She blinked wet eyes at him and rose from her huddle, breathing deeply before starting along the bridge with a determined stride.
“Where are we going?” Clay called after her. She paused, turning back to speak a single word in her own tongue. He knew from Lizanne that a shared trance did not bring immediate understanding of a previously unknown language. Such proficiency required repeated trances, but even a brief mental connection could engender a small amount of comprehension. So when she spoke the word he found he knew its literal translation, though its meaning remained as baffling as everything else in this hidden world.
“Father,” she said before turning and striding off into the mist.
CHAPTER 29
Lizanne
“Spare me the performance, please,” Julesin said, wood scraping as he dragged something across the room. “I know you’re awake.”
Lizanne pondered the wisdom of ignoring him, keeping her head slumped forward and torso limp within the mesh of ropes securing her to the chair. In fact she had woken only a few moments before, having managed a brief, blurred glance at her surroundings before hearing his footfalls on the steps. Feigning senselessness was a crude but occasionally effective technique in resisting interrogation. Any kind of response counted as engagement, the cardinal sin of the captured agent. However, the urgency of her predicament left little option but to abandon standard doctrine.
She raised her head, opening her eyes to see him perched on a chair placed at a sensible remove, giving him ample time to react should she contrive to get loose. Taking no chances, she decided, the thought bringing an uncomfortable realisation. He’s done this before.
“I’ll just keep calling you Krista, if you don’t mind,” Julesin said. “Not a lot of point in extracting your real name at this juncture. I wish I could say the same for the other information you hold.”
Lizanne said nothing, eyes flicking around the room. It appeared to be an attic, possibly in one of the houses on Prop Lane, though something made her doubt it. There was no sound from downstairs and she felt sure the Coal King would have wanted to be present for her interrogation. Her cross-bow, knife and penknife were set out neatly on a table beside Julesin’s chair. The sole window had been boarded up but she could see a dim glimmer of light through the cracks. She had no way of knowing how long she had been unconscious, but given the general lack of noise bleeding in from outside, she knew the Ore Day Promenade hadn’t yet started. However, the most noteworthy feature of the room lay below the window, a huddled, slumped form she had initially taken for a bundle of rags but now saw, and smelled, it to be a corpse. The face was obscured by the rags that covered the body but she found herself annoyed by the worry that it might well be Makario.
“Three Cadre agents sent into this mire in such a short space of time,” Julesin mused. “I’m afraid your colleagues were somewhat amateurish compared to you, but what they lacked in ability they made up for in dedication. One forced me to kill him and the other swallowed poison before we could have a chat.” He reached into the pocket of his waistcoat and extracted a small white object. “This is fine work,” he said, holding her false tooth between finger and thumb. “I was somewhat surprised to find it empty. Or perhaps”—he leaned forward, eyes intent on her face—“it held something other than poison? Something you already used?”
Lizanne met his gaze, finding herself reminded of another man of professional demeanour she had met aboard ship not so long ago. But then the circumstances had been reversed. “If I am what you think I am,” she said, “don’t you think the wisest course would be to let me go? If you have any interest in a long life, that is.”
His brows rose in surprise as he leaned back in his chair. “Speaking so soon,” he murmured. “I expected to have to at least pluck out an eye before we got to this stage. Why abandon protocol so quickly, I wonder?”
Lizanne cast a pointed glance around the attic. “I take it the Coal King is otherwise occupied? Or, does he perhaps have no idea that I’m here?”
“Angry men are rarely truly dangerous,” Julesin replied with a shrug. “So easy to manipulate. I expect he’s probably off beating one of the younger Scuttlers into a bloody pulp for a minor offence. He always likes that. And no, he has no notion that I have you, nor will he up until the moment I twist his ugly head from his shoulders.”
Lizanne sighed, sagging a little in her ropes and using the gesture to conceal the act of testing the knots. In addition to the ropes binding her torso, her hands were bound together at the base of the chair-back and her ankles had been secured to the legs. Sadly, each knot felt too well tied to break without the assistance of product.
“You want information,” she said. “Very well. Here is the most important intelligence I can impart to you at this juncture. You don’t matter. Whatever you’re doing here doesn’t matter. Let me go and you might live. That’s the only promise I’ll make.”
He kept his face neutral, but she saw the faint twitch in his eye that told of an unexpected reaction. “People in your predicament usually have much more grandiose, not to say lucrative, promises to make.”
“Really?” She inclined her head, smiling a little. “I recently heard about a treasure to be found at the bottom of a lake in the Arradsian Interior. I’ll draw you a map if you like.”
The bland neutrality on his face darkened considerably. “It’s really not in your interests to mock me,” he said, rising and moving to the corpse lying below the window. “Take this fellow for instance.” Julesin dragged the corpse across the floor towards her, heaving it upright and pulling away the rags to reveal the face. Lizanne managed to conceal a wince at the sight of it, her alarm only slightly alleviated by the realisation that this wasn’t Makario. The face was missing both eyes, two dark empty sockets staring at her above a gaping and mostly toothless mouth. The lank grey hair and deep lines in the face told of a man in his fifties, but she had no notion who the unfortunate might be until her gaze slipped to his hands. The left was whole but the right was missing two fingers, and it was an old injury.
“The bomb-maker, I take it,” she said.
“Very good,” Julesin conceded. “I never knew his true name either, so I called him Mr. Stubby on account of his fingers. I don’t think he liked it. A fellow of many mechanical gifts, particularly when applied to the design of cross-bows and bombs. Sadly, such largesse of talent made him over-estimate his importance and attempt a renegotiation of the terms of his employment, little realising that his contract had already been fulfilled. I consider it poor practice to leave an aggrieved bomb-maker alive.”