CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO - THE BLACK LAND
Tanner was ready.
Tanner was definitely ready.
She was wearing the governor's stuff, she could feel his spectral fingers digging into her shoulders, a confident voice murmuring in her ear, telling her where to go, what to do, how to do it. A stiff iron rod lacing through her spine to keep it rigid, a bundle of steel cables permeating every muscle and dragging it to a state of alertness, a metallic quality to her gaze, to the set of her jaw. Authority, as everyone knew, was carried in the jaw - thrusting, powerful jaws conveyed an impression of being powerful and thrusting. And powerfully thrusting, perhaps. After all, your voice (another key part of authority), could only be released by the mechanisms of the jaw. Volumes was dependent on the jaw, too. Everyone knew that someone who breathed through their mouth looked less authoritative, so the jaw remaining locked shut was vital to projecting the right aura. Plus, there was presumably some evolutionary reason - a powerful jaw in the wild meant that facing you was a predator capable of snapping your head off with a single devastating chomp. It was implied violence, but without the immediate threat of, saying, baring one's teeth. Also, suggested you'd built a muscular jaw by chomping bones/stones/the skulls of your enemies, or by playing the trumpet, the most warlike instrument of them all. Or, you chewed a lot of tobacco, like a hoodlum. Or toffee, which made you dangerously irresponsible and thus deeply unpredictable. Hell, the governor had a half-paralysed face that kept his jaw tight as a coiled spring, he was basically cheating.
Tanner was definitely not ready, she'd been thinking about jaws for hours.
The ledgers were plain. Yan-Lam had actually been the one to find out where Dyen was currently working. In the city, as an overseer of one of the smelters. A huge amount of metal was locked up in the city, and most of it was junk. No more use for rusted hinges, kitchenware, wrecked swords and spears... no more use but recycling. Hard, ugly work, but they were slowly recycling anything they could get their hands on, melting it down and refining it into ingots of steel, ready to fuel the growth of the colony. And they said there was metal in the hills, too. Once the colony was big enough, those smelters could turn from recycling to something grander, to ripping out the fruit of the earth. Still. Baby steps. Smelters were outside the city, their future expansions already planned, huge swathes of earth marked for use. Would be a small hike. Not that she minded - liked having a chance to walk around a bit, wake herself up as best she could. The chambermaid clearly wanted to tag along. But that would be deeply irresponsible.
Even so. Interrogation time. She mustered each and every piece of evidence at her disposal, each and every one. It was... well, not as fantastic as she'd hoped. A crushed cat. A suspicious exile, and frequent clashes with a sober, ordinary man. Two dead bodies connected to him, one of which was very, very close indeed to an ice-cold pond - the ideal place to chill someone rapidly. Dunk their head, hold them under, let them freeze or drown. Shoddy documentation by the mortuary assistant and the snow's preserving effect to launder away any incriminating traces. Could confront him at his home, but that... frankly, that would be too... sterile, in a way. Seeing him around others, how he held himself, handled himself, that would help reinforce or suppress her hunch. Plus, of course, this happening in public could put some serious fear into him. If the other bouncers found out he was getting interrogated... oh, that would send a message. And, obviously, meeting in public meant she didn't have so much undivided attention. The more muddled he was by the presence of others, the less he could see how much of a tired, stressed wreck she was, under all the layers of clothing and habit. She had plenty of reasons for not going to a man's house to interrogate him. Plenty. Totally wasn't just because she was already feeling nervous, and being alone in a strange house with a potential suspect was...
Well.
As a judge, she'd met with clients before, and as a rule, offices were for formal meetings and the signing of paperwork, homes were for more personal meetings where sensitive issues were discussed, and public spaces were for meetings where people actually felt more comfortable, less pinned-down, and right now Tanner wanted to be both of those things, thank you very much.
She tied her cape, and... yes, she used the borrowed tie as one of her ribbons. She wore sturdy boots, and clicked the heels together experimentally... yes, yes, that did make her feel neater and more orderly. The governor's shade slowly coalesced around her. Giving her authority. Strength. Making her jaw swell with lawful muscles. Sacrilegious? Yes. Definitely. But if the warming glow of the lodge's candles couldn't reach this far north - which seemed to be the case, based on how things were going - then she had no reason to believe Fidelizh's gods could do much up here either. Meaning, she had to get creative, by gum. Creative. So, yes, she had the governor riding around on her back. So what. Her boots were on. Her gloves were secure. She had a final emergency cup of coffee, a little blast of warming blackness to keep her alert... and a suitcase filled with pages of notes.
And off she went. Bidding Yan-Lam farewell at the door.
A second later, she was hurrying back, red-faced.
Yan-Lam suppressed a smile as Tanner headed for the soldiers. Needed a damn guide was what she needed, someone to make sure she didn't get killed out there. Be a fool to head alone, and Marana still hadn't reported back. Sersa Bayai was busy, but she was able to wrangle the help of a familiar soldier. Very familiar indeed. Still didn't know his name, though. He was young, contemporary-looking, still slightly unshaped, with large brown eyes, dirty blonde hair, a supple look, pretensions at a military moustache, and hands possessed of an unusual degree of swiftness, nimbleness, and dexterity. The hands of a stage magician, long and slender, yet corded with more than a little steel. In her mind, he was Mr. Supple. He'd been there, on that awful night, and had let her know that Tyer had been seen. Mr. Supple, who brought it to her, and Mr. Claw, who called it in in the first place. Hoped the former wouldn't meet the fate of the latter - and she still didn't believe it was an authentic suicide. Another murder, unless proven otherwise. He attended to her as she left, Yan-Lam watching them down the hill. The snow was growing thicker, more and more was falling, and none was melting. It piled in great ramps outside the walls of both colony and city, and the roof of the mansion strained under the weight. The sun was pale, and lacked warmth.
The soldier said nothing as they marched across the colony, boots sinking deep into the snow.
"Thank you, again. For volunteering."
The man glanced over, and up, a flinch playing over his eyelids - unused to being the shortest one in a conversation.
"Think nothing of it, honoured judge. Happy to help. Smelters, then?"
"Smelters. I take it they're still active?"
"That's right. Less to do with them, but there's still some backlog to clear out, last I heard. Workers get paid more to go out and do this stuff in the winter, but it's still... well, let's say I'm glad to be on guard duty in the mansion."
Made sense. A smelter was a huge bloody furnace, the change in temperature from winter to summer might not mean very much when working with the great extremes inside those things. The roads were barely visible, marked out by a handful of tracks... people were already shuffling out of doors. City workers had nothing to do. Farmers had nothing to do. Smelter workers did, though, and anyone who could work indoors. Otherwise, people sat around, read, talked with others, and drank. Waited for the great chill to end, and the slow thaw to begin, when actual damn work could happen once more. Eyes watched Tanner as she walked, suspicious of the judge who barely showed her face, who was single-handedly trying to solve a murder, when to them, her track record was conducting questionnaires, and failing to stop three people from dying in a single damn night. Sure, let her manage the governor situation, the place was already sick of death, and they could guarantee she'd never find herself a criminal to hang. She kept her head down. Moved quickly. Focused on who she was, what she had to do. Be a machine, an unfeeling machine that operated as it was intended to, wound up and sent off to war.
The smelters were enormous damn things. And in any other circumstance, Tanner would be afraid of seeing them. They were the only things in the entire landscape not covered in snow. The snow all around them was melted down, and there was nothing to focus on besides the looming structures. Far from the colony, to stop the fumes from contaminating everything. And so they could build more. In front of her was the bulb, but the rest of the plant was still waiting to grow up. All around her were its shades - plots marked out with high fences, paths navigating their way between nothing and nothing. Felt like walking across an enormous archery target, seeing the divisions, seeing the intention... and just waiting for something to snap out of the air, buzzing like a wasp, shrieking like an eagle, impaling itself into the crisp white nothingness. She kept her hands in her pockets. The colony vanished behind them in a glittering haze. Another wall-god kept an eye on them now, no longer the huge woman, now it was a huge man, smooth and immaculate, arms braced to hold the wall behind him. His face was shrouded in a tangle of curls, sculpted to seem as if they were dripping with sweat, falling in straggling locks. The light made his face seem almost sorrowful, and he watched with sad eyes as the first black monoliths were erected. And slowly... a red glow would be dawning.
Several blast furnaces. Towering well above her head. All black metal, spotless, reinforced with long poles and pillars until they seemed almost organic - a tree's trunk, anchored by roots. Already, a low, warning hum was emerging - the heat was beginning to rise. Equally bizarre structures surrounded it on all sides, hissing as they began to heat a great quantity of air, ready to blast it into the furnace and agitate it to life. Black mounds of anthracite lay scattered around, glittering in the sun like precious stones. Tanner knew about anthracite. Knew that for years no-one could get it to light. No-one. Too hard, too strange. But blast it with hot air, and then... then you could get it to light up. They talked about ripping it out the soil in the colony, dragging it up and using it to fuel an era of industrial expansion. And anthracite, once it began to burn, tended to not stop. She heard rumours about towns devoured by hungry smoke, the anthracite refusing to ever go out, not for decades. Whole seams igniting and refusing suppression. Beneath them, in this land, were three underground rivers. One was a river of contamination. The other was a river of bitterly cold water. And the third was a river of sleeping fire, of dead black rock eager to spring to life once again, if properly motivated. White stone buildings, built of scavenged rock, lay hunched around the monoliths... but they were turning black, piece by piece. The smoke allowed for no other shade to endure in its presence. White and black, like the hide of an exotic animal.
Black monoliths standing about, fuelled by stones that would never die, tainting everything around them with soot and smoke, unifying all into the same shade of inky black. The snow refused to touch it. Melted in the air, and turned to a kind of chilling rain, which ran in black rivers across the phantom landscape. While most of the vacant lots were, well, vacant, the 'streets' were slightly depressed into the earth. Very slightly. And thus, the black rivers were carried away in regular lines and rows, rolling downhill in a branching grid. Like a sigil was being carved into the world, a sigil of a phantom city, with no buildings, and streets of the blackest soot. And when the rivers ran away enough to become cold once more, to freeze back into snow... the blackness remained. And the streets were embedded, a black, ever-expanding scar. Snowfall would return the land to alabaster purity... and the reawakening of the furnaces would renew the scar once more. And each day, the heat grew. Perhaps, when this place began with a single solitary furnace amidst the snow, there was only a little pool of the black sludge. Now... now it had expanded. Soon, it would expand still. More black rivers, running for longer distances, staining the earth more deeply than ever. The furnaces were plotting the expansion of their phantom city. Perhaps, in time, the buildings all around would be so stained by soot and smoke that they'd eventually become furnaces themselves, poles springing from the ground to support them, anchored in their black, black streets. And even now, a small serpentine coil of smoke was beginning to issue upwards.
This place... it was what she imagined the black network of witchcraft to look like. The lattice of misfortune the lodge was meant to protect her from. And the fact that it was engraved so vividly into the landscape... it only confirmed, in some irrational core, that the lodge's candle meant nothing in this place. The storms had long since extinguished it.
Maybe they'd extinguished it because she hadn't visited during her time in Mahar Jovan.
Maybe.
Figures were moving around up ahead, slowly, in heavy coats. The heat was too low for them to be removed quite yet.
Tanner paused, studying the workers from a distance, as the first black rivers began to run around her boots, staining the leather as they went. Mr. Supple watched her, waiting for orders.
"...is there a canteen of some kind where the workers go? Or do they tend to just eat in inns?"
In inns? Dozy mare, speak properly, don't sound like you have a damned stutter. Mr. Supple hummed.
"Believe there's one, yes. Too far from the colony to walk there and back conveniently, and it's tough work. Fellows need food like the furnaces need coal."
"Could you... point me towards it?"
The soldier looked up at her silently. Oh. Well. That made sense. Didn't work here. Wouldn't know. And all the buildings looked alike, striped black and white, ornate without regard to function. A latrine could be fashioned from impeccable stone out here, ornamented enough to be a small shrine in another city. The canteen... there, there. Ramshackle, clearly designed to be torn down as the furnaces expanded across the black grid the rivers were forming. The walls were gates. Quite literally - the city had enormous gates embedded within it, seemed to be a hobby to build enormous iron gates. And with the city fallen, the toppled gates had been dragged out using horses, and now they were arranged in a crude building. Heavy iron walls, marked with the faces of strange gods and spiralling symbols, gaps plugged with rubble, all of it topped with wood and insulation. Didn't need to be stained - the soot was only turning it a slight shade darker, filling in the carvings. Flattening it all out and leaving nothing but unaltered darkness.
And inside... food. Of some description. Steam wafted through little metal chimneys, like still-smoking cigar stubs in an ashtray.
Tanner just followed her nose, really. Followed it into the great iron mass, as the furnaces continued to hum, louder and louder as the seconds rolled by...
* * *
It was a terrifically hot place. The smell of stew was almost overpowering, and the low benches were sporadically dotted with huddled figures in soot-stained overalls, glaring at their meals like they could eat the stew with eyes alone. They brewed coffee here in enormous, industrial quantities, spilling it from huge samovars that steamed and whined as they kept things warm. The stew was thick, potent, full of rehydrated meat from the cold-houses, shovelled down as quickly as possible before you had a chance to chew it. Winter, even with proper supplies, proper preparation, proper everything, was still a long, dark affair which tasted like sludgy coffee and old meat. Heads turned to stare at the new arrivals, and Mr. Supple sidled backwards to allow Tanner to take precedence. She scanned the room carefully... and began to ask her questions as quickly as possible, unwilling to remain still for too long, panic driving her limbs to move, regardless of necessity. Asked for his name. Dyen. Former bouncer. No idea what the man actually looked like, but... the lady behind the counter, who was sweating through her overalls, grunted and pointed towards a large man, turned away from the entrance. Conceivably unaware of their arrival. The iron wall in front of him was engraved, and from over here, it looked like an enormous whale-creature was opening its mouth to swallow him whole. He sat right where the gullet was at its widest, and chomped onwards, unawares of his impending fate. Tanner marched cautiously across the room, hands behind her back in the sort of way an official on a mission ought to do... brushed a lock of hair behind her ear, and cursed her general state.
The man jumped as she sat down opposite him.
He had a... sagging face. Once upon a time, she might've said that his face clung cleanly to the surface of the skull, making him look not unlike Mr. Canima. But over time, the tension died out, the wiry muscles slackened, and slowly, slowly, his skin began to sag away in little jowls. Still had the vague outlines of his skull, but it was all growing fuzzier, and his heavy stubble only added to the impression. His eyes were small and dark, reminding her of fish eggs, and his mouth was colourless. His hair was balding at the top, and thin strands of peat-coloured hair had been poorly combed over to conceal the growing patch. And his arms... his arms were muscled. Well-muscled, even as his legs and buttocks were wide with fat. This was a man used to using his arms, and his scarred knuckles spoke to... perhaps, less-than-pacifistic uses of said appendages. And according to a very sweaty woman in a hairnet, he was Dyen.
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He glared at her with his fish-egg eyes, and morosely chewed a chunk of pink matter.
"What."
Tanner kept her face placid, and moved her little suitcase onto the table, flinching internally at the thought of how much stew had been spilled across this thing in the past.
"I wanted to ask you a few questions."
His eyes were unblinking. His jaw twitched. Tanner's jaw didn't - her jaw was strong, and girdled with justice.
"Go on. Got work to be getting on with. 'less you feel like having no more metal, let me get on with it. Right?"
Harsh voice. Authoritative. Good for barking at drunks, perhaps. Tanner said nothing for a moment, just opened her case and began to remove papers. Notebook. Pen. And next to them, a great deal of notes. They were quite isolated over here in the corner. Not many people at work right now, with winter setting in. Looked like they did canteen breaks in shifts, stopped it getting overcrowded, meant the furnace could be kept running all day. Worked for Tanner.
"You're Mr. Dyen, formerly of the door-guard service?"
"I bounced, sure."
Tanner scribbled something meaningless. The man's eyes flicked over, trying to read her writing upside-down. No such luck.
"What's going on?"
"Just a few questions."
Don't elaborate further. People in positions of power don't elaborate when they don't have to, right? Right. Just like the governor. And people who lied elaborated too much, so by not elaborating, she was sounding very certain indeed. Gods, stop overthinking it.
"Sure, ask. Then let me get on with work."
Said the same thing a moment ago. Nervous?
"I won't keep you long. Does the name Law-Nat have any relevance for you?"
A twitch in the jaw - there, was that a tell? She'd heard about tells, maybe this was one of them. Goodness.
"No."
Tanner reached into the bag, and slowly extracted a little passport. Placed it before him without comment. A certain cat that had been crushed to death, and whose owner had a running feud with Dyen, apparently. He stared. Again, the twitch.
"Cat. So what? You think I know every lousy cat in this place?"
Another few papers. The two bodies. She'd written these papers herself, in large, official, automatic-quill letters, like they were formal reports. Particular attention, of course, being lavished on their names, and their conditions, and the establishment they frequented beforehand. She even included a little note, absent on the actual autopsy report, that dating the bodies was difficult, there was a margin of error... and on one of them, a note of 'possibility of drowning considered'. His jaw seemed to be animated by a devilish spirit, twitching the way it did. Oh, so she was onto something here. Right, right, note this down - intimidate people with piles of evidence, then let them come to their own catastrophic conclusions, never be explicit unless she had to be. Alright, encoded into her memory room, in the greasy texture of an abandoned fork on the mantelpiece. Interrogation was greasy. Good to know. Really just learning as she went, huh. The soldier with stage-magician hands was watching them quietly from the other side of the canteen, leaning casually against the counter while a small line moved around him, man after man shifting to get his breakfast.
"...papers. So what? Bodies. Years ago, years ago. Bringing up old memories, are you? Old dead? And a cat? What's the idea, not got anything better to do? Governor's dead, and you're asking me about some lousy cat and two dead drunks?"
Tanner was writing things down again in a small, neat hand. She kept all the tails, eyes, apexes, and shoulders as narrow and indistinguishable as possible - easy, when she was already used to writing at a scale that demanded multiple lenses for proper viewing. The man scarfed down another spoonful of thick stew, coating his mouth in residue. Trying to seem calm.
"Been speaking to that guy? Law-Nat?"
Tanner was silent.
"Been speaking to some turd who started trouble a bunch? I was a bouncer, he started trouble, I rapped him on the head and sent him home, simple as, simple as."
Tanner kept writing on instinct, and murmured mildly, not daring herself to raise her voice too much.
"I believe he was sober at the time."
An exaggerated snort of derision.
"Sober. Sure. What, he said that? He said that he was sober? Of course he would, makes me look like a jackass. So, what do you actually want, lady? 'cause I've got nothing for you over here, nothing but shitty stew. So?"
Tanner's eyes flicked up, her face absolutely flat - she was very, very tense right now, ludicrously tense, and deeply nervous. And that only made her more impassive. Sure, she was a second away from snapping her pen in half by accident, but he didn't know that. Did he? Nervousness spiked. Face became more impassive. Gods, stop thinking about false memories, she wasn't that sleep deprived, stop thinking about Mr. Canima. Think of the governor, think of his ties, think of his demeanour, his potency, his power. Right. Right. Keep going.
"So? What are you getting at? Thought this was all done with."
"Mr. Dyen, might I ask why you stopped being a door-guard?"
Another twitch - there, learned that from Yan-Lam. Change topics. Confuse. Put them off-guard. And don't panic. She had what she needed. Maybe. The guy was sweating guilt.
"Retired, not good pay, and I got fat. Wanted a better job."
Tanner said nothing. The echoing din of the canteen was quite enough to make her point. And she wasn't sure how to phrase her point in the first place, honestly. He seemed to want to growl at her now, enraged more at himself than anything else. Brutish fellow. Quick to anger. Easy to rile up. Bitter at his job? Or just this way by nature? Maybe a combination of the two.
"Still, you were a door-guard for some time. Have you remained in contact with any of your colleagues?"
Was colleagues the right word? Sounded very... formal, almost academic. But she couldn't say 'your mates', that would sound absurd...
"No. Not at all."
Tanner studied him, and wrote down a little string of gibberish. The sweat increased, his skin flushed - he was positively palpitating. Wondered if that was why he was here - he sweated when interviewed, he wasn't a brick wall at all, he was, in point of fact, fairly clumsy. Messed up too often, and now...
"I see. Made new friends here, then?"
He glance around, seemed to calculate the odds of her interviewing others. Calculating risk. Coming to conclusions.
"Not really. No. I like being alone."
Another scribble.
"So, I take it that when the evening arrives, you'll head straight home?"
"'course not, I'm a man, I head to the inns with everyone else."
A pause.
"I just drink alone in there."
Tanner tried to look understanding.
"I suppose that must be difficult."
"What?"
"Many of your old colleagues still work as door-guards. I suppose it must be awkward, interacting with them whenever you go out for drinks."
"...sure. Yeah. Awkward. Difficult. No fun. But I don't contact them. I bump into them by accident, I move on, no conversations, nothing like that."
Excessive elaboration.
"And given that it's been a few years, I imagine you've rather drifted away from them."
"Yeah. Damn right."
Tanner jotted down something else, and spoke very, very mildly indeed.
"So, I don't suppose that if I were to accompany you to the inn tonight, I wouldn't see any of your old colleagues greeting you in any way?"
Silence.
"You said you hadn't spoken with them for years. You bumped into them, moved on, no conversations... I suppose they must've gotten used to seeing you as a stranger after so long with no contact or conversation."
She glanced up.
Oh. That was a very, very sweaty man indeed. How had the Erlize not pinned this man for something? The evidence wasn't abundant, but it was there. She could smell the lacunae - why hadn't they been detected and filled up by loyal agents of the governor?
Well. There was an obvious answer.
He had smarter people covering for him. The question being - who, and why. He was hiding something. The bouncers were hiding something, and they were tied into this, tied in at a fundamental level. She was at the mouth of a gold seam, and her pick was a-swinging away, hoo nelly. The man responded... poorly. His voice dropped to a rasp - even enraged, he didn't want to be heard by anyone else.
"Again. What the fuck do you want, you oversized freak? Why're you coming here with shit like this, when I'm busy eating, I have work to be doing, I'm tired, the governor's dead, and you're harassing me about, what, my fucking social habits? Some lousy cat?"
Tanner felt herself shrinking back into herself as the tirade continued. Judge she might be. But she had feelings. And when a scary man started talking like this, yes, she instinctually felt nervous, and her face only became flatter as a consequence. Dyen didn't take this well. Goaded by stoicism, a bull driven to fury by a beige kitchen cloth.
"You're harassing me over my fucking breakfast with random papers from fucking years ago, asking me about my job, about my life, about shit that doesn't matter when the governor is dead, and there's a bunch of other people dead too? Seriously? Where the fuck are your priorities? Are you retarded, are you one of those freaks with a half-made brain? Yeah, heard you came up here alone, no other judges, no-one to hold your hand and tell you you're being a moron, well, alright, here we go - you're being a moron. Stop fucking bothering me, and find someone who actually matters."
That... hurt. Again. Tanner had feelings. She didn't like being insulted. By and large, when people talked about her height, her size, her... everything, she wanted to curl up and pretend nothing was happening. Like when she was a child, and reacting to insults meant hurting someone, meant being given suspicious glares by every parent who even heard about her. Now, the instinct reared up once more.
But a little core of white-hot anger was blooming underneath it. Sometimes born out of stress. Weariness. Age, maybe. A little, precious, burning core.
A core that was expanding slowly and consistently with each hateful syllable the man spat out. How dare he.
Her pen moved faster, scribbling actual notes, actual judgements.
"For instance?"
The man blinked, train of thought derailing.
"What?"
"Someone who actually matters. Do you have any examples?"
"...do I... what? No, I don't. None. Just saying, I don't matter, so why don't you find someone who does? Someone who actually matters, and knows things?"
Tanner stared at him. Said nothing. Remembered Mr. Canima, and how he made the silence speak. She couldn't do that, not remotely, but... silence demanded to be filled. Maybe this would work. The man sweated. The canteen bustled all around them, but they were an island of immobilised calm in the heart of a storm of bodies. Tanner kept writing. She wrote down random notes. Wrote down random laws she dredged out of the memory room. Wrote down an excellent recipe for stargazy pie, or, well, most of it. Forgot some of the spices. And all the while, Dyen continued to glare, to sweat, to twitch erratically. Was he going to try and run? Wouldn't get far, and he must know how that'd look. He knew he had to stay still and bear with the interview. He knew he couldn't retreat. He knew he'd already dug himself into a few holes, but not enough to confidently say he was doomed. She needed a confession of something. If she didn't get one, all she had was conjecture. Not enough for a solid judgement.
Did that matter? She knew he had something to be guilty for. Could smell it on him, see it in every drop of putrid sweat down his sagging-skull face, that clung to the ends of his thin, wispy hair.
What did it matter if she lacked evidence?
...no, it mattered. It mattered an enormous amount. The governor was clinging to her back, but Sister Halima was embedded in her thoughts, and she'd...she'd be ashamed at her conduct, if she debased her role in such a fashion. Ashamed of ever having taught her how to be a judge, if she was going to abuse her position.
So she waited. And watched. And let him stew while she wrote and wrote and wrote, in letters too small for him to read, yet he saw how the page was filling up with detailed notes. And each one, in his rheumy eyes, might well be a judgement. His own death warrant, perhaps.
She didn't need to accuse him of anything. Not yet.
Right?
Gods, she hoped she was right. First time. Very nervous. Should've brought Marana. Gods...
His fist came down on the table with a crash, and the canteen fell silent. All eyes turned towards them. Tanner wanted to crawl out of her skin, and was about to try when Dyen spluttered out a few words, harshly whispered to stop the others hearing more than a scrap.
"You're on a damn ugly road, you rotten cunt. You want to see what's at the end of it?"
Tanner leaned forwards, eyes wide. Even managed to ignore the insult. Almost. Still stung.
"Yes please, sir."
"You don't. You don't want to find out where this ends. Understand?"
"No, sir. I don't understand."
Her pen remained poised. Dyen glared. Sweated. Looked around... stared at the rest of the canteen for a long, long second...
Then dashed.
He lunged from the bench, and sprinted for the exit. Huge, panicked bounds, far in excess of what she thought he was capable of. Tanner was on her feet in a second, chasing him, hand going for her club, stowed in her skirts... the breakfast queue erupted, and it seemed like half a dozen people were trying to grab him, to drag him inside, to get him by any means necessary. And the combined effect was... half a dozen people, surpirsed and panicked, lunging at a figure that was more slippery than he appeared, while a giantess tried to shove her way through without hurting anyone.
A blast of winter cold and furnace heat came through the open door.
Tanner's face was frozen. She waded through the scrum of bodies, which seemed to have quite forgotten what was happening, some trying to go into the canteen, some trying to stick to the queue, some running for the door and blocking the entrance for crucial moments, some just standing and gawping like idiots...
Tanner knew how easy it would be to crush them aside. Oh, she knew.
She grabbed shoulders and moved people like she was handling fine porcelain. Yelps of surprise filled the air... it didn't take long for her to reach the outside, to reach that awful cold/heat, illuminated by the hellish red glow of the furnaces which was reflected over and over again in the shimmering black pools and rivers that spread away from the central complex...
She sprinted once she had air.
Hunting for him.
Desperately
.
Where the hell was Mr. Supple? No, wait - she could see him, vaguely, a coat-clad figure sprinting off into the snow behind him. Tanner considered... and started to run. Started to open up. Like on that awful night. Her skirts were clutched in white-knuckled hands, her face was a rictus of concentration, her legs pumped, her lungs blazed, her heart pumped, her blood seemed to be hotter than the furnaces... she sprinted, cape flying behind her like a bat's wings, running through the snow, the soot, the interminable bodies and smoke and steam, the flying of sparks...
Bodies scrambled to get out of her way, and her boots sank deep into the rancid earth, sending up geysers of soot-marred water, chilling her to the bone, cutting through her clothes like they weren't there...
The great pale sun leered down.
And she sprinted after them. The people around the durance slowed her, interrupted her eyeline. She had a nightmare vision of pushing someone aside too roughly, sending them into the furnace, into a pile of jagged scrap, and turning to see screaming, burned bodies, people cursing her with their dying breaths. Oh, gods, gods, slow down, just slow down and avoid killing anyone. Dammit, dammit. Too many obstacles. Too many hazards. Too many people. And she didn't know this tangle of structures, she didn't know where dead ends were, she had to go slower simply to get her bearings... if she wasn't so tall, she would've already lost him to the scrum of workers going about their business, trying to ignore everything around them. Tanner yelled, her voice rising at first, then dying in the latter part as confidence failed.
"Mo-ve!"
Some did.
Another bellow. More confident.
"Move!"
More obeyed.
She ran. Closer, closer, closer, closer...
"Stop him!"
People were tired, people were focused. A worker could barely process what was happening before it was too late for him to act. Dammit, dammit. Dyen knew this place too well, he wasn't slipping or falling, he wasn't hesitating, he knew this place like the back of his damn hand. Come on, if she rushed, if she just shoved pepole, crushed them aside, she'd get him, she knew it. She'd just have to feel hollow bones straining as she brushed past, feel shouts of surprise and fear echo through her mind, see their gazes for the rest of her time here, see the burns she might leave them with, the injuries, the scars, she remembered the chasm of Tyer's skull, oh gods, she remembered being a child and breaking another child's arm, and the crashing of machinery around her could well be the snapping of bone and a high-pitched squeal echoing through the playground and the incensed roar of an approaching mother and father, and-
One period of blindness. Too many bodies, too many bodies.
She saw the coat-clad figure dashing after the man. Running so fast his legs barely seemed to exist, just a vague haze, as unreal as the intangible cloud-gnawed sun... run, run, run, and-
Another period of blindness - bodies and smoke and steam and sparks.
She saw a vague shape. Could be him. Could be another. The black rivers spread over the horizon like poisoned arteries around a corroded heart, like blood congealing in the veins of the dead.
She was close, close to the outskirts, open stretch, and...
Another period of blindness. Smoke in her eyes. Steam in her lungs. Heat and hellfire, cold taking away feeling in her fingers...
And when vision returned...
She saw nothing.
Nothing but barren, barren snow.
Tanner stared.
Where.
How.
How.
No sign of either. Not one. She looked at the ground... unreadable, the furnace melted snow, what lay before her was slush, slush that devoured footprints and gave nothing back...
Her club shook very, very slightly in her grip. Could feel splinters where she was gripping tightly enough to strain the wood to the point of breaking.
The corners of her mouth slowly, slowly tilted a fraction of a degree downwards.
She turned on her heel. Workers were staring at her. Some looked terrified.
She said nothing.
And walked to the canteen in a brisk, yet orderly fashion.
Retrieved her tools while everyone stared at her, mixed between suspicion, amusement, pity, maybe a hint of fear... she felt heat in her chest, felt embarrassment coil like a parasite in her guts...
And Tanner made it most of the way back to the mansion before she stood dead in the middle of the snow, shrouded by the smoke of the furnace, far enough away for no-one else to hear her...
Before she let out a single, solitary word.
"Nuts."
And a second later.
"Balls."
And as her face turned bright, bright red...
"Son of a... red-lantern lady."
And with that, and her face as red as the aforementioned lantern, she straightened her cape, adjusted her club, brushed some snow from her skirt, and continued to march home. Where she was going to order, in a reasonable, dignified fashion, a manhunt like no other, and in an equally reasonable and dignified fashion, she was going to stalk the streets until she found that odious little pimple, and then, reasonably, and with great dignity (plus some panache), she was going to pick him up and squeeze him until droplets of truth frothed out of his rotten carcass. She'd do all of this reasonably, of course. By no means would she do this angrily. She wasn't angry. She wasn't even annoyed. Might not even wring him dry, but she did intend to sweat him until nothing more could emerge but truth. He wouldn't escape. She knew that.
...but even so.
She spent most of the walk back picking splinters out of her gloves.
And each one solidified her resolve.