The Clarity of Cold Steel

THE IPHIGENIA, along with her zombie crew, is just where I left her, wallowing knee deep in gloam, loam, and misery. I lope across the gangplank and catch Parth’s attention. His eyes go wide. With panic, terror, hope. The hope doesn’t persist, though, and he’s upright instantly, looking over one shoulder, then the other. Clapping the dirt from his hands, he nearly stumbles as he lurches through rows of crops. “You shouldn’t be here,” he gasps, taking me by the arm with filthy hands.

I twist loose. “Easy.” I already ruined one suit today.

“Please,” he swallows, gasps, “the coppers. Go.” The other croppers are all glaring over now, collective herd fear brimming in their livestock eyes, ready to pour over and drown me. “If they see you here, they’ll—”

I stifle him with the raise of a hand. “I took care of them.”

“What?” Parth demands, looking over my shoulder, all around, pale as a ghost.

“Draegar,” I keep my voice low, “looks like a scarecrow with the stuffing kicked out? I took care of him.”

“You can’t pay off—”

“I didn’t pay him off. I paid him back.” I let that settle in.

Parth latches onto a line of lantern-wrapped rigging, steadying himself. “You killed a copper?” Eyes clamped shut, lips moving in reflexive prayer, he takes a deep breath, opens his eyes, his visage green all of a sudden. “Are you insane?”

“If I was sane I wouldn’t be here.” Hell, I should be at the Cartagena, bracing Mac Heath for all she’s worth, but I came here instead. Figured on wringing the last bit of info I could before the big reveal. Ducks in a row and all.

“But the cops, they’ll come here. For Draegar. For—”

“Relax.” Man has a point, though.

“But—”

“Was Draegar and his crew leaning on you? Skimming off you?”

Parth nods once, quick, clean, abrupt.

“Right.” I reach into my coat, take out a cig and lighter. “Just like he’s leaning on everyone this part of the Boneyard. Getting his pound of flesh. Well, a real pillar of the community like that’s got a lot of friends. Lot of people hungry to see him treated real proper.” I shake my head in sorrow. “A lot of people gonna be real sad to see him gone.” I fix him an eye. “You hazard you’re the only one?”

“No,” he mumbles after a pause.

“Have to keep an ear to the ground. See how it all shakes out.” I cup my hand over my cig and light it. “It’s a time-sensitive issue, though, I’ll grant you that. Expect new interests.” I glance at my pocket watch. Not much time. I need to be at the Cartagena before Draegar’s demise becomes speakeasy banter. “Where there’s a hole, there’s always some prick looking to fill it.”

Parth nods, fingering his lip. Aces to deuces he didn’t grasp a word of my eloquent soliloquy.

“I have some questions I need answered.” I chop through his fog.

“Below, though,” he points toward a hatch, “please…?”

“Lead on, good sir.” I brush dirt off my arm.

As he’s hustling for the hatch and I’m trailing, he’s casting about like some squad of hit-mech assassins is fixing to pour out of the woodwork and take a gobble out of his world. They ain’t. There’s only rats and roaches and dying dreams. Parth’s wife glances up as we trudge by. We clamber down into the wooden depths of the hulk, stairs creaking ominously. I duck a rafter, stifle the memory of my most recent below-decks experience, step in, take it in.

“Nice place you got here,” I lie.

In the hold, a shrine to Chandra, a fertility god, lies in the corner, illuminated by a crescent of candles burning around it, wide soft pseudopods of melted wax collected about their bases. His crude wooden avatar stands in his chariot, drawn by seven sad wicker animals that represent deer but look more like used pipe cleaners. Made out of a few splinters of one-by-one strapping, the shrine’s built around it. Candles burning nonstop in a kindling diorama can’t be a good idea, but I say nothing. Smoke my cigarette. Crates lie stacked neatly all about, dividing the hold into berths, each one interspersed by hammocks hanging as limp and empty as desiccated insect husks.

“What is it you’ve found?” Parth’s eyes are wide as he turns. “You’ve found out something, yes?” Footsteps sound out on the stairs behind us. “Please, what happened to him?”

I hold up a hand, stifle him, turn, going for my gun. “Did Gortham say anything about the surgery?” My hand falters, falls as Catia sidles up and takes station beside her husband. There’s a tension between the two, no doubt concerning Catia’s clandestine knowledge about Gortham’s decision to opt for elective surgery. I wonder if they’ve talked to each other since I last left. I’d bet not.

Parth crosses his arms, glares down at his wife. “Well…?”

“A kidney,” she vomits out. “He was going to sell his left kidney.”

“Woman—” Parth seethes between clenched teeth, all stooped there in the gloom.

“It would have set us for the year,” Catia says, “whether the crops fail or not.”

“He was still recovering from—”

“Your boy have any good friends?” I cut in. Let this play out later, when I’m somewhere that’s not here.

Parth pauses, finger to his jaw as he considers. It soon becomes apparent that he doesn’t know if his son had any friends, which means he didn’t really know his son. If I wasn’t such a shit, I’d try to relate to him. But I can see Catia out of the corner of my eye, standing with arms akimbo, waiting to descend upon him like a falcon. “There was a small gang of them,” Parth ventures. “All … neighborhood boys.”

“Know any names?” Nope.

He snatches a glimpse at Catia, then looks away, shrinking visibly.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Catia snarls, “like you care. Your head’s always in the dirt. You care more for it than ever you did for him. Gortham did this because he wanted to help. Because you made him feel worthless. And that’s why he went to that blasted Butcher. That’s why he sold his body. His soul. To make you proud of him,” she spits aside, “for once.”

“Any of them go with Gortham to his, uh, ‘appointment?’” I ask, hoping I’m not setting a lighted match to a powder keg.

“Yes.” Catia draws herself up, wiping an eye. “One friend. His only friend.”

“Know his name?”

“Lars,” she says. “A Swede boy from the Fleet Wind.”

“Where?” I glance up.

“Not far from here. Four ships east. He was going for the same reason.”

“Lars?” Teutonic name. My stomach drops as I remember something I’ll always try to forget. “Blond kid?” A slit throat. “Skinny?” A leg chewed off. “About fifteen?” A bloated salt-drenched corpse. “Indentured to Jackson-Hewitt?” My stomach begins to turn inside out.

“Yes.” She hazards a tepid nod, the final nail in Lars’ coffin. Maybe he wasn’t dead a second before, but he is now. “How did you…?”

“You know his parents?”

She shakes her head. “No.”

“Good.”

Parth is back, eyes brimming with concern. “What is it?”

But I’m already stalking past. Up the stairs, out of the hold, onto the filthy deck. And if Lars is dead, that’s the lynchpin in the game as far as I’m concerned. If they murdered one kid, chances are they’d murder two.

Catia catches up to me as I make the gangplank, digs her nails into my shoulder as she clutches my greatcoat. “What is it?”

“Find Lars’ parents,” I say, shouldering out of her grasp. “Tell them to go to the floating morgue if they haven’t already.”

“Was he there?” She clutches her chest. “Was Lars there?”

“Most of him.”

“Was Gortham?” Catia collapses to her knees in the soft earth, gasping, choking, carrying on. Parth rises behind her, his hat clutched in his quivering fists. “Was he?”

Not yet. But I don’t say it cause I know I ain’t got the stomach for it or for what’s yet to come.