Crystal Rain (4 page)

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Authors: Tobias S. Buckell

BOOK: Crystal Rain
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People peered out their windows to see the excitement as Dihana and thirty ragamuffins marched the two blocks to Capitol City’s waterfront. A drunken fisherman paused at the street’s corner, swayed, then retreated back into the alley’s shadows when he saw them.
The ragamuffins slowed down in front of warehouse fifteen. A trio of mongoose-men guarded the large doors, deadly long rifles held in the crooks of their arms. They surveyed the street and the ragamuffin force with cold calm.
“Is better you wait up some,” the first mongoose-man said.
Dihana shook her head. “I am the prime minister of this city, with all the rights and responsibilities that entails.” Over a hundred thousand people lived inside Capitol City’s walls and she accepted responsibility for them all. “You tell me I can’t go
where
?
”
She’d learned that particular verbal tone from Elijah, her father, well before he’d died and she inherited the position of prime minister.
The mongoose-man nearest the door cleared his throat. “Let she through. Alone.”
The rusty side-access hinges squealed as the mongoose-men pushed the door open. Dihana walked through, her skirt filling out and brushing the sides of the doorframe with the motion.
In the middle of an empty expanse of dirty concrete floor, a man stood over five dead bodies. Blood settled in several footwide pools underneath each victim. Knife strokes had left tattered and sliced shirts on both the dead and the alive.
One corpse’s throat still seeped blood from a bullet puncture.
“General Haidan.” Dihana kept an artificially calm composure. The mongoose-men’s leader usually stayed out beyond the city’s immense walls. “What the hell have you done here?”
“Repaying a debt, as an old friend of Elijah.” His dreadlocks
had grayed, and his face looked more leathery. A man who always braved the elements. A man who had always stood by her father. “You go listen?”
Dihana bit her lip. This was irregular. “Okay. Go ahead.” She did her best to ignore the death by her feet.
Haidan turned to the mongoose-man by the inside of the door. “Bring them two we got over here.” He folded his arms.
Dihana shook her head, impatient with his cryptic approach. “Last time we met, Haidan”—just after Elijah had died and she’d been struggling to handle her new responsibilities with no time for grieving—“you said you’d honor the contract between the city and the mongoose-men. That you always would protect us. Why couldn’t you have just asked me what you needed done in the city. It’s suspicious when mongoose-men start just showing up in the city in numbers.” A mongoose-man pushed two men with burlap sacks over their heads through the door.
“Shut the door,” Haidan ordered. The door squealed and slammed shut. Dihana flinched. She’d made a mistake, gotten trapped. The Haidan she knew as a child would never have done this. But things changed. Hundreds of mongoose-men had actually come
inside
the city tonight. Maybe alliances were being made in the dark behind her back.
“The ragamuffins know where I am,” Dihana said. Haidan had encouraged her when she’d struggled to run the city after Elijah had died. She wanted to say she felt sorry he no longer felt she was the best choice for prime minister. She hoped this new Haidan would exile her somewhere pleasant, and that the bush hadn’t changed him enough for him to kill her.
Haidan frowned. His locks swayed as he shook his head. “Don’t be silly,” he growled. She’d read him wrong. “Them man can’t even test with me mongoose. I don’t want the city, we protecting it. Me and you, we go have to reason things out. Things happening.”
Dihana almost shuddered with relief. Deep inside, she hadn’t believed, couldn’t believe, that Haidan would do such a thing. The mongoose-man stopped in front of them
and ripped the burlap sacks away from the two men’s heads. Dihana stared at them.
“You’re familiar,” she whispered. She hadn’t seem them since she’d become prime minister. Councilmen. They’d all abdicated the Council, disbanding it when she came to power, leaving her confused and without any help except for Haidan. They’d hoped she’d fail, she knew, and that they could return to run Capitol City.
But she hadn’t failed. And they’d remained in hiding all this time.
Dihana looked down more closely at the corpses. Two she recognized as other Councilmen from her father’s circle. The other three: poorly dressed farmers. Or maybe shopkeepers in work clothes. Haidan caught her eyes when she looked back up. The two Councilmen shuffled nervously.
“Them two claim they was here to meet a Vodun priestess,” Haidan said.
“She a trap for we,” the nearest man said. He glared at Dihana, and she looked back at Haidan.
“This ain’t no Loa doing.” Haidan shook his head. “Is Azteca.”
“They don’t look like Azteca,” she said.
“When you promise a desperate man gold, land, woman, power, whatever, he would do anything. Even against his own people. This ain’t the first Councilman we find dead. Seen many more outside Capitol City.” Haidan looked at the two nervous Councilmen. “More go die if them keep try hiding.”
“Why?” The Councilmen had hidden themselves well enough all this time.
“Azteca activity like nothing before. And we lose communication with Mafolie Pass. Them dead quiet. Street whispering say any Councilman head go be repaid in it own weight in Azteca gold. So them Councilmen need you, Dihana. They ain’t go say so, but they need you bad.” He looked at her.
Dihana let the pause hang between them all. Let them stand and fidget for a few seconds, she thought. Haidan
folded his hands over his belt buckle and waited. He could be fully trusted, she thought, though she wondered why he hadn’t come to talk to her before any of this. Dihana turned to the two Councilmen. “Get to the Ministry building. We have space for you. Call all the other Councilmen you can in.”
They stood still. Maybe they thought there was some negotiation to be hammered out between them.
“If you smart,” Haidan ended any such thought, “you go do it.”
The two Councilmen looked down at the dead men by their feet. “We accept,” the one nearest Dihana said, the words forced. “But we expect to stay in the East Wing rooms.” The best rooms in the Ministry.
“We’ll see what we can do,” Dihana said as Haidan shouted orders to reopen the doors. Two mongoose-men and some ragamuffins led the Councilmen down the street from the door.
Haidan turned to Dihana. “Still got time?”
“Yes.” Dihana looked down at the bodies. “But not here.”
“Fair enough,” Haidan said. “Ministry?” Dihana noticed, for the first time, the powder marks on Haidan’s right hand. He looked down, rubbed the hand against his thick pants, and shrugged.
“Yes. Yes, that would be good,” Dihana said.
 
Capitol City’s walls towered above the rooftops, taller than anything anyone in the city could build. A reminder, always, of the secrets Dihana’s ancestors died with. Only they could have built something like Capitol City. The great amphitheater-shaped city perched on the rocky peninsula’s end created a natural harbor inside its protective walls and housed Dihana’s hundred thousand fellow city dwellers. Just outside, an ever-shifting population tended to farms and grain depots that supplied Capitol City. To secure a fast and constant supply of food, Dihana had presided over the construction of train tracks, the Triangle Tracks, that extended out 250 miles from the city. She wasn’t sure how many villages or towns had sprung up
along those tracks, but one of her projects included a new census that would start among the towns and villages along the tracks and into the bush, all the way down the dirt roads and coasts to the Wicked Highs. But the planning for that was just beginning.
The Ministry building had the only real park inside Capitol City, a long, rectangular green spit that extended until it stopped in front of the waterfront warehouses. Dihana and Haidan walked the road back to the Ministry building, the park with its shadows and shifting trees on their right. On their left the city’s buildings blazed with lights from their windows, supplied from the proliferation of electric cables that draped between them like jungle vines.
They walked two blocks in silence. Haidan’s mongoose-men remained at the warehouse taking care of the bodies, and Dihana had ordered the ragamuffins back to their nightly patrols.
Haidan nodded at the two ragamuffins standing watch when they passed through the Ministry’s gates.
“Someone waiting for you,” the ragamuffin on her right said. “By the step them.”
“Mother Elene,” Haidan said, pointing out the Vodun priestess who sat waiting for them.
Mother Elene stood up, her shaved head gleaming in the light as she raised her chin. Gold earrings flashed near the knotted handkerchief around her neck. “Thank you, General, for your warning.”
Haidan nodded, then stepped back, watching both Dihana and Mother Elene with interest. “Me, Mother Elene, and them Councilmen were invite to come talk at that warehouse.”
“We think the Azteca were hoping to set we against you, Dihana,” Mother Elene said. She smiled and glided past Dihana with a rustle.
“And now you’re leaving, just like that?” Dihana had clenched her hands into fists. She opened them.
Mother Elene paused just behind her. “Maybe time come for we speak again. The Loa wish it. You?”
The city’s gods, the Loa, had opposed Dihana’s leadership
along with the Councilmen. Only instead of hiding as the men had, they had continually critiqued and opposed her decisions through their priestesses all throughout the city. They had opposed the expedition she’d created to explore the north lands, and they’d resisted her creating the Preservationists, who scoured the city and the lands for insight into their past, and the past’s technologies.
“Why the change?” Dihana finally asked, but got no answer. Mother Elene had left.
Haidan put a hand on Dihana’s shoulder. “Come.” Instead of heading for the large steps up to the storm doors, he turned right. “I want show you something where the light don’t shine so.”
“I used to do that with Dad.”
“Yeah. Back then.” Haidan followed the hibiscus bushes inside the wrought-iron gate. “A lot change since then.”
Dihana sighed. “You don’t think I did things right?”
“Dihana.” Haidan shook his head. “The airship you sell me mongoose, that alone worth all the trouble you stir up.” He stopped. “You know Elijah and I disagree a lot, back then?”
“No,” Dihana said. “It would have been nice to have heard that, at some point.” Haidan sat down on a stone bench. Dihana sat next to him and folded her arms. “You left me just like the Councilmen did. But at least you didn’t hide.” Haidan had continued taking the mongoose-men defense taxes, purchased weapons from the city, and sent telegrams from wherever he hid in the bush. The Councilmen had just disappeared. “I had to deal with the Loa alone—”
Haidan interrupted with a snort. “Dealt? You cut them out of any chance to direct the city. Instead of keeping them close, you push them away. Now they doing everything from deep in the dark where you blind.”
“They lied to my father, Haidan.” She’d had every right to deny the manipulative Loa their demands that she cease building airships, or their order that she stop helping fund a fishing fleet, or that she shouldn’t allow villages and farms to grow along the tracks. The Loa agenda was to keep them stuck in a fallow state.
“You think he didn’t know that? Girl—”
“I am
no
girl, mongoose-general.” Dihana glared at him. Haidan rubbed his nose and looked down at the ground. “The Loa promised him things they could not deliver. Could never deliver. And they strung him along with those promises.”
“I know, Dihana.” Haidan stood up with a grunt. “I tell him so, often enough. But Elijah say that using old metal technology would doom us, like it had doom everyone in his time. He insist the only way for we survive is for we adapt the Loa organic knowledge. We had to grow we weapon, not hammer out the metal.”
“I changed that.” Dihana had created the Preservationists, a society of people who dug up everyone’s past and investigated it, found things. “It was not a mistake. We have better rifles, better airships, steam, all no thanks to the Loa.”
“I know. I had ask you dad for something like what you doing now.” Haidan took her arm and she stood up. “Even though I was Elijah’s closest man, he never agree with me there.”
“Dad’s closest man.” Dihana closed her eyes. “How come you were never mine?”
“Trust me, Dihana, you did fine. I had mongoose-men to look after, I had to make sure we was strong, that Azteca couldn’t cross the Wicked Highs, couldn’t mess with the city. I couldn’t be here the same for you as I had for you father. Until now.”
“Now?”
Haidan put his arm around Dihana’s shoulder and turned her around, pointed up into the sky at the Spindle. “It’s changing, Dihana. Did you father ever tell you about that? What that mean?”

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