Breath of Earth Page 15

  Cy stared at the Durendal, the expression on his face making him look like he’d tripped over a full chamber pot. She looked back and forth between him and the tank for a moment before she spoke.

  “Was it your time in the A-and-A that made you a pacifist?” she whispered, making the question as casual as could be.

  His leather coat rustled as he moved. “Yes.”

  “Where’d you serve?”

  “Everywhere.” His eyes stared somewhere beyond the Durendal. His voice lowered. “Lee shouldn’t even have weapons like that, not here. Chinatown must be stockpiling, fortifying. The war’s set to come stateside all too soon.”

  “Weapons like what? I didn’t see anything.”

  “It was all in his warning. Be ready.”

  He stopped talking as Lee ambled toward them along the sidewalk, bold as a strolling tomcat. A strange leather bag swung from his shoulder. He stopped about ten feet from the tank.

  “Hey—” one of the soldiers started to say.

  Lee screeched out something in Chinese—not the words he’d warned them about—as he reached into his bag and threw something at the soldiers. Red exploded across the street. It took Ingrid a half second to recognize he was pelting them with tomatoes.

  “Damn chankoro!”

  The soldiers scrambled. The two men bounded from the porch. More tomatoes flew their way. Lee sprinted, tomatoes in hand. The soldiers yelled. Two set off after him, one with a gun brandished. The top of the Durendal popped open and a soldier emerged, in near hysterics.

  “You said you wanted to lose your cherry tonight,” the soldier said, gasping through belly laughs. He pointed down at one of the men. “Instead, you got a tomato!”

  Ingrid couldn’t see the two soldiers on the other side, but quite loudly heard their eloquent profanity. Beside her, Cy cringed.

  “I work in a building full of men,” she said. “I’ve heard worse.” That didn’t mollify him.

  As the exchange continued, she looked both ways up the street, trying to see anyone else. She wiggled, her hip brushing Cy as she almost lost her balance again. He rested a hand on her knee to steady her.

  “You’re flushed. Do you have a fever?” He reached toward her and then froze, fingertips inches from her forehead.

  “Probably,” she said, and leaned into him.

  His fingertips were soft and callused all at once. Strong. Cy had hands designed to grip something and hold on. She recollected a novel she once purchased that turned out not to be quite so appropriate for young ladies; it described in alluring detail how a man’s broad hands could hold on to a woman by her curves and press their bodies together. She had an abundance of hip that could be quite useful in that regard.

  She still had that book tucked beneath a floorboard in her room. Maybe. Sutcliff might read it at bedtime now.

  “Yes, you are feverish.” His hand left her skin, gently brushing a kinky strand of hair from her eyes. “I work with kermanite plenty, Miss Ingrid. I know how geomancers work. I’m especially curious about how you work.”

  She swallowed down dryness in her throat. “So am I. I fear that I’m figuring this out as I go along. I—”

  Cy’s full attention shifted to the street. “There.”

  Lee ran from the opposite direction, obscured behind the Durendal, and crossed the street. The man in the turret looked his way.

  “Fan kwei!”

  Ingrid threw herself down, squeezing her eyes shut. Cy flung himself over her, his chest heavy across her shoulders. Even so, through the veil of her eyelids a brilliant white flash of light illuminated the world. The soldiers’ taunts turned to screams and moans.

  “My eyes!”

  “Goddamn chink!”

  “Time to go,” Cy said, pushing himself off her. “Head to the alley behind your house and wait there for me.”

  “Cy!” she gasped, but before she could stop him, he had dashed around the bushes. Dear God, there was still a soldier in the Durendal! What if he hadn’t been blinded by that flash grenade?

  Flash grenades—a weapon used in China. Ingrid shivered as Cy’s comments suddenly made sense. Chinatown was so close. She was so close to the Chinese, to Lee and Jiao.

  So close, and so oblivious.

  Despite his order, she crawled on all fours to stare through the thick branches in horrid fascination. Cy’s long, lean body hopped to the running board, then to the railing, and up the turret. She waited for the soldiers to yell, climb the turret again, do something. She could see only one soldier from here, and he was curled up in a fetal position on the sidewalk, blubbering.

  Cy slipped inside the turret. Ingrid stopped breathing, even as her heart roared like a kermanite engine at full throttle.

  Silence. Nothing beyond the sobs of the soldiers. Not so much as a yell or thud from within the insulated metal hulk. What if he was attacked, what if he needed her help?

  “Damn it, Cy!” Ingrid hiked up her skirts to knee level and skedaddled. She wound through the cover in the neighbors’ yards and down to the next street, where she cut over to the alley. No sign of the soldiers Lee had led away. No sign of anyone at all. Even the birds had been rendered mute, as if in suspense.

  The narrow band of the alley looked the same as always. Wooden fences lined the way while trees cast patchwork shade. If not for her heavy breaths and anxious heart, she could almost pretend everything was normal. She reached the fence at the backyard and crouched down into a ball, as if she could make herself small as a gnome. Her skirt restrained her at the knees and bowed her backward. She hit the dirt with a small grunt and pushed herself up to a crouch again.

  God, please let Lee get away from the soldiers, please let Cy escape the Durendal. Ingrid pressed her face to her knees and was surprised at how the cloth was suddenly moist.

  She had all this power—what could she really do?

  Heavy feet pounded on the hard dirt. As low as she was, she couldn’t see beyond the rubbish bins, and then a dense body leaped down beside her.

  Energy accumulated against her skin and flickered outward just as she recognized Cy. Alarmed, she physically recoiled as she willed her body to stop. The heat dissipated. She sagged in relief.

  “Don’t do that!” she gasped. “I almost made you . . .” Fly like a sack of meat, but she didn’t. Focus seemed to be the key, even when her power was triggered by an instantaneous reaction. “Were you seen?”

  “Those boys won’t be seeing anything for a good twenty minutes. I just so happened to truss them up and drop them all in the Durendal.” He was sweat-soaked and panting from the effort. “Here’s hoping Lee led the other two on a merry chase, and that any neighbors peering through the curtains are just as blind.”

  “Is the Durendal disabled?”

  “Yes, miss.”

  “Is it really that easy to do?”

  “Certainly is.”

  “Then other than the difficulties of getting inside one, why aren’t more tanks being sabotaged?”

  “Only the designer of the Durendal knows the flaw. Created the flaw.”

  “Oh.” She looked at him, eyes widening. “Oh.”

  Who was this man? The Durendal was made by the Augustinian Company out of Atlanta. If Cy created it over a dozen years ago, he must have been little more than a kid at the time. Lee’s age. Some pieces started to come together in her mind, jagged as they were.

  He’d served in the military. He was a pacifist. He’d likely deserted. If he was caught by those soldiers, it could very well mean a firing squad.

  “If you built a flaw into Durendals, then . . .” Her voice trailed away. Cy made it clear he didn’t want Lee to know how it was done, but the very existence of the weakness meant that Cy planned to exploit it someday, or for someone else to. Interesting.

  She jerked her head toward the fence and her house. “This will provide the best access to Mr. Sakaguchi’s office. Will there be any surprises in the backyard?”

  He peered over the fence. “No, not w
here birds or weather could set them off. Here, I’ll help you over the top.”

  Mama used to say that whoever decided women should wear skirts should be forced to do constant jigs for the devil in hell, and this was one of those moments when Ingrid agreed.

  The coarse wood of the fence grabbed hold of her skirt. Instead of heaving over the top and landing with finesse worthy of those boo how doy in Chinatown, she ended up upside down, the goddamned skirt tangled and half upended for all of three seconds before gravity did its job and brought her down with a mortifying rip of cloth. It took everything she had to not screech at the hard impact on her hands, her forearms, and then her knees. Blue mist flared again.

  “Are you all right?” hissed Cy.

  She choked down some blasphemy that would have made the southern man turn vermilion, and managed to crawl a few feet to hide behind a bush and assess her injured skirt and dignity. The cheap cotton had shredded from the knee on down to a ninety-degree angle at her other leg. The apron didn’t fall quite far enough to cover it. The rip exposed her lacy bloomers up to the thigh.

  Cy had seen that, and a whole lot more. Good Lord, of all people. Now she was feverishly red for a different reason.

  Cy landed with lean grace that befitted the fantastic coyote. “I’m so sorry. Your skirt—”

  “I’ll make do.” She grabbed the two ripped ends and tied them together in a knot. It bulged out and showed her knickers. “Pretend you don’t see that.”

  He utterly failed to choke back a laugh. She glared him into muteness.

  In naughty books, if a lady’s bloomers were exposed, there tended to be kisses and other pleasantness involved, not to mention some semblance of privacy. Now she and Cy risked getting shot, captured, or worse. In the best-case scenario, she’d have to walk blocks through San Francisco looking like this. Dandy.

  “I reckon they set alarm devices at all major entrances to the house and inside the house, too.”

  “Like . . . a trip wire? The sort they use over in China and the Philippines?”

  “Worse. In a set environment like a house, they have automata that use a beam of light instead of a wire. If something interferes with the light, it triggers the blast.” His brow furrowed, causing his pince-nez to rise on his nose crinkles. “The question is, what did they use here, and where? Could even be something akin to a flash grenade. They’d want to question, not kill, any interlopers.”

  “Ah, yes, because being maimed is so much more pleasant.” Ingrid frowned toward the house she had loved all of her life. It looked different since the shooting. Ominous. Even the fairy motes had fully retreated from the garden; the distinct prickling sensation of their magic was gone. She leaned on a small statue of a kirin. The fabled creature was a chimerical mix of dragon, goat, and unicorn, and the fantastic’s arrival was supposed to portend the coming of a wise ruler. As a statue, it was intended to bring good luck. She couldn’t help but give the ceramic snout a quick rub; they could use any luck they could get.

  “Where do we need to go within the house?” asked Cy.

  “Mr. Sakaguchi said to go to the namazu wall. He has namazu-e prints in his study, over bookshelves. See those double doors?” The soldiers had nailed boards over the broken glass. Under other circumstances, that might be regarded as considerate.

  He pursed his lips. The faint trace of a mustache colored his upper lip, the tint a deeper red than his wavy brown hair. “Almost too easy, having such direct access there.”

  “Easy?” she snapped. “After what you did, and then Lee . . .”

  “Easy for them to rig something, miss,” he amended, gently. “Let’s go closer.”

  They snaked their way through the paradise of Mr. Sakaguchi’s backyard. The gravel of the Zen garden crunched underfoot. The soft, almost rubbery leaves of the vivid Japanese maples stroked her arms and attempted to snare her skirt.

  As they rounded the catfish pond, she couldn’t help but glance within the rock-lined basin.

  “Dear God,” she whispered.

  Dead catfish blanketed the top of the water, their white bellies exposed to cloud-strained sunlight. Wide mouths gaped open in the rictus of death. Some fish still lived, barely. Their sleek black bodies twitched and writhed as though starved for air. A day without food couldn’t have done this.

  “Poison?” Cy asked.

  “No.” The straightforward, scientific explanation was that they died because of the dearth of geomancers in the region, but she couldn’t help but think of Mr. Sakaguchi’s stories. Of a geomancy-bound Hidden One’s agitation causing totem creatures to go crazed or die because of the looming energy of a major earthquake. Were the double-headed snakes within the San Andreas fault about to writhe and resettle their coils? Was that because of the lack of geomancers?

  Cy waited at the door for her, frowning in concern. Ingrid shook her head. “Later,” she whispered.

  It was impossible to see inside the house with the door partially boarded over and the intact glass covered by shutters.

  “Do you have any electronics on you? Are there any within the room, within about ten feet?” Cy asked.

  “Me? No. Inside there’s a Marconi, a Graphophone, a couple of other little things. Why?”

  “I’m about to kill them. Until some components can be replaced, in any case. Here.” He reached inside his coat for the Tesla rod and handed it to her. The metal rod was warm with his body heat. From the depths of a pocket, he pulled out a wooden box about the size of his palm. The lid was inlaid with stained glass panels, and through a clear triangle she could see a piece of kermanite the size of a walnut. It took up almost the entire box. Wires and clamps occupied the rest of the space, like a miniature heart and pulmonary system.

  “If you don’t mind, Miss Ingrid, please head toward the fence with the rod so I don’t neutralize it.”

  She obliged and retreated. Cy set the box on the porch welcome mat and opened the lid. He twiddled with the mechanism and went very still. She expected something intense. A bright flash, a boom, something to reveal the nature of the weapon in his possession, something that might bring the soldiers swooping in like Valkyries to a battlefield. Instead, he closed the box and returned it to his pocket. He beckoned her over.

  “Thank you,” he said, taking the Tesla rod and extending it with an elegant flick of his wrist.

  “What was that? Another Tesla invention?”

  “No. This one is all mine. I call it a radioflash. Invented it a few years back, and Fenris near strangled me when I neutralized most everything he was working on.” He eyed the door. “I think you’ll understand when I ask that you—”

  “Don’t tell anyone? Of course. And before you get any fancy ideas about that door, I should tell you I have the key.”

  “Kicking’s not fancy, Miss Ingrid. It’s practical, if a bit too loud for our needs.” His broad grin made her smile in return. “Please unlock it. I’ll be ready for any surprises.”

  With trembling fingers, she worked the key in the lock, even as her anxious heart all but galloped up her throat. The door clicked. Cy led the way. Ingrid’s fingers twitched with want of a gun, but at least she had her power. Maybe now she could figure out how to control the damn thing.

  The wood-paneled room was as dark as a cave. Glass crunched underfoot. Cy held out the Tesla rod and did something at the base. Brilliant blue light spilled forth, kermanite-powered and pure. At his nod, she shut the door behind her.

  The familiar room spooked her in its wrongness. The army had clearly visited, and their imprint made her even more certain that Sutcliff’s men hadn’t ransacked Mr. Thornton’s house. The azure beam revealed tidy disarray. Books had shifted. A mantel clock faced the wrong way. The desk chair sat upright.

  Blood had dried in long streaks leading out to the hallway. Sweet Lord, there was a lot of it.

  “Don’t look at it.” Cy’s voice was soft. “He’s alive. He’s with a ki doc. Focus on that.”

  “Easier said than done.” He
r voice shook.

  His hand reached for hers, and she met him halfway. She sucked in a breath. She had never held hands like this with a man before. Fenris and Mr. Sakaguchi, that’d been different. Cy’s fingers were long enough to encircle her wrist like a bracelet. His solidness anchored her in the present.

  “We dare not dally too long, Ingrid.” It jolted her, to hear him say her name without a title. “Think on where he’d hide important papers for you.”

  “Right.”

  Ingrid faced the wall with the namazu-e. The framed propaganda posters from Japan showed the massive catfish in many forms—in his native environment of the sea, as a monster being flailed for killing so many with his movement, and so on. Mr. Sakaguchi had said something about a box. Could there be a hidden vault in the wall?

  Releasing her hold on Cy, she ran her fingers down the panels, exploring every crevice and knothole. Cy followed her example. The two went up and down every panel over a five-foot span, but nothing happened. She crouched down at the low shelves built into the wall. There were several netsuke of carved ivory, bone, or wood, most depicting earthbound Hidden Ones from around the world: the buffalo from Bulgaria, the turtle of Algonquin mythology, the frog of Mongolia. Cy pulled out books and flipped through pages, checking to see if they were actual books, and then tapped the wall behind them. It thudded as solid, not hollow.

  More of Ingrid’s hair slipped loose from its bun and dangled before her eyes. She blew the strands to the side with a frustrated huff.

  “I don’t know where else to look!” She scanned the entire room, desperate for any possibilities. Mr. Sakaguchi said to look for the namazu wall.

  The namazu. She almost smacked herself in the forehead.

  Ingrid headed toward the door. “When he said to look for the catfish, I assumed he meant the box had to be here, indoors, in the library. But that’s where anyone searching would look first, so of course he wouldn’t put anything here. I wasn’t being literal enough.”