winters had churned that aging pavement like taffy, but fractured and crumbling, there was still enough old blacktop left to drink up every drop of sun and fill the air with the fierce smell of baked tar.
On the front edge of the asphalt, an OldTech horseless cart had been crisping its way to rust for four centuries. The exterior body was completely gone, shredded partly by weather and partly by Tober children prying off souvenirs to stash in dresser drawers and other hidey-holes. Earlier generations must have had it easy; by the time I came along, the only parts left were solid and heavy, almost impossible to break off. Cappie had won himself a quick close-lipped kiss for chiseling off a piece of the underframe and giving it to me on my ninth birthday.
As soon as the cart came into sight Rashid made a beeline for it, his plastic boots making sticky sounds as he crossed the sun-soft blacktop. Leaning over the remains of the engine, he tried to wiggle various components. I could have told him he was wasting his time — anything with a hint of wiggle had been worried off by children long ago.
Steck nudged me and murmured, 'All his life he's been looking for a car that's still in running order. We've found plenty that look good on the outside — preserved by eccentric collectors, that sort of thing — but the engines are always seized up. Even with a heap like this, Rashid has this insatiable optimism that he might find good spare parts.'
'This one doesn't have any parts,' I said. 'It's rusted into a solid whole.'
'I know that,' Steck replied. 'You think I didn't try to pull pieces off that pile of junk when I was—'
She stopped. Rashid had just reached down into the motor, a look of triumph on his face. He bent over farther and farther, straining to get at something until his feet were almost off the ground.
'What is it?' Steck called.
Rashid's voice echoed from the cart's metal belly: 'Something I've never seen in all my years looking under the hood.'
Steck gave me a 'let's humor him' look and we both moved forward. Rashid pulled his head out of the machine long enough to take a short metal cylinder from a pouch on his thigh; when he twisted one end of the cylinder, the other end suddenly shone with light like a lantern. He turned the yellow beam toward the engine and aimed it down into the rusted guts. 'See that?' he asked.
Steck and I looked. The beam of Rashid's lamp was centered on a palm-sized box of black metal, attached to a hunk of rust-slathered steel. Of course I'd noticed the black box before, back when I was young enough to care about getting a piece of the cart. I'd hammered the box with a rock, poked it with knives stolen from our kitchen, even held a candle under it to see what happened. 'It doesn't come off,' I told Rashid. 'It's just a black lump.'
'A black lump that shouldn't be there,' he replied. 'Ask Steck how many engines I've examined since we've been together.'
'And the engines have all had their idiosyncrasies,' Steck told him. 'I admit I haven't studied cars like you have, but you've taught me yourself there were hundreds of different types. Dozens of companies manufacturing dozens of models each, and every year they made changes and improvements… not to mention that individuals sometimes whipped up customizations of their own. Why is it surprising there are engine thingummies you haven't seen yet?'
'Because I'm the Knowledge-Lord.' He leaned into the cart again, trying to give the black box a jiggle.
'It doesn't move,' I told him. There was no shade here on the asphalt, and the sun pressed down hard. The last thing I wanted was to stand around baking while a Spark Lord picked away at something that died four hundred years ago.
'Aha!' Rashid said, his voice muffled. 'An antenna!'
'What?' Without thinking, I glanced up to the antenna on Patriarch Hill. This cart had nothing remotely like that. I supposed there might be different types of antennas, but our schoolteacher had never mentioned the possibility. She had been hard-pressed to tell us much about radio at all: she called it a baffling OldTech technique for sending sounds from one place to another. Almost every town on the peninsula had at least one antenna, usually rusted and toppled by wind; but all such antennas were long and thin and exposed, not hidden in the motor of a cart. 'What are you talking about?' I asked Rashid.
'This box has a wire antenna running tight against the engine block. Camouflaged to match the metal. And there's another wire running to… I'll bet those are photoelectric cells. Solar collectors. This thing may still have juice.' Rashid lifted his head and grinned at Steck. 'Still think it's just a normal engine thingummy?'
Steck put a hand to her mouth and faked a yawn. 'The OldTechs had a saying,' she told me. 'Something about boys and their toys.'
I nodded, amused that Steck had decided to play the age-old part of the long-suffering woman when she was half man herself. Then again, how could
He grinned impishly at me. Men get a kick out of being an aggravation to women; my brother self delighted in teasing anything female, especially by exaggerating the most juvenile tendencies of being male. A long time ago, some bastard invented the phrase 'boyish charm,' and since then the whole gender has believed the way to a woman's heart is behaving like an eight-year-old.
Then again, we women still believed the way to a man's heart was playing hard to get. Why did the gods have to make both sexes so calculatingly stupid?
'Just one more thing to check,' Rashid said. He pushed his shine-light cylinder back into its pouch and drew out a hand-sized plastic box. 'Radio receiver,' he said. With his thumb he rolled a dial on the box; the little machine began to make a raspy noise, like waves washing up on a gravel beach.
'Nothing but static,' Steck said.
'You think it's just static?' Rashid asked. Slowly he moved the radio receiver toward the black box on the engine… and the volume of the sound increased, as if the waves on the beach were churning up, peaking, getting blown into whitecaps.
'See?' Rashid told us, patting the black box fondly. 'This little baby is transmitting something. Using the whole car as an antenna.'
'Why would the OldTechs do that?' I asked.
'They didn't,' Rashid answered. 'If I didn't know better,' he looked at me, 'I'd say someone from a long way away has been planting bugs in Tober Cove.'
His eyes turned thoughtfully toward the sky.
FIFTEEN
Mayor Teggeree had heard nothing about the murder — no one had even told him Bonnakkut was dead. That didn't surprise me; the news was still in the bubbling gossip stage, and people wanted to share it with others quickly. Mayoralty House just wasn't close enough to the rest of town for people to pop in on a moment's notice. Under normal circumstances, it would be the First Warrior who hurried across the hot pavement to pass word to Teggeree. As it was, we were the ones who got to see the mayor's jaw drop when we reported the bad tidings.
For one second Teggeree was caught by shock. Then he opened his mouth and said, 'How tragic.' A mayor's phrase: the position was talking, not the man. In a way, I admired Teggeree for that. 'How tragic,' he repeated. 'But at least we're fortunate in having a Knowledge-Lord to seek out the truth. That is, if it's not an imposition on Your Lordship's time…'
'No, no,' Rashid answered, 'I've already started investigating. That's why I came here — I'm told that anyone with relevant evidence will report it to you.'
'Just so,' Teggeree nodded. 'Let me ask my family if anyone has come by already.' He turned to me. 'Fullin, perhaps you'd show Lord Rashid to the Patriarch's Hall where he can wait in comfort?'
'Sure.' I had to smile; every child in the cove was marched through the Patriarch's Hall at least once a year, and I had never imagined it could be described as comfortable. Our mayor simply wanted to impress the visiting dignitary. Don't ask me why Teggeree hadn't dragged Rashid into the hall as soon as the Knowledge-Lord arrived last night — Rashid must have dodged the mayor's clutches somehow.
Then again, the Patriarch's Hall was dusty, self-important and largely irrelevant. It might be exactly Rashid's cup of tea.
'This old place!' Steck said with disgust. But her gaze traveled sharp-eyed around the room, as if reminding herself of all the things she had missed the chance to despise during her banishment.
The hall was the Patriarch's memorial, and crammed with keepsakes from his era: some mounted in formal displays, others just stacked where there was available space on shelves or the floor. This was my first visit here since I'd graduated school at fourteen, and the room seemed to have shrunk in the intervening years… not to mention the air growing more stifled and close, as dust accumulated on the so-called 'treasures.' It occurred to me that mayors might regard this place more as a junk heap than a shrine — somewhere to stash things they couldn't throw out but didn't want cluttering up the rest of the house.
Take, for example, the collection of glass jars filling up three long shelves — the same sort of jars all Tobers used for fruit preserves, but this batch contained ashes from the execution pit on Beacon Point. They had no labels: no way to tell whether a given jar contained the incinerated remnants of a scientist, a Southern trader, or a Neut. Knowing the Patriarch, some of the jars might just hold clinkers pulled out of his bake stove — the old tyrant had no qualms about inflating his reputation with a few false urns. Then again, if the Patriarch thought his shelves looked too empty, he might simply accuse another Tober of uttering heretical thoughts; preferably someone well off, whose goods could be confiscated for the public coffers.
The public coffers administered by the Patriarch, of course.
Looking around the room, I was struck by how he had spent that money on personal indulgences. Paintings of himself. Fine clothes and trinkets brought from the South. Still-corked wine bottles that probably contained nothing but vinegar.
Supposedly, my violin dated back to those times. Leeta claimed the old tyrant had paid a master violinist to come up-peninsula and settle in the cove, so that the 'palace' would always have music. Such an extravagance was typical of the Patriarch — killing innocent Southern peddlers to 'cleanse' the cove, then immediately importing a Southerner of his own because it suited his pleasure.
Still, I shouldn't complain: I was descended from that hired Southern musician… as was Steck.
Neither she nor I spent much time looking at individual items in the hall; it was more a matter of absorbing the whole ambience, letting our attention wander from the Patriarch's tooled leather saddle to his 'coat of many colors' constructed by the Hearth and Home Guild at his dictatorial command. I blanched at a tapestry showing a couple making their marriage vows on the Patriarch's Hand — unbidden, my mind conjured up the image of that hand suddenly coming to life and grabbing the woman by the throat as the Patriarch hissed, 'Do you love him?
But I put that out of my mind; I had promised Cappie to Commit female and become priestess. To hell with the Patriarch and all his successors.
