He kept a pile of rumpled sheets on an iron bed frame and a partially dissolved bar of soap in his shower. The soap had cemented itself to the tray and seemed morose, surrounded by exposed pipes and tiles the color of toilet bowl stains.
A half-drained bottle of Pplarian whiskey sat on the floor by the bed.
There were some fake time cards from one of the factories in Growl Mort, a change of clothes, a worn-out toothbrush and a knife that looked like it might have once been used for murder.
Zane looked out from his balcony. It was barely large enough to accommodate him standing.
The sun was just slipping into a drunken red-faced coma behind heavily decayed buildings to the east. The sky was pink as nockstress flesh by the time little orange squares began to flicker in the darkening walls and edifices that pressed the street. People lit candles and oil lamps, moving light from room to room.
The streetlamps remained ornate blackened scepters. Metholinate to Ghoul Court had been rationed, said the papers. In reality it had been turned off.
Zane felt the indignation boiling just under the surface. The population wouldn’t stand for it much longer.
Just the previous week, a man had tried to tap in under the street to siphon his own supply. He was smoking at the time and the explosion had thrown him through the bricks. He came out of the tunnel, through the street and into the open air, popping up like toast.
A team of city engineers had come in to fix the damage, guarded by a squad of five knights in full battle gear. That was something new. Not even the hardest criminals thought about tangling with the knights. They were quite possibly the first outsiders not to leave in fear.
Zane Vhortghast knew they wouldn’t be the last.
Caliph’s plan for cleansing the Court would see action soon and it would not be a gentle clean.
Part of Zane bemoaned the time he had sunk into the Court. He would lose most of his contacts to prison or they would become casualties of the raid. On the other hand, if it worked, it meant he would not have to invest any more time chasing phantoms.
From his balcony, Fifth Street extended north like a latrine. Great peaked canisters, water towers and grinding engines squatted on rooftops like deformed metal goblins. They muffled the desultory moans emanating from windows with sashes thrown open to the night.
The struggling cries of Ghoul Court’s diverse clientele issued lustily through the thick humid air. Zane imagined their sweating bodies for a moment wrestling in the dark, enduring the hot weather as they worked out anxieties linked to the encroaching war.
A bottle broke in an alley and someone screamed. Three dark shapes trampled across the street, carrying clothes and other plunder.
A knock sounded at the paper-thin door. Zane turned and crossed the room in four steps. He opened it, revealing a hallway that was darker than his room and smelled far worse.
“Hey Peter.” A skeletal lad with mad black hair and deliberate scars up and down his arms stood wavering on the threshold. He had a birdcage in one hand. “Got yer tweet.”
Zane jammed his hand into his pocket and pulled out a handful of coins. He squeezed them meticulously, pushing them out between his thumb and forefinger one at a time into his other palm.
“Three gryphs is robbery.”
The dizzy man smiled and loosely extended his hand.
“Yeah, well, you know any other bird-duffers?”
“Plenty.”
The man sneered and gave Zane/Peter the cage.
“Don’t spend it all on sweet red,” said Zane.
The man made an obscene gesture in reply and stumbled off into the dark.
Zane closed the door and locked it out of habit. He turned up the oil lamp on a small badly beaten desk and pulled off the cloth covering the cage.
He swore.
It was a pathetic sight. The pigeon was black from soot and badly torn as though it had been stuck in and then ripped out of a chimney pipe. The chirurgery had been preformed ruthlessly and recently. Blood still caked the feathers all around the excised flesh. The skull was pink and the bird cried piteously.
Heartless as he was, cruelty to animals was something Zane Vhortghast could not stomach—which was why he ate the insensible meat produced under Thief Town as opposed to beef, rationalizing that meat wasn’t really an animal. It was more like plant life that grew in the dark. More like fungus.
He swallowed a lump in his throat and set the cage aside in disgust. He wondered if the thing could even make the flight. It was a long way. Farther than he himself had ever traveled.
He had to hurry. He had been sweating it out waiting for the duffer.
Tonight was the twenty-fourth of Lüme, the night the High King was taking his tart to the opera. Zane had promised to be there when they arrived, overseeing the security detail assigned to the building.
He took the note he had composed earlier and opened the cage. The bird went hysterical. It didn’t have a hood. It thrashed about, terrified, clawing and pecking at his gloved hand. He was forced to grab it by the head to cover its eyes. The duffer hadn’t even given him a tube.
Cursing violently, Zane struggled to get a tiny scroll case wired to its ankle. He then inserted his note and grimaced as he pressed a black cruestone into the metal clip screwed into the creature’s skull.
He took it to the balcony, hoping it could still fly.
Carefully, gently, with ridiculous indulgence, he set the thing on the floor. It took off at once, flapping back into the room, crashing into walls and lamps in its confusion.
Zane winced and swore. He leapt about, trying to corral it, waving his arms, herding it toward the open sky. For a moment, he wondered if the chirurgeon had been ripped on something when he performed the operation. But then the fire in the bird’s mind finally seemed to consume its confusion. It stopped its self-abuse and wheeled toward the balcony. It sped out, up and away into the skyline’s brown glow.
Heart pounding, Zane Vhortghast let out a long sigh, vowing to find the duffer and the chirurgeon when he had spare time.
With only twenty minutes to reach the opera, the spymaster leapt out his balcony window, landed deftly on a steel drum and hit the bricks running.
As the sky clotted with stray vapors and shadowy things, the Byun-Ghala departed Isca Castle. Its huge pulsating propellers powered it out across the striated murk. Miles of bruised atmosphere and city enmeshed, twisted together in a surreal tangle of deep maroon and deviant structural black. Lights twinkled far below, white-gold and tiny.
From the observation deck, the wind smelled clean and cool despite the humidity. Sena had never flown before. She was giddy with delight.
She wore a formal décolletage, indigo with tiny diamonds down the kick pleat. One of many choices given her by the army of tailors and dressmakers, it accentuated her movements by design. Her entire back was bare.
She had explored every cranny of the zeppelin, seen the huge bedroom and made a flirtatious joke before dragging Caliph quickly out onto the observation deck. It being her first ride, she was unwilling to miss a moment of the view.
The airship plugged east, great flaps of skin pivoting, guiding it out over Ironside, over water. It slipped into the darkness above the bay and turned south, providing a rare romantic view of the city, a deception caused by dusk.
Sena rested her head on Caliph’s shoulder and gazed at the distant lights and smoldering industrial stacks of Lower Murkbell. Growl Mort gave off a volcanic glow that turned the heavy vapors erratic orange. It came home to her again with considerable poignancy that the man who ruled the city, who ruled everything she could see was standing right beside her. The most powerful man in Stonehold.
She looked at Isca.
Caliph looked at her.