FOUNDRYSONG Chapter 3: Unterwelt

    There was never enough time for sleep. Dolora was in bed by three and up at seven again and she hadn’t even had a chance to drink. Collating her notes was an important part of an investigation, one she did even when half asleep. She spent the night on the murphy bed in the office and sent Miles home to get some rest.

There was really only one approach that made sense now. Miles would have to use his connections to try to get in to see this ice wagon driver. He had strings with several judges. Unlike Dolora, he’d made it off the force in good standing. Before he left for the night they seriously discussed the likelihood that the warden had been instructed to keep them from Tyrsis Trist on the grounds that it was Dolora Spade investigating.

“That might account for that lawyer, too,” Miles mused. “You know how they are. Long memories. Much as I hate to say it, you might be better off with the Oenotrians. They understand, at least, when someone has to do their job.”

That was just what Dolora had been thinking. Besides, if word on the street meant anything, it was Aniello Marcone running things in Orcland now. To her knowledge, Big Niel “the Boss” Marcone didn’t have anything against her, even if she’d tangled with the Oenotrians in those parts in her youth.

“It was a shooting war on the Island a few years back,” she said, “so I don’t think there’s much to worry about. Big Niel Marcone’s in charge now, if you believe the rumors. He and I never crossed paths. As long as I stick to his territory and don’t go wandering off anywhere I shouldn’t, I think I can handle it.”

“Who was it whose nose you went up back then?” Miles rubbed his eyes.

Dolora had grimaced. “Calabresi,” she said. “He’s still around, only I hope not as big.”

Now it was morning again, when the sun rose over the foggy eastern sea. The back windows of the office glowed. Down in the street, the chime of streetwagon bells and their wooden rattle had started up again. Pushcarts were assembling to dispense coffee, donuts, liver and onions, sausage, fried potatoes, and hot grease.

She hadn’t had a drink in a few days and it was starting to tell on her. Her head ached. Her knee was on fire. There was a coffee pot in the office, but rather than wait for it to brew up the same stale slop, she took the elevator down and bought one from a pushcart. When she was safe in the Spade and Kowalski rooms again, she tipped in a mouthful of whiskey from the bottle in the bottom drawer of her desk.

She burned through nasvy and rolling papers like kindling. The office was filled from corner to corner with the sound of the fulminating typewriter clacking as she transcribed her notes into some semblance of order. Soon, her desk was stacked high with a geography of information. Foothills of blue-bound folders lurked around mountainous outcroppings of notebook paper. Low lying swamps of coffee and nasvy-powder comprised a network of rivers and lakes between them.

Miles showed up not much later. By then, Dolora was sleeping at her desk, face being imprinted by the typewriter keys. She snorted awake as he opened the door, smoothed down her hair, and straightened her rumpled shirt and tie. “Miles,” she muttered, tasting the slick of grime on the back of her teeth. He was carrying something toothsome in a paper bag tucked under his arm. “What’d you get for lunch.”

The big orc glanced through the window of her office and she would have sworn he was blushing. “Fish stew and bread. I figured you could use something hearty.” His voice, always rough, was papered over with embarrassment. He came through her open office door and cast about for somewhere to set her breakfast.

Dolora sighed and cleared a spot on one of the chairs. “Fish stew,” she repeated.

“It’s good! The old man who makes it gets everything fresh from the bay every morning. He’s just a few blocks up.”

She dug through the bag and plopped the paper container on her desk. It was a red soup, filled with hunks of fish, crab, oysters, and red pepper flakes. She took the hunk of bread and set to. Miles was right; she felt like steaming trash, but getting something substantial into her belly helped immensely. She’d not have thought up stew for breakfast. “Thanks Miles,” she said around a mouthful. “I’ve been going through my notes all morning. We need to get ourselves a game plan.”

“I figured.” Miles had fried cod of his own. He started picking at it with his big blunt fingers.

Dolora spoke between gulps of chop-soup. “We’ve got a few major leads. The Oenotrians are one, since he was in hock to Marcone. The Dragons are another, because our man’s apparently got friends who go to the Benevolent Association. I know we talked about what Wei said, but you gotta let me get it out there, so as I can think better.” She always thought better out loud, and now that the words were coming out, she was beginning to get a picture of what had to be done. “The Oenotrians and the Benevolents are working together, and getting in with Marcone can help us get in with the Benevolents, so that’s a birds one stone deal. As for the other lead, the way I figure it, that’s Tyrsis Trist, that ice wagon driver. You’ve got better connections in the Juridicium than I do. Haven’t burned ‘em, at any rate.” I need to get close to Marcone. That meant going under cover. She’d been thinking about it all morning, but she was still afraid to say it. “You get on Trist and I’ll…” she hesitated.

Sometimes the job called for this. “I’ll get in with the Marcone mob.”

“I don’t like this,” said Miles. He’d made himself a perch in one of her other chairs, moving the pile of folders to the floor. His greasy cod dribbled onto the newswrapping with a patter. “Some of those people know you. You said so yourself. What if one of Calabresi’s people recognizes you?”

“Then I’m shot,” she said.

Miles frowned. “You can’t be serious. How are do you —“ He stopped. “Georn himself, you can’t mean you’re going to…” He shook his head. “Well, you have to take some time before you…” He stopped again, laughed. “I can’t believe I’m saying this. You’re going to try to go underground?”

Underground. Under cover. Those were two words for it. She was going into the criminal unterwelt. She knew what it entailed. It was part of being a private shamus. Unlike Blues, shamuses often operated under the attention of the criminal unterwelt in the city, but occasionally they had to get so deeply entangled with them they risked their very lives. Rumor had it that Juridicium officers did the same thing. They’d started only at the height of the war, trying to root out Aonrijk spies, but everyone in Cinder City had heard about the Spooks by now.

There was an art to it, going into the underworld. You had to spend a lot of time preparing, fabricate a new personality, a new history. That wasn’t that hard. You rent an apartment, you fabricate some basic paperwork, but you had to pay attention to detail. Even auto and pistol licenses weren’t difficult to make, if they didn’t have to pass through government scrutiny. Once you went underground, though, you had to have every lie in place. One lie birthed three more, and so on, and you had to keep them all under control. Dolora found it helped to keep notes. She relied on hers—what to say, what not to say, who she “was,” who she’d “been.” It helped to try to lie as little as possible. She would say she’d been wounded in the war, of course, and that she’d lived in Alstat her whole life. She’d just recently moved to Foundrytown or Orcland, wherever they got the apartment.

“We’ll have to keep the rest of the fellas out of it,” Miles broke in. “All our extras and ancillaries, even Rita.” Rita was their secretary. She didn’t come in until ten. “They’ll all have to be laid off until we’re done. If even a whisper gets out while you’re with Marcone…” He tapped a tusk thoughtfully. “I suppose you’ve already done some prep work, instead of sleeping.”

Dolora grinned, then spooned more stew. “You’d think right. I know you don’t think it’s a good idea, Miles.”

“No,” he said after a long moment, “I agree with you. I think it’s the right move. We don’t have a lot of options, and we need to gather more information. If we press from outside, we risk them clamming up on us, the way the warden did. We have to move carefully. There’s all kinds of things happening that we don’t see.”

“Deep waters,” she said.

Miles nodded. “Deep waters.” When a case had sharks swimming below the surface, out of sight, that’s what they called it. These waters were deeper than most. Juridicium officials, the warden of the Cinder City Penitentiary, the Stadtprasident’s campaign, and the two biggest mobs in the Umwelt. There were shoals, and shipwrecks, and vanished oil tankers below, and the sharks were swimming in and out.

Everything was so damn hard all the time! “I’d kill for a magician on the payroll,” she said.

“Yeah. Can’t afford it, though, we’ve been over that.” Dolora nodded. It was true. They’d done all the numbers out time and time again. Still, the Blues had a few, the Spooks had their own, and all the big consortia employed them in the hundreds. Academic wizards were hard to come by, especially at the discount prices of the Alstat. There was better pay to be had binding djinn to autos and luftlighters than there was working for peanuts at Spade and Kowalski.

They both knew what magic could do. Sergeant Lusky had been a Talent, someone born with the natural capacity, and he could drink refined giantsblood like water. Her brigade captain, a refined elf named Ashley, was an Academic magician. She’d seen him deflect stromkanon bolts and rip enemy formations to shreds. Of course, they didn’t need that kind of raw firepower. She really wanted a magus who could turn himself invisible, or slide through a closed door, or dissolve into a mist. That wasn’t realistic, though, no matter how much she wanted it. Damn consortia would always outbid them for someone with skills like that.

Miles tapped his tusk again. “You’re going to have to tell Kit before you go.”

There it was. The subject she’d been avoiding since she woke up. She’d decided almost as soon as her eyes opened that she was going to have to go underground with the Oenotrian mob. Her mind had circled this one fact ever since. You’re going to have to tell Kit. Things were not good with Kit, she knew that. She had delayed, and demurred, and basically screwed everything up from start to finish. If she hadn’t gone off to the war… Well, what good did it do to think about that? She had gone to fight, and now she was back, and Kit was like a different person. That girl from Centrum Hills had a fancy Silver City apartment and swam with the big fishes. She was gonna be somebody.

“I’m not gonna,” Dolora said, surprising even herself.

Miles put down the piece of cod he was raising to his mouth. “What?” he asked, incredulous. He knew what his ears had told him, he just didn’t believe it.

“I’m not gonna tell Kit. She doesn’t have to know.”

“She’ll worry about you,” Miles said. “Dolora, that’s not fair. She’ll be sick with worry.”

“You can tell her something,” Dolora said, flippantly, even as she fished around in the bowl for another spoonful of soup. The heel of bread was almost gone now, and the paper of the bowl was wearing thin. “Tell her I’m in the New Territories. Hell, I don’t care, tell her I’m underground, just don’t say where.”

“Dolora…”

She couldn’t. She couldn’t. This had to get done. This was a case, they had an obligation, and Miles and she both agreed that the only way to fulfil that obligation was for her to drop off the map. Going underground was like going into a giantsblood mine. You disappeared. You wouldn’t see the metaphorical sun for an age. Dolora knew what it was like. She also knew how Kit would react. She couldn’t face that, but she couldn’t abandon Hadrada. Not now. She’d been in his ghost-haunted apartment, seen his statographs, poked through his personal correspondence. She felt like she knew the dwarf, and she certainly owed it to him to see this through to the end.

Kit wouldn’t understand that. She never understood. She’d coo and say “I’ve got money enough for both of us for now. Come and stay.” She’d put her gloved hand on Dolora’s and that fulminating charge would course through the air. Dolora would feel the pull, the magnetic energy that shot from Kit Winter like sparks from a dynamo, and she’d be caught. Just the idea was putting knots in her belly. She couldn’t face Kit. She could not face her.

“Miles, you gotta do this for me.”

The big orc hunched down and made himself small. “Dolora, you’ll regret it if you don’t do it yourself. Take it from me.”

“Miles,” she said slowly, “I’m not going to see Kit before I go. I can’t. Just lay off it. Tell her for me, or don’t, but there’s nothing you can say to change my mind.” She grimaced as hot pain shot through her knee. “Correis, this thing is killing me.”

Miles sighed, all the tension running out of him. “Alright, Dolora. You do what you have to do.”

“I always do, don’t I?”

They finished their meal in silence.

 

Cherry Street was where she made her name, but Orcland was where she lost it. Iron Island was just across the channel from Alstat. The northern half of the island was a sprawling patchwork of factories, mills, assembly plants, and high-walled magical engineering halls. Consortia, big and small, owned every scrap of land. This was Foundrytown, with its wood-and-tarpaper housing—consortia barracks, where the men and women who worked the factory floor could live and eat just a brick’s throw from the machines they worked. The Foundrytown ferry terminal faced Alstat, Dwarfside, and Shipton.

The southern side of the island was built around the Cinder Fulminating Light and Power Plant. That was Orcland, the enormous slum where most of the city’s orcs and ogres lived. The island still bore the scars of the iron mines that once shot through it. The mineheads were closed down, the dirt and gravel roads abandoned, but the corrugated iron and tin consortium barracks halls still served to house thousands of Orcland residents. Only the widest streets were paved, and those but poorly. Dolora had ridden horseback through the winding mazes of clapboard, iron, brick, and tin when she was busted back down to patrol.

All of Orcland stank of coal and oil. That which didn’t reeked of garbage. Smoke and dripping soot ran from the plant’s great towers and cast a pall over the island. Slag piles remained of the mining days. Little grew there, save for stunted grass. The streetwagons were infrequent and late, and autowagons were rare. Much more common were the old ogre-drawn drays and hacks. These relics had serviced the whole city once, and fleets of them sat in Orcland warehouses, mouldering. It wasn’t only the outcast races in Orcland either, but Oenotrians, people from the New Territories, and Alkebulans, were all confined to the narrow strip of Iron Island. No bank would loan to non-Continentials, no building rent to them, outside Alstat, Shipton, and the Island.

It wasn’t hard for Dolora to find a building to rent. Her story was a simple one: a veteran of the Triple Alliance who wasted her benefits on booze and women. That much, at least, wasn’t far off the mark. She could actually use her army pension to pay for the place, though they’d need to supplement it with some of the steel combine’s allowance to give her enough to actually live on. They’d forged her discharge papers and some identity documents to show the superintendent, set up a false bank account, the whole thing.

The building had a grocer on the ground floor and two floors of apartments above. She got her own place, had to for the ringer to work proper since she wasn’t going to be home most of the time and she didn’t need anyone noticing the apartment was a front. She moved in some furniture over a long and painful afternoon on the ferry with a handcart. By the time it looked good enough from the door to convince the casual observer, she was slick with sweat. Why not take the time to get into her new role? Her temples were pounding again and her knee was laced with lines of fire hot as any smelter.

The late afternoon light shot down through the Orcland clouds. The black pall of the soot cloud rising from the power plant drifted off to the south, over the water and the tailings pools on the southern edge of the island. The road was filled with horse and ogre-drawn drays, the crunch of their passage mingling with the chime of streetwagons.

Dolora knew this neighborhood - northern Orcland joined with Foundrytown seamlessly. She’d worked here, once upon a time, a punishment beat. The memories oozing, oily, from the ground, were much worse than those from the Dragons. It was her youth that haunted the streets of Dwarfside and the Dragons, but here the very bricks were suffused with her anger. How many nights had she staggered down these very streets, intent on her last, most foolish conquest? There were still no lamps on the streets or call boxes on the corners. Power was hoarded, a handful of buildings on each block strung up with copper.

Her destination was a bar she’d seen on the way to her rooms. It hadn’t existed three years ago when she was here, which made it the perfect place to call home. No one would recognize her. She was hobbling by the time she got to the door, but the gin would solve her ache.

The place was dark and filled with the sound of hiss of a badly tuned radio. She ambled to the dark oak expanse of the bar, which smelled of shellac, and perched on a stool. She drank slowly, but used her eyrie to observe the comings and goings. The gambling was the most obvious thing she noticed, hidden as it was behind a thin pine door in an adjoining room. They were playing cards back there. There was an ogre servant in gartersleeves seemed dedicated solely to their use, ducking in and out every so often with a tray.

There were paintings directly on the walls that Dolora vaguely thought of as frescoes. These were so nasvy-stained already that the place could have been a hundred years old. The few windows were too grimy to let in much of the late afternoon light. There was no power, leaving parafin lamps to drive off the darkness as though it were last century. Orcland, she thought archly. Everything was like that in Orcland. She’d tried to forget it, the way you did when you left something behind, but here she was, back again. She could almost feel the truncheon in her hand and the heavy cap on her brow. She’d walked her beat with an oil lantern until she was brought back into the fold as a shamus again, and then she’d thrown it all away. Why? Orcland again. Or maybe not. Maybe it was her. You just can’t stop, can you, Dolora, even when they tell you no.

The second thing about the place were the working girls. They were of various races, of various kinds, and of various ages. Dolora didn’t notice them at first; it took a while for her to realize she was seeing the same handful of women every few hours. They left and came back, to sit at the same tables. The place is a cathouse, she realized. They must owe part of what they made to the dwarf barman.

Though she lingered over her drinks, she spent the night there, eating little more than a beef patty on toast. Snifter followed snifter. She was an engine guzzling fuel, and by the end of the night she realized that she’d foolishly taken too much on board. The music buzzed in her head like the thunder of propellors. She filled her notebook with doodles and pencil-scrawl and only when she looked back minutes later did she try to bring herself under control. Must write down the girls. She squinted at their tables from across the bar as they came and went. Can’t be too obvious, she told herself. Can’t let anyone realize what I’m doing.

She made a list of descriptions and where they sat. Her sight was going fuzzy when someone sat down next to her.

“Help you, darling?” a voice drawled.

She jumped. “What?”

“You looking for someone to spend some time with? Only you keep looking, is all, and I wanted to ask before you got too sloshed to enjoy yourself.”

Dolora found one of the women sitting next to her at the bar. She couldn’t be older than twenty-five, had dusky skin and dark hair done in a finger wave. She wore a simple flapper’s dress and a chain of paste stones.

Dolora blinked hard, cleared her head. “Barkeep, pour me a coffee.” She wasn’t as drunk as she looked. Dolora had learned, through many long drinking years, how to slow the pace and reserve a part of herself to maintain control. It was only a momentary disorientation to swing that into effect. She’d let herself drift, but that was the end of that.

She eyed the girl up and down. “I’m good. Thank you. New to the neighborhood.”

“Dotti,” the girl replied, sticking her hand out.

Dolora took it. “Myrtle,” Dolora said. “I’m up the block.”

The girl narrowed her eyes at Dolora and a little smile played over her lips. “Myrtle, huh?” Dolora grabbed the coffee as it arrived and stared her down. Can’t get startled when they don’t believe you, that just tells ‘em they’re right.

“Yeah. What of it?”

“Nothin.” Her eyes sparkled. “Welcome to the neighborhood, Myrtle.”

 

Over the next few days, Dolora integrated herself into the neighborhood. She spread money around, made sure she was seen everywhere. Memories bubbled to the surface of their own accord. She’d never lived in Orcland before; back before the war, she’d taken the ferry every morning. She still remembered what it was like to get up before the sun, pile onto the boat with all those other folks still reeking of the prior night’s labors, and cross over in the predawn light.

An Orcland shamus, it turned out, did less in Orcland than she’d thought. As much as her hands remembered the weight of the truncheon and her feet the shape of the boots, she saw things now she’d never seen on her patrol beat or even with her shamus’ badge in her pocket.

In Orcland, the shamuses busted up illicit kinomat rings where low-budget hoodlums made pornography, or shut down giantsblood trafficking by busting doors and heads. They didn’t have homicide on Iron Island because there was no homicide department. There were unexplained deaths, but those were chalked up to general misbehavior on the part of the goblin population. Can’t trust ogres and orcs, after all, right chief?

It was no surprise that Dolora had always bucked the trend. When the chief wanted whores taken down a notch, Dolora busted johns. If he wanted drug traffic stopped, Dolora would make sure to get a bagman instead of the shivering saps in the burned out mines and warehouses. She’d already had a reputation when she got to the Island. This didn’t improve it. Sooner or later, everyone in the precinct knew about Dolora Spade. What are we going to do with you, Shamus Spade? Hell, it had been a prostitution ring that finally brought the hammer down on her. Not johns though, and not the pimps, but the people who owned both.

Correis, it brought back dreams. Dreams of John McTavish and his smarmy smiling face. She couldn’t bear to think about him. In her worst nightmares, Kit and McTavish circled each other with knives, each waiting to slash the other to ribbons. She’d wake from those in a cold sweat, her Orcland sheets stinking with raw fear.

But when you did a raid on a giantsblood house or an illegal refinery, you were in and out. Sure, maybe she’d seen the living conditions and wrinkled her nose at them, but she’d never lived them. Now she was walking through the streets, talking to her neighbors, peeking into the open doors of the run-down shacks that made up the districts of Orcland. Things were worse than she thought. In some places, stores hung lights over their doors, but in many the streets were pitch black at night, as though the city were a world away, or a different time. You could see the glow of the mainland over the rooftops in one direction, and the hellish red fire of the plant in the other. Orcland was trapped between them, suspended, between the amber heaven of the city and the ruddy demoniac inferno of the power plant.

She’d lived without fulminating power when she was a child before it was common, but that was a long time ago. Living in Orcland, only one in three buildings on any given street had power lines. Her own apartment had none. She bathed in candlelight and cooked by paraffin lamp.

She wasn’t an intruder into the lives of Orcland anymore. She was one of them. She didn’t burst through doors and sling handcuffs anymore. She lived with the giantsblood pushers. The working girls were above and below and to either side. She bought her groceries at the local market and felt the eyes of the Orcland Blues boring holes in her back. She knew she’d made it when, on the second evening, after drinks, a Blue in his dress tunic sauntered up to her and demanded a bribe. “Taking up a collection,” he’d said. She laughed in his face and gave him five bits.

It took time to get to know the neighborhood. Dolora couldn’t afford to just go all over her building introducing herself. She took the first full morning walking from one end of Orcland to the other. It didn’t even take until noon. Dolora kept her eye out for anywhere she could make inroads. One of the tricks of moving in the Unterwelt was not to take too big a leap. The darkened nightclubs and bars all had a similar caste to them: Oenotrian. You didn’t start by going in and asking for a job right off the street. That wasn’t how things worked, in Orcland or anywhere.

No one paid attention to her. She was just another woman in a flatcap strolling through the streets. She’d ditched her suit and wore simple slacks, a tattered pair of suspenders, and a sweat-stained shirt. She hung on the street corners and listened to the chatter. She took an afternoon job moving gravel in the shadow of the plant and talking to her two big ogre companions. Toward the end of the shift, she asked if either of them had heard of Mr. Marcone or the Marcone gang. It was an Oenotrian name: Mar-cone-ay.

They got real quiet and mumbled about being late. They didn’t know anything, but it was clear the name had power. He’s consolidated since the last time you were here, Dolora, she told herself. He’s a big name now, not just some little strummer-runner on the docks. She wondered where his territory was. It would be a real gas to go looking for Marcone and instead run afoul of one of his competitors. They’d probably plug her as soon as talk to her. Some war vet looking to get in with the Marcone mob wanders into the wrong neighborhood? Pop, and an end to it.

That almost sounded inviting. Maybe she could just get herself knocked off. But no, then she’d leave things undone. Kit would be waiting and she’d never turn up again. Hadrada’s murder would never be properly investigated. The Bluebells would sweep everything under the rug, and she’d be in the ground. Nah, can’t do that.

The way home was longer than the way down. Carrying barrows full of gravel had almost blown out her knee. Dolora dodged autowagons and horse hacks on her way back to Trenton Boulevard; she was lost in thought and kept wandering into the road. I might try going to buy some giantsblood or siren. The drug trade had come under the control of the bosses all over the city. From Iron Island to Reise Landing, if you needed to get your hands on drinkable giantsblood, sirensong, or any other high-test formula, you’d need a connect. Like the copper wires that ran out of the Orcland Fulminating Power Plant, if you followed that connect’s connects you’d eventually wind up in Alstat or Iron Island where the stuff was stored, produced, distributed, and counted in the ledger books of people like Marcone.

She was due to meet with Miles at the end of the week, which gave her just a one more day to turn something up worth reporting. She ground her teeth and let the ruinous pain of her knee wash over her. It lapped at her consciousness, threatening to subsume it, but it also gave a kind of burning clarity.

Well, kid, she told herself, there’s one surefire way to find someone in the giantsblood scene. That was very simple. All she had to do was find someone like her. During the war, they used giantsblood as medicine and pick-me-up both. Burned-out soldiers were a dime a dozen in the City. They were all over Foundrytown and Orcland. Iron Island was crawling with them. Those who had the wherewithal to join the ranks of the ersatzmenn lived on the other side of the channel. The kind that stayed out here on Iron Island were New Territories black folk, or orcs. Ogres didn’t get ersatz, the stuff didn’t agree with ‘em. Dolora had heard of one with an ersatz implant while she was convalescing. The poor bastard had been in an eisenwagon at Breach, had been blown half to paste by a sticky bomb that went off under the gunner’s seat.

She’d been in the clinic outside Schweinfurt. She remembered the day: it was hot, summer. She still couldn’t stand without a cane. The hospital, if you could call it that, was a set of tents outside the old medieval city. The doctor, some little Aeran sprat who hated Ae Virans more than he hated the Rijk, told her about it. “Tore his fool head off,” he explained, “the arm just wouldn’t be controlled. Their bodies can’t handle it. Terrible shame. Terrible shame.”

When they were in the trenches or amongst the whispering trees, sometimes it would was hard to stay on sentry duty. Before she’d been blown up, Dolora had learned the pain of long nights on guard. Your eyes started to burn. Your hands would tremble. Your brain kind of ate itself up, treading and retreading old ground until you wore a rut in your skull with all your worrying. But, see, there were people counting on you. Fall asleep or let that brain rest, and your friends and squadmates could wind up dead. Shot. Blown apart. Bayonetted, or throat opened with a knife like those doughboys in the Trallen Valley who were all killed before they opened their eyes.

So what did a poor sentry do? Well, soldier, there’s always giantsblood. You’d drink down that fire and it sits in your belly, and then there’s no more night, there’s no more sorrow, there’s just you and the rifle and the forest or the field. And you take a second sip and you can see in the dark. By the third your trigger-finger is faster than a lokomotive.

Dolora knew what it looked like. They all knew. You took giantsblood when you needed to be sharp and sirensong when you wanted to rest. It was, over there, like being a machine. You were regulating. It was just oil and grease, fuel and damping. No need to be worried, soldier.

She looked for the hounded eyes she’d seen on the front, the drawn and hunted looks. She found them.

The house was crowded on a rise. The filigree was worn to ruin. It smelled of the war: deisel, giantsblood, lightning. The tangle of copper wire that webbed the city didn’t touch it. Strung as they were from the Orcland Plant like a webwork across the city, still they somehow missed this great house on a hill. Like the big houses all over the Island, Dolora knew this one, too, had been the home of some fat overseer when the mines were still running. Even in the dark, you could make out what it had been. Pink paint was flaked and peeling, sea-foam woodwork adorned every surface. A garret projected from the front, and a tower, and a wraparound porch.

Instead of the overseer and his dog, his wife serving tea, and the kids playing on that porch, there leaned a handful of battered figures with slouch hats and glowing bidis. They were sirenbitten. She could smell the sticky sweet odor running underneath the oil and tar.

Dolora flicked her bidi into the street and climbed the front steps with a wince. No one turned to see her. They were all part of a shared misery, and they needed no words to join together in a brotherhood of sickness on that porch. Their sweat-soaked clothes radiated sorrow. Two wore heavy overcoats, though the night was warm, to keep off the siren’s chill.

This wasn’t the kind of place where you asked for the proprietor. She rapped on the door and waited. What other smells where there underneath? As she waited she tried to sort them: piss, sea salt, and tide. There was the sweet but astringent smell of sirensong and the burnt iron waft of giantsblood.

Footsteps on the far side of the door. The handle turned. Dolora blinked in surprise as a woman answered. She had expected perhaps a seedy man, an ogre tough, even the kind of tired mistress of a cat house. The woman on the other side of the door was more than fifty, broad but short, and dressed like a matron. She was more mother than madame. “Need some help, honey?” she asked. Dolora nodded.

“Help,” she agreed, stepping over the threshold. The stink of human filth poured over her. She tried not to gag. “Before I come in, though,” she said, heedless of the fact that she was already in the dark coat room of the unlit house, “I gotta know whose joint this is.”

The woman pulled her shawl tight around her shoulders. She had a little cane with an ebony haft and a silver handle. She clacked it against the wood of the floor. “What bidness is that of yours?”

“Oh, I don’t mind,” Dolora said, trying her best to laugh off the question. It’s no worry on their part, she wanted her face to say, it’s a worry on mine. “Problem is, I do some work for Mr. Marcone, so I wouldn’t want to find myself in his competitor’s house.”

“This is my house, girl,” the woman snapped, “you want something hot, something cool, or are you leavin’?”

She pursed her lips, felt a surge of apprehension. She might be known in this part of town, or else remembered. Did she need this? A den to drink the sweet red blood, to feel the power of its fire flow through her? The gamble might be worth it. It might not. She could wake up with no money in her billfold, her strummer stolen, or in Aniello Marcone’s company right before being condemned to the bottom of the channel. “And Mr. Marcone oversees it?” she asked.

“Mr. Marcone don’t need to see shit, honey, and I’m getting mighty tired of this business. You come to feel good, or you come to make me kick you out?”

Dolora thrust a bit into her hand. “Naw,” she said, “I’m good.”

“Honey, you ain’t no kind of good,” the woman snapped.

Dolora thought about those words all the way back to her Iron Island flop.

 

Miles Kowalski always had coffee for breakfast. Black coffee, burning in the mouth and down the throat. He ate almost exclusively from the Alstat food carts. He chewed open a cigar from the Islands and smoked it while he strolled. Dolora liked to think in her office, massaging her bad knee with her foot thrown up on the desk. Not Miles. He needed to walk. His feet did his thinking for him. Like orcs and ogres all over the New Territories, he’d grown up before they had permission to use public transport. He was used to walking.

On Friday morning, Miles took his coffee and a box of glazed donuts to the benches at Mulberry Park, on the edge of the Dragons. Kowran Street was headed by a great dragon gate and a statue of Meng Zi. Miles liked it in Mulberry Park. He’d never been an officer in the Dragons, not like Dolora, but he was no stranger. Unlike Dolora, Miles Kowalski hadn’t spent his whole life in and out of uniforms. Sure, he’d been a Blue, but that was only skin deep. There were always certain people who could make use of a man with sap and a lack of scruples. Being an orc didn’t hurt.

He tapped his tusks with a finger and alternately drank his coffee, smoked, and ate. A handful of people were moving around in the pre-morning gloom. Fish carts trundled up from the bay toward the markets in the Dragons. A few ogre haulers trudged through the dark. Every so often, a streetwagon rang its bell in the middle distance, or an autowagon hurtled toward midtown. A dirty picture house let out, the kino attendants staggering into the dawn air like drunks, some blinking, others trying their best to hide their secret shame. Some were ersatz or down-and-outers who had just been in there to catch a few winks. Slumping down during a dirty kinograph was cheaper than finding somewhere to stay for the night.

It was time, he reckoned, to go and have a look see and try to get around Warden Cain and whoever had gotten to him. Tyrsis Trist, the autowagon driver for the ice company, somehow figured into this. It was too coincidental, him being known by the Steelworkers, being a former teamster. There was something going on, he and Dolora agreed on that.

How to go about it? First was to go down to the Chief’s office. Orders like “don’t let anybody see this prisoner” usually rolled down from the top. It was possible some local station head had given the notice, but with the lawyer from the Juridicium coming down to harass Dolora, the juice felt like it was coming from the bigwigs. If it was some local schmo getting in over his head, Miles was probably about to bring the hammer down on him. Oh well. No accounting for crooked Blues.

Miles brushed the crumbs from his shirt and reached down for another donut. None left. Well, that was another habit. He often found himself at the bottom of a bowl or the end of a plate without realizing it.

That was a sign. It was time to work.

The offices of Harden Wilder, Commissioner of Constables and Chief of the Bluebell Watch, were located in none other than downtown Silver City. Where else? The Bluebell Commission was in the heart of the wealthiest block overlooking the water and Parliament Island. It wasn’t a glittering glass and steel tower like the homes of the big banks. The Bluebell Commission was set up on the grounds of old Contentin Bellwright. Everyone knew the eccentric Etoillere nobleman had founded the force way back when. While he was alive, his house was the nerve center of the operation. When he died, he deeded the mansion and grounds over to the city to go on serving that purpose.

Miles thought as he walked along the brick wall that separated the grounds from the city. Little spiky bits of iron were stuck along the top, as though they could keep people out. It wasn’t a particularly defensible place: a huge wooden house with an enormous porch, multiple wings, balconies, projecting dormers, and glass everywhere. If anyone ever really wanted to storm it, it’d quickly be little more than kindling.

Still, there was a gate. It wasn’t guarded like the Penitentiary. This was meant to feel open and welcoming. To certain people, at least. The gate opened on a path of rare pink crushed gravel, taken from a quarry on one of the Tears. Miles tried to imagine what it would look like with the wrought-iron gate shut, all those curlicues providing nooks and crannies for autowagons to hook chains and pull them down. If someone wanted to get in, they would get in.

But, again, it was all for show. There were no snipers up on the roofline. There weren’t even regular Blues wandering around the garden. Though this was the seat of the Bluebell Watch’s power, it was a building of functionaries and errand-boys, not a fortress.

Commissioner Wilder was no mere functionary, though. He had come up through the force to replace doddering old Contentin. Commissioner Bellwright had been an elf obsessed with the theory of the constabulary. He had dedicated his life to working out a way to patrol the city, stick the noses of blue-clad busybodies in everyone’s business, and most of all monitor the goings-on of the poor, working class, the orcs, the ogres, and the Alkebulans. He’d hated Alkebulans most of all.

Wilder was different. He wasn’t a theorist. Wilder was a doer, a skull cracker, who had swung a truncheon with the lads down in the trenches. Contentin had written books on criminality. He’d identified the criminal type (type criminale, as he said), by head shape and nasal bone, and race. Mostly race. For Wilder, criminals had come in only one type: the type to be crushed. You hit them with your bludgeon as hard as you could. If they hit back, you went and found a bigger bludgeon. He ran the Bluebells like a man waging war. Reports were block by block. His captains talked about “territory” and “holding the line.” When Wilder made reports to Parliament he discussed “strategy” and “body counts.”

Never mind that the Bluebells hardly ever solved a Fabricator-damned thing. The most they did was swept up the broken glass after the mess was already made. Catch a killer? Ha! Miles could count on one hand the number of times his Watch Houses had caught a killer. One of them, the bastard was standing there in a pool of blood, having called the Watch himself. That was what they called the Cutter special. Evil little Harry Cutter had been first on the scene. That was probably that dwarf’s only clearance.

It took a little while to get through the layers of administrative bullshit that surrounded the Commissioner. Miles knew they’d been designed to keep your regular civilians from getting in to complain about this or that Bluebell action and to keep Parliamentarians from breaking into his office and yelling. For an old Blue like Miles, it was just possible to eke by. To do it, he needed to use all his suction with the Commissioner’s people. But Miles had always been canny. He’d stacked favor after favor like cordwood, waiting for the day he’d need them. Old sergeants who were now captains, his old captain who was now an administrator in the big building, every string or lever he could pull, he pulled.

At last, he found himself in Commissioner Wilder’s office. Every man on the force knew Wilder. They’d seen him at a thousand functions. They’d seen him at parties, at public ceremonies, looked at his picture on the Watch House walls for years. Miles had known Contentin when he came up; not personally, but to look at. Old Man Contentin, the founder of the Blues, had come to the Watch Houses once or twice a year for inspection. But as he got older, his mobility declined. Wilder was always waiting in the wings, and some time early in Miles’ career, he took over.

It was by appointment. The Parliament approved. Contentin didn’t like him, but though he had started the force, he wasn’t the say-all master of the Bluebells. In the end, the politicians had allied behind Wilder and shut the old man out. Wilder knew how to get things done. He didn’t spend hours puttering around his office trying to uncover the secret to rehabilitating the depraved orc mind. He saw what needed to be done, got on the parley, and ordered his people to do it.

Commissioner Bellwright had been a round, jovial Etoilline. He was precise and fidgety, filled with a nervous kind of energy. Miles had never seen him without a biscuit, a cake, or a bun near at hand. Commissioner Wilder was nothing like him. Miles didn’t know where Wilder was from originally, but he wondered if he couldn’t make out a faint Aerish accent in his voice. Unlike Contentin Bellwright, Hardin Wilder looked the part of a Bluebell. Square jaw, thick mutton chops, brow like an ocean shelf. He wasn’t an ogre, but he’d boxed one when he was a beat patrolman once, and won. His hands were like beer barrels. His face was a brick wall. Miles had a grudging respect for the bastard. He was reputedly impossible to kill, and Bluebell legend said he had three lead balls in his body, the relics of shootouts from days past.

The office of the Commissioner of Constables was a wilderness of dark wood and gleaming brass. Wilder was ensconced behind Bellwright’s massive desk, a huge man almost lost in a forest of fulminating lamps, calipers, and books. Light poured in from the bay windows behind and Miles could see the Bellwright gardens stretching a quarter of an acre to the back boundary wall of the estate. They were joined by Jayel, the elvish First Secretary of Constables, who stood to one side and scribbled on a stenographer’s pad.

Wilder looked through the confusion of bric-a-brac with a level blue eye. “Shamus Kowalski. Didn’t you leave the force? I swear I remember reading your letter of resignation.”

“Ah, that you did, Commissioner,” said Miles. He felt himself hunching down, trying to avoid the glare of the Bluebell Chief. He gave a humble smile. “Sorry to say, that was some years ago.”

“You worked in Orcland, didn’t you?”

Miles ducked his head. “Yes. But now I’m on my own with—“

“Dolora Spade,” said Wilder. He spat the name out like he’d been chewing on a pip. “Don’t worry, I know all about Ms. Spade and her… investigations. She didn’t resign.”

“No,” Miles agreed, “she didn’t.” He gave his best approximation of a smile.

Jayel leaned in and muttered something to the Commissioner. Harden nodded at his secretary, then turned back to Miles. “I’ve got a busy day, Kowalski. What exactly are you looking for?”

“Well… to be honest, there’s a prisoner I’m trying to talk to. It’s taken me all day to get in to see you, Commissioner—not that that’s a problem. The situation is like this: we need to talk to a prisoner at the Pen. We’ve got a case, nothing major, private murder investigation from Iron Island. The problem is, we think this elf is involved, but Warden Cain won’t let us talk to him. He’s being held for his own protection. I don’t see why we shouldn’t be able to see him, especially since it’s just protective custody right now. Though it seems like he might be charged with manslaughter.”

At the mention of Trist’s name, Wilder’s secretary, Jayel, stiffened. “This is in reference to the Varnag murder at that metalworks,” he said.

“Ah, that fucking thing, is it?” Wilder’s brow sank, turning his eyes into smoldering pits. “There’s a Juridicial investigation going on surrounding the dwarf. You know I don’t have the authority to interrupt.”

Miles wanted to leap across the desk and strangle the slimy little secretary. If he hadn’t said anything, Wilder would never have realized there could be a connection between Trist and Varnag. But there is a connection. Otherwise Jayel wouldn’t have said boo. If nothing else, this confirmed it. Tyrsis Trist had something to do with Hadrada Varnag. Whether he had been involved in the death was a different question.

“I don’t think that—“

Wilder made a chopping motion. “No, shamus. I know you had to do a lot of maneuvering to get in here today, and I appreciate your dedication to a client—“

“To justice,” Miles cut in.

Wilder rolled his eyes. “To justice then.” The way he said it made it clear he didn’t believe in any such thing. “But this was a commonist matter, between commonists. And if the warden didn’t want you to see this Tryst fellow, there’s a good reason why. Juridicium agents have been crawling up my ass for days about this whole thing. They want this closed, and by them, not us. So if they don’t even want the Blues involved, how do you expect me to convince them to let you get in there to talk to him? No, not going to happen. You want a way in? Get a court order.”

“I can’t—“

“A judge, shamus! Go ask a judge.”

Just like that, Miles was dismissed.

 

Dolora brushed her teeth with gin, cooked herself some flapjacks to the sounds of the people upstairs screaming, ate her breakfast, and went out onto the landing.

The building was always filled with life. She wasn’t surprised; it was this way in all the poor parts of the city. She’d grown up in a tenement where the biddies gathered to trade secrets, to coo at the ice man or the milk man, to chase working girls off their steps. It was no different here, only there were more black folk, more orcs, and more ogres too. How have I never seen this? She’d worked for over a year on Iron Island. When she was in her state blues, she’d never once seen any sign of solidarity between the orcs or the foundryfolk. Wherever Bluebells were seen in Alstat or Iron Island, people got quiet. They stopped laughing, stopped mixing lye in buckets, stopped shredding old garments for rags. Being in the Blues, Dolora had been some alien insect, landing among a frightened and startled people.

Now, she was on the inside. Women crowded the railings with their washing, their starch, their irons heated in coal stoves. The working girls emerged from their boudoirs. They were chattering flocks of tropical birds, smoking their bidis and laughing. They didn’t cover their smiles with their hands; their teeth were bright, their talk unburdened.

Tired men came from the plant or the foundry in their shirtsleeves. Their suspenders stood askew and stale sweat clung to their faces. Others, fresh, emerged from the apartments with cups of coffee, or bidis, or the occasional pipe and made their way toward the quarries, or the lumber yards, or the docks.

The stairs of Dolora’s building jolted with life. Some old orc behind a half-open door was playing a lonesome guitar. She took her own coffee and went among the people. The part inside her that was on the job, the shamus, felt bad. She was gliding throug the locals like a wolf. She smiled, introduced herself, took a few minutes to chat, and went on. She’d changed her worsted wool suit for a loose jacket with a belt sewn into the back and a moth-eaten green sweater with wooden buttons.

She needed a line on Marcone. Everyone in her building had heard of him—big scary Uncle Niel, who hired Alqies, orcs, and ogres. If you were black or off-race and needed a job, so long as you could throw a punch or look menacing, Uncle Niel could use you. No one wanted to say too much about him. Darling, who lived upstairs, told Dolora that she looked like she could work for the boss. “Uncle Niel would love you, babe,” she said, leaning on the stairs in her night gown. “He’s all about toughs. You look like you could throw a fella off a balcony if you had ta.”

Dolora grinned. She was still Myrtle here, the down-and-out war vet who’d refused an ersatz leg. “I could,” she said.

The morning went by quickly. Soon, the crowds broke down into cliques of ever-diminishing size as people went to work, returned to their apartments, or went off to run errands. The bustle of Orcland wasn’t accompanied by streetwagon bells. There were precious few here. Even the roar of autowagons was rare. While you might see the occasional horse-drawn hackney or coach in Alstat, in Orcland they were the norm. Everyone used drays, wagons, carts. Locals told Dolora that Uncle Niel drove a Juncker White Lightning and his lieutenants (they called them “capos”) had autos of their own. Dolora wondered how they ran on the rough, unpaved earth streets or if they stayed to the main ways.

She had a handful of leads, so when she met Miles she wouldn’t have to tell him they pissed their money away. A handful of back-hall pool and card joints that sounded like they might be connected to the Oenetrians was all she had to show for her time. There was nothing in the whole Umwelt that she hated more than coming back empty-handed. Empty-handed. That was what her mother had said, long ago. “Don’t you come back empty-handed.” It meant with nothing, with hands outstretched, fingers clutching air. It was the ultimate proof of your own worthlessness. But that was not Dolora. Rather than come home empty-handed she would get herself fired from the Bluebells, she would bite like a hunting dog and never let go, she would fight in the Rijk, she would be blown half to pieces, she would refuse the ersatz replacement that could fix her ruined knee, she would, she would, she would.

It was in this state that she found Dotti again.

Well, found is a strong word for what happened. She ran into Dotti Freeman at a sandwich stand on Canal Street near the wharfs while she was on her way to Krashnikol’s. She recognized the working girl from the bar. At first she hastily crossed the street to get away from her, but the shamus blood in her veins wouldn’t let her pass up the opportunity.

It was took all her guts to pretend that she’d been walking on the far side of the street the whole time. What if she saw me trying to duck her? This could give the whole game away. That would lead to a lot of uncomfortable questions. Why did you pretend to get away from me was only the first. Like an jacket with a loose thread, Dotti could pull and pull until Dolora’s whole fabric unraveled. Why are you here would inevitably become who are you and who do you work for?

She steeled herself and crossed the street. “Dotti!” she called. “I didn’t realize you lived around here!”

The dark Alkebulan girl hesitated. She was talking to a slender man in a slouch hat when Dolora yelled her name. “Oh,” she said. Her face belied confusion, but her voice was smooth. “Where did you pop out of… Myrtle?”

She remembered my name. Or rather, the assumed name Dolora was operating under. It had taken effort to recall it, but she remembered.

“This is Slim,” Dotti said, gesturing to the girlish looking man with the coffee-and-cream smile standing behind her. He tipped his hat. “Slim, this is Myrtle.”

“I live around the block,” Dolora said, answering Dotti’s question. “I didn’t realize you lived right over here.” A thought popped into her head: she could be working. This could be a date. There was a sudden lurch. You’ve put your foot in it. She did her best to control herself, not to wince. No, no, this couldn’t be a trick. What John would take his whore out for a sandwich first? That’d make no sense at all.

He could be her pimp.

That wasn’t so far-fetched an idea as the other.

Myrtle stuck out her hand. “Slim. That can’t be your real name, can it?”

“Solomon, actually,” said Dotti’s friend—pimp? He had a lazy look to him, with his suit loose-fitting and free. Rather than a tie, he wore a deep purple ascot with a silver stick-pin. “Nice to meet you, Myrtle.” They shook. His hand was rough. He was wearing a holster under his coat. The polished wooden handle of an Atla wardart stuck out just a little, like the hilt of a knife. But this knife was an Atla consortium strummer made to throw lead farther than a city block. Still, the wardart was small, personal, an up-close weapon. It had no accuracy at range. A pocket-book strummer, she thought, or a hit man’s.

Dotti skinned her teeth. It would be wrong to call it a smile. “What are you doing here, Myrtle? Its off hours.”

“Oh no,” Dolora blushed, “I wasn’t… I didn’t mean to… I’m new to the neighborhood, that’s all. I saw you and thought I might buy you lunch. I didn’t realize you had a friend in line.”

Slim (Solomon?) laughed. Like the carefree girls of landing, he wasn’t afraid to show his teeth. “Friend’s pushing it a little, I think. Ms. Freeman prefers to think of me as a business acquaintance.”

“Let me pay for both of you, then,” Dolora offered. Dotti goggled as Dolora peeled a bill from the roll of cash in her pocket.

Slim tipped his hat. “I’ll leave you ladies to it. Don’t want to be in the way. Ma’am. Dotti.”

“Just what you lookin for here?” Dotti hissed, suddenly filled with fire. Slim was turned back already, doing his best not to get involved.

Dolora took a step back. “I didn’t mean to insult you. You’re the only person I really know here.” She let her lip tremble, moistened her eyes with dew. “I was hoping I could buy your friendship, I guess.” She shook her head. “I’m sorry. Here. For the trouble.” She thrust the dollar bill at Dotti.

“Aw, come on. You don’t need to do that.”

“No?”

Dotti grabbed the bill and stuffed it in her blouse, but rolled her eyes. “Alright. Alright! Correis!”

They took their sandwiches in butcher-paper packages and walked to the water. They were silent for a while. Dolora kept her questions to herself. She couldn’t push her luck now, not given how how Dotti reacted. She would wait, like a trapdoor spider, until the girl was in just the right place, then she would spring.

“Sorry ‘bout that. Back there, I mean.” Dotti frowned. Sewage-slick water lapped at the old embankments. Slime poured from the old stones. The crash of distant foundries was cut by the occasional groan of a horn in the strait. The buzz of a slow luftleighner drifted out from the upper clouds where it was hiding. On its way to or from Liftfield Island. “I guess I’m just not used to people throwing money my way without wanting something.”

Dolora unwrapped her sandwich. She trimmed the rancid rind off the meat with her pocket knife. “I did want something, to be fair.” To ask you questions. But this Dotti was too afraid of transactional friendship for her to ask them now. She had to wait. Make nice.

“Not quite the same. I guess things can be different up here.”

“Up here?” Dolora flicked her knife back into her pocket.

“Cinder City. Not quite like the south. Some things are the same, but some different, too.” She fluttered her hand like a bird, trapped in a cage. “Can’t trust most folk. Maybe you’re different.” Dotti cocked her head, began unwrapping her sandwich. “Maybe you’re not.”

“The south?”

Dotti snorted, folded her dress beneath her, and sat on a lump of concrete that overlooked an empty quay. “You know. The Territories. Where they keep black folk, ogres, and orcs as slaves.”

Dolora didn’t know her history from a pack of gum, but she knew that wasn’t right. “They don’t, not anymore. There was a war.” Then she remembered Warden Cain and his penal plantation. “I mean… wasn’t there?”

“Oh sure, there was a war, and now they can’t call us slaves. But whether it’s on account of a law saying we can’t leave or a slip of paper saying the bank owns a farm, there’s no damn difference. You ever been to the south, honey?”

“No. The Continent, but not the Territories. Not even the treatylands.” She and Kit had talked about it though—the freedom of the south, the west, the great open world of the New Territories where there were no rules or laws flowing out of Cinder City. But if what Dotti said were true, there was no such place. Even in the south, in the west, the iron rule of the bank cast its long shadow.

Dotti snorted. “How you think this city eats? All its teeming minions? Sometimes, in the morning, when the sun comes through the window, its almost the same color as all those fields of barley, wheat, and corn stretching out to the horizon. And the meat? Where’d you think it comes from?” She gestured with her sandwich, thrusting it at Dolora. “Them handful of farms at the edge of the city don’t make all this, not for all these people. Even though we don’t get to vote. Didn’t know that either, didja?”

“That can’t be true,” Dolora countered, but not with much energy. She had the feeling it very well could be true.

Dotti snorted through her sandwich. “Oh, sure, they say we do, but the polls are a hundred miles apart, and you have to pay to get in. What’s a poor farmer going to pay to choose your big Stadtprasident here? I thought it was different in the City, but it ain’t. It’s not, I mean. There’s chains everywhere. The only thing that’s different is what they look like.” She fell silent.

The city across the water was a distant ghost. The streetwagons moving through the hills, the autowagons zipping and glinting in the light, they were nothing more than shapes beyond the waves. Ferries crowded the Silver City piers. Dead ahead, Parliament Island reared out of the ocean, some titanic beast turned to stone in its death throes, then covered over with skytowers. Chains everywhere. Here in Cinder City, there were chains of steel, of glass, of paper. There were all kinds of chains waiting to scoop you up and lock tight around your ankle, your wrist, your waist. Is the whole world a world of chains?

“I fought in the Aonrijk to help people be free,” Dolora said after a long time. Her voice was small.

Dotti shot back fast as a quickdraw six-string. “No you didn’t. You tell yourself that. They tell you that too. But it ain’t the truth. You fought to keep Cinder City on top, and to steal the Aonrijk’s best people. I know how it is. You think we don’t know ‘cause we live on Iron Island?” She laughed, and the laugh was mean. A slim arm circled Dolora’s shoulders. It drew a shiver from her as Dotti pointed to Parliament Island. “Who you think’s in those towers? Them very elves that shot and gassed all those folks are up there now, running things. They think the same way those big bastards in the parliament do, you just too blind now to see it. You can’t bear to think that the shit you saw in Aon is the same as the shit back home. How many people you Cinder City folk stomped out? How many Alkebulans like me you paid to have transported to the Territories?

“Hell, that’s a funny word, ain’t it? Transported. Sounds like we had a luxury cruise.” She shook her head. “Nah, they got you twisted up, sister. All knots inside. All wrong.” She let her hand drop. Dolora could see the fine hairs on her arm, the little puckers of gooseflesh. She felt the tension go out of Dotti all at once. Ms. Freeman’s frame drooped, like a marionette with its strings cut. Her eyes were tired. Bone tired. “Sorry, Myrtle. I guess you didn’t know what you was buying when you got me lunch.”

“No,” Dolora said slowly, “but I’m not sad I bought it.” And the funny thing was, she meant it.

Dotti laughed. “You ain’t half bad, doughboy.”

 

Miles had nothing to say. Dolora had nothing to reply. They sat in the back of Salafar’s having coffee and staring at each other. The Commissioner? Dead end. Iron Island? Too early to tell.

“I’m getting my roots in. It’s only been a few days!”

Miles wasn’t impressed. “Most murderers that aren’t solved by now are never solved. You know that. How many cases go cold in this city?”

“We have leads.” Dolora folded her arms. “We have leads!”

“Where are they, Dolora?”

She stuck her chin out. “The party. The Kirks. You haven’t checked them out yet, have you? Even though I found those Longstreet posters in Varnag’s house.”

He eased off. “Alright. Alright! But it’s costing us money to keep you out there on the island, and you could be doing other work here. Or, hell, even if you went back to the foundry and asked around again. You know doubling back on your tracks can always do some good.”

“Yes. And I will. Once I’m sure I can’t get anywhere with Uncle Niel. But I’m close, Miles. I’m close!” A pause. “Did you tell Kit?”

“I told her. She wants to throttle you. Can’t say I blame her.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Dolora shook her head. “Who doesn’t, these days?”

 

She didn’t go straight home when she got off the ferry. She should have. Iron Island was no place to be out and about at night. You could get hurt. People did, every night. Run down by a horse-drawn wagon, or just beaten to a pulp by some ogre enforcer. It wasn’t unheard of. But she wasn’t ready to go back to that grim apartment block and hide. Hell, it was worse than her own apartment, and that was grim. She’d rather spent the night in some flophouse over in the Dragons, roaches and all. At least they were friendly roaches who spoke the language. The Orcland roaches were big as rats, and the rats were big as cats.

Instead, she found herself walking toward the Cork and Barrel. This was, apparently, the name of the bar where she’d met Dotti what seemed like a year ago. It was only the other day, she reminded herself. She liked Dotti Freeman. Dotti didn’t mince words, didn’t try to fit in, said what she was thinking and wasn’t afraid to cut you if felt it was warranted. There had been a softness underneath all that, one that sometimes rose to the surface, but it was restrained. It was controlled. You’d never see it unless Dotti wanted you to. Maybe she’ll be working tonight, Dolora thought. Then, and if she is, then what? You’re going to go watch her at work again? How much more pathetic can you be, Spade?

Dotti wouldn’t like it if Dolora showed up. Her “friend” Slim might not like it either. But then, the Cork and Barrel was a public fucking place, and Dolora could drink there if she wanted to.

She wanted to.

Quite aside from Dotti Freeman, Iron Island, Hadrada Varnag, and Miles Kowalski, Dolora needed a fucking drink.

On her way over, through the darkened streets, she felt like a criminal. The glare of red ersatz eyes flashed in the alleys. Giantsblood addicts, the sirenlost, they were everywhere. She was one of them. Maybe she didn’t pour the burning blood of the Umwelt in her veins, but she drank something that was only one step away. She wasn’t slumped in some stranger’s house paying through the nose to Uncle Niel Marcone, but she would be slumped on her own cot in that Orcland apartment pretty soon, sleeping off the gin.

And the thought of Dotti Freeman was haunting her. She was strong, and sad, and angry for good reason. She’d be a good contact. It’s nothing more than that, you sap, she’d be great for this investigation. And she sounded like she needed a real friend. Not a friend like Slim or the others. She said everywhere was full of chains, but she could find an escape from the chains in someone like me. That was a lie, too, and Dolora knew it. Dotti didn’t even know who she was. Dotti thought she was some girl named Myrtle and so did everyone else on Iron Island. She wasn’t freedom from chains, she was only another kind.

Besides, wasn’t it betraying Kit to think so much about Dotti?

That was what really put the hurt on, the thing that really stuck in her heart: the guilt of thinking so much about some whore she’d spent an afternoon with while her Kit was off in Silver City wondering what the fuck had happened to Dolora Spade. And what if she found Dotti, and Dotti didn’t want to talk to her? What if she came into the Cork and Barrel and Dotti said just what the fuck are you doing here now, you don’t got somewhere else to be? You don’t got a life of your own to live? The only thing you know how to do is come and suck the life outta Dotti Freeman?

Dotti wasn’t there. Thank Correis and the Fabricators for that! She could get good and drunk and not worry about being judged. But was she really happy Dotti wasn’t anywhere to be seen in that dark hole of a bar? No, of course she was, yet she was also disappointed. Relief and disappointment in equal measures. A strange cocktail. Oh well, she could always drown it in gin.

So she drank. And she drank. This wasn’t a strange experience for her. The drinking came as naturally as it always had. This is what it had been like before the war, just up to the point where the Blues shitcanned her. Can’t get justice? Then get drunk. That was the Spade motto. Oh Fabricators, am I back here again? She knew this road. She knew every gas lamp and every gouge in every curb on it.

Somewhere before she was totally blotto, she stopped. Gotta get myself under control. I’m here to do a job. This is too much. Too many drunken nights too quickly. She’d thought, before, that once she had a job to sink her teeth into she wouldn’t have so much damn booze. But the booze tasted good with the bidi in her teeth. It tasted good with the shitty steak sandwich she ordered from the kitchen before it closed. It tasted good between cups of coffee and with the smell of paraffin oil in her nostrils. Hell, it just tasted good.

But she had to stop. She had to put the cork back in the barrel, ha ha. She couldn’t let herself get like this. She would lose everything if she did. Not just Kit. Kowalski, the agency, the case, and eventually herself, washed down the gutter on a tide of cheap gin and high-test spirits.

So she did. She corked the barrel. She stopped, swayed out of there, and started walking home.

That’s when she saw Dotti.

At first she didn’t think it was Dotti, and then she thought it was, and then she thought she must be imagining because she’d had her on her mind so much lately. It was the same skimpy beaded dress Dotti had been wearing that afternoon. The red beads were droplets of blood in the moonlight. The same damn baby blue slip she’d had on, too, just peeking out under the hem. Except now it was in an alley and it was all in disarray.

There was a fella on top of her, struggling, his pale white ass swaying against the brick. Was it Dotti? Does it matter? Dolora’s drunken brain lurched and her body struggled to obey. Her bad knee twisted as she heaved herself forward. She drew her six-string from its holster. “Hey! Hey mister!” she bawled.

The figure reared up. A hard face came into the moonlight. A face fuzzed with drink and pleasure, wearing a puffy mustache at the lip and thick eyebrows over dark sockets. It was Dotti Freeman under there. She was a puddle, her face bruises from the top to the bottom. The fella had a belt in one hand, wrapped tight around his knuckles, like a father does for a son who just won’t listen. But Dolora Spade already had her fingers on the trigger. “See this, mister?” she asked. Her voice didn’t slur. Her hand didn’t waver. She was a soldier again, the little fragments of grenade clicking against her bone. She wasn’t even a person. She was ersatz, replacement, machine. “This is a Sage & Hoenecker Firedrake. It’s plugged plenty of Aons, mages and all. It can plug you. Unless you get your pants on and get out of here.”

This prompted a grunt and a sneer. “Little missy, you don’t wanna fuck with me tonight.” The man, the man who’d hurt Dotti, opened his other hand. There was a little tin shield in it. “Get it?”

“I’ll clip you all the same. Those Sage & Hoenecker guys—they know how to make a pistol.” She thumbed the hammer back for effect. When the creep started moving toward her, she jerked the strummer to one side and blew a shot past his ear. The crack of the strummer was like the lightning of the old strompistoles. The Blue, ‘cause he was a Blue, off duty, just using his free time to beat whores, clutched his trousers.

“Fabricators!” he moaned. Dolora smelt piss and cordite.

“Run,” she ordered.

The creep ran.

Dotti was gathering herself now, getting up, and she was all fury. As the Blue ran, Dotti spit at him. “You’re fucked! You hear me, mister? Fucked! Uncle Niel gonna hear about this! Solomon Slim gonna hear about this! You think you can just run and hide in your Watch House? You’re dead! You’re dead!”

Dolora rushed forward and threw an arm around Dotti as she tottered back. “Hey, hey, you’re safe now. You’re safe.”

“All kinds of chains,” Dotti murmured.

“You’re safe.”

Uncle Niel, Dolora thought. She didn’t want to. She tried not to. She tried hard to be in the moment, to feel Dotti melting in her hands, to bring her some comfort. She wasn’t hurt as bad as she’d looked, but it wasn’t good either. Dolora wanted to be there with her. But her mind was already racing away on its own. Niel Marcone and Solomon Slim. Looks like we’re getting somewhere after all.

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