Юлия Авилкина – The Bodiless Shadow (страница 7)
"My career, Kaira, is a service to the truth. It sounds pretentious, I know. But in this city, where everything is woven from lies and magical illusions, paper is the only thing that doesn’t know how to lie. If there is a black hole in history, it means someone cut it out. And I... I really dislike it when books are missing pages."
He raised his eyes to her.
"Besides, you are the first person in years who looks at these archives not as a wastepaper warehouse, but as a key to life. That... is winning."
Kaira looked away, feeling a strange lump form in her throat. She wasn't used to hearing such words. In the world of the Inquisition, she was valued for her utility; in the world of Nutra, she was feared for her origins. But no one had ever said that her interest in a case could be "winning" to them.
"The third point..." Soaren leaned over Larsen’s map again, frowning. "It’s the Old Port district. The very edge of Avrin, where the city walls meet the sea. But the coordinates... The blood soaked too deep into the parchment. See? The stain covers the numbers themselves."
Kaira leaned in. The brown crust on the paper was thick. The killer (or Larsen himself in his death throes) seemed to have deliberately erased the most important part.
"Is there any way to restore it?"
"Possibly," Soaren rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "I have chemical reagents that can bleach the blood without damaging the ink. But it's a painstaking process; it will take time. I doubt I’ll manage before tomorrow evening."
Kaira nodded, gathering her things. Inside her, disappointment and a strange relief fought for dominance—she had a legitimate reason to return here again.
"I'll go there tomorrow anyway. Look around the sector. The Old Port is large, but if something is resonating there, I... I’ll see it. In my own way."
She stood up, putting on her hat and checking if her revolver slid easily from its holster. A familiar ritual that brought her back to reality.
"I’m used to a cruel city, Soaren. We’re old acquaintances."
She had already taken hold of the doorknob when his voice made her turn back.
"You know..." Soaren stood by his table, gathering the tea things. "I finished reading that fragment you brought me today. Larsen wrote that in silence, there is sometimes more meaning than in the loudest song."
He looked at her—openly, without a shadow of fear or professional curiosity.
"You aren't 'mute,' Kaira. You simply speak a language that this city has forgotten how to understand. Don't let them convince you otherwise."
Kaira said nothing in response. She simply nodded and stepped out into the dark corridor. But as she descended the wide staircase, as she walked through the pouring rain toward her office in Nutra, those simple, human words of Soaren’s warmed her better than the strongest tea.
She locked the office door, brewed herself another cup of thyme tea, and sat in the darkness for a long time. She didn’t yet know exactly where she needed to go in the Old Port tomorrow. She only knew that she absolutely had to find answers—for the sake of the city, for the sake of the dead, and perhaps, for the sake of seeing the archivist’s gray eyes again.
Chapter 7: Tower of Silence
Avrin’s Old Port was a place the city would have preferred to forget. If Nutra was its festering womb, then the port was a withered, dead limb. Once, before the Great Rupture, life had teemed here: heavy merchant galleons from the continent crowded the docks, and magical beacons pierced the fog with beams of pure, blindingly white ether. Now, however, it was the territory of the "Dead Zone." Magic didn't flow here—it stood still like stagnant water in a ditch, filmed over with slime and exhaling the scent of decay.
Kaira walked along the embankment, where the hulls of abandoned ships jutted out of the shallows like the ribs of prehistoric monsters. The rain here didn't smell of soot, as it did in the central quarters, but of salt, rust, and something intangibly metallic. The wind from the bay was prickly; it unceremoniously crept under the hem of her coat, bit at her chilled fingers, and hurled icy drizzle into her face.
Her search had been going on for four hours. Without exact coordinates, the Old Port turned into an endless, maddening labyrinth of collapsed warehouses, stacks of rotting crates, and abandoned docks slowly sliding into the sea. Kaira tried to "switch on" her vision to full power, searching for the very resonance Larsen had written about, but the sector remained stubbornly silent. To her senses, this district was gray, flat, and absolutely empty.
She stopped at the edge of a crumbled pier to catch her breath. She pulled out her pocket watch—the second hand jerked and stopped. In the Dead Zone, mechanical devices, even the simplest ones, often acted up. Time itself seemed to mottle in an invisible molasses here.
"She doesn't like being watched."
The voice was quiet, whispering, like the sound of dry leaves driven by the wind over stones. Kaira spun around instantly, her hand habitually falling to the grip of her revolver, but she didn't pull it out.
In the shadow of an overturned boat encrusted with barnacles sat a teenager. Thin, in rags that might have once been a cabin boy's uniform. His eyes were strange—too large, almost transparent, devoid of pupils. In his aura, which Kaira saw with her "special" vision, there wasn't a single whole thread. Only torn, charred edges that fluttered feebly in the wind. "Burned." A victim of a magical discharge so powerful it had seared away his very ability to perceive the ether.
"What am I looking for?" Kaira asked, her hand still on her weapon.
The boy slowly raised a hand and pointed somewhere toward a foggy spit stretching far into the bay.
"What hums in the silence. Everyone says there’s nothing there. Even the rats have left. But she sings, mistress. Every night, when the tide reaches the old supports, she begins to sing her song. Only there are no words in it, just the cold."
Kaira looked in the direction he pointed. Through the thick, almost palpable veil of fog, a tall, thin silhouette was barely discernible. A lonely tower standing on the very edge of a rocky outcrop.
"A lighthouse tower?"
"It was a lighthouse," the boy wrapped his thin shoulders in his arms, rocking from side to side. "Now it is a needle’s eye. The wind from another world passes through it. Go there if you must. But don't listen to her for too long. Or you’ll become like me... seeing only ash."
Kaira tossed him a small coin. He caught it in mid-air but didn't hide it; he simply squeezed it in his fist, continuing to look through Kaira with his transparent eyes. She didn’t ask anything more. In this district, words meant less than premonitions.
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