it was all happening too fast. Kella screamed at herself to do something, to do anything. But she was trapped in this injured old body, in the dark, against a whirlwind of fists and steel and half her mind had already realized that she was not going to survive more than a minute or so. A terrifying coldness was creeping into her bones through the knife buried in her left shoulder, and as she toppled to the floor all she could do was snag a few fumbling fingers in the lapels of the white coat and pull the Samaritan down on top of her.
Kella felt the floor slam into her back and the weight of the other woman flopped onto her chest, but suddenly Shifrah was screaming and wriggling, kicking and rolling away, and the detective felt the weight on top of her vanish. The detective lay still on the floor, staring up at the naked bulb in the ceiling as the other woman went on screaming and sobbing. The throbbing pains of the cuts in Kella’s chest and face grew duller and colder, but her skin was warm and wet, her shirt sticking to her arms and growing heavier by the moment. Each breath came a little shallower and faster than the last. Lightheaded and dizzy, she blinked hard and prayed for it to just stop.
All of it. The pain, the screaming, the whole world. Dear God, just let it all stop. I don’t want to see this or feel this. I’m done. Just make it stop.
The other woman’s sobs droned on and all the horrific hot and cold and sharp and aching sensations in the detective’s flesh crashed into her mind again and again, as ceaseless as the tide.
Like a broken wooden doll, Kella rolled onto her stomach, pushed up to all fours, and began crawling across the room to the open doorway. She passed the Samaritan balled up like an infant, her bloody hands clutching her face. For a moment, a gap appeared between her hands and Kella saw the pulpy, raw chasm where the killer’s left eye should have been. And as the detective completed the long journey to the door, the question began to nag at the back of her mind.
What happened to her eye?
The hall seemed to be a thousand miles long. At the end, the stairs rose higher than the peaks of Kilima Njaro, yet she climbed them. Shaking uncontrollably with bloody saliva dripping from her open mouth, she climbed. When she reached the top and looked down, she saw the unbroken smear of blood on every single step. She was about to turn away and claw back toward the workshop to collapse and die when she heard a bestial, labored breathing below her. Looking down again, she saw the Samaritan climbing the stairs with one hand plastered over the hole in her face where her eye should have been.
How long is she going to keep this up?
Kella lurched up to her feet, shivering and trembling. She slumped against the hallway wall and stumbled back into the workshop. Her clothes felt heavy, clinging tight against her skin. With slow deliberate steps, she stumbled across the room, knocking over shelves, dummies, and anything else she could grab. She crashed through the back door into the alleyway where a freezing wind whipped over her face and stung her in a hundred raw places, and she fell to her hands and knees.
Not going to die in an alley, not in an alley, alone in an alley, stupid cliched crap. Move. Move, damn it. You can die in the street, but not here.
At the end of the alleyway, the detective’s shaking hands refused to crawl any farther, so she sat up against the cold brick wall and stared at the open door behind her, praying that no one would come through it.
And then the ground erupted beneath her. There was no tremor, no growling or rumbling, only the sudden titanic boom like a thundercracker in her skull. The cobblestones tossed her into the air as a chunk of the wall collapsed into the alley, bricks disintegrating into gravel and dust all around her. The stones under her hands began to lean and slope and she realized that the street itself was sinking and sliding toward the building. A steady crumbling, cracking, and crashing echoed from within the building as the walls broke up and fell inward, destroying more and more furniture and windows and equipment with each passing second.
Kella took her hands away from her head and saw a low mound of rubble where the medical shop had been a minute ago. Dozens of tiny fires were burning merrily here and there on the pile of bricks and beams, snapping and crackling as they danced in the dark.
The faint sounds of voices and fire bells intruded on the moment and the detective tore her gaze away from the burning wreckage to watch the street, to watch the people coming out, shouting and pointing. Suddenly there was a young boy in his night shirt standing over her, staring at her with wide eyes. He pointed at the knife in her shoulder and whispered, “What happened?”
She looked down at the pointed handle of the stiletto and saw the butt of the weapon dripping with blood and also a thin watery fluid with little globs of white matter stuck in it. As white as an eye in the dark. Kella smiled and passed out.
Chapter 30. Syfax
Syfax leaned back in the saddle to stretch his neck and shoulders. The position offered him a lovely view of the night sky, a blue-black river shimmering with stars and bordered by the leaves above either side of the road. The trees sighed and shivered as the breezes played through their branches and the cicadas droned on, though more softly than they had in the traveler’s camp a few hours ago.
Someday, the railroad will come through here and they’ll pave this road, and all this forest’ll be razed for farms, he thought. Too bad, really. Although I won’t miss the bats.
The view of the road never changed. It sometimes curved to the right or left, but essentially, in all the ways that matter when traveling, the view never changed. Gravel, dirt, holes, rocks, tree branches, and stars. Forever. Syfax slumped forward again and rubbed his eyes. Sometimes to his left the trees would thin and he would glimpse the tops of the northern ridges, just another shade of black on the horizon.
She can’t be far ahead. She can’t. Chaou was only ever a few minutes ahead, an hour at most. And she’s old. Older than me, anyway. In a stage coach. Any minute now. Any minute now, around the next bend, I’ll see the coach, just a hundred yards ahead, rolling along in the dark. Alone. Exposed. She’ll hear me coming but she’ll have nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. She’ll probably try to talk again. She’s a talker. Then she’ll try to grab me, to shock me, but I’ll be ready for that. My coat is heavy. I can wrap her arms up…
The monologue droned on and on through the major’s mind, an unbroken chant that melted seamlessly into the noise of the cicadas and the crunch of gravel beneath the horse’s hooves. The stars overhead wheeled slowly, carrying the bright sliver of the moon across the void and casting it back down at the horizon. And then the world of black and silver grew hazy, gray, and pink to the east.
The view changed. The trees thinned to reveal long stretches of grass. Meadows. Fields. Pastures. Open spaces studded with distant blocky shapes of houses and barns. Another hour of slow trotting passed and Syfax felt his muscles and bones turning to wood, stiff and hard, so stiff they forgot how to ache. The eastern sky was a pastoral wash of pinks and yellows and lavenders, and ahead of him, clustered around the road, mostly to the left, were buildings. Tall, heavy, imposing masses of pale brick standing shoulder to shoulder to block the wind and draw the line between wilderness and civilization. The major veered to the left as the road came alongside the railroad tracks coming up from the south from Maroqez. Dirt gave way to a brick-paved street as the scattering of small cottages became a solid wall of rowhouses. A handful of people were standing in the street and staring at him. After a moment, they stopped staring and resumed their hushed conversation.
Arafez. At last.
Syfax had to clear his throat twice to revive his voice. “Excuse me.” He approached the four men loitering by the tracks. They stared at him as though unsure of the proper response and seemed to agree that none would suffice. “Have you seen anyone else come this way?”
“You mean…” The one man cast a confused look at his friends. “You mean on the train? Not yet.”
“No, I mean on the road. The stage coach from Meknes.”
“Sorry, no. We’ve only been here a few minutes.”
Syfax nodded, nudged his horse to the far side of the street, dismounted, and sat down on a long bench outside what seemed to be a warehouse. It stank of rotten vegetables. He sat and watched the sun rise, his mind cold and thick, unable to focus, unable to plan.
Chaou was definitely…where? Definitely on the ferry. And a witness put me on the road to Khemisset. And she was probably at Othmani’s house. And probably on the coach to Meknes. And probably on the coach to Arafez. Damn. That’s a whole lot of “probably.”
