All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) (20 page)

He closed his eyes, dropped his chin, and squeezed his own arm. That hurt too, but not too badly.

He should have known: too good to last, too much to hope for. He should have known that nothing in the world ever worked out this well. And now, moreover, somebody was
watching him. He felt the gaze on his neck, moving the fine hairs like a breeze. He flinched.

And opened his eyes, turning to survey the approaches with manufactured nonchalance. He needn’t have gone to the trouble, as his observer was going to none to conceal herself.

It was her eyes he noticed first, because they gathered the dim available light and reflected it back at him in a metallic green shimmer. The second thing he noticed was that she was a she. Although her body was angular and alien under the black leather and ceramic armor, lean and breastless, her cloudy milk-and-pewter pelt peering through everywhere the armor did not cover, she stepped forward, and the cant of her pelvis, the angle of her femur were ineluctably feminine, though her stride, long and assured, fell on the border of swagger.

A flechette pistol hung on one hip, a coiled shape he recognized after a moment as a monofilament whip on the other. Not a weapon Cathoair would have chosen to try to handle, or to face.

An insignia of rank glimmering on her chest below the collarbone—he couldn’t call it a breastplate, when her armor was all segmented overlapping bands—marked her Black Silk. The Technomancer’s elite.

Cathoair swallowed half in relief and half in renewed worry. Here was help. And here was also the glove and boot of the law he survived on the fringes of. No one who lives by his wits enjoys talking to the cops.

“Name,” she demanded.

They were supposed to be able to smell lies. “Cathoair. Officer.”

She closed the distance between them, leaving clawed prints in the mud. There was enough light from the floatlamp to see
her clearly, once she emerged from shadow. She made not a whisper of sound, her silence reminding him of the Grey Wolf’s.

She wrinkled her nose, whiskers laid back against velvet-furred cheeks, and whuffed delicately. “He was here,” she said, and even though he knew better Cathoair was startled by the sweet painstaking voice from an animal’s fanged mouth. All he knew of animals—or moreaux—was holo and vii. And even though the machinimated imitations spoke quite clearly, if not quite in human tones, it was somehow different to find himself standing a meter from an unman, hearing her voice come out with extraordinary crispness. She sniffed again, leaning close. “You touched him.”

“I fought him,” Cathoair said. “He got away.”

“And the woman, too?”

“She . . . chased.” He drove his nails into his palms, scraping crescents of dead cells and sweat off the skin. He should have run—.

And then she would have chased him down. Unlike Muire, he could not vanish into the night as if he had never been.

“You were with her.”

“Yes,” he said. “I work for her.”

“Not him.” Her face was almost expressionless, but creases deepened between her eyes and her ears flicked forward. Not a frown, but something he could tell himself was intensity, focus. Her tail lashed: angry? Or did cats lash their tails when they were on the hunt?

“No.”

“And what is her relationship to him?”

Damned if I know,
Cahey thought, but didn’t have the gall to say it. “She is chasing him.”

“They are not allies.”

“They are not allies,” he answered, letting his breath flow out in relief. The tightness across his chest eased. “And you?”

The Black Silk settled back a little, weight on her heels, knees flexed. She did not look as if she meant to spring. “It is not my purpose to answer your questions. You’ll come with me willingly?”

Unspoken in the request was the threat. “Where?” he asked, although his answer wouldn’t change with hers.

“To Her,” the officer said. “She is personally interested in this case.”

Cathoair folded his arms. Before that moment, he hadn’t noticed the cold.

S
elene brought the human up the easy way, out of pity. It might be circuitous, but he was young and wobbly and slightly injured, and she thought he was probably slipping into shock. Which had the benefit of making him docile, but also made him stupid and prone to falling over.

At least he did not actually collapse. And he was biddable, or at least cooperative, which might prove as inconvenient as it was useful, because it tended to indicate he would not be able to provide much assistance in locating the quarry. Or—and here she felt half hopeful—perhaps he was simply clever enough to pretend, and more would emerge under interrogation.

But as she studied him staggering up the stair to the lift, clutching the handrail, she was doubtful. “Am I being arrested?” he asked halfway up, pausing and turning, craning his neck to look down at her. He was
very
young.

“No.” She shook her head, the human way, or as close as she could come. From the way his eyes widened, it didn’t look as
he’d expected. “You are being brought in for questioning. That is all.”

“Oh.” But he turned away from her again—human arrogance, or exhaustion?—and hauled himself up another step. Three others, each more laborious than the last, and he reached the landing. Selene was two and a half steps behind.

The lift came to her thumbprint. No one used it unless admitted by an unman. The operator, waiting on the landing, was a silky-eared spaniel named Mnemosyne, but she was low-ranked and effaced herself in Selene’s presence. The human nevertheless smiled at her nervously, and she wagged her tail in hesitant response.

Selene squeezed her eyes at the dog. Not everyone was created a warrior; a task for each, and each suited to the task.

That was Her law, and a good one.

The lift descended silently between its cables, rocking in the motion of air displaced by the falls. Selene could manage the complex currents around the Tower on a hoverboard, but others needed assistance. Or the security of the lift, no matter that sometimes it swayed like a pendulum.

It was swaying now. Selene affected inscrutability, scratching the palms of her hands against her armor, but the human’s attempts to project calm amused her. He stood with his hands on the railing, fingers relaxed, face tilted upward and soft around the stiff vine of his scar. His throat worked, though, and his sweat was souring. When the lift clicked against the platform, he flinched.

Selene, still pretending incognizance, stepped past. As she brushed by she caught his arm, mindful of her talons. It would be less than helpful if she rent his flesh an inch deep. Human flesh was soft, as the damage to his face testified.

If he worked for Her, that injury could have been repaired.

The human came with Selene without resisting, so she led him gently through the steel blue light of daybreak. As they paused within the open cage, he turned and stroked the grille, which clacked shut in response. He jerked his hand back and pressed the fingers against his lips, but still stared about.

That it was technomancy did not mean it must be unlovely. Even to Selene’s aesthetic, the lift was beautiful. The cornerposts of the cage were worked like tree trunks, the lesser bars between them wrought into vines covered in twisted leaves and ornate flowers. There were paste jewels set in the iron blossoms, gray and dull now but backed with foil mirrors. When the cage rose into the Defile-dimmed sunlight that already painted the reaches of Tower and Ark, they would catch it and erupt into brilliance.

Selene did not know where She had salvaged it from. She was certain She had not made it, but perhaps She had had it commissioned. There were ironworkers in the city still.

In any case, the tall young human reached out before the lift lurched into motion and steadied himself against the waist-high rail provided for that purpose. One hand only, though the fingers on the other twitched. “How long will you hold me?”

Selene’s tailtip twitched. “That is Hers to decide,” she said. And then, because she could still smell his sweat souring, she touched him lightly with the palms of her hands, fingers bent back for fear of scratching, and said: “If you have done no wrong, you have nothing to fear. Whatever you have heard, She does not take prisoners for the sake of holding them.”

“Oh,” he said.

The lift, once started, ascended more smoothly, though it
did twist between the parallel cables it rode. He managed the sway very well, for a human, though his balance was not as deft as Selene’s. He cocked his head as if to study the sound of the ratchets, rhythmic and comforting. Selene’s ears pricked this way and that, chasing it, but it came from all sides. “You have employment?” she asked. “We can send a messenger.”

He looked down. His lids drooped. He had long lashes for a human, as long as a mare’s. “My mother,” he said. “She’s pretty much dying.”

He wouldn’t look at her. Instead he craned his neck, staring out over the city as they rose above the rooftops as if he expected to somehow catch a glimpse through or above the Defile. There was nothing beyond but crumbled suburbia, but he could not be expected to know, and Selene could not think why she felt the urge to tell him.

She glanced around. The lift was a hundred meters above the ground already, and rising. Below, Mnemosyne stared up through the grayness, one hand resting lightly on the control stand, alert to the remote chance of emergency.

Selene sheathed her claws, carefully, and watched to make sure that they did not reflexively reemerge when she patted the human on the hand. His skin was moist against her pads; when she withdrew, she could detect his scent on her fingers. Her palms itched; she rubbed them together. She had no more than slight comfort to offer, but he appeared startled and grateful to receive it.

Not as startled as she, though, when she opened her mouth and said, “I am sorry your mother is dying.” Personal comments to suspects were not protocol. It was not only inappropriate for her to say that; it should have been impossible. And neither was it protocol, when he stared at her—mouth open wide enough to
show the several missing teeth at the side with the scar—to continue, “But in a complete analysis, I suppose we all are. Dying. Not sorry.”

He shut his mouth. He smiled, just as they rose to meet the rays of sunlight descending to meet him. The strike of light across his face made him wince and squint and shield his eyes with his hand, but not before Selene saw they were a cracked, surprising hazel. As if she had been seeking permission, he rolled his shoulders back and said, “It’s okay to be sorry, too.”

C
athoair had never in his life been this high above the ground. Unsurprising, given that he’d spent most of his life in the Well, sheltered by the very earth-berg he now rose beside, hoisted on creaking cables. It must be safe; the Black Silk officer beside him seemed at ease and even a little amused by his discomfort.

Still, the motion of the lift and the slide of air between the bars was not a comfort. He locked his right hand on the rail—not that even a death grip would save him if a cable snapped—and distracted himself with breathing and the view.

The city’s unkempt walls were visible in three directions, blocked to the northeast by the bulk of the Tower itself and the spires of Ark behind. Rising mist obscured the surface of the river, so Cahey could imagine the water beneath as a chasm, a gulf. Bottomless, except where it rose in midair to flow through the Tower, and morning light shone through. He wished Astrid were here to see this. She would adore it.

And he wanted her there, for strength and calm.

She would be frantic when he wasn’t back at the Ash & Thorn by lunchtime.

When the sun grew higher, the mist would burn through. But not yet. Now, it sent creeping fingers through the narrow streets of the old city across the river, lapped the slate rooftops, coiled copper railings and wreathed goblin wings. It flowed down the slope into the Well and obscured the makeshift buildings there—and there, it would linger, shielded from the sun’s rays by the Tower.

Out here, beneath all that sky, Cathoair was anything but comfortable. That was worse than the unsteady swaying of the cage beneath his feet, honestly. What was a little motion, a little height? The vast unboxed sky, however, made his heart sting, his mouth dry. It was bigger than him. Bigger than anything. And even up as far above the ground as this, he wasn’t any closer.

If it wasn’t for the green shimmer of the Defile bounding his horizons, even paling now as the light soaked through it, Cahey thought he might have sunk down on the floor and buried his face between his knees.

Still, they rose without disaster into the docking cradle. The lift latched into its clasps with a harsh, carrying sound, and the opening grille rasped. As the moreau led him out onto an exposed landing patio tiled in yellow sandstone, Cahey thought that was likely by design. It made enough noise to be thoroughly useless for sneaking.

He rubbed his hands on his trouser legs to dry them, and tried to seem at ease as he glanced around.

Despite the early hour, the broad yard before them was crisscrossed by pedestrians. Yawning students, most no older than Cathoair and some several years younger, slouched from what must have been dormitories to assemble before a building from which drifted cooking smells. Unmans, some armored like his officer and some clad in robes or loose trousers, moved
among them but seemingly at cross-purposes.
They
did not seem sleepy, nor in a hurry to eat.

“Do—” He wasn’t sure of a polite term, honestly. What did they call themselves? “—your people have their own cafeteria?”

“We eat first,” the officer said. “Humans sleep. Unmans do not. And She says as we work harder, and it is no inconvenience to us to rise for meals before sunup, we take precedence.”

Cathoair watched her sidelong as she spoke, but no trace of irony tainted her face or voice. “You don’t sleep at all?”

“We have never needed to.” Her tail swayed lazily, ears alert and polite when she glanced at him.

She padded forward across the stones, and he followed. And, unwilling to relinquish the conversation, asked, “So the Grey Wolf made you miss breakfast?”