benches. Eventually found what she was looking for and spent the next half hour finding a comfortable place to curl up and go to sleep. The place she found was not very comfortable, but she was too tired to care.
Kella awoke slowly to the muffled sounds of footsteps and voices and heavy things being loaded into the carriage. A fire purred somewhere nearby, and boiling water bubbled and steam hissed. The entire carriage trembled slightly. She wanted to roll onto her side, but the narrow space she had crawled into behind the carriage’s rear seat cushion would not allow any movement at all. It had taken quite a bit of crawling around in the dark to find a place to hide, only to discover that there wasn’t any such place. Every board and bolt on the steam carriage had been carefully crafted to maximize the interior space for greater passenger comfort, leaving no clever little compartments for baggage, food, or unwanted stowaways. With no other option, Kella had identified the thickest seat cushion against the back wall, gently tore it free, and carved out a small hollow space for herself by removing quite a bit of the cushion’s stuffing. After disposing of the feathers under the horses’ feed, she had slipped down into her burrow and tacked the cushion back into place over her from the inside, hoping that she had left no trace of her handiwork in the cabin.
A dull yellow glow near her head indicated that some faint hint of the morning sun was touching the cushion through the carriage window, and the occasional thumping and rocking of the entire vehicle told her when a bit of luggage was placed on the roof and when a passenger entered the cabin. Eventually everything and everyone was stowed, including two adults pressing their backs against the thin cushion covering the detective’s body.
“…thank you again for letting me join you.” An older man was speaking, one with a distinct accent. The old man from the hotel? “…certainly have a lot of children here with you…”
“…to be trained in the palace as…”
Then the steam carriage jolted into motion, crossed the cobbled streets, and then stopped abruptly. Kella held her breath. The Royal Road checkpoint. The guards.
A long pause followed and Kella listened to the passengers answering the guard’s questions. Then there was more thumping as the guard inspected the carriage, and luggage, and the passengers. Eventually the search ended and the coach rumbled to life again, beginning the long journey up the Royal Road to the Upper City of Orossa.
Damn it! Where are those marshals? What are they doing out there?
The detective lay crushed into the rear wall of the coach without air or light, only the hard rattling of the wooden wall behind her skull. Within minutes, her entire body was aching and throbbing. The clattering, wooden cacophony of the wheels and the axles and the engine’s pistons made listening and thinking equally impossible, so she gave up doing either. But inside the cabin, the slow drive up the mountain road passed in near silence, broken only by a dull murmur that rippled through the passengers as they remarked on the Mother’s Shrine in passing.
A conversation began suddenly between two speakers sitting quite close to Kella’s head. They spoke in Mazigh, but in an older dialect that Kella struggled to understand.
“My lady?”
“Not now, Barika.”
“You must understand, I was following your instructions to the letter. She brought the wrong animal. I did everything I could think of to give you time,” Chaou said. “And I was very careful in covering my tracks. I flew to Chellah, took the ferry halfway to Khemisset, and changed coaches several times.”
“And yet the marshals followed you the entire way,” Sade muttered. “Fariza told me that a Redcoat showed up at her front door moments after you slipped out the back. Your incompetence is shocking. Did you really think I would be unable to replace one animal with another? Luckily, I had the new cat ready before your marshal arrived and arrested Medina. Idiot. We may still need her, but there wasn’t time to arrange her release last night. And what do I have now? Riots. Riots in my own city. And why do I have riots in my own city, Barika?”
“Well, there are always riots, my lady.”
“No, Barika. I have riots right now because you led the marshals to the beloved Doctor Medina, who is now behind bars, which has sent the working classes into a frothy-mouthed frenzy. And apparently that marshal also found time to lead a small army of beggars to a temple where they demanded asylum with armfuls of starving children, a temple where a very nasty little newspaper reporter happened to be. Thank God that Shifrah managed to get Hamuy out of jail before anyone in the press discovered he was there. With any luck, he crawled off into a ditch to die quietly.”
“My lady, I’m so sorry.”
“Shut up, Barika.”
For the last half hour before they arrived at the gates of the Upper City, all the detective could think about was her growing need to urinate. But as the carriage rattled to a stop, she forgot her need and instead focused on the sounds of Lady Sade and her companions stepping out and collecting their things. The carriage shook as servants retrieved the cases on the roof. One of the children laughed and was promptly slapped.
Suddenly the noises were very faint, and then they were gone all together. Kella lay in the hot darkness, reveling in the stillness of her uncomfortable hiding place. She counted to one hundred, and then pulled out her tacks and pushed the cushion away so she could drink in the cool mountain air. After replacing the cushion, she climbed out into the carriage house, one large enough to shelter dozens of steam carriages, coaches, and horses, and at that moment, the horses were the only ones to see her limping across the space to the door, squinting at the bright courtyard, and slipping out into the city.
The Upper City was no more a city than the humble village that sprawled below it in the valley. What stretched across the mountain ridge was a shining palace, once the military fortress of her ancestors and now the airy paradise that housed generation after generation of Numidian princes and Mazigh warrior queens. Here within the city walls, Kella could see elegant Hellan temples, soaring Persian towers, and angelic Espani statues all gathered together by Ifrican royalty into a single, harmonious artwork of stone, glass, and bronze. For a moment, the detective allowed herself to simply stare at it all.
Then she hurried away from the carriage house across the courtyard and up a quiet street of massive buildings that transformed the roads into shaded canyons where only a few supervised children seemed to be roaming. The unfamiliar city was at once utterly baffling and yet strangely sensible, as though the chaos of temples, towers, domes, and gardens had been scattered around the palace to subtly guide all travelers upward and inward to the private house of the queen.
Kella let the roads lead her away from the gates and into the stone canyons and forests of Orossa, past titanic columns and monstrous bronze women and men on marble pedestals, through quiet shady lanes past the occasional tutor and her charges, past the occasional soldiers who nodded politely to her as she limped by on her cane.
The queen’s home nestled in a park dotted with enormous acacias, each one meticulously trimmed and trained to stand almost like a dancer with arms raised, waiting for the music to begin. Beyond the trees and the shrubs and the colorful splashes of flowers rose a pale dome flanked by two towers, all veined in flowering vines and spotted with the watercolor glints of stained glass windows. And beside every door and below every window stood a member of the Royal Guard in bright white coats and veils, rifles clasped across their chests, silent and still. Only the dark tufts and braids of their hair shivered in the mid-morning breeze.
“Well, there’s only a few hundred of them.” Kella sighed into her scarf. “Now I just need to get past them, find Lady Sade, and convince the guards to arrest her. How hard can that be?”
Her inspection of the mansion grounds slowly spiraled away from the house across the lawns and gardens, and came to a sudden halt as she recognized a circular grate set into the ground in the center of a shady path just a few yards away. She went to stand on the grate and heard the familiar echo of rushing water beneath her feet.
Well, it’s better than nothing.
Chapter 40. Syfax
“How many times do I need to explain this to you people?” The major stepped closer to the guard in white barring the entrance to the Royal Road. The guard wore an infinitely calm, sleepy-eyed look that Syfax recognized as the fatalistic resignation of an experienced killer. “The governor of Arafez, Lady Sade, and Ambassador Barika Chaou are going to murder the queen. Now get your asses moving, there isn’t much time!”
