The Dawnhounds Read online

  She couldn’t be bothered dealing with the guards at the Wall—her demotion was the talk of every station in town, and she didn’t want to deal with some pigshit newbie deciding he needed to take her down another peg. She could probably lean on the Sergeant to push them through, but it hurt her dignity less to just avoid going that way entirely. He was humming now, with his hands in his pockets. She didn’t know how he did it: how he managed to care so little.

  She made for the port: the walls there were modern, and guarded by blanks. They weren’t smart enough to ask questions. Their empty stares made her uneasy, but nobody ever got blanked who didn’t deserve it. They had failed the city, so they were remade to serve the city. No steel out at the port, just low palisades of engineered hardwood: post-revolution tech. Ron-Yaj built in steel and gold; Hainak built in cellulose, mycelium and stone. She took a sip of tea from her flask. Tea was, as her father had taught her, the panacea for all ills. Feeling cold? Tea. Feeling hot? Tea. Feeling like your job is going nowhere, and your life is empty and hollow? Lots and lots of tea. Drown yourself in it; crawl into a towering fortress of teacups beneath the sweet sea, and never leave.

  The flask was steel, and she enjoyed the cool weight in her hand. Technically contraband, but it was one of the last things her dad had given her, and she knew Sergeant Sen wouldn’t dob her in. Steel wasn’t dangerous or anything, it was just uh, political. There was steel all over the city, even when it wasn’t useful, because it was difficult to tear down and a lot of folks couldn’t afford to replace it. She ran her thumb over the engravings: her family name in the center, and an old story around the edge, the one about the gods’ golden peanut. It had been her favourite story when she was a kid—everybody was either good, clever and strong or bad, craven and weak. Nobody was just scared, or confused, or trying their best in a difficult world. An ordinary cat could steal the secret of magic from the highest heavens; an ordinary girl could be anything. She put the flask back in her pocket.

  No sooner had she done so, its weight wasn’t there. She turned in time to see a small figure tearing off down the street, with a chunk of dull steel in his hand. She was chasing him before she even realised what he’d stolen: her feet moving a half-second ahead of her head. The streets in this part of town were alchemically-treated teak, and they flexed and creaked beneath her boots as she pounded after the thief.

  Same kid from the roof. He was running north, towards the Shambles. She knew that part of town better than most, but if he got into that rat-nest of alleyways and overgrown houses, she’d never catch him.

  He turned right down Janekhai Street, and she followed. The last of the vendors were still there, packing up their carts—the night market stragglers must’ve finally run out of coin. She skidded around the corner and almost crashed into a man carrying a cauldron of hot soup. She apologised and pushed past him, trying to find the kid. She saw him leaning against a wall, cap low over his face, trying to look casual. A woman in a yellow kefat was trying to sell him something, but his eyes were on the two flatfoot cops who’d just come around the corner. As soon as their eyes met, he was off running again.

  “Stop!” shouted Sen, “stop that thief!”

  There were too many people. A lot of them were carrying things, or elderly, or just tired: they were moving, but not quickly enough. They started to shuffle out of the way faster as Yat pushed through them, but the kid was getting away, tearing down the street, running straight at a fruit-stall. He shoved past a young soldier, leaning on a crutch, his face a mess of scar tissue, then leapt up onto a crate. He leapt again, and grabbed ahold of the collapsible arm of the stall’s awning. In one deft movement, he swung his body around and let the momentum carry him upwards; he caught the guardrail of a second floor balcony, then hauled himself over. Their eyes met again, and he stuck out his tongue at her, then clambered over the windowsill into the house.

  She tried to calculate the jump as she ran. She could make it. Well, she could’ve made it a few years ago. Gods, she used to be quick. She didn’t have much time to hash out the angles, and at the last moment, she slowed. It was the wrong move: she stumbled, and it was all she could do to avoid going ass-over-teakettle. Sen skidded to a halt beside her, grabbed the cuff of her uniform, and yanked.

  “Henhai Lane,” he said. “We can cut him off at the Grand Canal: he’ll need to go street-level. C’mon.”

  She took one last look at the balcony, then ran after him.

  He was trying to talk his way past a blank when they showed up. He was bouncing up-and-down on the balls of his feet, looking at the other side of the canal while the half-man went through his papers. Must’ve been an older one: it took then a couple of years to get the process right. They used to take too much consciousness away, but it made them work slowly, stiffly. Maybe a mk2? Pre-revolution conversion. Unless he was serving life, it would be coming up on the end of his sentence. She’d never met anybody who’d come back from being blanked, but they were apparently around. The process was good—if it worked right, you’d never even be able to tell.

  The papers would be fake, of course, but the blanks were bad at figuring it out. They were smart enough to grab a runner though, so the kid was playing it cool. He was too busy watching his front to hear them approach. Yat stumbled towards him and put a hand on his shoulder. She had her cuffs ready in the other hand: vines that would tighten when the arresting officer tore a certain stem away, then only release with a special chemical broth found back at the station.

  “You’re—” she gasped, “you’re under a-arrest.”

  He slumped, and the blank responded to the words by grabbing tightly onto the kid’s shoulder. He spoke in an empty monotone: as if he were just making sounds, and did not understand the meaning.

  “Do not resist, citizen,” it said, “this is an ar—”

  “Yeah he knows,” Yat said.

  “—rest. Compliance is its own reward. If you have any issues with the way your arrest has been handled, please contact—”

  “Arse” said Sen. “Override: Jen-xat, 13186”. The blank slumped, but didn’t loosen its grip. His eyes, already dull and empty, went milk-white, and he shuddered once, twice, then stopped speaking. The kid had gone the same colour, like he was about to be sick.

  “‘m sorry Miss,” he said. He couldn’t be older than thirteen. He had what looked like his first crop of pimples, covering his cheeks.

  “Yeah, well,” she said, “you can be sorry back at the Station.”

  He looked at the blank, then back at her. Then he started to cry. Not the petulant tears of a kid caught being naughty, but real panic sobbing, coming in bursts between gulps. He was staring at the blank now, and moaning.

  “Please miss,” he said, “you can’t.”

  He thought they were going to make him into a blank. It didn’t happen like that any more: back in the bad old days they’d snatch anybody, but there were rules. The bridgeman had probably been a savage killer. If he wasn’t, somebody would see him walking around and they would say something—the system worked. Yat had been where that kid was before, and they’d had her in a cell for a while but she turned out fine: it would straighten him out. It would be good for him. She’d make sure the right papers got filed and he got some rice and a warm cot, then they’d chuck him out into the street when his belly was full.

  Sen cleared his throat.

  “Constable,” he said, “a word.”

  She shot him a look, but he shot one right back: I’m being nice, but I outrank you. Don’t make me use it.

  The blank had the kid firmly in his grip. She turned, reluctantly.

  “You want to explain to Brass why you’ve got a pretty chunk of steel in your pocket? You’re already on thin ice.”

  “I need to show them I’m good at this, that I’m, you know, better than—”

  He shook his head. “I’m invoking my discretion as senior officer, constable
,” he said. “You can take your property back, then we’re leaving.”

  She sighed, then spun on her heels. When she reached the kid, she stuck out her hand.

  “My flask,” she said. He nodded, and fished it out of his pocket. Once she had it safely back inside her own jacket, she nodded at the blank.

  “Mistaken identity,” she said. “Release this man.”

  The blank let him go, and the kid’s body visibly twitched: she realised how hard the blank must’ve been squeezing his shoulder.

  “Sorry for the inconvenience Sir,” it monotoned, “if you wish to lay a complaint, you may—”

  Sen cut it off again.

  “Now sod off,” he said.

  The kid sod off.

  She walked ahead of Sen, and didn’t make eye contact with him. They passed through the Eitu Gate, nodded to the blanks on duty, and made her way down to the docks. There was a corner out beyond the bars and brothels where you could just see the beacon of the Hainak Lighthouse. All the lighthouses used clusters of bioluminescent fungi for the light itself, but were otherwise old Lion structures: steel and stone. She sat down, and passed her flask from hand to hand, and watched the winking light in the distance. Her feet dangled over the edge. No ships in the harbour this time of year: a sporadic outbreak of peace in Accenza had sent the merchants scrambling east , and the warfleet were all patrolling up north and around the Sea of Teeth. She closed her eyes; she let herself take in the gentle murmur of the water against the docks and the earthy smell of seaweed and salt water. She sat and—

  “Yep, that’s water,” said Sen. He sat down next to her and pointed at the lighthouse.

  “Liiiiiiight,” he said. “Light.”

  Yat pushed the anger down. She’d made the right call with the kid, and he’d used her weakness against her. She considered the man a friend, but it was a rude thing to do and she hated that he wouldn’t acknowledge it. Still, she couldn’t afford to chase him away: he was one of the precious few good men left in the force. He just didn’t understand how hard it was for those street kids, and why it was important to look out for them whether they wanted it or not. Her shoulders slumped: it wasn’t the time for that fight. She pointed at the lighthouse, and cocked her head to the side.

  “Light?” she said, in her best drooling rookie voice. “Like when it’s night but it’s not?”

  “Exactly,” said Sen. He drew himself up, waved a pontifical hand, and put on his best bureaucrat impersonation. “You’ll go far in this department, Constable Yat-Hok. Got a bright future ahead of you. That’s like a light future except it’s meta-forrical instead of actual.”

  “Very good, sir,” said Yat. She liked the sergeant, despite herself; his hair was a mess, and the less said about his uniform the better; he outranked her but apparently had never read the regulations; he told her once that he’d been in the army, and the rules were sometimes useful but always exhausting. And of course, he knew when to shut up.

  They stared out to sea for a while.

  “You forgot to sign in at the precinct when you got in—” he said.

  Hells.

  “—so I did it for you. Signed you out too. You worked a full eight hours, as it turns out.”

  They sat in silence. The light winked at them through the harbour fog.

  “Thank you, sir,” she said.

  His mouth twisted a little. He looked like he was studying her. “Go home and get some sleep,” he said.

  She turned to say something, then saw the concern in his eyes. Gods, she was tired. Three months of night shifts had thrown her body’s clock right out. She’d been up all night as a kid but it had been years and she wasn’t sure she liked going back to that life. She’d invested in heavy curtains to block out the daylight while she tried to sleep, but it didn’t really work. She’d been having nightmares again: deep water, strange flowers, eyeless faces looming out of a grand and endless darkness.

  “Serge—”

  “No more ‘Sergeant’,” he said. “Your shift is over. It’s ‘Sen’ or nothing. ‘Mr Kanq’ if you’re feeling polite, though I suspect you’re always feeling polite. You ever get mad at somebody, Yat? You ever just let loose and call somebody a fuckwit?”

  “No, s– no I—” she said.

  “What do you do if they’re being a fuckwit?” he said.

  She thought about the kid. He needed a stronger hand, that was all. A role model: somebody to show him there was a way to break out and survive. Maybe she’d done the right thing the first time.

  “I tell them to have a nice day,” she said.

  “Damn,” said Sen. “You kiss your mother with that mouth?”

  He didn’t entirely sound like he believed her.

  She did not in fact, kiss her mother with that mouth. She might if she ever met the woman, but that was beside the point. She shrugged. It seemed like the right thing to do. She liked the guy, but she didn’t trust herself as a judge of character—she’d been critically wrong in the past. Easier to just assume everybody was out to get you, than assume otherwise and have them prove you wrong. Easier to assume the world was going to let you down: protect it, but don’t be surprised if it bites.

  “Right,” she said, “I’m going home.”

  She leapt to her feet and Sen twitched, just a little.

  “You trust me, Yat?” he said.

  She shrugged. “Sure,” she said. She didn’t, but she considered him a friend. It seemed like the right thing to say.

  “Sometimes,” he said, “I feel like you’ve got shit going on that you don’t tell anybody. Not even yourself. I worry about you, you know? You come out here all the time and stare at the sea, then you come into work with bags under your eyes and fall asleep at your desk. Sometimes, I worry you’re not eating, but I’ve got no idea because you don’t tell anybody shit. It’s just ‘yeah’ and ‘sure’ and if you keep refusing to talk to anybody about it, one day you’re gonna say ‘I’m fine’ and then fall down dead in the middle of a shift.”

  She didn’t know how to respond to that. Sarcasm seemed like a solid bet: a reliable shield against having to mean anything. “Gee Sergeant,” she said, “tell me how you really feel.”

  He didn’t smile, he just pursed his lips and shook his head.

  “Fine,” he said, “don’t talk about it. But you’re gonna burst if you keep it all inside, and I’m not gonna be the one to sweep up all the bits.”

  What was she meant to tell him? That she broke everybody she touched? That her hands shook sometimes and she didn’t know why? That staring at the ocean was the only thing that silenced the mad bickering of her own thoughts? But she couldn’t keep her head down, of course. She had what the Captain’s report had called a delicate issue.

  “Yeah you are,” she said. She tried to smile.

  “Yeah,” he said, “I am.”

  She shrugged. It didn’t seem right to complain: things had been so much worse for her. She’d gone without eating for three weeks, once. She’d passed out somewhere near the Grand Canal, and woken up with an old woman offering her a bowl of congee. She’d barely had time to eat it before the guard came and arrested her for vagrancy. She’d been twelve years old. She’d been back on the street in a month or so, once somebody got around to doing the paperwork.

  She sprang to her feet: old reflexes still in place. She’d never been strong, but damned if she wasn’t quick. On the streets, quick counted for a lot.

  “A girl’s gotta have secrets,” she said. Her head hurt and she badly needed a smoke, but she couldn’t tell the sergeant that. Better to pretend it was a game, or a little mystery. Better to hide in familiar words than explore words she’d never found the right way to say. She left. The whole way down the street, could feel Sen’s eyes drilling into the back of her skull. The man was smarter than he let on, and it worried her. She strolled through the alleys of The
Shambles and tried to put it out of her mind. The streets were mostly empty: stragglers going home from bars, Erzau Priests in their feathered masks, the occasional hawker trying their luck.

  She took off her helmet and badge, and stowed them in her bag—she could’ve been anybody in a dark blue uniform without them: a mercenary or a civic alchemist, or any of the hundreds of guards who watched over rich households.

  She didn’t put her nightstick away; with the cnidocyte asleep, it could’ve been any old piece of wood. Inside the stick, a rubbery, whiplike vine lay coiled; with a touch of a button, it would unfurl from a hole in the top. The toxin was ostensibly non-lethal, but Yat had spent too long in her father’s lab to trust that—anything could be lethal with the wrong dose, and a cnida was hardly a precise delivery mechanism.

  She remembered sitting on a high stool, watching him bent over a tray of cellulose cultures: the singing leaves—the patent had gone nowhere. He tried to argue with the parliamentary science committee that they’d been used as the basis for the early model Tinker’s Horn but they’d laughed him off. Dad had died poor. He got through the last few years making fireworks: pretty, useless things. The chemicals he had to work with burned a thousand microscopic holes in his lungs and one day he just stopped breathing. The city ate him piece by piece: first his ideas, then his dignity, then whatever else was left. She’d had nobody else. It was a hard few years. But there she was, getting maudlin again. No point living in the past.