He’d gone pale as chalk dust. Even the red marring his nose had faded.
“That’s enough.” Kisser grabbed her arm. Ripka let the woman’s fingers bite down into the muscle beneath her flesh, but planted her feet when Kisser started to drag her toward the door. “Back to your cell, captain, and I better not see you at my breakfast table, understand?”
“The others don’t know, do they? Forge and Honey and Clink – pits below, I’d thought Clink was your ringleader. But they’re puppets for you, aren’t they? You’re jerking their strings to provide you protection, to shield you from suspicion. I wonder what they’d say, if they knew their leader wasn’t even a convict?”
Kisser struck her, a burning streak of pain lancing across her jaw. Ripka jerked back, twisted her arm free, and brought her hands up to shield her face from further attack. Enard slipped to his feet, falling in alongside her, his presence a silent threat. Kisser’s chest heaved with angry breaths, hair hiding half her face.
“Tell her,” Nouli said.
“No.”
“She’s gotten this far.” Nouli rubbed his cheeks with both hands, as if he could massage the blood back into them. “You’ll either have to tell her, or kill her, and I for one could use another ally. Especially one as observant as Miss Leshe.”
Ripka watched in morbid fascination as Kisser mulled over the decision, subconsciously rolling her shoulders to loosen them for a fight if it came to that. After a breathless pause, Kisser’s posture deflated.
“If I’d known what trouble you’d be, I’d have encouraged that songbird to shank you. Sit.” Kisser pointed to the crate. Ripka obliged. The woman was ready to talk, and she wasn’t about to be quarrelsome until she’d heard what she’d had to say. Enard settled in alongside her.
Nouli said, “Allow me to explain. I am the one insisting, after all.”
“Go on then, you fool old man.” Kisser crossed her arms and slouched with her back against the wall, angling herself to keep all three of them in her line of sight.
“If you are here to ask my help, then I assume you know of my… reputation.”
Ripka inclined her head. “The Century Gates.”
His eyes closed, a brief fluttering, as if recalling the name brought the image so strongly to the forefront of his mind that he could not resist basking in it for a moment. “Yes. My Gates. Great soaring walls of granite filled in with weaker stone, buttressed so high the tops of them scraped the empress’s floating palace. I built them to keep Valathea’s inner heart strong and safe for a hundred years, sheltered from monsoon winds and invasion alike. Until that skies-cursed Honding blew a hole in the side of one, precisely where a key support leaned its weight.”
Conversations she’d had with Detan, late at night when maybe the liquor had flowed a little too freely, came to mind. How he’d described his escape from the Bone Tower. How he’d run in blind fear, full of nothing but animal panic to escape. He hadn’t found out until much later that the wall he’d destroyed was a part of the famous Century Gates. Hadn’t found out until later that innocents had died in that conflagration. She knew what was coming. Tried to keep her face neutral as he pressed on.
His fingers curled into fists upon his lap, his lips drew thin. “A large section of the wall came down, crushing noble houses that had been built too close for my liking. Hundreds died. I’d seen the firebombs we used in war, of course, had designed many myself, and the Gates had been constructed to withstand them, but the rending strength of that explosion… I saw pieces of the rubble, later. Twisted. The very grain of the rock metamorphose into some other stone. I could never have planned for such a force. And yet I was responsible for it.”
“It was not your fault–” Kisser began, but Nouli held up a hand, silencing her.
“Maybe. But it was my fault I could not see how to rebuild it.”
Kisser looked away, bunching the loose cloth of her jumpsuit in both fists. Nouli’s gaze drifted, snagged on the tools spread across his desk as if he hadn’t seen them before.
“Your age…” Ripka murmured. He only nodded.
“I see. But the walls were rebuilt–”
“Yes,” he reached out and pat Kisser’s arm. “She was always my finest apprentice.”
“I’m no engineer.” Kisser shook her head. “My specialty is chemistry.”
“You give yourself too little credit,” Nouli said. “After the wall was repaired, rumors of my absence from the project spread. The empress grew worried. How could she publicly hire a man with a reputation for failure? How could she hire a man when her courtiers whispered that his mind had been demolished along with his finest creation? It helped not at all that I began forgetting names publicly. And so she ignored me.”
“Until she sent you away to rot.”
“Kanaea, please–”
Kisser’s rounded cheeks flamed red. “No names!”
Nouli waved a dismissive hand. “Calm yourself, girl, we are beyond such concerns now.”
“He is your real uncle?” Ripka asked, weathering Kisser’s glare.
“I am that.” Nouli rose from his seat and fussed with the instruments strewn across his table. “My empress sent Kanaea with me into exile to keep an eye on me, and to assist me in my efforts to cure my mind. And to remind me that she could do anything at all she liked with my family.”
“I insisted,” Kisser retorted.
“My dear, she expected you to.”
She snorted and turned away from him, crossing her arms so tightly the force dragged taut lines into the material of her jumpsuit. Ripka wondered at her intentions – at her need for both independence for herself, and to look after her uncle. Ripka could not even recall the names of her aunts and uncles, so brief her time living near her family had been. What life had led Kisser – Kanaea – into such loyalty for her family? Ripka decided she’d do well to try and keep the woman on her good side. They might need her expertise.
“And so all of this,” Ripka prompted, extending her arm to encompass the accoutrements scattered over the table, “is the result of your research? But why distribute the clearsky? What does the empress want with a petty street-drug? Aside from annoying Radu Baset, which is an endeavor I heartily approve of.”
Nouli grunted a laugh. “Baset is a gnat, not worth the wave of my hand. This… keeps me lucid, for a while, a step toward clarity. And the empress believes it will help her deal with the Scorched problem.”
Ripka exchanged an anxious glance with Enard. “And just what problem would that be?”
“Can you not guess? The empress is tired of her colonies acting up. The loss of Aransa’s selium mines annoyed her greatly, and she fears the other cities of the Scorched may take Thratia’s cue. She cares little for the middling cities, of course, but to lose control of the selium-producing cities? She won’t have it. Selium is the trade-blood of Valathea. A few uppity city states will not stand in her way.”
Ripka swallowed, the dryness in her throat as rough as sand. “And how does this substance of yours fit into this?”