He risked opening his eyes. “How in the pits did it all stay in there?”
Her face was a mask of professional decorum. “The late warden had been sealed with guar sap. On all ends.”
“Still got him? … I could use a new buoyancy sack.”
Detan was too busy laughing until the tears flowed to see her coming. She swept the leg of his chair away and he went down with a grunt, but he didn’t care. It was just too much for him to let go. When he had subsided into burbling chuckles, Ripka cleared her throat. He felt a little triumphant to see a bit of wet shining at the corner of her eye.
“Are you quite finished?” she asked.
“For now.”
She produced a short blade of bone-blacked Valathean steel. It probably had a poncy name, but all Detan cared about was the fresh glint along the cutting edge. It was a good knife, and that was usually bad news for him. Good women with good knives had a habit of making use of them in his general direction. He swallowed, tried to scoot away and only dug his splinters deeper.
“Now, there’s no need for–”
“Oh, shut up.”
She knelt beside him and cut the ropes around his wrists and ankles. He knew better than to pop right up. Irritable people were prone to making rash decisions, and he’d discovered there were a surprisingly large number of irritable people in the world. When she stepped away he wormed himself to his feet and made a show of rubbing his wrists.
“Some higher quality rope wouldn’t be too much to ask for, I think.”
“No one cares what you think, Honding.” She jerked the chair back to its feet and pointed with the blade. “Now sit.”
He eyed the rickety structure and shuffled his feet toward the door. “Wouldn’t want to take up any more of your time, watch captain…”
“Did I say you could leave?” Her knuckles went bloodless on the handle of the blade, her already thin lips squeezed together in a hard line. Detan glanced at the chair, then back at Ripka. A few traitorous beads of sweat crested his brow. He thought about the selium, looming somewhere behind her desk, but shunted the idea aside. She pointed again.
He obliged. He had a life philosophy of never saying no to a lady with a knife if he could help it. And anyway, something had her wound up crankier than a rockcat in a cold bath. She needed something, and needful people often played loose with their gold.
“Thought you wanted me gone yesterday,” he ventured.
“Then it’s too bad you’re here today. I want a timeline from you, understand?”
“Oh, well. Let’s see. In the beginning, the firemounts broke free from the sea–”
“Stop. Just. Stop.”
He shut up. He didn’t often know when he was pushing it, but he knew it now.
“Thratia is making a grab for the warden’s seat, understand? I can’t have you in my hair when I’ve got her in my shadow.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, oh.”
He grimaced. Detan had been all over the Scorched Continent a half dozen times easy and he had yet to run into a woman more ruthless than ex-Commodore Thratia Ganal. Sure, she was Valathean bred and all sweetness and light to anyone with gold in their pockets. But it had to be the right amount of gold, backed by the right intentions.
Poor as a smokefish? Better work for her. Enough gold to buy a proper uppercrust house? Best pay your fire taxes, Aransa was a dangerous place, after all. More gold than her? Better invest in whatever she wants and then sod right off to wherever you came from.
A pleasant conversationalist, though, so that was something.
Rumor had it Thratia didn’t appreciate the spidery arm of Valathean law meddling with the Scorched settlements, which meant Ripka was in the shit if Thratia took over. Even with the whole of the Darkling Sea between Valathea’s island empire and the Scorched, the empire’s control over its frontier cities was absolute through its selium-lifted airships and its watchers. The watchers held to imperial law, and kept the Scorched’s selium mines producing to fill Valathean needs and Valathean coffers.
And Thratia didn’t much care for Valathean needs, now that they’d kicked her loose.
He stifled another oh, watching the honorable watch captain through enlightened eyes. The way she kept glancing at the door, as if she were worried someone would barge in. The way she held her knife, point-out and ready to dance. She was scared senseless.
And scared people were easy to play. Detan leaned forward, hands clasped with interest, brow drawn in grave understanding.
“You think she was behind the warden’s death?” he asked, just to keep Ripka talking while he worked through the possibilities.
“That crow? I doubt it. It’s not her style, wasting something as valuable as selium to make a point. The favorite theory going around right now is it was a doppel.” She snorted. “Caught one a few days back, impersonating some dead mercer. City’s been seeing them in every shadow ever since. Might as well be a ghost or a bogeyman, but I can’t ignore the possibility. Your mouth is open, Honding.”
He shut it. “Are you serious? A doppel?”
He’d heard of the creatures – every little Scorched lad grew up with stories of scary doppels replacing your loved ones – but he’d never seen one before. The amount of skill and strength it’d take to use a thin layer of prismatic selium to cover your own face, changing hues and sculpting features, was so far beyond his ken the thought left him speechless. He was all brute strength when it came to his sel-sensitivity. He even had trouble shaping a simple ball out of the lighter-than-air gas.
“They’re not pets, rockbrain,” Ripka said. “They’re extremely dangerous and if they’re geared up to attack the settlements then we’re going to have to send word to Valathea.”
Detan’s mouth felt coated in ash. Valathea liked its sel-sensitives just fine, but as Detan had found out to his own personal horror it liked them weak, fit for little more than moving the gas out of mines and into the buoyant bellies of ships. Anytime the sensitives got too strong, or their abilities deviated from the accepted standard, Valathean steel came out ringing.
“That’d mean a purge,” he said.
She tipped her chin down, and her gaze snagged on the knife in her hand as if seeing it for the first time. For just a moment, her mask slipped. Detan squinted, trying to read the fine lines of her face. Was that sadness? Or indigestion? Ripka rolled her shoulders to loosen them and retightened her grip.
“I can’t have half this city’s sel-sensitives wiped out because they might be breeding too strongly. The Smokestack is an active mine, we need the sensitives to keep it moving. I’ll find the murderer before Valathea needs to get involved.”
He shook off the thought of a purge and focused on what mattered: Thratia was filthy rich. And, even as an ex-commodore, the owner of a rather fine airship.
Even trolling around the smaller, ramshackle steadings of the Scorched, Detan had heard of Thratia’s latest prize. The Larkspur, she was called, and rumor had it she was as sleek as an oiled rockcat. Being both fast and large, that ship was making Thratia mighty rich as mercers across the empire paid a premium to have her ferry their goods to the most lucrative ports long before slower, competing vessels could catch up. Detan had no need for the Larkspur’s goods-delivery services, but he rather fancied the idea of ripping the rug out from under Thratia’s quickly growing mercer collective. And anyway, he thought he’d probably cut a pretty handsome figure standing on the deck of a ship like that. Although he’d have to upgrade to a nicer hat.