Beneath Ceaseless Skies #155 Read online

  One of our table knives was glinting in the gutter, handle and blade slick with blood. I picked it up, ran my finger on the blade. It wasn’t sharp, and the cuts in the girl had been ragged. It could have done it. I wiped the knife off and slipped it into my apron.

  What else? Just the usual trash. Juicers had left jars smashed against the cobblestones, and there was a spirit vial in the gutter. The dragon stamp on the vial’s seal was still sharp, not worn down by days of being kicked and trampled.

  I held the vial up to my nose, sniffed, and felt bigger than I was. I could feel the glitter in my eyes. I had expected it to be empty when I had taken that sniff, but that vial was still half full. Two, three doses left, not counting the one I had just gotten. I popped the cork back in, tucked the vial in my apron along with the knife.

  I didn’t know what I was looking for, and I hadn’t looked as long as I could have. But I couldn’t afford to spend the rest of the morning poking around in gutters. I went back into the kitchen with a spring in my step that was spirit and nothing else. I had snorted up a full day’s wages, and I had another two tucked into my apron, easy.

  We were behind, but I took control, and we started catching up. The soup and bread started going out fast enough to meet orders, fishes started getting oiled, cubes of turtle and porpoise went into pans of vinegar and brandy.

  Beian had started work on the star dumplings, and had made a mess of it; he had done a third as many as we needed, and he had made them lopsided, beef spilling out into the broth. I took over, square of dough in my right palm. Half a spoon of meat, quarter spoon of mango and mint, then close the hand to seal the dumpling with a five-pointed star.

  My father had taught me how to make star dumplings, back in Xacta. We had them for the festivals, and I could remember standing on his feet to reach above the rim of the pot, his hand folding around mine as we squeezed the dumplings into shape.

  “Meica was like that,” said Aama from right behind me, and I damn near jumped out of my skin. I don’t go up on spirit much; in addition to everything else, it made me jumpy as hell. Aama was lucky she hadn’t come up on me when I was holding a knife, or I might have had a second dead girl to deal with.

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “She was made into a five-pointed star,” she said, grabbing one of the dumplings from the broth with her sticks. “It’s a Tauki symbol.”

  “Great,” I said. “So there aren’t people out there waiting for stuffed bread? Because if there are, what the fuck are you doing by my station?”

  “Ask him!” she said, gesturing towards one of the dishwashers. “Ask him what he knows!”

  “Stuffed bread!” I bellowed, hopefully loud enough to keep people from thinking too much about what she had said. “And if you use the black tree fungus again, I swear Young Shuan will hear about it.” It was traditional in stuffed bread, but it was far too bitter for modern tastes.

  Aama stalked back to her station, and after a quick glance at the dishwasher, I turned back to mine. He was a skinny fellow, who wore a long jacket all year round, even in the summer when it was too damn hot even when you weren’t in up to your elbows in a tub of hot water. I hadn’t really thought about it before then, but it could have been that he wore the jacket and his checked headband to keep Tauki scarring hidden—some of the Tauki higher-ups had scars and symbols burned into their flesh.

  Could have been that’s why he dressed like that, could have been something else. So long as people got their work done, I didn’t ask questions. He hadn’t given anything away in response to Aama; just looked up when she started yelling about him, then went back to grinding burnt dough off an oven pan.

  If that had ended it, it would have been fine, even though we were limping through breakfast like a three-legged dog. The problem was that Aama was right. Maybe not about the dishwasher, but about the way the girl had been laid out. Arms and legs spread, and that mess of stomach and intestines between the legs. Not just that, but the way she had been opened up. The cuts had been rough, but it was clear enough; a five-pointed star had been cut out of her stomach, and her guts had been pulled out through it.

  The five-pointed star was a Tauki symbol. That’s why we had star dumplings for festivals—Tauki was the royal religion, and the state festivals had all been Tauki. The dead girl had been Sisori. I had seen her at the lunchtime prayers.

  In exile, the Tauki and Sisori mostly got along, but if that girl had been killed as part of a Tauki ritual, we’d see the Sisori Wars fought out in our kitchen. If history was any guide, the ensuing revolution would kill about half of us, a quarter of those left alive would become refugees, and the rest would be under the thumb of a People’s Committee. More to the point, if there was a riot, the police would find out, and I’d swing for what I had done to Meica’s corpse.

  I looked back at the star dumplings and saw what I was doing. They were more or less right, but there was a twist that I had never used, and they were heavier on the mint than I had learned. I remembered my father teaching me how to make them, and I also remembered that my father was the sort of atheist who hated the festivals and never let us make star dumplings.

  The man I was remembering as my father looked a bit like the picture I had seen of my great-grandfather. Hard to tell, because he wasn’t stiffly posed and looking blank, and also because all the memories that came riding in on spirit would’ve been family of one sort or another. I shook my head, tried to clear it of my grandfather, or great-grandfather, or whoever’s spirit I had borrowed, and went back to making the dumplings like I had learned from Old Shuan. Then Young Shuan came in and started yelling.

  When Old Shuan died of winter fever, Young Shuan had been a junior line-cook, and one of the older chefs tried to get Uncle Cestin to put him in charge of the kitchen. Young Shuan didn’t bother with that. He just came in and started running things, and when that other fellow came back, Young Shuan cracked his jaw with a head-butt and chased him out of the kitchen with a cleaver. Hell of a cook, but not the type to let it slide when things were as bad as they were for this breakfast.

  There was spittle in his beard and rage in his eyes when he made it over to my station. I kept making the dumplings, because there wasn’t anything better for me to be doing.

  “You run a kitchen like this?!” he screamed. “Get out. Get out, and don’t come back, you hear?”

  I spent my mornings picking up three-hundred pound carcasses with one hand, and taking them apart with the other. If he tried to throw me out, I’d break him, head-butt or no. “Someone killed a waitress,” I said. “I had to deal with it.”

  For a while, the only sounds in the kitchen were cooking. Young Shuan’s hands clenched and unclenched. He wasn’t used to being argued with, and he wasn’t used to a kitchen running behind, but I hadn’t been wrong to do what I did. “Tell me about it,” he said, finally, and I did, as the clamor of the kitchen picked up again.

  “It’s done,” he said, when I finished. “You can’t waste any more time on this.”

  “But—”

  “It’s done.”

  I didn’t argue, because he wouldn’t listen, but it wasn’t done. Either the Sisori would try to take revenge for Meica’s death by killing a dishwasher, or the Tauki would decide to preempt the retaliation, or someone else would get laid out as a star. And for all that it was Young Shuan’s favorite way of dealing with problems, he couldn’t fire anyone for any reason; give someone a grievance, and maybe they go to the police and start talking about a dead waitress.

  It wasn’t done, but Young Shuan didn’t want to hear it. It wasn’t done, but maybe it’d simmer down rather than flare up. I couldn’t do much about it either way. The problem was, when I tried to work, I couldn’t help thinking about that girl, how she had looked out there on the cobblestones, how she had moved on the hook when I had taken her apart.

  #

  It had been a hell of a morning, it was a hell of a lunch, and the afternoon wasn’t great either. Youn
g Shuan tried to pretend that nothing was wrong, which left me holding everything together. When people take their breaks, they start to clump up as Tauki or Sisori, so I stopped letting them have breaks—no matter how well run a kitchen is, there’re always gutters to flush and ovens to scrape clean, and so on and so on.

  That didn’t make anyone happy.

  Then there were fights. Two that I broke up when it was still just yelling, and one a proper brawl out back just after lunch. By the time I got out there, Aama and the dishwasher were about to go at it with knives.

  I got behind her, tossed her clear.

  “You idiot!” she shouted. “He killed Meica!”

  “You have proof?” I asked. “You have proof, we’ll deal with it.”

  “Look at his shoulder!” said another of the Sisori. “That scar, those lines—”

  I looked. The dishwasher’s jacket had gotten ripped in the fight, and he had a hell of a lot more tattoos and scars than most Tauki. Great. Some sort of higher-up. “Don’t see any proof that he killed Meica,” I replied.

  “He’s the King of Xacta, you idiot,” said Aama. She surged forward, trying to get at him, and he brought his knife back up, and the whole thing started again.

  “Enough!” I yelled again, but nobody was listening.

  Then the pan I had wedged into place to keep the back door closed got knocked loose, and Young Shuan came out. His lips were pulled back, and he was shaking with rage. I was twice his size and on his side, but I had to fight back the urge to flee or beg forgiveness.

  He was carrying one of the big soup pots. When those were full, they were as heavy as a calf; heavier, because of the way the water sloshed, and he was carrying it like it was full. Young Shuan threw the contents out over the brawl.

  If it had been cats or juicers, he’d have used hot water and scalded them, but judging from their reactions, it was cold water. It did the job. The people out on the cobblestones went from wanting to kill each other to being confused, wet, and cold. Young Shuan pointed at the door, and they shuffled past him, back into the kitchen, like recalcitrant schoolchildren. Maybe the dishwasher was the rightful king of Xacta, but Young Shuan was the king of the Mountain Pine, and it wasn’t wise to forget that.

  I joined the line heading back into the kitchen, but as I passed Young Shuan, he grabbed me by the shoulder. He didn’t say anything, but there were all sorts of things in his look. Rage, fear, confusion, and a plea for help that he could never voice. Young Shuan had an ailing mother and three sisters, and he relied on the job to support them. More than that, the Mountain Pine was his life. It was falling apart, and he didn’t know what to do about it. I didn’t either.

  Most days, during the run-up to dinner, I did more supervising than actual work. A word here, a stir there, that sort of thing. The staff was good enough that most days, even that wasn’t necessary. That day, it was. They needed to know that I was hanging over their shoulder, so they’d keep their minds on the food, not on other things. Me, I was mostly thinking about other things.

  If that dishwasher was the king, it could be that some Tauki had decided to cut up a Sisori in his honor. There were fewer sacrifices in the royal calendar than there used to be, and all of those had been shifted over to animals during the Sisori wars. But there were still old-school Tauki who blamed the fall of the monarchy on the reforms in the Imperial cult, and if one of those had found out where the rightful king was hiding, I could believe a sacrifice on his behalf.

  Or on his orders. I didn’t know a damn thing about this Prince Telac. Propaganda against him poured out of the Xactan Republic, and Xac royalists in exile printed out propaganda supporting him, but neither side was heavy on facts. Smuggled out when he was seven, then disappeared, more or less. Could be that he was just getting along, or could be he had become someone who could see a girl cut all to pieces in the hope of it bringing him luck.

  As I worked my way through the kitchen, I did my best to look over at that dishwasher from time to time. There was a big Tauki who stuck to his side—had been there during the fight, and had knocked a couple of Sisori flat—and I didn’t try to separate them. I didn’t want to see Telac dead before I knew who had killed Meica. And it was Telac. Those bumps on his shoulder... traditionally, the crown jewels of Xacta were sewn into the prince’s body when he was still in swaddling clothes. My father had a yellowing newspaper clipping about that in his collection of ‘idiotic barbarisms that destroyed Xacta.’ That star-shaped lump on his shoulder was either the five rubies, or it was a replica that someone had undergone a lot of pain and effort to produce and then hide.

  Course, just because he was the king didn’t mean that he had killed Meica, or that Meica had been killed for his benefit. Could have been that someone stuck a knife in her, and decided to mock it up like a royal Tauki sacrifice to keep people from figuring out who had done it. Since you needed the king around for that sort of sacrifice, it’d have to have been someone who knew that the rightful king of Xacta was washing dishes in the Mountain Pine, anyway. Otherwise it didn’t make sense.

  None of it made sense, so I decided to see what the dishwasher had to say. He was elbows-deep in water so hot it was almost boiling, trying to get goose fat from the clay pots before it went rancid. His large friend looked up at my approach, hands dipping down into his apron. I gave him a short nod, didn’t make any sudden moves.

  “How many people knew?” I asked.

  “I don’t—” he started.

  “How many knew, before this morning?” I needed to know, and king or not, he was going to tell me.

  He shrugged. “Reitan,” he said, nodding towards his friend. “I don’t think any of the others, but sometimes the headband slips. There is always the chance that someone will see something.”

  I hesitated. Two of the line chefs—Aama and Beian—were watching us, and there were other dishwashers closer, and there were still runners bringing trays of dirty dishes back from the lunch. It was the closest we’d get to privacy.

  “Was this for you?” I asked.

  He was a skinny guy, nose like a beak, and eyes that were older than his face. He recoiled at that, just slightly. “I hope not,” he said, quietly. “Too much has been.... I hope not.”

  Maybe he was lying. He didn’t sound like he was, but living that sort of life, he’d have had to learn how to lie. Hell. I wasn’t even sure why I had asked, anyway—if he’d done it, he wasn’t going to just tell me.

  “You should leave,” I said. Whoever had killed that girl, having the king in the kitchen wasn’t helping things.

  “I can’t.” He shook his head, put the pot he was working on to the side, started in on the next one. “There aren’t enough who can be trusted, and on short notice... it isn’t safe here, but it wouldn’t be safe to run.”

  Maybe that’d be true for some provincial official or former judge, but not the king. Go out into the street in any Xac neighborhood, and half the people you’d meet would be willing to give up their lives for their king. Tauki mostly, but there were plenty of Sisori who blamed the Sisori wars on the king’s advisors rather than on the king. All Xac refugees loved the idea of the king. He was all they had.

  I must have let some of my disbelief out onto my face. He turned away, looked back down at the pot. “Everyone has family,” he said. “People will cross lines for their family.”

  The Prince Telac didn’t have any close family—there had been detailed accounts of the trials and executions in the broadsheets. But I took his point. Everyone had relatives left behind in Xacta, and telling the embassy where to find the king might get a grandfather out of forced rustication, or a mother from a labor camp. Hell, for all that my father had fought against the People’s Army, he’d have a hard time not giving the People’s Committees anything they wanted if it’d get my Aunt Ari out of whatever hell she was in.

  “Besides,” continued Telac. “If I leave, everyone thinks I was involved.”

  That was stupid, but made more sense th
an the other reasons. He didn’t seem to have anything else to say, so I gave a snort, and turned away. When I got back to my station, I saw what I had done.

  Plum wine vinegar for the marinade, instead of sorghum vinegar. I swore under my breath. It’d take an expert to taste the difference, and it cost five times as much. The last of the spirit. Great-grandfather wouldn’t have used sorghum. It would’ve been worse if that vial of spirit had taken me up with someone who couldn’t cook, but this wasn’t great either. I swore again, louder, slammed my handtowel down on the counter, and went back to the privy.

  Coming down from spirit is like being drunk; like being two drinks past drunk, when the joy has faded but the sick is still there, and you’re not sure if you’re going to puke or not, and your thoughts chase each other around without getting anywhere.

  I squatted over the privy, and I could see the dead girl, head turning to the side as I took a cleaver to her, and I could see the fight out behind the restaurant. I could see it spreading, I could see faces I knew split open by knives, I could see other heads turning to the side, with that same looseness of death in them.

  It didn’t make sense. The king, or whoever’d done it—they’d have to have known that throwing the dead girl out on the cobblestones like that would cause trouble. There was no reason for it. Once they’d done the sacrifice, they could have dumped her in a rain barrel, or in with the trash, or the king’s giant friend could’ve stuffed her in the fire under the big stone oven. They hadn’t even tried to hide her in a corner or anything. Only reason to leave her public like that would be because they wanted someone to find her, to see what they’d done.

  Because people had seen her, the king was going to get killed. Either by the Sisori in the restaurant, or one of them would tell someone else, or something. So, maybe there was a Sisori who wanted to kill the king, and thought killing a waitress was easier than killing a dishwasher. No. Didn’t sit right. Go to the Xactan embassy, tell someone about the king, and he’d die. No need to kill a waitress and hope for the best.