Читать книгу The Lost Puzzler - Eyal Kless - Страница 14

Sunlight rarely touches the Pit, so I lost track of time and it seemed like it took forever to get from the Den to Vincha’s home. We had to climb several ladders and cross a rope bridge to reach her wooden shack. It was indistinguishable from the hundreds of such structures, a neighbourhood built up against the base of the Tarakan towers in rows that rose above the lower market halfway to the Central Plateau and was adequately called Shackville. The word shack was perhaps an overstatement. It was a small, windowless hut made of rotten wood. Between the gaps in the warped floorboards, you could see the drop below. Even with the protection from the elements that the City of Towers provided them with, shacks would occasionally collapse, and the Pit’s residents would jump to help casualties—relieving them of the burden of their belongings at the same time, then using the leftover debris to build more shacks.

I sat down heavily on one of the only two stools available and massaged my temples. The air was hot, and there was a constant humming noise. Galinak wasted no time. He sat on the floor and began to dress a blaster burn with salve he bought from a Mender’s stall at the market, while Vincha poured us a drink from a flask she fished out from under her makeshift bed. To be precise, she poured two drinks, one for herself and one for Galinak, but did not offer me any, which, oddly, made me feel a little hurt. She downed the drink and busied herself chopping the eel we also bought on our way back. If the butcher in the ever-open food market thought there was anything odd about bloodied and bruised customers, she was wise enough not to show it.

There wasn’t much to look at, so I end up eyeing Vincha’s travelling bag while considering our current position. Vincha travelled light; her bag confirmed this. My guess was she planned to split town, but first she wanted to eat, gather her strength, and figure out the best way to hustle more coin out of me.

The cooker was powered by a cable she’d clearly attached without permission to a local power generator. Still, it was a blessing. Many residents of Shackville had no choice but to cook over open fires. Vincha brought two cracked ceramic plates to the small table. There were no forks or other forms of cutlery, only Vincha’s blade, which carved the cooked eel with alarming ease. She served herself a hefty portion, then sat down in front of me and folded her arms across her chest.

“No instruments” was the first thing she said.

I nodded my compliance.

“No prodding of any kind, and if I see your eyes glow, or if they even so much as look funny, I’ll carve them out.” She made a show of looking meaningfully at her knife before carving a piece of eel for herself.

“Done.” I tried not to stare at the blade as she cut through steaming flesh or dwell on how it had felt pressed up against my skin back in the Den.

“So where’s my payment?” Vincha shoved the piece of eel into her mouth.

“First I need to know you were in the Valley when it all happened.”

She snorted, swallowing. “Rust, yeah, I was there. Not many of us came out alive on that day, but I made it.”

“And you remember what happened?”

“I remember.” Her voice got uncharacteristically quiet. “I’ve been trying to forget ever since.”

“You were close to him.” It wasn’t a question. I’d spoken to dozens of ex-Salvationists about that period. Actually, I’d coerced, drilled, begged, seduced, bribed, threatened, and occasionally beaten the stories out of them. They had all talked, eventually. Each had a personalized version of the same story, placing themselves at its epicentre, yet they all had one thing in common: Vincha, and how close she was to the boy.

“Yes, we were close,” she admitted. “He was just a kid, small and skinny, frightened, surrounded by the worst Salvationist scumbags, a broken soul, like the rest of us. Somehow, we connected. I don’t know why. We just did.”

Galinak chuckled and said, “Woman’s intuit—” then ducked the knife that flew past my face and embedded itself in the rotted wall behind him.

“Go rust, cheap wires,” she spat at him, but without much zeal in her voice. Even the throw was halfhearted, although I was just guessing that, really.

Galinak and Vincha traded colourful insults for a while, but I didn’t pay much attention to the poetry. I was too excited. My long search was over and the key to solving the mystery was sitting in front of me. This woman knew what had happened, she knew, and for all her bravado and greed, I sensed that like the rest of them, she wanted to tell me her version of the story; all I needed to do was ask the right questions.

I knew what I was going to ask first, but I just had to wait until Galinak fell silent.

“What was his name?” I asked.

Vincha smiled coyly. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

I already knew, but that wasn’t the point. “I’ve heard many names.”

“Yes, they called him the Kid, or the Key, but mostly just the Puzzler. They never called him by his name, maybe because it would have reminded them that he was human. But I knew his name, he told me …”

“What was it?”

She knew …

“Where’s my coin?”

I took out two diamonds from my pocket and put them on the table.

She looked at them, then at me. “What are those?” she demanded.

“These will fetch you a quarter of what you asked for.”

She looked back at the diamonds with open suspicion on her face “Where?”

“Upper Towers will give you a fair price, or the East Coast traders if you want to make the trip. Most craftsmen would buy them as well, but for a reduced price.”

Anticipating her protest, I added, “No one could carry that much coin around. The diamonds are sound, and worth a quarter of what we agreed upon.”

She scooped up the diamonds into her hand in a fluid motion and inspected them before saying, “I’ll tell you a quarter of the story, then.”

“It’s a start,” I said, my heart pounding.

“His name was Rafik, but his friends called him Raff, a boy from one of the Wildener villages, you know, those who followed that weird Prophet who rejected technology. Of all the places he could have been born, fate chose for him the worst rusting place.”