Chapter 99
Ardan was awoken by a headache. It wasn’t the best way to wake up, but still encouraging. It was as Ergar used to say: “As long as it hurts, as long as you’re cold, or hunger and thirst torment you, all is well. It means you’re still alive, and your body is still fighting for the chance to see the Spirit of the Day’s next journey.”
Wheezing, the young man drew in air through his nostrils and, before even making out the contours of the world around him, reached for the glass of water standing on the bedside table made of compressed sawdust. This was a new technology used in factories to produce very cheap, not-especially-durable furniture. Arkar often lamented the fact that some carpentry shops were now trying to pass off compressed sawdust as the quality work of a cabinetmaker. The thick layers of lacquer and assorted chemicals would hide its true nature unless you knew what to look for.
The air smelled of mothballs, the first appearance of mold, and the heavy staleness of an abandoned dwelling.
And so, when the young man opened his eyes, he wasn’t surprised to see where exactly he was. Half-lying and half-sitting, Ardan was sprawled out in an armchair reeking of tobacco, alcohol, and... a certain variety of biological fluids. The instant he identified the smell, he attempted to get up.
Alas, his legs betrayed him, and he very nearly fell face-first onto the carpet, which had been trampled to a state resembling cardboard, but Milar caught him.
“Easy, Magister, easy,” the captain tried to return the young man to the armchair, but Ardi quietly pleaded:
“Anywhere but there.”
The captain frowned slightly but shrugged and helped Ardan reach a chair and table. There was an ashtray there that still had tobacco in it. It had a very distinctive odor that simultaneously triggered his gag reflex and his curiosity—what in the world could smell so foul?
Then the young man recognized the smell. These were the same kind of cigars and cigarettes that Lieutenant Yonatan Kornosskiy smoked, prompting Long Neck and Katerina to regularly curse his habit. That was why Ardi wasn’t surprised to find Captain Aloaeiol standing by a window, peering out past a curtain she’d lifted slightly. It was easy to forget that this petite woman with an ungainly figure who wore form-fitting clothes and had strange, crossed scabbards on her back (the blades’ hilts were pointing down, toward the small of her back) was one of the mutants created by the Black House.
The Empire, of course, did not engage in mutation experiments or, as it was called in scientific circles, “the process of permanent partial chimerization without loss of cognitive function or consciousness.” Ardan had read certain articles about that in the Grand’s library. Had he not possessed the proper clearance, merely requesting them would have earned him an escort to an interrogation room in a dark office in an equally-dark building.
It was a somewhat inconvenient system, but one that was presumably justified.
His thoughts were leapfrogging one another…
“What are we doing here?” Ardan asked while sniffing the glass of water.
Fortunately, it turned out to be perfectly drinkable and clean, unlike everything else in the cramped little apartment where the kitchen, living room, and bedroom occupied one and the same space of some twelve square meters.
“You overdid it at the hotel, partner,” Milar explained, sitting down opposite him and extracting a cigarette from his ever-present, crumpled pack. In winter, Milar carried this instead of his cigarette case—the case had the stupid habit of freezing practically solid and refusing to open. “Captain Aloaeiol got us out.”
Evidently, the night had been a wild one, because Ardan recalled Milar starting the evening out with twenty-six cigarettes and there were only eleven left now. The twelfth was in his hand.
Ardi turned to the mutant, who, out of the corner of her eye, was watching the goings-on outside with a hawk’s intensity.
“May I ask how you ended up here?”
“You can drop the formalities,” the captain said, not turning her head, and she didn’t answer his question. “Especially since, not long ago, you addressed me without any such etiquette.”
Ardan wanted to clarify that, at the time—on the balcony of the Prime Minister’s residence—the circumstances had been somewhat different, but he chose to let it go.
“How did you end up here?” The young man repeated his question.
Aloaeiol looked at Milar, and in the half-dark of the acrid gloom, which was being dispelled by a solitary candle (the Ley-chandelier had evidently been left unlit on purpose), her orange, inhuman eyes blazed like bright spots. Given the fact that she and Milar were still here, Captain Aloaeiol had likely already explained everything, but...
“Milar can’t hear another person’s heartbeat,” Ardan explained his reasoning.
“Which has never stopped me from spotting a liar,” Captain Pnev muttered.
Aloaeiol turned to Ardan and smiled gently. It was the expression of a kind-hearted grandmother who’d just heard a naive youngster say something truly foolish.
“And would that help you?” As she asked this, the mutant’s heart practically began to dance.
It accelerated, then slowed, then stopped entirely for an instant before galloping madly. And the captain’s pupils were contracting and dilating like the focusing lenses of a telescope.
Mutants...
“Or have you decided to continue what we started in the nude, Corporal?” Aloaeiol’s smile shifted from kindly to foxlike. Her lips drew into a thin line, their corners stretching toward her cheeks.
“In the nude?” Milar stirred. “Ard, do I need to worry about your wedding?”
“No,” Ardan said curtly, not looking at his partner. “Captain Aloaeiol was simply trying to force me to use my Witch’s Gaze against her.”
Which, in his current situation, Ardan would not have been capable of. However, exactly zero people needed to know that.
For a time, Captain Aloaeiol and Ardan gazed into each other’s eyes, then the mutant raised her hand in a gesture of surrender.
“Milar, can you take my place?”
Captain Pnev nodded and rose to take up a position at the window, assuming the same posture the mutant had held moments earlier. Aloaeiol moved to the table, where, after rummaging in the ashtray, she fished out half a cigar and spent some time getting it lit with a match.
Yes, these were undoubtedly the same cigars as Kornosskiy’s. Which, in all honesty, was rather easily explained.
“I heard the Prime Minister trying to extract something from you concerning the Crown Hotel,” the captain began her account in a calm, even tone. “And judging by the fact that you’re sent there every night and you look no better than a sleepy gopher during the day, the matter is clearly not a trivial one.”
Ardan sat silently, his fingers wrapped around the glass. The tactile feel of the glass edges calmed him somewhat.
“General Zakrovsky, with all due respect to him, withdrew from Dagger affairs and the Black House in general long ago. He does, of course, try to keep his finger on the pulse of things,” Aloaeiol continued. “But more in the role of a patron. And it’s not as though we don’t need him. Were it not for His Excellency, Parliament would’ve reduced us to scarcely a fraction of what we currently are.”
Something told Ardi that this devotion to the Black House was the reason the Emperor had appointed his mentor to such an important post. But as Milar had said, it was best to keep politics at cannon-shot distance. And in recent times, Ardan had come to understand the wisdom of that advice too well for his liking.
“When the incident on the airship occurred, a good acquaintance of mine was killed,” the captain said suddenly. “And we both know who I am speaking of.”
What a small world... Although, considering how few Cloaks there actually were, it was hardly surprising that most of the senior operatives and investigators had crossed paths at least once.
Aloaeiol was speaking of the elven Dagger, the son of Duke Abrailaal, who’d been killed by Alla-Lisa, the enemy mutant. What had his name been... ah, yes—Esvaialaal. And Captain Aloaeiol had spent part of her life among the remnants of the elven tribes in the High Forest.
“He was your mentor.”
“More of a friend, Mr. Investigator,” Captain Aloaeiol corrected with little joy in her tone. “When I was taken into the Black House, Esvaialaal—may his name not be forgotten—kept me company on the days when I was thinking about... the possibility that nothing good would ever happen in my life again. And he saw to it that Yonatan and I ended up in the same unit.”
“Which didn’t end well for anyone,” Milar observed from the window, his tone unexpectedly sharp. “Not for you, not for him.”
Ardan frowned. Why did he feel like this sudden hostility was connected to why Yonatan had been banished from the capital? The man had spent years on back-to-back assignments that had bounced him and his subordinates across the Empire. Only on the most serious of occasions, for a few days or weeks, had he managed to return to the capital.
And, by all appearances, he hadn’t gone to Niewa Avenue or the Dawn Garden, but here. To a small apartment that was visited so rarely it looked more abandoned than lived-in.
Perhaps the world really was, in fact, small...
“Your absence will be noticed, and the Colonel-”
“No one will notice a thing, Corporal,” the mutant interrupted him, and for some reason, she produced a blank sheet of paper from her pocket. She placed it before Ardan and said calmly: “An interesting seal, wouldn’t you say?”
The young man frowned at first, and then... frowned even harder. Before him lay one of the latest versions of his Ice Dolls seal, in which Ardan had been experimenting with a somewhat different approach to his theory on transmutational runic links.
Ardan tilted his head and ran his fingers across the paper. He could even feel the raised ink. It felt as solid as the glass of water.
“An illusion... no... It’s something akin to the Witch’s Gaze...” Ardan whispered and looked up at the captain, whose face had paled slightly—the trick was not quite so easy to use on him. “So, Ivan Kornosskiy was working not only on mutants, but also on an attempt to recreate the Witch’s Gaze. And with the military, at that...”
Ardan recalled how, relatively recently—after Colonel Kshtovsky had used a curse on him that had led to Tina Eveless getting injured—he’d spent several hours reading literature on magic capable of influencing other people’s perception of reality.
The captain, after hearing Ardan speak, was clearly surprised at first, then she took back the once-again-blank sheet of paper.
“Sometimes I forget, Ard, that you’re a future luminary of Star Magic,” she rasped, exhaling a cloud of foul smoke. Ardi and Milar coughed in unison. “I know the smell is wretched, but mutants have a whole range of physiological peculiarities. Including our taste receptors.”
Ardan nodded. He was not especially well-versed in the fundamentals of chimerology, but even Professor Kovertsky’s lectures were sufficient for him to understand what she meant. Without the suppression of a whole range of the body’s regulatory functions, mutants would simply go mad from the more unique aspects of their own existence.
“That still doesn’t explain why you turned up at the hotel at exactly the-”
Ardan stopped talking. Why had he assumed that Aloaeiol had simply “turned up at the right place at the right time?” It would make far more sense if she…
“You’ve been following me for a while now,” Ardan said quietly, and deflated somewhat.
Ergar would not have approved. Nor Shali. None of his forest friends would have praised him for such negligence. Except, perhaps, the she-wolf. She’d always supported him in trying to not follow the path of a hunter, but... something else.
“Such is the job,” Aloaeiol said the favorite phrase of Black House agents. “We’re trained for years to be invisible, Corporal. The fact that neither you nor Milar noticed me, despite the three undeniably delightful nights I spent with you, is nothing remarkable. What’s more, I would have been seriously concerned had either of you spotted me.”
What a terrifying mutation. Being able to make other people see, hear and feel things that weren’t really there… It would make for a perfect mole... but, on the other hand, there were so many immediate inconsistencies there as well. The theory that Captain Aloaeiol was a Puppeteer or one of their puppets had more holes than a colander.
“And why would…” Ardan began and immediately caught himself.
“I can see that you’re succumbing to your professional deformation, Corporal,” Captain Aloaeiol observed with a touch of sadness. “The simple desire to find those responsible for the death of a close friend is no longer sufficient motivation for a mind buried in cold calculations related to other people’s conspiracies and intrigues? Eternal Angels, Ard. In this entire world, there were exactly two people that cared about me. Esvaialaal. And Yonatan. Two. Do you understand? And now only one of them remains. How’s that for a motive? Sufficient?”
Ardan said nothing. Every word stung harder than a slap from Taisia Shpritz. He really had stopped paying attention to the category of variables known as “feelings” for a moment. He’d been deceived by the outward coldness and calculation of the Black House’s operatives, entirely forgetting that they still had families, loved ones, kin, and friends.
They loved, hated, rejoiced, and grieved exactly as he did.
“I’m sorry,” Ardan apologized sincerely.
The captain merely waved her cigar-free hand, drew on the stub, and continued:
“Connecting Esvaialaal’s death with what’s happening right now doesn’t require any special investigative skills. In both cases, your name comes up, the Colonel’s outwardly-illogical actions seem suspicious, and the level of secrecy is so heightened that it seems like no one knows anything at all.” The captain set the stub on the ashtray’s edge and crossed her arms over her chest. “So, I presume you’ve also managed to miss a mole in the Black House. Hence the second round of questioning I’m getting.”
“Tazidahian is involved in this, Aloaeiol,” Milar added calmly. “And you-”
“I’m a mutant, yes,” the captain finished his thought. “But I was born in the Empire, Captain Pnev, back when your grandmother and grandfather were busy making your mother. Or your father. So, if anything, I’ve got more reason to suspect you. Or the half-breed over there. He’s the bloody offspring of the right hand and mentor of the Dark Lord.”
“We’re not accusing you,” Milar grimaced. “But you said it yourself—such is the job. You suspect everyone and everything. In fairness, even Ard has only recently been brought in on most of the investigation’s details. Same as me. And the full picture is probably known to no one except the Colonel and His Imperial Majesty.”
“Well, it’s not as though you’ve shared that many details with me,” Aloaeiol spread her hands out. “But I won’t insist. Even though I pulled your skinny backsides out of a trap.”
An oppressive silence settled over the room. Ardi did not know what to do next, so...
“We’re looking for secret documents that the Tazidahians were supposed to hand over to representatives of the conspirators,” Milar said with unexpected directness. “The documents were stolen by a traitor mutant. And before handing them off—not to the conspirators, but to someone else—he dropped the packet into the garbage chute. And so now we’re going to have to rummage through a dump.”
Ardi was initially surprised by such candor, but then it all fell into place. If the information Milar had just shared surfaced anywhere else, the sole source of the leak would be Aloaeiol.
Yes, perhaps they didn’t suspect her at the moment. But... such is the job.
“And the mutant himself?” The captain asked.
“A finger bone is all that’s left of him,” Milar answered and nodded toward Ardan. “Our Magister saw to that.”
Aloaeiol looked at Ardi and stretched her lips into that foxlike smile once more.
“So, the rumors that Mshisty has acquired a rival aren’t exaggerated... For your information, Ard, they’re already placing bets on who will cause more destruction over the next five years. You or the Major.”
“For the record, partner, I’ve put four exes on you,” Captain Pnev added with exaggerated cheer.
Ardan muttered something unintelligible. It wasn’t as though he went around deliberately blowing things up and tearing them down. It just happened!
After several moments of lingering silence, the key question was asked:
“What are you planning to do, gentlemen investigators?”
Milar and Ardan exchanged glances. In the muted light of the safe house (he believed that was what Captain Pnev had called such places), their eyes gleamed with something between a senseless and ruthless adventure and utter absurdity.
“That’s insane,” Captain Aloaeiol voiced the collective thought and retrieved her stub from the ashtray’s edge.
“Do you have any other ideas?” Milar asked, speaking somewhat more roughly than was perhaps warranted.
The mutant exhaled a wisp of smoke and shrugged her deceptively-slender shoulders. Ardan knew perfectly well that Milar, despite his rather decent physical condition, could not have dragged his partner along the snowy, ice-covered embankment. Which meant that Aloaeiol had managed it. And she’d likely done it with casual ease, too.
“I have only one thought,” Aloaeiol answered. “If the documents, which might not even exist, have been lost, then that is equally disadvantageous for all sides. And, by default, it plays into the Black House’s hands and against the conspirators.”
Ardi blinked several times. He hadn’t yet looked at the problem from that angle, but upon reflection, the captain’s words sounded quite reasonable. Just days ago, the Black House hadn’t even known about the documents’ existence, which had preserved the general status quo. And now the Puppeteers had also failed to obtain the papers, while the Second Chancery had discovered their existence.
From a purely mathematical standpoint, if one translated everything into some abstracted system of calculation, the Black House was indeed ahead. Even from a chess perspective, the Second Chancery had seized the initiative for once.
“And you’re lecturing us about professional deformations?” Milar asked in annoyance. “Aloaeiol, this isn’t a Dagger game, where you often don’t even see your opponent until the very last moment. This is investigator work. We look for evidence so we can see the full picture. We don’t work in shades of gray or with a mosaic of shadows.”
“‘A mosaic of shadows,’” the mutant repeated acidly. “Don’t quote old service postulates to me, Milar. I’d already read them back when-”
“When my father and mother hadn’t yet been born,” the captain waved her off. “I’m aware. You’ve already mentioned your incredible life experience.”
“And it’s precisely that incredible life experience, Milar, that tells me,” Aloaeiol flicked the ash and drew on her cigar again. The red circle on the stub was already close to touching her fingers. “That searching for discarded documents—if such documents even exists—at a waste disposal site in the middle of a snowstorm is, if not entirely idiotic, then categorically desperate.”
“And I still haven’t heard any other suggestions from you.”
“I don’t have any,” Aloaeiol shrugged again. “As I’ve already said, we benefit from the mere fact that we’ve learned about the failed handoff.”
Milar threw up his hands and turned to Ardi.
“What do you think, Magister? Can we try to find the documents at the disposal site?”
In total, four waste disposal sites had been built for Old Town. Two of them were located not far from the Tend and Tendari, which, given the concentration of factories and manufacturing in those districts, was entirely logical, and two more had been erected at opposite ends of the northern part of the city. And, naturally, all four of them lay beyond the last residential buildings and both the railway tracks and the automobile roads. They were also positioned so that the land didn’t adjoin the agricultural holdings that spread across the landscape for many dozens of kilometers like a ragged blanket.
In other words, refuse from the Central District was transported across the river, then, after skirting the Firstborn Quarter, taken another ten kilometers north. Why not northeast? Because that was where the trucks from Baliero and the old Financial District would be headed. And the Crown Hotel fell within the jurisdiction of the Central District’s services, so determining which disposal site its waste went to was easy.
But after that... After that, the difficulties would begin. And even leaving aside the snowstorm that was blanketing the disposal site as well, a packet of papers was quite modest in size. And the sheer volume of refuse that accumulated before it was buried in rocky soil unconnected to the groundwater could reach dozens, if not hundreds, of tons. This was a natural furnace of sorts, in which waste rotted away and dissolved into the earth.
A furnace...
A furnace!
“Wait,” Ardi suddenly perked up and looked first at Milar, then at Aloaeiol. “It’s winter right now!”
“A most commendable observation for an investigator, Ard,” the captain noted ironically.
“Yep,” Milar muttered.
“That’s not the point,” Ardan said, and as so often happened when he was thinking hard about something, he began tapping his fingers on the table. “Even in a normal winter, the heating stations are always short on coal to heat the buildings. And in one like this, they’ll have started up-”
“The waste incineration plants!” Aloaeiol and Milar thundered in unison.
“Exactly,” Ardan nodded. “They were recently connected to the water circuits for auxiliary heating of the central network. But not all buildings have been connected to it yet. The Crown Hotel, however-”
“Was one of the first to be connected,” Milar said excitedly. It wasn’t like he was interrupting Ardi on purpose—he simply could not contain his thoughts, which were galloping ahead. “And finding out which specific plant the heating system is connected to isn’t terribly hard.”
“You don’t even need to find out,” Captain Aloaeiol shook her head. “We checked all the systems’ integrity in advance. They haven’t been compromised.”
“Can someone crawl through the narrow cast-iron vents?” Milar snorted.
Captain Aloaeiol pretended not to hear the snarky remark.
“The Crown Hotel is connected to the plant at the intersection of Orlovsky Avenue and Monk Street.”
“Excellent,” Milar slapped his hand on the table. “Then let’s go.”
Captain Aloaeiol was silent for a time, then shook her head.
“There are still tons of garbage, Milar.”
“You’re right,” the captain shook his head. “Finding a single, perfectly-ordinary envelope there would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.”
Ardan frowned.
“It’s not guaranteed to be ordinary.”
The young man felt two bewildered gazes turn to him.
“Think about it,” the rhythm of his fingers quickened. “If these really are important documents... So important that their inconspicuous transport required waiting for the Congress, then how great is the risk? For both sides of the exchange, I mean.”
Aloaeiol and Milar exchanged glances.
“They must have some way of making sure that the documents or even the envelope itself is what it’s supposed to be,” Aloaeiol mused.
“And not some kind of setup or forgery,” Milar added. “With stakes this high, the Puppeteers must have insurance.”
Both captains converged their gazes on Ardi once more.
“There’s a mark on the envelope,” the young man was drumming his fingers so fast now that the table had begun to rock slightly. “One that was designed to pass through every barrier, including the hotel’s stationary shields.”
“A magical one?” Milar asked.
“Most likely.”
“Using the art of the Aean’Hane?” Captain Pnev pressed.
Ardan thought about it. Not long ago, he would’ve dismissed the possibility as utterly untenable. The Tazidahian Brotherhood and the Aean’Hane? Before the fall of Ectassus, practitioners of the art, like the Firstborn in general, had settled across the entire western continent. And while the densest concentrations of Firstborn settlements had lain in the central and southern parts of the continent, they had existed in the north as well.
The Inquisition, before finding itself confined to the territory of the Enario Theocracy, had substantially culled the numbers of both Firstborn and the weaker adepts of the art. And in a rather specific fashion, they had concentrated their efforts not on the Aean’Hane themselves, whom they’d sometimes been unable to overcome, but on the Speakers. The logic was simple and effective. If you deprive the Aean’Hane of potential students, then where will new Aean’Hane come from?
And so, the prevailing assumption had been that if any Aean’Hane remained in the north of the continent, there were even fewer of them than in the south. Perhaps it was only a couple of solitary individuals living in seclusion.
And yet, that summer, on his way back from Shamtur, Ardan had seen with his own two eyes a half-elf Aean’Hane who had been trained in the art within the Brotherhood! This wasn’t exactly impossible, but it was highly improbable. And yet Ardi had seen what he had seen…
“Most likely,” Ardan nodded, answering Milar’s question.
“Can you find it?” The captain asked, squinting at him.
Ardan shrugged. He would’ve liked to answer the question with any sort of certainty, but he couldn’t. There were too many unknowns in the equation.
“I can try,” Ardan admitted honestly. “But I don’t know if I’ll succeed.”
For a time, silence hung in the small, smoke-filled apartment. It was as thick and greasy as the ancient stains on the kitchen that was used only on the rarest of occasions and seemingly never cleaned. And honestly, what would be the point of cleaning it if the place was only used for those rare meetings where neither Aloaeiol nor Kornosskiy cared about anything except each other?
“All right, gentlemen investigators,” Aloaeiol cast a final glance at the street and headed for the exit. “Let’s go. We’ll test your luck.”
Milar and Ardan exchanged looks and both rose to their feet. The young man swayed slightly, but, by gripping his staff tightly, managed to keep his balance. He wanted to sleep, eat, and... sleep. And then sleep again several times. By the Sleeping Spirits, if he managed to lay his head on a pillow right now, or even simply lean the back of his head against a wall, he would not open his eyes again for at least a week.
Or even better—eleven days. That way, he’d wake up just in time for his and Tess’ wedding ceremony.
But alas, blessed sleep remained the privilege of the Sleeping Spirits for now, however much of a pun that assertion was.
“Are you sure you have the strength for this?” Milar asked in a quiet whisper, offering him his shoulder.
Ardan merely gave him a restrained nod.
“In case you were wondering, gentlemen, I can hear you,” Captain Aloaeiol said from where she stood near the door, already bundling herself up in winter clothing.
*
Their truck passed through all the cordons on their return trip to the Central District without incident. And no, the streets hadn’t been blocked off by the military with sandbags piled across the road. There were no heavy barriers, no hastily-nailed-together checkpoint booths.
Instead, from time to time, as if by chance, a truck sitting quietly by the curb would come into view. A miniature stove with a chimney poking through the canvas canopy would be puffing away inside it, warming those who dwelt inside and watched over everyone’s peace.
The capital in general, and Old Town in particular, had begun to resemble Shamtur. Naturally, this had stirred up certain fears and worries among the populace. The shop signs and restaurant windows, normally bright and perpetually festive, had unexpectedly gone dark alongside the sky, and together with the draped windows and the rare handful of pedestrians (those brave souls who, for some reason, had ventured out to battle the elements at night), they created an unfamiliar atmosphere.
“Do you have any theories about what might be in those documents?” Captain Pnev asked.
Captain Aloaeiol was steering the truck confidently, forcing her way through the snowdrifts that, despite the efforts of the clearing crews, seemed to be growing. Milar and Ardan were sitting on the rear bench seats. They were hard, uncomfortable, and categorically cold.
“I haven’t the faintest idea, Milar,” Ardi answered honestly.
At that, their brief conversation died of its own accord beneath the rumble of the enormous wheels wrapped in equally-formidable chains—otherwise, driving through the buried streets would have been simply impossible.
A journey that would normally have taken just under an hour consumed nearly an hour and a half of their time. Ardan even managed to rest along the way. It wasn’t enough for him to stop dreaming about the leave he had earned after the Congress, which would be entirely consumed by his exams at the Grand, but still enough to stop him from nodding off.
And so, when their truck halted beside some gates that stood between two buildings with low windows, Ardan was able to climb out without assistance. Cold wind lashed his face.
Ardan coughed. Not because of the dry, throat-scraping air that city-dwellers complained about in the freezing weather, but from the suffocating stench. He smelled burning rot, scrap wood, possibly even rubber (burning it within city limits was prohibited), and something else that Ardan could’ve maybe identified but simply didn’t want to.
A small industrial area that had been set apart from its surroundings had its back resting against the railway line adjoining its rear yard. The paradox was that even waste incineration plants generated their own byproducts, which needed to be hauled somewhere. That ash was loaded onto railcars and taken somewhere north. Apparently, the military had found a use for it, but Professor Erik Convel had not ventured that far during his lectures devoted to this type of industry.
“Come on,” Aloaeiol waved her hand, and the three of them, bypassing snowdrifts that rose up to their waist (in Ardi’s case, they were barely above his knees), followed the cleared path to a door set in the middle of the massive, locked gates.
The captain pressed the doorbell, but nothing happened.
“The wiring has frozen,” Ardan hastened to explain for some reason. “The conductivity has degraded, and the Ley can’t pass through-”
“Corporal,” Aloaeiol cut him off.
Ardan fell silent mid-word. Right. Of course. The captain was probably old enough to understand that much.
The mutant inhaled deeply, placed her hand against the door panel near the hinges, and, exhaling a wisp of black smoke, shoved it forward. Ardan had never before seen steel hinges tear nearly as easily as wet paper.
With a hoarse screech, they burst apart, and the door flew nearly a meter before crashing into the snow.
“And here I thought the Daggers worked quietly and unobtrusively,” Milar snorted.
“And here I thought that investigators weren’t fond of excessive chatter,” Aloaeiol replied coolly.
Ardan didn’t know what exactly had happened between the two captains, but he suspected that it wasn’t something that could bring Black House colleagues closer. Likely the opposite. There was a cold wariness and mutual distrust between Aloaeiol and Milar that neither of them was even attempting to disguise.
Entering the factory’s inner yard, Ardan swept the area with a quick glance. It was nothing especially noteworthy, on the whole. The main building had its furnaces and a long, narrow smokestack reaching toward the sky. There were also some small “sheds” concealing whatever was needed to keep things running beneath their awnings. He spotted a security annex that was currently vacant. One could understand the guards—the walls were too thin, there was no heating, and the assorted other hardships didn’t exactly make night duty an appealing prospect when the thermometer’s column couldn’t even properly register the frost outside.
But on the other hand, it was their job.
Rounding the main building, they approached an enormous brick cube resting on a half-meter cement foundation. It was big enough to contain some five hundred cubic meters of garbage.
Using simple math, one could calculate that the cube, which was the size of a two-story house and connected to the main building by a heated passageway, held approximately three hundred tons of waste.
“And so it goes,” Milar grumbled, watching Aloaeiol as she prepared to repeat her trick with the heavy door. “You take the oath, you hunt serial killers and terrorists, you participate in joint operations to catch mad mages, you restore order in underground tenement houses, you tangle with gangs—and bam! A mage shows up in your unit, and a year later, you’re rummaging through garbage. So tell me this, Ard: am I simply misunderstanding the concept of career advancement, or did I somehow offend the Eternal Angels at some point in my life?”
Ardan let Milar’s grumbling pass by him. When Aloaeiol simply ripped the door from its hinges, he climbed up to join her on the unpretentious, concrete platform.
A disturbing pattern of green-black veins had wound its way across the mutant’s face, and two thick, greasy streams resembling machine oil were running down her cheeks. Ardan knew that different mutants possessed entirely different strengths, and what came easily to some could prove impossible for others.
It was unlikely that Aloaeiol, like Kornosskiy, belonged to the variety of “humanoid chimeras” whose physical capabilities left even ogres behind. So, the captain had probably paid dearly to tear the two doors open.
“I’ll recover in a couple of hours,” Aloaeiol rasped, as though reading Ardan’s thoughts. “Brute force isn’t my forte.”
Ardan nodded and stepped inside. The interior reminded him of a simple barn. Only its smell set it apart. That, and the presence of a conveyor belt onto which orcs with faces covered in cloth would normally be shoveling garbage with enormous spades.
Why was Ardi so certain that the workers here were specifically orcs? Because he could see them. They’d been torn to pieces and were lying on heaps of bloodied refuse.
“Milar!” was all Ardan managed to shout before the inner yard drowned in the thunder of gunfire.