Inherit the Flame

Chapter Eight

Ripka was being followed. At first she suspected the watchers, tailing her to report back to their captain, but not a hint of blue flashed in the corner of her eye. No, someone else was shadowing Ripka’s heels, and it wasn’t likely to be anyone friendly.

She didn’t dare pick up her pace or start weaving through streets, lest she alert her tail that they’d been spotted. She kept her gait a slow, easy stroll. Just a woman new to the city out for a little exploring. Anticipation tingled in her fingertips. She wished she had her weapons – a cutlass, a baton, anything really. But she was no longer a watcher, and normal citizens didn’t roam the streets armed to the teeth.

Despite her unease, a little thrill went through her. It’d been a long time since she’d played any flavor of cat-and-mouse game. She meant to win.

The street opened up into a stall market, hot spices and pungent dyes heavy on the air. She cut close to the right-hand stalls, weathering the clamor of excited vendors with polite, but firm indifference. She had no interest in their goods, she just wanted to see what her follower would do in a denser crowd.

The crowd congealed behind her as she passed, as it always did in busy marketplaces, but this had a different feel to it, a touch of tension. Someone was moving quickly back there, trying to keep Ripka in their sight. She grinned a little, pretended to finger a light-woven scarf, then stepped into the narrow space between two stalls, flicking her gaze back the way she’d come. A hint of an arm as a person – by build she suspected a woman – slithered back into the crowd. Nothing recognizable. Nothing even inherently threatening. But that arm had been clothed in russet, not watcher blue.

While her follower was busy avoiding Ripka’s backward stare, she slipped behind a pile of rugs and darted into a side-alley, drawing raised eyebrows from the rug seller, but nothing more. Back pressed against the stone of the alley wall, she waited. A smear of a shadow approached, movements halting and furtive. The shadow stopped to finger the same rug Ripka had.

The shadow drew close. Ripka tensed. An arm swung into the alley and Ripka was upon it in a second, yanked hard on the forearm and pivoted, swinging the woman like a club into the alley wall.

She smacked the stone with a grunt and a yelp of surprise, bush of pale blonde hair catching some of the dust that showered down upon her. Ripka’s eyes widened.

“Honey!”

She released her and stepped back, wary. Honey was her ally – or had been, in the Remnant – but the woman’s lust for violence wasn’t something to be ignored. Ripka wouldn’t have been surprised at all if Honey’d decided to hunt Ripka through the streets, just for fun.

“What are you doing following me like that?”

Honey peeled herself off the wall with a little grunt and adjusted her clothes, wiping away grit and bits of slime as best she could.

“I was bored,” she said in her whisper-soft rasp. “Dame Honding says I’m not to play with the knives, they’re for the kitchen staff.”

Ripka swallowed a laugh. “Well, she’s not wrong. Did I hurt you?”

Honey’s eyes widened as she prodded at the forearm Ripka had yanked on. “Just a little bruise.”

“I’m sorry about that, I didn’t know it was you.”

“I don’t mind.” She lapsed into her usual silence, watching Ripka with those wide, reverent eyes. Honey, bored. In a city of hundreds of thousands. Ripka swallowed. In bringing Honey here she had, inadvertently, released a viper into a nest of pinkie rats.

Before they had arrived at the city, Ripka had made sure Honey had a new set of clothes outside of the worn old jumpsuit the prison had given her. They were a little big; the new clothes hung down around her body making her look like an underfed urchin.

“Hey, you two!” The proprietor of the rug stall stuck his head down the alley, pinched eyes narrowed with suspicion. “I don’t like no one sneaking around my goods, understand? Get lost a’fore I call the watch.”

Honey began to hum softly to herself.

“Took a wrong turn. Don’t mean any trouble!” Ripka grabbed Honey by the wrist and yanked her along the alley to the other side. This street was quieter, a residential neighborhood with a sparse scattering of foot traffic. Ripka huffed the warm desert air and breathed out with a heavy sigh.

“Honey,” she began haltingly. “This city is in danger, and I have a lot of work to do to try and keep it safe. You–” she bit her lip, cutting off what she was going to say: you can’t keep dogging my heels. What else was Honey going to do? This wasn’t a woman who made easy friends, and for some reason she’d taken a liking to Ripka. “You want to help me?”

Honey visibly brightened. “What do I do?”

Ripka knew of Honey’s more violent skills, but the fact remained that she hadn’t a clue how the woman had come to be the way she was. What Honey’s life had been before the Remnant was a mystery to Ripka, but she might yet be harboring some skills that could be of use.

“What did you used to do, before we met?”

She frowned. “Hung with Clink and the girls.”

“Yes, but, before that – before the Remnant?”

Honey buttoned up her lips and just stared. Ripka knew better than to think that it was because she didn’t understand.

“All right then, you don’t have to tell me. I have to go and stake a place out. It’s watcher-work, but I think you could help. All you have to do is be quiet, and remember everything you see and hear. Can you do that?”

Honey, always a riveting conversationalist, nodded.

They found the bright berry cafe at the end of the market, tucked under a faded garnet overhang in the shadow of Hond Steading’s forum, a place the Dame had built to allow the intellectuals of her city to debate the problems of the time.

Ripka hadn’t known what to expect, really. The taverns of Aransa that had sold Renold Grandon’s honey liqueur, hiding weapons of Thratia’s loyalists in the bellies of the crates, had been middling places. Places where the working class of Aransa gathered to drink, gamble, and talk out their worries. Bright Eyes, as the cafe’s slapdash painted sign declared itself, was packed with men and women whose nails Ripka found suspiciously clean.

Small round tables spilled out into the street, barely large enough to support two of the small sienna-glazed mugs of tea the cafe sold. Patrons leaned over their steaming mugs, either engaged in animated conversation with their partners or bent over sheaths of ragged-edged papers. The tannic-sweet aroma of the tea was so heavy on the air that Ripka felt more alert just by taking a deep breath.

A harried waitress emerged from the cafe’s doors, spotted Ripka and Honey standing there, and bustled right up to them. She’d piled her hair atop her head and speared both sides with two charcoal pencils. She bared her teeth at them in a forced smile.

“Got a table around back that just opened up. You want it?”

“Sure,” Ripka said.

The waitress turned on her heel so sharp she’d make a watcher look sloppy, and stormed the doors of her cafe. They were deposited at a tiny round table with precariously high stools on the cafe’s back patio. The waitress vanished, returned with a couple of matched cups and saucers, and hit them with a hard stare.

“You want it hot?”

“Uh, sure,” Ripka said.

The waitress snorted, disappeared, and returned with a piping hot pitcher full of bright eye berry tea. She doled out both mugs, then dashed them off with something from an amber glass bottle. Something that, as soon as it hit the hot liquid, sent up a steaming curl of biting alcohol. Ripka wrinkled her nose.

“What’s that?”

The waitress scowled. “That’s your heat. First tea refills are free, rest cost you a small copper grain. Want any more heat, and it’s double that. Cause any trouble, you’re banned for life.”

“Lot of people cause trouble here?”

The waitress puffed a curl of hair from her eyes and pursed her lips like she’d kissed a cactus. “Lady, there’s nothing worse for trouble than a couple of bright-upped brainiacs.”

With that pronouncement, she swept from the patio and left Ripka and Honey alone with their drinks. Ripka gave hers a tentative sniff. Bright eye berry was a common enough staple at all watcher station houses. She’d never been a regular drinker herself, she preferred her teas heavy with spice, but the bright eye taste never quite managed to offend her. She took a sip. Couldn’t much taste the sweetness of the tea over the acrid bite of the dash of whisky.

Honey stared at her cup like it was a viper rearing to strike.

“Everything all right?” Ripka asked.

“Smells sweet,” she said.

“Not a fan of the sweet stuff? Unfortunate name choice, then. Go on and give it a taste. It’s not too bad – the whisky cuts the sweetness.”

Honey gave it a taste, and a flicker of pleasure crinkled her face. “Oh. That’s nice.”

“See? Drink it slow, now, I want to get a good look at this place.”

Honey sipped quietly while Ripka leaned back, cup in hand, and took in the view. The interior of Bright Eyes Cafe hadn’t been much to look at. It’d been a cramped space, just a handful of tables and narrow chairs, the air heavy with smoke. But the patio was wider than she’d expected, and whoever owned the place had put some effort into the details. The stone walls hemming them in were crawling all over with spiny-leaved vines, sporting the tiny buds that could be harvested and roasted to make the eponymous tea. Huge umbrellas dotted the patio, dropping and faded, but well patched and providing much-needed shade. Whether by chance or choice, the patio was angled to take advantage of the evening breeze.

Ripka sighed, leaning into her seat, truly relaxed. Here, she couldn’t see the Honding family palace. Here, she could pretend the city would carry on like this forever.

“I say, it’s not right. The old Dame has got to see sense.”

Ripka searched those gathered for the voice and found the source. A man no more than twenty leaned across a table toward two companions, gesturing with every word. A rat’s tail of a beard clung to his chin, and he wore a drooping hat that the poor soul probably thought gave him a rakish air, but really just gave off the rather unappealing message that he was, as it were, limp.

His companions did not seem half so moved by the man’s words as he’d hoped they would be. To his right, a woman in a cheap beige shift with hints of ink and paint about her fingers leaned back to put distance between them and snorted. To his left, a man just slightly the speaker’s senior toyed with the rim of his cup, fingers drumming against his knee under the table. The nervous man wore a suit coat despite the steamy monsoon warmth, the elbows and hemline patched with ruddy brown to contrast the overall hue of mustard. The colors would have made most complexions on the Scorched look as if they were suffering from sand scabies, but this man was dark enough to carry them off.

“Let it go, Dranik,” the woman said. “The Dame knows what she’s about.”

“Does she?” the young man pounced. “She’s what, seventy-five? She could be going raw in the head and no one would dare point it out. We need a new system in place. A representative law code.”

“My own grandma’s near ninety,” the patched man offered, “and sharp as Valathean steel.”

“Bully for her, but I don’t see how that’s relevant.”

“I don’t see how any of this is relevant.” The woman shook her cup for a refill and clucked her tongue. “The Dame will do as she wills. It’s not for us to decide.”

“But it could be, that’s the whole point!”

Ripka caught Honey’s eye and mouthed, “What do you think?”

“Thunder, no lightning,” Honey murmured.

Ripka nodded agreement, but kept an ear on the conversation anyway. The young man’s tone was unusually earnest. She’d come across a lot of people with that kind of earnestness in their voice in Aransa. Nine times out of ten, they were just dying to tell her all about whatever strange conspiracy they’d stumbled across that week, and their evidence was always in the dying off of a tree, or the presence of game tracks where they were convinced nothing could have made them. Nonsense, on the balance.

But something about this man told her that he wasn’t prone to that particular flavor of conspiracy. For one, he was quite a deal cleaner than the usual type, and for two, there really was something afoot in Hond Steading. She thought about approaching him outright, expressing interest in the ideals she’d overheard, but that’d raise suspicion. He must meet with more like-minded individuals sometime. If she managed to cross the lad’s path at just the right moment, then maybe…

“Republicanism is dead,” a wiry-bearded man at a table near Ripka’s suspicious trio declared. The young man, Dranik, bristled all over.

“There’s no proof of that,” Dranik said.

“Fiery pits there isn’t. Look at what happened in Aransa!”

“That was a success! Commodore Ganal was voted to her post, in case you’ve forgotten.”

“Voted,” the older man slurred, making air quotes around the word with both hands as he swayed toward Dranik’s table. He thumped a hand down and made all three cups jump. “That previous warden of theirs – he was voted in, right and proper, then Thratia comes along and gets him killed and scoops the city right into her pocket. Tell me, who was running against her in this fair and enlightened election?”

“That mine-master–”

“Also dead! Murdered, his sel-hub burned down around him. You think that’s coincidence, I got something shiny to sell ya.”

“Knock it off, old man,” the woman said. “It’s all just an intellectual exercise anyway. People like us don’t make these calls.”

“People like us can!” Dranik jumped to his feet and wagged a finger at the older man. “Ganal was still elected! I’d rather a contested election than a line of succession, wouldn’t you?”

“Pahh. Nothing wrong with a bloodline at the head. Got a lot of sense to pass down through the generations. Can’t elect experience like that.”

“Oh, and that’s working out well. Dame Honding’s a grand woman, I’ll grant you, but that nephew of hers is a discredit to the name. Where’s he been? He doesn’t care about this city. Hardly stepped foot in it.”

“Heard he’s hustling gambling tables in the south,” the woman drawled.

“I heard he’s murdered someone,” Dranik threw in. “What kind of leader would that be? We need a new system in place, before it’s too late and we end up with the likes of that buffoon.”

“You want to run elections like the other un-founded cities?” The old man snorted. “Know what they call the leaders of those places? Wardens. Like they run a prison! Hond Steading ain’t no prison. It’s a jewel. The Scorched’s jewel.”

“That’s only because the wardens operate under the yoke of the empire. If we were to shake off Valathea’s rule, then–”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” the old man sneered at Dranik. “You some kind of secessionist?”

“I’m only saying–”

The older man grabbed Dranik by the front collar of his shirt and gave him a hearty shake. “Saying what? Saying that bloodthirsty Ganal would be better for us than the Dame and her lineage?”

“I didn’t mean that,” he squeaked.

Ripka was on her feet without realizing. Between the sedative effects of the alcohol and the energizing nature of the tea, she felt a weird disconnect in her body – as if she were at once sleepy and alert, sharp but slow. Dimly she was aware of Honey rising alongside her, of the woman and the man at Dranik’s table shouting protests.

She closed the distance. The old man was weakened by drink and age, so he put up no resistance as she peeled him off a flush-faced Dranik. No physical resistance, anyway. He spun around and loomed over Ripka, yelling into her face so that spittle flecked her cheeks. She grimaced.

“This is no business of yours, girl!”

Honey sidled up alongside the old man and pressed something shiny down low against his hipbone. Not too hard. Just enough to be clear of her intentions. Her voice was soft as always, but from the way the old man’s eyes widened he didn’t have trouble hearing.

“Don’t yell at the captain.”

Dranik brushed off his clothes and scowled, oblivious to the real reason the old man had gone pale. “This brutish behavior is the inevitable result of just the old-fashioned kind of thinking I was talking about.”

“Out!” The waitress reappeared, her serving tray wielded like a battering ram. “I said no trouble, understand? I’m sick of your brains and your squabbles. Take it to the street, now, you’re barred for the week.”

“But–” Dranik protested. The woman with painted fingers whooped a laugh and jumped to her feet. The man in the mustard coat had managed to fade away to another table during the scuffle. Ripka caught his eye, and he winked, then hid his face with his mug and turned away.

“Knew this would be a good time,” the woman said.

While they scurried to gather their things, the old man stood stock still, a little bit of sweat on his pale brow.

“Honey,” Ripka murmured, “that’s enough.”

She pouted, but slipped whatever implement she’d found into a pocket and slunk away from the old man to take up her usual position in Ripka’s shadow. Tray held before her, the waitress ushered all of them out onto the road and slammed the gate behind. The old man stomped off without another word. The woman gave a whoop and clapped Ripka on the back.

“Haven’t seen you ‘round before, lady, but that was a fine showing, twisting up old Hammod like that.”

Ripka flushed. “I didn’t want anyone to get hurt.”

“Sweet of you, but Hammod’s all bluster. I suppose now you know. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s running home to change his pants.”

“That’s unkind, Latia,” Dranik said.

“True, though, innit?” She flashed him a grin, and he rolled his eyes.

“So sorry to get you involved,” Dranik said, turning to shake Ripka’s hand, “but thank you nonetheless. Hammod may be toothless, but he’s got to learn that that kind of behavior is no way to argue a point.”

“You really believe all that stuff you were saying?” she asked, keeping her voice carefully neutral.

Latia snorted. “He believes it well enough, it’s what he’s willing to do about it where it all falls down.”

“Now, that’s unkind,” Dranik admonished. Latia rolled her eyes, but lapsed into silence. “I am a believer, it’s true. Say, you didn’t get to finish your teas. May I buy you another?”

“And bend our ears?” Ripka asked. Dranik shoved his hands in his pockets and made a close survey of the ground.

“Hah,” Latia said, “don’t let him pick the place, he’s got terrible taste. Let’s all go back to my studio. I’ve got the tea, and Dranik hasn’t got the grains to treat you both anyway. Could barely afford his own cup today.”

“I afforded my cup just fine!”

“Then why were you nursing it so long?”

Dranik scuffed a kick against the dirt floor. “Fine. But I’ll replace the tea we drink.”

“Sure you will. Care to join us?” Latia turned to Ripka and Honey, eyebrows raised expectantly.

“What about your other friend?” Ripka asked.

“Oh. Him.” Latia threw her hands in the air dramatically. “He’d only drink the tea to be seen drinking it, if you catch my meaning. So, what about it? Coming along?”

“We’d love to. I’m Ripka, and this is Honey,” she said. Latia gave Honey the once-over and harrumphed.

“Don’t hear a name like that every day.”

“It’s for my voice,” Honey said. Ripka held her breath, but they seemed to take this at face value. Despite Honey’s muted rasp, she had an undeniable sweetness to every syllable.

As they followed the two through the city, listening to them rehash old arguments, Ripka leaned close to Honey and whispered.

“Did you get a knife?”

“Found it.” She flashed Ripka a quick glimpse of a worn fruitknife and then slipped it back into her pocket.

“Where?”

“The waitress’s apron.”

Ripka coughed on a laugh and grinned despite herself. “Honey, you little thief.”

“She wasn’t using it,” Honey protested, a faint pout on her lips.

“Keep it close,” Ripka said, eyeing Dranik’s back. “And hidden.”