Iron Circle Page 5

  “I know,” said Simon. He told them about the incident at the pueblo, how his sister and their guide had been taken and his inadvertent robbery. The girl chuckled at this before being silenced by a look from her father. Simon made no mention of where he’d come from nor where he was originally headed, and the pair didn’t ask. He sensed curiosity in the girl, but she restrained herself—or else her father’s presence did it for her. Since beginning his travels, Simon had grown aware of a de facto code of conduct among travelers that softened the abrasion of personalities constantly bouncing off one another. It was the same etiquette that kept him from asking about the old man’s injury, or what the two of them were doing out here in the middle of the badlands.

  When he finished his story, Otis clucked his tongue and tugged contemplatively at his septum with thumb and forefinger. “I’m right sorry to hear about your troubles. It’s a hard thing, losing family.”

  “I haven’t lost her yet,” Simon said, his tone a bit sharper than intended. He studied his knees, spots of warmth blooming on his cheeks.

  “Course not, course not. But you’ve a long way to go, and you ain’t gonna get there with nothing but a few cups of water and the shoes on your feet. We’d best get you kitted out, point you in the right direction.”

  “You’d do that?”

  “I don’t want you on my conscience, boy. And sendin’ you out onto the road without a sack full of provisions’d be good as thumpin’ you dead.” Otis leaned forward and sniffed the carcass on the spit. Evidently satisfied, he hoisted the shaft from its supporting posts and scraped it onto a tarnished brass pan with a hunting knife. He used his crippled hand for the operation. It handled the blade deftly despite its truncated digits, moving with the adaptive agility of the abnormals displayed in the curio caravans that crisscrossed New Canaan, their glassed-in enclosures stuffed full of armless boys and girls with fingers fused into lobster-like claws. Such unfortunates were common in the east—bred, his parents told him, from the bad air lingering from the Last War—but the government kept them largely out of sight, shunting them to rural workhouses or stowing them in basement hospices to live out their dwindling lives. Except Otis’s deformity didn’t look like a birth defect. His finger stumps were too abrupt, the borders of his mutilated cheek too well-defined. Simon tore his eyes away as Otis divvied up the meat into three portions, which he served on slates of smooth grey stone. He noticed with a pang that his meal was the biggest: Grace’s was a bit smaller, Otis’s mere scraps. He urged himself to refuse, to offer back most of the largess, but hunger slapped aside his pride. The first bite exploded with flavor. Simon scarfed it all, not wondering until he was finished what exactly he was eating.

  “Thanks,” Simon said, wiping his mouth. The words felt pathetically inadequate. “For everything. I really appreciate it.”

  “Don’t mention it. You should probably rest up now. We’ll get things sorted tomorrow.”

  Though bereft of rooms in the traditional sense, the cavern had been parceled into sections by the accumulation and positioning of furniture, most of which appeared to have been built from scavenge. Emily led Simon to an alcove deeper into the cave, where a strip of translucent polyurethane yellowed with age hung from the ceiling, offering a vestige of privacy. A loose assortment of fabrics collected in piles on the floor, resembling nests more than beds in their hodgepodge of textures. Emily took some blankets from one of the piles and laid them neatly on the ground one atop the other until they formed a makeshift mattress. Simon lay on it and squirmed himself into a comfortable position. Its limitations were evident—the layered fabric couldn’t entirely mask the pits and nodes brambling the cave floor—but exhaustion plumped them into something resembling heaven. He folded the covers over himself and plunked into sleep like a stone tossed down a well.

  Part II: Los Marcados

  10: Insulted Flesh

  Consciousness returned to Selena in fragments, discrete packets of time that stopped and started with the labored arrhythmia of a dying heart. Scenes played out before her in perfect fidelity, interspersed with fugues of immeasurable length.

  She was outside, a dry wind scraping across her cheeks. The hooted exchange of a marketplace rattled the adobe walls of a cobbled courtyard. A crone with a triangle of flesh missing from one nostril poked a bony finger in her mouth and pried her teeth open. Rough fingers held her jaw in place to prevent her biting down. The crone shook her head at an attendant and hobbled off.

  She was in a long corridor lit by torchlight, their orange flames spinning webs of light and shadow. Hands gripped her in a dozen places, handling her as one might a piece of furniture. She raised her left fist to strike her nearest porter but found it shackled.

  She was on a gurney wheeling over rough stones. Iron rings pegged her arms and legs down in half a dozen places. Someone threw a switch, and fluorescent light jabbed blindingly into her eyes. She squinted against it until a man’s head eclipsed the bulb. A cotton mask obscured his face from the nose down. He held a strange device in one hand. It looked like some sort of weapon, perhaps a compact blowgun built to launch poison darts from a short distance. He fiddled with knobs and fastenings along its slender barrel.

  The intermittent drip of her thoughts coalesced into a tiny stream, a rivulet of light and heat and pain trickling down the center of a vast black void. The stream widened into a river, washing away the darkness bit by bit until she emerged from its current, dripping but alive.

  She was in a cell carved from naked earth, its rough-hewn walls powdered with dirt. A chain bound her left leg to a post driven deep into the floor. A patch of rug-burn misery sizzled across the left half of her face, stretching from her cheekbone to her eyebrow. Her mouth felt as if it had been scrubbed with steel wool. She coaxed some spit up her throat, sloshed it around her mouth, and spat. A wad of gooey redness splattered the floor.

  A glance around her revealed four walls, an iron door, and little else, unless she counted the chain and her clothes. Light poured through two barred windows set high in the back wall. Folding the fingers of her right hand into a composite digit, she probed her body in a dozen places, checking for injuries to bones or deep tissue. She found nothing beyond the standard nicks and bruises—apart from the vast stinging welt on her left cheek, which she knew better than to mess with.

  A hollow click sounded in the door’s steel belly. It swung outward, admitting a tall, slender man dressed in a suit of thin cotton dyed a charcoal grey. A yellow cravat cinched his collar to his neck. He had the prim bearing of a banker or government envoy, though he moved through the cell with an easy confidence Selena wouldn’t expect of a bureaucrat. Propping the door open with one foot, he grabbed a stool and set it down several feet in front of Selena. She eyed the man as he sat down, glanced at the chain around her ankle, and judged she could just about reach him if she sprung. She filed this information away for future reference and met the man’s gaze blankly.

  The man reached into a pocket and removed a glass vial. He flicked open the stopper and rattled two tiny white pills into his cupped palm. He held these out to Selena with one hand while the other refitted the cap, slipped the vial away, and withdrew a small flask from the breast of his jacket.

  “These will help with any pain,” he said, shaking his hand invitingly.

  Selena’s eyes flicked to the pills and back to the man’s face. A fine growth of close-cropped hair darkened his jaw. He tossed the pills into his mouth, downed them with a swig from the flask, and wiped his lips on his sleeve. This demonstration complete, he offered Selena another two pills. She reacted just as she had the first time. The man shrugged.

  “Suit yourself.” He pocketed the pills. “So long as you don’t get an infection. You don’t get a say about those pills, I’m afraid. Not to worry there, though, Alphonso’s quite good. I imagine everything’s been cleaned.” He leaned forward, hands pressed together in ersatz prayer, elbows propped on narrow thighs. “So. I’m told you p
ut quite a hurting on Thorin’s thugs. Took over six of them to subdue you. I don’t usually make acquisitions on hearsay, but I’ve got eyes in his circle, and I trust what they see. You’re a fighter?”

  Selena said nothing. Her face might as well have been carved from the dirt wall behind her. The man’s mouth lifted in the same tiny smile.

  “You’re a fighter alright. Everything’s always gotta play hard. I dunno how you stand it. Me, I much prefer the go-along-to-get-along approach. Might be worth trying. Just a thought.”

  Her stone visage stared back, silent and unchanging.

  The man gave a fatalistic shrug. He reached in another pocket and withdrew a drawstring pouch containing a crumbled mixture of tobacco. He sprinkled a few pinches into a curl of paper and worked it into a cigarette.

  “You’re new here, so let me give you a bit of a rundown. Name’s Eric Todd. I’m from away as well. Came here from New Dixie. You know it? Dominion of West Georgia, far side of the Delta Sea.”

  He struck a match and touched the flame to the tip of his cigarette, which balanced on his lower lip. The flame wicked into the paper as he drew breath. He shook it out and tossed the spent matchstick onto the floor. Twin spirals of smoke curlicued from his nostrils.

  “Guess not. Anyway, the New Confederacy don’t cotton to slaves anymore—pretty funny, you know the history. But never mind. Different story here. The marcado trade’s big business and you’ve gone and gotten yourself caught up in it. Never mind the whys and wherefores. They don’t make much difference, and you don’t seem too keen to tell ‘em anyhow. Point is, you’re now property. Sorry to put it so bluntly, but it’s a thought you best get used to, and for some folks it takes a while to sink in.

  “Now obviously, this changes some things in your day-to-day, but don’t go letting your imagination run away with you to any dark places. Some owners mistreat their property, but I’m not one of ‘em. Never saw much point in it. Why collect fine china if you’re just gonna smash it to bits? Same is true for people.

  “You see, I’m not a pimp or a plantation man. Not at heart, at least. I’m a collector. I see things of a type, and I buy ‘em. That’s not such a bad attitude, as far as owners go. You probably don’t feel that way right now, but give it time. You’ll meet the other girls soon enough. They’ll set you straight.”

  He placed his hands on his thighs and boosted himself upright, tugged a few wrinkles from his shirt cuffs, and flicked a mote of dust from his sleeve. He reached into yet another pocket and pulled out two objects, the first of which he tossed at Selena’s feet. A single key clattered against its iron keyring.

  “For the chain. The door’ll be unlocked. Come out whenever you’re ready. I expect you’ll want to run, so I might as well tell you now that it won’t work. You’ll be picked up as soon as you reach the nearest town. My sigil’s well known, you see.”

  He hefted the second object he’d taken from his pocket, a small disc of polished metal, and flicked it like a large coin. It landed in a puff of dust next to the keys. He tipped an imaginary hat and left, closing the door softly behind him.

  Selena scooted forward, the links of her chain jangling, and grabbed the metal disc. It was surprisingly light, made not of steel but of some chintzy metal alloy too insubstantial to serve as a weapon. Its edges were rounded, negating any use as a cutting tool. She held the object to the light dribbling through the nearest window and caught sight of her reflection, which answered in a stroke two of her many questions:

  What the man had meant by sigil, and why her face stung.

  Bright blue slashes marked her cheek and forehead. She took them at first glance to be wounds succumbing to some unknown infection, but a closer look found the skin, though raw and slightly inflamed, was unbroken. They weren’t wounds at all, but tattoos of two sleek blue arches tapered to points on both ends, curving downward in parallel on either side of her left eye—the upper arc above the eyebrow, the lower tracing the cheekbone. She ran her fingers along their paths and studied her hand, as if expecting the blue ink to have leeched into her fingertips. They brought back nothing, no blood, no blue dye.

  She observed her face a while longer, absorbing the depth of the affront foisted upon her. It wasn’t the marks themselves that bothered her. She had marks aplenty already, the knot of insulted flesh that was once her right ear not the least of them. But those were scars, and scars were earned. A tattoo was different. A tattoo was vandalism. She hurled the circlet of reflective metal at the wall. The thin plink it made as it struck its target was deeply unsatisfying. She wanted to break something, but everything in the room seemed unbreakable by design. Even the stool, which Eric Todd had neglected to take with him, was of stout construction, a squatting thick-limbed thing carved from a single chunk of hardwood. She kicked it anyway, sending it skittering against the wall with a din more viscerally appealing than the metal disc, but just as fruitless.

  Her rage momentarily blunted, she slipped the key into the chain around her ankle and was surprised when it turned easily. There seemed no further use to the key so she threw this too, though she could summon no real malice behind the gesture and the key clanked down before it reached the wall. Her aggression, unspent, soured into lethargy. She slouched from the room, hoping to find someone to hit.

  An opportunity presented itself just outside the door, though Selena had no cause to pursue it. A young woman leaned against the wall opposite her chamber, thick arms crossed over a wide chest. She wore a leather jerkin and pants sewn from strips of weathered hide, both garments the washed-out brownish no-color of the cavernous hallway. A chain of baubles—tiny dolls knit from spun hair and bits of salvaged plastic—hung around her neck in a spasm of color, as if to make up from the plainness of her dress. Her hair had been knitted into sleek tubes threaded with bits of colorful string. The tendrils flowed toward a single nexus at the back of her head, where a strip of rawhide choked them into a common stream. Twin lines like blue claw marks marred her cheek and forehead. They were identical in shape to those on Selena’s face but a lighter, greener shade of blue, perhaps to better contrast with her mahogany skin.

  “So, you met Mr. Todd, huh?” she said, by way of introduction. “He’s a bastard. But less of a bastard than all the others. My name’s Mary Catherine. The girls call me Mary.”

  She extended her hand and Selena shook it. Her palm was dry and rough with calluses, her grip firm. They pumped hands up and down for a moment, an awkward pause stretching between them.

  “You got a name?” Mary prompted. Selena felt a twinge of guilt at her impoliteness.

  “Selena.”

  “Silent Selena, huh? Well, that’s okay. They call me Mouthy Mary sometimes, so the contrast works nicely. Who picked you up? Harriers? You from one of the factions, or were you just on a trader’s caravan with shit luck?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Well, it just got a whole lot simpler for you, so there’s that. C’mon, let me show you around.” Mary walked off, assuming Selena would follow. After a moment’s hesitation, and for want of other options, she did.

  Mary issued a steady stream of commentary as they walked, offering a desultory description of life in Juarez. “Todd’s got two kinds of girls: bruisers and beauties. You’re a bruiser if I ever saw one. No offense.”

  “I’d be more offended if you called me a beauty.”

  Mary laughed. “Fair enough. I’m a bruiser too, in case you couldn’t guess. It’s the better gig of the two, in my humble opinion—but I’m guessing the beauties feel the same about theirs, so it all works out in the end. You speak Mejise?”

  “No.”

  Mary tisked through closed teeth. “Pity. But you’ll get by. A few of the girls speak Llanures okay, and I can always translate for the others until you pick it up.”

  “Llanures?”

  “You know, plains talk. What we’re speaking now.”

  Selena pursed her lips. She’d never heard the
term plains talk before, but when she moved to correct Mary, she realized that she had no satisfactory word for her own language. There’d been no need for one in New Canaan, where inflection varied between Salter and Seraphim, but the same tongue was shared by all. She felt at once repulsed by and drawn to this strange lacuna, poked it the way a tongue probes the gap left by a missing tooth.

  They ascended a staircase and emerged into a small courtyard. A broken fountain with a dry, cracked basin leaned atop a stumpy pedestal. The fountain’s original subject, a granite angel whose lips puckered to spout a playful jet of water, had been knocked down and cast aside. It lay in several fragments beneath the fountain’s bulbous underside.

  In the angel’s place stood a robed figure cobbled together from bits of wood and ceramic, its head a grinning human skull. It clutched a scythe in one twine and wire hand, while the other held a dried gourd painted in blotches of brown and blue. A host of candles slouched half-melted at its feet, while offerings filled the basin below: coins, beads, baubles, flower heads pressed into delicate crowns, poppets made from twigs intricately wound together, bundles of dried herbs bound with string.

  As Selena and Mary walked past, an old woman hobbled to the altar. She knelt and uttered a prayer, her eyes shut tight with devotion. A palsied hand drew a copper coin from a pouch and set it reverently atop the pile. The woman stood and wiped a tear from her wrinkle cheek before carrying on her way.

  Mary led Selena through an onion-domed archway onto a cobbled thoroughfare. Wooden boardwalks lined it on both sides, their planks warbling beneath the steady footfalls of pedestrians. Relics of bone and metal hung over nearly every doorway, adding splashes of texture to the otherwise flat adobe. Men in ragged clothes stood before thin-legged tables, hawking skulls or bits of crude taxidermy. A dozen rattlesnakes fanned across one display like a selection of fine leather belts. The proprietor cast a showman’s inviting hand over the wares and winked at Selena knowingly.