FOUNDRYSONG Chapter 2: Benevolence

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Benevolence

The white halls of the Veteran’s Sanatorium didn’t smell clean, exactly. They smelled like freshly mixed bleach. Astringent. Every time Dolora came she got the sense that something awful had just been scrubbed away somewhere behind the scenes. It didn’t help seeing all the people waiting for the same thing she was.

When it had been happening, everyone had just called it the War. Now, with the benefit of retrospect, historians had given it a name. The War of the Triple Alliance. Dolora wasn’t just some ex-soldier. She was a Veteran of the War of the Triple Alliance. So were the thousands of lost souls she saw when she came to the Sanatorium for treatment. They went the range in ages, from little better than kids in caps to old-timers who’d signed up to do one last tour of service under the old Cinder City banner. The Triple Alliance Veterans shared something, no matter how old they were. They were all dead behind the eyes. Some were shiny steel ersatz with djinn trapped inside, and others were simply mutilated, but they were all the same. Hollow. The War had made them hollow men.

Women, too. Dolora was hardly the only “lady soldier.” The others were all like her. Most wore long coats, and almost everyone wore hats, even inside the Sanatorium. It was part of feeling safe. Dolora didn’t have a hat, but her overcoat, her suit jacket, and her vest made layers enough. Not quite like the steel cuirasses the snipers had worn, but it served the same purpose.

There was a twinge in her knee as she lurched across the interior courtyard. The doctors had filled the Sanatorium with ferns, perhaps to make the patients think of somewhere tropical. Cinder City’s last war had been in the tropics, but that was longer than ago Dolora could remember. The veterans of that benighted war where all old men now. What did they call it? The Sugar War. They said it was fought on behalf of the New Territories’ alliance with Ae Vira, but it was, in truth, for favorable export prices from the newly established Ae Viran colony in the Sugar Isles.

Palm-bladed fans spun lazily overhead. She passed towering oak doors to other wings. Men and women with those blank, blasted looks lurked near them. A man with an ersatz arm argued with it in a low, strained voice. Dolora had been told that those erstazmenn who went into war with mechanical limbs remembered the face of every enemy they killed. The djinn wouldn’t let them forget. They were tortured by dreams, haunted by shadows.

Once, before Breach, she’d been stationed in a dugout with a half squad of those men who’d come back broken from the front and were given new arms, legs, eyes, hands, guts, then been sent right back to fight again. One of the ersatzmenn was what they called a flamensoldat, a fire-soldier. In the dim light of the bunker, as Aon artillery pounded overhead, he’d sidled up to her. At first she thought he was going to grope her. She looked for Sergeant Lusky, but the soldier shook his head. His eyes had glistened in the dark. “It’s all a lie,” he’d whispered. His voice cut under the bass drumming of the shells above. Dust settled in his beard. “They say we’re fighting the war for freedom, but it’s because the Cogs are close to winning. Can’t let ‘em get all the glory. Everything they tell you is a lie.”

His name, he said, was Sidney. Sidney Backstreet, from the Alstat. “Me too,” Dolora had confessed.

Sidney had hissed to her, “Don’t believe anything they say.” His left hand had been shot through three times with a repeating strummer. The tendons were blown away. There was no fixing it, the doctors said, but they could offer him something… better. He’d been given his flambeaumain, his fire-hand, instead. Clanking chrome with an evil red djinn-stone embedded in the gauntlet. A nozzle for gas, stored in a tank on his hip. “It shoots a stream of fire,” he said, “but I dream every night of the people I burn. Aons, maybe, but that doesn’t make no nevermind when you’re dreaming. Can’t tell yourself they’re just the bad guys then.” He’d wept. No one else was looking. He was secret, he was free.

“Don’t let them lie to you, friend,” he’d said. Then, the whistles. Over the top! She hadn’t seen him again.

She thought about that flamensoldat often.

It took a while, but she finally limped to the double doors that marked Dr. Horn’s rooms in the Sanatorium. The hospital was just inside the Dragons. The Dragons had grown to swallow the building, encroaching ever eastward. Year by year, the Dragons edged in on Centrum Hills. They nibbled away at the edges. Property values dropped; a shooting here, a crime wave there, and now the Dragon warlords were at the base of the hills themselves. Dolora wondered when they’d crawl through the little canyons, turning the secluded communities into hutongs. Not that she minded. The drips in Centrum were little better than the thieves in their mansions in Woodland, further east. They were grasping, stealing, kicking anyone lower than them for a leg up. She liked the people who lived in the hutongs. She hated the Centrum crowd. A bunch of bloodless bankers. Most of them didn’t even work in the hills, they commuted down south to Silver City. Let the gangsters take ‘em all.

Dr. Horn’s clinic, nestled in the back of the Sanatorium, had been on Cherry Street long ago. A cramped apartment, working just that side of legal, where he saw poor patients for nothing and charged whatever anyone could afford. Since the war started pouring broken bodies back into Cinder City he’d gone up in the world. A Parliamentary grant settled him in the old Sanatorium with his own examination room and everything. No more sitting on the doctor’s bed and waiting for him to test your reflexes. He had real steel tables and assistants, the whole works.

He even had his own receptionist. “Hi dear,” she said as Dolora walked into the waiting room. Charts of anatomy hung from the walls and the big windows looked out on a Dragon restaurant’s back porch. “The knee again?” Dolora nodded. “Just sign in here. He’s with a patient right now.” She followed the instructions, putting her name on the big registry. She didn’t like being tracked, but if you couldn’t trust Doc Horn, you couldn’t trust anybody.

There were a handful of other folks waiting in the lobby. She tried not to make eye contact and so did they. They were veterans of more than the wars. No one wanted to talk, and long practice made it easy. Just come, sit, wait. There were a few newspapers piled up on the shin-heigh table but Dolora was in no mood to read. She rolled a bidi and smoked it while she waited.

When she finally got in the office an hour or so later, Horn was perched on his doctor’s stool taking notes. He was an elf, delicate and graceful as an ibis. Long fingers flickered over his clipboard. The fountain pen danced as he wrote, barely touching paper. She knocked to alert him. She didn’t like the idea of creeping up on poor Dr. Horn, or making him jump. He looked up from behind his small round glasses and smiled. “Ahhh, Dolora!”

The examination was the same as ever. Dr. Horn frowned, see-sawed her leg back and forth. “It’s still in there,” he said after a while. “I can feel it when you move.”

“The shrapnel,” she said. She knew, she didn’t have to ask, but it felt good to say it. It was the way Sidney the flamensoldat must have felt when he offloaded his secrets to her that night. The shrapnel. The fragments of an Aon grenade and the chips of stone it blew from the rocks. She’d been knocked off her feet. It had felt like her leg was torn off. She was certain of it: she was dying. The pain had washed over her like a ceaseless tide. It came and went. With each wave, she knew she was being carried to some farther shore, one from which you never returned.

Only she didn’t die. The dwarf unit stationed with hers sent out a runner to get her. Drammen, his name was. Drammen Burr. Ae Viran family, even spoke with the funny islander accent. They hadn’t lived in Cinder City a generation. She didn’t know what happened to Private Burr. So many faces she’d seen that were lost now; dead, vanished, or gone back to their old lives.

That had been near the end, well after Lusky was shipped back for a Cinder City grave. Some ugly schloss in the Aon hills, defended by a brigade of blitzgruppen. That was a story to tell: knee ruined by the elite soldiers of the Rijk. By then, of course, the Rijk was already collapsing. She sat out the last phase of the war. Literally. After Pvt. Burr pulled her back behind the tree line, the dwarves had sent her off to the field hospital. From there, she watched as they lit up the afternoon with tracer-fire. The tall grass hissed. Occasionally, bullets tore through the trees. Someone would scream; the stromkanon on the ramparts would crackle and the scent of burning pine needles followed the stroke of lightning.

Dr. Horn nodded. “It’s getting worse. The longer you keep this up, the less range of motion you’ll have. At some point, you’re going to be chair-bound.” The doctor pursed his lips. “You know, there are other alternatives.”

Of course she knew. “Haven’t I been coming here?” she asked sourly, “haven’t we all seen them? They gave me the papers when I got hurt. ‘Free to all wounded soldiers.’ You think I want to end up like them?” She jerked her head toward the hall.

Horn touched his lips with his pen. “Let’s say we are considering ersatz for a minute. What objection do you have against it? The government would pay.”

“It talks to ya, doc. The djinn inside.” Dolora shook her head. “No way.”

Dr. Horn snorted. “Who told you that? Ersatz is completely safe.”

“Nightmares,” Dolora said, “and dreams. That’s what happens when you get one of those metal monstrosities.”

“Dolora, be reasonable. Do you get nightmares when you ride in an autowagon or a luftleighner?” A look of vaguely amused disappointment played over Dr. Horn’s features. He may have been raised in Dwarfside, but all that time with the fancy doctors gave him that detestable patina of the downtown official. Underneath he was still alright, which is why Dolora didn’t get hot and yell at him. Still, he didn’t know what he was talking about.

Horn shrugged. “There are other options. A brace, to prevent the fragments from moving and shredding the remaining ligaments and tissue. A cane, to help—”

“I don’t need a brace. I don’t need a cane!” She shrugged him off and pulled her pants on. “I got work to do.”

Dr. Horn sighed. “Off to save the world?”

“No,” Dolora said, “just doing my job.”

 

It was still early when she met Miles on Worm Street. He was standing out in front of 791 with a paper coffee cup and a sticky cruller. “I’m sure you didn’t eat yet,” he said, thrusting the pastry at her. Behind him, steam rose from the open street where Cinder City Consolidated engineers were hard at work.

“No coffee for me, though,” she said.

Miles chuckled and gave her two five cent pieces. “Here, the cart’s on the corner.”

“I can pay my own way,” she said, huffing. “You eat that. Let’s go.”

Miles shrugged. Dolora had always been this way. He started in on the cruller as they approached 791.

“Oh,” she said, stopping him on the steps, “I got dragged in yesterday. To Dublay Street. Some suit from downtown claiming to be from the Juridicium said this was some kind of Commonist revenge killing.”

Miles shook his head. “You believe that?”

“No. You?”

Another head shake.

“Someone wants us to, though. We gotta be careful. He threatened to use process on us and said they’re considering it a Juridicium case.”

Miles was big. When he shrugged, it could often seem like a threat. Bring it on. Dolora grinned. Yeah, she thought. Bring it on. Let ‘em try to stop Spade and Kowalski.

“He was working for Longstreet’s party, I think,” Dolora said. “Had Longstreet posters in his apartment.”

The building Miles had pegged as Varda Ovirov’s was a tenement building, larger than Hadrada’ss. It dominated the whole block, but was in a disastrous state of repair. All of Worm Street was this way: brick towers leaning against one another for support. The tarpaper roof slumped where water had pooled. “The place is a mess,” Dolora said, folding her arms.

“Where isn’t?” Miles walked up to the brickwork and tore down a wheat paste poster. “Maybe that’s why it’s part of this so-called revitalization project of Longstreet’s.” His mouth moved as he sounded something out. “Credit Moe-bill-yer.” He frowned at the poster. “Strange. You’d think one of the big banks’d get a city contract like this. Silver City Savings and Loan, or First Reliance.”

Dolora shrugged. “Who cares. We got a dame to talk to.”

Varda Ovirov lived in a combined apartment with six other people. They’d each chosen their own stretch of wall and thrown up curtains to give some semblance of privacy. The corners, Dolora figured, had to be prime territory. Varda had one of those.

They had to hammer for a solid minute to be let in to the big concrete box Ovirov shared with her fellow tenants. Someone had a phonogram going, someone upstairs was playing the violin, and Dolora smirked to hear the creaking of bedsprings being given the ol one-two. “Lot of working girls in this building,” she said to Miles as they waited.

“At this hour?” He pulled his watch out of his pocket and frowned skeptically at it.

Dolora smirked. “Last call,” she explained.

The door was answered by some chippy in a dancer’s outfit. “Morning,” Dolora said.

“The fuck are you, Blue plainclothes?” the girl asked. “I didn’t see nothin’ last night. You want someone who had eyes, head over to Granite Street. That’s where it happened.”

Dolora flashed her private shamus license. It wasn’t impressive. They gave Blues tin badges in the shape of a shield, but a P.S. got nothing more than a slip of paper. Still, Dolora kept hers in a leather wallet. “Quite a tongue. We’re here for Varda Ovirov.”

Miles leaned in and smiled. His expression was not unkind. “Sorry, she’ll want to talk to us. This is about her beau, Mr. Varnag. We’re trying to find out who killed him.” Before the girl went back to find Varda in the apartment, Miles held out his hand. “What happened last night?”

“You didn’t hear? Ice truck killed a kid. I’ll get her.”

Varda met them at the kitchen table, which was by the way of being the only surface big enough to support a meal that wasn’t part of someone’s cordoned off space. The tenants shared a common stove and a common burner to heat coffee, which Varda did, offering some to Dolora while Miles finished his. Dolora declined.

Hadrada’s girl Varda was a somber dwarf. She had the fixed and steady eye of a Dvarnag peasant, someone who’s weathered many storms. Dolora would never make the mistake of calling her pretty. She was craggy, unbroken. When she, and Miles, and Dolora were all seated and a fresh cup of coffee was warming her calloused palms, she said, “You knew my Hadrada.” Her voice, like old Krashnikol’s, dripped industrial coolant-thick with Dvarnag vowels.

“No,” Miles said, his voice doing the apologizing for him, “but we want to find out what happened to him.”

“What happened?” Varnag shot back. “Someone killed him.” She said it this way: someone keeled hem.

Dolora nodded. “That’s right. We aim to find out who. Nice place you got here, by the way.”

Varda turned, raised her eyebrows, looked at her own little domain. “You think?” she asked. “Is not bad. In Tyrinsk, was the same except we had whole families in place half this size. Shared oven, shared kitchen, is same.”

Miles snorted. “I thought you folks fought a revolution to put an end to that?”

“Long way to go,” was all she would say.

Dolora took out her pad. “When was the last time you were there?” she asked, tapping the paper with the eraser.

“Where? Tyrinsk?” Varda frowned and sipped her coffee. “What difference it makes?” Deeference.

“Maybe some, maybe none,” Miles replied.

Dolora leaned back and the chair gave a plaintive creak. It felt like it was made of sawdust. “We got a reliable tip this has something to do with the commonists.”

Because Miles was a shamus, he wasn’t surprised by her about-turn on the commonist angle. He nodded gravely as though this were the most natural line of questioning in the world. Dolora had never worked with anyone as good as Miles when she was on the force. Still, Varda was blank, unresponsive.

Dolora pressed. “Do you think it was commonists?”

“Don’t know any commonists,” she said.

“That’s fine, Ms. Ovirov,” Miles replied, smoothing over the tension. “How about anyone that might have wanted to hurt Mr. Varda? Do you know anyone like that?”

She shook her head. “All friends. Hadrada all friends. He worked for Mister Longstreet. You know him? Kirk candidate for mayor. He won.”

“Stadtprasident,” Dolora corrected. “We call them Stadtpradisents here. They run the city and the whole New Territories. Little more important than a mayor in Dvangar.”

Miles tried a different approach, pursing his lips around his tusks. “How about gaming? We heard he had some debts.”

Varda bobbed her head. “He played.”

“That’s alright, lots of folks do,” Miles said genially.

Dolora raised a brow. “Ever go with him?”

“Sometimes.”

“Where’d he go?”

There was a list. Gunsel’s off Hardway on Iron Island, Aberline’s in Dwarfside, The Cap and Bell in Shipton, and, most of all, the Dragon Empire Benevolent Association of Cinder City.  Miles and Dolora exchanged a look. The Benevolents were the largest and most dangerous gang in the Dragons. Ostensibly founded one hundred years ago, they were supposedly but one branch of a Umwelt-wide criminal conspiracy operated by masters far off in the Dragon Empire.

“The Dragons were his favorite hosts, eh?” Dolora pressed.

Varda looked at her flatly. “Who did you say was paying you to ask these questions?”

“We didn’t, ma’am,” Miles said gently. He took a gamble. “The Combine. Lee Finster.”

Varda’s face softened. She knew Finster, and trusted the Combine, or Dolora was a sap. Good thinking, Miles. We need this one. She knows all of Hadrada’s business. And I’ll be damned if there’s not things she isn’t telling us. That wasn’t hard to see. Varda was guarded. There were whole stretches of her private life that she didn’t want to get into. For example: connections back home, Commonism, that sort of thing.

“Hadrada liked the Dragons because he owed the Oenotrians money. Orcland bosses wouldn’t let him play on Iron Island anymore.”

This just kept getting better and better. Not just the Benevolents, but the Oenotrians too. If there were two big criminal organizations in the Umwelt, the first was the Oenotrians and the second was the Benevolents. Figures Hadrada was tangled up with both of ‘em. Worse, it was no wonder he’d ended up smeared all over a press-hammer. Dolora’s visions of mobsters in slick hats and fancy suits took on a whole new reality. She looked sidelong at Miles and wondered if he was thinking the same thing she was. The big crime syndicates were out of their league. Spade and Kowalski weren’t equipped to take down, say, an Oenotrian mage. It’d be Miles and Dolora who wound up spread over Foundrytown.

“That’s something to get us started,” Dolora said. To Miles, she offered, “You wanna take Orcland and I can stop by the Benevolents?”

Miles gave a curt nod. “You worked in the Dragons on the beat.”

“Yeah,” Dolora agreed, “and you’re an orc.”

 

The Dragon Empire Benevolent Association of Cinder City was housed in an enormous pagoda tower in the heart of Dragon territory. From deep in the Dragons, you could just make out the slopes of Centrum Hills and distant Newstat. The Dragons stretched all the way from Sidon bay to the Shipton dry docks. The streets and alleys all had their official names of course, passed in acts of Parliament approving City Commissioner’s plans, but no one used those. They were the names of places in Ae Vira, or of old dead men who’d settled the New Territories long ago. They meant nothing to the Dragons. The street signs had long ago been replaced by the locals. They made their own, though no one was certain if they’d brought them in from the Empire or made them in some local metalshop. Now, only one of the Dragons themselves could find their way around unless you read their language, or spent  stime learning the roads. Dolora had spent a lot of time there back when she was earning her rank as shamus.

There was a memory that lived in her legs and her nose. The smells of the Dragons were found nowhere else in the city or the New Territories. The sweet succulence of a fryshop and the musty, dry tang of the Dragon pharmacies mingled with the other Cinder City smells: occasional wafts of raw sewage, ozone from the fulminating power lines that gave the streetwagons life, refuse rotting in alleys. Dolora had grown up in the Dragons, been part of them, before being thrown out of the Bluebells, before the army. She’d known every low-level criminal and the names of all the high-level ones. From the croupiers to the giantsblood importers, she’d known the ins and outs of everything in the Dragons.

Which is why they transferred her to Orcland. But even still, she’d learned that place too. The Dragons, Dwarfside, Orcland, Foundrytown, Shipton, they were all the same. That’s what the other Blues didn’t get. These were separate worlds, where the normal rules of Cinder City didn’t apply. These were the places where folks that were ground up and shit out in Silver City, Regensburg, Reise Landing, folks who couldn’t even get a streetwagon there, well here they were in charge. Sure, there were Dragons or orcs or ogres on the bottom here, but at least they were on the top, too.

Hell, the city’s very wealthiest residents didn’t even live in Woodland or Regensburg; they lived on the island chain called the Tears, just off the Peninsula. The swells lived in Woodland, but the lords of the New Territories kept their private islands in the Tears. The waters were policed by Blues stiffened with squads of private security. In the Dragons, the kings lived among the commoners. Sure, at the top of tenement towers or in apartments above their workshops, gaming halls, giantsblood parlors, but at least they weren’t secluded on rambling estates and locked in houses the size of whole city districts.

Dolora tried not to think about those people too much. Maybe that’s why she liked the Dragons. Everyone was in reach. Good and bad, they were all right there with you, down in the muck.

It was too early in the day for the kind of action that the Benevolents were known for. That was nighttime business, didn’t even get humming until well past midnight. Dusk was the absolute earliest they’d open their halls. Still, they had to have some business during the day. It’d help to get an eye on what was going on in there.

As always, this required a period of observation to get started. Watching and waiting where the two key skills of the shamus. Somehow, most Bluebells forgot that or never learned it. They’d rather barge in somewhere, flashing their badges, showing warrant papers, hefting their six-strings over head and their big bass strummers slung between burly arms to show they had command. Show us the goods or we’ll take ya in, hands up or you’ll get a belly full a’ lead. Amateurs.

She monitored traffic going to and from the building. There were as many dwarves, orcs, and elves in the Dragon Empire as anywhere else, and they made a steady stream in and out of the pagoda tower. There were humans, too; they were just like the rest. They mostly wore conservative suits without the ties or bolos. There were the occasional few who wore something more like the traditional Dragon Empire garb. That comprised of robes of several layers, the outermost being colorful silk kept closed with polished wooden toggles.

At first, Dolora thought they were merchants, but she couldn’t see them delivering anything, except that they all carried leather bags with them when they went in and nothing when they came out. It took an embarrassingly long time, going on an hour or so, for her to realize they were local business leaders. Those leather cases were filled with money, and these were the local underbosses of the association. These upstanding men extorted their own little constituency as part of the protection racket that webbed the Dragons like a trawler’s net.

Once she figured that much out, she knew she could handle this. It had been another lifetime on Cherry Street when she’d done a beat in the Dragons, but at least she hadn’t lost every bit of sense-memory. She rolled up her sleeves, brushed her hair back, and climbed down from the stool where she sat. The tools of her observation outfit she abandoned: the Dragon newspaper, the tea, the change left on the bar of the open-air eatery. She stopped being a snoop and started being a Private Shamus again.

The doors of the Association were lacquered red and cut with coffers. They stood open, inviting the neighborhood in. Dolora accepted the invitation and breezed through them as though she belonged there. That was another shamus trick: it took brains a little while to catch up with their eyes when you pretended like you had the right to waltz in. Go slow, checking over your shoulder, looking at the muscle anxiously, and they would stop you at once. Walk with confidence and you at least stood a chance.

The inside of the great pagoda was airy and just as florid as the Veteran’s Sanatorium. The plants in the big pots were less tropical and more foreign, though. Dolora couldn’t identify any of them. Many were in bud, and all breathed easily in the chill spring air. Dolora passed waiters in full dinner dress, with tails and all, as she explored the parquet floors and open halls. The place was something like a cross between a government building and a restaurant. It had the feeling of being highly unsecure, but Dolora knew from experience that couldn’t be true. She swept the walls with her eyes. There were panels built in; careful attention showed the handles, the slots for watching, the places where giantsblood, pure liquors, and other gray and black-market goods could be stowed. There were toughs with strummers in some of those cabinets, or she was a fool.

She cased the place for nearly thirty minutes before someone stopped her. By then, she had a good idea of the layout. There were outer rooms like petals on a flower, but the inside rooms were all shuttered. Around the ring, you could find halls for eating, for talking, for playing simple tile games. The inner heart of the pagoda, however, was inaccessible save for a single set of double doors. These did have guards, though they looked sleepy. Two men in fancy black pin-striped suits sat with their hats pulled over their eyes. One smoked the tail-end of a bidi down to last embers.

“Pardon me, friend,” said a well-heeled voice at her ear. She jumped and spun, hand instinctively flying to her strummer. Her palm was already touching the polished grip when she realized it was only a maitre de. “No need for that,” he said. He was a Dragon Empire man who wore a thin mustache and had his hair well-greased into a fashionable part. “But if you’re looking for entertainment, I’m afraid we are not prepared to accomodate. This hall is for Association business, and friends of the Association.” He had no accent Dolora could hear.

“Dolora Spade,” she said, sticking out the hand she’d almost used to blow this fella away. “I’m not here to gamble.”

“No gaming goes on here, I assure you. Everything is strictly legal.” The man smiled.

She nodded and took out her pad. “I get that, mister. But usually, in Cinder City, when someone introduces themselves, its polite to introduce yourself back.”

The smile faltered a little. “Of course. How could I be so unkind? I am Jie Wei, at your service.” She noticed he automatically transversed his name; in the Dragon Empire, the family name came first. He was, more properly, Wei Jie. “I would be happy to direct you to somewhere more suitable, ma’am. There are many establishments in this area that can cater to those who are regular clientele.”

“Just to be clear, you gotta be a member of this here club to go back there?” She jerked her thumb back at the snoozing guards.

Mr. Wei’s smile was very put-upon indeed. “That is, rather, the gist of it, I’m afraid.”

She sidled up to him, and now she was all smiles. She stuck a five dollar bill, which was as good as a days pay for a common ironworker, in her palm. It was easy business to clasp Mr. Wei by the shoulder and put it in his hand. “And can you tell me, Mr. Wei, if a dwarf by the name of Hadrada Varnag was a member here, before his unfortunate and recent passing?”

Jie Wei blinked. He looked around guiltily, and lowered his voice to a raspy whisper. “Come here tonight, Ms. Spade, and we will talk. Let us say one, ante meridiem.”

Dolora nodded. “Alright, alright, pal,” she said, loud enough for even the sleeping watchman to hear, “I get it. I get it! I’m going.” She gave a broad wink, then skipped through the door.

 

After talking to Varda, Miles didn’t go straight to Orcland. In fact, he was dreading heading back there. He and Dolora had worked all over the seedy parts of the city in their day. That’s what you got if you were a Blue who insisted on making arrests. Dolora’s stint on Iron Island was still remembered, and people who knew Dolora knew Miles Kowalski. “That’s the chit what tried to get us sewn up,” people said. They had long memories in Orcland. Normal Blues would have just taken the graft and looked the other way. Hell, Miles had taken the graft. Not Dolora. But Miles knew what he’d been getting into when he signed up to be her partner. He knew he was buying himself a pain in the ass. He liked the pain, though. It reminded him when that ass needed kicking. For too long, Miles had let it sit complacent in bed and gather sores.

Still didn’t mean he was looking forward to Orcland.

The thing about the ice truck driver, the thing the dancing girl said when she answered Varda’s door, had stuck with him. At first he thought it was nothing. It was the standard kind of gossip you could hear around Dwarfside. It had all the right elements: a drunk, a consortium, and a dead kid. You heard about this kind of thing all the time in Alstat. A kid on the assembly line down in Shipton got tired and riveted his drunken father through the head. You learned to hear the patter. Sometimes there was a grain of truth to the story. Sometimes, there was more than a grain.

Miles went on down the way from the Worm Street tenenment to the cart where he’d gotten the cruller and the coffee while Dolora was hopping a streetwagon to the Dragons to find a place to eat and watch the Benevolent Association.

“Say, mac,” Miles asked, “You hear about that drunk last night in the ice wagon?”

The beleaguered man adjusted his cap and nodded. “Yeah, I heard it. Over on Granite, where they’re doin’ work on the steam lines, some bloody-boy got into a big smash up. Killed a kid. Blues dragged him away to the Pen on account it looked like there was gonna’ be a riot. I hear they’re chargin’ him with manslaughter.”

“Do you know the fella’s name?”

The vendor shook his head.

Well, he thought, it’s probably nothing. Only it wasn’t probably nothing, because everything was something. The question, really, was whether it was part of his something, the thing he’d been hired to investigate. Dwarfside was a small part of town. When something happened there, it was invariably connected to everything else. His gut was warning him that this was something, and he normally trusted his gut.

He also had to do what he said he’d do, and run down Hadrada’s gaming habits in Orcland. On the ferry over to Iron Island hewas reminded again of the driver of the ice wagon. There was a banker type sitting over near the prow, his suit protected by an unfolded newspaper. It was the early edition of the Clarion, and the front page splash read “DRUNK DRIVER CREAMS KID, DWARFSIDE”. Subtle. Miles edged up near the guy and surreptitiously read the article as they cruised the waves.

Tyrsis Trist, odd job man and sometime driver for the Smith & Bros. Ice Consortium had a bellyfull of giantsblood last night when he… Yeah, yeah, yeah, let’s see something good. The name’s a start but… Links to the Dwarfside branch of Stadtprasident Heward Longstreet’s Kirk Party, Tyrsis worked as a driver for the party before…

Wait a minute - hadn’t Varda said Hadrada worked for Longstreet during the election? And Dolora found posters in Hadrada’s apartment. It might be nothing, but… No, he told himself shaking his head. Not in Dwarfside. Everything’s connected.

When the ferry pulled up to the pier at Iron Island, Miles stayed on. The brick warehouses and factories of Foundrytown leered like Aonrijk Luftleighters up on the screen in the kinos. Krashnikol’s Hammers was undoubtedly back at work. But Miles wasn’t going there, and he wasn’t going to see the gamblers in Gunsel’s. He had to parly Dolora. They were taking a trip to the Regensburg City Penitentiary.

 

The City Penitentiary served the entire city. It had been built a century and a half ago with the goal of reform. It was run by a private consortium started by particularly pious Revelationists with a hard-on for spiritual and physical labor. It was the first of its kind in the New Territories, though now it looked quaint compared to the reformatories out there on the mainland. Dolora had always hated it. It looked like a killing yard. Rumor said certain army units had found processing plants in Aonrijk as the war was ended, all filled with what the Aon High Command called the “lesser races.” Dwarves, orcs, ogres, Alkebulans, anyone from the Dragon Empire, which they called “degenerate Meridianics,” all were stuffed into these narrow barracks buildings where they waited until starvation, disease, or a spray of bullets from a high-powered strummer killed them. That’s what the Pen looked like to Dolora. She’d never seen the death camps with her own eyes, but they couldn’t be much different.

The Pen, as Blues and criminals alike called it, was surrounded by granite walls thirty feet high. They were overtopped by a walkway. Pen Guards patrolled it all hours of the day and night, with buckshot strummers cradled in their arms, the big bass kind. Those things could throw a cloud of slugs hundreds of yards before they hit their falloff, which was more than enough to perforate anyone down in the yard who was being particularly naughty. A few big towers watched over the buildings, and the guards up there had rifled strummers any Rijk sniper would be proud of.

To the west, the side of Centrum that didn’t touch the Dragons. All around it for about half a mile, the city drew back and left bare fields. The prisoners tended those when they weren’t breaking gravel or stamping autoplates.

Dolora and Miles arrived by taximeter cabriolet, paid the fare, and asked the cabby to hang around. “I’m gonna have to keep the meter running,” he warned.

“Correis,” Dolora swore. “I’d rather wait for a second cab.”

The cabby shrugged. “Fine by me, lady.”

“Buzz off!” she shouted, shaking her head. Miles merely snorted good-naturedly at her. As the auto sped into the distance, Dolora clapped her hands. Dust plumes rose in its wake. “Godspeed,” she said, rubbing her palms together. She watched it disappear back in the direction of civilization. “Tell me again what we’re doing here? How’s this guy connected?”

“I don’t know that he is,” Miles admitted. He’d done some fancy talking on the parly when he finally got Dolora on the line. It had taken a lot to convince her to break her routine and head out to the Pen, that’s how much she hated it. Miles’ word alone wasn’t enough.

They walked toward the ugly gatehouse. “So this is pure hunch,” she griped.

“Not pure,” he said. “Our guy, Hadrada, worked on the Kirk campaign for Longstreet. Well, turns out so did this Tyrsis. Maybe they have nothing to do with each other, but what’s the likelihood that one Kirk agitator drops, and the next day another one has a bad accident?”

“I dunno, pretty good if one of ‘em’s a giantsblood addict.”

“Maybe,” Miles conceded, “and maybe not. It’s too fishy not to investigate. If it turns out to be nothing, I’ll owe you dinner.”

The shadow of the gate swallowed them. “Tell me again about this Juridical attorney you met,” Miles went on as he clipped the end off a new cigar.

Dolora wrinkled her nose. She didn’t like the feeling of the walls closing in around her. They were cold. “Ansel Williams. Never heard of him. Might be a special prosecutor assigned by the Juridicium.” She paused. No reason he couldn’t be part of the bulk of line prosecutors. “Maybe I’ve just never heard of him before.”

Miles rapped on the metal door. “I have. He’s a big shot who normally goes after political crimes. He doesn’t normally get involved in Bluebell affairs, probably why you never met.” Dolora bristled at that. She’d never been in the big leagues, but when Miles was a Shipton shamus he’d had a few brushes with the New Territory Investigation Department, the Terries, on some big political scam.

“Well, lookit you,” she muttered.

The slat rolled back in the door. Someone drawled, “Yeahrrr?”

“Miles Kowalski, P.S. and Dolora Spade, the same. We’re here to see a prisoner. Trist, brought in last night.”

Dolora sauntered over to stand shoulder to shoulder with Miles in front of the door. The eyes behind the slat surveyed them. “You got court orders?” the voice asked.

“Listen, mac, just open on up and let us talk to the warden,” Dolora growled. “We got on ongoing investigation here. You treat us nice, there’s some scratch in it for ya. You treat us nasty, and we’re all gonna be unhappy. Get me?”

The eyes vanished. The sound of a hand-cranked parly rang through the gate tunnel. They heard the gate guard on the other side jawing with someone but couldn’t make out what he was saying.

“Do you always have to be so…” Miles puffed his cigar, “straightforward?”

Dolora barked out a laugh. “I guess I do,” she said, massaging her knee with her left hand. “What’s the point in making up all these fancy lies?”

It was Miles’ turn to laugh. “Being nice isn’t lying, D. You never heard ‘you catch more with honey than with vinegar’?”

“Alright, alright. So listen, I got us an interview tonight with one of the Benevolents, a fella named Jie Wei.” She said it with the proper tone, and Miles let out a low whistle.

“Well,” he said, blowing smoke, “good thing you went. I’d break a tusk. All that time on Cherry Street paid off.” They both smoked in silence for a moment. Dolora looked at the huge arch of institutional stone overhead, the run of the tunnel from the fencing on one side to the studded steel door on the other. “When we’re done here, you and I have an appointment with the Steelworker’s Combine over in Alstat,” Miles added.

A huge clanking sound filled the tunnel as the guard drew the bolt back on the steel door. It swung outward. The guard sat in a wooden chair by a table where he’d spread a hand of playing cards to pass the time. “Awright,” he called, “You can go on up to the Warden’s office. You know where it is?”

“Unfortunately,” Dolora said before Miles could give a more polite answer. She shot him a mischievous look. He smirked and rolled his eyes. He blew a puff of smoke and they went on their way.

Warden Cain was perched in the highest tower of the bunch. This one was right in the heart of the prison complex, standing head-and-shoulders above the rest. Everything radiated outward from it the center like the spokes of an enormous wheel. It had windows facing every which way. Dolora supposed it was to allow the warden to look at any portion of the prison just by turning his head, but it made her feel like she was being watched. She could see into each of the guard towers and the wallwalks. They were everywhere, those grey-clad cudgelmen. They were like ants in a hive, crawling over it to do their work.

The warden himself was ensconced behind a desk that nearly pinned him into its rear corner. The door was closed and a grey-coated bully stood just beyond the sheet glass. Dolora could make out the shadow of his club on the floor. “We’re doing an investigation, warden,” she said.

“So I gatha’,” Cain replied. He was a tiny man, almost a dwarf himself, with a mustache waxed in a style more suited to the last century. Warden Cain was an outcountry man from way down in the Territories. No one seemed to know where he’d been scared up from, but one day he just popped up in Cinder City with a cushy appointment. That was going on fifteen years ago, Dolora realized. Cain had been warden for that long. “I seen yowa’ papuhs and they’re all in ordah.”

He slid Miles’ P.S. License back across his yard-sized inkblotter.

“We’re interested in talking to —”

Dolora couldn’t help herself. She leaned in, pushing on her bad knee. “Hey, you don’t mind - sorry Miles - if I ask who you worked for before coming to the city, Mr. Cain?”

Warden Cain’s manicured eyebrows jumped. “Mind? Nowah, not at awl.” He adjusted his fob, pulled his vest straight. “I worked runnin’ a camp nawt dissimilar to this a-one in the Territories. Little consoshium that ran a mine just at the edge of the jungle, had a cawntract with Juncker Steam Boilah. They make luftleighners now, I’m told.”

She could just imagine it, this little man in a linen suit and a white hat standing on a platform, belt sagging with the weight of a leather whip. He’d have been younger then, full head of hair, big mutton chops to go with that ridiculous mustache. Penal colonies in the Territories had been out of vogue for a long time. They cost Parliament too much at home, with the abolitionists screaming in the street and the former prisoners on the radio and the kino screen describing the lick of the lash, but apparently Warden Cain had been running one. No wonder he was in charge of the Pen. If he’d proven himself to a big firm like Junker Steam Boiler, his stock was in the ascendent. “Cheapest metals and giantsblood in the Territories, Ah’m towld,” Cain added. Couldn’t she just see the tropical sun on his skin, the sweat running off the end of his nose as he raised his bullhorn to exhort his prisoners (no, his slaves) to swing their picks?

Someone, she couldn’t remember who, had once told Dolora the penal colonies were closed because they were competing with firms in the more civilized part of the Territories and no one wanted to lose their profits to free labor. She couldn’t remember who it was. Had the feeling of something that marine pilot, Richenbach, might’ve said. She’d known him only a short while when she was stationed in Foundrytown on her third tour as a shamus, after Cherry Street, but he’d always been saying things like that. “You don’t know half of what goes on outside the City, kid,” he’d told her once, “or half of what goes on under your nose, for that matter.” Correis, that was just before the McTavish case.

“Naow this prisonah, who was it agin’?”

“Don’t think we said, Warden,” Miles sat forward and tried to look attentive. It was what Dolora privately liked to think of as his schoolboy pose. Miles knew he was huge, so he often scrunched himself down to minimize his enormous presence. He’d probably kill her if he knew she saw through him.

Cain opened his arms. “Cain’t help unless Ah know.”

“We’re looking for a fellow by the name of Tyrsis Trist. He was arrested for manslaughter and brought to your door to protect him from a crowd. Crashed his truck into a food stand.”

The warden was nodding before Miles finished talking. “Ah was afraid you fellows maight say that.” He shook his head. “Ah was hoping for a myootually beneficial resolution, if you catch my drift.” To his credit, Dolora thought, he looked genuinely sad to miss out on the little Spade and Kowalski bonus they were prepared to offer. “Ah have specific instructions not to let anyone see that pahticular prisonah.”

Dolora looked at Miles. Good hunch, partner. She raised her eyebrows.

“Well, of course, we would be very discreet,” Miles said, chewing on his stogie. “And as you probably figured, Warden, we have an expense account. It’s all on the level, withdrawals are made in cash, and we don’t keep very good records of where it goes.” Give ‘em a fifty, she urged silently. We can handle a fifty. Anything less’d insult the man. She glanced at Cain. His expression was one of pain. He massaged his side as though he’d gotten a stitch there.

Miles was fast; he was reaching across the desk with a leather holder filled with ten dollar bills. Dolora peeked at them and saw at least eighty dollars in the fold. Cain didn’t even open it. He slid it back and shook his head. “It’s woath more than my job to cross the gents that put yoah Mistah Trist in this place.”

“He’s important?” Dolora asked.

Cain raised his eyebrows. “Mistah Trist? Not himself, but impotahnt to someone, I reckon.”

“I reckon,” Dolora echoed. “Important to someone.”

Miles nodded slowly. Dolora wrote in her notebook: Tyrsis Trist: blocked by someone. Juridicium? Important, but maybe not to us. Still worth checking out.

“Thanks, Mr. Cain.” Dolora rose, buttoned her jacket, waited for Miles to get to his feet. “C’mon Miles, we have some people to talk to.” As Miles filed out into the foyer, Dolora paused at the door and turned. “Oh, and Mr. Cain?”

“A-yes?” the warden asked.

“Could you, by chance, call us a taxi?”

 

The meeting was just after lunch. They stopped at a diner in Centrum to pick up some grub. It was one of those eisenbahn wagons up on blocks. Dolora had a steak sandwich and Miles satisfied himself with an onion soup and a half loaf of hot buttered bread.

The combine was renting a hall in Alstat, a brick joint in the back of a warehouse. They had toughs posted outside with axe handles and doughboy caps. Some wore knee-pants. Most were smoking.

“We’re here to talk to Mr. Finster,” Miles said as they sauntered up. This drew looks, laughs.

“Mister Finster,” someone said.

Miles laughed, adjusted his hat. “Lee, then. We’re privates doing a job for him.”

“Meeting’s going on, mister,” said a swell with a curl to her lip. “Steelworkers only.”

“What about you? You a steelworker?” Dolora jerked her chin at the woman.

She laughed. “We’re the United Brotherhood of Teamsters. We watch their meetings, they watch ours. You wanna go in? Show me your union card.”

“Just go and tell Lee Finster we’re here,” Miles said. “We don’t want any trouble.” He showed his green palms.

It didn’t take long to be let in. Whether it was Mister Lee Finster or someone else in the combine that knew them, they gained entry through the narrow side door. The room was warm against the cool spring afternoon. It was filled with row upon row of wood-and-iron folding chairs, and those chairs were filled with men and women. These were hard folks. Dolora recognized some of the same workers from Krashnikols, but the meeting hall was packed with more than they. The light streamed in through the windows, grimy as they were, pouring out of a sky painted with boiling clouds.

The building rattled as a luftlighter rumbled across Alstat, so low that Dolora could hear the wine of each engine. Lee Finster, behind a podium at the far end of the hall, paused with a smug grin as every brick shook.

Heads swiveled toward the two shamuses. Dolora murmured, “Maybe we should just take a seat and wait.” Miles nodded.

They found themselves a pair of chairs near the back. Both Miles and his seat groaned. Dolora leaned in and whispered, “We should watch. Get the lay of the land. Understand our constituency.”

Miles chuckled. “You worked Foundrytown. Hell, so did I.”

“Never the foundries though, was it?” she shot back.

A few sharp glances in their direction, the tightening of hands on hats held firmly in laps, warned them that the lighter had passed overhead to other shores. Finster raised his narrow calloused hands and called his combine to attention. “We have the good fortune of being graced by two guests at this meeting of ours today: Dolora Spade and Miles Kowalski, who were hired by our organization to investigate the death of our brother-steward Hadrada Varnag. We’re going to continue as though they weren’t here, and those of you who knew Hadrada can talk to them afterwards. That work, shamuses?”

Dolora nodded and Miles inclined the brim of his hat.

“Brothers,” Lee said, his voice louder now, and in a new tone, a voice pitched at returning to old business and bringing his people back in line. “We were discussing our new Prasident.”

Bang, bang, bang, the combine crowd drummed their feet. This, they accompanied with a traditional loader’s chant: hoo, hoo, hoo. Some slapped their thighs in rhythmic time. “Lively crowd,” Dolora cracked.

“Now, now,” Lee cautioned, “let’s hear it. Do we like the Prasident?”

Bang, bang, bang, hoo, hoo, hoo.

“So tell me why. What’s he done for us?” Lee was working the crowd. Dolora scanned the seated steelers. There were plenty for Longstreet in those seats. For Longstreet, or skeptical, but none against him. Like Hadrada. Hadrada had been a Longstreet man. It could mean nothing, it could mean everything. There might be a relation between Longstreet and Hadrada’s death, or else there might be one between old Prasident Harker and the dwarf’s downfall.

Caps in hands went up just like little schoolboys before the blackboard. Look how disciplined they are, these big strong steelmen and ironwomen. It shocked her to see it. When she’d worked Foundrytown she saw them at bars, after hours. She’d never done a patrol beat there, but enough thefts and murders featured combine men of one sort or another. She’d never seen one sober. Loaders, teamsters, longshoremen, fishers, transporters, even, yes, steelworkers, they all beat the tar out of one another when the sun went down. But here they were, as well-behaved as a choir on a church trip.

Lee, the choirmaster, called them out one by one. “He promised to put money back into Alstat, and he has.”

“How? Where?” Lee asked. There was a stenographer recording everything in the corner, a thick-set dwarf with fingers like sausage stubs. Everything’s being written down. Probably to send to their combine leadership, wherever that was. He’s making a record.

She leaned in to Miles. “Are we sure there’s no Commonist angle? Look at all these people.”

“Well, for one, they’re putting a new end on the streetwagon line, way down to the shore.”

Lee called another.

“He started that, whattaya call it. That re-vitalization project.”

“What do we know about the revitalization?” Lee asked the room.

More caps in hands went in the air. “They already marked buildings for knocking down.”

“And rebuilding!”

“They’re gonna pull down the rotting, stinking hovels in Dwarfside and put up new tenements. Maybe rowhouses, but the good kind, from stone, not like those clapboard shacks down on the water.”

Lee nodded at all this, the good conductor. “Ok, sure, and that’s all fine. Have we seen anything new going up? Have any of those tracks been laid for the streetwagon?”

This brought some thoughtful, slow replies. No, he’s just marked things. “That building on Worm Street, it’s had notices sent to all the residents. They’re going to be moved out.” Have they, yet? “No, not yet.”

Someone else, a grease-stained woman in shirtsleeves, asked Mr. Finster and the crowd, “Has anyone heard where they’re gonna put those people up? The ones on Worm Street on all the buildings to be demolished?” But no one had heard the first thing about it. Apparently the Prasident’s office hadn’t sent any messages. In fact, all the communication so far had been from local Blues and the Credit Mobilier bank.

So much for revitalization. Lee Finster pursed his lips and said, “Let’s look at his record with the combine, then. Teddy, you have the circular?” The dwarf scribe tottered to his feet and passed a packet of papers to Lee at the podium. Lee cleared his throat and read from the document. “Leadership would like you to know that, to date, Stadtpradisent Longstreet has signed off on a bill that would empower the Bluebell Constables to determine when a ‘labor violation’ is or is not occurring at a local, district level. If the Bluebells decide that a strike is illegal, they will, beginning in the summer, be permitted to break that strike—and now I’m quoting from the law of our humble city—using ‘all means necessary to return the striking, and illegal, combine back to work.’”

This drew the predictable chorus of boos. Lee went on. “That’s not all. We know Longstreet isn’t a friend of labor. How do we know that?”

Someone, an orc woman near Dolora who hadn’t seemed thrilled at the parade of Longstreet’s good qualities, didn’t wait to be called on. She growled, “He’s an elected official.”

Lee’s face lit up like the sun after a rain. “That’s right, sister Lovett. We should never forget the lessons we’ve learned. Leadership hasn’t forgotten them. You think Big Bill is up there now kowtowing to Parliament? He’s not! Longstreet might be fine, if we can hold him to his promises.”

“Fat chance!” the woman Lovett cried.

“If, I said! Or if we can force him to give way. But the only thing that buys change in Parliament or in the Prasident’s office is us. Not in the polls, but in the streets.” Now, the great majority of folks looked skeptical and only a few were nodding along. It’s reversed, Dolora saw. The people who’d been most ardent in support of Longstreet wore the biggest frowns now. Most of the steelworkers thought Longstreet was on their side, no matter what Lee Finster said. Hadrada could have been in either camp.

“The combine supports Heward Longstreet,” shouted one of the malcontents.

Lee raised one hand. “We do! We do. Because he’s more pliable than Boss Harker. At least we can force Longstreet to listen to us.”

The room stewed with tension. He’s going to lose control, Dolora realized all of a sudden. For all his charisma, Lee Finster was about to lose the combine rank and file. She brushed back her jacket and laid a hand on her strummer. She wouldn’t be caught flat-footed if something went down. Hell, the piece might be enough to keep everyone cool in an otherwise flammable situation.

But she was wrong. Lee didn’t press. He knew his crowd well, and he could see they were turning. Instead, he leaned across the podium like an old friend at a bar. “Alright. Well, we’ve dealt with most of the business we had, and we’ve talked about the policy questions a bit. We have another meeting next week, same time, same place. By then we should have some news about Hadrada Varnag, and some idea of who’s to blame. Isn’t that right, friends?” This last, called back to Miles and Dolora in the rear of the hall.

“Something like that,” Dolora replied.

This appeared to satisfy Finster. “Now, if everyone’ll stick around, there’s coffee and donuts at the refreshments table, and we’d love to see you at the Bell and Bottle when you’re off work for the day. The weekly pot is open if anyone wants to lay bets. Just talk to Teddy!”

Like that, in a snap, the meeting was over. Lee thanked his combine brothers and sisters for attending the meeting, they deposited their dues and signed on for whatever betting pool the dwarf Teddy was in charge of, and went to get their fill of coffee, donuts, and nasvy at the folding tables by the wall.

Dolora stood up, stretched her legs, waited for Miles to come with. “Say, Finster, that was one hell of a meeting. You always school your combine folks like that?”

“They’re liars,” Lee Finster said, indicating the Longstreet posters on the far wall. They were already faded. “Sometimes we need reminding. It’s not their fault. Those bastards do everything they can to trick folks like us.” Now Lee was smeared with smoke and ash from the hammer-press. Sweat had made tracks in the soot, trailing down from his temples and his hairline. He smiled. “How can we help?”

“The teamsters outside with the clubs - what do you need them for?” Dolora asked.

Lee laughed. “There’s people who break up combine meetings. Hell, it wasn’t even legal until twenty years ago. To form a combine I mean.”

It was Miles’ turn to laugh. “When I was coming up in the force, we used to bust you guys up all the time.”

“Well,” Finster said with a broad grin, “it’s a good thing you’re on our side now.”

Dolora took a deep breath. Broaching the subject would be uncomfortable, but better to do it sooner rather than later. They had to at least pretend to run down the Commonist angle, and who would know better than a bunch of reds like Lee Finster and his combine boys? Still, she could ease into it a little. “We’ve got a meeting later tonight with someone from the Dragons, where Hadrada used to play cards and whatnot. But that’s not why we come here this afternoon.” She looked at Miles, then back to Finster. “We’ve had a push from Juridicial to look at a certain… angle.”

Finster cocked his head. “Something that you had to come to us to ask about.”

A buzzing noise permeated the meeting hall. Everyone, the other steelworkers included, looked up: it was coming from the lights and the wires strung between them. The filaments in the globes flared, died, flared, died again, then left them in the dark for several long moments before they came back on for good.

“Well, listen,” she said, catching Miles giving her the warning eye, “We don’t take our marching orders from the Judges. In this matter, we represent you, and by you Mr. Finster I specifically mean the combine. But the Juridicium thinks it might be a Commonist matter. Now, before you say anything, I’m not accusing you all of being Commonists or anything.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time a Blue said that to us,” Lee smirked. He stepped out from behind the podium and invited Miles and Dolora to walk with him as he strolled up the now-empty aisle. “I mean, look around. I wouldn’t blame ya. We’re a shop of workers all pulling together. I hear ya asking. How is that different from what they do in the Commonwealth of Guilds, in the old Dvangar territory? How are we any different from Cogs?” He shrugged. “You won’t find any Commonists here, shamus.”

“Not any?” Dolora pressed. “Not even a single brother? If Hadrada was a Commonist or knew Commonists, we need to know.”

Finster gave her a sidelong glance. His face, which had formerly been open and broad, was now sharp as a shuttered ore ship. “So you can tell the Juridicium?”

Miles chopped the air with his hand. “Absolutely not,” he said. “First of all, you should know that our clients confidences are private. By law. If you tell us not to spill, we can’t be compelled to. Secondly, we have no reason to go to them. Believe me, they’re just as much a hassle to us as they are to you.”

“I doubt that,” Finster said, but his voice was playful.

The swell from outside, the tall orc teamster with the axe-handle, sauntered over. She had a coffee in one hand. “These folks bothering you, Lee?” she asked.

“We hired ‘em, Sally,” said Finster.

She shrugged. “Still.”

Miles didn’t exactly square up with her, but turned to show his full bulk. She was a spindly thing compared to Kowalski. Dolora didn’t like the look of that club, and the orc girl’s limbs were still knotted steel, spindly or not. Her hand strayed back to the butt of her strummer. Not touching it, not moving aside the jacket, but not too far away, either. This whole place was a bomb ready to go off. Combine people were touchy about outsiders.

“They’re looking for Commonists. Know any?” Finster asked Sally.

Dolora felt the heat rising in her gut. Here they were, trying to do a good turn for these people. Like every other client she’d ever had, they weren’t telling her the whole story. Why they thought concealing important information from their own hired eyes was a good idea, she’d never understand. And the orc, with her axe-handle dragging behind her, only added to the fire. There were embers swirling up the chimney.

Sally snorted. “Commonists? Those Cog crazies who want everyone to own everything all in common? Nah, I don’t think we have any of those around here. Why, they’re downright unpatriotic,” she said, the sarcasm slathered on like too much mustard.

“There you go,” Finster said. “We don’t have any.”

This was too much. To be mocked, too? Dolora wouldn’t take that from a Blue captain, and she certainly wouldn’t take it from this elf with sweat on his face. The place wasn’t the bomb, she was. She was an old steam boiler with too little sleep and no watcher at the release lever. “Listen, mac,” she said jabbing a finger into Finster’s narrow chest, “we’re here for you people. I wanna solve this case, get me? But I can’t do that unless I have good information.” She huffed a breath that was smoke and cinders. “Which includes whether Hadrada was or knew Commonists and whether there was a war going on behind the bricks here. We’re gonna do our due diligence over in Orcland where Aniello Marcone’s in a turf war, too. Hadrada gambled in Orcland at Gunsel’s. Ok? It’s not personal, it’s because we want to find out what happened and help you get justice. And if it does turn out that it was some Commonist with a grudge—based on his, I don’t know, allegiance or not, based on the fact that he just hated Hadrada’s guts but happened to know him because they were both Commonists, aren’t you gonna wanna get your justice on him too, Commonist or no?”

She stepped back, took a breath. Miles clapped her on the shoulder. “Nice touch with the Marcone bit.”

She’d just thought of that now, actually, hadn’t been intending to go after the Orcland mob seriously at all, just leave it to Miles who could maybe slip around unnoticed among those Oenotrians, but now that she said it, it sounded good. Aniello Marcone, Anthony Calabresi, and Giuseppe Morello hated each other and ran Iron Island like their own private fiefdom. Maybe they’d iced Hadrada over something other than gambling debts.

Sally was ready to club her, but Lee Finster raised his hands. “Alright. Alright! You want to talk to a Commonist, you think that’d help the investigation, we can talk to one. Come with me.”

Finster took them through one of the side doors that led deeper into the warehouse. Sally the teamster accompanied them, a coffee-scented presence behind Dolora. “You know how to use that thing?” Dolora asked her, to which Sally said, “Swung it a couple times before.” Dolora had no doubt. The teamsters were, after all, the rowdiest of the combines.

“Say, you have a guy called Tyrsis Trist with you? In the Brotherhood of Teamsters, I mean?” Dolora asked.

Sally spit on the cement floor. “Used to. Turned into a giantsblood addict, stopped paying his dues. You ask on account of the smash-up?”

“He might’ve known Hadrada Varnag and we can’t talk to him. The Pen won’t let us through.”

“He’s low. Not a commonist, barely a man.”

Not wanting to whip out her little pad there and then, Dolora made a note of Sally’s language. Barely a man. Not a commonist.

The commonist they found in a side room near the far end of the warehouse. She was a middle aged woman smoking a hand-rolled bidi and wearing a green visor to cut the glare from the overhead lights. She was completely nondescript. Dolora would never have pegged this broad-shouldered, heavy-footed woman as a commonist organizer.

“O,” Lee said, apologetically, “this is Spade and Kowalski. They’re private shamuses here to look in on a brother steward we think might’ve been murdered. They wanted to talk to you.”

The woman, this “O,” looked up from her massive ledger. She folded her hands on the crisp pages where the ink was already dry. “By all means, Lee. Please. Ms. Spade, Mr. Kowalski. Have a seat.”

Lee left, but Sally stayed, and she stayed standing. The room was hazy with nasvy smoke. Dolora and Miles sat in the rickety folding chairs and Dolora pulled out her note pad. “Mind if I—?” she asked. O shook her head.

“As you like.”

Miles cleared his throat. “Ms. O, we were told by the city Juridicium that commonists are engaged in a little war.”

“Oh, dear,” O said, and she sounded like someone’s mother when she said it, as though Miles were her own wayward son, “We commonists are engaged in a thousand wars all over the Umwelt. Cinder City is one front. The Continent, Ae Vira, the New Territories, the Dragon Empire…” She smiled sadly. “Where are we not engaged?”

“Wait a minute,” Dolora asked, “you folks are part of that Dragon Empire civil war, too?”

“The struggle for Commonism is everywhere, Ms. Spade. From here to the farthest south. Simply: yes. There are commonists fighting in the Dragon Empire.”

Dolora breathed out and sat back. “Fuck.” More complications. This was always how it was. You pull one thread, and the whole damn weave starts to come unraveled.

“What do you want to know about us? Was Mr. Varnag a chartered member? No. Did he do work for us, was he a fellow traveler? Yes. But I can guarantee you that no commonist killed him. He wasn’t close enough to the organization for that.”

“But there are killings going on,” Dolora insisted. “Commonists killing other commonists.”

The woman, O, looked suddenly very tired, as though a thousand years fell on her all at once. Her face was a crane finally releasing an heavy cargo. “Say opportunists instead, or revisionists, and you have it right. There are many factions of our struggle. We are divided in tactics, in… you might say, in theology, and in means, but we all want the same thing. Mr. Varnag wasn’t on any opportunist radar. He was killed, plain and simple, by Cinder City interests. Not by the International Commonwealth of Guilds. You have my word on that.”

She held up a finger indicating that they should wait, ducked under the table on which her ledger rested, and rummaged around for in a gladstone bag. When she surfaced again, it was with a thick pamphlet of printed paper bound with red cardboard. She slid it across the table. “You can read that, if you want to know more.”

“Just one more question,” Dolora said. “What exactly is it that you’re doing here, at this meeting, if I can ask?”

O sat back and looked up, over Dolora’s head. “Every guild and trade combine is part of the struggle, whether they know it or not. Those that know it can expect cooperation from their partners in the COG.”

“And what exactly is the struggle, ma’am?” Miles rejoined.

“All for all,” said O simply.

Dolora rose, pocketed the red booklet. “Well, thank you for your time. I think you’ve allayed our suspicions on the red front.” She smiled at O, but the woman only nodded gravely back.

As she and Miles filed through the door, escorted by the handle-toting teamster, O called after them: “For what it’s worth, if it helps lead you to his killers, Hadrada Varnag was not a commonist on paper, shamuses, but he was always a commonist in his heart.”

 

The streetwagon jolted as it took the hill. Miles grunted as a hot sausage rolled off the newspaper that covered his lap. “Oh hell,” he said as it made its merry way down the length of the car and came to rest behind the driver’s booth.

The sun had set an hour ago over the New Territories. The gas lamps flickered over the webwork of Alstat streets as the wagon rumbled on to its destination at the edge of the Dragons. Dolora opted for a more compact meal: a five cent sandwich, a potato knish, and a cup of coffee with a cardboard lid. It bounced on her knees as the wagon slammed against the rail ties.

“Does this clear the commonists for you?” Miles asked, a forlorn look spared for his wayward sausage.

Dolora sipped her coffee, swore as it touched her lips and burnt them. “Fuck, no. That was the most suspicious thing that’s happened so far. And now we got red literature on us, too. All we need is to run in with another of our friends in blue and get stopped for sedition.” She huffed and took a bite of the sandwich to assuage her mouth.

At the same time, she flexed her left knee, listened for the click. “That alright?” Miles asked, gesturing over the newsprint filled with sausages, fried eggs, and potatoes.

She shrugged. It wasn’t all right; would never be, if Dr. Horn was to be believed. It hurt like hell. She thought she could feel the metal shavings wearing against the bone. “It’ll be fine,” she said.

Miles shrugged, popped a sausage into his mouth. “So the Oenotrian angle with Marcone, was that something you wanted to go after? I did say I would go to Orcland. You know I don’t welsh.”

“No, I think I should do it. Wanna do it. I dunno. And you found that ice wagon driver.”

“For all the good it did us.”

“A lead’s a lead. And besides, you’re gonna watch my tale tonight with Jie Wei.” That would be important. She needed someone on the lookout. She didn’t trust any of these mobsters, not even around the block. They’d stab you in the kidneys and leave you bleeding behind the garbage bins. They did it to each other all the time. Never seemed to matter whether you were a player in their game or just an innocent bystander. It was all one to them. Oenotrian, Dragon, Dwarfside mobs, whatever. You got in the way of a gang, you were liable to wind up dead.

They were like the Blues that way. You throw a wrench in the gears, whether they belong to the Dragon Benevolent Association or Parliament Hall, and you find yourself dead in the channel or drifting past Shipton before the next sunrise. That was the unbreakable law of Cinder City. Poke your nose where it don’t belong and they won’t just cut it off, they’ll stuff your whole body down an elevator shaft. Or into a press hammer. And here was Dolora Spade and Miles Kowalski who’d decided to make sticking their noses in a way of life. Some business model.

“Could be the Oenotrians. Could be the Dragons. Could be the commonists.” She shook her head. “Could be any dope in this city.”

Miles thought this over. While he did, Dolora found her mind running circles. There were too many unknowns, but she’d get to the bottom of it. She always got to the bottom, unless some iron will stood in her way.

“I don’t think so,” Miles said at last, digging in to his potatoes with the tin fork. “I think your Ansel fellow came down because something big is going on. Then they blocked us at the prison. It’s that driver. He and Hadrada worked for Longstreet’s Kirks. I know you don’t follow politics.” I know you don’t follow politics, so let me explain it to you, rather. She huffed and took another sip of motor oil from her coffee cup. “You know old Boss Harker was a Cavalier and Longstreet’s a Kirk. But he had to take the Kirks from the inside. From Dwarfside, Alstat.”

She went on massaging her knee and balanced the sandwich on the paper cup. “That’s why he was down here last year speechifying.”

Miles nodded. “That Ansel is his operative, mark it.”

“And you said I was like a dog with a bone. Come on now, Miles, you can’t already know where we’re headed. Too many alleys left to go down. You’ll get yourself turned into knots like those Blue dummies.” She shook her head. He knew better than this. Get yourself a theory before you had enough evidence, that was how you wound up like a Juridicial attorney, forcing what you found to fit your vision of what you should find.

Her partner ate the last of his sausages. “No, just saying. It’s you I’m worried about. If I’m right and we have to drop this, if there’s too much pressure from upstairs, you know we’re going to be out of luck.”

“Miles Kowalski,” she said, taking her sandwich in hand and skimming her breath over the glistening surface of her coffee, “if I was that kind of gal, I’d still be a Blue.”

 

The Dragons at night were completely transformed. The streets, with their Dragon scratch-writing signs, thronged with crowds. The thousand dialects of the Dragon Empire rang from brick facades. Temporary markets sprang up when the sun went down. The gas lamps were lovingly tended by the locals, kept in good repair by unauthorized engineers. The only Cinder City Consolidated wagons that ever came to the Dragons came under duress and did their jobs quickly.

The street wagon chimed as it disgorged its last passengers at its terminal. “End of the line for tonight. Going back to the wagonhouse. Everybody OFF!” the driver called.

There were more pushcarts out than ever, selling sticky rice and dumplings. “Shoulda waited till we got here,” Dolora said, tossing her crumpled cup into a gutter. “Ok, so, the plan is I’m gonna go in, Wei will give me the meeting spot and I’ll use whatever grease needs greasing. You stay at a distance and don’t give yourself away. As much as that’s possible.”

Towering Miles Kowalski snorted. “I won’t light up, then. That’d make me a lamp post.”

The Association building was humming like a power line. A neon dragon above the door was splashed with more Dragon Empire writing. The dirty glass tubes shone livid red and yellow. The noise from within was deafening. Dolora pushed through the crowd toward the main lobby, where she’d been that morning, and saw the inner doors were now thrown open. Dragon Empire toughs in sharp suits stood on either side and a velvet rope kept back the crowd. Those admitted were from a wide variety of backgrounds. Dolora watched for a minute, keeping an eye on the time. There were men and women in tailcoats and evening dress, but also dirty flat-capped shippers and haulers. Everyone was required to speak to one of the strum-molls at the door before they went in, even if it was just a simple “hello.”

Ok, so there’s no way I slip in. They check and know everyone. She narrowed her eyes, trying to see if there was a card or other admittance paperwork, but no one had anything like that. It was no use. She was going to need Jie Wei, unless she tried to get by as the help. A second quick glance informed her that all the employees were also Dragon Empire exiles, so that was out.

She found Jie Wei by the cherrywood front desk. He was talking on a parly, the receiver up to his ear and the candlestick clutched firmly in his hand. His Dragon Empire Common flashed by like a bolt of lightning, so quickly that even if Dolora had recognized a word or two it would have been lost in the speed of his speech. Wei gestured with the parly’s stick, indicating Dolora should wait.

This called for a stroll through the outer halls, which she did, just to pass the time. When Wei finally found her, he was sweating beneath his finely coiffured hair. “Please, Ms. Spade, we must be circumspect.” His gloved hands tugged gently at her elbow. “Not out in the open. There is an office in which we may speak unobserved.”

“I saw your spy-cabinets,” Dolora remarked, “and there’s no way I’m getting into one of those little offices with you. No hard feelings, you understand, but I’m not about to be knifed in quiet and taken out with the garbage.”

Wei looked hurt. “Ms. Spade, I would never. What do you suggest, then? It will not do to continue our conversation in the present circumstances. My employers do not look kindly on the discussion of their clientele with… interlopers.”

“C’mon, mac.” Dolora pulled a face. “You don’t know any eateries around here?”

Wei’s frown deepened. He scanned the crowd, then began to stride purposefully toward the door. “Yes, very good idea, Ms. Spade. There is a quiet noodle house not many blocks from where we’re standing.” In a trice they were on the sidewalk and moments later weaving through the unpaved back ways in the heart of the Dragons. Dolora didn’t want to look for Miles but she was worried at the speed with which Wei was moving. The tall man used every inch of his long legs to propel himself as though he were in a particularly stead footrace.

When they got to the place, Dolora faltered. She recognized this noodle house. It was a tiny shopfront smashed between two faceless warehouses. Wood-framed plate glass doors stood open to the sidewalk and a printed menu hung in Draconic was pasted to one. This place had been around ten years ago, too, when she was first made shamus at the Cherry Street station. She’d taken Kit here a handful of times, way back when, before she was transferred. But they’d stopped coming not because she landed in hot water and had to be shoved off to an Iron Island beat, but because of something that happened in that shop.

In those days, the Dragon bosses had a handful of shamuses on their payroll. Shamus-sergeant Eddie O’Doyle was one of them, probably the highest placed in the station. No one really knew what happened, but Eddie made the Dragon bosses mad. Maybe he’d asked for too much money, maybe he’d turned somebody in he wasn’t supposed. Either way, it was a hot summer morning, the kind when the ice’d melt in the icebox, and Eddie was out front enjoying his complimentary Bluebell tea on the sidewalk, when—

“This is where Shamus O’Doyle bought it,” Dolora said softly.

Wei, who hadn’t been paying much attention to her, stopped at the door and glanced at the sky. “I do not know who this Mr. O’Doyle is, but it is going to rain. I suggest we get indoors.”

Dolora sighed and followed. She had time to ask herself Where is Miles? but, again, didn’t want to alert her friend Mr. Wei to the presence of a partner. They got themselves seated inside. Dolora hastily sat facing the windows and the door. She let her jacket fall open so she could casually reach her six-string in case anyone she didn’t like came in. If this was a setup, she was going to go down shooting.

“Would you like—?” Jie Wei gestured to the bar where orders were placed, the broth roiling beneath a glass shield. Dolora shook her head.

“You order for me, Jie. You know what’s good. I haven’t been here in a long time.” She slid a twenty dollar bill across the table. Jie considered it for a moment. It was a lot of money, as much as a hard-working laborer might earn in a handful of days, depending on how many odd jobs he supplemented his work with. “There’s more if the information’s good.”

While Jie was up at the counter, chattering in Draconic, Dolora finally managed to peep out of the doorway and see Miles slouched on the opposite corner, his hat pulled down over his eyes, back against a warehouse wall. Good. At least if I’m gonna get iced, he’ll make ‘em pay for it. Between the two of them, she was confident they could put at least half a dozen lutists in the ground, even if they came in with strummers blazing.

She breathed a little easier when the maitre de was seated across from her. He looked ridiculous in his tailcoat and gloves here in this dirty little Dragon eatery. “So, is what you got worth all this subterfuge?”

“That is for you to determine,” Jie Wei replied, sliding a white bowl toward her. “I can only provide you with what I know. You were came looking for Hadrada Varnag, a member of the Benevolent Association, yes? I can tell you about him. You want to pin something on him? This would not be pleasing to my superiors, but I can oblige.”

“Mac, I just wanna know about him. There’s no big conspiracy afoot, unless you’re gonna tell me about one. Whatever info you got on him, that’s what I want to hear.”

Jie Wei watched her, the steam from his noodles rising to form a screen before his face. “Please, eat, Ms. Spade, while I regale you.” Dolora obeyed. She was always ready for a second, late-night dinner. “Mr. Varnag was a regular at the Benevolent Association. He did some work for us, I’m not certain exactly what kind. It earned him his position. His friends often go there to play, the lot of them. They seem to be important Alstat men, and they have connections in the Dragons. They were around all the time about six months ago. No—before you ask, I do not know exactly what they did for the Association. I’m not privy to that kind of information.” He turned around to look at the doorway, to reassure himself no Association men had followed them. “Mr. Varnag was in trouble with the Orcland bosses. I don’t know why, but I gather it had to do with unpaid debts. I believe, but you cannot quote me on this, that he came to the Dragons in the past few weeks to try to earn enough to pay those debts off.”

“And that’s all? He wasn’t a high-level hit man for your bosses, or something like that?”

Jie Wei chuckled. “If he was, I was not informed of it. I would be surprised. He seemed a very… conscientious individual.”

“And these friends of his, the ones he was always with, could you tell me their names and addresses?”

“I’m afraid not, Ms. Spade.” Jie Wei shook his head, picked up his chopsticks. “If you want to talk to them, you’ll have to find a way in with the Association.”

“How would I go about doing that?”

“Of late, my employers have had dealings with a Mr. Marcone from Orcland. They’re helping him resolve some… troubles he has there. It is possible, though I do not know for certain, mind you, but possible, that he may be able to smooth your way.”

Oenotrians, Dolora thought. The hot, slimy noodles hit the spot, but the thought of going back to Orcland was like looking into an open grave. Why is it always the Oenotrians?

 

It was late in the high-security block at the Pen. The night shift had been on crew for two hours. Giancarlo “Fast John” Messina had been in high security for going on two years.

Giancarlo had been born on the island of Crotona in Oenotria. When he was a boy, Crotona had belonged to a different country. There was no Oenotria then, only the Sacred Precinct near the Hierophant’s Palace. Those were the days before Gigaldi and the Unification. Giancarlo hadn’t known he was Oenotrian. He’d barely known he was Crotonian. He was from a fishing village on the island’s exposed southern shore. The cliff-villages were regularly scoured by brief but brutal storms. His mother had been that way: full of tempestuous rages that exhausted themselves quickly but were no less fearsome on that account.

When Giancarlo was ten, his father was killed by the sea. When he was twelve, he went to work for Salvatore Reina up on the mountain. That was where the big town was, on the mountain. These were the early days of air travel; from the big town sometimes you could see a luftleighner drifting like a heavenward sow, wallowing through the clouds down to the Sacred City or some southern port.

Mr. Reina was called patrone, patron. When you were down on your luck and your ma needed more fish for the stew than she was pulling off the waves, Mr. Reina could help. To start, Giancarlo helped load carts at Mr. Reina’s house. The house Mr. Reina lived in was nothing like the house Giancarlo lived in. Giancarlo’s house was an adobe box with a cool-room carved into the cliffside. Sometimes, he pretended he lived in a cave like the men and orcs and ogres of old. His ma didn’t like that. You aren’t a cave-dweller, Giancarlo, have some pride. Holy Hierophant, my son is an idolator and a blasphemer. If she’d had enough wine, she might thrash him with the soup spoon and make him kneel before the saints and prophets to say his prayers.

Mr. Reina’s house was enormous. It had a wine cellar. It had a stables for his carriages and his horses. It had a race-track, and an Old Oenotrian ruin on the grounds. He had an upstairs, a downstairs, and a down-downstairs. He had balconies that looked out over the town. He wasn’t maior, but the mayor paid him patronage. He wasn’t the governor, but the governor came and ate at his table. Mr. Reina was an important patrone.

Mr. Reina, he never made Giancarlo say his prayers. The only things Giancarlo had to say for Mr. Reina was “Yes, patrone,” and “Right away, patrone.” Truth be told, Mr. Reina hardly noticed him. He was so far beneath Mr. Reina’s concern, he could probably die and the old man wouldn’t even ask what had happened to him. But Mr. Reina didn’t run the house on his own. He may have been the man in charge, but he didn’t like to do the regular, every-day affairs. That, he left to a young orc called Marcone. Mr. Marcone knew Giancarlo. He liked Giancarlo. He told Giancarlo he was a good boy and always on time and was getting along well. Someday, he told Giancarlo, he would be Mr. Marcone’s man, when things were different. Giancarlo liked Mr. Marcone. He was nicer than his ma, and he, too, never made Giancarlo say his prayers.

Giancarlo was fourteen or fifteen (he couldn’t recall) when Mr. Marcone asked him if he’d ever held a pistola tempesta. The sun was baking the granite stairs outside Mr. Reina’s house. Giancarlo had just finished unloading fifty cases from a wagon come up the coast, and had rolled a bidi with the good nasvy Mr. Reina gave him. He was lighting it when Mr. Marcone came up from behind and asked the question. That summer, Giancarlo had heard of Gigaldi for the first time. Rumors of the revolutionary spread through the south like wildfire. They said he had support from Leovic and he moved secretly from Oenotrian state to state, undermining the supremacy of Etoilliere and the Ae Virans. Mr. Reina didn’t like him. He said he was bad for business. “He’s just going around stirring everyone up, making a mess of things,” Mr. Reina had said. Mr Marcone felt differently.

“One Oenotrios, that’d be a fine thing. I’m tired of living on my knees.”

That day, he showed Giancarlo how to shoot a pistol. “This is the old kind,” he explained, “mage-make. Not these little strompistols they have now.” The weapon he showed Giancarlo fit easily in his hand. The stock was polished wood, the barrel terminated in a pair of forked tines. “When you pull the trigger, it won’t be mage-killing lead that comes flying out.”

Mr. Marcone showed him. He took him to the ruins out back near Mr. Reina’s horse track, stood with his back to white marble pillar, and pointed at a tree. “Watch,” he said. He fired.

Everything happened in an eyeblink. Giancarlo’s hair stood on end. A ticklish feeling, like a caterpillar’s feet, crawled up his arms. The air smelled burnt somehow. He heard a crackle, like paper tearing, and then, before he could even think about any one of those other things, a stroke of lightning belched from the fork at the end of the weapon. It flew across the grassy track, sizzling and spitting. When it struck the tree, the mighty branch caught fire, cracked, and fell from its perch. The stump left behind writhed with steam and boiling sap. “You can do that, can’t you?” Mr. Marcone asked in the stunned silence that followed. “It’s easy.”

It was. Giancarlo worked directly for Mr. Marcone after that. He rarely got to carry a pistola tempesta for him, but he had strummers aplenty. Mr. Marcone told him the Aons called the lightning pistols strompistol, and by extension the lead pistols were “strummers.” Giancarlo called his il mandolino. They called him fast because he could draw and shoot before anyone—other made guys or the law—could react.

One day, years later, Mr. Marcone took Giancarlo aside and told him he wanted to go to Cinder City. “That’s where the action is. I have contacts there. We can make a mint. But, Giancarlo, there’s someone in the way.”

“Who, Mr. Marcone?”

“Mr. Reina.”

Salvatore Reina was the last hit Fast John Messina made in Crotona. He approached him from behind while he sat at his couch admiring the sunset. “Mr. Reina,” he said, readying his mandolin, “I just wanted to thank you for everything.”

“Eh?” Salvatore had complained, by then getting on into his sixties. “I can’t hear you, boy.”

He left the old boss slumped over on his fine polished table. Bits of skull made a mosaic on the tiles.

Fast John was pinched shooting up Anthony Calabresi’s joint. That’s why he was doing time in the Pen. Oenotrians still had disputes with each other, no matter where they came from. It was like Gigaldi had never lived.

Fast John wasn’t just his mandolin anymore. He was a man of some importance himself. He’d gone from a cave in Crotona to a palatial cell in the Cinder City Pen. He was well taken care of here, and even got to make sure his businesses were running right. He was one of Aniello Marcone’s top capos. He was doing time for Mr. Marcone. So when he was disturbed at three at night in his cell, he was rightfully angry. After all, Warden Cain knew he was a man to be treated with respect, not someone who’s belongings were to be tossed. It was the Pen guards themselves that brought in his liquor, his steaks, his nasvy, and anything else he might want from the outside. It was an open secret.

But the Corrections Officer wasn’t there to toss his cell at three in the morning. The grey-coat had something else in mind. John had never seen this particular guy before, big, broad-shouldered, lantern jaw. He was from some other part of the prison. The salient features were that he had a wad of cash in one hand and put it down on John’s table. “Mr. Messina, begging by your pardon, but there’s a problem you can help solve.”

John was smart enough not to let his grogginess get in the way of business. “Oh yeah? A problem? How’s that?”

“His name,” said the big man, “is Tyrsis Trist.”

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