Heart of Veridon (12 page)

Chapter Five

Beetles of Memory and Blood

I
CLEARED OUT
of the house shortly after Valentine made his own exit. Cacher and his boys had abandoned their posts at the front, probably to escort Valentine back to some other safehouse until the Badge pressure eased. Rather than follow Valentine and maybe catch the eye of some curious passerby, I took the back door.

The pains in my chest were getting worse. This happened sometimes, some bit of the damaged machinery worked loose or missed a cycle and I was left with a heartache that pounded through my bones like thunder. It usually happened after a bit of traumatic repair to my meat, but worked itself out in a couple days. Just a very inconvenient time to have my secret machine grinding into my ribcage like a drill bit trying to work its way to fresh air. I kept a hand to my chest as I clambered down the porch stairs and into the close, wood-rot smell of the back alley. I could feel the thrum against my palm.

I took my time on the stairs, thinking about what had just happened. Valentine’s cashing me in, I thought. He’s had his use for me, and now I’m too much trouble. Maybe later, if the pressure eases and I can be of use to him again, maybe he’ll let me back in his little gang. Well. Fuck him.

I stepped off the porch and Cacher came from under the loose fencing of the staircase and tried to put a leather-wrapped baton into my skull. I caught sight of him just out of the corner of my eye, had time to curse myself for not expecting it and get a hand blindly into his swinging forearm. The baton skated off my shoulder, just glancing my head as it arced down. I stumbled, grabbing most of his collar and pulling his coat awkwardly over his shoulder and head. He struggled to pull free and get a good swing, but I kicked a heel into his knee and then we were both on the ground, swinging and grunting and rolling around in the puddles and muck.

It ended when I got my arm across his throat, fist on shoulder and elbow punching down. He looked up at me with such angry eyes, mad eyes, that I almost stumbled back at their fury. Instead I waited until his grip loosened on my arm, then I straddled him and punched him twice, fast, across the cheek. I got up and kicked the baton into a gutter, then frisked him. My service revolver was in his coat pocket.

“What’ve you gotten her doing, Burn?” He was on his side, and the words were wet and distant. I rolled him onto his back, made sure he knew I had the revolver.

“Nothing, Cach. Certainly nothing worse than what you had her doing.”

He sneered, his mouth an angry smear of black teeth and red gums. “Just cuz she made you pay like...”

I leaned down and casually put the brass inlaid butt of the service revolver into his temple, backhand, then dragged him under the stairs and left him.

E
MILY LIVED IN
Highmarche, pretty much the center of town. Half of Veridon above you, half of it spread out below you in broad, flat terraces. It was a place of neat houses with peaked roofs and lace drapes over windows that looked out onto clean streets laid out in squares and broad avenues. None of the narrow claustrophobia of the old city, or the decrepit apathy of the harbor districts. I had to walk for a while to get there, and by the time I navigated the market traffic and the press of carts moving from the harbors, an unnatural early spring heat had settled over the city like a fog. The stone glittered underfoot with warmth and the smooth shine of heavy wear.

I was sweating. I kept my coat on, my hand on the revolver in my pocket. When I took it away to wipe sweat from my brow, my fingers stank of hot metal and cordite. The misaligned gears of my heart had taken up a stabbing beat, lurch-wince, lurch-wince. I tasted oil in the back of my throat, thick like blood.

I hitched up to a doorway about a block shy of Emily’s place. Leaning against the railpost, I could see most of the street in front of her address. It was a quiet brickfront home, split and split again to house a number of young couples anxious for a good address but thin in the pocket. The crowd in the street moved steadily, no one lurking or doubling back to patrol. If Valentine had someone posted here, they were doing a fine job of it.

I walked down past her place, around the corner, spent a minute in a bakery then went back. No one seemed to notice me as I walked by the door; no one looked familiar or suspicious. I went around to the back and palmed the dropstone Emily and I had used to arrange meetings. There was a key inside. I put the ‘stone back in its notch, went around front and let myself into the building. The same key opened her door. Once I was inside I locked up and then jammed a chair under the door.

The key in my hand was new metal and smelled of oil, as if it had been freshly pressed. It didn’t look familiar, but I had never seen Emily handle a lot of keys. The ’stone downstairs usually held a coded message, with times and places. I pocketed the key and looked around.

Emily was neat, almost mechanically precise in her tidiness. The apartment reflected that precision. The desk where she and I had sat the day before was clean and empty, the chairs set at an angle. Maybe even the angle I had left it at when I stood up. Valentine said that Emily missed a meeting with Cacher, and I remembered her mentioning that he was on his way over. That’s a tight window of opportunity. Would Valentine have leaned on me harder if he’d known how tight?

I opened each of the drawers in turn, emptied them completely and checked for hidden compartments before I moved on. It took about ten minutes, and at the end of it I didn’t know anything new. There was no Cog. There were no secret instructions from shadowy agencies about my meeting on the Heights, or anything to indicate that Emily was anything more than the whore and fixer I had known for five years now. I put everything away and looked around the rest of the apartment.

There wasn’t much to see. Her clothes were all neatly arranged in the bedroom dresser, her bed was made. The room smelled like her, like summerwisp blooming in spring. I didn’t spend a lot of time in the bedroom, and the kitchen nook was just a drawer of cutlery and a coolbox that was empty. There were no signs of struggle or forced entry, but the gun she kept in the closet by the front door was missing, as were the ledgers she had been working on when I left. Those had been for Cacher, I remembered, which meant he had been here. Probably let himself in, couldn’t find Emily so he took what he had come for and left. Did he take the Cog, too, or had Emily taken it with her? For that matter, where did she go, and why?

I sat on the divan that looked out over the street, laid the service revolver in my lap, and turned the situation over in my head. Lot of ways to come at this one.

The least likely, least worrying possibility was that Emily was just on some business. Not missing, just laying low while she attended to... whatever. Either one of her Haven Hill clients or some deal that required her personal attention. And maybe she took the Cog with her, intending to drop it with Valentine or whoever, as part of her errand. But if that’s what was happening, Valentine would be able to track her down. For that matter, it seemed awfully early for Valentine to be concerned about Emily’s whereabouts. People in this business disappeared, they went to ground fairly easily. Being able to stay out of trouble is what made fixers like Emily valuable.

And the gun? It was her home defense piece, a cruel foot and a half of metal, just the critical bits of a shotgun with the rest cut away. She had a traveling piece, always left the shotgun in the closet in case someone jumped her as she came into the apartment.

That left the more worrying option. Emily, surprised somehow in the apartment, caught off guard. Taken without mess or struggle. Taken, and the Cog with her. Not a lot of people could pull that on Em. Maybe there had been a fight, and the creep cleaned up before he left. I looked around the room; everything was obsessively aligned, clean, perfect. It would take time to get a room back into this state, and there wouldn’t have been a lot of that, between my departure and when Cacher had arrived. It didn’t make sense.

I was standing up when I heard them on the stairs. I snapped out of my revere and immediately understood why I hadn’t seen anyone stalking the house from the street. They were across the way, two Badges in gray overcoats peering calmly through a rented window. Fucking stupid and lazy; my head just wasn’t in this staying alive thing. Now that the move was on, their boys hammering up the foyer stairs, they had given up hiding behind the curtains and were leaning out into the street, sighting the long rifles that the Council rarely issued and that you never saw in the city limits. I rolled away from the window just as the glass splattered into bright shards and the far wall crumpled into plaster.

I took four squatting steps to the door before I remembered the feet on the stairs and threw myself back into Emily’s room. The front door began to flex under officer’s boots, flakes of plaster dusting down from the jambs like snow. I fired twice into the door and then winced as a shot from across the street splintered the bedroom window sill and sprayed the room with splintered glass. I leaned over and, bracing with both my feet, flipped the mattress over and against the window. Better that they fire blind. The pounding on the front door started again. I belly-crawled over to the fireplace and scooped up the iron poker. Another bullet came through the window, dust and feathers puffing out of the mattress, wood splintering from the bed frame. I wedged myself into a corner of the bedroom and started hacking at the plaster ceiling. Emily lived on the second floor of a two-story building. When I got to the plank slating I climbed on a chair and put my fist through, depending on the laced bone conduit of my Pilot’s interface to hold me together. There was a lot of blood, the skin flapping back from my knuckles, but I got through. I pulled myself up into the darkness as they cleared the front door.

The attic was dark, and it was hot. There was only a little light, coming in from the gable vents. I had plaster dust in my eyes and mouth, and my hands were bleeding all over my gun. The floor of the attic was just beam framework over slating, so I balanced carefully toward the vents. A spattering of fire came up through the floor, the Badgemen getting damn desperate. I was pretty sure they wouldn’t follow me up, all of them too precious to be the first one to stick his head up into the darkness.

I kicked the vent out and shimmied up onto the roof. It was all of two heartbeats before the goons across the street shot at me. Hard to miss with a rifle like that, but they did. I rolled down the opposite decline of the roof, hooked my leg over and crawled, slowly, too slowly, down the drainage pipe and into the street. People had cleared out, all the gunshots and kicked out architecture had scattered folks. The Badge came out of the building, just about the time I was putting my boots on the ground.

I didn’t bother aiming, just shot, cycled, shot, bullets nicking off the brick wall of Emily’s building. I was on my heels, backpedaling so fast that I was falling. The Badges dropped to the ground or ducked behind doors and barrels. I only counted four of them, but there were more inside.

I finally came down on my back, rolling around the corner of the building and coming up on my knees. I realized that my last couple shots had been dry, the cylinder empty. Kneeling, I dumped the hot shells into my lap and started to quick load, keeping one eye on the building front. The Badges started to peek out. I had a brief memory, kneeling like this in the empty room of the Tomb Estate, fumbling bullets into this gun as that thing came down the hall. I thought I could hear the dry rasp of wings on wallpaper, blinked and realized I was frozen, a bullet pinched in my fingers, the Badge slowly creeping across the street towards me.

I snapped the cylinder closed and fired hurriedly. Luck put the bullet into one of the Badgemen, into the meat of his arm. He fell and the others crouched and started firing. I scrambled out and ran down the street. I wasn’t sure how many shots I’d loaded. Not a full cylinder, surely, and one fewer now. I looked for a place to pull off and finish the load.

I darted around a corner and dragged to a stop. There was an iron carriage, the shutters riveted shut, parked across the avenue. It was cold, the chill washing off it in sheets, breathtaking in the day’s freakish heat. I had never seen such a thing. I was cold just standing here. There were Badges all around it, leaning against walls or talking quietly among themselves. They were dressed in winter gear, heavy gloves on their hands. Their skin was pale and their faces were puffy, like they hadn’t been sleeping well. They looked up.

I shot the closest one, stepped forward and put my shoulder into his chest as he staggered, knocking him into one of his boys. The rest started to draw, but I kept my gun low and shooting. I fired three times before I heard that horrible dry snap of an empty chamber. The Badges were down, either bleeding or behind cover. There had been other shots, I slowly realized, and my chest and leg were hot. I looked down, saw that I was on one knee, saw red, red blood running down my shirt.

I stood up, staggered, stumbled past the carriage. Someone was yelling and I turned. The street was incredibly close, a tunnel of buildings and a burning sky pressed down. The Badges were hidden behind the iron box of the carriage. I waved my pistol at them, shuffling backward. My chest was tearing itself apart.

Another carriage rolled up, pulling between me and the iron box. Its engine clattered like shuffling plates as it idled. I put my hand on the side. There was a lace of blood between my fingers, and I winced as the door opened. It was Emily, and she was waving that wicked little shotgun at the Badges.