FOUNDRYSONG Chapter 7: Giantsblood

The Hall of Records was a regular stop for any dedicated shamus. When she was on the watch, Dolora had been able to get away with sending patrol officers to pick up her research from Records. All she had needed to do was put in a parly call, give the watch house number, and tell the clerk what she needed. The same courtesy was not afforded the private shamus. Like Miles, she had to ride the whole way in streetwagons and trollies until at last she was disgorged with a hoard of other passengers at the terminal.

The actual building was magnificent, even if she hated the class of privileged, sneery clerks and attendants who worked there. She winced crossing the street toward. A hitch in the knee, again, which she rubbed as she went.

The Hall of Records was a great hangar of brick, iron, glass, and copper. It was a temple to the city government, complete with marble floors and wrought iron statues depicting the Revelationist virtues. Its crown was lined with representations of the Fabricators. What did Sacramentalists think of that when they came into this enormous structure, this church of state? Watched over by arch-demons.

The knee was acting up even more than usual, which meant there was a change in the air. She limped to the main desk and started breaking her head with the clerk. “No, I need everything on Cinder City Consolidated and the Bank Mobilier. Yes, all their contracts. City or not. I know it’s a lot. Yes, I know. I want anything you have on John MacTavish, too. He’s the Chief Officer at CCCG&S. And I’ll take reading room three. For the day. Thanks. Bring it up when you got it. Oh, and send me whatever you can find on Aonrijk patriations. Elves being brought in under the city or territories government and given high-level contracting jobs.” The clerk looked just about ready to shit. She put two bits down on the counter to make her point and waited for the key.

This was the glamorous life of a shamus. Cooped up in a stifling wood panelled room at the Hall of Records for the entire morning and most of the afternoon and maybe the next day sorting through an enormous pile of records was not what her mother would have called “a well-heeled position.” Her mom had wanted her married and a happy housewife by now. That was a riot.

The room overlooked the streetwagon tracks and Silver City Station, where the big eisenbahn lokomotives left from. The rails went due north to Woodland, through Centrum and not far from the Penitentiary. Dolora wondered if you could stand on them and see all the way to the edge of the peninsula, where the Giant Territories began. Probably not. Always some damn thing in the way.

She started with her own pet cause, that of Mr. MacTavish. Miles would have chastised her for wasting her time on a passion project, but he wasn’t there. She clamped on her bidi and smoked the room into a gray fog reading motions on the Parliament floor, bills, and even newspaper clippings about the bastard. Most of it was from long ago. Back in Dolora’s Bluebell days. About an hour in, she found a curious article entitled IRON ISLAND MP WANTS DEMOLITION which she read voracious.

John MacTavish, the Parliamentarian representing all of Foundrytown, has sponsored a bill on the Parliament floor this week indicating much of Orcland should be marked for demolition by the city. His bill proposes to pay off the recalcitrant inhabitants by sending them to live in Shipston or north of the Alstat on a government wage, to be extinguished after two years. And what’s the reason behind it? Well, expansion of jobs on the whole island, or says this slick-talking Aeren lad. He proposes to establish an adjunct to the Orcland Fulminating Power Plant, improve supply and distribution, and lay underground copper wiring throughout the city to ensure a constant power flow. This suggestion was taken well by the Cinder City Consolidated lobby, which hopes to secure the contract to maintain the plant while leaving the city with its construction costs…

Fuck. That wasn’t nothing. That wasn’t what she’d expected to find. She thought it would turn out to be nothing, a waste of time, just one of a thousand dead-end roads that sprang up from every investigation. But it wasn’t nothing. It was worth following up. Cinder City Consolidated was involved in all this somehow, or else there were some truly incredible coincidences at work.

She opened a window, waved out the smoke, and went to go get something to eat. She came back with an overpriced downtown sandwich then spent twenty minutes rearranging the room. She moved the ottoman to put her feet up, adjusted the bookshelves into a more pleasing configuration, and adjusted the blinds until they were just right. Only then did she get started on the huge stack of folders and papers that comprised the various Cinder City Consolidated files. They clerk had only brought up the last year’s worth of filings. “Volume,” he explained tersely, “is an issue. You can call down when you finish these.” Implying she would never make it through them.

Ha! They didn’t know Dolora Spade.

Twerp.

She sneered at him in apostrophe as she tore into the stack. Where was it? Where was it? Somewhere in here was the link, the connection. There were all kinds of files in all kinds of jackets: beige, red, goldenrod, blue. There had to be one in here that linked MacTavish - no, the company - the crime. Where the hell was it?

Here, a bid for a new steam line to the Teardrops. No. Here: a contract with the city to ship in hundreds of gallons of giantsblood to fuel the power plant. No, not that either.

What’s this? Another folder, this one light blue. Something called the Business Development Council, partially backed by the CCCG&S. She flipped through it. MacTavish was right there on the first page signing for Cinder City Consolidated as one of the founding members. What did this council do? She flipped a few pages in, past the other founding consortia. Oh Correis.

Right there, printed across the top of the page in block letters: WHEREAS we, the Cinder City Business Development Council, desire to put ourselves at the disposal of Cinder City and provide capital for the improvement of this city, we hereby register CREDIT MOBILIER as a Banking Consotrium to… She flipped to the end of the document. What year was this consortium formed? 5725, the same year the Territories entered the War of the Triple Alliance. Four years ago. Long before Longstreet.

The damn thing was a list of all the notables and important consortia of the city and the territories. The Cinder City Development Council.

Credit Mobilier.

She went through the rest, just to be thorough. It bore up under scrutiny. Everything was perfectly legal. Signed, countersigned, stamped, sealed, and all. It was all done before a state registrar, prepared by a small legion of lawyers (who underwrote the documents). Everything was done according to form. Here were the Credit Mobilier bylaws.

So, the bank is doing something sinister. But what? That wouldn’t be here. The bank’s plans would only be known to its constituent membership. They didn’t have to file a public prospectus of their long-term goals. It would be easiest, said the oldest and most angry part of her, to go straight to the source. Forget trying to put together a careful picture using only the fragments we can glean from the public record.

We can break into the Orcland plant and see what MacTavish keeps in his damn office. She sighed and sat back, stubbed out her bidi, took a bite of the by-now soggy sandwich. The clock on the bookshelf said one forty-five.

She huffed and picked up the one-way parly to the clerks to let them know she was done. Someone would be up to clean up her mess in a little while. The clerk didn’t sound thrilled. Unlike Miles, she didn’t have anywhere she could hide important files, so she committed everything to memory and her notebook as fast as she could scribble.

If she hurried, she could make it back to the Alstat by 2:30 and meet Miles for coffee and a debrief. It would be good to get this out of her head and into the world. It had happened too often before that a great idea turned to lead when she tried to speak it aloud. There was a certain power to speech; the act itself, that is. It could make something real or deny its reality merely by entering the world. That was the first test: does Miles buy it? If she couldn’t convince her stoic, slow-thinking, hunch-shouldered partner she didn’t stand a chance trying to get it past a prosecutor or a jury. Although, this case would never get that far. You didn’t put John MacTavish in front of a judge, and you certainly didn’t do that to people like Henry Juncker.

She went through the list of consortia. Juncker Autoworks and the Juncker Steam Boiler manufactory. Woodward Steel. Cinder City Consolidated. Beyerfarben. ACE Aeronautics. There were so many huge consortia on the list, it was daunting. How will we bring them to justice?

No, no. Justice was a question for after the thing was solved. She knew the players. Now she had to understand the game.

The sun was shining when she emerged from the gargantuan building. She threw out the sandwich on her way through the foyer. I can find something else down town before I head back. If I’m quick. The big clock in the foyer warned her that time was growing short. She briefly considered calling Miles from the lobby parly, but decided to save the nickel and just run to the tram.

It was ill luck or bad timing that, just as she reached the platform across the street from the Hall, the streetwagon back to the Alstat took off. It would be another fifteen or twenty minutes before the D line trolly-and-streetwagon would return. She spit and lit another bidi, posting up under the awning of the station. She half-lidded her eyes and concentrated on the pain in her leg. It had developed a new tenor lately, a sort of horrific grinding that brought Dr. Horn’s incessant warnings to mind. She could feel the ruined grenade fragments grinding against one another. She sucked in air, then bidi smoke, then spit again. Damn the thing.

When she opened her eyes, it wasn’t to the next D-line trolly. It was to find someone staring at her from across the platform. The mope was a tall, lean man with graying hair. He wore a patrolman’s cap and the brass-buttoned uniform of a Bluebell. The uniform made anyone look impressive. The big shield, the leather straps, the pistol, the truncheon, the gloves… Dolora missed wearing it. It had made her feel powerful. The suit wasn’t the same. When you wore the double-breasted Bluebell uniform it was like wearing armor. People knew two things: to treat you with respect, and to fear you.

It was apparent in the way the thin crowd parted for the Blue coming across the platform. Dolora straightened up. She had a nagging feeling that she’d seen this Blue before. It was hard to place him, but her memory raced to put a name to the face.

She didn’t need to. Within a few moments, the man was standing opposite her. She could read his name on his badge. Sergeant Krasky.

Krasky! But he didn’t look like someone who would try to cold-cock Miles. The Blue couldn’t be more than two hundred pounds, wet. “Shamus Spade!” Krasky said with a smile as he approached. “I almost didn’t see you there.” Didn’t he? He was staring.

“Sergeant,” she replied vaguely.

He grinned. “You likely don’t remember me from your time on the Island. But I was at the same Watch House for a while. Heard you fought in the War. Good on you!” He pointed at her knee. “Thank you for your service, shamus.”

“Not a shamus anymore. I’m sure you heard.”

He bobbed his head. “I did at that. Terribly sorry to hear it. But listen, I had a run-in with your partner, Mr. Kowalski, and I just wanted to apologize for my behavior. I thought he was someone else and I really got my clock cleaned. He’s no pushover!”

“No, he’s not.” What does he want? Of all the Blues she’d known on the force, there were precious few she could imagine getting the snot beaten out of them by an orc who would come and apologize for starting the fight.

Krasky put his thumbs in his belt. “Well, I thought I could make it up to you. To both of you, that is. See, I happened to be downtown on some work of my own, and there’s a few people who you two could stand to talk to.” He leaned in closer. He smelled of aftershave and pomade. “I just left them, actually. They were near the foundry on the night of the murder, and they have plenty to say on the subject.” He took a few steps away, waved for her to follow.

Dolora looked up the tracks, as if to confirm to herself that there were no D-line streetwagons on the way. She thrust forward her bad leg and, with hitching steps, followed Krasky. “Who are these people?” she asked.

“Easier to show you than explain,” he said. “Here, we can cut through this way and get to One Cinder Plaza faster.”

One Cinder Plaza. The Stadprasident’s complex. Krasky’s involved with the Kirks. She wondered how many sides there were to this damn conspiracy. Could it be that the Kirks were only one factor in a complex web of crime and graft? Krasky led her into a narrow alley between two major streets. Silver City towers rose up on either side.

“Damn. Damn!” he hissed, and turned to look behind her?

Dolora frowned. “What?”

He drew his truncheon. “They followed us.”

She whirled.

There was no-one there.

Before she could turn back, Krasky’s long-fingered hand was wrapped around her mouth. His face was pushed up to the side of her head. Her nostrils filled with the stink of his hair product: wax and petroleum jelly crawling up her nose. His voice had changed. No longer everybody’s favorite watchman, it was low and brutal. It throbbed with anger. “This is what you get when you meddle in someone else’s business, you dumb cunt.”

Then his face was gone, but she heard the whistle of the truncheon as it fell. She started reaching for her pistol, but THWACK! It crashed onto her bad knee. Her mind exploded with fire. Her leg burned. She felt the bones grating, shredding the muscle of her knee and thigh. She couldn’t help but let out an explosive shriek. The thought of the pistol was driven from her. It was all she could do to remain standing when the next blow fell. At the third strike, she felt the leg give out. She crumpled onto the ground.

“This is bigger than you, you dumb orc-fucker,” Krasky said, delivering a kick to her head. “And its bigger than your big-boy partner. You wanna end up like poor Mr. Varnag? Keep it up. There’s a hammer in your future.”

 

Dolora didn’t make it to the meeting. Nor did she show up at the office afterwards. Miles called her apartment, but the parly rang and rang with no answer. He had her apartment key, but he was loathe to use it. It felt like (it was!) an intrusion. He kept one in case either of them were ever picked up by the Blues or offed by a client or a target. She had a copy of his key, too, but neither of them had ever used theirs before. They had come up with the idea a year and a half ago when they first formed the agency.

When the time had come and gone, the afternoon was wearing on, and she’d still made no appearance nor answered her parly, Miles decided to make use of the key. He walked over to her building, shouldered his way into the apartment, and called out for her. “D? D are you in here? Dolora?”

He swept through the apartment and quickly determined it was empty. Where was the last place Dolora was meant to be before the meeting? The Hall of Records. That was where Miles had seen his tail for the first time. Could it be that the ersatzmenn got her? It was hard to picture anyone getting the jump on Dolora.

There were no quick jaunts into Silver City, but he was getting worried. He jotted a note for her and left it on a table, then bundled himself up and took a streetwagon downtown. It was warm as he blew through Shipston. He tried willing the carriage to move faster, but it proceeded ahead at its steady, work-a-day rate, clicking along on the elevated rails.

It wasn’t a bad commute—down to twenty minutes, he caught all the right trollies and made every interchange in good time. When he arrived at the Hall of Records he went through and spread some money to his favorite clerks. Yes, she’d been there. No, she wasn’t there now. Yes, she left a while back. She was looking at these files. She left her room a mess. You know her? Tell her to clean up after herself.

The more time passed, the more anxious he became. Tension crawled along his flesh like arcs of lightning. He shifted from one foot to the other. At some point, though he didn’t remember doing it, he lit a cigar and started chewing it to frayed ribbons. “Well, what damn time did she blow out of here?”

Round two.

Well, it was now four, and the sun was hanging low and bloated in the sky, Luftleighners were coming in for the night, crowding around the towertops of Silver City. Blazing red sunlight glinted from their silvered gas bags. Lighters zipped between them as the rich and powerful unloaded in the late afternoon sky. Miles ground his teeth and tapped his tusks.

He needed to find her. This was no ordinary case. The tail had been one thing, the streetwagon “accident” quite another. If Hadrada’s killers were as motivated as he thought, they might have made sure Dolora took the last fall to the Big Sleep. He couldn’t stop imagining her body washed up in the channel, or discovered hanging from a gaslamp in the Alstat, or worse. They might make it look like it something other than assassination, the way they’d tried to do with him. Maybe she’d turn up tomorrow, mangled between the wheels of some autotruck, or having “fallen” onto eisenbahn tracks, sliced to bloody strips by the passage of a lokomotive.

People were dying. People died every day in Cinder City, but Miles was fairly confident they were usually murdered by consortia, cartels, or politicians. I’ll find you, Dolora. Stay alive. Fight ‘em! I’ll find you!

She was a tough broad, that D. She’d survived worse than a little ersatz. He didn’t know the full story of her service in the war, but he knew it was grim. The closest Miles had ever seen of the war were the troop ships unloading the dead and wounded in Shipston harbor. These had come every month until the end of the war. He hadn’t really known Dolora then. It was possible that he’d watched her hobble from the deck of some churning djinn-driven sea-crosser and not even realized it.

The idea of going to the Continent terrified him. Ships, luftlighters, and the big luftleighners that did had to pass through the Closure, that horrific eye of magical force the Cinder City fathers had opened to separate the New Territories from her long-time Ae Viran masters.

There was no time for him to idle over this flim-flam. He had to get his feelers out. He put in a dime on the Hall of Records lobby parley, but couldn’t raise Kit. He had to look through his own little datebook to find the number for Dotti Freeman where Dolora had scribbled it down. She hadn’t seen Dolora either. They commisserated over her hot-headedness, and then Dotti said, “I’ll see if anyone else knows where she is. You’d better find her, and quick, Mr. Kowalski. She’s gotten herself in with more dangerous people than I can count.”

“That’s Dolora,” he agreed.

He swung by Kit’s apartment building, but she didn’t answer the buzzer. Probably out at some social function. Kit Winter was a rising star. He was beginning to fear that his star, tied to Dolora’s, was falling. Your girl is missing, he sighed into the dead and voiceless intercom.

It’s those damn ersatzmenn. They’re g-men without a doubt. This had to connect up to the Kirks. He tried to think through where they would take her, if she were still alive. If the Stadtprasident is behind this… but they wouldn’t go to the Bluebell Commission, or City Lockup, or the Pen. They might be in on the conspiracy (probably where, considering the way Hardin had acted the last time Miles went to his office), but he just couldn’t see them using ersatzmenn for their dirty work. That had to come straight from the top. From the prasident himself.

The more Miles held this thing up to the light and examined them, the less the events of the past few weeks seemed like a coherent scheme and the more they appeared to be a complex prism of fractured and disparate motives. How many interests were at work here? The Blues and the Stadtprasident might very well be in opposition to one another. This wasn’t a straight line, but a web, a sticky and dangerous net of influence that had tangled them up in every direction. Being as they were in the middle of it, it was difficult to get a sense of its shape and scope. Every time he thought he had a handle, something changed and he realized that nothing was as it seemed.

What had Dolora found in the records? Where had she gone?

One Cinder Plaza wasn’t far. Miles rolled up his sleeves, pushed back his tie, and started walking there with real determination. He blew across the sidewalks, shoving people aside. He was grumbling to himself under his breath. He couldn’t help it. He spat out his cigar in a wire trashcan as he passed.

The Stadtprasident’s offices were a huge tower in downtown Silver City. The plaza was a huge rotary of trollies and streetwagons, surmounted by Cinder Central Station and overlooking the channel to Parliament Island. Across the water, the glass towers of Parliament Island and the sweep of the Parliament dome perched atop the precipitous slopes of a green mountain. The ferries were still running, but Miles had no reason to cross the water. Let the Parliament hang. His goal was right here, in the plaza.

The marble entrance of the One Cinder tower confirmed his suspicions. Perched all along that enormous flight of stairs were ersatz of various age and prosthesis. These lost souls made up a veritable flock. “Where is she?” he shouted as he approached. He flexed his limbs, rolled his shoulders, cracked his knuckles. His suspenders strained against his gut. “Where is she? I know you have her!”

Three of the ersatzenn peeled off from the group to move toward him. They were led by a woman with a djinn-stone eye and a clacking piston-pumped legs. “Who are you looking for?” she asked in an empty, metallic voice.

“You know damn well,” Miles barked. “Is she up there? Or did you take her somewhere else?”

“Mr. Kowalski,” the woman said quietly, “you are here out of your element.” Her voice rang like a dull chime.

One of the ersatzmenn at her flank was the very mope who Miles had tackled in Woodland. Miles gave him a nod. “I already know your friend. Who are you?”

“We don’t want to hurt you, Mr. Kowalski,” the big ersatzmann growled.

Miles sneered. “Oh. I see. You think because there are more of you—“ Miles was in the midst of a red rage. He could barely contain himself. What did it matter that there were at least twenty ersatz souls crouching or leaning or sitting on the steps? It made no difference that he was standing in front of the Stadtprasident’s office, that the Blues could descend on him at any moment, that he was probably breaking at least three NTA laws and could even be tried before Parliament for an assault on the government. He was going to get Dolora back before these people killed her. Before they made her a wet red stain like they had to Hadrada Varnag and Tyrsis Trist.

“There are quite a bit more of us, Mr. Kowalski,” the woman said. “You have to leave. You don’t understand what you’re involved with. Rest assured, we will try to get Ms. Spade back to you.”

Miles was tired of being told he didn’t know what was going on. Georn burn you, I already know I don’t know enough!

His fist connected with the woman. He had half thought she would spring back on those ersatz legs of hers and avoid the blow. Instead, she went down like a sack of flour. Then the others were on him, grabbing and twisting at his arms. “Don’t fight it, Mr. Kowalski. Don’t fight it.”

He fought.

 

When Dolora awoke, she had no idea where she was. The last thing she remembered was the blinding agony of Sergeant Krasky wailing on her leg. She expected pain, but found only a world of soft cotton. She was wrapped up somewhere, held in place, cradled by something warm, and smooth, and soothing. It was like drowning in a sea of gauze. She missed the pain. She wanted to hurt. After all this time, it had become part of her. Not a day had gone by, not an hour, when she hadn’t been plagued by the searing ache of her knee and the shards of the Aonic grenade lodged there. Waking or sleeping, it didn’t matter. She was the pain and the pain was her. Now, to be without it, she found herself losing definition. She was blurring around the edges and bleeding into the formless, eiderdown void.

Do I exist without it?

Her head felt gauzy, too. What was going on? She was disconnected. From her body, from her life, from her memory, from everything. She was like a parly-horn that had been pulled out of the wall. Without the connections, what was she?

What happened to me?

She remembered being led into ambush by Krasky. Then something else… An autowagon? A police wagon. Blue sides, painted like the sky. Krasky had propped her up in the seat and driven her… where? She couldn’t even fight back. Every time she had started to come around there was a wap!, that sharp mind-blanking pain of the bludgeon striking her knee. She had tried to marshal her strength, to ball her fists, to do anything. Once, she had nearly gotten her hand to her strummer only to realize it had been taken from the holster under her arm.

Krasky had a good laugh about that. “You think I’m a sap, don’t you?”

“No,” she mumbled.

Wap! he replied, sending her spiraling again into the blank nothingness of outrageous pain.

There was something else, too. A gentle rocking in the wagon, though the wheels were no longer turning. Then darkness. A cell? She didn’t remember eating or drinking anything, but that was meaningless. The past (hours, days?) were a gulf, a void pierced by a handful of brilliant lights that represented the few memories she’d managed to form. The smell of motor oil. The drip of water. The sound of waves. The churn of a boatscrew and a djinn-driven engine. And then…

Here.

Except where is here?

She opened her eyes. Or rather, she tried. Closed, open, both revealed total darkness. She brought her hands up to her face to confirm it. She knew her arms were moving, but they felt like they were floating away from her. She tried to bring them back under control, to tether them to the tender flesh of her body. Her arms were luftleighners, desperate to break their moorings and fly off into the dark of the eternal night that now enfolded her.

I must be drugged.

Eventually she got the heels of her palms into her eyes and rubbed. There was some feeling, though it was little more than contact. Distant, as far away as a tiny little man on the ground when you were high overhead in a lighter, cooking a grenade to drop on him.

A few moments later, she could make out a handful of faint outlines. There was light, but not much. Moonlight?

She squinted. A radiator. Cells didn’t have radiators… did they? She could be anywhere by now. On Iron Island, at the Pen, or even at the Levanstone Naval Base just off the southern tip of Parliament Island. Does Cinder City Consolidated have me? Does the Cinder City Development Board? Confused visions of tightly-printed contracts and sinister sheafs of goldenrod paper fluttered at the edge of her consciousness like flames licking the first few briquettes of coal.

The consortia. It wasn’t the Stadprasident like Miles thought. It was the consortia! It was John MacTavish and his whole circle of cronies, grifters, and politicos.

Miles. Her mind ricocheted between thoughts, ungrounded. She needed to contact Miles and tell him what she’d found. If they snuffed her now, she would never be able to help him solve the Varnag murder. It had something to do with Credit Mobilier and the Cinder City Development Council. There was no telling who else was wrapped up in all this. It could go as high as Commissioner Wilder. It could go higher. They were on the cusp of something. It was big, bigger than she’d imagined when they took the job. Miles had been the one who kept saying it could go higher and higher. Hadn’t he searched the Kirk offices for evidence? Hadn’t he found proof of electioneering? I’m not sure of anything anymore.

Why did she think it had something to do with giantsblood?

The silvered edge of the nail-bitten moon leered like a dead giant’s grin. She was in a bed. This was no cell. Her body was still drifting in some ether, far away, but her eyes at least responded. They roved over the dark room and took its measure. It was larger than she expected. Was that a fern growing in a pot in the far corner? A wooden door stood partially ajar, open to a hall or corridor beyond. Krasky must trust I’m too wounded to move.

She tried. That same strange sensation flowed through her as she swung her legs around the edge of the bed. It was a bed! She was lying in a tangle of covers. She could hear her knee grating through her bones, the sound conducted up like fulminating power from the distant power plant through the copper. It should hurt. Instead, it was merely an awareness. There was no sensation of pain or discomfort, just the knowledge of the vibration.

Other images swirled out of her mind as she tried to take her feet. Krasky dumping her at the front door of her apartment building while she was still delirious with pain. She couldn’t be sure how much later that was, how many days or hours after the kidnapping (that’s what it was) she was set free. There was a vague memory of the stairs, of being unable to keep her feet, of… Could it be Dotti Freeman and Miles Kowalski rushing down to meet her? That didn’t make sense. Confused, I’m all confused.

The light overhead strobed on with a growling hum, throwing the room into sharp relief. Dolora twisted on her knees and collapsed to the ground. She slid out of the bed like a fish, the cold rail gliding by the small of her back, her knees then head slamming into the hard tile. The light in the corridor came on as well. Another outage, she thought.

The sound of her fall brought running feet down the hall.

Dr. Horn came rushing into the room. The Sanitorium. She didn’t remember coming here, but that’s where she must be. “Ah! She’s awake! And she’s fallen out of bed. Mr. Kowalski, please, if you could give me some assistance. I’m afraid her medication makes her quite… pliable.” She could feel his little elvish fingers pressing against her flesh, trying to prevent her from sliding any further onto the floor.

The light from the hall was blotted out. Dolora felt a sudden fear she couldn’t account for, as though the dark shape that swelled in the doorway was MacTavish himself. For a brief moment she imagined what it must have been like for Marguerite before MacTavish broke her neck. Then, the figure resolved and she saw it was Miles, hunching as always, a look of concern written on his big oafish face. He hurried over to her and she relaxed into his huge orcish hands as he and Horn levered her back into her sickbed.

“What… what happened?” she croaked. Her mouth tasted of linen, and she could smell something sharp and unpleasant under the odor of baking powder.

Miles grumbled, “Dotti found you in your building. We were looking for you.”

“Dotti…?” Dolora tried to raise herself on one elbow.

A soft, feminine voice came to her from the directin of the door. “Now we both got marks from Blues to our credit, darlin’.”

Dotti Freeman! “I… It was Krasky!”

“You said,” Miles said gently, patting her arm. “When you were under.”

“Whoever it was, “ Dr. Horn said, pushing Miles back a bit and interrupting himself. “Give her some air! Whoever it was, they did a real number on your knee. And your Mr. Kowalski is pretty banged up too.”

“Ersatzmenn, like I said, Doc,” Miles said, lowering himself gingerly into a seat. Dolora tentatively sat up while little Doc Horn fluffed up a pillow behind her. Dotti came into the room too, to stand by the window. The grinning moon rode high behind her shoulder. “One Cinder Plaza is swarming with them.” Now, to Dolora, he confided, “I think they’re all in the employ of the Stadtprasident.”

“That much I can confirm,” Horn said. “The Stadtprasident is working with us.” At the sharp looks from Dolora and Miles, the little doctor held up his hands. “I mean the Sanitorium! He’s hiring these poor ersatz souls when no one else will. To serve as a sort of adjunct security corps. His man, Adelaide, comes to watch over them. Bring them food. Help them get on their feet, take them into the church, even give them confession.”

“He’s going to take over the city,” Miles growled.

Dolora lay back and closed her eyes. She wanted to shut it all out. Everything: the case, the Stadtprasident, Miles, the entire course of her life that had led to this point. “He’s not going to take over the city.” She could hear the frown in Dr. Horn’s voice. “He needs security and labor, that’s all. You may not understand this, Mr. Kowalski, but those poor souls out there are bedeviled not only by loss, but by the way they are perceived in society. They are seen as monstrous, or less-than. It wears them down. They’re just as deserving of respect as anyone else. It’s… vile, what’s been done to them. Used up and then forgotten, or cast aside. If anything, Stadtprasident Longstreet is fulfilling his promise.”

“Alright, doc, I’m sorry. I’m sorry!” Miles threw up his hands and Dolora rolled to look at the two of them.

“What promise?” she asked.

Dr. Horn pushed up his little glasses. “To help the poor.”

From her place by the window, Dotti snorted. “You think Longstreet is helping the poor?”

“I know he is,” Dr. Horn said as his cheeks flushed.

“It’s the consortia,” Dolora said. “They killed Hadrada. I’m sure of it.” Her body was starting to feel like hers again. There was a steady increase in its presence and solidity. The limbs were more and more her limbs and not some strange appendages only loosely under her control. “Cinder City Consolidated,” she said.

Miles clucked. “Not John MacTavish again, D.”

“I don’t know if he’s involved,” she grimaced, “but the consortium is. Credit Mobilier, the bank. I don’t remember where we heard of it before, but it’s got something to do with Cinder City Consolidated. They founded it. There were other consortia that had a hand in it too. I tried to write ‘em down, but I guess that crackerjack Blue Krasky took my notes from me.” Damn it, and my strummer. She loved that pistol. “Hell,” she swore, feeling the loss more keenly than the pain of her body. “I couldn’t figure out what the scheme was. With the bank, I mean. But it ’s the same one that Hadrada was talking about before he died. That’s gotta mean something. Doc, when can I leave?”

Horn frowned. “Not for some time, yet.”

Miles was tapping one of his tusks. “Varda Ovirov.”

“Hm?” Dotti raised a brow.

Before he went on, Dr. Horn pushed to the door. “Whatever it is your discussion, I don’t feel like I should have any part in it.”

Dolora and Miles watched him go. She could tell that Miles didn’t like him. His eyes narrowed as the doctor disappeared. Once he was gone, the big orc said, “There were notices posted on Varda Ovirov’s building for this Credit Mobilier. I remember taking one off the wall. When we went there, they were on the outside.”

She did remember that. He’d said something about how it was strange the building wasn’t being bought by Silver City Savings and Loan. But what did it mean?

“You have to get those papers from the Hall of Records,” she said. “Everything you can on this Credit Mobilier and the consortia that made it. This has got something to do with it. Hadrada knew it. Varda must have known to. The combine might know it too.” She wondered if Finster would be more forthcoming now that the commonists were on their side. Or were they, she and Miles, on the commonist’s side? Dotti’s presence in the window, framed by the moon, was proof that one or the other was true. Perhaps both.

She closed her eyes.

“It’s MacTavish. I know it is.”

 

She lost track of time again. Dr. Horn’s face swam up out of the miasma of her pain, which came and went like the rolling of a tug ship on a stormy sea. Her body was wracked alternately with pain and numbness. Horn was there, then gone. She saw him once as a leering Aonrijk sorcerer, hovering over him in a long leather coat. Later, he seemed to be a priest with a kindly smile.

Darkness swallowed her. It ate her whole, sucking the little spark of light down into the abyss. When she surfaced, it was night again. The moon, barely larger than the rind of a lemon, glared through the tall Centrum hills. Beyond the walls of the Sanitorium she could see the arches of autowagon and street-trolly bridges criss-crossing the night. The Pen lay in that direction, and the comfortable homes of the Centrum crowd. Her room was a sea of shadows, but the globes in the hall still burned with their antiseptic glare. Somewhere out there, ersatzmenn were moving, their limbs clicking and cranking, the trapped djinni straining to work their way free.

Dr. Horn could easily be part of this whole damn scheme, she thought. He provides the ersatzmenn to the Stadtprasident. They come from this Fabricator-forsaken place and swarm down to Heward Longstreet and… Cory Adelaide. Did she know that name?

But Adelaide wasn’t the real puppetmaster… was he? Miles certainly thought he was. That’s why he’d gone to the prasidential tower and tried to bully his way in. Yet, her own footwork contradicted him. It wasn’t the office of the Stadtprasident that formed Credit Mobilier. But if Miles was right…

If Miles was right, she was in the den of her enemies. Why had he left? How could he leave her here, where she was vulnerable? She couldn’t defend herself in here. She was full of drugs, floating on them. If Horn wanted to incapacitate her, he could. Hell, he could kill her and there was nothing she could do about it. She didn’t even have her pistol.

Miles didn’t know Klymas Horn. No, Miles didn’t know him. He couldn’t be right. Dolora had known Dr. Horn long before the war, before she was his patient. His clinic on Cherry Street was well-known to the Blues in the Dragons. That homely elf, slaving away in the two rooms of his apartments, could not possibly be in bed with Heward Longstreet, and with a plan to… what? Take over the city using ersatzmenn? The man was Stadtprasident already. How much higher did he have to rise? And did she remember Miles saying something about a queer priest working for him? According to Miles, Longstreet would have to be running just about every game from here to Regensburg. It didn’t make any sense.

But then again… Dr. Horn did get this big clinic posting…

That was before Longstreet was elected.

Ah! It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter! There was a way to find out. There was always a way. Leave it to Dolora to find it. Right? Everything fell to her in the end. Damn it, Miles, that’s why you left me here. She was finally thinking clearly, finally piercing through the haze and delirium. If there was evidence about the doctor’s involvement with the state, it would be here, in his office. Correis, but you’re good, she thought, imagining Miles’ cunning face grinning back at her. Alright. So I just have to break into Horn’s office, rifle through his papers, and confirm that he is or is not in Longstreet’s pocket.

Miles would cheer her. She would get her own damn parade. Maybe she could bring down the whole administration? Nothing seemed out of reach at that moment. She couldn’t pinpoint the source of this confidence. It welled out of her like warm spring water. She climbed out of her bed and hobbled over to the hallway.

The sharp pangs of the grenade surged through her shin, her foot, and her gut. They spread outward like faulty wiring. She could feel the sparks shooting off inside. Damn it. The pain medication—whatever tincture Dr. Horn had used—had worn off. Never mind that. Still, she could hobble.

The midnight Sanatorium was a different place from its daylight self. It felt different, smelt different, and echoed with the moans of the dead and dying. Its marble hallways were cold and backwards. Everything stank of bleach and linen. The huge fans turned lazily overhead, rustling the leaves of the potted ferns. It was like sliding through a marble jungle. Halls and foyers that were refined and monumental during the day had become a series of haunted, inky chasms. They were oceans of unbeing, pierced only here and there by whatever fulminating lights were still burning, mystic energies humming through their coils and driving off the darkness.

Dolora hurried through the nighted patches of black as fast as she could. When she passed through those pools of tar and oil, those starless chasms in the light, she was enveloped by freezing cold, as though she were stepping from the real world and into its frigid negative, a sort of magnetic opposite where life was pulled through your heels and into the earth.

She could feel the freezing marble through her slippers. They were thin cloth, the kind that would tear if you pulled too hard. They made it difficult to walk. Her rolling, hitch-hipped gait was not improved by a lack of arch support, and the pain spread from her knee to her hip as well. I need a drink, she thought, almost absently, trailing her fingers on the smooth tile walls.

Dr. Horn’s personal office was upstairs, through the main entryway. She knew because she’d been to see him up there before, after-hours, when the clinic on the first floor was closed. When she reached the big entry foyer, she waited. Every so often there was an autowagon or a street trolly that passed the building. They threw light through the main windows that flanked the door and transformed the midnight jungle into a chiaroscuro mockery of the Sugar Islands. Where are the soldiers of the Sugar War? She asked herself. Where are the sorcerers who did this to us?

Strange that there were never any sorcerers in the veteran’s hospitals. Those men where the most involved in every war Cinder City ever fought, and yet you hardly saw hide or hair of them among the people. There were no local sorcerers, no little magic shops. They lived with the bankers, financiers, industrialists, plantation owners, and politicos on the Tears, in Silver City, or on Parliament Island.

When it was dark and quiet for a long time, Dolora darted up the central stairway. She sucked in air like a lokomotive, hissing and spitting as she worked her bad leg. At the second-floor landing where the stairs ended, she had to pause again. Which way?

The main foyer was surrounded on all sides by a balcony on this floor. The balcony was crammed with even more plants brought over from the jungle islands conquered by the New Territories Administration during the Sugar War. The idea, which had seemed so clear-cut and brilliant in the moonlit confines of her sickroom, was now presenting major second-thoughts. Why had she thought this was smart? The doc could still be in the building, for one thing. For another, she had no idea how to get to his office, or how to get in it when she got there. Other thoughts crowded in: would Miles really let her stay here, all alone, if he thought Horn was one of the mopes involved with Hadrada’s murder? It was ludicrous. He was smarter than that.

But she was already here, already well out of her room. Might as well take a few more experimental steps, go down a few more halls. If she didn’t find it, she could give up, say she got lost on the way to the bathroom. I was tired of pissing in a pan, she rehearsed in her head. Yeah, that’d play.

She slipped silently through the hospital, a ghost among ghosts. At first she wandered aimlessly through the upper floor, lost. It was easy to get lost in the rambling wilderness of the Veteran’s Sanitorium. This was the collective shame of the New Territories. In fact, she realized, in a strange moment of lucidity, there was a way in which it was the mirror-image of the Cinder City Penitentiary. The Pen was raised to house the shame of Cinder City’s Juridicium, to pinion the convicted away behind its walls where they wouldn’t be seen. The Sanatorium was made for the same reasons: to hide the sick, the wounded, the cripples who had been made that way by their own government. Just as the Juridicium made the criminals in the Pen, so the New Territories Administration, Parliament, and the Stadtprasident made the living dead ersatzmenn and wounded in the Sanatorium.

We are the wreckage of the City. It devours us, it makes us, and then it casts us away. We fight its wars, we starve in its streets, we are ground up by the street-trolly wheels… and then we’re all put in the Pen.

A groan drifted from one of the huge wooden doors in the hall. Dolora snuck her way to it, limping every step. The room beyond was a sort of infirmary lit by a dull red glow. It took Dolora a few moments to realize what she was seeing. She’d never seen so many ersatzmenn together in one place before. They were tucked into beds, wrapped with gauze, grimacing, clicking, moving in place. Their limbs leaked giantsblood nearly as black as motor oil. The familiar smell of processed siren poured from the room. They were all hooked up with tubes and wires attached to glass jars that had been hung upside-down near the beds. These were filled with the faintly luminous purple glow of tempered sirensong.

Her eyes roved across the room. Here they were. The wreckage. Close by the door was a woman with half a head. The other half had been replaced by steel and pistons. Metal braces drilled through her jaw and into her cheekbones. These wept a faint pus of giantsblood. The djinn-stone over her heart pulsed in time with her breathing. She was decaying underneath those metal plates. Her skin was slackening, sloughing, losing elasticity and deforming like a wet paper bag. Dolora turned to keep from gagging, then hurried on.

She recognized the intersection ahead. I’ve been here. The sensation was a strange one. It welled up beneath the mire of doubt and assured her that she had seen these halls before. She went right, following the signs, and found herself moving as though her feet themselves had a memory. Without meaning to, she was suddenly in front of Dr. Horn’s door. A little plaque of bronze read “Klymas Horn, Medical Doctor.” It was unlocked.

Dolora let herself in. She had enough presence of mind to close the door behind her. The doctor’s office faced south. A narrow window behind his desk gave a view of the Alstat beyond, through the few lanes of the Dragons, and down into Dwarfside. Dolora moved to it, entranced by the ghostly red banners flapping along the Sanatorium fence—remnants of the commonist march on the building, days before. She watched the city, her city. The rhythm of its breathing, the thrumming of the blood, that is its people, along its streets.

She shook herself of the strange melancholy that had grabbed her, then set to working open the desk. This was easy: most of the drawers were unlocked, and the one which was pried apart at her grip. Yes, her fingertips were filled with splinters of the desk, yes her arms strained and the veins stood out like cords, but the lock gave and the drawer opened. She left bloody smears on the wood. It was only as she pawed through the now-sticky documents that she realized it didn’t hurt. Maybe the medicine hasn’t worn off. But then why was her knee filled with stabbing pain?

She shuffled through the papers.

There was nothing there. Not one of these things linked Dr. Horn with Cory Adelaide. If there was a secret funnel of ersatzmenn, a kind of ersatz army built by the Kirks, surely there would be some sign of it.

It was in the midst of a blood-stained nest of paperwork that Dr. Horn finally stumbled onto her. He let out a soft, moist “oh” as he stepped into his office and laid eyes on the disaster occurring just below his window.

“Ms. Spade, you shouldn’t be out of bed. And you certainly shouldn’t be doing, ah, that.” He frowned. “Perhaps your medication needs to be adjusted.”

“Not enough sirensong,” she laugh-sneered. Where did that come from? She hadn’t been angry at him, yet all of a sudden there was this burning desire to get back at him. At him? Maybe it was simply a desire to hit something. She couldn’t strike at her true enemies—MacTavish, Cinder City Consolidated. Klymas Horn was at least within reach. But it felt bad making that gold-spectacled face frown. He was so slight and so pathetic, that she immediately apologized. “Sorry.”

“It’s alright. Why did you come in here…” he gestured wordlessly at the papers.

Dolora leaned back and closed her eyes. “To make sure you weren’t supplying Cory Adelaide with an ersatz army.”

Dr. Horn let out a breath of air. “I told you and your friend Mr. Spade, it’s quite the opposite. Those unfortunate enough to be fitted with those mobile prostheses live quite difficult lives. You were right to refuse the implant, I think. Even if it was for different reasons.” He smiled sadly. “But you do need something. If you won’t take the surgery, a cane and a brace. Otherwise you won’t be able to solve your case, because you won’t be able to walk. Those fragments are destroying your knee.”

He sat down in his chair and rolled it toward her. Gently, he removed her hands from the pile of papers. He unballed them, took the crumpled bloody sheets. “You have to be careful, Ms. Spade. They use everyone. They use them up. Those people out there? They’ll use you up until there’s nothing left. This is what they do. This is how they are. People are little more than machines to them. That’s why they offered them the ersatz. The army, I mean.

“The more like a machine a man is, or a woman—ha—the better they can control them. The more work they can get out of you. That’s what you have to be careful of. All they want is what you can offer.”

“I don’t work for them,” Dolora said slowly, carefully forming her words. “I work for Hadrada Varnag.”

“I hate to tell you this, Ms. Spade, but Mr. Varnag is dead.”

 

Not the next morning, but the one after that, Miles and Dotti came to see Dolora. Dr. Horn had changed her medication and forced her, almost at pistol-point, to put a brace on her damaged knee. This contraption of metal made her feel almost an ersatzwomann herself. When they came she was fiddling with the cane Dr. Horn gave her. He had it on hand when she finally relented. He’d had it made nine months ago, when he first told her she was going to need it, and had been hanging on to it since.

They brought pastries. Upon seeing the soggy cardboard box of donuts, Dolora’s stomach growled comically, as though she were in some bad radio drama. She grimaced, but ate two of them before slowing down and taking the coffee Miles offered her.

“We found the Credit Mobilier filings,” Miles said. His face was grim.

Dotti sat at Dolora’s bedside. She had a sheaf of papers in her lap—the filings, snuck or bribed out from under the clerks’ noses. “There’s a lot here,” she confessed. “But we managed to go through it all yesterday.”

“Ms. Freeman has been a big help.”

Dotti clucked. “Important work, even if it takes me away from my duty.” Dolora could only imagine what that duty would be. Something secret, dirty, and commonist. But here she was, working with Spade and Kowalski. Does that make her a shamus, or us commonists?

“Well?” Dolora asked, licking the sugar from her fingers, “what did you find?”

“You were right,” Miles said slowly. “MacTavish is involved.”

“Told you, ya mope!”

Miles shook his head. “It’s more than him, though. There’s a whole… well, it’s hard to call it a scheme. We can’t really see the outline yet.”

Dotti leaned forward. Her breath smelled like coffee and caramel candy. Dolora tried not to squirm with discomfort as a familiar sensation of longing coursed through her body. “Every member of the at Business Development Council you found has a seat on the Board of Directors of Credit Mobilier. The Council is the primary shareholder. It was incorporated just before the last election season started, in 5728, around the time the war ended. The Council applied for visas and permanent residency papers for hundreds of NTA prisoners in the Rijk. Sorcerers, mostly, and engineers.”

“They were re-patriated to work at Juncker Steam Boiler, Juncker Autoworks, Lynch Autoworks, Carby, ACE Aeronautics, and a hundred other consortia.” Miles’ frown deepened. “They were brought over almost as soon as the war ended. And Beyerfarben, that big Continental chemical concern, moved people over here too. Not to mention,” He ticked off his fingers, “engineers from Stromkrupp, the biggest weapons manufactory in the Rijk, magicians from the Imperial War Akademy and the Hesse State Akademy who were fleeing the Cog advance, and half a hundred sorcerers from the Imperial Aonrijk Strombrigades who were taken onto the staff at our own Cinder City Academy.

“All of this was done with advance knowledge of the consortia. It looks like the Development Council was already in talks with Beyerfarben months before the war ended.”

Dolora grinned blood. “We got ‘em.”

“On what?” Miles grunted, “War profiteering?”

“No, Hadrada found something out. He was after Credit Mobilier for this.”

Dotti clucked again. “What’s the explanation for Credit Mobilier buying buildings in the Alstat?”

“What?”

Miles went on, “They’ve been the main backer of the revitalization project. It doesn’t make any sense, D. Why would all these consortia be helping rebuild Alstat? What’s in it for them?”

Dolora thought about this. There was no clear angle, that was true, but it was because they didn’t have enough information. She knew that if they couldn’t squeeze profit out of a venture, the consortia would never act. That much she’d learned. The news from the warfront just brought it home. All of these firms—Juncker, Lynch, every one—pretended to be patriots. They drove autowagons around with New Territories flags trailing from their cabins. They ran ads on the radio and in the kinos about their all-Cinder-City workforces, about rebuilding the New Territories, about down home values, and all the while they were taking dangerous war criminals through back doors to enhance their own production lines.

She had seen those Aonrijk sorcerers first-hand. She knew what they were capable of.

“But I was right about MacTavish,” she asked.

Miles nodded. “Cinder City Consolidated seems to be at the heart of everything. They have representatives to every deal. They’re the biggest investors in the bank. MacTavish is the executive director of the Credit Mobilier board.”

“You know where the plan will be kept, then,” Dolora hinted darkly.

Dotti raised her eyebrows. “MacTavish wouldn’t keep it in his house?”

Dolora grinned and shook her head. “No. In the Consolidated head office. In Orcland.”

 

It was hell getting out of bed. It was a nightmare getting Dolora down to the ferries. The ride across to Iron Island was even worse. Every swell jolted her so that Miles was afraid she might actually go overboard. He’d never seen her so badly off. Even in her first days home from the war when she was bedraggled and still hadn’t dried out, she had at least been able to keep herself together. Now, she seemed to be all gristle and joints. Her limbs bent any which way. She grinned and chuckled strangely at things, as though all the world had suddenly become one great amusement, one kino show for her alone. She was using a brace and cane, something that was utterly inconceivable to him, so far was it out of his experience with her. She would rather die than ask for help. Once, she’d twisted her bad ankle in a gutter and preferred to fall and smash her face on the curb than take Miles’ hand on the way down.

He wasn’t sure if this was a good or a bad development. On the one hand, it meant she wouldn’t destroy herself. On the other, it could be a sign that she was on her way down, that she had reached the very deepest pit of her despair.

How are we going to get into the plant like this?

Miles had broken into buildings before. It was part of the job. Both as a blue and as a private, you had to know when to follow the law and when to break it. Back when he was in uniform, there really hadn’t been anything to fear. That was another Cutter rule. You could force entry bold as you like and claim you’d heard banging or shouting. If anyone tried to screw you for it, you just told the all-important story. “Oh, I thought I heard a struggle. I needed to gain entry to that building to ensure the safety of everyone involved.” That always worked. Well, he wouldn’t have tried it out in Centrum or Woodland on the house of a law-abiding white couple, but it always worked on Iron Island.

When you were private it was a different story. There were countless ways to have your license revoked. Breaking in was pretty bad. They’d take away your license, charge you with the simple trespass crime, and then you’d have to pay a fifty dollar fee to have your record cleaned up and another hundred dollars for the new license. If the Juridical Attorney was a particular prick, they could make it a condition of your sentence that you have to wait six months to a year to get a new license issued. A private shamus without his license was like a Blue without a badge: nothing more than hired muscle.

So the shamus method of getting into places was not to bull straight through. People like him, with licenses to lose, had to leave that to Blues and mobsters. Which meant there had to be a certain level of agility, a certain finesse to the process. Dolora wouldn’t be able to engage in most of the tricky parts, which meant thinking through alternate ways of getting her inside the Orcland offices.

Miles watched her as the ferry chugged across the channel. It was a warm night, and the city was spread out behind and before them like a field of stars, or a cloud of fireflies. The diesel stink of the engine as it ate through giantsblood washed over the deck now and again, pouring down between the canopy and the seats. There were other tugs out there in the darkness. They lowed to each other like calves.

The island bobbed ahead, a cork on a stormy sea. The Orcland Fulminating Power Plant was the highest point of Iron Island. It had once been the site of the mine operator’s complex, back when there was still actual iron ore to get out of the soil. Its ten chimneys blew fumeroles of black-red smoke into the night sky as the engines within processed giantsblood into fulmination. The copper wires strung out along the island were nothing compared to the leagues of copper beneath the Silver City Sound. Even though Alstat was right across the channel from the plant, the power went first to downtown and then split amongst all the different regions of the peninsula-wide city. Alstat was the last to receive fulminating power, of course, just as it had been last to get steam heat.

In the Alstat, unlike everywhere else in the city, fulmination was paid for on a piecemeal basis. Every apartment and storefront had a Cinder City Consolidated box installed somewhere inside. Each box of gray steel boasted two features on its face: a coin slot and an “on” switch. These were nothing more than complicated timers. Clocks inside ticked and rolled over, counting down the seconds until the money was used up. If you wanted fulminating power, you had to put a coin in the box and turn the switch. This started the clock. Then, and only then, would the Orcland Fulminating Power Plant pour the bottled lighting into your bulbs and power your appliances.

“You sure you’re gonna be ok?” Miles called to Dolora. She didn’t answer. She was too busy cozying up to Dotti.

Miles liked Dotti. She was smart as a whip and more stable than Dolora by a whole boatload. Not that he didn’t trust his partner, but she was prone to do some… nutty things. Not all on the level. Not playing with all her cards. He knew why, which made it easier. She had a sense of adventure and a sense of justice, and those things together just didn’t make it in Cinder City. His own feelings about justice were mixed at best, having been taken out and neutered long ago. Henry Cutter had been effective as hell at chopping off the best parts of Miles’ expectations.

The streetwagons weren’t running by the time they reached the island. Foundrytown also didn’t run night-time cabriolets. That meant a long walk to the power plant. Miles checked his pockets on the way. Lockpicks, check. Pistol, check. Prybar, check. Bolt cutters, check.

They would have to go past the guards and get into the main offices. Luckily, the plan for the place had been filed with City Records (as was required) back when it was put it up. That meant he had a pretty good idea where the offices were. The big room on the second story of the overseer’s block undoubtedly belonged to the Chief Officer, in this case MacTavish. That meant the long room just down the hall was probably the record archive. They could search MacTavish’s office and, if they didn’t find anything, break into the records office.

He hoped against hope they wouldn’t have to make two stops.

Breaking into a building, yes he’d done that. But he’d never gone into a big complex like this before. A shamus often had to jimmy a lock or lift the sash of a window to get a key piece of information for a client. It was rare indeed that the key bit of information was stored in some sprawling industrial enclosure. “Are you sure we’re going to be able to do this?” No answer. They were still talking to each other.

Miles huffed.

In a handful of days he’d discovered that he was a secret Fid, the country he’d lived in his whole life was rehabilitating anti-Fiddish and anti-orcish Aonrijk war criminals, and that the consortia that ran the damn place had been conspiring to do… what? Something worth killing a dwarf and an elf for. What else was he going to find tonight? He squeezed his fist tight. Not the inside of a jail cell. Please, Georn, please Karzel, don’t let that be the end of this venture. If Miles Kowalski and Dolora Spade were taken in now, in the middle of a break-in while a Juridicial investigation was still ongoing, they would feel the full hammer of the law. In fact, the whole set of murders might be pinned on them, as unlikely as that seemed.

Miles never put it past the Blues to save themselves some work by making up an incredible story and trying to spin it to Juridicial. He’d done it himself hundreds of times. That wasn’t a Henry Cutter special, that was something that every Blue on the Watch did. It saved on paperwork and made your Watch House look good. Who’d complain? Well, the poor saps you pinned it on, probably, but that’s why you always chose someone who couldn’t fight back. Someone like us. Not enough dough to go toe-to-toe with the Juridicium in court.

He tried to put those thoughts away as they approached the plant. It was enormous, like an old Continental fortress. The plant was an enormous brick warehouse capped with ten titanic chimneys, each of which vomited forth a continuous stream of black smoke tinged hellish red where it emerged from the mouth of the chimney. No one wanted to build near it, maybe because of the constant humming. The closest building nearby was the Orcland Water Authority, just down the hill, with its enormous desalinization tanks.

They crept through the nighted parking lots and across warm, pliable macadam. Miles sniffed and eyed Dotti and Dolora. They were still talking, low bubbling conversation that was quiet enough not to attract outside attention but loud enough to vaguely irritate Miles. We’re supposed to be sneaking out here. They should be paying attention!

They came around and clammed up as they all approached. There was a little wooden shack that served as a guard station for the plant’s parking lot. The half-empty lot was a mine field of autowagons, black and sleek in the night like giant insects. Getting by the shack was easy: the private guard inside was asleep with his feet up and a cold cup of coffee on the desk. Only Blues were permitted to wear the signature blue-and-brass of the Watch, so this mope was in brown and green.

Miles ducked low to obscure his massive frame, and they held to the shadows between the autowagons. This wasn’t like the Pen: there were no guards atop the plant, no long-throwing strummers waiting to perforate them for breaking in. The earth shook with the thump and thrum of the giantsblood turbines.

The offices were a separate block of buildings, and Miles grinned when they saw the back entrance had been chained shut. “Luckily we brought these,” he said, flourishing the bolt cutters. The lock snapped off with a clang. “Now let’s go slow and quiet. Dotti, turn on your torch and keep it low.”

The commonist flicked on the fulminating light in her hand. “Ready,” she whispered.

Miles shouldered the door open, revealing the dark hall beyond. The beam of the fulminating torch swept through the emptiness, a lighthouse upon a lonesome shore. They breathed easy. “No one,” said Miles.

He looked to Dolora, made sure she went in first. The limp really isn’t that much of a hinderance. Still, it was strange to see the brace on her knee and the cane in her hand. His friend had never once submitted to anything, not weather, not circumstance, and certainly not her own body. To see it now sent a chord of warning through his spirit. Maybe it was a good thing, he told himself. Maybe she’s learning that she has to rely on something other than herself.

He’d believe that when he saw it.

MacTavish’s office was on the second floor, at the far end. Dolora took the torch from Dotti. It swung wildly as she lurched, slicing through the darkness like a knife. Doors stood out from the nighted hall as they went. Miles tensed with each sweep, wondering if the guards outside could see anything. He had a plan for that, and it was to run.

At the stairwell, Dolora flicked off the light. They climbed in grim silence. The stairs had outward-facing windows, and Miles stopped to watch the handful of workers crossing the macadam yard from the plant building to the outbuildings. Some few were hauling a large piece of equipment from the machine shed toward the plant proper. They were dark imps against the searing light of the plant floor. It was like some Continental painting of the underworld.

The door to MacTavish’s office was locked. This, they couldn’t simply force. Well, they could, but it would be seen the following day. The idea was to leave as few signs of their presence as they could. No reason to get the Blues involved. Cutting the lock was a necessary risk, but blasting through MacTavish’s office door would be more than noticed, it would launch an investigation, particularly since they didn’t plan on taking anything. It might have been written off as industrial espionage. It wasn’t worth rolling the dice.

Miles knelt at and unrolled his picks on the ground. “Get your photostat ready,” he whispered to Dolora. As he worked through the lock, pin by pin, Dolora assembled her photostat device. When the lock clicked, she was ready.

The records they were looking for where in the back of the office in a huge cabinet. That was locked too, but it caved much faster than the door. They closed the blinds as tight as they would go, turned on the desk lamp, and spread out everything they could find beneath the bulb. This light, this power, so close to the plant, didn’t flicker. Trust MacTavish to make sure he had an uninterrupted supply of fulmination.

Dolora lifted her photostat and started snapping. Miles pieced through the paperwork, scanning for what he could see at first blush. They would check over everything later, on the photostats, after they developed them, but he wanted an idea of what he they’d find. Reports from giantsblood mines in the south, construction orders for a whole slew of new company towns in the New Territories (and these all empty, as if waiting for occupants), a development plan for… well, it looked like a development plan for the Alstat that included a new fulminating power plant there, but how could that be? Here were the old proposals from when MacTavish was still an MP off of Iron Island. Miles flipped through them. Beneath were matching proposals with the Credit Mobilier logo.

Georn and Karzel, they’re using Credit Mobilier to buy Alstat. He rifled through the papers to confirm it. There was no question. A letter from Woodward Iron and Steel bemoaning the election of Longstreet. He scanned it as Dolora took photostats of the other pieces. Our ENTIRE PLAN will be scuttled if we can’t get this upstart to heel… Miles snorted. He kept reading. The Woodward people were furious at the election. Credit Mobilier had pinned their hopes on Boss Harker, and he’d fallen through. Good.

But further down in the stack, Miles discovered new plans for giantsblood processing centers on the Island, and below those congratulatory notes taken in MacTavish’s hand from a Credit Mobilier meeting. It’s done. Use ‘revitalization’ project. His stomach turned. Heward Longstreet’s landmark legislation, the revitalization of Alstat would be… what? A way to improve the infrastructure and kick people out. There was a list of targets.

The properties Credit Mobilier had singled out for the first wave of acquisitions were right in the heart of Dwarfside. There was one address in particular he was keen to find. There it was. 791 Worm Street. Right on the corner of Granite and Worm, just a little way from Salafin’s, that was the address of Varda Ovirov.

“D,” he hissed, tapping the property listing, “this is why Hadrada was looking into Credit Mobilier.”

“Huh?” She looked over, frowned, snapped a photostat.

“It’s his girl’s building. She’s being pushed out. Look at these plans.” He spread the proposals out for her to see. “They want to force the Dwarfside people out with higher prices, relocate them to the south where they can work in the mines, and turn Alstat into another Regensburg or Silver City. CCCG&S is planning to bulldoze half the neighborhood and sell the other half.”

Dotti gave a low whistle. “I knew these consortia were evil, but that’s…”

“Varda is going to be forced out of her building. They worked out some kind of deal with Longstreet. That must be why Hadrada was investigating the bank.”

Miles shook his head, in awe at the scale of the thing. Dolora sneered and slapped something down. “Yeah? Well, look at this.” He did. The sheet she tapped was a Credit Mobilier balance list. He followed Dolora’s finger down, down, down. Sum, withdrawn, contract payment: Sgt. Leon Krasky.

“That’s our Krasky?” Miles asked.

Dolora nodded. “Oh yeah. That’s our Krasky. That’s our killer.”

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