Blightborn (23 page)

“I don’t think our burlap friend over there enjoys being called a dummy by such a dummy.”

“Hah, dummy!” the little urchin girl yells from the back.

Gwennie shoots her a look. The girl gives her the middle finger.

She turns back to Davies. “I’m no dummy, and you watch your mouth.”

“
You
watch where you’re throwing those knives.”

“I’m getting good.”

“You’re getting one degree less awful.”

“That’s something.”

He rolls his eyes. “You want to see what
something
is? Squirrel!”

The girl skips and traipses over, la-la-la. “Papa?”

“Knives, my darling little girl, the knives.”

The girl pirouettes as if she doesn’t have a care in the world, as if she’s a sweet little princess playing with dolls instead of a motherless, smudgy-cheeked rebel girl in the bowels of a flying city. She picks up the knives, dainty as anything, as if she’s picking up crumbs of bread, then dances back over to her father and Gwennie.

“Papa,” she says, offering him the knives.

“Show the dummy how we throw knives, Squirrel.”

The first two knives fly in two blinks of Gwennie’s eyes—one minute the girl is standing there giggling, the next she spins
around and her arm is outstretched and the two sides of the target’s neck are torn open. Sand pours out. One knife remains.

Squirrel turns back around, facing away from the dummy.

She cranes way back and flings the knife backward and upside down. The blade finds the center of the dummy’s sand-filled head and sticks there like the prong of a hat rack.

Squirrel giggles again and twirls.

“
That’s
how you throw knives,” Davies says. “My ten-year-old throws knives better than you.
Way
better. She makes
you
look like the child. A child with a dirty nappy hanging off her bottom, sticky jam-hands fumbling with some cat turd she found in a nearby sand pit, cheeks wet with tears and—”

“I get it,” Gwennie barks. “So, what’s the secret?”

Davies kneels by his daughter. “What’s your secret, Squirrel?”

“I just don’t think about it!” She holds up her hands, like,
I don’t know!

“See?” Davies says, standing. “She just doesn’t think about it.”

“Is that how you throw knives?”

“Bah. I don’t throw knives. I like a gun at my hip.”

“I want to try again.”

“Nuh-uh-uh,” he says. “It’s time.”

“Time?”

“Time to meet with Salton.”

Mary Salton is a hard-looking woman. Her face is dark leather marked by the tines of a fork. Her hair, short: little curls of dark hair tight to the scalp. Gwennie met her when she was first offered the deal to stay. And she hasn’t seen her since.

Salton sits at a table made from a few corn-fuel drums with a plywood board laid over the top.

Gwennie enters the room.

Davies closes the door behind her, leaving her alone.

“Sit,” Salton says. An empty half drum waits, serving as a stool.

Gwennie sits. Hesitant.

Salton slides a visidex across the table. The screen is dark. “Tap the screen.”

Gwennie’s not sure why this feels like some kind of trap, like she’s going to touch the screen and the floor will open up and she’ll be tossed into open air, down through the clouds, down toward the unforgiving earth.

Still, what can she do? She taps it.

A half-blurry image appears on the screen.

Two figures sitting in a café.

One of them, a man she recognizes as the peregrine.

The other, a girl a half inch away from shoving a cupcake in her mouth. A cupcake with frosting so tall it’s like the Babble Tower men once tried to build to be closer to the glorious manse of the Lord and Lady—a tower the Lord and Lady struck down with world-drowning storms.

Gwennie knows that girl.

Merelda McAvoy.
La Mer
.

“You know her,” Salton says.

“I . . .”

“You do. We know you do.”

“Yeah. Yes. I know her.”

“We want you to go to her.”

Gwennie almost laughs. “
What?
Go to her?”

“Sorry, do I have shit in my mouth?”

“I . . . wh . . .” She makes an incredulous little snort. “Merelda McAvoy is with the peregrine.”

“Clearly.”

“The peregrine who probably won’t be very nice to me if he catches me visiting with his little . . . house whore.”

“She’s not a whore; she’s a house-mistress.”

“I don’t get the difference.”

“She is his mistress. She chooses to be with him. The look in her eyes is one of love. Or, at least, fascination.” Salton sniffs and scowls. “It is
because
she is with the peregrine that you will go to her.”

Gwennie stands. “Whoa, no, I’m not doing that. I have one job here, and it’s to find my family—”

Salton scowls.

“You
do
have one job,” Salton says, “and it’s to help us. You are to support the cause before you support yourself. Let me remind you of the deal you made. You’re with us or you’re against us. The ship you’d use to hop off the flotilla and float back down to the Heartland like a little feather has
literally
sailed. You either commit to our goals or we dump you over the edge like so much wind-frozen waste.”

Gwennie gapes. She doesn’t know what to say.

“You’ll go to her. You will solicit her help one way or another.”

“Help? Help with what?”

“Help with destroying the Empyrean, Miss Shawcatch.”

SHINING THE HORSE APPLE

THE FLOTILLA
is a black beast passing across the sun. The flying city casts a long, dark shadow over the town of Boxelder.

Proctor Simone Agrasanto stops and stands in the middle of the street, staring up, shielding her eyes from the ragged fingernail of white sunlight creeping around the edge of the flotilla.

She wonders which flotilla that is. It’s either the Ormond Stirling Saranyu or her own home city, the Keppert Shinehart Anshar. No others would be floating this close at this time of the year.

Squinting, she returns her gaze to the town around her. The bubbled-up plasto-sheen “main street.” The tavern, the Tallyman’s office, the doctor’s, the general store—and, beyond that, not much else but the swaying corn. Her skin feels greasy. Her fingertips as dry as the inside of an old bone. And the pollen
has swollen her sinuses, made it feel as if she’s trying to push a chicken’s egg from the corner of her one good eye.

Since the other is just a dead pucker and all. Just thinking about it makes it itch. Folks watch her from the windows of their businesses and from between buildings, and so she has to resist the urge to flip up the eyepatch and go crazy scratching the skin around the ruined socket.

Nearly two weeks ago she thought her purgatory in this bowl of dust was swiftly fading: Boyland’s crew had done what she felt was impossible. They’d found Cael and the two other boys.

Of course, they’d found them at the same time the Sleeping Dogs swept in over the Provisional Depot.

Boyland had been both apologetic and apoplectic.

Simone had told him to calm down. She’d said,
This is a good thing, not a bad thing
. Getting a bead on both Cael McAvoy and the raider army that’s been a splinter under the Empyrean fingernail for decades?

She had told Boyland to follow closely.

Then she’d ordered a small strike-fleet of well-armed swiftboats to attack the raider contingent.

And, finally, she had the Anshar lob a torpedo at the Provisional Depot. Now it, like the town of Martha’s Bend, is a smoldering crater.

A good way to send a message to these Heartlanders, she thinks. And, more important, to the raiders.
Anything you touch, you corrupt—and anything you corrupt, we destroy.

But now . . .

She stomps into Busser’s Tavern. As is her wont this time
every day. Devon, her attaché (his arm still hanging in a sling like a pigeon’s broken wing), stands by the table.
Her
table. And there on the table is a bowl of chicha beer, a sour, fermented drink. After her first taste she’d called it a bowl of horse urine—it was acidic and made her cheeks pucker. But then the next day she had an unusual desire to taste it again.

And so began her daily ritual.

There, across the room, stands the barkeep. Tom Busser. Arms folded. Eyes staring out from under the dark slashes that are his brows.

She puts down the visidex. Has a sip of beer. She shudders the way she does every time, then taps the screen and initiates contact.

The face of the mayor’s son appears.

He looks nervous.

He
should
.

“You have botched things,” she says, taking another sip.

“We’ll pick up the trail again. It won’t be long.”

“It’s not just that, boy. It’s that you pointed my swiftboats south. You know what they found in that direction?”

“The raiders?”

She almost laughs. “The raiders? Are you really that daft?” He starts to say something, but she shushes him with a short, sharp shake of her head. “They did
not
find raiders. They found corn. Wide-open tracts of empty corn. They were not where you said they would be.”

“Hold on, I said they were
going
in that direction. I can’t help it if they changed or decided to go east or west or disappear down a godsdamn rabbit hole—”

“Find them,”
she growls. “I don’t want excuses. You know what excuses are? Lamentations to justify our own failures and weaknesses. You failed. Own your mistake. Fix what you broke. We’ll talk again this time tomorrow.”

Boyland nods. She can see the fear in his eyes even across the great distance connected by two visidexes.

She closes the connection and darkens the screen.

Outside, she is serenity. A sip of beer. A tight smile at Devon.

Inside, she’s a swarm of starving locusts.

Boyland looks up and flings the visidex down on the floor of the yacht. On all sides, the corncobs thud against the boat. Stalks cracking as they push on. He keeps the boat down in the corn. All an effort to stay low. To stay
hidden
. The sails stick up over the tops of the stalks, but nothing there should catch the light, reflect back to those who might be looking from above.

“Why’d you lie?” Wanda asks, hands tucked into her pockets.

He says, “Because I don’t like her. Or trust her.”

“But we have a deal with her. You piss her off—”

“
I
have a deal with her. You have a deal with me.”

She scowls. “That’s not how I remember it.”

He steps closer to her, chin up and out. “Then you remember it wrong.” He smiles as he sees her looking left and right. “You’re thinking your drunken angel with broken wings is going to protect you, aren’t you? In case you hadn’t noticed, Mr. Cozido bailed on us, Wanda.”

“Maybe you ran him off.”

He laughs that high-pitched pig laugh of his, a laugh that
arrives fast and dies quick. “Yeah. Maybe I did. Just like I ran those swiftboats south.”

“Why did you tell her that anyway?”

“Because,
Wanda
, I don’t want to get in the middle of a shooting war with the Empyrean. And I want to be the one to do it—to scoop up that piece of shit you’re Obligated to.”

“To which I am
Obligated
,” she corrects him. “Though it could be
to whom
, but you said
piece of ess,
so I thought—”

“Whatever, priss.”

“You didn’t tell her about Mr. Cozido, either.”

“No, I did not. That’s not her problem; it’s ours. And far as problems go, it’s a pretty good one to have.”

“You really hate him, don’t you?”

“I don’t bend much either way for that old drunk. But I am glad he’s gone, because he was stinking up the boat with his whiskey farts.”

She makes a face. “Not Rigo’s dad. Cael.”

Boyland doesn’t need to answer given the way his cheeks redden and a fat vein stands out on the large, plains-like expanse of his forehead. But he answers anyway: “It’s his fault all this happened. Him and his gimp father. Now my daddy’s gone. And my daddy was no prize bull, but he was my daddy just the same. And my girl is gone, too, and she
was
a prize, a real peach, maybe the best thing that happened to me.”

“That wasn’t Cael’s fault.”

“But what
is
his fault is that he was sticking it to her before she ever got Obligated—”

“What, like she’s ruined now?”

“Maybe not ruined but, but—
tarnished
. Like a mushy spot on a perfectly good apple.”

“Some of us aren’t the children of mayors who get to eat apples all that regularly, and I might add that it sounds more like you’re mad at Gwennie than you are at Cael. You ought to be nicer to the women in your life. I seen the way you talk to your momma. No respect.”

“Way I talk is my business, and I’m not mad at Gwennie, because it wasn’t her fault. You hear me? She was . . . she was
made
to do it. Coerced! That’s the word.
Coerced.
You talk to me about being nice to women, but Cael’s no gentleman. He was the captain of that crew, and he could make her do whatever he wanted—”