He looked again at the sheets on the floor. She wanted Wax out of the way. An elaborate puzzle? It was a time waster, a distraction. She’d ripped out these sheets not to tease him, but to remove him from the investigation long enough to accomplish the next phase of her plan. She’d led him here with that dust on her robe. She’d planted it there for that purpose.
“She knows,” Wax said softly. “She knows what you’re going to do, TenSoon. What you’ve done.” He felt cold, and met the kandra’s inhuman eyes. “She’s planned that you would send your kandra to try to win back the hearts and minds of the people. That exposes you. Her next step is to bring them down.”
*
Wayne wandered between two bonfires. Inside one, table and chair legs made sharp lines, like the shadowy limbs of corpses being burned. The mists didn’t get too close to the fires, though the smoke made a good imitator in the night. Like a beggar dressed up so nice, you only knew him for what he was when you got close enough to catch a proper whiff.
Wayne leaned in to one of the bonfires to light his cigar, though that required him to heal the skin of his arm as it burned. He smelled both of his own singed hair and of the scent of the fire. Polished furniture didn’t burn clean. He liked feeling the heat though. Made him feel alive.
He had stopped filling his metalminds, hoping he had enough health for what was coming. He couldn’t afford to be weak or sickly right now. Not with what was happening.
He leaned back away from the flames and settled the cigar between his teeth. It was a fancy type, from the governor’s own hidden stash. Wayne took a long puff before remembering that he hated the rusting things. Ah well. He hadn’t traded anything good for it. Just one of Wax’s forks.
The crowd gathering here in the square was the biggest he’d seen this night. They clumped in the bonfire light like a flock of ravens drawn to a kill. Wayne moved up to the back of the crowd and handed his cigar to someone there. He left her standing, baffled, as he dove into the crowd.
With a crowd this big, you couldn’t move through them, but with them. You hadda pull the crowd on like a good coat, snug and tight, then let the cloth give you some direction. Wayne shuffled when the people shuffled, and shouted at the proper points, giving just the right drunken slur to his speech. He gave back a friendly elbow when one nudged him, and before too long he neared the front. Here, above everyone else, a shirtless fellow in trousers and suspenders stood atop a fountain statue, holding on to the Survivor’s spear for balance, his other fist raised toward the crowd.
“They rob us blind!” the man shouted.
Aye, that’s true, Wayne thought, shouting along with the crowd’s roar of agreement.
“They expect us to work long hours every day, but then when it ain’t convenient for them, they just cut us loose and don’t care none if we starve.”
Yeah, they do, Wayne thought, joining in the cursing and shouting.
“They do each other favors,” the man bellowed. “They suck us dry, then gather to throw lavish parties!”
I’ve been to those parties, Wayne thought. Good sandwiches.
“Would the Survivor have stood for this?”
Probably not, Wayne admitted. As the crowd surged around him, Wayne folded his arms and thought. Sure, bringing down a homicidal shapeshifter was important and all, but rusts, this seemed a bad time to be hanging around with conners and noblemen. Listening to this speech, he was half inclined to string himself up, which was really disturbing, since he was generally suicidal only in the mornings.
He was about to turn away and flow back toward the mansion to talk with MeLaan about this when something changed. A new figure climbed up onto the statue: an older, balding man who was a little thick around the waist, but in a friendly-type way. He wore ornate robes that frayed like a mistcoat at the bottom. A Survivorist priest?
The older man held up a pleading hand, and the fellow who had been shouting bowed his head in acknowledgment and stepped back. Beneath the giant image of the Survivor, his priest would be heard. Wayne felt a disturbance stir within him, like his stomach discovering he’d just fed it a bunch of rotten apples. Religion worried him. It could ask men to do things they’d otherwise never do.
“I come to you,” the priest said into the night, “understanding and sympathetic. But I implore you, do not invoke the Survivor’s name for looting and destruction. There is a way to fight back, and I will join you in it, but these are not the days of the Lord Ruler’s tyranny. You have the ability to make your voice heard. You can send advocates to the government for you.”
The crowd hushed. A few men shouted out expletives, explaining exactly what they wanted to do to the governor, but most grew quiet.
“The Survivor said that we should smile,” the priest pled. “He taught that we should not let our sorrows drag us down no matter how bad life became.”