Blightborn (19 page)

Though, frankly, Palace Hill makes Balastair uncomfortable. A sour septic layer pickles his gut as he walks. The discomfort is not because of the wealth; oh, Balastair has plenty of that. More than he could ever want or understand. Most flotilla denizens do,
except those who toil in the Undermost or, worse, the Engine Layer.

No, it’s all the concentrated power. Thick like a sauce reduced for too long, till it’s just a salty syrup. Power held tight in the hands of a few dozen men and women—many of whom are demented by the bends of age. Some are young, more vital, but also turned mad by the power they did nothing to deserve.

Lord and Lady, the
praetor
doesn’t even live here—and she is the foremost authority, at least on paper, on the Ormond Stirling Saranyu. She and her administrators, including the peregrine, live on an entirely different hill: the Hill of Spears (
Blessedly all the way on the other side of the flotilla,
Balastair thinks as he looks over his shoulder to make sure none are watching him from behind parted curtains).

These houses are the finest homes on all the flotilla. Marble from the quarries at the foot of the Crowsblood Mountains. Granite from the peaks of the Workman’s Spine. Red khaya and black kohekohe woods from the River Glades. The addition of polished chrome and frosted glass give the homes a motley hodgepodge feel—almost comical in the way they don’t match—but wealth and prestige do not necessarily partner with good taste. And besides, what these old, shriveled walnuts think looks good ends up transmitting like a virus of grotesque discrimination.

Bad taste all around.

Everyone here is a known personage. There, the sun-bleached white home of the sculptress Janus Janus, with her husband, Caidan, and her wife, Juno. Across the way, the massive oaken door, and above it a bas-relief of winged horses and
mighty angels doing battle with mer-creatures leaping up out of the sea—all hand carved by the shipbuilder F. E. Quercus (who is quite fond of correcting others as to the type of woods they are seeing: “That is mahogany!” is a famous refrain). Farther up the hill: the gold-leaf-on-red-lacquer door of Grand Engineer Domin Arravore. Next to that, the great, arching windows of Fenton Franklin the Eighth, administrator of the Wine-Makers’ Cooperative. He’s more than a century old. And quite the alcoholic, having had at least three livers brined to fatty lumps before they had to be replaced.

Finally, beyond all that, a house Balastair recognizes intimately.

And perhaps the true source of the ill feeling in his stomach.

There, a house of beige brick, the color of cashews. Once that bland, soft neutral was counterbalanced by a wealth of botanical accents: two urns of sprouted lilacs, windows framed by fingers of angel’s ivy, a climbing trellis of wandering eye with flowers as purple as fingers stained by blueberries. Green leaves and dark vines, petals of every color.

His heart jumps in his chest—a curtain moves, and for a moment he sees her there, hair the color of sunlit wheat, eyes of sea foam, the curve of her collarbones casting shadows, the angles of her shoulders, arms long and lithe like the delicate legs of a glassqueen butterfly.

Then the curtain flutters again, and he sees it’s not her—not his mother—but rather a small child. A young boy. Different from him—dark hair, olive skin—but still, that could have been him once upon a time.

“That was my bedroom,” he says.

“Bedroom,” Erasmus echoes.

“I lived here, you know. With my mother.”

“Esther!”

“Yes. Yes, that was her.”

“Gangplank!”

Balastair represses a shudder. “Let’s go.”

It isn’t far from his old home. The alley. A crooked sign hanging from an old nail reading
BLACK SLIVER ALLEY
—a sign of notched wood, the words in faded, chipped paint—the alley itself grown up with weeds. All quite out of the ordinary for the otherwise pristine Palace Hill.

Every flotilla has a Palace Hill.

And every Palace Hill has a Black Sliver Alley.

And at the end of every Black Sliver Alley is a portal—a hatch, a set of double doors, maybe a trapdoor. That portal takes one down into the Wolf’s Lair, sometimes called by its old name, the Lupercal.

It’s one of the worst-kept secrets. Even children know of it.

Balastair darts down the alley before anyone sees him.

It’s early yet. The moon is still up. Few will be going this way now.

He steps over broken stones. Weeds whisper and rustle at his thighs.

There. The trapdoor. Ill concealed beneath an overgrown brush.

He opens it and descends, Erasmus the grackle flying down with him.

Bang. Bang. BANG.

The now-dented vent drops off its screws and hits the floor. Gwennie’s foot throbs from the effort, but she’s been in these vents for a long time. Too long. Six hours? Seven?

She crawls on her belly and peers out the vent.

A hallway goes left and right. Everything is flaking rust and grimy, once-white plastic—pipes and bundles of wire are clamped to the wall and run the length of the hallway. The floor is grated; beneath it is darkness.

Here the smell is strong: burning fuel. The air is damp, too—warm and wet like a heavy breath. And everything vibrates with the deep thrum of hover-panels and booster turbines. That’s how she found the place in the maze of ductwork: when the smell and sound grew stronger, she kept going. If it started to fade, she turned around.

Gwennie pulls herself out of the vent. She marvels at how filthy she’s gotten just by crawling through the ducts—her hands are streaked with black, her sleeves tattered and smudged.

She drops headfirst—bracing herself with her hands.

With a groan she sits upright, then stands.

This, then, is the Engine Layer.

Gwennie takes a deep breath and heads right.

The hollow space beneath Palace Hill is lit with flickering sodium lights—they buzz and hum, casting everything in a yellow glow that calls to mind that child’s game of holding a buttercup flower up against your chin and letting it color your skin with the hue of the petals.

It’s mazelike. Men have gotten lost in the Lupercal. Lost coming down in search of distant, discrete pleasures. Or lost on their return instead—too drunk on wormwood or goggled on poppy-smoke. Or perhaps led astray by some brothel doxy or boy-toy looking for a few ducats to buy the next fix or passage to another flotilla.

Balastair knows that had he not taken her as his ward, Gwennie could have been sent down here. She’s a strong girl; she would have survived.

But it would have changed her.

She could
still
end up here, if the peregrine catches her in his talons. They might just toss her over the side, but they might send her here. To work in a way none should be made to work.

But Balastair can stop that from happening.

Not because you like her. Not in that way,
he tells himself. A simple Heartland girl? Scant years younger than he, yes, but worlds apart. They don’t understand each other. They’d never work together.

She’s his ward. So it falls to him to help her.

Which is why he’s here.

He follows the signs that hang along the wall, signs that are utterly blank until you run a penlight with a black bulb over them—then the messages are revealed. This way lies Madam Treachery’s House of Joy; the next tunnel leads to Madam Joy’s House of Treachery; a third path reveals The Black House Distillery; and around the bend is what Balastair seeks:

The Slap-Me-Dead Speakeasy.

The brick tunnel becomes a narrow hallway of shattered concrete, and there he passes by a droopy-headed lad rubbing
his back against the wall like a cat stropping up against a lamppost. The boy—fourteen years of age, maybe—says nothing as Balastair passes but is like a hound smelling the apron strings of a passing butcher. The blood is in his nose, and suddenly he’s up and following Balastair.

“Hey, fella,” the boy calls.

“No,” Balastair says. It’s all he says.

“I could use a few chits. Maybe a ducat if you can spare it.”

“Here, yes, fine.” Balastair stops fast, fishes in his pocket for a few chit-coins minted with the face of the sky-goddess, Saranyu, buoyed by a pair of clouds—currency minted specific to this flotilla, though good across all of them—and pitches them onto the ground with a tinny clatter.

The boy scoops them up, and now Balastair sees for sure that he’s dealing with an addict—the hollow-set eyes, the bony wrists, the lips chapped with peeling, ash-white skin.

Balastair keeps walking.

He hears footsteps behind him. Shuffling. Hurrying.

Trying to be quiet.

“Fella,” the boy says again.

Balastair quickens his step.

“Fella.”

A hand reaches, grabs Balastair’s elbow—

He turns, thinks,
He just wants more money; I’ll give him more money
. But when he pivots, he sees the flash of something—a knife. No. Not a knife. A sliver of broken glass, a swaddling of dirty cloth forming a safe grip.

The boy shows his teeth. Like an animal.

“I need a fix,” the boy says, the words a desperate moan, a
forbidding plea. “Give it to me.” He rears back with the shard of glass—

A flutter of bruise-purple feathers—

Erasmus the grackle launches himself at the boy’s face. Clawing and pecking. The boy screams. The glass knife drops, and Balastair hastily steps on it the way one might anxiously stomp a roach. He feels it break beneath his feet as the boy backpedals, his face a mask of little scratches—

He mewls and scurries away.

Erasmus lands back on Balastair’s shoulder as if nothing happened.

“Thank you, Erasmus.”

“Need a fix!” the bird chirps.

An ant in a maze.

She’s already lost.

Every ten steps sits another junction, another choice of left, right, or straight—another intersection of vibrating pipes and rattling floor-grate, of heavy hot air and eye-watering engine stink.

When she was a little kid, she and Scooter used to sit on the dirt mounds outside their driveways and make these elaborate—well, elaborate for little kids anyway—labyrinths out of flat rocks, wood chips, and cornstalk stubs. They’d take these fat black wood-borer ants and drop them into the maze one at a time. They’d have perils set up along the way (for all mazes in all stories have perils along the way) such as deep pits or puddles of water. A couple times they even caught barn-spinner spiders and let them wander the maze: monsters hunting the intrepid heroes.

It never worked. The ants weren’t smart, but they were made right by the hands of the Lord and Lady and would just climb up over those walls and disappear. The spider caught one once. Just once. Rest of the time the ants just escaped.

She wishes she could escape now. But there is no up-and-out for her.

She misses Cael.

She misses the Heartland.

She misses Boyland and stealing chicha beer from Busser’s, and she misses flying over the corn in
Betty
the cat-maran and scavenging junk from dead towns and boat wrecks and old motorvators and—

She misses her family, and suddenly they feel farther away than ever.

Gwennie presses her back against the wall and slides down until she’s sitting. A break. She just needs a break. Her muscles are sore. Back kinked up. Neck, too. Her head thunks dully against a pipe. It’s hard. Uncomfortable. But still, her head seems to rest right against it. . . .

She gasps, suddenly awake.

Was she asleep?

She was totally asleep.

What woke her?

Footsteps.

Shaking the floor beneath her. Closer and closer.

She scrambles to stand, hoists her bag—time to pick a direction. Back the way she came? Onward left? Right? Straight? Back into the vents? Indecision paralyzes her feet—she doesn’t know who’s coming, or where they’re coming from, or—

“Hello,” calls a voice from behind her. Gruff. Male. Wet, too. As if his words first have to gargle past strings of phlegm.

She wheels.

It’s not one man but two.

The one is thick and lumpy—a body built like a broken toe. His arms are bare, muscle and flab in equal measure. The skin, greasy with oil, smeared over crooked, clumsy tattoos. He’s older—older than her own father, old enough to be her granddad.

The other one is about her height. Her age, too. The boy’s hair is shorn to the scalp—the stubble thicker across half.

The older man speaks—it was he who spoke the first time.

“You lost, girl?”

“Lost,” the boy echoes. A smile creeping across his face.

The older man takes a step forward. The boy’s eyes dart toward the older one, and he shuffles forward, too, as if to mirror the steps.

“I’m . . .” She hesitates. “Looking for someone.”

“Oh?” the older man says. The look on his face—is it sympathy? Mock sympathy? Something meaner, something worse? “Tell me who, now. I know this place pretty well, I do. Let me help you, girl.”

Another step closer. She matches it with one back.

“My father,” she says. “I need my father. Richard Shawcatch.”

“Shawcatch,” the boy echoes, and suddenly she wonders if he’s a little bit mule kicked.

The lumpy one grins—half his teeth are jagged spurs jutting up from puckered, wine-stained gums. “My name isn’t Richard, but I’m happy to be your daddy for a little while. Would you like that?” Another step closer. “I could take you over my knee. Pull
your little leathers down. Spank that naughty behind of yours until it’s good and
red
. And warm. Oh so warm.” A foamy, pale tongue licks his lips, and he chuckles.

The boy laughs, too, a half second after.

The older man lunges—

She shoves him back into the boy and turns tail and runs, her sore muscles screaming. Behind her, she hears the fat one yell, “Go after her, boy! Go, you dull turd, go!”

Balastair steps into a small antechamber off a curving tunnel; the walls are lined with books. Old books, the kind that give off the smell of dust and decay, an odor Balastair associates with the scent of pure knowledge. Knowledge of new things. Knowledge of new places. Every book a doorway—a cabinet of curiosities opening to a new land. His childhood was given over to books. Nose deep. Eyes crossed from reading too long. This room calls all that to mind in a sudden nostalgic wave, and there in the back of his mind is his mother again, telling him to come out and play: the sun is up, the day is warm, the flowers are calling to him. . . .