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The hurty dust that had risen during the day settled on the ruins of the Old Quarter. It made the air red and anxious, like the hearts of people who were homeless overnight and had already lost hope of finding their loved ones. They worked in shifts to clear the rubble and slept right on the observation square. The women had already done their crying and worked on an equal footing with the men. The Magistrate's ship hovered in the middle of the street, with particularly heavy blocks attached to it that could not be cleared by themselves or by golems, who slowly removed debris from the street and in places were already advancing into alleys, allowing them to make their way further to the houses cut off from the main artery of the quarter. Food and water were brought here from all the surrounding establishments, from the taverns to the restaurants. Zara hurried to the camp with heavy bales, too. The girl had been on her feet for twenty-four hours already, cooking all night, but she did not allow herself to rest. Climbing up another mountain of rubble, she began to descend toward the observation square, where a field kitchen had been set up. A bald bartender from 'the Thirteenth Moon,' carrying a barrel of desalinated water on his back, hurried behind her.
Ethel, with his tray labeled 'Safrona's Chemical Theater,' now converted into a transportable cauldron, moved among the wounded and handed out plates with soup.
"I heard it was all the insects' fault," grunted one wounded man to another while Ethel poured him soup.
"What insects?" the other one asked.
"Well, the cruckchafers, apparently," the storyteller quacked, "All the great houses obey them."
"Cruckchafers?" his comrade asked again.
"They are invisible, and in order to become visible and reproduce themselves, they need great sorrow," the first one raised his spoon with a clever look, "So they did it all. All disasters are because of them."
"And I heard that after death, everyone goes to the underworld, where they serve the worm king. So don't sleep too much," the other said as he took the soup from Safrona, who leaned over to him.
When he looked up, Ethel noticed Zara on the slope of the rubble and waved to her. The girl noticed him, too, and as her hands were full of heavy bags, she nodded in response. When she reached the kitchen, she dropped her bags by the large table where the Cult sisters stood, distributing the food, and rushed toward Ethel.
"Well?" she asked in a frantic voice, sneaking through the crowd and almost knocking the young man off his feet.
"No, they haven't got there yet," he looked away sadly, holding the girl by the shoulders.
She went limp and collapsed to the pavement, clasping her knees. Ethel picked her up under the arms and lifted her up.
"No, do not despair," he whispered confusedly in her ear.
The girl broke free from his grasp and darted toward the rubble.
"Zara, wait! Zara!" the young man shouted and rushed after her. The bartender, who had come to the tray, dashed after them, but saw the victims reaching for the broth, so he returned to the cauldron and began to fill the plates.
Zara, stumbling and not caring that her dress was clinging to protruding pins and dislocated eaves, ran through the ruins. Ethel followed her clumsily, unable to keep up. A small wooden man wedged between the rocks reached out with its free hand and squeaked something as the young man ran past. A feeling of shame took hold of his throat, but Ethel pretended not to notice it. He wanted to go back, but a burning rag fell beside him, and its flames set the mixture of concrete dust and purple mass ablaze and hissing and glittering in bright flashes.
The girl ran as far as the bend to the elevator that descended to the Heart Square, where the now fallen barge was sticking out. Zara stopped, trying to get her bearings. When she saw a big golem breaking the wall of the nearest house, she ran up to it and pounded her fist on the stone arm, shouting:
"Hey, you!"
The golem slowly put the wall back down, causing it to crumble into small pieces, and turned its head toward Zara.
"Follow me!" the girl shouted and waved at it, pointing to where she thought the alleyway with the prison was. Ethel slid down the pile of garbage toward them, and from across the street a man in the Magistrate's uniform, who seemed to be in charge of the excavation, was already running to them and shouting angrily:
"What are you doing? What right do you think you have?"
But at the sight of Zara, the man pressed his head into his shoulders and walked meekly in the other direction, as if he were just passing by on his own business.
"How do you do it?" Ethel glanced at him in surprise and hurried after the girl and the stone giant as they climbed up another pile of rubble.
They climbed under the roof of a half-destroyed house and from there ducked into a small alleyway that was cut in the middle by another barge – it covered the ruins with concrete. Zara pointed toward the bow of the ship and ordered the golem to dig. The jumbo obediently headed to the wreckage; Zara turned to Ethel, white of concrete dust, and with a soft look, asked:
"Two shovels."
Ethel was taken aback at first, but then he caught himself and walked back through the wreckage, sneezing and coughing.
"How strange," he said to himself as he walked past the mountain of crumbling concrete, "It's like I know that smell."
But he pushed the intrusive thoughts away, because the Magistrate's manager once again loomed on the horizon.
"My good sir," the young man shouted.
The manager flinched, stumbled on a wreck, and nearly fell backward into a muddy puddle from a broken sewer pipe. After he got over the force of gravity, he looked angrily at approaching Safrona.
"What on earth do you want?" he asked rudely, jabbing his hands at his sides and frowning.
"I'm sorry again," Ethel said with a strained smile, and almost fell into the same puddle himself.
The man now folded his arms across his chest and stared questioningly at the young man.
"The girl who borrowed the golem from you," he continued embarrassed, "Needs shovels. Would you be so kind as to..."
"You! You!" the man burst out with a splash of his arms. "You have no...! Foolish youngsters! You always want revolutions, changes. And what do these changes lead to?"
"You don't look... old either," Ethel began, but finished to himself, because the man was really getting rowdy.
"Yesterday you were confusing the people at the Temple with speeches about false history, and today you are killing them! You should all be thrown out into the desert to feed the sand!" he shouted, stomping his foot.
"Wait, what are you talking about?" Safrona grabbed him by the shoulders.
The man looked down, and Ethel followed his gaze to the scrap of morning newspaper beneath his foot. The large headline on the front page was still legible. Ethel turned his head and read it aloud:
"The 'Free City' organization has taken responsibility for..."
"That's right!" the man cried out, freeing himself from the unwanted embrace. "Assholes, bastards, keep coming and coming! Where did this filth come from? Who gave you the right?"
The man suddenly cried and collapsed, falling back onto Ethel, who barely had time to pick him up.
"My son, my little son," cried the magister.
Ethel awkwardly pulled the weeping man to him, and the man sobbed out loud, shaking on the young man's chest. Ethel looked up. Time stood still. The magister's sobs echoed in his heart with the beats of a bell. From the second floor of the house, whose wall was beneath their feet, a fluffy creature that looked like a cat was staring at him melancholically. Sparks of a fire still blazing somewhere in the distance were falling from above, and black scavengers were circling in the sky in clouds of heart dust, seeking their prey.
Ethel returned to Zara when the golem had already dug out part of the rubble and the old sidewalk, which formed the intersection of two alleys at this point, was visible. Safrona carried two shovels in his hands; he was quiet and not talkative. The girl's face was covered with a piece of sleeve torn from her dress to protect herself from the air full of dust. Zara looked at the young man, tore off the other sleeve, and handed it to him. Ethel tied the rag around his lower face, silently picked up the shovel, and began to dig beside the ruined wall, where the heavy metal door of the prison was already visible.
After a few hours, coughing and sneezing from the burning concrete and heart dust, they finally dug the entrance. Zara turned to the stone giant, who had raked the concrete they had dug out, and whimpered, pointing to the door:
"Break it..."
The golem went down to the door, almost stepping on the gaping Ethel, who was completely exhausted and kept on his feet only because he did not want to appear weaker than the girl. The golem yanked on the door, and it creaked, but did not budge. He yanked again, also to no avail.
"Break it down, don't pull it," the young man wheezed.
The golem lifted its foot and kicked the door. Something crunched behind it, and it fell backward. Zara rushed inside. Ethel staggered after her. It was dark inside, and there was a musty, thick smell. The girl had already run down the stairs and turned right. But where the tall policeman had been sitting, there was now earth covering the entire corridor. Zara began pounding the rubble with anger, but Ethel managed to stop the girl. He looked back at the golem figure still standing in the doorway:
"Hey, you! Can you get through here?"
The golem slowly bent down and poked its head through the door several times smaller than itself. But then the giant stuck its huge hands through the door and pulled the walls apart as if they were made of paper, and began to descend, raking the masonry and earth crumbling around.
"I think I..." Ethel began, but Zara yanked him to his left.
In the same instant, the rubble of the wall collapsed. They managed to take cover in the left wing of the corridor while the golem went down, destroying the stairs. The dust was too thick to breathe, and they could see nothing at all through it. Only the sound of rocks and earth crumbling down the stairs could be heard. Ethel felt Zara's breath next to his face; he was embarrassed and pulled away from the girl, hitting the stone vault.
The golem rumbled down, covered the passage with stones, and froze, awaiting further orders. Zara groped up to it, coughed heavily, and pointing toward the rubble in the right wing, she wheezed:
"Dig here."
The golem turned around and started shoveling the ground in her direction. The girl bounced, climbed up a few steps, and returned with shovels, one of which she tossed to Ethel. He got out of the left wing, dodging rocks and earth that flew at him, and began to shovel away what the golem had cleared. The girl joined him.
A while later, the golem froze, half-lying in the corridor. Zara dropped the shovel, snuck between its arms, and disappeared into the passageway.
"Light!" she shouted from a distance.
Ethel ran up, looked around, stripped off his dirty doublet, wrapped it around a steel bar lying underfoot, broke an oil lamp sticking out of the rubble of the building, and poured the oil residue onto the cloth. Finding nothing suitable for kindling, Safrona ran back. As he slid down the giant's beaten path toward the golem, he slipped the torch under its arm and shouted, out of breath:
"We need a spark."
The golem raised its hand and drew a sharp streak across the wall, sending out a shower of sparks. The torch flashed, sharply illuminating the ruined building. Ethel squeezed between its arms to where Zara had disappeared, and found himself in a spacious room, flanked by cages. Zara was sitting beside one of them, holding the old man's hand in hers. Ethel ran up to the weeping girl and grabbed the hand, trying to feel for a pulse. There was a pulse.
"It's all right," the young man wheezed, "He's alive."
The girl raised her weeping eyes.
"The key..."
Ethel jerked to one side, to the other, but found no one and nothing in the room.
"Golem?" he asked himself. "No, no, no, if it moved, the whole vault would collapse."
Safrona hesitated, then snapped his fingers and exclaimed:
"The Heart Truth!"
As he secured the torch to the wall, he disappeared into the opening, and Zara was left alone with Magister Wolfie, who barely showed any signs of life. Ethel did not return immediately, but with a handful of concrete in one hand and some purple mass in the other.
"Get away!" he almost shouted to the girl. "And pull him away from the door."
The girl began awkwardly dragging the old man's body, while the young man meanwhile poured concrete and purple mass into the keyhole of the cell.
"Close your eyes and ears," Ethel wheezed.
After waiting for Zara to do his bidding, he held the torch to the lock. There was a white light and a rumble that threw Ethel to the side. He was lying on the floor with his eyes goggling. The girl rubbed her temples, the magister was lying lifeless in the cell, and the lock was a gaping hole. Zara came to her senses first, she stood up, entered the cell and began to lift Wolfie, trying to heave him on her shoulders. Ethel came up to her and took the burden for her, waving a hand at the torch. The girl, bent over, walked to the burning doublet and lifted the heavy rod with both hands. Climbing over the golem's arms, she secured the torch in the ruined masonry and helped Ethel squeeze the magister's body through the rubble. Dirty and exhausted, dragging the old man by the arms, they took turns climbing out of the hole where the door had once been, and breathing heavily and coughing, collapsed into the concrete dust. At that moment half of the first floor of the prison crashed down, covering the entrance and the golem that remained below.
106Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡPqgYr0U1zM
Albert the Drill Sept was gazing sadly at the crumbling building of the old prison wing from his gondola. With his fingertips he rubbed a pinch of that very purple mass. But it was not the loss of the moonforsaken city jail that saddened him, it was the answer he had received from the Supreme Head to his request for the arrest and interrogation of Duchess Kee. It appeared that she was no longer Tamen's mistress. The Drill himself had seen the young beauty beside the Usurper, when the ruler had embarrassed him so casually in front of all the seminary students who had been assigned to duty that night.
"What did you say it was called?" he asked one of them, named Paritz, who was now standing behind him.
"God's dew, Mr. Sept," said the student, with no tone or word that betrayed the mockery with which the whole Cult was probably now judging that night.
"Not Mr., it's Cleric," Albert corrected the student thoughtfully.
He turned on his heels toward the table that stood right on the deck. On it, pinned with his favorite figurines of the false gods popular in the pre-mechanical era, lay a map of the Old Quarter before the devastation that had befallen it. The red chips marked the Cult buildings with the ancient relics (most often the spirited organs of one saint or another), and so they were the first to be rescued. Sept soaked one of these chips in a purple mass, then carefully washed his hands in a nearby barrel of water and wiped them dry with a dragon-printed towel hanging over the barrel. He went to the table, took a pinch of concrete and sprinkled just a little of it on the chip. Nothing happened, but when Sept lit a match and held the flame to the chip, it flashed, dazzling the cleric and the student, and hissed a white flame.
Sept rubbed his eyes and, stroking his beard, walked over to the man kneeling in front of the table with the sack over his head. He tore the sack off and slapped a thin, dark-haired, middle-aged man with a neat beard and mustache across his face with it.
"Good afternoon, Monsieur Chevros," said Sept, kindly, coming to the edge of the deck, "I hope you heard our conversation well?"
Chevros flapped his big eyes and breathed heavily.
"I see that you did," Sept went on calmly. "God's dew, God's dew... What have you heard of God's dew, my good Gus?"
Chevros ran his tongue over his lips in silence, knowing, by hearsay, the Drill's habits and not daring to interrupt him.
"That's right, that's right, nothing," Sept nodded, leaning on the wooden handrail that separated him from the edge of the deck. "And why is that? Because you couldn't possibly know anything about it, my good Gus."
Sept turned to Chevros and looked at him reproachfully:
"Because this substance was for many years under the strictest secrecy behind the seven seals, and only a few people had access to it."
Chevros turned his head toward Sept and looked sadly, even pleadingly, at the cleric.
"Now, now, my dear, why don't you tell me how you got your hands on this... um... 'Free City' information? And how, even if I suddenly believe it to be true, did this organization gain access to such a rare substance as God's dew in this day and age?"
Sept finally fell silent, crossed his arms and waited.
"I-I-I have an informant," Chevros began, shaking his head, "We never communicate directly, he sends me messages with birds."
Sept shook his head skeptically:
"You upset me, Gus."
"I can write him answers. But the birds are his, and only they know where to fly," Chevros said, and once again he looked pleadingly at Sept.
The cleric squinted his eyes and looked at the chief editor of 'the Evening Wind' with disbelief.
"What if you're lying, Gus? How would I know that?" he asked glumly, rising sharply from the rail and moving toward the table with the map.
"I'm... I'm... I'm not lying..." the chief editor babbled.
"Do you know who it is?" Sept asked, picking up the statue of the four-faced goat from the table, and without waiting for an answer, continued, "It's Besil Mun. God who conquered time," Sept said with a kind of undisguised pride for the goat. "God, lord of shepherds. He is not in demand these days, of course, but before, even when the Cult had already emerged, he was a most powerful figure. To join the Besil Mun community, one had to slaughter a goat, bathe in its blood and guts, and then eat its flesh along with the rest of their brothers and sisters."
Chevros sighed heavily and looked at the figure of the ancient false god that the Drill was spinning in front of his face. Having played with it, Sept set it down on the table, securing the edge of the map that had fluttered in the wind.
"So, those who wanted to leave the community had to voluntarily cut off their ears and nose. And if such a person did not follow the custom, the brothers and sisters would find them and take away what the great goat demanded."
Sept washed his hands again and wiped them with the towel.
"I hope you understand the primitive nature of the allegory, my good Gus," he said, leaning his hands on the table.
Chevros nodded.
"Therefore, from now on, don't even think about publishing such reports without consulting the Cult. And if you happen to receive a pigeon from this mysterious gentleman, immediately inform this young man," Albert pointed to one of his subordinates, "He will now accompany you everywhere, even during personal hygiene sessions," Sept emphasized. "I sincerely hope it's clear to you, Gus."
Chevros nodded even before the Drill was finished.
"Great," the cleric concluded, "Take him away."
The Cult student grabbed the chief editor, surprised by his unexpected freedom, under his arms and dragged him to the dinghy moored at the stern.
When the dinghy departed, Sept rubbed his eyes with the fingers of his right hand, then tapped himself on the forehead with the back of his hand, sighed heavily, and called for the last student left on the ship, the one assigned to him the other day by the seminary.
"Is there any news about that unfortunate Potions Master's assistant?" he asked.
"No, Cleric. Search teams are on the trail of his regular suppliers, but other than the fact that he traded at the Lower Market, there's nothing yet."
"Let them sweep the canal," Sept frowned, "His Eminence has again asked me to pay special attention to this case. It's as if I had no other headache."
When the student disappeared overboard, having jumped off in an emergency hang glider, the Drill opened the door to the cabin and at last breathed in a pleasant coolness. But the relief was short-lived; his thoughts seemed to enter the room following him. So far he had not had a single solid lead in his hands, and he could not touch the main suspect, for reasons beyond his reach. He should question Magister Asstolok and the maid once more, and send someone to the University library to check the books. But he couldn't even think of whom to send there, for the law required summary execution for reading the books kept there. Only those closest to His Eminence had access to it. There was nothing left to do but fly there himself. And that would have taken all his time, even if he'd just skimmed through the table of contents in the topical sections that might have dealt with runes and those creepy substances that could blow up half the city and were now lying around freely in the Old Quarter. He couldn't even cordon off the place properly, because the population would finally hate the whole Cult if he didn't let them find the missing and dead relatives. He simply could not entrust the Magistrate with the case for both political and ethical reasons, and there was a categorical shortage of people for the cleaning up.
He had a headache, and he went to the back of the cabin, where a silver jug with oblivion-water stood on a small table. He filled the glass to the brim, but he didn't drink it, instead staring out the window, where he could see the petals of the Garden District, the huge multi-story platforms where the plants were grown. Something was keeping him from focusing on his goal, some detail that he felt in his gut but could find no explanation at all. There was something he didn't understand, something essential.
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