By sunset, the indige were thoroughly exhausted, sweating silver bullets that hissed when they struck the hot rocks and smelled like vinegar. All of the names on Pogo’s list were accounted for. He had insisted that the men keep looking for a while, just to satisfy his sense of completeness. He was about to call them in when a boy of sixteen ran up to him.
The boy had tattoos that indicated he was a Thoron from a Chapel Street Household: stylized seabirds and the double-eagle that the Trowthi-men used to mark their churches. He began speaking at once. “Ramo, ramo! I’ve found another-”
“Hap!” Pogo interrupted. He held up his hand.
The boy bowed his head, ashamed. “Forgiveness, ramo. I am Gad ada Sho, of Clan Thoron, Second Chapel Street Household, third son of Sorine Thoron, second cousin of Aran Akori. My father was Darag Thoron of…I do not know his household. He was born in the homeland, and died before I knew him.”
“You are welcome, cousin. Many of our people have never known the households of Daeagea, there is no shame. What have you found?”
“Another body, sir. In a crevice in the rocks.” He pointed to the south.
Pogo looked at his list, then thought fondly of the meal that would be waiting for him at home. This man was not on the list, surely the Trowers don’t care about him? But then he thought of a nameless corpse, whose spirit was trapped in rotting flesh because no one had informed its ancestors of its death, and sighed. “Show me, boy.”
Gad Thoron led Pogo close to the walls of the gorge, far from the shattered traincar, to a black crack in the rocks that was just taller than a man.
“What were you doing in here?” Pogo asked him.
“Ah,” the boy said. “Forgiveness, ramo. It was hot, and I thought I would steal a few moments in the cool shade.” He reached in to the dark, and heaved out a naked and badly-damaged body.
Pogo looked at this corpse. It was covered in black and purple contusions, and suffered from a kind of shapelessness indicating that many of its bones were broken. It was male, certainly, and very, very white. It had been a big man, with a barrel chest, thick legs, and broad shoulders. Its face was gone entirely, chewed off by animals, perhaps, no eyes or teeth apparent. There were livid red blotches on its skin where blood had pooled.
“How did he get in here?” Pogo wondered. “Could he have fallen from the train?”
“He must have been pushed in, ramo,” said the boy. “He was far inside. There is blood still on the walls, you can smell the salt. It cannot have been long ago.”
“Someone must have done it, and taken his clothes as well. Hup. Well. I will invoke his ancestors, then you can put him with the others.”
“Yes, ramo,” the boy said.
“Ancestors of what was once this man,” Pogo said, not bothering to call out. If the Trower ancestors could not at least hear him this far away from their city, then they were likely to be thoroughly useless. “Sons of Gorgon and Demogorgon. Here is the soul of your child. I do not know if he was good or wicked, but if you have watched him, please reward or punish him accordingly. Set a place for him at your table, or, if he was wicked, find degrading work for him to perform among the many wicked and disloyal children that you likely already have.”
Pogo nodded to the Thoron boy, who proceeded to drag the new corpse to the pile of corpses already recovered. Pogo decided that the day’s labors were finished, and he called a halt. The men gathered downwind of the bodies, and passed around a jug of brandy and djang while they waited for the airship to return.
When it did float back into sight-looking at this distance for all the world like a great fish that, unaware of the divide between ocean and sky, had simply swum up towards the clouds-the coroner on board refused to come down. He called down to Pogo to ask if he was sure of the identification-forgetting that he’d actually assigned this task to Pogo’s cousin, or else not being able to effectively distinguish between indige. The ramo couldn’t hold this against him; without thorough description, Pogo had a hard time telling Trower men apart.
“We’ve found them all, yes,” Pogo called up.
“Good. Burn it then.”
“What?” Burn the list? Or burn the bodies?
The coroner waved at the pile of bodies. “They dead. Burn. Phlogiston.”
Pogo shrugged; he and his family covered the many corpses with sticky blue phlogiston, and set it alight.
Thirty-Five
“Okay, hold this. Hold it tight, okay?” Skinner said. “What are you going to do with it?”
“Mummy,” Jaine Akori said. She was six, and clever, but much more proficient at Indt than she was at Trowthi. “Aikiat da aga da’an?”
“Mummy what?” Skinner asked, holding Jaine’s hand closed around the stack of hundred-crown notes. She had decided to keep only two hundred from her first payment from Emilia Vie-Gorgon. She suspected that, now that the assassination attempt had failed, and now that Skinner could identify Emilia as being involved, the second payment would not be forthcoming.
“Bring to mummy,” Jaine said. “Jana agad. Osheed?”
“Osheed is right, honey,” Skinner replied. Eight hundred crowns would take the Akori a long way, and two hundred might be enough to give Skinner a head start, at least. She had no illusions about what would happen now. “And what do you tell mummy?”
Jaine obediently recited the message Skinner had given her. “Thank. You. Very. Much. From. Miss. Skinner.”
“And if she asks where I went?”
“You had to go. To be safe. You can’t come back.”
“And?”
“Uhmmm. Don’t follow!”
“Good girl.” Skinner patted her on the head. “You wait here for mummy to get home, okay?”
“Okay! Where are you going?”
Skinner shrugged. “I don’t know. But even if I did know, I don’t think it would be a good idea to tell you.” The girl said nothing. “Though I guess I could probably tell you, and it wouldn’t matter that much. Never mind. Wait here for mummy, okay? And make sure you give her the money. Okay?”
“Gan. Okay!”
Skinner left the house in Bluewater for the last time. It was, as to be expected in Trowth during the summer, raining. Not the razor-sharp jags of calcium that would rattle on the roofs in late summer, fortunately, but a steady, warm rain that, if not for the stifling humidity, would have been quite pleasant. Rain clattered on slate roofs and cobblestones and had soaked her through to her socks in a few moments.
The truth was that Skinner didn’t know, at all, where she would go. She didn’t have any friends left in the city and now the trains were all closed down, so she couldn’t even go back to her family if she wanted to. As a woman alone, she couldn’t rent lodgings except in the most dismal and dangerous of locales, and she wasn’t sure how to find those anyway. But she absolutely could not stay with the Akori.
It’s not that she doubted that Emilia Vie-Gorgon could get to her without any collateral damage. Killing an emperor was one thing; killing an unemployed knocker living in a ghetto with a family of immigrants was something altogether different. It’s just that Skinner wasn’t fully certain that Emilia would bother not causing collateral damage. After all, wouldn’t a bomb serve to disguise who the target was? Anonymous bombs obscured even their own intentions. Was it to kill a person? To cripple the gendarmerie? To strike out against the Empire, or against the indige?