City Of Ruin (13 page)

They were certainly not a particularly friendly bunch, this lot, but he didn’t know whether this was normal behaviour in a city so far north.

‘Morning.’ Eventually, a grey-bearded man with tiny eyes spoke to him. ‘Rumel, I see?’

‘You see right,’ Jeryd muttered in response, then to one of the serving girls, ‘Black tea and a pastry, please.’

‘We don’t get many rumels visiting this place,’ grey beard remarked coldly.

‘That right?’ Jeryd lowered himself onto the chair with a groan.
Still
not getting any younger.

Grey beard stood up, and his companion, a blue-masked woman wrapped in a matching cloak, looked away, probably embarrassed. ‘Not sure you understand me, friend.’

Jeryd stared back at him, conscious now of his coarse dark skin, of his tail, of his glossy black eyes. He hadn’t dealt with any of this kind of shit for a long, long time. ‘You’ll have to forgive me.’ He undid the top buttons on his jerkin to reveal his Inquisition medallion, featuring its iconic angular image of a crucible. ‘Investigator Rumex Jeryd, pleased to meet you. New to the city, you see, so I’m not yet sure which of these places are full of bastards – or not. I’m still finding my way around.’

‘Oh,’ grey beard replied, backtracking desperately. ‘Well . . . I can see . . .’

‘All you can see is a rumel, right? I understand. And if you don’t like that, you can just wait half an hour until I’ve finished one of these delicious pastries, or I can haul your arse into a cell overnight, where you might or might not get beaten unconscious by one of the inmates. Now, then – is that enough to impress your fancy woman,
friend
?’

The waitress brought over Jeryd’s order, just then, with a cheeky smile on her face that said she was enjoying the show. He winked at her.

Grey beard sat back down, to commence a terse and angry argument with his female companion. Sure rumels constituted a minority across the Archipelago, so Jeryd had had to deal with racism before, a while ago, but Villjamur was enlightened now, so he just didn’t expect to encounter it in any major city elsewhere. At home they’d closed down the last humans-only tavern before he was even born. Perhaps things really
were
different, this far north.

As he chomped into his pastry – a wonderfully sweet creation with honey bleeding from the middle – and sipped his tea, he found the mood in the room becoming much more amicable.

*

Arriving at his desk by eight each morning, he found his groove quickly, getting some of the good tea available, then chatting to the few enthusiastic Inquisition staff, and getting stuck into things. They began to respect him – and he knew it. It wasn’t tough to work out why, because Jeryd seemed the only one to actually care about solving crimes – a fact that somewhat surprised himself.

He asked for some unsolved crimes, and files soon piled up on his desk.

He scanned the papers for anything that might help with the Haust case. There were the usual cases you got in any big city: theft, rape, assault, murder. Yet more people had been reported as missing recently, though no one had found the time to pursue the fact. There’d also been an interesting increase in the number of porno golems being distributed – cultists were manufacturing these doll-women via gangs as an alternative for the desperate males of Villiren, so that prostitutes would not die of pneumonia from having to stand outside in the chilling temperatures. Jeryd was sickened, though not surprised, when someone hinted that this trade might have been sanctioned by the portreeve, and the Inquisition were advised to ignore the seedy industry.

The previous evening’s murders: there had been four reports of dead bodies found with puncture wounds in the neck, the corpses shrivelled, but they had never gone missing for long – and were usually found round the back of whichever tavern they’d been drinking in the night before – and no one was too surprised at them ending up dead. Anyway, such cases tended to be allocated to a special department within the Inquisition, and passed out of Jeryd’s hands after that.

An hour later, after skimming over all the cases, Jeryd found himself seated at a meeting table with three of his superiors, all grey-skinned rumel much older than himself, and who seemed drunk even before midday.

He briefed them on the new case, to ensure that he could pursue it legitimately, and found they put up no objections. No one else in the Inquisition seemed all that bothered about what he was doing, which both annoyed and gratified him. No distractions, no one pushing administrative duties his way, no one tying him up in red tape.

*

Jeryd began the process of interviewing all those who had reported missing persons. He went about things in a thoroughly organized manner, touring the streets with Nanzi, the girl proving as diligent as ever in her assistance.

Jeryd liked her. She brought some much-needed stability and an enquiring mind to their partnership. She also brought him tea regularly. She kept fuel for the fire well stocked. She organized his notes, fetched in a map – he didn’t even have to ask for it. On top of helping him she saw to the needs of the women and children who thronged the lobby of the Inquisition headquarters, reporting sickening deeds of one kind or another. Good aides were hard to come by.

As they plodded through the streets they soon found that those who had vanished from the streets of Villiren were a varied range of individuals. Jeryd had numerous bereaved families to interview, but he was especially keen on locating any similarities to the disappearance of the missing Night Guard soldier. By concentrating on that, the probabilities of discovering him or what had happened to him were greater.

Some of the houses in the city showed evidence of extreme poverty; hastily built constructions with no flair for design. People were crowded into cuboid rooms that adjoined exactly similar rooms – in buildings run up because they were claimed to be the future in modernity and clean living. This was progress, Lutto had declared, as he pocketed their rent money, but somewhere over the course of the years the soul of the entire street had died.

Thus he persevered: family after family, door after door, face after face.

Jeryd knew, without understanding how, that some of the missing were never going to be found again. He saw the homes that they’d vanished from, and there was something about these decrepit places that suggested they were probably better off now, wherever they were.

Jeryd was surveying lives that no one in authority had ever bothered to check on. Lives that had capsized years ago: women who looked constantly on the verge of tears, men beyond desperation, young girls holding younger girls he hoped weren’t their own, the elderly afflicted with diseases he didn’t know how to describe. Forgotten people rotting inside their homes, conscious that they were not wanted in the city proper. Jeryd knew he could have been the first investigator to ask these families about the person who had vanished from their existence. Mothers who had lost their eldest children, on whom they depended. Husbands who had lost their wives of thirty years. Families of children with no parents.

You will find them, won’t you? You will help us?

Many said they couldn’t find a job, yet couldn’t survive out in the ice. Some claimed the portreeve had crippled or bribed the unions, and encouraged such an influx of cheap tribal labour that it meant they were paid next to nothing. Some described how he had issued regular pamphlets declaring that benefits had to be limited to pay for the cost of mounting a defence against the threat of attack from the north – which was merely a variation on earlier years when he said the money was needed to fund preparations against terror attacks from the tribes of Varltung. Thus Lutto created an air of danger to keep these people in their place.

If these families knew that a war was imminent, they didn’t show it.

How can you destroy people who are already broken?

But he and Nanzi found out one crucially interesting fact: those who had disappeared in larger numbers were the citizens with better-quality jobs – traders and tavern owners and smiths. Jeryd was frustrated with how the Inquisition could have overlooked such reports.

They strode from the houses back to the Inquisition headquarters in the ambience of the falling snow.

‘It’s not a pretty picture, is it?’ Jeryd’s mood had been so contemplative, he had momentarily forgotten Nanzi was next to him. He supposed today’s task had not been easy on her.

‘I had no idea how bad things were in this city,’ she confessed. ‘It doesn’t look like we can do much for them though, does it?’

‘The good investigator’, Jeryd replied, ‘always has choices before him, even when it seems there are none. He instinctively knows what’s right. He knows he has the option to do
something
.’

‘Sounds as if you’re the only good investigator left,’ Nanzi remarked.

‘I feel like I’m holding the fort all by myself.’

*

Another long day till his legs ached and sentences were drying up in his throat. After Nanzi departed for the night, he sat and contemplated the day’s findings in his chamber, a cup of tea in one hand, a biscuit in the other.

Patterns materialized.

Give or take half an hour’s walk, the majority of disappearances had taken place between the Ancient Quarter and the seafront, or concentrated in Deeping, around the Citadel and the barracks.

Jeryd brooded on these facts, as if tuning in to their importance.

What was special about the types of citizens who resided there? He had to also consider whether they had been murdered by some careful killer operating stealthily, or if perhaps prosperous men and women were walking out on their families because of the threat of war.

The red sun having set early this far north, he deliberated the subject for some time while in darkness.

*

Another whisper, someone calling out a name, one that wasn’t his. Night-time now, and once more Jeryd was lying in his bed. His gold-starred red breeches hung on the back of a chair as if mocking him. He’d been reading a history book he found on the shelf, the kind of dry information he needed to take his mind off things.

Marysa had kept herself busy by hunting for all the libraries. Not one central depository, they were spread across the city in small bohemian enclaves, some no more than front rooms or attic spaces. Her current area of research involved antique architecture. The Boreal Archipelago was littered with the remains of structures of dubious purpose, edifices that had been reduced to nothing more than crippled aesthetics, though there was little of the old stuff to be found in Villiren. She hoped to find herself employment from history tuition, but few people seemed interested.

And tonight she had recently returned from one of her first classes in some obscure technique of personal combat. Garish advertising leaflets constantly made their way around the city, promising methods of safety amidst the gang violence. He himself could never keep up with them: there was always a new technique to be learned: a punch or a jab that would defeat all others.

The ultimate fighting moves! The killer system! Women, defend yourselves against gang tyranny!

Currently she was out of the room making them some more tea, when suddenly he heard a voice that might or might not have been merely the wind; he couldn’t be certain.

The second time, it spoke a name, for sure.

When he opened the window to investigate, the area outside was quiet. No one walked the narrow, lacklustre streets. Was it possible he was being spied upon?

Malum was enjoying a card game with JC and a choleric trader called Gall, who was bleeding Sota and Lordil coins across the table. Malum didn’t need the money, just liked to win, although sometimes he wished that these types didn’t let their fear of him get in the way of a good game. Gall did a little work for the Black Eyed Dog mineral franchise, and some said that he dealt in slaves, though Malum had never seen much evidence of that.

There was a glass of blood to one side, from which he took a swig, savouring the metallic taste. Down here, none of this gang made any effort to hide what they were. In one corner of the room, watching the door, was Múndi, a tribal kid no older than ten who’d become orphaned after the rest of his tribe was slaughtered by Imperial soldiers. He normally sauntered around with a spurious arrogance, carrying his machete with casual ease.

Múndi stepped aside as two of the youngest recruits came clambering in to the rear of the dimly lit bar, and Malum studied the two youths from behind his mask. They were both blond: Jodil the chunky one, while Din was skinny. Fourteen and fifteen years old respectively, they wore thigh-length leather coats and the same brand of paduasoy hooded jumper that Malum had bought for them on their initiation. Annoyingly, they kept wearing crude home-made fangs to blend in with the fully ordained members of the Bloods, but Malum didn’t discourage their enthusiasm.

They now seemed nervous, each shifting his weight from foot to foot, hands buried deep in their pockets. He liked the kids. There was a deep sense of loyalty in them, which derived from the fact that they’d both lost their fathers to the sea and didn’t have much else in the way of family. They had drifted, he had caught them and nurtured them. A lot of young recruits came to him that way.