She would be back, as would the others, but in the meantime that left Caleb in charge. And the King in Red would want answers, soon.
Light streamed under the door of a conference room down the hall, the department’s only sign of life.
He thrust the door open, and it struck the wall with a mighty noise. Mick and the few other actuaries that constituted his army looked up from the documents sprawled on the conference table. Paper fluttered in the draft; ghostlight shone from Craft circles scrawled onto slate walls. A young woman hunched over a gutted chicken on a silver tray. The room stank of fear and auspices.
He saw himself through their eyes: hair wild, eyes wide, clothes shredded. Blood seeped from the wound in his shoulder.
“Ladies,” he said. “Gentlemen. Tell me what you know. And someone, please find me a bandage.”
21
Forty-five minutes later, Caleb stood in a dark and spacious room, addressing figures wrapped in shadow. “The black sludge is basically water.” He removed the test tube from his pocket and placed it on the long mahogany table. “Laden with muck, heavy metals, and particulate refuse, obviously unsafe to drink, but water nonetheless. Water, infested with Tzimet.”
“We are fortunate it appeared so unappetizing,” said Ostrakov, the Chief of Operations, from a seat to Caleb’s left. “Imagine if someone drank Tzimet water. We are doubly fortunate that only the wealthiest districts were affected. The Skittersill would have rioted by now.”
“Do not underestimate the number of disturbances we have put down tonight,” said gray-faced Chihuac of the Security Bureau. She wore a Warden’s badge and number, but no mask: the public, human face of Dresediel Lex’s police. “Seventy-three arrests in the last two hours, for public brawling, disturbing the peace, arson, assault, and second-degree sedition. That’s aside from the injuries caused directly by Tzimet.”
“And why is our water no longer safe to drink?” Lord Kopil leaned forward from his throne at the far end of the table. Darkness rippled around him like a cloak, and the fires of his eyes flared.
Caleb’s throat was too dry for him to swallow. Tollan sat at the table beside Chihuac, but there had been no time to bring her up to speed before the meeting. This was his play.
He tapped a Craft circle on the table. On the wall behind him, a wriggling colony of glowworms flared to display a map of the west coast of Northern Kath. Dresediel Lex strangled a giant bay in the continent’s southwest corner. Blue lines wound from the city across the blasted desert, north and east into mountain ranges and south into the jungles of the Fangs. “Most of our water comes from Bay Station.” He gestured to a glowing dot at the harbor’s mouth. “But we haven’t been able to expand its production since the mid-eighties, while the population of Dresediel Lex has grown three percent a year. More people means we need more water—for manufacture and agriculture as well as drinking and bathing. The native water table is already too depleted to support the city. We’ve contracted with other Concerns to pump water from springs, lakes, and rivers in the wilderness. Heartstone was one of the most productive of these contracts; that’s why we subsumed them.” It was not precise to say devour, though that was the word Caleb used in private to describe the process: Heartstone lived on within the hideous, many-limbed organism of RKC.
“One of their main projects was Seven Leaf Lake, a natural reservoir in the northern Drakspine. Eighty square miles of surface area, and deep—a hundred twenty eight million acre-feet, fed by snowmelt and mountain springs, with a refresh time of about two hundred years. Seven Leaf has enough water to sustain our growth for another decade at least. Over the last two years, Heartstone has bound the local spirits and opened an aqueduct between Dresediel Lex and Seven Leaf. Three days ago we began mixing Seven Leaf water with the DL system, specifically in Sansilva and downtown. We chose those districts to limit unrest in the event of any, ah, problems.”
When he said “we,” he spoke figuratively. No one had asked his advice about these decisions. But he was a part of something larger than himself—one limb of a reeling beast.
“The Seven Leaf water is tainted.” Caleb removed a second phial of black water from his pocket. “Maintenance tapped this direct from the Seven Leaf aqueduct half an hour ago.” He removed the phial’s cap and poured foul black liquid onto the table.
It landed on the lacquered wood with eight legs sharp as scythes, an exoskeleton lacking guts or soft tissue. Mandibles clashed in the air. The tiny Tzimet screeched with organs that were not quite vocal chords, and pounced at Ostrakov, who vaporized it with a backhand wave.
Kopil’s red gaze turned to Alana Mazetchul, head of the Pipeline group—draped in robes, her face fallow and lined as if she had not slept in months. “Were there any signs of contamination in Seven Leaf Lake before tonight?”
“No,” Mazetchul replied. “None of Heartstone’s water came to us tainted, nor do their projects have a history of Craft trouble. We performed extensive tests on Seven Leaf Station before Heartstone was subsumed.”
She left that sentence hanging, and Caleb recognized his cue. “The corruption could have two sources: either the aqueducts and pipes are faulty—unlikely considering the number of wards that would have to malfunction—or the problem lies at the source, with Seven Leaf Station or the lake itself. Seven Leaf Lake contains about a hundred and a quarter million acre-feet of water. It could not have become this corrupted in a few weeks. Trouble at the station is the likely cause: accident, assault, act of gods. We can’t raise the station by nightmare telegraph, which supports this theory.”
“An attack using Tzimet,” Tollan added, “would fit the pattern established by Bright Mirror Reservoir.”
Caleb waited for someone else to speak. When no questions or objections rose, he continued.
“Until we fix the problem at Seven Leaf, we’ll have to meet the city’s water needs somehow. Conjuring water out of thin air, or purifying the ocean with evaporation, is expensive. To subsume Heartstone, we issued private bonds, and borrowed funds from other Concerns including First Soul of Alt Coulumb, the Collective of Iskari Faith, and Kyrie Thaumaturgics. If we borrow more, other Deathless Kings will doubt our creditworthiness, which leaves us open to attack. Unless we find a major source of soulstuff, our only other option will be to adopt rolling droughts within the city.”
Kopil shifted in his chair. Hidden snakes rubbed scales against scales in the darkness around the table. “There will be riots, if we institute a drought.”
“There will be riots anyway.” That was Chihuac. “Sansilva and downtown may be more easily cowed than the Skittersill, but the limits of the people’s patience have been tested. Rolling droughts will manage social unrest.”
“Exactly,” Caleb said. “We can’t afford to appear weak, especially if we are: a lack of confidence will make it even harder to borrow the soulstuff we need to survive this.”
“Why not use the Serpents?”
An opening door shed light into the dark conference room, and Mal stood on its threshold. Caleb’s first impulse was to run toward her, but he suppressed the urge, and watched.
Mal’s words rippled through the room. Ostrakov swore in a language Caleb did not recognize. Chihuac and Mazetchul turned to the King in Red, either for reassurance or to watch his reaction. Tollan grimaced.
Kopil spoke, his voice heavy with death and time. “I summoned Ms. Kekapania to this meeting. I am glad she has chosen to attend. If Heartstone has exposed us, Heartstone should stand to account.”