The Drowned Cities (Ship Breaker #2)(79)

Mahlia laughed shortly. “All those people down there, they didn’t have to run.”

“And you would like to make them run the way you had to.”

Mahlia shrugged. “Sure. Teach them a lesson.”

“You believe that seeing your enemies running and afraid would accomplish something?”

“What? You Doctor Mahfouz now?” Mahlia didn’t like the tone of judgment coming from Tool. “Don’t give me that ‘eye for an eye makes us all blind’ talk.”

Tool’s teeth showed briefly, a cynical smile. “Not I. Vengeance is sweet.” He was squatting in the shadows, a massive statue of muscle and death. “But this place has gone beyond that. The people here don’t even remember why they revenge upon one another.”

“Doctor Mahfouz used to say living in the Drowned Cities made people crazy. Like it came in with the tide. When the water came up, so did the killing.”

Tool laughed at that.

“Nothing so mystical. Human beings hunger for killing, that is all. It only takes a few politicians to stoke division, or a few demagogues encouraging hatred to set your kind upon one another. And then before you know it, you have a whole nation biting on its own tail, going round and round until there is nothing left but the snapping of teeth. Destroying a place like the Drowned Cities is easy when you have human beings to work with. Your kind loves to follow. My kind at least has an excuse, but yours?” Tool smiled again. “I have never seen a creature more willing to rip out its neighbor’s throat.”

Mahlia was about to retort, but a 999 boomed, interrupting her. Its artillery shell buried itself somewhere to the east of them. Another followed. And then another. Tool’s ears pricked to the sounds. He began nodding slowly.

“What do you hear?” Mahlia asked.

Tool glanced over. “The tides of war. They are flowing strongly against Glenn Stern. The Army of God suddenly finds itself well armed.”

“And?”

“The UPF will not last long. If your friend Mouse is still alive, he will be in greater and greater danger. The 999 means that the Army of God has negotiated a way to bring in weapons past the sea blockades. Presumably they have made promises to share the UPF’s corpse with their suppliers, people on the outside who are rich enough and hungry enough for raw materials.” Tool shrugged. “It could be any of dozens of countries or companies. Perhaps Cycan Mining? Perhaps Lawson & Carlson. Or Patel Global or Xinhua Industrial. It hardly matters. The Army of God has sold the last scraps of their city so that they can dance on the skulls of their enemies.”

“You don’t know that’s what’s happening.”

Tool smiled. “I am ignorant of many human things, but war I know. War requires a steady diet of bullets and rifles and explosives shoveled into its open maw. None of that comes cheaply. The only thing the warlords have to offer is the scrap of this city. I very much doubt they even remember what started their fighting with one another. Now they just want the territory so that they can sell a little more scrap and buy another handful of bullets.”

Mahlia considered. “So they buy things from the outside?”

“They don’t have the intelligence or the wherewithal to make their own equipment. All of them are funded by other groups who hope to profit.”

“Those other people,” she said. “Lawson & Carlson, or whoever. Would they buy stuff from other people? Not just soldiers?”

“What are you suggesting?”

Buyers. Mahlia tried to control her excitement. There were buyers, still. Just like when she’d been young and her mother had found the rich people who wanted antiques from the past. There were buyers.

She motioned Tool to follow, then guided him down a dusty stairwell.

“You can’t tell anyone,” she said, her words a whisper. Echoing her mother’s own words the first time Mahlia had seen her coming out of her secret place.

Mahlia reached the level above the canals. Scanned the hall. It was abandoned. No one was moving about. She ran her fingers along a wall, pushing on it, feeling for the latch buttons. Pushed hard. They were stuck.

Tool reached past her. He leaned and she heard the click. A portion of wall opened. Tool cocked his head. “A secret door?”

“My mom had it built, my old man’s idea. He bribed people. You’ll see.”

Mahlia waved for Tool to follow. Past the secret door, the warehouse was large. Bigger than two apartments put together. It was dim. The only light filtered in from the outside through high-up slits with bars. Barely noticeable. Barely worthwhile to investigate. With no way into this corner of the building, it had lain undiscovered, even as all the living spaces and apartments were ransacked.

Mahlia squinted in the gloom. Treasures surrounded her. They still existed. It wasn’t just her child’s dreaming mind that remembered this place.

It was truly here.

Oil paintings in gold-leaf frames. Marble busts of old men and women. Ancient muskets. A tattered banner with a circle of white stars on blue, and bars of red and white. A head, almost as tall as her, marble and craggy, knocked from some forgotten monument and moved by barge to this secret hiding place, until a buyer could be found. Old books, moth-eaten. Bits of paper curled and torn. Manuscripts. Bits and pieces of the Accelerated Age.

Mahlia’s mother had known history, and she had had an instinct for what foreign buyers might desire. And it was all here. Still undisturbed. The valuables that she’d been sure the man who had fathered her daughter would never abandon.