Steal the Sky

Chapter 7

The warehouse district had always been dark, but now that Thratia’s compound loomed above the wide mud-brick buildings, the once familiar streets seemed to grow seedier in her shadow. Somewhere from within the compound the thready whisper of music struck up. Soft, but growing. Thratia’s entertainment getting ready for her guests tonight.

Ripka bit her lip, forcing herself to ignore the swathe of excess shade laid over the building she was reconnoitering now. She could not let her prejudices against the ex-commodore cloud her judgment; make her rash. Not tonight.

She crouched alongside Banch and their newest recruit, Taellen, relying upon a hip-high stack of ruined crates to obscure their presence. On the opposite side of the targeted warehouse five other watchers lurked, awaiting her signal.

The cold of the desert night bit into her flexed knees, stiffened her tensed back. She shifted her weight, pretending to adjust the angle she held her crossbow at, but found no relief. They had been a half-mark lurking behind that pile of detritus, and the sour stench of alley garbage was growing disturbingly less noticeable. Ripka resolved to give herself a full, hot bath just as soon as she got home.

“That’s the place, I’m sure of it,” Taellen murmured and gestured with his charcoal-blackened crossbow.

“So you’ve said,” she whispered, nudging his weapon back below the line of the broken crates. “Now hush.”

He grunted, sullen, and she bit her tongue to keep from reprimanding him further. This had been his find, and she was grateful for it, but the lad was too eager to lay claim. Too eager, she suspected, to prove he served Aransa. He’d only moved to the Scorched a single moonturn ago and still carried a Valathean accent – and a Valathean name, despite her urging to change it. Aransa may be governed by Valathea, but the people of the Scorched liked their names harsh as the landscape that housed them.

Banch lifted a hand in the air, his finger extended, circled it, then pointed. Setting aside her annoyance, she squinted through the dark at the window he indicated. The curtain flicked aside, the edge of a man’s face peering out into the dark. Ripka held her breath as he scanned the area beyond, then let the curtain fall back into place. Had he seen them? Heard them? She cursed her inability to communicate with her other team.

A rumbling echoed down the street. She tensed, straining to make out the details. The sound was a dull, rhythmic clunk punctuated by two soft thumps. Clunk-thump-thump-clunk. Ripka raised her brows at Banch, a silent question, but he only shrugged.

Something dark moved down the street, the finer details of it erased by the shadow of Thratia’s compound. Ripka made a note to later insist that these streets were kept bright by the lamplighter children. It was well past time to chase the shadows out of Aransan commerce and she, quite frankly, would be delighted to light some fires under the hides of those mucking about with shady dealings.

A wide cargo door slid open on the face of the warehouse, its hinges so well greased she would have missed it if she weren’t looking right at it in that moment.

Faint light spilled from the door, illuminating a small section of the road. Plodding toward the opened door was a cart pulled by the slow trod of a hump-backed donkey. Ripka squinted, and saw that both the creature’s hooves and the wheels of the cart had been wrapped in thick cloth. Shady dealings, indeed. Enough to reasonably demand the right to search them. She smothered a hungry grin and put on a smooth, professional expression.

“You see?” Taellen hissed, his voice high and eager.

Ripka cringed and grabbed the lad’s arm, dragging him back down as his head popped up. “Quiet,” she whispered. “Wait until we have a better idea of what it is they mean to do.” And to see if they do anything obviously incriminating, she thought, but Taellen was too young for that train of thought just yet. Too green.

Green things did not last long on the Scorched.

Taellen grunted but ducked his head, annoyance simmering in the set of his shoulders. Banch caught her eye over the lad’s bowed head, one brow arched in amusement. To keep from grinding her teeth she pulled a pinch of barksap from her pocket and popped it into her mouth, rolling the sticky, resinous heap around until it was narrow enough to fit down one row of molars. The sharp flavor calmed her, the viscous lump gave her tongue something to worry over, something to do while she waited for an opening.

A man in a tight-fitted, slate-grey coat drove the cart, his narrow back slumped over the slack reins. He leapt from his perch as a man and a woman in matching grey coats stepped into the light from within the warehouse. Their hands hovered at their hips, though Ripka could see no weapons on them. She bit her lip, thought better of it and shifted the sap so that she could chew it instead. The three peeked beneath the mottled cloth covering the cart’s contents, nodded to themselves and waved the donkey-driver in.

“What do you think?” Banch whispered.

“I think a few questions wouldn’t go amiss.” She pursed her lips, stroking the forward curve of her crossbow. “But let’s keep the others in reserve, for now.”

Ripka stood, straight as an arrow, the blue coat of the Watch comfortably snug about her waist and shoulders. The weight of the cudgel at her hip brought her confidence, the shadows of her colleagues rising beside her strength. Chin up, crossbow leveled, she strode through the dark toward the warehouse, trying to smooth the eager thumping of her heart, the heady twitch of her fingers toward the bolt trigger.

The scene felt sharper, brighter. Her past as a prizefighter raised its head, calculating how fast she could close on the big man, judging the reach of the woman’s legs. She licked her lips and twisted a manic grin into something like an affable smile. It was a relief to be effectual, to put the shade of the doppel out of her mind for a while. Even if she couldn’t, ethically, come in swinging.

The two leading the cart stopped cold upon sighting them, hands disappearing beneath their coats to seek weapons until the color of the Watch blues took root in their minds. A thrum of excitement tingled over Ripka’s skin as recognition settled, their eyes narrowing and their lips thinning with irritation. The cart driver disappeared within the wide cargo door, so she tipped her chin to Taellen, motioning him to circle them at a wider berth and keep an eye on the door.

“Evening, watch captain,” the woman drawled as she raised her hands into the air. The man followed her lead, taking a half-step back. “Come to help us unload this delivery?”

“I’d sure like to have a look at it,” Ripka said, keeping her bow trained on the woman while Banch and Taellen fanned out around her. She drew up within five paces of the woman, close enough to see the wrinkles like cracked mud around her eyes. The woman’s face twitched, her lips fighting down a scowl.

“We’re not doing anything illegal, now, we got our paperwork in order.”

“Then you wouldn’t mind Sergeant Banch here having a look at it.”

Banch stepped forward, one hand held out expectantly while the other propped the butt of his crossbow against his shoulder. The woman pulled a sheaf of papers from a leather satchel strapped to the donkey’s side, each movement orchestrated with such precision that Ripka wondered if she’d rehearsed the motions. If she’d been anticipating the Watch’s interference all along.

A tickle of worry scratched at the back of Ripka’s mind, and she flicked her gaze to the side just as Taellen loped further inward, drawing in towards the warehouse door. What was that fresh-blooded idiot thinking? He was meant to watch the door, not enter it. There could be a dozen or more of the thugs lurking beyond, and though they would be wary of attacking a watcher, Ripka had made it a habit not to rely on someone else’s fear to keep her skin intact.

“Distribution approval here says for honey liqueur, though the house importing isn’t noted.” Banch handed the papers back to the woman.

“Difficult to get distribution in Aransa without a mercer house to back you.” Ripka raised her brows in innocent question at the woman. “How’d you manage it?”

The woman took back the papers and spread her arms wide as she shrugged. “The Mercer Collective has become amenable to independent enterprise as of late.”

“Lucky for you.” Ripka motioned toward the cloth-covered cart. “I’m sure you won’t mind if we check the goods against the manifest, then.”

The woman’s expression rippled, a subtle disturbance, but enough to put Ripka on sharper guard. She swallowed her barksap and stepped toward the cart, sparing a glance to make sure Banch had her covered. With one hand she peeled back the cover to reveal a mound of stacked crates, each one no bigger than the length of her forearm on each side. She tipped her head to the man. “Open it.”

He glanced at the woman, got a nod of approval and shrugged. From somewhere on the cart he grabbed a pry bar and heaved the crate’s lid open, wood and metal groaning with each tug. The man tossed the levered top to the ground and nudged aside a fistful of straw packing. Between the dried grasses Ripka could just make out the deep amber of liqueur bottles, their tops sealed by red wax stamped with the shape of a bee.

“Remove one,” Ripka ordered.

“Here to levy a tax, watch captain?” the woman said, this time not bothering to hide her smirk.

Ripka ignored her, instead keeping her gaze on the bottle the man removed. It was in the round-bottomed style currently fashionable, made possible by funneling sel into the glass during the manufacturing process. She frowned, something not quite right about the shape of it twisting through her mind.

“You see?” the woman said. “Nothing strange about a bottle.”

Except that it was too short to fill the crate. Ripka returned the woman’s smirk. “True, but I’m more interested in what’s in the crate’s false bottom.”

The woman’s grin lost its mirth, her eyes went hard as flint. “I don’t know what you mean, captain. Perhaps you’d like to take a bottle to try? To make sure the quality is up to the standards you expect for Aransa.”

“Bribes?” Ripka clucked her tongue. “You must think you’re talking to someone else.” She caught the man’s gaze and flicked her eyes to the crate. “Break that open completely. Now.”

The man shifted his weight, fingers going white around the neck of the bottle he’d presented to her. The woman chewed her lip, and Ripka allowed herself a small smile at the recognition of nervousness, of distress.

“Scatter!” the woman yelled loud as her lungs would let her.

Before Ripka could get a shot off, the man threw the bottle at her feet, a foamy explosion of alcohol-drenched honey sweetening the air. She swore and fired at the woman, swore again when she saw the bolt skim off the woman’s cheek without causing more damage than a rockcat scratch.

Banch loosed his shot, missed, then leap-tackled the man who had thrown the bottle as he bolted right by him. Ripka jumped over the tangled pair, reloading her bow with practiced ease as she ducked into the warehouse after the woman.

Mountains of identical crates dotted the warehouse, great stepped pyramids of them rising up on all sides. Ripka spared them only the briefest of glances. Some part of her couldn’t help but register the expense involved in such an operation. Her steps were silent, the dirt-packed floor smoothed by the passing of many feet. Half of the wall sconces had been lit in anticipation of the night’s work, the flickering flames throwing strange shadows in her path.

“Turn yourselves over, and we won’t use force,” Ripka called, though the words felt pointless, perfunctory. These people, whoever they were, had been ordered to run. Which meant that they more than likely had orders to keep themselves out of official hands at all costs.

“Captain!” Taellen yelped from around a pile of crates to her right, his voice high with surprise.

Before she could move two steps in his direction a crash broke through the night, the splintering of wood and shattering of glass louder to her overstrained senses than any crack of thunder.

Rounding the crate-pile, her foot went out from under her. The world skewed as she crashed down hard on one knee, bright spikes of pain lancing up her leg. Ripka got a hand down to steady herself, old instincts overriding momentary terror. The floor was sticky mush, sugared mud. She peeled her hand free and glared down at the syrupy muck coating her palm. Tried to ignore the needles of pain radiating from the knee she had fallen on.

“Look out!” Taellen barreled into her from the side just as a crate went flying through the air where her head would have been. Ripka grunted and gasped once, quick to recapture the air that had been driven from her lungs. Taellen rolled away from her and sprang up, the easy agility of youth driving his knees. He dragged his cudgel free and brandished it, the crossbow lost.

Ripka heaved herself upright with, she supposed, far less grace but just as much effectiveness. The cart driver was opposite them, his scrawny arms flailing like a broken windmill as he clambered up the stepped mountain of crates. Where in the pits did he think he was going? The ceiling?

“Easy now,” she called, reining in her anger. “That’s not the most stable of locations.”

“To the pits with you!” he screeched and whirled around. Ripka blinked, slow as honey rolling downhill, as the driver grabbed a crate from the pile he was climbing and flung it one-handed straight at her. She skittered away and the cheap wood crashed into dozens of pieces, throwing its delicate cargo high into the air.

The crate’s bottom broke, spilling weapons onto the liqueur-drenched ground. They gleamed in the flickering light, wicked expanses of steel winking at her out of the dark. She took a half-step back and scanned the mountains of crates all around her once more.

There were thousands. Did they each carry a deadly gift?

And how had he managed such a ferocious throw? The crates weren’t big – they barely came up to her knee – but they were laden with thick glass bottles, liqueur, and steel. Too heavy by far to pitch around like toys.

Another crate burst upon the ground, just before her feet, and she flinched back into reality.

“Cease this immediately!” she demanded, keeping the man in her line of sight as she skirted the detritus, looking for her crossbow. Where were Banch and the others?

“Blasted skies he’s strong!” Taellen called out as the man flung yet another crate one-handed without so much as a grunt. The heavy wooden box sailed through the air as if it were as light as a paper airship. Ripka froze, squinted down at the thick puddles, their surfaces pockmarked with tiny bubbles, and realized just why the man found the crates so light.

“Surrender!” Banch’s voice echoed all around, the heavy tromp of the other five watchers hard on his heels.

The cart driver’s eyes went wild – mad.

“He’s sensitive! There’s sel in the booze! ’Ware the crates!” Ripka yelled.

Too late. The man’s hand shot out toward a pile opposite him, his fist clenched around empty air, and yanked. The crates groaned, shifted, wood cracking as the heavy contents pushed against the friction of being stacked one atop the other.

Ripka spun around, saw her watchers running her way, faces red with exertion and boots slamming the ground so hard they could scarcely hear the complaint of the wooden heap beside them. It twitched, leaned.

The face of the cart driver went red, sweat sluicing down his cheeks. Ripka made her decision, and sprinted.

Her knee complained, her shoulders burned, but still she flung herself at the pyramid the man had climbed and heaved herself upward. He saw her, his expression of intense concentration flickering only a moment as he catalogued this new threat. In that moment he lost his tug on the crates threatening her people. It was enough.

With a roar of effort she leapt upward and threw one arm out, cudgel raised high, and brought it down in a punishing arc against the side of the sweating cart driver’s head. He slumped, a leaf cut free of its branch, and began to slide down the stacks. Ripka scrambled, gathering the fabric of his coat in one numb fist, and leaned her weight against the mountain, breath coming in sharp gasps.

“Captain!” Banch called from the ground below, his expression a mix of bewilderment and fear.

“Get ready to catch this sonuvabitch, because I can’t hold him much longer,” she called back.

The five scrambled to get into position, and she tossed the cart driver so that he wouldn’t bounce all the way down the sharp corners of the crates. When he was safely in hand, she let herself down with care. By the time her feet touched the ground they had bound the blasted man.

Taellen offered her an arm of support. She was grateful to take it.

“The others?” she asked Banch.

“Our rear guard detained the woman, but the man made it out.” Banch glanced away as he spoke, a flush of embarrassment mingling with the fresh bruise on his cheek.

“That will have to do.” Ripka ran her hand through her hair, then immediately regretted it as her hair stuck up in a mass of sticky spikes. She sighed. “I need a bath.”

Banch chuckled and clapped her on the shoulder. “I’ll secure the area, don’t you worry captain.”

Shrugging off Taellen’s support, she directed the loading of the prisoners into the donkey cart, making sure to offload all the selium-enriched bottles of liqueur just in case the sensitive were to awaken. The last thing she needed was another avalanche of overly sweet booze coming her way.

Taellen grabbed the reins to the cart and she took up guard in the back with another of the Watch. Her sticky crossbow she kept close to hand, but it was one of the smuggled blades she held, turning it over in the slim light as Taellen drove the donkey back to the station house.

The metal was smooth, the forging done well enough to keep any pits from marring the surface of the blade. It had been oiled recently, an unctuous film coating her finger as she stroked the length of steel. Ripka sniffed the smear on her finger and frowned when she did not recognize the scent. Where had these weapons come from? And why so many? Importing weapons was not illegal in Aransa, but clearly someone wanted to avoid raising suspicions.

Someone. Hah. She knew full well who had done this, even if she couldn’t prove it.

“Captain.” Taellen’s voice drifted back, soft and uncertain.

“Yes, watcher?”

“How’d you know?”

“Know what?”

“That he was a sensitive… That there was even sel in the liquor.”

She smiled to herself. “Simple observation. As you commented yourself, the man was unusually strong.”

The watcher keeping guard alongside her snorted, shifted his weight. Ripka raised her brows at that, but the man didn’t look at her, just kept his gaze tight on the prisoners. As he should. And yet… Something in the stance of his shoulders, in the purse of his lips, set her ill at ease. What was his name, Jetk? She shook her head. The Watch was getting too big – too fragmented.

“Oh. Thought you might be sensitive yourself,” Taellen said.

A cold knot formed in Ripka’s belly. “No. Not even a little bit. Don’t forget it.”

Taellen grunted apology, but Ripka couldn’t shake the serpents of dread worming their way into her thoughts. The last time someone had accused her of being sensitive she hadn’t been able to prove otherwise. It was so obvious to her, the way sensitives worked. Illusions broke down under hard scrutiny, subtle movements gave away attempted mirror manipulations.

She never could understand how anyone else didn’t see it. But after rumors began to spread through the Brown Wash that she was hiding sensitivity her fights had grown more violent, the crowd’s taunts more pointed. No one had a kind word for the woman they thought was shirking the duty that bound their own loved ones.

The second night she’d left the ring to find some flea-bitten bastard waiting for her in the alley with a broken bottle and lungful of curses, she’d taken her prize purse and left the Brown Wash behind, joining Faud’s mercenaries on the long caravan to Aransa.

She clenched her fist on the blade’s grip, watching her knuckles grow so pale the scars didn’t show. In Aransa, she was watch captain, not some cracked-toothed fighter living from purse to purse. She had sway here. Allies. And it was true, anyway – she was no sel-sensitive. They’d believe her.