I grinned as they halted outside of easy lunging distance. “Mr. Voltar, Mr. Dawes. A pleasure to see you both!”
“A pleasure to see you again, Miss Falara,” the detective replied cheerily, lowering his revolver while a stoney-faced Dawes kept his trained on me. “Or would you prefer Ms. Harrow, or even Ms. Xang?”
“I’d ask how you know that, but that would give you a reason to be smug,” I said. “Although I suppose I can’t stop you in that regard.”
“You could try, but you’d run out of body parts well before you’d manage anything.”
Dawes’ expression turned disapproving as he looked at Voltar. “Could you not needle her?”
“This isn’t needling. This is a simple stating of the facts. She’s ripped herself open just from tonight.”
He wasn’t wrong there. Pain still lanced me in several places, and just moving got me a half-dozen little stabs of pain acrossmy body. I’d dressed what wounds I could, but cannibalizing my wardrobe again wasn’t the same as treating them or bandaging them with clean clothes. There was my stash of tools not touched since I’d become Falara, which could have at least brought back my eye if I hadn’t buried them in the Infernal Quarter halfway across the city..
“I think your friend has the limits of my abilities down, Doctor. Unless you two are about to kill me, I’m not about to rip apart my body hoping to hurt you. Hells, I’d much rather we all part ways and never see each other again, but that choice isn’t in my hands any longer. If it is to kill me, I just request it is quick.”
“Hrrm,” Voltar eyed me with an unnerving look on his face. “It would perhaps be the most opportune time.”
“No,” Dawes stated flatly. “I’m not shooting a defenseless woman, and neither are you.”
I’d take offense to the word defenseless, but I couldn’t protest.
“Even if you will not shoot me, just turning me over to the Watch would have me dead. Death would be the penalty for my crimes even before accounting for me being a Diabolist, unless I’m mistaken. With it added to the list, I imagine I’m going straight to a quick drop on the end of a rope.”
Voltar chuckled. “Oh no, the Diabolism means you’d stay alive. You’d get an invitation from a representative of Her Majesty’s government, with the alternative being that quick stop at the end of a rope you were thinking of.”
“Either way, you have me at your mercy, detective. Please, monologue about how you figured it all out because I’m very interested myself in what the Hells has been going on.”
Voltar’s grin faltered a little. “I do not monologue.”
“Are you calling your partner a liar, then?” I said, gesturing towards Dawes with my uninjured hand. “I’ve read the account of the Perilous Ruby. It went on for nearly three pages, and the book’s pages were not small.”
“Truth be told, we had to cut it down,” Dawes responded. “His actual speech to me afterward went on for six and the publisher insisted I cut it down. And that I insert more internal dialogue to break it up some. ‘Rambling’ was the word used.”
“I do not ramble!” Voltar protested.
“Please. Even if Dawes’ books aren’t the actual events, I’ve had to endure Versalicci’s rant about how you rant. If your monologue was long enough to leave an impression on him, it must be massive in its length.”
Voltar glared at me, then turned his gaze to Dawes, who looked a trifle embarrassed.
“They can get a bit long. They are always very educational, old friend, but it can tend toward the monotonous.”
Voltar looked like he was contemplating arguing the point further, but he decided against it.
“My suspicions began when the Watch found you in the aftermath of Mr. Govlar’s demise, the only survivor. A random alchemist accompanying a highly-ranked member of the Black Flame? While your record indicated some manner of illicit activity, nothing on the level of the Black Flame, and certainly nothing to suggest you’d be trusted by Versalicci’s former right-hand man.”
He looked at me as if that last sentence was a question.
“I’ve not been part of the Black Flame for five years. I don’t have any if you’re asking for some deep insight into how they run things these days. Golvar was the dependable one, which is why he was the right hand. I doubt Understreet would change that.”
“Well, after you caught my attention, it was simplicity itself to deduce who you were. Even ignoring the fact that one Lily Xang appointed Katherine Falara to manage the affairs relating to Bao Xang on her behalf, once it was clear I was dealing with someone associated with the Black Flame, I went through the list of all Black Flame members who were alchemists and who had died. Already strong circumstantial evidence pointing to your name aided by suspicions you had been the Black Flame’s biosculptor, but to put everything to rest, I dug up ‘your’ corpse.”
Ilta. One of the earlier casualties of Understreet, and when I’d first considered the possibility of leaving, the first corpse to be secured for faking our deaths. The fact I hadn’t killed her had been only a small assuaging of the guilt over mutilating her body afterward.
“You didn’t do the bare minimum either, considering how little attention just another corpse would have received back then,” Voltar said praisingly, which only made me feel worse. “It took Dawes here peeling the flesh back and looking to the bones to find the evidence of you manipulating the body to resemble your own.”
“I would like her name, just so her family can be notified of her death?” Dawes asked.
I shook my head. “Ilta. But she was an orphan. The name was likely fake, and more than likely she had no family left. The fewer connections you have, the better a recruit to the Black Flame.”
Voltar continued onwards. “Our initial meeting also piqued my interest. Training a tell to disappear can leave its own tells. If you don’t know anyone who has sculpted their face in that way, looking for the minute details of someone trying deliberately to not have sudden motions of their facial expression look unnatural doesn’t look different from just how people move their faces naturally. When that suspicion is already there, however…”
“I should have lied about the sculpt,” I mused to myself. “Although at that point, any amount of suspicion would have been too much. I built a mask out of paper, it seems.”
“We, of course, needed to confirm things, which is where finding your possessions confirming you first as a Biosculptor and second as a Diabolist proved useful. We have possession of both.”
“So, you two were the ones who pilfered my apartment?” I asked, tone mild. One of my remaining good fingers dug into the wooden floor of the warehouse, blood beginning to trickle from the knuckles down.
“On my honor, we did nothing more than find your boxes under the floorboards and take two of them, Miss Xang,” Dawes assured me. “The destruction of your possessions afterward was not our doing.”
The Imp sighed inside my head as I lifted my bleeding fingers off the warehouse floor. A wrench in my gut almost strangled my next statement, but I managed to get a hoarse reply out.
“It’s appreciated. So you do not know about who nabbed my last box then?”
“After finding there was a tracking tracer in the box, we decided the best thing to do was leave it alone. Inspired idea, fitting it inside the wood of the box itself, being burrowed in there, makes it difficult for most tools that find tracking tracers useless. Most. So no, we left it, and presumably somebody else found it.”
“Josiah Hawken. Or maybe Hawkens, if that even was a real name and not a fake one he gave me. Probably a fake. That’s an interesting tale, assuming you don’t know anything about that yet.”
“Oh, I haven’t had time to look into that yet,” Voltar said. “I’m sure once I do, all the pieces will begin to fall into place. Like how his height suddenly increased, walking from one end of the warehouse to the other. Or you being a diabolist, which I don’t think anyone would have guessed.”
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
“Versalicci kept that close to his chest,” I said. “Calling back home to his Papa made me very useful to him.”
Voltar arched an eyebrow. “Only his? Well, I suppose that’s another theory confirmed. I don’t suppose you can fill in any more blanks about events from five years back before we take you away?”
“Depends,” I replied. “Who hired you for this, detective? If anyone did, and it wasn’t just curiosity and Versalicci’s involvement that drew you in.”
“Lady Karsin,” he answered, and I didn’t know where to delight or despair in how freely he’d given that information up. “She wanted you vetted after you cured her son, although it was originally something I was to get to at my own pace. If it wasn’t for the death of our mutual acquaintance, Mr. Golvar, I’d have probably begun looking into you a few weeks from now. Speaking of, how much did your account of his death different from what actually occurred?”
“Very little. I didn’t mention that he knew who I was, but the events played out as I told the Watch. I didn’t know he had Angel’s Sorrow on him, and if I had, I guarantee I would never have surrendered to the Watch to begin with. Guess I would have avoided a few evenings of being stalked by Watch tails if I’d tried making a run for it.”
“Angel’s Sorrow?” Voltar asked. “That’s intriguing. You’re certain of this?”
“You didn’t know?” I asked. True, the Watch officer interrogating me hadn’t seemed pleased, but they and Voltar being far apart was a departure from the norm.
“That you were being actively watched and what was in the package Golvar carried? I knew the former, just not from the Watch, who have been less communicative with me as of late. Although I suspect that’s just the result of some long-building tension.”
“They don’t like him leaning on his connections to the government,” Dawes explained. “Which included leveraging your early release from the Coffin.”
“You might have stepped on the toes of some Watch Officer’s attempt at another iteration of the secret police, and also why? You could have just kept me in the coffin.”
“Hrrm, no, we could not,” Voltar said. “Finding out where you would go, what you would do, those were more important than hoping a probable Black Flame member would break in a Watch prison. You were certain that was Angel’s Sorrow in the box?”
“The Watch officer I got it from seemed pretty certain, and she could have thought of much more reasonable things to get my knife off her partner’s throat.”
The two stared at me in silence for a while as I realized how that sounded.
“They were tailing me,” I said. “On a rooftop. Self-defense.”
“Against a pair of people just following you while you both walked on top of someone else’s house?”
I tried to move past that topic before I lost on it any further. “The question is, where do we go from here? You’ve successfully caught me, probably the one person in the mess who knows the least about what’s going on, detective. What’s the next step?”
“For right now? We bring you to Lady Kersin and Lord Montague, since they are paying me for this case. Not that I particularly agree with the decision to have you brought in now, but considering the mess you’ve been making-“
“Can’t blame a girl for defending herself,” I interjected.
“You weren’t the one to start that?” Dawes asked, eyebrow arched.
“She was,” Voltar told him. “Relative positions inside the warehouse when the fight starts, as well as the blood splatter. Unless they both were wielding flintlocks, which, given the contents of the underground room, whoever she was fighting should have been much better armed.”
“He lunged at me,” I said. “I was only acting in self-defense.”
“Even so, hardly the only disruption you’ve caused,” Voltar said. “Then again, given the theories on familial traits.”
“Don’t you dare,” I hissed while Dawes looked at Voltar disapprovingly.
“You know those theories have as much science as any number of street prophets, Voltar.”
“Fair enough, although I can hardly forget your relations,” Voltar told me.
“They're just as hard for me to forget,” I responded bitterly.
“Would you mind answering a question of mine?”
I shrugged. “It seems only fair. Depending on the question, I can’t promise a truthful answer.”
I would protect some things. Tolman and Arsene. My mother. Other things Voltar didn’t need to pry into. Even a few things regarding Versalicci were off-limits in that regard.
“Was there anyone besides you practicing Diabolism in the Black Flame you knew of? I’d hate to find any more popping up I was unaware of.”
I sighed. “Again, my knowledge is old. There were eight of us originally, two experienced, the rest of us novices and intended to be stuck that way outside specific tasks Versalicci wanted us to perform. You caught Daver and Mallet died during the initial wars with the other gangs. Matt tried to turn and got his throat slit for it. Ilya burned after you exposed Understreet. Rebecca, Dodge, and Alice might have escaped for all I know, but if they’re still with the Black Flame, I do not know.”
“All three of them died in the Understreet,” Dawes told me sympathetically. “I wish I could say it was swift, but…”
“You don’t need to sugarcoat it, doctor,” I told him. “I may not have stuck around the entire time, but I saw the worst. It was their choice to stay and fight for that in the end.”
The Watch was brutal but for some of my fellow novice diabolists…. Alice loved summoning imps, specifically inside people, to watch them eat at her victims from the inside out. Then again, would I have been different in the same position? Versalicci had put hooks in people younger than he had with me.
“My question. Do you think Versalicci is behind the poisonings?”
The two traded looks, Dawes stony again and Voltar amused. “I think you have your own thoughts on that we’ll be hearing anyway, so perhaps you go first on that subject?”
“He didn’t do it, and I don’t say that out of any loyalty or affections for the man,” I said. “He’s a snake and a monster, and a few other things besides, but he’s not an idiot in this way. Is there some benefit to having leverage on the Montagues or the Karsins? Perhaps, Lady Karsin has been around for a long time and may know where some bodies are buried, and the Montagues have access to records that could be useful as well. But how would he get this leverage? This scheme wouldn’t give leverage, what it does at most is raise funds by making nobles pay the poisoner for the cure via a proxy, me.”
“One could argue that the amount of money one would make from this scheme would be quite high,” Voltar interjected. “Especially with repeat business. Each poisoned victim would earn him quite the ransom per cure.”
“Except it’s not his style,” I replied. “Versalicci can be dramatic, but only to distract from another scheme. For raising funds, he can make more with less risk in a hundred different ways.”
Voltar arched an eyebrow. “And can you be certain this is not some dramatics intended to distract from another scheme?”
“No, but I damn well can state in terms of direct risk this would top the list of those types of scheme,” I countered. “When messing with nobility, there will be one member of the gang directly involved. Everyone else is either hired hands, or proxies, or people from out of town. If I were still part of the Black Flame, he wouldn’t simultaneously risk both me and Golvar with this. Hells, Golvar being used as a mule for the poisons, that would never happen. It’s a poisonous loyalty that Versalicci makes, but he doesn’t make it by risking people that loyal for something this trivial, and that’s ignoring Golvar being too useful to waste on this.”
“I’d hardly say the amount of money being made is trivial,” Voltar said.
“By his standards? When he can make the same more consistently and with less risk? Especially after Understreet, he won’t take the chance of bringing attention to him again. He wants to stay in the shadows, lick his wounds, and let people forget about him even more. They already do half the job for him since no one wants to admit how much of the city infrastructure was being run by an Infernal.”
Honestly, I didn’t know if they’d try to cover it up even more or just bite the bullet and send the military deep into the underground to kill him if they found out who he was the son of. Having an Infernal come close to being the mayor of the city in all but name was embarrassing. Having the son of a Duke of Hell doing that might cause riots and result in a round of executions for the people who were supposed to be safeguarding against exactly that.
“If there is some deeper scheme, he may have entrusted it to people he knew he may trust,” Voltar said, pointedly looking at me.
I scowled. “There’s no trust between us. I’d be more loyal if he forced me to swear an oath overseen by a demon, and if you want to test for that, you are welcome to.”
“Another factor is the poison itself,” Dawes interjected. “Angel’s Sorrow requires a captive divine creature, which is a much rarer sight than their Infernal counterparts, especially in modern times. Not exactly something that would be cheap to acquire or to contain. Not the poison of choice for making money via ransom.”
I inclined my head at Dawes, thankful for the help, even if I couldn’t guess why he was supporting me.
“One last point in its favor. Do you really think that those Pure-Bloods happened upon Golvar by accident? Someone set them on him. Someone who knew he’d have Angel’s Sorrow in that box.”
“Someone who wanted it to be a group of thugs to find it? Do you think they’d even recognize what it was?”
I faltered a little. That was true. The Pure-bloods and their involvement in this was one of the more murky parts of this entire affair. I rallied a second later.
“Catspaws as well. Probably with instructions to take the box to whoever is actually behind this. Or a middleman. Probably a middleman. Unless they stumbled across Golvar in the underground and attacked him for no particular reason besides to beat up the Infernal.”
“They don’t really need many other reasons to attack people,” Voltar noted.
“How about pursuing someone into the Infernal Quarter? Five humans, chasing an infernal through the Quarter, hoping no one has an issue with that?”
Voltar sighed. “I hear your point. I have quite a few questions myself regarding this. But to a more immediate point, Ms. Xang-”
“Harrow,” I insisted.
“Harrow. Falara even. What would you suggest?”
I paused, considering Voltar. There was no chance he hadn’t thought of this already, even if he lacked some of the information. Why hadn’t he simply dragged me off?
“I think that someone is playing us all for fools, and if I’ve noticed, you’ve noticed. Why play along, detective?”
Voltar cocked his head to the side. “Because playing along for now gets me more information to make my case. As well as other concerns.”
“He doesn’t have a free rein to do everything he wishes,” Dawes said. “Especially not after Understreet.”
I considered the good doctor. The ever-present shadow, the dutiful sidekick and chronicler, always in the shade cast by the skilled detective.
“You hold the leash?”
“I have some influence on how tight it draws,” Dawes corrected me.
Well, it just meant I had two people to convince instead of one. “It seems to me that playing along might go easier if there was a little fire spread to make the rats panic. Let someone else serve the role of the fool, enforced by all three of us.”