FOUNDRYSONG Chapter 1: Power

 Power

A dwarf was dead. Nothing unusual about that—dwarves died every day in Cinder City. Sometimes it was old age, sometimes sickness, sometimes even a gruesome streetwagon accident, but this was something different. Dolora had been in the war. She’d seen Sergeant Lusky’s head cored like an apple by strummershot. He had fallen right next to her, big doe eyes staring up forever at the Aonrijk sky. She’d seen things. She’d never seen anything like this.

The factory floor was utterly silent. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, Krashnikol’s Hammers thundered like the Fabricator’s own artillery and the factory smoldered like the pits of hell. The hydraulic presses could crack the bones of giants. The tremor of their fall would shake your bladder, rattle out your fillings, blast your whole body to dust. Each minute they lay dormant was a loss on old Daorlag Krashnikol’s balance-sheet. Today, not a single hammer rose. Not a hammer fell. The air came in cold from the channel. Machines stood idle. They were in mourning, their silent metal motionless, pistons frozen. The absence of thunder rang louder than the peal of Krashnikol’s thousand-ton presshammers.

Dwarves and orcs, workers who would normally be at each other’s throats, stood in a rough mob, shoulder to shoulder. An ogre held his hat in his hands. They stared, grim witnesses to the ghastly scene. No one spoke. There were no words to say. Tongues had been robbed of feeling and no one could muster up a single word in the face of the tragedy. The dwarf Hadrada, never much liked by anyone on the pressworks floor, had suddenly become the factory’s’ favored son. Dolora chewed on her bidi, putting a lid of smoke on a bellyful of last night’s sour gin. No one should go the way Hadrada went. They’d be washing him off the hammer all day.

Daorlag’s call had woken her from troubled dreams. The sound of the parly ringing had plunged into her nightmares like a hydraulic spike through riverbed ice. Or like a press hammer, she thought. The bidi tasted like last night’s vomit as she shuffled it to her back teeth. Daorlag was in his office. She could see the light on at the back of the foundry, between the diamond-shaped panes and reinforced wire. Newsprint papered over a smashed patch of glass.

Dolora, having already made her way through the crowd of frozen workers, crossed the floor to speak with her employer. The sound of autowagons boomed with unnatural volume in the macabre silence. “No one touch that,” Dolora said, gesturing at the gore-stained presshammer. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

The office was locked. Dolora rattled the door, disgusted at the thought of having to overcome an obstacle so mundane this early in the investigation. Her guts were still roiling. “Daorlag, open up!” she called.

Scrape. The sound of a key turning in the lock, the clunk of the bolt drawn back. Daorlag had wheeled his office chair to the door and sat in it, withered and ancient as any Oenotrian mummy. “Misses Spade,” he said. His voice was wind from a sepulcher.

“Miz,” she corrected. The old man bowed his head and rolled aside to give her entry.

His accent was thick as molten steel. “Miz, then,” he agreed. His beard was so long that it fell in a cascade over his vest and past his knees.

The office was comfortable. The yellowed glass had been treated to let Daorlag see the factory floor while keeping his workers from looking in on him. He had a heavy-set wooden desk with brass fittings, several dwarven lamps that bore stamps on their shining metal surfaces marking them out as Aonic, and a lumbering old calculating machine the size of a dresser with a handle to pull for making it do sums. Daorlag was smoking a pipe.

Dolora’s bidi burned her lip. She smoked them down to the pith. As Daorlag wheeled by, she crossed the room and spat the burning ember into his ash bin. Her left knee, as always, was throbbing. “So, Mister Krashnikol, let’s talk turkey. You know my rates?”

“You told me this already, on the parly this morning when we spoke.”

Had she? The parly call was another country. Her head was filled with the sound of drums. The Gaslight, she remembered. Gin. “Right, well. Let’s get down to it, then. How’d it happen?”

“This,” Daorlag Krashinkol said to her, “is what I want you to discover. Something like this does not happen in my shop. Hadrada Varnag does not fall beneath the press. He is competent engineer who has worked in shops like this his whole life.”

Competent engineer. From a dwarf like Daorlag, that was about as high praise as you could get. “Any enemies in the shop?”she asked. Before he could respond, she drew a notebook and a stub of pencil from her pocket. “Hold on.” She needed another smoke. She took fresh bidi paper from inside her vest, a sprinkle of nasvy from her pouch, and rolled another. The lighter snicked when she lit it. “Ok, shoot. Who didn’t like him?”

“Like, enemies, what does this mean? Mr. Varnag was a combine steward here. Half of them out there are combine workers.” Daorlag gestured with an arthritic claw to the crowd near the open loading dock doors.

“Ok, mac, what combine?” She could tell the disdain Krashnikol had for the idea. Combines were the bosses best friend: they could organize strikes, slowdowns, cripple a shop if they didn’t get what they wanted. They’d been illegal for a long time. Still were, back on the Continent. Of course, in the Cog countries… Woah, woah, hold on, one question at a time. You’ll just confuse him.

“Steelworkers, of course. Thirty-one.”

She wrote: Steel 31. Their local. “And how do you feel about combines, Mr. Krashnikol?”

“How am I feeling about them?” He gave an elaborate shrug that she couldn’t quite read. “These Steelworkers have never had a reason to boycott my factory. We are on good terms.”

“How did they feel about them in Dvangar?” The accent and the name. He had to be Dvangren. There was no question.

The dwarf narrowed his eyes. “There is no Dvangar anymore, Miz Spade. You are knowing of this.”

“Is that where Mr. Varnag was from?”

Daorlag shook his head. “Long ago, maybe. But he was speaking like you, not like me. Friends with dwarves, even some orcs. But good man to keep floor organized. You know what I mean?”

“Sure, I follow. He made sure everyone was pointed in the same direction, and no one was slacking unless the combine said it was time to slack, right?”

The dwarf relented. “As you say.”

“Ok, so there were people who didn’t like him. The slackers. Who are they?” Daorlag clammed up. “If you aren’t going to tell me, how am I supposed to do my job?”

“It was not one of my people, Miz Spade,” he insisted. The old dwarf dug in his pocket and produced a neatly folded group of bills. “This is first part of your payment, to keep for first three days, as you made request.”

Did I? she thought. That was smart of me.

Dolora took the cash. It was slightly damp with Krashnikol’s perspiration. “Alright. I have to start by talking to your people, as you call ‘em. See if anyone saw anything, or is willing to talk. But I’m on the case.”

When she left the office she was greeted by two pleasing sights: 1) the workers hadn’t gone near the bloody hammer, and 2) the Blues hadn’t showed up yet. She called back over her shoulder, “Don’t call the Bluebells until I’m done here. They’ll only get in my way.”

Krashnikol’s voice floated through the door. “It is too late, Miz Spade. I have already been doing this. I had no choice. They will ask me why I delayed already.”

Well, she liked beating the Blues to a scene, and she still had some time before they showed up and started grubbing over everything and making a mess. Where her partner was, she had no idea. She wondered if she’d called him. A vague memory, like a reflection on an oil puddle, floated through her mind. She’d babbled into a parly horn this morning, after talking to Daorlag. She might have been talking to Miles.

The problem with getting to a crime after the Blues did was they were liable to touch everything. For a real professional, the place where a crime was done could leave what you might call clues. To a Blue, it was an opportunity to misplace a coffee cup or spill kraftpowder over everything. Dolora wanted to be open when she surveyed the scene. Blues were the opposite. For Dolora Spade, investigation was like being a radio receiver. You listened for what there was, tuned across all the bands that might be relevant, and tried to build an idea inside yourself of what must have happened from all the various chatter. For your average Blue, investigation was a chore that needed to be done by dinner time, with paperwork signed and sealed to keep their captain happy.

If you wanted something solved, you went to an investigator. If you wanted to get sidetracked and questioned and hauled into the city courts yourself, you called the Bluebell Constables.

First things first: the body. Or rather, what was left of the body. Dolora mounted the metal scaffold around the hammer. Her knee clicked. Ok, Hadrada the dwarf had to stand here to work the controls, and here to shout orders to whoever was on shift. Make a note: who was on shift? Probably not to many folks, it was the middle of the night, graveyard-time. She examined the controls. Someone had already been up here to shut the thing off. That much was evident by the fact that it wasn’t running. Note: who turned off the press?

Whoever it was hadn’t hopped to it fast enough. Hadrada’s body was a pulped mess between the hammer and its payload. Parts of the poor bastard were grilled. There was still a pungent tinge of burned fat on the air. He’d fallen - where? Scuff marks here, by the railing. So over it, then, even though dwarves have a low center of gravity, over the rails and into the path of the hammer. There had been red-hot steel down there too, which had burned him when he hit. Then, BAM! the hammer-stroke. And not just one, not by the look of things. At least a few. She wrote that down: Smashed a few times. Ask coroner. As though the coroner would be able to tell anything from that soup down there.

Ok, now what? The instrument panel that controlled the machine. Anything fishy there? Some threads stuck to one of the little switches. What kind? Better grab ‘em before the Blues came and wiped everything clean. They really couldn’t care less, the Blues. So, into the pocket with the threads. She considered doing a print-dust, but her kit was in her bag by the door and it was so unreliable, she decided against it. Besides, it cost a hundred bucks every time she had to run ‘em, because the Blues were stingy with their registry cards and she had to bribe a clerk on his graveyard shift.

“Anyone down there working when this happened?” A bunch of quiet Mollys. No one volunteering anything. “You know I’m trying to find out what happened to your co-worker. The same could happen to any of you.”

An elf shouldered through the steelmen. He was burly for his kind, his hair cropped short, his bare arms flexing in the cold channel air. “I wasn’t on shift, but I can find out who was,” he said. Other workers nodded at him. Orc and dwarf both gave him encouraging looks.

“And you are?” Dolora needed to know this guy. He seemed like he got things done.

“Chief Steward,” the elf replied. “Maybe we should talk.”

Dolora agreed. This was a chance to get two paydays in one. If the combine wasn’t behind it, they would always front some cash to make sure the murder of a brother steward was solved. Can’t have your folks getting popped into ovens or thrown in the path of oncoming lokomotives. It was bad for combine business. That was one of the ways the bosses could break you, Dolora figured. Hire guys to go kill your stewards.

She looked over at old Daorlag’s office. Could the codger be capable…? Nah, she thought. This was an outside job.

 

The elf’s name was Lee Finster. He ordered everyone out of the mill and they obeyed. Huge steelworkers hopped at the elf’s direction and went to sit on the loading stubs where autotrucks pulled up to take on or deposit steel. They kicked their heels against the rubber bumpers like oversized children.

Dolora was impressed. That this elf, muscular though he was, could so instantly command the respect of a rowdy and ragged bunch, especially so soon after a tragedy, spoke of real power. He might have more say over what went on in the mill than Daorlag Krashnikol.

“Your boss told me half you fellas are combined,” she said.

The elf pushed his cap back on his forehead. She could imagine him covered in soot, stinking like charcoal and brimstone. “All the floor workers are. This is a combine shop, miz…” He let his voice trail off to know he was asking her name.

“Spade,” Dolora said. “So listen, you want this thing solved.”

Lee nodded. “Mr. Varnag might not have been everyone’s cup of tea, but he was a combine man, through and through.”

“Local 31,” she said, to prove she knew what she was talking about. It was always easier to gain someone’s trust if you could parrot some bit of information back at them. Showed you were paying attention, on the level. Most Blues would already be threatening to take him down to the station. Then again, Blues generally didn’t get their paychecks from the combines.

“We want the killer found, Miz Spade. And the boys are prepared to pay. Whatever Mr. Krashnikol is offering, we’ll match it. But we want you to come to us, when you know who did it.”

Dolora blanched. She pictured Lusky’s face again, sightless eyes wide, that bore-hole through his forehead. “You want to do it yourself,” she said.

Lee Finster chewed on something for a moment. A nasvy plug, she realized when he spit into a can he took from his pocket. “Does that bother you, Miz Spade?”

She chewed on her bidi, thinking. The payday’ll be nice, and more still to keep quiet. “No,” she said, “not anymore.”

“Good. Then we have a deal. What’s yer stipend?”

Good question. She wasn’t sure what she’d worked out in her half-delirious state. She fingered the money in her pocket, surreptitiously counting it. If they were all tens, then… “Thirty dollars a day. Plus expenses.”

The combine steward frowned. “I don’t have that much on me, but come to the hall tonight. We’ll give you two hundred to cover the week.” He paused. “You come to us first.”

“Of course. Mr. Finster.” She stuck out her hand. He shook it.

 

Someone tapped Dolora on the shoulder. The familiar smell of fragrant nasvy and clove would have told her who it was, even if he hadn’t said, “Hey Dolora,” in that voice of his. Miles Kowalski was a six-and-a-half-foot tall orc with a gut like canvas sack of oats full to bursting. He wore a short, fat tie and wide-legged pants. His tusks pressed against his lower lip where he couched his cigar. He looked better than she felt, Dolora had to admit. Miles was always well-groomed, even if he eschewed vests and shirts with cufflinks. He wore a white collar and a blue shirt beneath his worsted wool jacket. “I saw the boys in blue roaring down Grand Street when I was getting off the streetwagon.”

“Great. Just in time. You sure know how to beat ‘em to the punch, Miles.”

Something in her tone made him frown. He pulled her away from Finster and toward the hydraulic hammer. “Dolora. You’ve been back for a year now, and every time I see you, you look worse. What’s going on? You can’t live on grain alcohol alone, you know.”

Dolora ripped her arm away from her partner’s heavy grip. “Oh, here’s Mr. Kowalski come waltzing in late to the scene of the crime to lecture me about my performance. If I wanted a talking-to, I would still be with the Blues.”

Miles’ expression was not one of belief. In fact, it said: that’s not why you don’t work on the force anymore. “Ok, it’s personal, I won’t ask,” he said with a sigh. “What’ve we got here? Besides an almighty mess? I picked up the background from our erstwhile employer.”

“That’s all we got to go on so far. And it’s employers now. The plural.” She jerked her head in the direction of Lee Finster. “The combine wants to know who offed their man.”

They had a rhythm, and they were falling back into it. In the first days after the war, Dolora had been afraid the magic that made Spade and Kowalski had disappeared. Hiding in trenches and hurtling through pine woods was a rhythm all its own. Behind enemy lines in the Rijk had been something else. When she was there, Cinder City had seemed a dream. Now that she was back, the Rijk was a species of nightmare. A pensive, gin-soaked, year had passed and they were Spade and Kowalski again.

Miles drew up a list. He would take the places Hadrada had frequented. He would also talk to the steelworker’s combine and get the second half of their pay. Dolora would go to Hadrada’s residence, question the neighbors, do a snoop job. If someone was after something the dwarf had, it’d be good to get eyes on his place. “If they haven’t been there yet, they might be going. And if they don’t, there’s likely some clue.”

She showed Miles the threads she’d pulled from the console. “There’s these, too. Brown. Could be from the fella who did him in, could be from Hadrada himself. Either way, I’ll hang on to ‘em until we speak with the coroner.”

“Coroner,” snorted Miles.

Dolora glanced over at the wreckage of Hadrada. Correis, was that part of his eye socket?

They walked to the press hammer together. Neither needed to speak. They circled it in opposite directions, examining it top to bottom. Was that scrape important, or a relic of when the machine was set on the mill floor? Was there a reason for the pipe wrench leaning against its bulk? What had they been making, and where did the steel go when it was done, and who else had been standing near? Where did the men down below stand while the operator controlled the fall of the bonecruncher?

Dolora held her breath and leaned in over the paste that had been Hadrada Varnag. She didn’t want to look at the body, or what remained of it. What good would that do? Other than give her nightmares of Lusky’s limp form next to her on the brown needles, nothing. She was no doctor. Even in the army, she’d never picked up so much as a tourniquet. No, what she wanted to see was the hammer and its mechanism. She turned to look up.

This is what he saw. This is what he was looking at as his back started cooking. First his clothes fried, then he started to burn. Then the weight came down.

She could envision it. That was the scary thing. She could feel the hammer moving, faster than the eye could register, a black stamp to pound her into nothing. She’d thought of other deaths every day in the Rijk. The sound of a sniper crunching in the underbrush. The crackle of a stromkanon as it flung lightning through the trees. The drone of a luftlighter preparing to strafe their position. All these thrummed in her heart ten times a day. Is this it? Is this it? Is it now, or now? Will we be discovered by a patrol? Will we be cut down by friendly fire? Yes. Dolora knew the friendly grip of death’s terror.

Her reverie was cut short. Hand-cranked air sirens had been blaring away for some minutes in the distance. Now they rose to a frenzied volume. Autowagons screeched into the loading yard and workers came back into the factory floor. Miles looked across the remnants of the body at her. “The Blues are here.”

“We’d better beat it.” Miles nodded. They would meet up later. They already knew the time, the place. Dolora didn’t need to see any old friends in uniform today.

 

Salafar’s wasn’t one of those glitzy rooftop places with a view of Parliament Island, but it had always served when Dolora and Kit wanted to meet for more than a coffee or a grease-skimmed soup. Oh, Kit pretended to hate Dolora’s little neighborhood in Alstat, but Dolora knew different. Whenever she complained that the narrow streets and brick tenement houses gave her nightmares, Dolora reminded her of the cold, heartless glass towers of Silver City and Regensburg, downtown. Dwarfside, the Dragons, and Alstat were at least filled with life. It flowed from the walls and streets like a torrent. In Silver City there were only cold rooms and vaults, office towers and counting houses.

Dolora cleaned herself up, splashed some water on her face, took care of some particulars, then poured herself into a suit that smelled a little less like last night. She pomaded her hair, starched her collar, and even found the silver cufflinks Kit had given her.

Kit was waiting by the time she got there. She’d chosen a table next to one of the plate glass windows. Salafar’s had been on the corner of Granite and Ward longer than Dolora had been alive. For half a century it had eked out an existence selling hot North Alkebulan food to the working folk of Alstat. It was an institution.

Dolora found Kit sitting under a poster of Stadtprasident, Heward Longstreet. His face beamed down from the wall in its good-natured glory. “You like the new guy, huh?” she asked as she slid into the booth.

“Oh, Kit, I’m so sorry I kept you waiting,” Kit said. “I know we said ten-fifteen sharp, but I had important business that just couldn’t wait.”

Dolora rolled her eyes. “You know I did. Had to hop the ferry from Iron Island. Some poor sap got the hammer last night. Literally.” She started rolling a bidi.

Kit was already smoking one. Kit was fancy in every way that Dolora wasn’t. They both cropped their hair short: Dolora’s blonde was slick back against her skull, Kit’s was carefully pressed in an S-curl. Dolora smoked filthy little hand-rolled bidis; Kit had a long elegant holder that she clenched between her teeth. They were opposite terminals of the battery, and they charged the air with power.

“This is a standing appointment,” Kit complained. “You’re not supposed to have to clear the books for me.”

“I got the call before I even knew where the sun was, doll, I couldn’t say no to an old hand like Krashnikol. Remember when he asked me to tail that fella’s wife and we ate out on caviar for a week? The old dope’s paid my rent more than any other client.” She jammed the hastily-made smoke to her lips and set fire to it.

It was Kit’s turn to roll her eyes. There was a moment of silence as they shifted to another track. “I do like him, by the way.”

“What?” Dolora didn’t follow.

“Longstreet. You said ‘you like the new guy.’ I do like him. You should too.”

Dolora didn’t keep track of who was in the big office on Parliament Island. It didn’t seem to matter. Every few years they had a big shuffle-up and some other bum put his ass in the chair. Nothing changed in Alstat. “Why’s that? Because he gave a speech outside Salafin’s once?” It was true. Heward Longstreet had campaigned in the poor parts of the city where the old fella, Boss Harker, wouldn’t even dare to tread.

“Because he’s got good ideas, Dolore. He’s going to change things.”

“Yeah, he’ll take ‘em right down to the bank and get ‘em changed in for a nice house in Woodland.” She sighed. Kit could be so naive. For someone in the fit set, jetting all over Silver City and doing Correis-knows-what, she liked to believe in her little stories about how the world worked. God forbid she really see what went on in Alstat.

But… that was the old Dolora acting up again. That was last night’s drums, and fast music, and gin. She was trying to be good. She had to be better. She was getting better. She wasn’t going to be this person anymore. “Well, anyway,” she said, before Kit could offer some riposte about how clean Prasident Longstreet ran his fledgling administration, “I didn’t come down to fight. How’s shakes? Anything moving in the big time? Openings for my gal up there?”

A waiter swept by and brought them two paper cups of coffee black as Alkelbulan soil, a basket of flatbreads hot enough to sear your fingerprints off, and a white bowl of what Mr. Salafin had put on the menu as “fool mesdames” but which was, in Cinder City parlance, dried fava beans drizzled with lemon and olive oil.

“Not yet,” Kit said. She tried to play it off lightly, but Dolora saw the way her face fell. It drove a spike through her chest.

She pretended to busy herself with the coffee. “That’s okay. Nothing’s stone.”

“Nothing’s stone,” Kit agreed, but there was that special Kit Winter lilt in her tone that meant she was feeling down.

Shouldn’t have brought up work. You’re doing great, kid, maybe next you can shove her in a puddle or tell her that you’re seeing some fella.

Kit recovered. She was marvelous that way. Hits that would have floored Dolora just rolled off Kit. She could take a punch and come back a minute a later as though nothing had happened. Course, you weren’t allowed to refer to the punch again, or else everything came unspooled, but still: that was some resilience. “Speaking of stone, when are you coming to my place? You said you’d stay the weekend.”

“What’s that got to do with stone.”

“Nothing,” Kit laughed, dressing a flatbread, “but I wanted to ask.”

Dolora thought about the gruesome stuff she’d already seen that morning. It wasn’t going to be anytime soon, that was for sure. Cases like this, genuine murder cases (if that’s what this turned out to be) needed to be worked fast. Once the trail ran cold, they’d never crack the bastard. And this one deserved to be cracked. Didn’t matter that Hadrada was some combine stooge. No one deserved to go out that way.

Salafin’s was warm, but Dolora still shivered. This morning wasn’t the only tragedy on her mind. Hadrada’s was hardly the only corpse in her closet. “Nothing doing. Not for a while. This case…”

Kit reached out. Her nails brushed the back of Dolora’s hand. Their eyes met over the table and for a moment it was like it had been before. There was no smoke of the war between them, no arguments. Their history drained away; there were no fears of the future, no regrets of the past, only now, and the things that filled it up. And Kit was all of those things.

“When everything’s said and done we’ll go out of the city. Take a long vacation in the New Territories.” Dolora waved vaguely. To her, the New Territories were a sort of otherland. She’d been raised on the islands and peninsulas of the City, lived her whole life amongst its streetwagons and bustle. Sure, she’d seen Ae Vira when she was being staged for the war, and then crossed over onto the Continent and fought in Aon and Leovic. Those places were haunted by their evil past. The Aonrijk’s extermination project, the centuries of imperial war between Ae Vira and Dvangar.

The New Territories were untroubled by anything so vile. They were the fresh lands, untouched, and settled by the colonists long ago when Cinder City was just a dream. Dolora knew they were vaguely divided into treaty territories. When she thought of them she imagined great wilds, sweeping vistas, thundering waterfalls, and distant villages.

Kit laughed. “You want to charter a luftleighner while we’re at it? We can cruise over the jungles and spend our days sipping mango juice and rum.”

Dolora grinned. “That sounds nice.” She covered Kit’s hand with her own.

“So…” Kit drawled. “Your case. Tell me about it.” Kit put her chin in her hands. Smoke drifted from her bidi holder. She was a dragon.

Dolora gulped a mouthful of hot coffee. “Ok, where do I start? So, like I said, Krashnikol…”

 

Hadrada’s apartment was up the narrow back stair of a Dwarfside tenement. It was just off Wild Mountain Road, at the end of a blank alley that had a number rather than a name. It was one of those stinking piles of bricks that stood upright against all the odds. Rusty water stained it where the steam pipes went through the walls. This place would give Kit the shivers, thought Dolora. From the kids playing jacks to the old duffer practicing the bassoon in the sunken court of a garden floor stairwell, it would all have her heading for the hills in seconds flat.

Dolora stood in the alley for a while, making herself unobtrusive. She smoked, she bought a paper, she took a stroll around the block and eyeballed all the entrances. She didn’t spot any surveillance on the place. Unless they were hiding up in the adjoining buildings, it looked clear.

After a few hours, she jawed with the neighbors and tried to get a feel for the area. It was like the rest of Dwarfside: working class, low rent, hardscrabble. Locals were, unsurprisingly, overwhelmingly dwarves. There was a little Filic temple down the way, even. Dolora hadn’t been in a church for praying reasons since she was a kid, but she figured it might help to get the lay of the land. The Lamplighter on duty didn’t know Hadrada. Not a religious man, it seemed, or maybe not Filic despite his race. It was unlikely he’d go to a different temple with this one so close at hand.

Nobody suspicious was coming or going, either. That could mean a number of things. Dolora ran down the list. If someone bumped Hadrada off for an object, there were three possibilities. One: the thing was on Hadrada at the time, and the assailant got it before he was crushed or didn’t and the thing was dust. Two: the thing was in his apartment and the assailant had either been there or already or wasn’t coming. Three: the thing was somewhere else entirely, and Dolora was wasting her morning scouting the place. Didn’t matter which was right. They could all be wrong, if the murder were for something else. For a debt, maybe, or for love, or hate, or to keep a secret.

She went on to the next step, which was to get into the apartment. People left detritus around without thinking about it. It would be filled with the wreckage of Hadrada Varnag’s life. His hopes, his dreams, his desires. Whoever had pushed him—and let’s be honest, it had been a push, the scuff-marks on the platform indicated that much—there would be some hint to the reason up there. Hadrada wasn’t killed on the job by a stranger. It was someone who knew him, whatever that meant.

Unobtrusive entry into tenements in the nicer parts of town was actually quite difficult. You had to bribe a doorman, or a servant, or wait near the cook’s entrance. She didn’t have to slip by anyone on her way into the foyer here because the lock on the outside door had been smashed off ages ago. No one stopped to ask her why she was going in. No one even looked up.

The tenement was dark and close inside. The air smelled miasmic. Kit had said something about physicians cautioning not to live in the narrow, stinking confines of buildings like this one. Well, where are they gonna go, Dolora thought as she crossed a puddle in the main hall. A steam pipe was leaking. It’s not like they can shimmy up to Woodland and cool their heels with the bigwigs. It was all very well to rail and condemn the living conditions of Alstat. When it came time to do something, to change them, that was a different story. All of a sudden the brave will of Parliament and the Stadtprasident’s office shrank into nothing. A dry well.

Dolora padded across peeling tiles. She had considered taking off her shoes, but the floor was too slimy for that. Instead, she went as slowly and carefully as she could, a shadow among other shadows. Bare bulbs sat in cement sockets overhead. No expense spared in putting this place up. At the end of the hall, she found the back stair.

Up, up, up, past the few narrow, yellowed windows the building had. The interior would have none; only front- or rear-facing rooms had access to natural light. She could imagine the family apartments with their coin-operated power boxes, coin-turned hand pumps, and windowless common areas. They’d be lucky to have a bedroom.

Hadrada’s apartment was on the fifth story. It was flush with the back of the building: swanky. Dolora checked the door, found it locked. She peered at the bolt. A simple, cheap piece of work. Nevertheless, it had no signs of being forced. The door wasn’t cracked, there were no scratchmarks on any of the metal. The hinges were on the inside and the wood was fairly thick, which meant it was going to be a lock job.

Once upon a time Dolora had carried around a whole bunch of fancy lock picking tools. Master keys, too. But the problem with a master is that you need the same kind of key as the lock series. You’d wind up jingling like a streetwagon making a stop. It defeated the purpose, really. So Dolora had slimmed her toolkit down to a narrow knife with a little hook on the tip. She’d had to make it herself with a file, but it paid off. Sure, anyone with a pair of eyes would be able to see you’d forced the door, but this was about going quick, not about leaving no trace.

She flipped out her picking knife and gave a quick survey of the corridor. Footsteps below descended the stair and faded as their owner left the building. When she was satisfied no one was coming up to the top, she thrust the knife into the lock and felt for the tumblers. It took no more than a few moments to finesse them into position. She jammed her file in and used it to turn the mechanism. The door gave with an easy snick.

The apartment on the far side was untouched. If it had been ransacked, whoever had done it had taken a great deal of care to put everything back just so. There were two plaster-walled rooms joined by a small doorway, a front and back. The front room was large, a single cubicle with stained white walls. Pipes snaked across the ceiling and drilled through them. It was a combined bedroom, living room, and dining room. “You had this whole big place to yourself,” Dolora muttered, closing the door behind her. This was larger than Dolora’s own apartment. She shot the bolt.

She craned her neck to look at the back room. It was a narrow hall that doubled as a kitchen. It’s rear wall boasted the apartment’s only window, man-tall and framed by an iron rail and the top of a fire escape.

Despite the size, the furnishings were ragged. A couch in the style of the last century sagged atop a threadbare carpet. Hadrada’s bed was a sad affair of bare springs and sagging cloth. His dining table was set with freshly cut flowers and a bowl of almonds. The walls were hung with combine posters: steelworkers, longshoremen, teamsters. They were splashed with red and black. “YOUR BOSS NEEDS YOU - YOU DON’T NEED YOUR BOSS!”, “JOIN THE COMBINE - FOR WORKER’S RIGHTS!”, and, threateningly, “JOIN THE COMBINE OR HAVE AN ACCIDENT! WHICH WILL IT BE?”

Could he have been offed by one of his combine brothers? She padded carefully into the room. It wasn’t that she was afraid of leaving her mark, she just didn’t want anyone downstairs to hear. That would be all she needed. Some busybody would hear her and ring up the Blues on the parly. Hello, excuse me, someone is in the dead man’s apartment. Please come quick. I think they’re trying to make off with his life’s savings.

She flicked the lights on to get a better look at the place. The power flickered on and off for a few seconds, strobing through the lights. Dolora shaded her eyes until the effect was replaced by the steady hum of Hadrada’s power-use box turning over. One cent. Two cents. Three cents. Well, it’d be billed against a dead man, anyway.

First she went to his bedside. An old apple crate held up his candlestick parly-horn. It was still on the hook. No address book to speak of, but some of the numbers on the rotary were worn. He made calls to the same line often. Probably his combine friends.

A rolltop writing desk was pushed against the wall, under the biggest of the Steelworkers posters that just said ORGANIZE on an iron beam. The desk was promising. There were papers on it, and a line of statographs in wooden frames along the top. Dolora picked up the statos one at time. Maybe the killer’s in one of these.

The first few were nondescript towns in the mountains. They were peppered with people in somber clothes. The buildings were mostly made of wood: shacks, huts, huge-tufted eaves of thatch on small houses, reaching down to the ground. No one was in motion and everyone was looking right at the viewer. They had to be taken last century, back when you needed to expose a plate for whole minutes at a time to get a good ‘graph.

That’s Dvangar, Dolora realized. Those villages clinging to the slopes of the mountains, the long-bearded faces and dark clothes. Dvangar before the fall. Ok, so Hadrada really was from the old country, and he was old. She went on the to next ‘graph. This stato was an image of a family standing in front of a temple. All dwarves. Maybe a coming of age ceremony. There were ribbons in their beards and musicians to one side. The hooting of the bassoon down in the courtyard could be coming from any of these, Dolora thought with a smirk.

Next was a stato of a city. The streets were filled with people, fists upraised. Banners trailed from high windows, and snow was piled in heaping mounds on either side of the street. Fires were burning. Correis, Dolora realized with a shock, this is Dwarfside. Sixty years ago, but Dwarfside. There were still wooden tenements back then, but there was Salafin’s. The roads were just crushed gravel. Hadn’t been paved yet. No streetwagon lines to speak of, and no autowagons. A horse and buggy was trapped by the crowd. She could just make out the frame of what had to be an old style Bluebell patrol wagon, complete with horses and strummer on top. Someone had written in the corner of the stato using a white wax pencil. Dwarfside Steam Riots, 5665.

The steam riots. Hadrada had been there. Back in those days, Cinder City Consolidated Gas & Steamworks didn’t have lines going into Alstat. The neighborhood was too poor. Dolora vaguely remembered her own mother telling her about the riots. In the winter of 5665, Alstat had frozen. People had died in their apartments. The cold killed the weakest first: babies, the elderly, the sick. Then, in the coldest part of the season, a fire someone started to keep their family warm, probably using parafin lamp oil and smashed furniture, caught the rest of their old wooden tenement block. Three hundred people died in that fire. The riots followed. Bring us heat! had been the rallying cry, and the Parliament had no choice but to do it.

Hadrada been one of those rioters, sixty-five years ago. Dolora knew that dwarves lived a long time, hundreds of years if they could, but this was the first time she’d really thought about what that meant.

“This guy was a rabble rouser,” she muttered. That expanded the circle. Maybe the killing was political. Maybe there was somebody with a grudge against the combine, or maybe he was meddling in things that were too big for him. “Hadrada, you dope, you couldn’t just keep your head down like the rest of us.” Shame to see a guy so dedicated wind up that way, being scooped up into a coroner’s wagon and slopped out into some grave on Iron Island.

She picked out the pre-flattened dwarf from the other statos. He was the one constant in them all. He had a short beard and big brows that made a beetled arch over his square, stolid face. She went back to compare the ‘graph taken in front of the temple. The older dwarf looked somewhat like Hadrada but he had a different nose, a different cant to his lip. Was that…? The young dwarf coming of age - could that have been Hadrada? His family from old Dvangar?

What of the papers on the desk? She sorted through them. Bills, lists of attendance at combine meetings, clippings of newspaper articles, an old Longstreet campaign poster, a stack of VOTE HARKER fliers that had been torn from their wheatpaste moorings. Longstreet supporter, that tracks. She sifted through a mass of notices from some bank called Credit Mobilier.

Beneath those was a handwritten letter, crinkled and well-creased. Dolora considered taking it, but lifted her head and listened first. No one coming, no noise other than the bassoonist below. She could take the time to read, to digest. She sat in Hadrada’s chair and scanned.

The letter was written in halting Cindish. The hand was blocky, like someone used to the crabbed script of Dvangar. A message from the old country. First, greetings. We’re all well, the shortages have almost ended. We send you hope for the future in the dark hellhole of Cinder City. Lots of this. Talk of harvests, of cities running out of oil, of giantsblood spoiled or destroyed by what the writer called wreckers. She smirked at how paranoid the letter was. You are surrounded by rehabilitated Aonrijk war criminals. Your city in the New Territories sits at the center of a web of evil, a spider bloated on… Correis where did they get this tripe? But near the bottom was something interesting: give our love to your Varda, and we pray you may come to see us soon.

Your Varda.

So, Hadrada had a girl.

 

“Our stiff had a lady,” Dolora said.

Miles chewed thoughtfully. “Stiff,” he replied, “Is a very generous term. I’d call him more of a jelly.”

“That’s not funny.” Dolora struggled not to smile. “The poor sucker bought it less than twenty-four hours ago.”

They sat opposite one another at Max Wilnow, a deli on Spengle Street in the heart of Dwarfside. This was one of the places Kit was scared to go. Harsh white lights, black and white tile floors, and waiters who would just as soon spit at you as take your order. For Dolora, this was home.

“Is that all you found? Got a name?”

“Varda Ovirov. As contained in a letter written from the old country. Hadrada was sending correspondence back to the Cog Countries, Fabricators only know where.” Addresses in the tiny villages of Dvangar had never been easy to comprehend. Since they overthrew their king and declared themselves the Commonwealth of Guilds, things had only gotten worse. “He was pretty old, even for a dwarf. Had a statograph of the ’65 steam riots. Apparently he was there.”

Across the table, Miles thought about this. His face moved slowly as the gears behind his brow turned. “Hmmm.” A spot of mustard stuck to the corner of his mouth. Dolora was poised to tell him when Miles started talking again. She decided to wait. It was better not to interrupt Miles once he started a thought. He got pissy if you did that, and accused you of not listening. No reason to get her head bitten off over a little mustard. “He had some outstanding gambling debts. I talked to the people at the combine hall, learned a little about him. Hard working, nose to the ground kind of dwarf. Did a lot of side gigs, apparently to pay for the gambling addiction. Sent money somewhere every now and again.”

“His apartment was big, Miles. I mean, it was on the top floor, which cuts one way, but it was two whole big rooms to himself with a bathroom and an outside window in the kitchen, which cuts the other. He wasn’t scrimping.”

Kowalski tore another bite off his sandwich. “Well, his combine people used his apartment for meetings. Apparently he used to put up five or ten other guys at a time when work was slow.”

“That jibes. He had combine posters everywhere. He was an agitator. But that doesn’t - listen Miles, before I say anything else, wipe the mustard off your lip, would you? - What I mean to say is, I don’t think the fact that he was so active with his combine implicates Krashnikol. For one thing, he called us.”

Her partner shrugged. “It’s happened before. It could happen again. Throw people off the scent by pretending to be eager to get it solved. Normally I’d say we shouldn’t sweat it, because if it is him, he’s the one paying us.” Miles smiled a little at the strangled noise Dolora made. The idea that she would have to swallow such an injustice, even hypothetically, was too much for her. Criminals should be hauled before a court and made to answer for what they did. If Krashnikol had done the murder, regardless of the fact that he’d hired them, they owed a debt to Hadrada himself to make sure the old dwarf saw justice.

It was OK, though, because Kowalski didn’t really believe what he was saying. He was playing the part of hard-nosed Cinder City private eye. She knew him better than that. He wouldn’t be working with her unless he felt the same way she did, not when he could be making a mint as some house detective down at a bank in Silver City.

“In this particular instance,” he went on, “it does matter, because we have secondary employers. So if the combine offed him, we owe it to Krashnikol, and if Krashnikol offed him, we owe it to the combine.”

“Let’s not get locked in to this theory just yet,” Dolora warned. It was easy to put on a pair of blinders and forget you were supposed to be looking at all the evidence. That’s what the Blues did. That’s what the State’s Attorneys did, too, come to think of it. Once they decided who they wanted to nail, all the evidence either fit, or wasn’t relevant.

Miles nodded. “So we’ll talk to the girlfriend tomorrow. I can run her down tonight, figure out where she lives, and then stop by the combine offices like we talked about. The only other thing is the list of gambling parlors. I think he’s been to a few in the Dragons.”

It was easy to lose your shirt and other things besides in that part of Alstat. Dolora had been to the Dragon gaming halls a handfull of times, almost always for work. They ran the gamut from unsanctioned tile-games in back alleys or paint-peeling restaurants to the fanciest establishments money could buy. Some of those places really deserved to be in Woodland or Regensburg. The swells from downtown actually came to the Dragons on occasion. When they got tired of the tame atmosphere of the Carlton Club and wanted a little dicey action, where the hooch was cut and the illegal treats on offer weren’t protected by the political establishment.

There were bigwigs from other parts of the Umwelt there too. There was a reason they called that part of town the Dragons. From the sloped pagoda roofs to the little folk temples, that run of Alstat had been the special preserve of the Dragonfolk from the far south. Not out of any design of their own, Dolora was sure. Neither Silver City Savings and Loan nor First Reliance would lend to people who rented to the Dragons.

Spade and Kowalski had done work for Dragons in the past. Not many outfits would take jobs in the Dragons. It was a whole other world there, one even the Blues were afraid to interfere with. Please, don’t let it have been some Dragon-boss. That was the kind of trouble she and Kowalski would do best to avoid.

A streetwagon rumbled by. As though on cue, the lights flickered. “It’s been doing that a lot lately,” Dolora said with a frown.

“Bad wiring, I guess.”

“Yeah. Not like Cinder City Consolidated gives enough of a shit to come down to Alstat to repair it.”

She took a spoonful of soup.

 

Later, Dolora hiked herself over to her own apartment. She’d been out all morning and a good portion of the afternoon running down leads that turned into dead-ends. Neighbors said Hadrada had a lot of combine friends, but they were always respectful. Sometimes there was accordion music coming from his apartment, sometimes clarinets or viols, sometimes all three, but never late at night and never so loud as to be bothersome. The bassoonist, an old man called Travinka, said Hadrada could speak fluent Dvangar but had no Dvangari accent when he spoke Cindish. “He has been here longer than I’ve been alive, I am thinking,” he told Dolora.

Other than the gambling, the dead dwarf was a model citizen. So where did that leave them? No closer to any answers, although they had at least a handful more leads. It’s going to be the mobsters, Dolora thought glumly as she trudged back up to Radnik Street. It’ll be some suit in a fedora with a repeating strummer who couldn’t get his payment fast enough. But why hadn’t Hadrada’s combine buddies helped him? Where had they been during the attack? They were paying a pretty penny to have his death investigated. If they knew he was in debt, they could’ve saved some dough by paying the gambling rings directly. Maybe they didn’t know. Maybe Hadrada was too proud. Didn’t tell anyone about his trouble.

Dolora winced. That struck a little too close to home. Too proud. How many times had Kit said that about her? Her knee twinged as she walked.

The corner of Radnik and Ward was aswarm with the hopeless. Ersatzmenn, the houseless poor, and flocks of urchin children with no parents left alive clogged the intersection. A band of veterans sat in a row on the sidewalk holding placards and playing a sad brass song. They stank of piss and desperation. Many boasted gleaming metal fittings, the ersatz replacements for limbs blown apart or shredded by strummer fire; some even had ersatz eyes that glowed an evil red with the power of the trapped magics inside. They fought for the attention of passerbies with the ragged poor, those who hadn’t served during the war and yet were still starving, or freezing, or dying. A small fire burned in a metal bin to keep them warm. Between them all ran the children, lifting what they could from those caught in the crowd.

Dolora forced her way through the walking wounded, the victims of industrial accidents, of streetwagon crashes, of the diseases that festered in the city like mold, and of the war. She tried not to make eye contact with the veterans. She was afraid she might see Lusky, his broad face frowning, the hole in his head plugged by shining chromium, his ruined brainpan repaired with ersatz magic and the spirit of a bound djinn.

“Hey lady,” one of the vets cried, grabbing his crotch with an articulated metal hand, “come give a soldier a kiss!”

She didn’t whirl on him. She didn’t draw her strummer and shove it up his nostril, nor did she say “I fought in the battles of Thaler, Carbis, and Breach - I watched my sergeant die and my unit get chewed up by armored fire. I kissed a Cog commissar on the lips when she crossed the ruins at Bergensdorf and said we’d won, that there were no more Aons to kill.” She didn’t say, “Briar Lusky was a good man, and it’s a shame he took a bullet and you survived.” She walked on.

Perhaps it was the encounter with the ersatzmenn and their hollow-eyed vacancy that distracted her as she approached her building. It may have been the intricacies of the Varnag case. Whatever it was, she didn’t see the Blues standing in front of the door until she was already within arm’s reach.

Dolora did not feel well. She had been having a rough go of it lately, and today was no better than the others. Despite having had both breakfast and lunch, her stomach was still in a mild rebellion, and the constant stream of bidi smoke hadn’t calmed things. Her knee was enflamed, likely due to the cool spring weather. Her back hurt, and she hadn’t gotten enough sleep, which meant she was also tired. Her reflexes weren’t what they could have been. If they were, she might have been able to slip away from the two stocky Blue officers on her steps. Instead, they swooped in, grabbed her by the forearms, and before she could protest were leading her to an autowagon.

“Little Miss Spade,” said one of the Blues in that thick, dopy voice they all learned at the stationhouses.

Dolora twisted. No use telling them she wasn’t who she was. She’d been on the force, so there was a statograph of her somewhere at the local watch station. These men had probably seen it. She could just imagine them being instructed to go get her. This is what she looks like. Imagine her without the double-breasted Bluebell uniform, officers. Them replying, Oh, can’t we just, eh boys?

“Constables,” she said angrily, “there’s no need for this. Whatever problem you have, we can work it out like reasonable adults.” She knew the chances of that were next to nothing, but sometimes a beat Blue might take a reasonable bribe to give their arrestee a few hours to work out an alternative disposition. No such luck in this case. They just kept dragging her.

Dolora made sure she didn’t fight or stir. She went limp, let them lead. Whatever they thought they had on her, she didn’t want to make it worse by adding resisting arrest to their list. They threw her into the holding cell of a big Blue autowagon. She still had her strummer on her. They hadn’t even thought to search her for weapons. Who trained these goons nowadays? She could plug them through the thin tin wall of the cell if she wanted to. Lucky for them, she wasn’t interested in a murder rap of her own, so she sat quietly on the wooden bench and held on with white knuckles. An empty Blue wagon wasn’t exactly known to be a gentle ride.

The engine roared to life as the djinn inside was prodded with currents of magic. Here we go, Dolora thought, closing her eyes. “Try to take it easy, will ya?” she asked. No one answered. There was a little slat for the drivers to look into the back, but the wooden bar was in firmly in place. They had no intention of talking to her during the trip.

It turned out that they weren’t going that far. The Watchstation was eight blocks away on Dublay Boulevard, which ran between Dwarfside and Lower Alstat. It was a big thoroughfare. Dolora could name the little cookshops running all the way up to where it met Granite Street. The autowagon whined around a corner and into the bitumen-paved lot behind the station. They let Dolora out without so much as handcuffing her.

“You ain’t unner arrest, miss, but you gotta come inside.”

“That’s the same thing as being under arrest, officer,” Dolora said. Didn’t anyone teach these mopes anything? But the officer didn’t respond beyond dragging her toward the station.

The Dublay watchstation, like all the big Bluebell strongholds, was a massive brick building with a central tower. On the Continent, Dolora had seen their like dotting every village. Churches, temples, the local town councils all had towers such as these. Unlike town halls on the Continent, the watchstations were strung with nests of copper wire. Dolora knew that these were power, parly, and communication lines that knit together every station in the city without making use of public channels. Eventually, those wires looped onto the poles that supported the regular power and parly lines and ran parallel with the general utilities.

This was the center of the Alstat precinct. None of the other wards had stations quite as impressive as this.

The arresting officers - for that’s what they were, no matter what they said - hauled Dolora through the chaos of the central station. They crossed the polished marble floor to the duty sergeant’s desk. “We got the Spade woman,” said the burly jerk on her right.

The old sergeant behind the desk stroked his white whiskers. “Interfering with a police investigation,” he purred. “The captain wants her in the conference room.”

Dolora ripped her arms from the officers. “All right, all right, I can walk myself. I don’t need an escort!” Her two new friends let her walk on her own, limp and all, but they stayed close by her sides, presumably in case she bolted. “You know, you mugs didn’t even take my six-string,” she said twitching aside her jacket.

“You ain’t gonna use that in here,” the big meathead on her left smiled. Cocksure. Well, he was right, but he had no way of knowing that.

The Dublay Street Watchstation was, like all Watchstations in Alstat, a hive of activity. Prostitutes in stained satin, giantsblood addicts with smears of crimson on their fingers, mages without licenses in lead deadening cuffs, pick-pockets and vagrants, housecrackers discovered on some second-story job, all crowded the processing desks where rank and file officers wrote out summonses or orders to the prison to transport them overnight for arraignment. The bullpen was a great open space stuffed with walnut desktops and framed by frosted glass panes.

Dolora knew her way around. She’d been in this station many, many times when she was a junior officer. “You know, I got my start here,” she said to… Officer Grady, according to the tin badge jammed on his hat and the other one stuck in his front pocket.

Grady, the big lunk on the right, glowered down at her. “Is that so,” he stated. His tone brooked no argument so, naturally, Dolora argued.

“Yea it is, flat-foot. I did your job.”

The other officer laughed. “Oh yeah? What happened?”

“Went and fought in the war.” Dolora said. “Got blown up.”

“Yeah? That’s not the way I heard it.”

They were at the conference room door. Lacquered wood with another frosted glass pane. She remembered this place. It was a lifetime ago. She’d been on loan from her own home watchstation, a ruinous little shack without even its own tower, over in Dwarfside on the edge of the Dragons. She sat in one of the rolling chairs and waited. One of the officers left, but the big dough-faced Grady remained. He stood two heads above her. He wore a thick mustache to compensate for his thinning hair. Dolora sat in silence for a while as Grady pursed his lips and stared down at her. His look was discomforting, the feeling of those eyeballs drilling into her head.

“Maybe I do remember you,” Grady said, “little pip from Cherry Street, ain’t it? Officer Dolora Spade, yeah. How long ago was that?” He counted back in his head. His tongue poked between his lips. “Must be going on ten years. You made shamus, even, didnt’chya? How many investigator-shamuses they got down on Cherry Street? Must’a been a big fuck-up.”

Dolora didn’t rise to his challenge. She waited instead.

A few minutes went past. Officer Grady, who would never make Sergeant, stuck his thumbs in his pockets and bounced on his heels. He had that stupid, bovine look Blues get after years on the job. That was the beat-eye, the expression you developed to pass the time. Most of being a Blue was waiting. Some of it was getting freebies from the local pushcarts and coffeehouses. Very, vanishingly, rarely it was chasing after some bad guy and bringing him down with your knee, or your elbow, or both. Dolora knew it well.

Eventually, the door opened again. Dolora was surprised; she’d been expecting a shamus, maybe even the one in charge of the Krashnikol investigation. Instead, a thin man in a gray double-breasted suit with sharp lapels and a red boutonnière. appared The brilliant blue bow tie at his throat made him look like a long-necked bird. “Good afternoon, Miz Spade,” this functionary said, inclining his head. He sat at the head of the long walnut table and gestured for Grady to do the same.

“My name is Ansel. I’m an attorney from the Juridicium.” Ansel smiled. His face was narrow, hatchet-like. He cut his hair short on the sides and swept back on top, all smoothed down with a pomade. “Its my understanding that you were at Krashnikol’s Hammers this morning and you’ve been asking questions about the death there more or less all afternoon. You were seen in the neighborhood of the decedent.”

“The what?” Dolora sneered, pretending ignorance. It was always smart to look like a fool in front of people like this. These assholes from Parliament Island would underestimate you in a second, and if you even so much as hinted you didn’t know something, they’d be glad to explain for hours. This was an old shamus trick; pretend like you don’t understand, and wait for the mark to give themselves away by how they explain to poor stupid old you how things are.

Of course, not many shamuses these days looking to put the screws on the Parliament Island types. That was one of the many reasons Dolora didn’t work at the Cherry Street Station anymore. Better to be Spade and Kowalski. No one told you to stop asking inconvenient questions when you ran your own shop.

Except here was some lawyer who was gonna do just that. “The departed, if that’s a term you’re more familiar with. The poor dwarf who was killed at the steel mill.” This Ansel steepled his fingers and leaned forward. Grady looked over and gave a lurid wink, as though to say now comes the good part. “The fact of the matter is, Miz Spade, you’re interfering in an official investigation of the Constabulary. As a former constable yourself, you are aware that this is a crime.”

“I got a license, mister.”

“Attorney Williams,” the pencil-neck said. “And licensed or no, you are being advised that there is an ongoing Juridicium investigation being led by my office. The man was a spy. A Cog spy. There’s nothing more for you or your people to do. Tell your employer that: his floor steward was a commonist.”

Dolora said nothing.

“You understand what I’m saying, Miz Spade? This dwarf Hadrada was killed by his own people. These Cogs… they kill each other like this all the time. You fought on the Continent, so you may have some misplaced loyalty to them. I understand it, really I do.” He took a pre-rolled bidi from the case in his vest, stuck it between his lips, lit it. “But here’s the thing you have to understand about these commonists: they hate us. No, not only us, but each other. They’re killing each other all over the Umwelt. Here, too. They hate us and they hate one another. That’s all they do, is kill.” Ansel Williams shook his head.

“It’s a bloodbath. Chalk this up to whatever incomprehensible struggle they’re having. If you need proof, the Juridicium will be happy to write you out an affidavit that will satisfy Mr. Krashnikol.”

Dolora squirmed. This guy was a weasel. She could feel it oozing off of him. His smarmy demeanor, his expensive suit, his high starched collar. His hair crept back from his forehead and temples. His eyes twinkeld with an evil good nature. Even Grady could feel it. He was shifting in his seat as though he smelled something foul.

“You’re saying you want me to drop the case,” she said, flatly.

The lawyer smiled. His teeth were tombstones, his lips pale and bloodless. “Your case,” he said, and suddenly his voice was a hungry rasp, “is solved.”

 

Tyrsis was late. The autowagon, a Mark H trucking frame, slewed onto Cherry Street. It was nearing eight in the evening and he was supposed to deliver at eight-ten. People demanded their ice on time. Smith & Bros. was famed for their delivery drivers. The bulky Mark H autotruck was part of a small fleet purchased by the the Misters Smith and outfitted to better store the big blocks of ice stacked in the back. The walls were reinforced and insulated and a grating installed to let runoff drain from the bottom of the wagon.

The ice trade was just one of the many businesses Tyrsis was involved in. He had a whole family to support and, being an elf, people tended to assume he was doing well. The fact of the matter was, there were just as many poor elves as there were rich ones, and not every knife-ear had the same connections to the Aonrijk. It didn’t help that up until a year ago, Cinder City had been at war with those genocidal bastards over on the Continent. Elves in the city got the short end of that stick.

For a long time, Cinder City had stayed out of the war. Let ‘em fight. It’s a war for the Continent. What’s it have to do with us? And, in the more cynical circles, maybe those Aonic bastards will kill the Cogs and together they can go hand in hand down to hell. But eventually Stadtprasident Harker convinced the Parliament that something had to be done. Production was way down, the city was in the grips of a major depression, and the war industry needed a boost. So it went from “our brothers in Aon” to “down with the elf menace!” overnight. Which meant Tyrsis always had to be on the lookout for anti-Aonic sentiment. While the war had raged, he always kept one eye open.

The icetruck barreled down the road, weaving between autos and a stopped streetwagon. Tyrsis pulled on the handle of giantsblood by his hip. The stuff had been proscribed since ‘17, but the way it made you feel… Technically, Tyrsis reflected, the crimson liquor passing through his system with a course like luftlighter fuel, there was a separate refining process for the drink and the machine oil, but it certainly felt like you could feel this stuff to a djinn.

His own djinn, the one in his autotruck’s engine, was growling in protest now. He jammed on the clutch, ripped on the handbrake, and spun onto Granite. “Shut up,” he said, kicking the dashboard. Stupid fucking thing. Every autowagon, every luftmachine, even every lokomotive had its own tutelary slave spirit, put there by some engineer-wizard. Tyrsis hated them all. Lead casings kept them in line. Lead and other base metals were like a blackout curtain to magic.

Almost there…

The djinn bucked, the autotruck hiccoughed, and Tyrsis struggled to keep control of the wheel. The bottle slid down between the seats. He spat and reached to grab it before the potent fluid was wasted on the truck floor.

He came back up just in time to see the open pit at the upper end of Granite Street. There were a few paltry wooden sawhorses put up to deter traffic, but it was really only in the way of a warning. There was no way they would stop the Mark H at full speed. He shrieked “ARTAX!” as though the Fabricators could help. But neither Artax, Karzel, Correis, nor any of the Fabricators had interfered in human affairs since the days of the prophets, if they ever had.

Tyrsis struck the hole with his front wheels. He had no time to turn aside. He had no time to react at all.

The pit had been dug by Cinder City Consolidated so their engineers could get to their steam and power lines. This meant the wheels skidded over the exposed piping and, rather than crack the axle and stop the truck where it was, the whole chasis flipped back up and onto the road in an uncontrollable slid.

Tyrsis screamed. The giantsblood he had been so desperately trying to save splashed over his arms and face. It burned where it contacted his skin, deep crimson hissing and sizzling. Welts rose. Smoke filled the cabin of the truck as it continued on down Granite Street, plunging, whirling, a tumbling nightmare of steel.

The elf didn’t see what stopped his autotruck. There was a crunching, crashing, tearing sound of metal howling and a hurricane of glass filled the air. For many moments he couldn’t move. His own blood trickled from his ear, from his mouth. His skin was seared red with long, caustic burns. Somewhere outside there were shouts. People were wailing. Someone was clutching the broken passenger-side window and screaming like the devil.

What…

He tried to open the door. It was deformed, bent inward. It took his shoulder and a great heave to wrench it free. A lamp post leaned dangerously over the rear of his truck. There was a hiss of gas escaping. Oil and glass pattered down. Suddenly, the light in the street lamp’s listing bulb caught the open gas line where it cracked. A plume of fire shot ten feet into the air.

Tyrsis knelt to discover what was under the front wheels. Canvas… Canvas slick with something. Oil? No, giantsblood… No…

Blood. It was a wood-and-canvas food pushcart. And there was… oh Artax, no, a hand under the spokes of his wheel. In the hellish red of the blazing street lamp, he could see a hand no larger than the few coins it was clutching, green skin rapidly turning grey. No, no, no! He flattened.

“Kid!” he shouted under the truck. “Kid!”

The kid, an orc, looked back at him with blank eyes. The body was mangled in ways that thrilled through him. “Oh Artax, no,” he moaned. The screaming was getting louder. The mother. The kid and his mother were in the stand. Now the kid was under his front wheels.

“Help!” Tyrsis wept, “Please, oh Artax please, someone help!”

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