Abbee paused on the Iron Bull’s porch. She stretched and scanned the street. Normal foot traffic for this time of night. Some stragglers heading home after working in the city proper. People who lived in New Bend didn’t pay for carts to drop them off; they had to walk.
Up the block, a big cart was parked in front of the nicest of New Bend’s three general stores. The cart had a heavy, reinforced cargo box bolted to a steel frame. Steel wheels. A drover up top. Two big guards on the street, wearing leather armor and carrying swords. Red jackets. Bank pickup. New Bend had three stops for the Bank of Akken’s deposit carts, and Maybell’s General Store was the last one on the list.
A third guard exited the store, carrying a heavy canvas bag. The other two guards perked up and watched everyone nearby. The drover looked like he was taking a nap. Abbee knew an open box of steel arrowheads sat at his feet. The guard with the bag signaled to his colleagues. The two on the street gave another look around before giving a thumbs-up. The bag carrier stepped around the back of the cart and out of view. The drover never moved. Three seconds later, the cargo was stowed, and three seconds after that, everyone was on the cart, the drover was awake, and the cart had pulled away from the curb. Six seconds. Smooth pickup. The cart rumbled past the Iron Bull, heading east. Two of the guards spotted Abbee on the porch. Hands tightened on sword hilts. They kept watching her until the cart turned the corner.
Abbee sniffed. Stab a bank guard, and they never forget it. She went down the steps and turned left. She relaxed into her regular, measured pace. Hood down, head on a swivel. Abbee wasn’t worried about anyone she might encounter in New Bend, but she was tired and wanted her bed.
Several blocks later Abbee crested another hill and descended down into the roughest part of New Bend. The Brakes occupied a narrow valley where the air turned cold and clammy. All the shanties leaned in different directions, with no right angles to be found anywhere. The road became soft, and wooden planks covered frequent muddy spots. Putrid puddles collected in the silty soil, and the air here smelled like desperation.
The reason New Bend had survived the dismantling of the work camps was over the next hill. The slate quarry. The massive pit had produced most of the stone used to build Akken—both times. It was deep, and rainwater loved to collect at the bottom. The old pumps had pushed that water up and out of the quarry—right into the Brakes. A canal ran southeast through the middle of the slum and drained into the Charrin, but the canal’s walls had never been reinforced with any of the ample stone lying around. The ground under the Brakes was sandy with centuries of accumulated slate dust. Everything turned to deep mud when it rained.
Not the best building spot, but everyone had thought New Bend would be temporary. Instead, New Bend had turned into a new district. All the other camps had been dismantled and removed, but cities always needed places to put the poor people. It was better if that spot was a little out of sight from everything else, and New Bend fit the bill. It rankled Abbee that she couldn’t afford a home in the old poor sections of Akken. The most durable spot in New Bend was the bout hall. The joke around this part of town was that you lived in the lap of luxury if your house didn’t need significant repairs after a thunderstorm.
A shadow detached from an alley ahead of her. Another shadow came out after the first one and yanked it back. Abbee heard a low, furious conversation.
“Get off me! What—”
“That’s Abbee Danner. Don’t ever get in her way.”
“—do you …? Really? The Butcher? How’d you know?”
“Short hair, alone in the Brakes at night without a blade, and walkin’ like she owns the place. If you tangle with her … Look, nobody’s carryin’ you to a healer if you do somethin’ dumb.”
Abbee paused when she got even with the alley’s mouth. It was less an alley and more an opportunistic space squeezed between two shanties. Dark. Big enough to hide several people. She gave it a beat. Two. Let the question hang between them in the night air.
Nobody came out of the alley.
The air lost its hopeless tinge at the top of the hill on the other side of the Brakes. A vast pit stretched away from Abbee. The quarry. Moonlight illuminated wide ramps on the far side. Numerous spots of light down in the depths. Green, yellow, a couple of red ones. The green and yellow lights moved. The ground shivered through Abbee’s boots. An irregular staccato drumbeat of feet. Giant feet. Stone feet.
Abbee headed south toward several long buildings. Further west was the slate-processing plant. Blocks of slate went in one side, and finished products came out the other. Roofing tiles were the predominant quarry product. The quarry also fabricated indoor flooring, wall cladding, and other building materials. The slate quarry saw steady business with the university. Abbee thought they should call the place the University of Explosive Applications, given how often they rebuilt the laboratories. The university never did anything small. While most schools taught known subjects, the University of Akken was a pure research institution. Over the past two decades, it had produced through science things that had been literally magic. Abbee had heard about some big construction project south of the city, something big enough to take half the golems, whatever it was. “Go big” was one of their unofficial mottos. “We never met anything we couldn’t blow up” was another.
Abbee descended the hill toward the eastern side of the plant. The closest buildings to the quarry perimeter were the commercial warehouses holding finished products. She saw a few green lights moving around at the far end of the plant. Golems never came out this way. Abbee was safe. She couldn’t see it from here, but beyond the product warehouses was a wide slate berm. Ten meters across, the berm served as a boundary marker for golem pilots and non-refractors. Golems ran on water, true, but the barrels ran dry all the time. A golem with empty barrels was deadly to every living thing in a ten-meter radius. While there were fewer golems here on the surface than down in the quarry, anyone who wasn’t a refractor took a risk traversing the berms.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
The warehouses were quiet at this time of night. She walked around the back of one building, to a set of wooden stairs leading up to a small, enclosed structure hanging off the back of the warehouse. Originally for a warehouse manager, back before the quarry had expanded and built its own administration building, the tiny office now served as Abbee’s home. The rent was cheap, and most people were afraid to get this close to the slate berm. That suited Abbee. She didn’t like visitors.
Abbee froze halfway up the stairs. Two dots on a step.
She’d gone up and down these stairs hundreds of times. She knew each one. The dots weren’t supposed to be there. She leaned back and let the moonlight hit them. Wet. It hadn’t rained for a couple of days. Abbee moved up the stairs. More drops. It was hard to see color in the gray, but Abbee knew what it was. Blood. She knew what blood looked like dried, half-dried, and fresh. This was fresh.
She stopped at the top. The door to her apartment was two meters away. Closed. She had the only key, and the lock looked unbroken. The drops didn’t go to the door. They went around the landing, to the back of the warehouse. Abbee had a window back there, in the privy closet. She suspected it was now broken.
Abbee hadn’t tried to be silent coming up the stairs. Anyone listening would know she’d paused. Abbee stepped over to the door and unlocked it. She pushed the door open and let it swing on its hinges. She remained outside. The apartment was a single room with a privy closet in the far right corner. Rainwater catchment barrels on the roof fed down into a pipe there, feeding both a small sink and the privy. A table in the center of the room with two chairs, and beyond that, a simple cot. The table and the nearest chair had clothes, papers, and old foil wrappings all over them. Abbee saw wet spots on the chair facing the door. The table was out of position by a handspan.
A single dark curse escaped her mouth.
A body on the floor. A man with a shaved head and one arm folded beneath him. The other sleeve was empty. Abbee knew the man had one arm. Knew the man. He was a folded lump on her floor, and she hadn’t seen him in twelve years, but she’d recognize him anywhere. Ipsu. Abbee guessed he’d sat on the chair and passed out, pushing the table out of the way on his way down. A pool of wet on the floor underneath him. A big one. Abbee couldn’t believe she hadn’t noticed it dripping through the floorboards on her way up. She knew Ipsu was unconscious. Otherwise, he’d have had some cutting remark about her sloppiness approaching her own home with someone waiting inside.
A welter of emotions flooded through Abbee. Shock, anger, satisfaction, and a glint of happiness. But mostly anger. She took a breath and pushed it all away. If Ipsu had passed out from blood loss, he was either dead or close to it. She didn’t have time to be mad at him.
Abbee poked her head inside and checked the room’s corners. Empty. Ipsu was alone. Two steps, and she was at Ipsu’s side. She rolled him over. Ipsu’s tunic was painted with a giant dark wetness. His one arm flopped onto the floor. Something hard clicked onto the floorboards. Abbee leaned over and snatched it up. A slender, unmarked cylinder. A message rod. She slipped it into her pocket. Abbee knew it was for someone else. Ipsu had an excellent memory and never wrote anything down.
She pressed two fingers into Ipsu’s throat. His pulse fluttered. She needed more light. The moonlight didn’t come far enough into the apartment to see what she was dealing with. Abbee stood up and unhooked her single oil lamp from the ceiling. Clicked the starter button a couple of times, producing sparks. One of the university’s early innovations had been self-starting oil lamps. A bright white flame sprang up inside the lamp and burned steadily. She set the lamp on the blood-slicked chair.
Ipsu had new wrinkles on his face. A new scar too. A big one, running from his ear up onto the top of his scalp. Abbee wondered who’d gotten the better of him so badly. Ipsu wore simple trousers and leather boots. No coat. A plain woolen shirt with a shoulder bag slung across his chest. The sheath at his hip was empty. It must have been a bad fight for Ipsu to lose his knife.
Ipsu coughed and inhaled. His breath rattled in his chest. Sounded wet. His eyes fluttered open and settled on Abbee. He grunted. Opened his mouth to speak.
Abbee beat him to it. “Where have you been? You left without a word twelve years ago. Twelve years. No message in all this time. Not a peep. Nothing. And now you come back to die on my floor? Who did this? Should I expect—”
“Yes,” Ipsu croaked.
“How long?”
“Not long.”
Abbee snorted. “Your gift for ambiguity is intact.” She frowned. “Why are you still bleeding? Why haven’t you stanched—”
“Red blade.”
“So? You’re a refractor. A red blade shouldn’t—”
“Tip broke off. On purpose.”
Abbee knew refactors were immune to magic but not if it got inside them. The old artifact chips worked if swallowed—though some of them were the size of an egg with rough edges. Swallowing them—and passing them in a privy—would be horrifying. “Broke off? That means … they knew you were a refractor. They knew it was you.”
Ipsu nodded. “They knew.”
“Network?”
Another nod. “Hunters. They’ll risk the quarry.”
Wizard hunters were far more attention than Abbee ever wanted. “Why are they after you?”
Ipsu held up his hand. “Where is …? You have it?”
Abbee pulled the rod out of her pocket. “This? What’s in it? Who’s—”
“They’re coming.”
Abbee felt a shiver through the floor. The structure was old and had problems. Sagged in places it shouldn’t. She’d been meaning to add extra supports under the floorboards. She felt another shiver. Someone was on the stairs. At least two people, maybe more.
Ipsu coughed again. Blood sprayed his chin. He grabbed Abbee’s jerkin and pulled her close. Strong for someone in his condition. “Give … give that to—”
His grip failed. His eyes glassed over, and he went limp.
Abbee stared at him. This couldn’t be happening.
The middle stair creaked.
Abbee started. She pushed the rod back into her pocket and rifled through Ipsu’s clothes. Nothing on him except the rod she’d already taken, and his shoulder bag. She pulled the bag off him. Slipped her arm through it and rotated it around until it had settled onto her back. Pulled the strap tight. She’d search its contents later.
Now she had to run.