The Iron Swamp (2 page)

Rake nodded. "I don't like being mocked by a man with a cock the size of my thumb."

I didn't like being mocked by men with brains smaller than my fists, but expressing this sentiment wouldn't do me any good. "If you'd stop watching me in the shower you could live in happy ignorance of the size of my cock."

Rake picked up my carded Pida Whey special edition with coin and ripped the corner back, his jaw protruding in faux-horror. It would have hurt if I hadn't brought the figures in especially for these idiots to destroy. All I needed to do was get Lisbold to break one as well, and if they ever bothered me again, I would send them both a video of the act with an ultimatum to either pay up or never talk to me again. It was not my proudest moment, sacrificing two of my most valuable possessions to rid myself of a couple of turds, but when a man was too short to reach the flush he had to find other ways. Even the basement, where new lights started flickering the instant the janitor fixed the previous one, would feel like bliss if I didn't have to talk to Rake and Lisbold.

Why either of them ended up in this cupboard for the dispossessed I didn't know. They were young men at the start of their careers, surrounded by people so old or so obviously incompetent that their productivity wouldn't decline greatly if they died. Neither Rake nor Lisbold seemed sufficiently stupid to have merited the basement, which meant their actions were criminal, and the bosses put them down here to hide them from the press. If the broken action figures didn't successfully segregate us, I would investigate further.

I gave no response to the damaged card, so Rake threw it at me. "Hope it wasn't worth much," he said, as the two of them walked away. I felt the prick of victory, but putting my ruined figure back on the desk was sufficiently sobering.

At the front of the room, the elevator dinged triggering a sea of gray hair and bald heads rising from the desks like wader birds evacuating a lake. As the doors slid open, a tall man I didn't recognize stepped out. He was older than me, though still young enough to drop the average basement age considerably. Mist goggles sat atop his forehead like horns sheared at the base. His boots rose almost to his knees, covered in mud fresh enough to entrench the sewage smell clinging to the air, wet prints slopping behind him. His black trousers were bath mat rubber, and his coat full of insulating zeolate that inflated his upper body like the head of a hammer. This man, whoever he was, had come straight from trudging through a swamp, and in The Kaerosh that never meant anything good.

He stopped at my desk. "I need to talk to you."

I eyed the empty desks either side of me. "Me or just anyone?"

"We can use that room at the back." He pointed to the sergeant's office, then walked off before I could object.

I followed him to the plywood door which fit into the metal tank like a varyball rammed through a bottle top. When turning the knob failed to open it, I suggested it might be locked, but he gave no indication of having heard. He lifted the door by the knob as he turned again, blasting me with the smell of microwaved noodles as he entered. Sitting in the sergeant's chair without removing his coat, he gestured to the other seat.

The sergeant was off on one of his snack breaks, so would probably be gone for some time. In fact, calling them breaks was a misnomer as he spent long enough leaning against the ground floor vending machine to leave a person print in the side. Even so, I sat uneasily, aware that he would not take kindly to our uninvited presence, and his nose-to-nose brand of shouting was worse than a face full of steam from a boiling ham.

The man glared for a few clicks, assessing me in the quiet. "Bishon Kenrey was murdered in his bedroom last night."

His words hung between us like a rotting noodle draped over the ceiling light. I lacked strong feelings towards the clergyman, only the faint recollection he was one of Clazran's high-ups, and therefore most likely a piece of dis. I had no idea why a man I had never met would come all the way to the basement, drag me in to my superior's office, and relay this information.

"Perhaps," he continued, "you are wondering what relevance this has to you?"

I looked through the window at the sea of incompetence from which I was especially selected. "Either I'm a suspect, in which case I should inform you I didn't know the man, or you want me to investigate the murder, in which case I would ask why?"

His pointed grin made his face look like a demonic triangle. "The
why
should be less important than the chance for you to redeem yourself."

I nodded. "But I would still like to know."

He leaned back in the sergeant's chair, scratching a set of long fingers across his chest. "I'll break it down for you so we don't waste hours arguing over it. We want you because we have leverage. You frak up, or don't do what we want, and you're back down here again."

I nodded. As self-confessed candor went, it was believable. "And what do you want?"

"We want you to solve the case obviously." He took a deep breath of noodle-filled air. "While partnered with Philip Rake."

"I see," I said. It didn't seem appropriate to tell him to frak himself immediately. "And what do I get in return?"

"If you solve it, you'll be reinstated upstairs, but I doubt you'll need it. Clazran will want you for his special police."

A lie. Given my background, the SP would sooner kill me than ask me to join them. "I'm not sure Rake will work with me."

My interviewer turned to regard the sergeant's poster on
The Top Ten Tips to Stay Fit in an Office Job
. "What do you want from me, Nidess?" He frowned, his eyes flickering from tip to tip. "Because you can cram it up your ass along with every other request you're thinking of making. This is the deal: You solve the case with Rake, and you can go upstairs again until your next frak up. And if anyone asks, you picked Rake for your partner. Clear?"

As crystal. The only question was whether I wanted to improve my life by playing their game or seize the infinitely more satisfying opportunity of telling the bosses to frak themselves. It wasn't me that decided I was better use to the police department picking my teeth amid their storage bin for the mentally infirm. I was a good detective once, until I crossed them.

I knew the consequences. Innocent or not, the SP wanted Sariah to go down so she was going down. All I achieved was to follow her onto the scrap heap. But that was five cycles ago, and the experience had changed me. I wasn't sure I wanted back out. Sam's voice rang loud in the back of my mind that there was danger in my reappearance. Apathy clouded my will, but I knew that whoever emerged from the basement would not be the same man who went in. I would not remain the disciple of my parents' religion. It was safer to stay, better to stay. I could give them that one last sacrifice.

I said, "Well, at least you're not here to frak me," pretty much as each word registered as a thought.

At that moment, the sergeant tried to return to his office. He actually felt the need to knock at his own door. "Excuse me–"

"Get out!" the dark haired man shouted without looking at him.

As the door shut again, every reject close enough to hear glowered at the fat man like a pack of aged volks, assessing whether they had the strength to bring him down.

He knocked again, opened the door slightly, but made no attempt to shift his mass across the threshold.

The dark haired man jumped to his feet like a trebuchet releasing its load. "If you don't stop bashing those sausages on this door, I will barbecue you in the incinerator and save the cafeteria the daily food mountain it takes to keep you alive. Get out!"

The door shut again, the sergeant now redder than after a climb to the vending machine. His grovelling had unmanned me. Suddenly, my rudeness seemed premature. "Perhaps I should apologize for my ignorance," I said, "but I'm not sure who you are."

"My name is Lisidia Vins; now do you know?"

I nodded. Everyone in Las Hek PD knew the name, fewer the face. He was Figuel's connection to the SP and rumored to be his brother.

"And now you know who I am, perhaps you wish to consider my offer?"

"I'll do it." Not being buried in the Gargantua was incentive enough. Men like Vins were untouchable, and men like me had everything to fear from them.

"Sure you don't want me to frak you first?" He flashed me a set of radiant teeth.

"I'd rather get to work."

"Very good." He got out of his chair and walked round the desk. "I'll let you break the good news to Rake before you head off to inspect the crime scene."

Chapter 2

Rake didn't take to the assignment with my degree of resignation. Perhaps he was excited by the revelation that he was the least useless person I knew, which I said mainly to piss off Lisbold, or more likely it was the chance of escaping the basement. He slapped me on the arm hard enough to bruise the skin beneath my dry-top, but his apology seemed sincere. I damaged easily.

The two of us joined the troop of policemen and CSIs outside as the police buses arrived. Two metal noses appeared out of the mist so quietly that a man in the road would have been crushed before he noticed them. Wheels dropped from the base and they floated to the ground, the supports sagging beneath their weight.

As people moved around me, I could see flashes of color and the occasional face, but the mist was strong enough to swallow Las Hek in a singular gray. I took out my mist goggles and pinned them to my face, the buses and people reappearing as if pasted onto my retinas. The fog wasn't as bad in Las Hek as in the West, but in the early hours clouds descended upon the entire nation.

A quick check on my tablet showed Kenrey was even more connected than I thought. Not just a bishon of the Felycian church, but the Archbishon. He was also a Guardian, which meant that Clazran would want blood.

Not even Granian would have dared give Guardianship to a Felycian bishon. The Guardians were supposed to be irreligious, unbiased representatives of the people as a whole. At least that's what they were in the Sodalis. The Kaeroshi fakes had always made a mockery of the title, but Clazran had not even bothered with the pretense. Combining all the positions of power amongst the few individuals he could trust not to overthrow him had created leaders of the faiths with no faith, and Guardians that should have been scraped off the bottom of a boot.

Enough people were moving around to fill three buses and several vans – a gaggle of untrained, inexperienced peons that would be enough to ruin any crime scene. Like most institutions, the station held to the fallacy that throwing more people at an operation gave it a better chance of success. The moment we arrived, out of reach of Lisidia Vins and the Commissioner, I would order nearly all of them to stay off the scene unless requested.

As the lead investigators, Rake and I were entitled to the front seats of the first bus, but two women, not long past 20 cycles already sat chatting to each other, entirely oblivious to my opening the door. Standing at the bottom of the steps, my head barely reaching their feet, I felt my ability to talk diminish. I was about to shut the door again when Rake stepped up behind me. "Get out," he said, with a similar ferocity to Vins in the sergeant's office.

The two women exited the vehicle as if it were on fire, two pairs of breasts dancing above my head. It was a slight clamber onto the high step, but no one gaped at me as I took my seat. We were separated from the people in the back by a layer of sound proof glass, so the two ladies saw Rake stick his middle finger up at them, but didn't hear him call them, "fracking dykes."

He grinned at me, so I smiled back despite feeling no amusement at all. Watching his brutish behavior directed at individuals besides me suggested I might be able to use him, if he could be controlled.

"Philip," that sounded weird. "We can benefit from each other's skills here, solving this case together. If we screw up, we might spend the rest of our lives in the basement." Or in the back of Vins' van.

Rake brushed his jet-black hair back with the flick of a hand. "You might, but if you can't solve this, my dad will find another way to get me out."

"If
we
can't solve this," I said, but my eyes were already closing with resignation. That was it then. Rake's daddy was someone important, and they gave me the case to get him out the basement without it looking like special treatment. Rake had no interest in this case. "Who's your father?" I asked, not sure I wanted to know.

Rake's widening grin was so reminiscent of Vins' that when he said, "The Commissioner," I was almost relieved.

"And you think if you frak this up he's just going to keep throwing chances at you?" I laughed. "Well maybe he will for a while, but
Cythuria
knows how long you'll sit in the basement flicking coins through holes in your desk before the next one. Not even a father's patience is endless."

Rake's grin vanished. "What do you want me to do?"

"Do what I tell you to do, and don't fight me around anyone else."

"What if I don't agree with what you're doing?"

"We talk in private. If I disagree with you, I will do the same."

He nodded.

"But the first thing I need is for you to keep everyone useless off the crime scene until we want them."

"Now that I can do." He shook my hand so enthusiastically I thought my arm might come out of its socket.

Kenrey obviously disliked people because I hadn't seen so much as a building for 100 kims. Instead, once the fog lifted, I watched tree after tree rush at us on either side, blurring as they passed. Not swamp either, but actual forests that people could walk through without sinking up to their waist in bog. The trees grew tall, and the canopy was filled by healthy looking leaves untainted by rot. Such forests were not normally found south of the Line of Knives, the desolate mountain range that split The Kaerosh in half. The trees were not as beautiful as the volcanic forests of Gys, constantly aflame as the cinder trees competed for space, or as magnificent as the jungles of the middle islands that supported entire cities within the tree tops, but somehow, despite being in the jurisdiction of Las Hek, Kenrey had escaped the fetid swamps of the southern Kaerosh.