Selium sensitives of deviant abilities, being kidnapped and shipped off to Valathea to undergo experimentation at the empress’s behest. Think what you will of me, but my actions are not petty. I passed this information along to those who might be able to do something about it before I was captured. I pray to the sweet skies they found a way.”

“Such a noble soul.” Kisser rolled her eyes and slumped back against the wall. “If your story can be believed.”

She spread her palms in supplication to the sky. “Believe it or not, but I did get myself sent to the Remnant with a purpose.”

“We had planned on capture,” Enard said. “I am familiar with the workings of these things. The stealing of the list was for good, yes, but also to be sure Valathea would wish to punish us dearly – without execution being a legal option.”

“Clever,” Nouli mused.

“Short-sighted,” Kisser said. “You came here to find my uncle, well, you’ve done so. Now what?”

Ripka hesitated, not wishing to lay too much of her true plans at their feet. But she could not remain coy much longer – Kisser was liable to drop them both in the well at any moment.

“Tell me, Master Bern, what is your goal at the empress’s behest? What would she use such soldiers for?”

He shrugged as if the empress’s end designs mattered not a whit in all the world to him. “The re-taking of the Scorched, the crushing of Thratia, the bringing to heel of Hond Steading. She believes she’s let the Scorched’s native cities go to seed too long. They need to be reined in, their courses righted. Their heads of state replaced with her chosen, their flimsy democracies cut down in place of heartier stock.”

“And you’d experiment upon the prisoners to fulfill your goals?” she asked, unable to hide her disgust, despite her better judgment screaming at her not to antagonize the very man whose assistance she’d come to beg. But what benefit would he provide, if he were no better than the whitecoats? She had to ask. Had to know what his intentions were – what he was willing to break to achieve his goals.

“My preferences are not in play here. Though I have small freedoms other inmates do not, you can see my hands are tied. I do as my empire bids me.”

“As do their whitecoats. And I’ve seen the gleam of passion in their eyes. Do you not love your work as they do, no matter the form it takes?”

“Do not compare me to those perversions!” He slapped a hand against his desk. “Do I love to practice science? Yes, of course. I am full of questions only experimentation may answer. But science is neutral – it does nothing but raise questions. How one goes about collecting those answers is a function only of human folly and evil. Or, in my case, imperial threat. You should know something of the business of asking difficult questions, Miss Leshe. Or were your efforts to steal information always humane?”

She winced. “Once, to save a great many people…”

“Then you know the nature of this burden. If I were given freedom to investigate these questions of mental alacrity as I saw fit, then I would use only free and informed volunteers, not addicts desperate for their next fix. But the empire binds me. And even still, I have caught and accidentally murdered a great many rats to be certain I was not poisoning anyone.”

“I am offering you that freedom, Nouli. Will you take it?”

Nouli looked up from his work, a sheen of hunger in his eyes so profound it made Ripka jerk back in her seat. “My dear, I will take anything that gets me off this cursed rock. The empress has promised me release upon my success. If you have come bearing a better offer, I suggest you make it now.”

Was this worth the risk? If Nouli turned on them now, much more would be lost than a chance to out-strategize Thratia. He and Kanaea could twist their connections to keep Ripka and Enard on the Remnant indefinitely. Could even prepare to capture Detan, when he came for them. Could hand any information Nouli managed to weasel out of them straight to the empress.

But they’d come this far, and had been lucky enough to find the old engineer somewhat sound of mind, if drifting in moral compass.

“If you agree to assist Dame Honding in defense of her city, I can return you to the Scorched before the monsoons come.”

Nouli sucked his teeth; Kisser let out a low hiss.

“You can’t be serious,” Kisser said.

“I am. Arrangements have been made. I will share no more information, for obvious reasons. Know that I am serious. That I have implanted myself within these walls for the singular purpose of extricating you. Hond Steading requires your expertise. Will you give it?”

He licked his lips, a fresh gleam in his eye – something beyond hunger to be free, something so profound it brought dampness to his eyes, filling his slightly rheumy orbs with a soft, glimmering sheen. “If you can free me, Miss Leshe, I will be forever in your debt. Yours and your friend’s, if he is indeed involved.”

“He is.”

“But monsoon season is coming now.” Kisser cocked her head to one side as if she could smell the approaching rains. “How can you promise this?”

“No details.” Ripka allowed herself a small smile at Kisser’s scowl over hearing her words thrown back at her. “Just be ready to flee at any moment, to jump when I say so and ask no questions. And–” she swallowed, knowing she took a risk pushing her luck, “–be prepared to leave this nonsense behind.” She jerked her chin to the clearsky distillation system.

Nouli wrung his hands in the towel slung over his shoulder, gaze darting between his work and the metal mesh over his window – that sliver of freedom. “You will have work for me in Hond Steading? I will not be left idle?”

“Better work, more suited to your talents. Not this twisted dabbling.”

“My mind…” he protested.

“You will be allowed to continue pursuit of a cure, and to make what you need to keep yourself lucid in the meantime. But only for yourself.”

“That is acceptable,” he said, nodding slowly.

“Uncle, please, we cannot trust her.”

“Hush, girl. You require only that I be prepared to flee when the time comes? There is no other task of me? Nothing that could compromise my position here if your promises turn out to be little more than hot air masquerading as selium?”

“There is one thing. Warden Baset has set me the task of sussing out the source of clearsky here on the island, and I am certain I’m not the only one. If you were to be thrown into tighter security – or executed – before rescue arrives, then that would throw a spanner in things, wouldn’t it? Can you cease production for a while? Claim illness, or the requirement of deeper research to your masters?”

“Hmm.” He dragged his fingers through the tangled whiskers of his scraggly grey beard. “I could, for a short time, but there is the trouble of my supplies.”

“Supplies?”

“Guards loyal to the empress slip in the raw ingredients I need for my experiments and collect my letters to the empress. One such transaction is scheduled to occur tomorrow evening.”

Ripka rubbed her temples with her thumbs. “Why this shielding from Baset? Why does the empress not want him in on your doings? Surely wider distribution through the warden himself would allow you greater success in your… research.”

“Indeed. But she is not entirely satisfied with Baset’s loyalty. She fears that booze-bloated old man is taking bribes from powers growing within the Scorched. Paranoid, no doubt. The empress is forever seeing daggers in her shadow. But, nevertheless, we have been sworn to keep our activities secret from the warden, lest he sell off my research to another bidder.”

“Very well,” Ripka said as she rose to her feet. She ached all over, but held her head high, her back straight. She needed her body language, her tone and her words, to all work together. To convince these two that she was in charge. That she alone knew the right path to take.

It was just too pits-cursed bad she hadn’t a clue what the best course of action was.

“If I may make a suggestion,” Enard said as he rose alongside her. She inclined her head to him. “If the supply exchange must be made tomorrow, then allow us to make it. We will claim the Lady Kanaea has taken ill, and Master Bern is too busy tending to her to make the meeting himself. Surely with some parchment from you confirming the fact – they know your handwriting, yes? – there will not be too much trouble.”

Nouli snorted. “And what would a couple of petty thieves know about making clandestine exchanges, hmm?”

Kisser actually laughed – a sharp, abrupt sound, as if she were trying to keep it back and choked on it instead. “Tall, dark, and useful here has the background to handle it. Valet for the Glasseaters, were you?”

He bowed a touch from the waist. “Something like that, lady.”

“You’d never know by looking at him,” Nouli said.

Ripka gave Enard the side-eye. “I believe that’s the point.”

“Indeed,” Enard said, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, the only sign he’d had yet to show of being uncomfortable in talk of his long ago past.

“I’ll give you this chance, Miss Leshe.” Nouli flicked a wrist at them in dismissal. “If you botch even the smallest detail, you will have no agreement from me, understand? I cannot put my freedom, nor my neck, in the hands of an incompetent.”

“I understand, Master Bern.”

“Excellent. Allow Kanaea to see you back to your cells, she will debrief you on what is required along the way. I will have a letter sent to you by the midday meal – beg off sick for the morning shift, if you can.”

Ripka thought of Kisser pretending stomach pangs the first time she’d shared a meal with the rest of the women and suppressed a smile. So that had been a meeting day, too. How often were they, truly? That had only been two days ago.

“Anything else?” Kisser asked, brows raised as she peeled herself off the wall and angled toward the door.

“Just one thing,” Ripka mused, trailing her toward the exit. “Could you please inform Misol that there’s no need to keep spying on me? I find her rather unsettling.”

Kisser blinked at her. “Who?”

“Misol… The guard who minds the yellowhouse.”

Kisser rolled a shoulder and swung open the door. “Never been there. Don’t know what her trouble is. Come along now, we already strained our time frame and our guard escort is going to have his knackers wound right up his rear.”

Ripka trailed Kisser out, scarcely listening to what the woman said as she briefed Enard on the arrangements for the exchange.

The yellowhouse had nothing to do with Nouli. With the clearsky.

So then, who was Misol? And what in the sweet skies were they doing out there?