“Where’s my bag?”
“Which way to the warehouse?”
“Well, where did you put it?”
The crowd grew larger with each passing second until the road was nothing but a sea of heads and hair and hats for as far as the major could see. He drove his horse in a mad dash halfway up the street before the press became an immovable sludge of bodies and luggage, forcing him to rein up and begin the laborious business of shouting at each and every person to turn around, look where they were going, and get the hell out of his way.
Over a thousand bobbing heads, Syfax saw the coach roll back a few feet into view, and then roll forward around the corner. “Damn it.” He glared in every direction, searching for some way out of the mass of bodies. “Marshal! Everybody out of the way! Make a hole! Move, move, move! Marshal!”
A few nervous faces looked up at him, and perhaps they tried to shuffle out of his way, but there were always three more people ready to slide into any gaps in the crowd. Syfax ground his teeth, wishing for once that he still had his sidearm. “Hya!” He kicked his poor horse again and again, forcing the exhausted animal to stumble into person after person, and the major’s frustration gave way to a sudden fear that there would be a child somewhere down in that sea of bodies.
“Damn it!” He leapt out of the saddle and charged through the crowd. The coach is leaving. Heading east on the next street. Need to head it off. Need to talk to the driver.
There were no side streets, no alleys, no way to get off the street until he reached the intersection, which was still twenty yards away. And then he noticed the half-open window of the old warehouse on his right. Shoving aside one last man, Syfax got to the window, pushed it up, and dove into the dark room.
The warehouse was one long dusty chamber with a handful of broken barrels and crates along one wall. Syfax raced to the back of the building, his footsteps echoing across the empty space. He spotted a door in the back wall outlined by a few feeble rays of sunlight, and he crashed his shoulder through it. Half the door clung to the hinges and the other half clung to the lock, but the center burst apart and spilled the major out onto another street. An empty street.
He swung left and pounded up the lane to the next intersection where he stumbled to a halt, his head swiveling every which way, searching, searching. There was no coach. It was gone. The driver was gone. Chaou was gone.
“Yaaaa!” Syfax put his fist through an old rain barrel standing at the corner behind him. The boards shattered, the bands bent, and several gallons of worm-infested mud slid out onto the ground at his feet.
There. At least I can do that right.
Chest heaving and legs shaking, he straightened up and glared at the people staring at him, and they hastily looked away. “What are you looking at?”
He studied the crowd for a minute.
All right. Arafez. Half a million people. Thirty square miles. One old hag.
How hard can it be?
Chapter 31. Taziri
Taziri stood in the street behind a makeshift barricade of sawhorses and fire brigade ropes and watched women and men in yellow coats carefully picking their way through the smoking debris of what had been Medina’s prosthetics shop the night before. It was a colorless morning and she scanned the cloud-spattered sky. It would rain soon.
Menna loves the rain.
She rolled her shoulders about in her heavy orange jacket as she sauntered along the line of sawhorses and ropes down the middle of the street. There were quite a few people gathered to watch, and after a few moments walking through the crowd Taziri began noticing the peg-legs, the hook-hands, and even the odd discolored glass eye among them. She hesitated, suddenly feeling rather out of place, as she realized that nearly two-thirds of the onlookers were wearing some sort of prosthetic. She felt a sudden urge to be included or to show her solidarity with them so she took her left hand out of her pocket and rolled up her sleeve to reveal her new arm brace and glove.
She listened to the undercurrent of shock and dismay in their voices, occasionally punctuated by an angry curse, a loud promise to help the doctor rebuild her shop, or a vow to hunt down the people responsible. Taziri flashed back to the previous night and the dark rage of the wedding guests, and the words of the song they had shouted into the darkness. She quickly moved to the edge of the crowd.
The firefighters dragged smoldering furniture and boxes out of the ruin to dump buckets of water on them, and then kick them back toward the remains of the building. A few stubborn, skeletal beams still stood high above the wreckage. A lone window frame clung to one beam up in the air, an empty eye socket in empty space. Taziri winced at the scene, at the thought of an entire building burning, of people stumbling about inside, of evil men with knives prowling the inferno looking for women to stab in the face. She wondered if she was developing a fear of fire. Or at least, a more irrational one than the fear of fire she had cultivated while flying on the Halcyon.
Kenan returned from his brief talk with the fire chief. “What is that?” He pointed at her arm. “And when did you get it?”
“It’s from the fire in Tingis. I got burned a little worse than I thought,” Taziri said. “I came down here last night and one of the medical techs fixed me up with this.”
“You were here last night? Alone? Why didn’t you tell me? Did you see the doctor?”
“No, everyone was gone except the tech. So what’s the word from the chief?” Taziri stared into the smoking black rubble, but she couldn’t identify anything at all. All the walls and floors and doors and tables, all the things, were gone and only dirty lumps and vague black shapes remained.
Kenan frowned at her as though he had more to say about her arm. He said, “The fire started early this morning. Witnesses say they heard a bang, like a cannon or thunder, and the building collapsed before the fire started. They’ve got no idea how or why.” The marshal ran his thumb along his unshaven jaw. “Total loss. The building was over a hundred years old. Dry enough, fragile enough. Woof. Gone.”
“Everything was destroyed?” Taziri glanced up at him. “If Medina was building electrical batteries and doing medical experiments here, then there should have been a lot of machines. Metal parts, at least.”
“Oh, there were. In that back room where the fire started, they found piles of brass and aluminum rods and joints. This whole place was a prosthetics shop. Although, I guess you figured that out last night, didn’t you? They made peg-legs and glass eyes, things like that. But apparently nothing complicated. The only machines were drills and a sheet press.”
“Can we see?”
“No, they won’t let us inside. Not safe. Most of the building fell into the basement, and everything else is about to collapse on top of that. They need to pull down those beams up there by the end of the day and get a crane to start clearing out the foundation.” Kenan pointed up at the rickety window frame still hanging off the side of one of the beams. “Never seen anything like that before.”
“So that’s it? The same day we come to town to find this doctor, her shop burns down?” Taziri glared at the rubble. “You don’t honestly think this was an accident?”
“No, I don’t.” Kenan frowned. “There’s a witness. A police detective named Massi. They found her in the alley behind the shop, all cut up with a knife in her chest, right here.” Kenan tapped his chest just inside his left shoulder. “She’s at a hospital a few blocks from here. No word on whether she’s awake yet. Or if she died.”
“She was stabbed?” For a cold instant, Taziri couldn’t remember where Medur Hamuy was and she could only remember that the killer was no longer in their custody. Then she remembered Kenan calling the police to take Hamuy away. “You don’t think Hamuy got free and did this?”