The Deepest Poison (6 page)

Can you show us the way, Lady? It seems everyone is trying to kill us. Can we find refuge beneath your branches?

And if not there, where?

 

Chapter Two

O
CTAVIA
WOKE
TO
the rollicking grind of the train's brakes. The Lady's warmth lay as a cozy weight over her, like dirt upon roots. She wiped a trail of drool from her mouth as she pushed herself onto her haunches. The circle around her held. She had seen circles stay open for hours during complex operations that relied on doctoring as well as herbs, but certainly not with the healer bound inside. The other women, long since retreated to their benches, began to murmur and stir. They eyed Octavia as they reached for their hats and bags. Their look reminded her of the vultures that clustered on the edge of a battlefield, waiting for their turn.

Octavia did not anticipate a pleasant disembarkation.

The train screeched to a halt. She dug her elbow against her satchel, readying herself. The rest of the women stood. The door to the train car flung open with a clang. Grabbing hold of the medician blanket, Octavia lunged forward, jumping over the stairs entirely. A surprised conductor fell backward.
Incontinence.
She landed, ready to run.

Pandemonium drowned her.

Songs, bodies, thousands of them. As many as an army encampment, but all in tight proximity. A stew of humanity, with her senses more attuned than ever before.

She screamed, but even that sound was lost in the cacophony.

She ran, faces blurring around her. Dark suits, dark skins, ­people, ­people everywhere. Train whistles blasted like a whisper against the needs of bodies.
Starvation gout disease pox infection syphilis double amputation typhoid pregnancy migraine.
She ran, she shoved, she found a wall of glimmering white tile. A door. She opened it. She threw herself inside. A hallway, the lights electric. She staggered another twenty feet until she collapsed, heaving for breath, heaving from terror. The songs still burbled close by, like ocean waves hidden behind a dune.

“Lady, what is happening to me?”

She pulled the blanket from beneath her arm and pressed it to her face. The cloth absorbed her sobs as she rocked for a minute.
Enough of this. I need to find out where I am. Find Alonzo.

Up the hall she found a map painted on the white wall:
TAMARAN
TERMINAL
Colored lines depicted a massive facility of multiple floors and several dozen tracks. The place could easily hold tens of thousands of ­people—­no wonder she had been overwhelmed. Even at her normal sensitivity, this place would have left her dazed and desirous of a quick retreat.

How am I to find Alonzo amidst these crowds? And how am I to cope with the noise of all these diagnoses?

The map showed several access hallways, like the one she was in, but she could not avoid the city itself. The terminal was located at city center, at the plaza. Even as a newcomer to Tamarania, she knew of the plaza.

The southern nations were a cluster of twelve city-­states. Tamarania possessed the largest area by far, though its principal city occupied only the tip at the continent's end. The other city-­states overflowed islands interconnected by bridges, naval vessels, and airships. The plaza was the hub of Tamarania, and of all the southern nations. Millions of ­people were said to live in the immediate environs.

Millions. My brain will explode.

Octavia had heard millions of living beings before—­microscopic zymes—­when the Lady's magic had enhanced her hearing so she could diagnose the Wasters' water contamination. ­People were so much bigger and more complex, there was no comparison.

If the Lady can enhance my hearing, maybe she can decrease it. Actually—­she did. In the train car, I barely heard the women's songs once I was in the circle. The magic filtered it.

Frowning, she fluffed out the medician blanket. It looked ghastly with an entire long edge hacked away. She had not properly disengaged the circle before she fled and she still felt the inherent heat of the Lady's presence. “I'm sorry,” she murmured. While she'd been in training, forgetting to disengage a circle was a grave offense—­the sort that earned a hundred lines and a week of doubled manure-­shoveling duty. “But I do still require your attention.”

She delved into her satchel to find her headband. The white cloth bore a hand-­stitched emblem of the Lady's Tree on the front. It sparkled with the same enchantment as the rest of her uniform. Warding the cloth had taken many days of meditation; she hoped that the existing enchantment might make the cloth more receptive.
As if I'm one to judge the Lady's capabilities.

Octavia sat in the circle, headband across her lap. “Lady,” she whispered. At the word, heat stroked her as if she were a cat. “You have opened my eyes and ears in new ways, and now I ask something more of you. I'm too attuned to ­people. I must be able to walk the city. Please, rest your touch on my headband so that I may cover my ears and dim the songs around me.” She lifted up the band. It grew hot in her grip. She remained that way for several long minutes, breathing through her Al Cala, and didn't let her hands drop until the cloth began to cool.

She disengaged the circle with murmured gratitude. She secured the headband to cover her ears, the embroidered side upside down and hidden at the nape of her neck. Immediately the background burble of songs vanished. She could have wept with relief as she murmured more thanks, but she didn't dare linger.

The longer I am hidden away
,
the harder it will be to find Alonzo.

She wended her way through more passages in an attempt to avoid the public terminal. Rounding a corner, she stopped. A body was sprawled on the floor. Even as Octavia approached, she knew this person was dead. There was no song.
Maybe the southern nations are not so different from Caskentia after all.

She stepped closer. The body's music returned, so thready that it barely penetrated her new headband.

Octavia gasped and dropped to her knees, hands delving into her satchel. What just happened?

“Octavia.” The woman's head lolled as the name gargled past her lips.

Shock froze her in place. “I—­do I know you?”

The cut and shabbiness of the woman's clothes denoted Caskentian origins, her skin honey in hue. Blank eyes met Octavia's gaze. “North.” Her jaw bobbed as if she struggled for more words. Frustration flashed across her haggard face.

With that, the music puffed out. She was dead. Again.

“Lady?” Octavia whispered, though she already surmised what had just happened. The Lady had spoken before through ­people on the brink of life and death—­through a boy in Leffen, and through Alonzo when Octavia had saved him with a leaf. She had a sense that a leaf wouldn't work on this woman now—­after all, she was too far gone for even the Lady to utilize as a messenger.

North.
Caskentia. What had the Lady tried to say? Octavia stood, shaken.

The entrance of the terminal roared with humanity, but this time she could discern true sounds as well: overlapping voices, footsteps, the clatter of wheels, the rumbles of trains. The songs were like breeze-­blown tree branches outside a window, much easier to ignore than the banshee screams they'd been before.

She studied the crowd. It was peculiar to see so many darker skin tones, ranging from deep tan to coal. Tamarans were rare in Caskentia, which was one reason why Alonzo had stood out so much to her.
And why he was doomed as a Clockwork Dagger—­too unusual, too memorable.
Now he would blend in too much for her to find him.

She followed the flow outside to the plaza and froze as elbows and bodies jostled against her.

Night draped over a metropolis set aglow. Before her was an illuminated hexagon easily a half mile in diameter. In the middle was a massive roundabout packed with more cabriolets, automated cycles, and bicycles than she had ever seen in her life. Each side of the hexagon featured a massive building that was blocks long and dozens of floors tall. Tramway tracks stacked around them. Every ten or so floors, another track made a circuit. Bridges spanned the high gaps, the trestles like fine spiderwebs. Beyond the plaza, tower upon tower stretched into the sky.

On the far side of the hexagon sat the ornate palace known as the Warriors' Arena. It was shorter than all of the surrounding buildings at a mere dozen floors, but no less magnificent. A bright stained-­glass dome crowned the gray edifice. Mooring towers lined the long roof; airships bobbed from several. Long, rippling banners advertised the next Arena bout several days away.

Peculiar, how the city-­states prided themselves on centuries without war even as they relished the blood sport of Warriors played out in the Arena.

Spotlights waved to and fro like gigantic dogs' tails made of rays. They beamed over airships on high, their gasbags adorned with advertisements far too distant for her to fully read from ground level.

Somehow, amidst these thousands of ­people, Octavia needed to find Alonzo.

As obvious as the Garret household would be to Daggers and Wasters, it also presented the only specific location for her to meet him. Now it was a matter of finding it. With her coat pulled close and satchel snug at her hip, Octavia set off across the plaza.

How can I inquire with any subtlety?
She approached a doorman as he stalked a yellow-­lit entry between a haberdashery and a cheese shop. The directory sign behind him listed a dozen residence floors, but no occupants by name. There were simply too many.

“Pardon me,” Octavia said, smiling. “I'm to deliver a message to the Garret flat but I've lost the address.”

“Shoo, girl. You look like you were dragged behind a lorry.” He motioned her away with both hands.

She bit her lip to contain a retort, but she knew the man was right. Her coat had multiple rips after the train ride, and it barely managed to cover her uniform if she remained standing. If she lingered anywhere for long, she would be jailed as a vagrant.

She looked around, scanning for any clue, any idea. Another airship drifted overhead. From here she could see the ad, the familiar calligraphy and crown logo featuring two fashionable young ladies holding up slender tins.

ROYAL
-­
TEA
.
A
TASTY
BALM
FOR
AN
Y
ILL!

She snarled. A few nearby pedestrians lurched away from her, wide-­eyed. That blasted Royal-­Tea was everywhere. The Wasters made the concoction by brewing the dried bark of the Lady's Tree—­and they were kidnapping teenage girls from Mercia to fetch the bark. A dangerous task, with the woods full of threems—­beasts part equine and part dragon—­to act in the Lady's defense. Ads for Royal-­Tea had plastered Caskentia, and each purchase unknowingly funded the war effort of their greatest enemy.

The presence of the tea was a reminder that Wasters would be here as well, keener than ever before to kidnap her.
Because trained assassins from Caskentia are not enough to worry about.

It also brought to mind Mrs. Stout. Octavia pressed her fingers to her lips and sent a prayer to her friend.

Mrs. Stout had been Octavia's roommate aboard the
Argus
. The vivacious and plump older woman turned out to be a childhood friend of Octavia's mentor, Miss Percival. Mrs. Stout was also the long-lost princess of Caskentia, Allendia. Her kidnapping fifty years ago had sparked the endless intermittent conflict with the Waste. The young princess had been presumed dead, and the next year, the rest of the royal family was killed in a Waster attack on Mercia. With her cousin Queen Evandia now on the throne, Mrs. Stout had adapted to life as a civilian with the hopes that it might spare Caskentia a civil war.

Miss Percival had been one of the few who knew Mrs. Stout's true identity and she'd kept the secret for decades, until now. She arranged for Octavia and Mrs. Stout to travel together by airship because she had sold them out to the Waste.

It was mostly about the money to save the academy. It had to be. But envy had to be part of it as well, and fear.

Octavia was so sick of being feared, but with these new changes, she was starting to fear herself as well.

She hurried past more lorries and cycles. A fountain glowed purple. Two boys in knickerbockers sat on the edge and splashed each other, giggling. The lit fountain—­Alonzo had said his mother's flat overlooked a blue fountain. Looking around, she realized that she had passed an orange fountain already, and she didn't see any duplicated colors. Lady be praised!

After another long block of walking, she found the blue landmark and glanced at the building above. At least now she was at the right place. It was just a matter of gaining entry and going from there. Could she sneak around the back? Perhaps there was a goods entry. She walked past a doorman, looking for any placard listing residences.

“Hey! You!” The doorman lunged to grab her arm.

Octavia's hand immediately went to her torso for her capsicum flute.
Drat. Used it on the airship!
When she found nothing, her hand formed a fist and she punched at his fingers. “Let me go! Stop!”

“Stop struggling, woman. I been told to look for you. Come here.” Chew tobacco reeked on his breath.
Mouth lesions.

She stopped fighting, though her heart continued to hammer in her chest. A small twist and she could grab her parasol from its loop on her satchel. It'd make a fine cudgel.

“Who told you to look for me?”

“A Mr. Garret. Said to look for a pale young woman with brown hair and a ripped black coat. You fit the description mighty well. Hold on. He just went inside to the lobby.”

She could have melted into the pavement in relief. The doorman returned to his station and scribbled a note. He tucked it inside a strange capsule and set it at the base of a clear pipe. At the press of a button, the capsule shot up the tube with a mighty whoosh and vanished through the ceiling. She stared, mouth gaping.