She had been saving people, yes. But she had also been gathering them. Gathering weapons.
Weapons Thratia Ganal was coming to meet.
Pelkaia smiled at herself in the mirror, and did not bother covering her Catari features with a false face today. When she opened her cabin door to gaze upon her crew, to issue the orders for the day, she looked upon them all – each in turn – and saw them for the truth beneath the veneer.
Sharpened spears, under her command. Weapons the likes of which hadn’t been released upon the Scorched since the time of Catari dominance.
And as they smiled at her, waved good morning and asked after her recovery from her so-called stomach troubles, she realized the true extent of her command, here and now. They trusted her. Implicitly.
Pelkaia looked upon her unknowing soldiers, and was filled with joy.
Chapter Eight
Ripka was being followed. At first she suspected the watchers, tailing her to report back to their captain, but not a hint of blue flashed in the corner of her eye. No, someone else was shadowing Ripka’s heels, and it wasn’t likely to be anyone friendly.
She didn’t dare pick up her pace or start weaving through streets, lest she alert her tail that they’d been spotted. She kept her gait a slow, easy stroll. Just a woman new to the city out for a little exploring. Anticipation tingled in her fingertips. She wished she had her weapons – a cutlass, a baton, anything really. But she was no longer a watcher, and normal citizens didn’t roam the streets armed to the teeth.
Despite her unease, a little thrill went through her. It’d been a long time since she’d played any flavor of cat-and-mouse game. She meant to win.
The street opened up into a stall market, hot spices and pungent dyes heavy on the air. She cut close to the right-hand stalls, weathering the clamor of excited vendors with polite, but firm indifference. She had no interest in their goods, she just wanted to see what her follower would do in a denser crowd.
The crowd congealed behind her as she passed, as it always did in busy marketplaces, but this had a different feel to it, a touch of tension. Someone was moving quickly back there, trying to keep Ripka in their sight. She grinned a little, pretended to finger a light-woven scarf, then stepped into the narrow space between two stalls, flicking her gaze back the way she’d come. A hint of an arm as a person – by build she suspected a woman – slithered back into the crowd. Nothing recognizable. Nothing even inherently threatening. But that arm had been clothed in russet, not watcher blue.
While her follower was busy avoiding Ripka’s backward stare, she slipped behind a pile of rugs and darted into a side-alley, drawing raised eyebrows from the rug seller, but nothing more. Back pressed against the stone of the alley wall, she waited. A smear of a shadow approached, movements halting and furtive. The shadow stopped to finger the same rug Ripka had.
The shadow drew close. Ripka tensed. An arm swung into the alley and Ripka was upon it in a second, yanked hard on the forearm and pivoted, swinging the woman like a club into the alley wall.
She smacked the stone with a grunt and a yelp of surprise, bush of pale blonde hair catching some of the dust that showered down upon her. Ripka’s eyes widened.
“Honey!”
She released her and stepped back, wary. Honey was her ally – or had been, in the Remnant – but the woman’s lust for violence wasn’t something to be ignored. Ripka wouldn’t have been surprised at all if Honey’d decided to hunt Ripka through the streets, just for fun.
“What are you doing following me like that?”
Honey peeled herself off the wall with a little grunt and adjusted her clothes, wiping away grit and bits of slime as best she could.
“I was bored,” she said in her whisper-soft rasp. “Dame Honding says I’m not to play with the knives, they’re for the kitchen staff.”
Ripka swallowed a laugh. “Well, she’s not wrong. Did I hurt you?”
Honey’s eyes widened as she prodded at the forearm Ripka had yanked on. “Just a little bruise.”
“I’m sorry about that, I didn’t know it was you.”
“I don’t mind.” She lapsed into her usual silence, watching Ripka with those wide, reverent eyes. Honey, bored. In a city of hundreds of thousands. Ripka swallowed. In bringing Honey here she had, inadvertently, released a viper into a nest of pinkie rats.
Before they had arrived at the city, Ripka had made sure Honey had a new set of clothes outside of the worn old jumpsuit the prison had given her. They were a little big; the new clothes hung down around her body making her look like an underfed urchin.
“Hey, you two!” The proprietor of the rug stall stuck his head down the alley, pinched eyes narrowed with suspicion. “I don’t like no one sneaking around my goods, understand? Get lost a’fore I call the watch.”
Honey began to hum softly to herself.
“Took a wrong turn. Don’t mean any trouble!” Ripka grabbed Honey by the wrist and yanked her along the alley to the other side. This street was quieter, a residential neighborhood with a sparse scattering of foot traffic. Ripka huffed the warm desert air and breathed out with a heavy sigh.
“Honey,” she began haltingly. “This city is in danger, and I have a lot of work to do to try and keep it safe. You–” she bit her lip, cutting off what she was going to say: you can’t keep dogging my heels. What else was Honey going to do? This wasn’t a woman who made easy friends, and for some reason she’d taken a liking to Ripka. “You want to help me?”
Honey visibly brightened. “What do I do?”
Ripka knew of Honey’s more violent skills, but the fact remained that she hadn’t a clue how the woman had come to be the way she was. What Honey’s life had been before the Remnant was a mystery to Ripka, but she might yet be harboring some skills that could be of use.
“What did you used to do, before we met?”
She frowned. “Hung with Clink and the girls.”
“Yes, but, before that – before the Remnant?”
Honey buttoned up her lips and just stared. Ripka knew better than to think that it was because she didn’t understand.
“All right then, you don’t have to tell me. I have to go and stake a place out. It’s watcher-work, but I think you could help. All you have to do is be quiet, and remember everything you see and hear. Can you do that?”
Honey, always a riveting conversationalist, nodded.
They found the bright berry cafe at the end of the market, tucked under a faded garnet overhang in the shadow of Hond Steading’s forum, a place the Dame had built to allow the intellectuals of her city to debate the problems of the time.
Ripka hadn’t known what to expect, really. The taverns of Aransa that had sold Renold Grandon’s honey liqueur, hiding weapons of Thratia’s loyalists in the bellies of the crates, had been middling places. Places where the working class of Aransa gathered to drink, gamble, and talk out their worries. Bright Eyes, as the cafe’s slapdash painted sign declared itself, was packed with men and women whose nails Ripka found suspiciously clean.
Small round tables spilled out into the street, barely large enough to support two of the small sienna-glazed mugs of tea the cafe sold. Patrons leaned over their steaming mugs, either engaged in animated conversation with their partners or bent over sheaths of ragged-edged papers. The tannic-sweet aroma of the tea was so heavy on the air that Ripka felt more alert just by taking a deep breath.