Iron Circle Read online

  “That was easy,” Selena said when the men were out of earshot. “I thought those guys’d be trouble.”

  “They are not so worried about who comes in,” replied Marcus. “More so who comes out.”

  The first thing Selena noticed was the silence, which was as uncomfortable as it was imperfect. The room gasped with the sort of hushed somberness that snatched at every little sound, magnifying sniffs and coughs and miniscule shifts of posture. Joints cracked, fabric rasped against skin, chairs scraped the tiled floor like swords on bone.

  Shadows hung thick from stone pillars. Sunlight slanted through a few narrow windows, but most of the light came from corn oil lanterns dangling from the ceiling by iron chains. Greasy flames hissed and spat from crude wicks. Stone tables bisected the room, at the far side of which sat men in chambray shirts noticeably unrumpled by labor. They were the clothes of businessmen, clean and neatly pressed. Larger men stood farther back, their vestments rougher and more noticeably worn.

  Across from the well-dressed men sat peasants of far humbler stock, men and women stunted by toil, their skin cracked and leathery from years in the sun. They hunched at their seats, eyes downcast, and laid their offerings on the table. Juarezian pesos and New Canaan Standard mingled with Republic dollars from beyond the mountains and sprinkles of rarer currencies from distant enclaves and city-states. Some shored up their payments with coins from fallen empires or bits of rare metal—chips of gold or silver, pewter goblets, coils of copper wire. Others offered bushels of corn or bottles of cloudy liquor. One motioned to a live chicken tucked under one arm, his free hand stroking the creature’s twitching haunches.

  The moneylenders studied the proffered wares impassively, counting money into piles or biting coins or holding bits of scavenge up to the light for inspection. When they’d assessed the payment to their satisfaction, they dabbed sleek metal pens into bowls of ink and jotted down itemized lists of the offerings and a total value, checking against amounts owing in a leather-bound ledger. They wrote the final balance twice and slid the papers to the peasants for co-signature. Some scribbled their names in shaking hands, but most drew symbols or made a simple X on the page. The moneylenders tore the sheets in half, handing one back to the peasant and tucking the other into the back of the ledger. One of the burly men would clear the desk while the peasants shuffled away, writs clutched to their chests.

  The whole thing proceeded with an orderly bureaucracy that surprised Selena, tinged as she was with the urbanite’s prejudice toward the backwoods. She found herself comparing the process with the registries and reportages of Jericho, admiring the efficiencies of her homeland and repulsed by that admiration. Any kind thought about New Canaan emerged from her like pus from a boil, squeezed out with a mixture of relief at its expungement and revulsion that something so vile could have come from inside of her in the first place.

  Marcus watched the desks until the center one became free. He approached without invitation and sat across from a thin, bookish man with a bulging forehead and pointy chin. A mustache, its black hairs threaded with bits of grey, sprouted from his upper lip, slickened into two points with styling wax. A flinty, astringent smell rose from his ink-stained hands, unpleasant in its cleanliness. He looked up from his ledger and smiled—a gesture Selena inferred from the deepening wrinkles of his cheeks, for his lips hid beneath the fronds of his mustache.

  “Marcus Ramirez,” he said. “It’s been some time. Three months, if I’m not mistaken.” He flipped deftly through his ledger and ran his finger along a column of names etched on its dry pages, clicking his tongue as he worked. “Yes, three months and two days. There will be penalties for your lateness, Marcus.”

  “Levee as you like, Hector,” Marcus replied. “I will make no complaints, for today I feel generous.”

  Hector’s cheeks twitched. Teeth flashed beneath the curtain of his whiskers. “As you like. Do you wish to put down for all three months, or buy back some principal?”

  “Not some. All.”

  Marcus raised the sack he’d dangled nonchalantly at his side and plopped it on the table. The neck came loose, spilling a thin stream of Standard over its bulging belly.

  Hector’s face grew pale and lineless. He pawed through the bag, making no effort to count it but merely assuring himself that the payload was not some clever bit of trickery. With pursed lips, he gathered up the stray bills, tucked them back in the bag, and pushed it back toward Marcus.

  “I can’t be guarantor for this, Marcus.”

  “What are you guaranteeing? The money is there. All of it. The interest too. You need only bring it to Thorin with my compliments.”

  Hector rapped his fingers on the edge of the table. His mustache twitched from side to side. He shook his head minutely, as if in answer to a question only he could hear. “You should not have done this. It isn’t Thorin’s wish to be paid back all at once.”

  Marcus smiled, though Selena spotted an artifice to its angles, as if it were a painting touched up for show. “If Thorin so dislikes my money, he need not take it at all. I would not hold such a slight against him.”

  “You can ask him yourself.”

  “Are you not his bondsman, Hector? It is for you to speak with his voice in such matters.”

  “Not such as these.”

  Marcus huffed. “Well, if Thorin demands these words from my lips, he shall have them. I will, in this case, need a stay of interest for my travels. Three months should do it.”

  “Juarez is not so far as this.”

  “Perhaps, but I have other business that is, how you say, most pressing.”

  Hector’s voice hardened. “No business of yours is more pressing than Thorin’s. You are in his debt, and will come and go at his pleasure.”

  “Thorin has no right to command my movements. I do not wear his brand.”

  “No, but you wear his debt. It was your intention to shed it outside the bonds of your agreement. By this trespass, he summons you. And you shall obey.”

  The last wisp of a smile vanished from Marcus’s face. “I am not marcado, Hector. You do not have the right to keep me in bondage, debtor or no. So says la paz inquieta.”

  Hector shrugged. “We shall see.”

  He made a small, almost casual gesture with one hand. A trio of burly men emerged from the shadows. The first shouldered a rifle while the second drew a pistol from a leather holster. The third, large and unarmed, merely cracked his knuckles.

  Hector made a brief chopping motion with one hand. “No closer. He is quick.”

  The rifleman’s eyes flicked from Marcus to Selena.

  “Y la chica?”

  Hector glanced at Selena as if he’d just noticed her. His long face looked drawn and weary.

  “Traela.”

  Marcus stiffened. “She owes no debt to Thorin. Leave her out of this.”

  “If you wanted her out of it, you should not have brought her into it.”

  Throughout the exchange, Selena took in the layout of the room, charting lines of escape or attack. Her conclusions weren’t encouraging. She counted nine men on Hector’s side, excluding the two just outside the door, plus half a dozen debtors who she highly doubted would raise a hand in her defense. If anything, they might attack in concert with Hector’s men, in hopes of currying a little favor. Her eyes moved from man to man, judging capabilities, aggression, likely first moves. The man with the pistol seemed cocky. The bore of his gun sneered in Marcus’s direction. The rifleman was more studious, his posture rigid. He kept the rifle pinned between her and Marcus, and a quick pivot of his waist could put either in his sights. The doorway stood thirty feet behind her, a distance that would give either man plenty of time to aim and fire.

  Her pistol pressed imploringly at the small of her back. She might gain a second or two by surprise, but she was no gunslinger, and Hector had more men than she had bullets. Even with Marcus on her side, neither fight nor flight seemed a wise course of
action. She cursed Hector for his bureaucrat’s deceit, Marcus for his fool’s bravado—and herself, too, for leaving Simon alone.

  Marcus seemed to reach a similar conclusion. His hands worked into fists, long clever fingers bulging with limber muscle. When he next spoke, it was through gritted teeth. “You are making me break a promise, Hector. I will not forget this.”

  Hector shook his head sadly. “No. I do not suppose you will.”

  3: Ugly Dreams

  The sun thrust down from its noonday perch like the molten head of a branding iron. The cold would creep back soon enough, dragging its shivering misery in tow, but at the moment, Simon almost missed it. He wiped sweat from his forehead and dried his fingers on the seat of his pants. Dust clung to his clammy palms. He cleaned them as best he could and resumed drawing figures in the dirt with his index finger.

  Patterns encroached on patterns in a palimpsest of scuffs and etchings, scored smooth by the motion of his fingers. His fingertips left only the barest impressions in the fleeting dust. He wished he had some paper—even a pencil would’ve been something. He thought of his art supplies, the fresh canvases and horsehair brushes piled in the annex of The Mayor’s besieged manor, and sighed.

  Traffic on the pueblo’s main road thickened as the sun reached its zenith. Peasants filtered back from the morning’s harvest to seek shelter from the heat of the day. A man with bulbous knuckles and a nose like a malformed root vegetable hauled a cart of corn ears from the fields. Its wheels were oblong and crudely carved from slabs of wood, and their uneven revolutions gave the wagon a lurching, drunken look. Simon felt a spasm of fear as the cart bearer glanced his way, a sharp tang that soured into shame as the peasant carried on, indifferent to the boy’s presence. It was pretty pathetic, being scared of a sick old man who could barely lug his meager pickings to market, but that didn’t stop Simon recoiling from every passing shoulder that brushed against the wagon, or casual glance tossed his way. Fallowfield had left him shaken and jittery and filled his nights with ugly dreams of death and fire and white teeth grinning madly beneath soulless silver eyes.

  A flurry of townsfolk burst from a nearby alley, followed by a procession of large men moving with stiff, purposeful strides. Heading the line was a stoop-necked man with a wide, black mustache. Behind him, mostly obscured by the broad shoulders of his retinue, flickered a familiar pattern of red and black. Simon looked closer and caught a fleeting glimpse of Marcus’s face, followed quickly by Selena’s.

  Simon’s breath clotted in his throat. He watched helplessly as the grim parade marched into the neighboring paddock, where they entered a barn and disappeared.

  Indecision pinned him in place. Should he follow them? Maybe this was simply part of the repayment process. They could be going to a bank, or getting a witness, or something. A final glance at the procession made this doubtful—people don’t get frogmarched like that to a business transaction, surrounded by a bunch of armed overseers. He clutched the wagon’s guardrails and squeezed until his fingernails sunk into the wood.

  4: A Cornered and Dangerous Animal

  The barn was brighter than Selena expected. Thick columns of sunlight pierced the roof, chunks of which had been ripped away by wind and time. A sour tang of manure hung about the straw, though the air was too dry to be truly pungent. It felt stale more than anything, brittle and flavorless as two-day-old bread.

  Hector led Selena and Marcus to the far end of the stables, past rows of skinny horses. Their ribs stood out in pronounced corrugations on their chests. Stable hands brushed them down or filled their troughs with cloudy water, pointedly ignoring the procession as they filtered into the backmost stalls.

  The animals here were healthier, firm muscle under glossy coats. Three of Hector’s attendants began readying the horses while another two approached Selena and Marcus. The first—barrel-chested, a lumpy face distended slightly at the chin and forehead, as if yielding to firm pressure against its cheekbones—pointed a revolver squarely at Marcus’s chest. The second held out a hand, palm up. He was wirier than the others, with overlong arms and bow legs that kinked strangely at the knees. A seemingly random assortment of metal piercings glinted in queer constellations on his face—three copper rings through his ear, a spike-tipped stud in his nose, a band of ersatz gold through his cheek.

  “Alright, kids. What goodies you got for me? Knives? Knuckle dusters? Hand ‘em over.” His fingers twiddled.

  Selena’s eyes skimmed over the room, sifting for escape or leverage. The nearest exit was a small square window set too high up to vault through, the next an open door thirty feet down a straightaway. Sighing, she took out her pistol and presented it to the wiry man, butt first. His eyebrows rose in silent surprise. He took the gun and passed it to his comrade, then reached out once more.

  “That’s all I’ve got,” said Selena.

  “We’ll see,” the man replied. He patted her down, slapping briskly at her shoulders and slowing at her hips, where his index finger explored the perimeter of her waistband. His hand lingered at her crotch, groping for a weapon that was obviously non-existent. She smelled the rankness of his breath, felt his respiration quicken as it buffeted her cheek. She bit her lip and said nothing, teeth settling in familiar grooves worn from past indignities silently endured.

  Eventually, he had his fill and turned to Marcus. He reached out more cautiously this time, as if beckoning to a cornered and dangerous animal.

  “I’m gonna need your toadsticker, Marcus.”

  Marcus’s lower lip curled. The whites of his narrowing eyes disappeared into twin portals of darkness.

  “You joke, surely.”

  “No joke,” said the barrel-chested man with the gun. “Hand it over.”

  Marcus withdrew a slender rectangle of glittering chrome cushioned with pads of black crosshatched leather. His thumb caressed a trigger, and an eight-inch blade sprung from the handle.

  Hector’s men took a step back. The barrel-chested man thrust his pistol out with both hands. Silence clung to every surface, an immense static electricity ready at the slightest nudge to unleash its fatal voltage. Marcus’s dark eyes met the other men’s one by one, his face smoothed out to a blankness more sinister than rage. The barrel-chested man’s finger tightened on the trigger.

  Marcus’s wrist swiveled and the blade snapped shut. He shouldered the wiry man aside and presented the knife to Hector.

  “You will treat this with care,” he said.

  “Of course, ese.”

  With that, the venom seemed to drain from Marcus. He slouched back beside Selena, his shoulders slightly hunched, his gaze downcast. He worried the hem of his serape, massaging the roughspun fabric through his fingers.

  “If you think pride will keep me from Delgado and Evangelista, you are mistaken. The trinity court will hear of this.”

  By the tone of Marcus’s voice, Selena could tell this statement was meant to hold weight. Yet Hector merely shrugged. “You can tell them what you like. But I don’t think you will get much of an answer.”

  5: Rock Bottom

  Occasionally, when duty had brought his parents to inspect the fishing villages along the coast of New Canaan, Simon would be allowed to accompany them. He relished these trips, rare as they were: the hum of the mag-train on its slender track, more felt than heard; the salty tang of the ocean air, a stark contrast to the stink of factory runoff and algae blooms that greased the waters on Jericho’s wharves; the contented sigh of space between their tiny houses and along their cobbled roads, smooth vistas where no angel ear could hide in hopes of catching an unpatriotic admission from a hapless Shepherd.

  He would spend these mornings strolling along the rocky beaches, searching tidal pools for crabs, tossing pebbles into the sea, or spotting spires piercing the water’s surface in the distance, steel tombstones memorializing the drowned cities long since swallowed by the rising sea. On warm days he would even splash about in the water, paddling along the
shoreline with his stolid breaststrokes or leaping over the waves as they crashed, pretending they were enemies he would smite with his falling elbows.

  Once a riptide caught him, and he found himself dragged into open water too deep to touch bottom. He wasn’t in real danger—it was a mild current that lasted only twenty yards, and he was a competent swimmer—but for a moment the frigid waters seemed to congeal in a rime around his heart. His fear at that moment was not of drowning, but of the unseen fathoms that lay beneath him, in which it seemed anything might lurk. The ocean floor—perhaps five feet below the reach of his toes—opened like a set of monstrous jaws, belching forth unspeakable creatures from the hadal depths of his subconscious.

  The memory rose to his mind, perfectly crystallized, as he climbed down from the wagon and followed Selena into the paddock. He felt the same portentous dread at approaching the precipice of an unknown and unknowable realm, as if toeing the crumbling edge of some vast cliff, below which yawned a darkness so deep it was tangible. Fallowfield had been strange, but the people had still been, in a way, his people. Many had come from New Canaan once, and the language they spoke was his own.

  Peasants eyed him with curiosity, exchanging remarks in their alien language. One came up to him and said something in the southwestern tongue. He knew it for a question by the cadence, but beyond that, he had no idea.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t… I’m not from here.”

  He ran off, the peasant still jabbering behind him. Maybe I’m not allowed in here, he thought. Maybe it’s against the law. He pushed on anyway, reasoning that without Selena and Marcus to protect him, he was in as much trouble as he could imagine already.

  Selena and Marcus emerged from the barn, surrounded as before by their overseers. Simon ducked down beneath a pile of straw, feeling faintly ludicrous to the peasants on his side of the paddock, who could see him clearly. The men led his sister to a black carriage with barred windows and a stout oak door. They ushered her and Marcus inside, closed the door, and slid an iron band across the doorway. It clacked home with the sound of a judge’s gavel.