The Clarity of Cold Steel
Chapter 2

THE GANGWAY onto the Iphigenia creaks and rolls beneath my feet, and the rigging looming high above hangs limp and rotten. The sea air is cold and bites at my face, my nostrils, my lungs. I blaze up a cig to warm me inside and out. Ancient war-hulks and derelict vessels span off infinite in the distance, each one deader and more decrepit than the last, all moored loosely alongside one another by gangways and snakes of parabolic chain.

Poised at the prow of this salt-scaled leviathan stands a figurehead carved in the boat’s namesake, a beautiful young woman before time and the worms ate into her, boring through her body, her face, her worn splintered soul. She leans out perilously over the surf, one hand by her side whilst the other clutches the hilt of a dagger plunged deep into her own heart. The look carved onto her face captures some occult emotion, making it difficult to discern whether she plunged it there herself or she’s struggling to draw it free.

As I set foot on the sod-hulk’s deck, some bloke’s suddenly prostrate on his knees in the dirt. “Oh, praise the lords.”

My foot sinks into the carpet of soft earth plowed evenly across the deck. Strings of heat lanterns hang above the green sprouts cultivated in even rows up and down the hulk’s expanse, delicate wisps of life coming into being. “How’s anything grow with all the salt and no shine?” I blow some smoke.

The man’s fingers are stained black from the earth as he raises them toward the sky in prayer. “Mister Shakteel?”

“You’re Parth?” I hazard, tipping my tricorn hat down, turning my collar up against the wind. It ain’t strong, but it’s cold, it’s constant, it’s coarse.

“I am.” Parth rises from the sod. I imagine rusted hinges squealing in protest as he labors up off his knees, smears his hands across his thighs, and treads toward me. He looks like his brother. More worn, though. More tired. More tough. “They claimed you would not come.” He casts a glare at the other croppers, heads down in the dirt, sowing, toiling, ignoring. One notices, though, casts a rotten glance, spits. “But I knew you would. Chirag wrote me you would, and he is many things, but no liar.”

Myself? I ain’t so sure, but Chirag did pay me up front and that’s more than enough if he is. “Just call me Avinash.” My bones ache and joints grind gout-like as I grab onto rigging when a wave broadsides the hulk. Parth doesn’t seem to notice. Sea legs. Fully intact. “How long’s your boy been missing?”

“Two days.” Parth clamps his eyes shut.

I nod. Never hurts to corroborate. I flip open my notepad. “He’s fifteen,” I rattle off, “about five feet tall. Missing his right arm, below the shoulder. And most of the fingers on his left hand.”

Parth’s eyes glisten over as he nods. “A skinny boy. Bushy hair like they all wear now-a-days.”

“The arm and fingers,” I raise an eyebrow, “cropper accident or the slough?” The slough’s a bad bit of shiny new pestilence afflicting the lot of Mortise Locke. Technically, it’s called neoteric leprosy, but no one calls it that. And no one knows where it started or how it’s spread. But it did. And it is. And it will.

“It was the slough.” Parth takes a deep breath, mastering his sorrow. “It came on about three months past. It came on fast. Bad.”

That’s what it does. And strikes randomly, hitting folks up and down the economic and social strata, rotting appendages off or gnawing organs clean out, and then it’s just gone. Sometimes it takes an arm, a face, a kidney. Sometimes it takes more. Sometimes it takes everything.

“No internal damage?”

Parth shakes his head. “He was lucky.”

Though lucky is a narrow term cause how lucky can a crippled cropper boy be? One arm. No fingers practically. How do you lift a hoe? Dig a trench? Plant seed? “Any idea as to what happened? The disappearance, I mean.” Nothing good, I’d hazard. The good news is, I’m only here for some precursory snooping. I ain’t going the whole nine yards. Just copping a lay of the land. “He ever try and run away?” Putting out some feelers.

The other croppers are glaring up now, furrowed brows mimicking the furrowed earth. One cropper hisses something to another. A few rise, rusted metal tools in hand, gleaming at the edges.

“I believe he was taken,” Parth ventures, wiping his neck.

“Taken?” I ask. “By who?” Now that’s a tall order in this city. Kidnapping, murder, organ pirating, all flavors of the day in Boneyard Bay: sea-born paradise for an armada load of dastardly bitches and bastards. And the thing about the Machine City as a whole or in parts, with regards to nefarious doings, is that it does not discriminate on account of ethnicity or age or sex or anything else. Some hazard the whole city’s festering top to bottom with untapped veins of villainous scum. Like maggots dining through a week-dead corpse. Me? I ain’t that optimistic about it.

“I don’t know.” Parth shakes his head, clutches his hands together in prayer. Old boy ought to pray harder next time. Might get better results than me.

The other croppers have pulled a collective Lazarus and shamble forth through the thick earth, stepping over rows, moving forward like the walking dead until they form a half ring around Parth and myself. Men and women. Some children, too. Ugly children. A lot of them are sporting stumps. Eye patches. One of the women, stocky would be the political way to describe her, with dark skin and darker freckles, wraps her only arm protectively around Parth’s midsection, clutching him tight. His wife, no doubt. Together they stand. Ain’t they a pretty picture? “My wife, Catia,” Parth says.

I nod. “Any idea why someone would take him?” I raise an eyebrow at Catia. There’s iron in her glare. Strong, sure, but brittle. And when brittle things break, they’re wont to leave sharp edges. But I digress.

Catia frowns, averts her gaze, shakes her head just a mite. Parth, for his part, looks dumbfounded. The others all finger their sharp tools and do their damnedest to make me feel welcome. The cold breeze blows.

“What’s the problem?” I ask, though I already know the answer. These dirt-worshipping sods eking out a life of salt-caked ocean-borne misery, on their knees, backs bent, bones ricket-brittle, think they’re better than me. Caste system bullshit. They’re poor, they’re ragged, they’re subsistence-level serfs dying by degrees under the thumb of some backwater ship-baron. They own nothing. They have nothing. They are nothing. Yet still, they might not be wrong.

Parth shifts uncomfortably from one foot to another.

It’s Catia who speaks up, though she averts her gaze from me, stares out toward the city proper, at the plague walls rising, dividing the shoreline. Above it all, the three cogwheel metropolises churn together on high. The arcologies. Maybe the limp shit they’re sowing here might one day garnish the plate of some highborn lord or captain of industry? Dare to dream. “You’re a dalit,” Catia spits. What she means is: I’m the lowest of the low. An untouchable.

I nod. I am that now. I didn’t used to be. Didn’t want to be. “Must be tough massaging all this mud from that high horse.” I take a gander round the sad premises. You never think about it when you’re sitting at the top of the pyramid, you just think you deserve it. I’ve had second thoughts on it as of late. Third, too, truth be told.

“We own part of this ship.” In her fist, she clutches a garden trowel like a dagger.

“Sure. Got a rich brother-in-law?” A shot across her bow.

“We work for ourselves.”

“And my-my, the good it’s doing you.” I whistle low.

“We don’t want your help.”

Parth raises a hand in peacemaking, but I stifle him with my own, take a drag, blow. “Lady, who here said anything about want?”

Catia rumbles a bit, and the mob at her back shifts uncomfortably. Those farming implements have a dual purpose and don’t I know it.

“Your boy’s gone.” I flick my dead cig over the side. “Couple days now.” I point to Parth. “And I wouldn’t be here if you all could handle it on your own. Shit, you probably tried, mustered up, marched in circles lockstep like lemmings, got lost in the maze, fumbled around like some fifteen-year old copping his first lay. All left hands and club feet, trying to replace the hole.”

Catia straightens. Don’t she just adore me? “Who sent you?” she demands, then glares Parth’s way. I admit I prefer it that way. “Who sent him?”

“My brother,” Parth admits.

A haze darkens over the collective visage of the cropper blokes, a grumble, and they start to move in toward me. I’m supposing Parth’s brother ain’t a crowd favorite, and by proxy, neither am I. But instead of copping chicken, I turn their way, coolly, calmly, heart hammering, and slide my hand inside my greatcoat. They give pause. Sure as shit they do. I’m strapped for bear and it ain’t a shovel I’m packing.

“Anyone notify the coppers?” I ask. I’m thinking of notifying them myself. Forthwith.

“The cops…” the wife scoffs.

“The cops don’t want us asking any questions.” Parth absently touches the bruise round his eye. “They made that clear.”

“Who’d you talk to?”

“A bastard named Draegar,” Catia says.

I’ve never heard of him. “Why would someone take your boy?” I ask again, eyes on the halted mob.

Still, no one says anything.

“Money?” I venture. Ha! From a sharecropper? I almost laugh at my own query but ask it I do. Hell, Catia claimed they owned part of the bloody boat. A berth maybe. More shaking of heads answers me, though. Wide-eyed, their implements of destruction lower. “Women?”

No.

“Drugs?”

No.

“He tight with the gangs?”

No.

“He like to bet? Gamble? He a violent lad?” No, no, and no.

Parth and his wife and crew listen to each of my questions and offer curt shakes of the head after each and every one. They’re starting to take a shine to me, but I still ain’t getting anywhere, and I’m blowing my own sweet time doing it. I could be drinking.

“He’s a good boy,” Catia says, then adds, “a smart boy.”

“They’re all good boys, lady, until they ain’t.” Just to get one question answered, I pitch a straight one right down the middle. “Who was the last one here to see him?”

Catia looks down. Away. Just like the rest of them. But enough eyes peek up her way. Parth’s holding her around the shoulders now though whether it’s to comfort her or keep her from stabbing me in the gut with that garden trowel is anyone’s guess.

“I can leave?” I offer, glancing at the mob, pressed in. Stifling.

“Please,” Parth turns, his hands up, begging them to leave us be.

After a moment and some grumbling, they do, meandering with over-the-shoulder glances of misgiving and menace. They don’t go far.

“Catia?” Parth glares down at his wife. His voice is low. “Please.” He lifts her chin until she’s staring into his puppy dog eyes. He blinks. Begs. Practically whimpers. I couldn’t say no. “Answer the man.”

I fix her a look no woman can resist.

“I…” Catia’s eyes are glistening, threatening to burst, to drown us all. “I was the last one to see him.” Maybe she ain’t cast out of iron after all. Her shoulders slump as she cracks, breaking down, falling to her knees in the sod. “He went to Mac Heath’s.”

Parth’s eyes narrow. “Who?”

“He,” her voice cracks, “he was going to the Cartagena.”

“He what?!” Parth bites his finger to allay a scream.

“What’s the Cartagena?” I ask dumbly.

“He went to that fucking Butcher?” Parth snarls, glaring bundi daggers at his wife.

The Butcher? Well now, doesn’t that sound promising?