Perdition

by Ann Aguirre

  Tam stepped forward and signed to the sentries. So Dred wasn’t kidding when she said they take a vow of silence. That would get old . . . and creepy, fast. A few minutes later, Tameron nodded and stepped back as the guards opened the gate.

  Impatient, Tam beckoned them on. Once they got past the checkpoint, he explained, “They gave me today’s password in case anyone stops us.”

  “How did you persuade them to let us see Silence?” Dred asked.

  Jael was wondering the same. Though he hadn’t been inside long, he understood that passing an enemy’s border wasn’t done lightly. According to local gossip, she’d executed one of Grigor’s people for doing just that, not long before his arrival. But they had temporary clearance to be here.

  “I told them it was a matter of life and death.”

  Dred cut Tam a look. “You realize she’s much more interested in the latter?”

  “It’s up to you to convince her not to execute us.”

  Jael thought that sounded remarkably unconcerned, but maybe Tam had that much confidence in her abilities. She had rolled into Queensland and taken it over half a turn ago. That wasn’t done lightly. From what he could see, the men were loyal. Well. Loyal as men like this could be.

  Me, included.

  Some distance from the border, the first patrol dropped down behind them. Jael had a garrote around his neck before Tam managed to signal them. The smaller man did so frantically, struggling with the assassin who held him. Jael didn’t bother trying to imitate the sign; he just slammed his head back as hard as he could. He heard the crack of cartilage.

  Got your nose.

  Jael spun. The man didn’t cry out as blood streamed down his chin. His eyes were queer, dead and empty. Despite himself, a shiver ran through him. This place truly is hell, a mortal afterlife where they chain those too monstrous for freedom.

  Me, included.

  Instead of signaling back, the sentries slipped into the darkness. Jael had preternatural senses; that wasn’t a boast, but fact. He could hear Dred’s heartbeat beside him, Tam’s a little farther on. He heard her faint arrhythmia and Tameron’s accelerated breathing. He heard the skitter of claws; the ship was infested. But from Silence’s killers, he heard nothing at all.

  Like they’re truly dead.

  Regardless, he was glad he’d been invited along so he could see the other zone. So far, this one was grimier—darker—than Dred’s domain, and it had black paint on the walls. Not a huge difference.

  But as they approached, he breathed, “Dear Mary, what’s that smell?”

  “Death,” she said simply.

  In his days as a merc, then from his time as a tank-thing, born of tubes and chemicals and wires, he’d seem some horrors. They’d driven many of his pod mad. To his knowledge, he was the only survivor of the Ideal Genome Project, and he’d still never witnessed anything like this. The room was full of rotting bodies, piles of bones. Obviously human, some had been fashioned into furniture. But they hadn’t been cleaned or treated, just rawly carved, and the stench lingered. A gaunt, sunken-eyed woman in black lounged on her grisly throne, gray hair a wild tangle about her head. Countless eyes fixed on them as they entered, but no one spoke.

  It was silent as the tomb.

  Jael thought back to Dred’s casual warning about Silence’s people and realized that was a massive understatement. If she was seeking an alliance with this lunatic, how bad must Grigor and Priest be? With an imperious gesture from a skeletal arm, Silence summoned them forward.

  Her eyes burned like black holes in her skull, and Jael fought the urge to retreat. He’d never encountered anyone who unnerved him more; he didn’t like to call her a woman because she lacked some key element of humanity. Is that what people see when they look at me? The question chewed in and burrowed deep.

  Silence studied them for a few seconds, then her thin fingers flew in complex gestures. Then a slim figure stepped forth from the shadows behind the gruesome throne. Clad in black, his face painted in gray and white to resemble a skull, this had to be the Speaker for the Dead, the one soul in Silence’s domain who was permitted to speak.

  All part of the spectacle, Jael decided.

  The Speaker intoned, “What brings you before Death’s Handmaiden?”

  It should’ve been a ridiculous, melodramatic question. It wasn’t.

  Dred held her ground. “I seek an alliance.”

  Jael listened while she elaborated on the coalition between Grigor and Priest and the danger it posed to Entropy should Queensland fall. In preternatural stillness, Silence listened. And then she signed to her Speaker.

  Who said, “Death fears nothing. What must be, will be.”

  That was a load of shit. Silence was utterly demented, and no amount of logic would sway her. There was no time to check with the princess in chains as the idea came to him. He sensed stirring in the shadows, sensing that any moment, they would become the day’s entertainment. Since he’d been tortured before—and he had no desire for these lunatics to learn how long he could suffer without dying—Jael stepped forward.

  “Then let Death decide,” he said.

  Silence skewered him with a gaze made of black madness, then she signed to her Speaker. “Your words are intriguing, child.”

  Don’t call me that. I never was one. Four turns into my creation, and I was already killing. Maybe he had no right to judge Silence.

  “You said Death fears nothing, but I’ve heard he’s a gentleman. So let your champion face me. And if I survive, you stand with the Dread Queen against Grigor and Priest.”

  9

  Bitter Bargains

  The new fish was crazy.

  There was no other explanation for the challenge he’d extended—without Dred’s sanction. And she couldn’t object without looking like she couldn’t control her people. She remembered Wills’s prediction about how this one would destroy everything.

  Suddenly, it didn’t seem so unlikely. The man was reckless beyond bearing.

  Yet she let the offer stand. Worst-case scenario, he died, and she stood no closer to an alliance. Then she’d leave the corpse with Silence and follow Tam back through the shafts to Queensland and start trying to come up with a plan B before Grigor and Priest completed their battle strategies. Overall, things didn’t look so bright at the moment.

  “Does he speak for you?” the Speaker asked, after conferring with Silence.

  Yeah, we’ll be talking about that.

  Tameron maintained a watchful air, but she could tell he didn’t approve. There was no way to deny it without losing face and the situation deteriorating, so she nodded. Then Silence turned to Jael.

  Wordless, she pointed to the center of the hall, past mounds of gray, withered bodies, beyond the bone pickets spiked into the metal flooring. Dred had been here before, carrying messages for Artan, but the horror of the place never ceased to overwhelm her. But she couldn’t give any sign of that. Weakness led to teeth on your throat.

  “Let the Dread Queen’s champion face the Death Knight,” the Speaker pronounced.

  Dred found all the titles and posturing tiresome. She hadn’t come up with the Dread Queen mythos, but the men ran with it, as it pleased them to have a figure around which to build a world better than the one they lived in. Without these trappings, they were all just beasts scrambling for scraps in a rusted metal cage.

  An enormous male, dressed only in black leather pants, strode to the center of the hall. His arms were easily the size of Dred’s head, and he stood two meters in height. Unlike Einar, he had no scars, unless you counted his expression. He wore pain like a wound, a suffering so deep it dug brackets beside his mouth, furrows etched into his brow and between his eyes. Silence’s other men had eyes like hers, full of nothing, but this was a beast in chains.

  Except he wasn’t.

  He carried no weapons, but Dred suspected he needed none.

  Jael should be worried. Terrified, even. She knew he was fast—and stronger than he looked�
�but to beat a gladiator like this, he needed to be a hero from the ancient stories. And if he were one, he wouldn’t be here. Just as well I didn’t get attached.

  Instead, the new fish strolled to the center of the hall. At some point, he’d traded his prison-issue gray for other clothing, handmade by Queenslanders. It let him blend in better, but at the moment, he looked oddly nondescript, considering what he was about to do. He raised his hands in a defensive posture, and she bit back the desire to chide him or warn him or call him names for being stupid enough, cocky enough, to toss his future down the recycling chute.

  I could’ve used somebody like you, she thought.

  The giant lashed out with a ferocious right cross, but Jael wasn’t there. He danced—and it was such a graceful movement that it seemed taunting—to the side. Then he spread his arms. “I’m right here, mate. Go on, then. Show everyone how terrifying you are.”

  Silence’s warrior rushed, head down, like an enraged beast, but Dred could tell his heart wasn’t in it. Somehow, he had been forced to this role, and his body was only going through the motions. He’d killed until there was no joy in it if ever there had been. She hadn’t even known that was possible, that one could rehabilitate a murderer via aversion therapy. But then again, no wonder; it required an endless number of worthless lives and the complete absence of anything like mercy or remorse. It required a certain conflation of factors.

  It required Perdition.

  Quick as a snake, Jael flipped the larger man in a strike so powerful, it snapped his shoulder out of socket. A normal fighter would’ve groaned in pain, either at the dislocation or when he hit the ground. The giant only breathed, his lungs hauling hard. She swore she saw pleading in his face as Jael kicked him in the head. In another zone, men would be cheering, taunting, placing bets. Not here.

  This poor Death Knight seemed eager now. His movements became rushed, sloppy. He threw punch after punch and landed none of them. His breathing grew hoarse, which could’ve meant desperation, but when she closed her eyes, she read them, and saw the fluttering orange eagerness that raced through his psyche like a psychedelic.

  He wants this, more than anything. Don’t make him wait, Jael.

  As if he heard, the new fish grew focused. The room fell to absolute stillness as Jael finished the Death Knight. He was merciful when he broke the man’s neck. She’d never seen anyone fight as he did—with reckless confidence combined with such skill. It was like he could tell what his opponent would do before he did it.

  Maybe he’s Psi. Limited precog, applied to combat. Such a skill wouldn’t surprise her, and it would explain a lot. Nobody had heard of her empathic permutation until she started trying to explain it to prison doctors, but they diagnosed her with all kinds of mental illnesses as well. They claimed the men she called killers were good family men; and she was absolutely delusional. As soon as she admitted it, then they could help her. Fix her.

  Bullshit.

  Dred preferred life inside to the lies they crafted and placed on her tongue in pill form. Once she spat the meds out enough, they took to feeding them to her intravenously. That kept her quiet in the planetside prison for a while. She had the dubious honor of being dubbed belatedly too dangerous for the common criminal.

  As Jael stood over the Death Knight’s body, she didn’t move; this had to play out between Jael and Silence. He’d thrown the dice, so it was up to him to cast the winning roll. Or eat his losses. If he survived, they’d talk about his impulse-control problems.

  Moving with quiet confidence, Jael presented himself to Silence, standing before the bone seat with his hands laced behind his back. Oddly, Dred thought he’d never appeared more impressive, a military cast to his stance. He actually looked like a queen’s champion. While he waited, Silence conferred with the Speaker, and Dred glanced at Tam, hoping he’d offer a clue as to what was going on. He only shook his head; talking would be rude at this juncture and might screw up negotiations.

  Fine. I’ll wait.

  “The Handmaiden will honor your bargain,” the Speaker announced. “It was a good fight and a clean death. But she has terms for your agreement.”

  “I’m listening,” Dred said.

  “You are correct in that if the Great Bear swallows Queensland, he will turn his eyes to Entropy. That one has a hunger that can never be sated even should he swallow the stars.”

  It was a poetic way to describe the savage, murdering conqueror, but Silence wasn’t wrong about Grigor. So Dred nodded, showing they were on the same page.

  Then the Speaker went on, “But the threat alone would not have been enough to push the Handmaiden to War, even though War is Death.”

  Weirdly, she could hear the capital letters in that sentence, as if War and Death were people. To Silence, maybe they were.

  “I understand,” Dred said, though she didn’t, really.

  This shit hole required a constant fight for survival. People who lay down, died, unless they were crazy in a sufficiently terrifying manner, so that nobody wanted to screw with them in case doing so stirred a nest of snakes so poisonous that it could end only in certain death. Silence had that down to an art, and maybe it was why she’d created the persona, ages ago. By this point, however, she believed in her own legend.

  Not the sign of a stable mind. But she’s my best shot.

  “These are her terms. First, if this alliance results in new territory, she claims half of it as her right for aiding Queensland.”

  “That’s fair,” Tam whispered. “No need to bargain.”

  “Done,” Dred agreed.

  “But if the battle is joined and Queensland is lost, then the Handmaiden must be recompensed.” The Speaker stepped forward, indicating Jael. “She will have him as the new Death Knight. The Handmaiden says while she is Death’s lady, this one is his son.”

  “I’m nobody’s son,” Jael muttered.

  Tam motioned him to silence, as Dred stepped closer to her self-proclaimed champion. “You had no hesitation about risking your life before. Again?”

  Something like surprise flashed across his face, then he inclined his head, granting permission. It was a lightning exchange, not enough to weaken her position, but Jael seemed glad she hadn’t disregarded his sovereignty. Dred wasn’t even sure why she’d bothered.

  She answered, “Of course, provided he’s alive. If Grigor or Priest takes my territory, Jael could be killed in the fighting.”

  “This one always survives,” the Speaker intoned. “The debt will be paid.”

  Dred had no idea if that was a prophecy or a prediction, but it sounded like a done deal to her. “Do we shake on it, or sign something?”

  The skull face seemed affronted. “Death requires no documentation. You cannot force him to come for you, but the Handmaiden’s word is good. Or do you doubt her?”

  Silence stared.

  “No. As far as I’m concerned, we’re set. How soon can we start planning?”

  The Speaker watched Silence’s signs, then answered, “She will soon send me with instructions.”

  She wanted to protest that she was an equal partner, but if she had been able to handle Grigor and Priest on her own, she wouldn’t be in Silence’s boneyard. Nausea rose in her throat, suppressed all this time through sheer will, but the smell was intolerable. Somehow, she didn’t flinch or weaken, kept her gaze sure and strong, until the Speaker dropped his eyes and dipped at the waist, acknowledging her dominance.

  I win, you bizarre bastard. Time to go.

  “Will the password hold until we reach the edge of your zone?” she asked.

  “The men will see you out.”

  “Thank you for your time and hospitality,” Tam said as he signed.

  Dred guessed he was spelling out the same thing in graceful hand gestures. Silence inclined her wild mane, regal in her visceral madness. So strange, pretending she had any idea about diplomacy or courtly nonsense. My father would’ve forgotten to put on pants if my mother hadn’t reminded him. But
Perdition was as much asylum as prison, and when you were standing in somebody else’s delusions, it was both polite and politic to play along.

  As promised, the Speaker sent an escort with them all the way out to the access panel. Once they boosted up into the ducts, shivering set in. Entropy was worse than all the stories.

  Jael put a hand on her arm, and it horrified her that he felt those tremors. She couldn’t afford for anyone to realize how close to the surface her sensibilities ran. The Dread Queen had to be all determined iron, an ice maiden incapable of disquiet or remorse, or her enemies would eat her alive.

  “Thanks for giving me a choice. I don’t understand why, but—”

  She substituted bravado for composure. “Step back. Or you’re three seconds away from the death you seem to desire.”

  We don’t have a connection, pretty lad. In here, people will gnaw you to the bone if you let them. It might even be me.

  He narrowed his eyes. “Not even in your best dreams, love.”

  “Let me explain how this plays out. If you don’t remove your hand, Tam has a needle full of poison that will put you to sleep. He has several in fact, so if you shake it off quickly, we’ll jab you again. I’m not positive what you are, but I’m pretty sure you can’t live without your heart.”

  A reckless laugh echoed down the ducts. “Poor, foolish queenie. I’ve done it for years.”

  10

  Sneak Attack

  Tam didn’t want to kill the new fish, mostly because it would be a waste of resources. The man might be useful; certainly he’d proven he could fight. He thought Dred was overreacting, but he chose not to countermand her orders. Instead, he watched the two size each other up, then Jael stepped back.

  He was smiling. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to lay hands upon the queen.”