Steal the Sky

Chapter 18

Pelkaia stood in the middle of her sitting room, flowing through her morning warm-up stretches, while shock echoed in her heart. Just the day before, Detan Honding had come knocking on her door. She still could scarcely believe it.

So very close. Her skin tingled with the memory of excitement upon seeing him. So close, so clueless. Insofar as she could tell, he hadn’t marked her for anything other than a standoffish woman of middling age.

Still, he had nearly undone her. Nearly ended her path before all was finished, before her fresh promises were kept. She could hesitate no longer. Now, before she lost the iron of her resolve, she must take the last name on her list.

Pelkaia thanked her guiding stars she’d had the foresight to keep her usual disguise intact. Even having caught her unawares, Detan had yet to see her true face. Sometimes, the best disguise an illusionist could muster was their own plain visage, and it did her nerves good to know she still had that trick in her toolbox.

But now she needed something a little more complex. She grabbed a bloodstone decanter from one of her knick knack-cluttered shelves and poured a deep draught of golden needle-infused blue succulent liqueur into a matching tumbler. Pelkaia breathed deep of the syrup-sweet aroma before downing the bitter liquid in one draw. It seeped through her, settling the tremble of her anxiety even as it settled the ache in her bones.

The bonewither had not reached too deeply within her just yet. Valatheans would call the slow speed of her decline miraculous, but only because those fools had managed to do nothing to hold the illness at bay. The Catari, on the other hand, well… They’d had generations to study it, to control its deadly progression.

By keeping to the old ways, Pelkaia had managed to remain hale through more years than she cared to remember. It helped, of course, that her control was so very fine that she could force the smallest possible quantities into the effects she desired.

On steady feet she crossed to the trunk that rested at the foot of her bed and flipped the lid open. Her son’s mining clothes lay within, their stark simplicity accusing the twisted paths she had taken.

Black dust stained the folds and caked the creases. She shook them out, but did not bother to clean them. She never did. The mine hadn’t changed their uniforms since they’d instituted them, and a dirty set of work clothes was more believable than a clean one. No one trusted a working man with soft hands and starched trousers.

Pelkaia hesitated, fingers trembling as she spread the crumpled garments upon her bed. The rough weave caught on her hangnails, grit clung to her fingertips. If she closed her eyes she could still picture him within them, could take a deep breath and smell the dirt-and-oil scent of his hair, his hands. She shook herself – she had wasted too much time to memory already – and stripped down to her bone-braces.

Her boy had been slight of frame and a hand width taller than her, but the clothes fit her well enough after she’d rolled up the hem of the pants. She let the shirt hang loose, better to make her feminine form ambiguous, and knelt beside her bed to tap the hidden sel bag sewn within. She pulled out a narrow stream, and took it with her to the vanity. Before the mirror, she began to transform.

The face that stared back at her was a generic one, no one she had ever seen before. Long years of practice had lent her the ability to gather the elements of disparate faces and blend them into a facsimile of a real person. There was something uncanny about her unowned face, but it would work well enough to get her where she needed to go.

A face browned by the sun and worn deep with the rippled-dune lines of the desert tipped this way and that in the mirror, examining itself. Pelkaia arranged a slightly crooked nose and a day’s worth of stubble. She even drew a few more drops out to add swollen roughness to her knuckles and fake filth to her hands and forearms. Normally she wouldn’t bother wasting the sel and would simply roll her fingers in dirt, but if she needed to drop this disguise in a hurry then it all must be ready to go.

Pelkaia stretched once more, cajoling smooth movement into joints that had sat too long unused. Her very marrow protested, joints cracking loud as a knifestrike against stone. She stood, still as an oasis, letting the pain that wove through her skeleton fade, and wondered if, at last, she’d grown too old for this.

But no. The pain faded, what bonewither she suffered giving up ground to the warm release of the drugged succulent liqueur. Pain she could manage, for now. Had managed for many, many decades. Though the threat of violence to come left her chilled.

She dipped her hands beneath her son’s clothes, checking her padded braces again and again to be sure they were secure. They did well to stop a slash, but she intended them to ease blunt force as well as they helped support her weight. If she were lucky, she would suffer no breaks. If she were very lucky, Galtro would never even see her coming.

In the drawer of her vanity lay a few well-weighted throwing knives, and beneath the drawer’s false bottom a long, lean knife of weightier craftsmanship. The throwing knives she could pass off as an old woman’s fancy – but the longknife? It was unique in construction, its bone-and-bloodstone handle echoing a time before Valathean settlement. A time no longer spoken of.

She secreted these about herself, disguising them easily in the oversized clothes. With one last glance in her polished glass, she covered her hair with a battered hat and tugged it down over her eyes. It would have to do.

Her eyes closed, her breathing deepened, as she prepared herself for what she was about to do. Doing away with Faud had been right, even if it had opened up a power vacuum for that spider Thratia to fill. Thratia was no matter to Pelkaia, now. Thratia was a foul scent on the wind – insubstantial, passing. Whoever held the seat of warden mattered little, so long as those who had allowed her son’s death to occur still breathed. She was rooting out corruption. Saving other mothers from a similar destruction of the heart.

So what if she could still feel Faud’s blood sometimes, warm and sticky between her fingers? She could still feel the exhilaration that had swarmed her, too, knowing that she’d done away with that monster.

She’d prepared for this. Steeled herself. This was right. Her revenge, her cutting out of the cancer that had destroyed Kel, would not be denied. Pelkaia breathed out, and opened her eyes, a serene sense of purpose subsuming her every fiber.

She let herself out the backdoor into a thin alley, careful to pull the latch behind her. The alley was a standardized firebreak, a little slash of emptiness snaking between her apartment building and the one next door. Such passages were usually given up to nightsoil and beggars, but she’d paid her neighbors well for their silence, and made her own alterations.

A thin wall separated her end of the alley from the others, and she had planted a tiny succulent garden there as explanation. The quaint affectation of an old, lonely woman. She smiled in the dark, breathing deep the aroma of green leaves even as she ignored the incessant hum of the city just beyond. Maybe, she admitted, it wasn’t such a cover after all. No matter that half her plant selections could be distilled to poison.

The alley’s entrance to the street she had capped with an illusion of crumbling mud brick. It had taken a great deal of effort to get the effect just right, but once she’d set the image firmly in her mind it had come to her in one great rush of inspiration. Once established, holding the illusion in place was as simple as remembering her name. It was a part of her, like the sel masking her face. Maintaining control over so much sel at once threatened to advance her bonewither, but this small indulgence she allowed herself. It was worth it to be able to leave her home unnoticed.

That was the danger, she thought, in calling illusionists doppels. They could do so much more than dupe another person.

To avoid accidental interlopers, she had made the wall a mangy thing. It had old creeper vines over its face, dead and brown in the desert sun. The bricks were rotten and worn. Occasionally a drunk would attempt to piss against it, but their confusion never lasted through the morning. Many things could be waved away if experienced in an inebriated fog. She sidled up to the illusion and squinted through the thin layers of sel.

Pelkaia waited until the traffic in the street beyond her narrow gate grew lean and those few who wandered by were distracted by market carts and squalling children. She slipped out into the street, careful to smooth the false stones and withered vines back into place behind her. She paused, pretending to adjust her shirtsleeves, while she counted in silence to one half-hundred. Once certain no one had witnessed her emerging from the gate, she strolled off down the road, hat pulled down tight to shade her eyes, and angled for the ferry to the Hub.

Having paid her grains to cross, and a little extra to cover her false name, she lingered toward the back of the ferry to separate herself from the rest of the passengers. The deck was crowded with a fresh crew coming in for the late-morning shift change, cups of bright-eye berry tea clutched in their hands. If she were lucky, they would think her aloof and leave her to herself.

She soon realized she needn’t have worried. They were all too busy with the local rumor mill to pay her any mind. Keeping her eyes on the sands below as the ferry sidled into empty space, she attempted to eavesdrop.

“Buncha’ blue coats swarming around the place. Something’s got Galtro spooked.”

“He’d be an idiot if he weren’t spooked. Pits, man, he’s put his hat in against Thratia. You know what they called her in Valathea?”

“Oh yeah, Commodore Throatslitter.”

“Exactly! Why, I bet the old warden’s death wasn’t even done by a doppel. Or if it was, it was one working for the commodore. If Galtro wins I give him a week until he’s filling in the dirt beside Faud.”

“He’s got the watch captain backing him though.”

“And you think Faud didn’t?”

So, Galtro had watchers hanging around. She drummed her fingers on the ferry’s handrail, watching Aransa dwindle behind them. Thratia’s compound hunkered along three levels, a blighted stain upon the face of the city.

Behind her, the miners’ conversation turned to the unruly working conditions they faced ahead. The pipe joints were rusted, the sel senders little trained, and the capture sacks had to be patched at a continual clip. One of the lines was clogged with an invasive insect colony. All the same complaints she’d had when she had worked the line. All the same complaints her son had brought home. Their time-worn grievances brought her a sliver of comfort, a traitorous smile twitching up the corners of her lips. The mines never changed.

“Who’s that?”

Pelkaia flinched, ducking her head to deepen the shadow of her hat’s brim across her eyes. She breathed deep to still her nerves, summoned in her mind the bitter taste of her spiked succulent liqueur.

“Hey, you.” One of the miners, his face young enough to twist Pelkaia’s heart, dropped a rough hand on her shoulder and dipped his head down to peer beneath her hat. “Never seen you round before.”

The others shifted close, wary of the balance of the ferry on its guy lines, but unable to resist a little conspiracy. Pelkaia forced herself to stand straight, to trust in the guise she had wrought to carry her through. She cleared her throat and thrust her voice low.

“I’m in from Hond Steading. Going over to get my assignment,” she said.

“Phew, a Hond-man.” The miner whistled low. “They let you out of that city? Thought they were hurting for the help, what with… how many is it? Four? Five firemounts to mine?”

Pelkaia shrugged, mustered a sideways grin. “They ask you to leave when the mine master’s lady takes a shine to you. But if you’re looking for a transfer, I heard they just got an opening…”

The miner whooped a laugh, his fellows joining in. He thumped her hard enough on the shoulder that she felt the warm spread of a bruise begin beneath the surface. She hoped the bruise didn’t bite into her bone, otherwise she’d be paying for that friendly tap for a full moonturn.

The worn ferry shuddered to a stop at the receiving dock, and she almost gasped with relief as the others gave her friendly directions to the Hub and took off to see to their own tasks. She lingered, letting the miners trudge ahead. No one else paid her any mind, because no one in the whole of Aransa was fool enough to come out here unless they had business.

Once the miners were out of sight on the long trek up the side of the Smokestack, she started down the winding path to the Hub. The operations station clung to the side of the firemount, great pipelines reaching up to its conical mouth. It reminded her of a brown spider with its legs curled in – swatted and dying.

Pelkaia paused in the shadow of a great boulder, getting an eye on the lines pouring into the Hub’s central containment chamber. All the lines leading down from the boreholes in the plug of the firemount’s mouth converged here, depositing their precious cargo for storage. The metal pipe-mouths were battered and rusted, strapped down with leather ties and fraying rope. It was a mess, but it worked. Galtro would forgo food before he’d risk losing a single drop.

She stopped cold as she rounded the path toward the Hub’s doors, nearly stumbled as she found the courtyard outside the Hub empty. No one lingered nearby, telling stories under the glare of the sun or checking on their schedules. Something had gone terribly wrong.

Pelkaia’s skin prickled with anxiety, and she spared a glance for those few men who had made the crossing with her. They were oblivious to the wrongness of their workstation, already tromping up the side of the Smokestack to relieve those that worked their lines before them. Chewing her lip, Pelkaia crept forward, straining her ears and eyes in a desperate attempt to see and hear beyond the vacuous silence which surrounded her. The doorway hung open, the gentle creak of its rusty hinges in the breeze the only sound to greet her.

She eased herself into the quiet and the dark, stunned that the lanterns had been snuffed. She’d been to the Hub many times before as a line worker, and never once had it been without light. Her breath came too hot, her fingers felt frozen. Before she had gone two steps, her toes stubbed against a warm, malleable mass.

Suppressing a shudder, she slipped into a crouch and squinted down at the face of the corpse. It was a woman, she knew not who, with her sword only half out. She wore blue from head to toe, and even in the dim light Pelkaia could follow the lines of her crisp uniform.

Expecting nothing at all, Pelkaia laid her fingers against the woman’s throat. Her heart was silent. The handle of the blade was caught in the iron grip of death, so Pelkaia helped herself to the cudgel hung on the dead woman’s belt instead. She hefted the deadly weight, squinting until her eyes adjusted to the dark. She had waited long enough. Nothing could delay her task.

Whatever awaited in the dark, she was coming for it.