He walks to Room 408—which is, as he expected, right beside the King Suite, where Ashara Komayd has set up her offices for the past month. Doing what, Khadse isn’t sure. The general word is that she’s managing some charity or other, something about locating orphans and finding homes for them.
But from what Khadse’s employer said, it’s a lot more than just that.
But then, thinks Khadse as he silently unlocks Room 408, the mad bastard also said this hotel was covered in defenses. He opens the door. But I don’t call two soft young eggs like those a very rigorous defense.
Again, Khadse tries not to think about the coat and shoes he’s currently wearing. Tries not to think about how his employer suggested that such articles of clothing would serve as tools against Komayd’s defenses—which, of course, would suggest that Komayd’s offices are covered in the sort of defenses Khadse cannot see.
That, he finds, is a very disturbing idea.
Horseshit, is what it is, he thinks, shutting the door behind him. Mere horseshit.
The hotel suite is empty, but its arrangement is deeply familiar to Khadse, from the weapons on the distant desk to the security reports on the bedside table. Here is where the guards prepare for their assignments, there is the telescope they use to watch the street from the balcony, and here is where they doze in between their shifts.
Khadse stalks over to the wall and presses his ear against it, listening hard. He’s almost positive Komayd’s over there, along with two of her guards. An unusual amount of security for a former prime minister, but then Komayd’s received more death threats than almost anyone alive.
He can hear the two guards. He hears them clear their throats, cough very slightly. But Komayd he doesn’t hear at all. Which is troubling.
She should be in there. She really should. He did his homework.
Thinking rapidly, Khadse silently pads over to the balcony. The doors have glass windows, veiled with thin white curtains. He sidles up to the windows and glances out sideways, at the balcony next door.
His eyes widen.
There she is.
There sits the woman herself. The woman descended from the Kaj, conqueror of the gods and the Continent, the woman who killed two Divinities herself nearly twenty years ago.
How small she is. How frail. Her hair is snow-white—prematurely so, surely—and she sits hunched in a small iron chair, watching the street below, a cup of tea steaming in her small hands. Khadse’s so struck by her smallness, her blandness, that he almost forgets his job.
That’s not right, he thinks, withdrawing. Not right for her to be outside, so exposed. Too dangerous.
His heart goes cold as he thinks. Komayd is still an operative at her heart, after all these years. And why would an operative watch the street? Why risk such exposure?
The answer is, of course, that Komayd is looking for something. A message, perhaps. And while Khadse could have no idea what that message would contain or when it might arrive, it could make Komayd move. And that would ruin everything.
Khadse whirls around, kneels, and opens his briefcase. Inside his briefcase is something very new, very dangerous, and very vile: an adapted version of an antipersonnel mine, one specifically engineered to direct all of its explosive force to one side. It’s also been augmented for this one job, since most antipersonnel mines might have difficulty penetrating a wall—but this one packs such a punch it should have no issues whatsoever.
Khadse takes the mine out and gently affixes it to the wall next to Ashara Komayd’s suite. He licks his lips as he goes through the activation procedure—three simple steps—and then sets the timer for four minutes. That should give him enough time to get to safety. But if anything goes wrong, he has another new toy as well: a radio override that can allow him to trigger the blast early, if he wants.
He dearly hopes he never needs to. Triggering it early might mean triggering it when he’s still too close. But one must be sure about such things.
He stands, glances out at Komayd one last time—he mutters, “So long, you damned bitch”—and slips out of the hotel room.
Down the hallway, past the bloodstains, then down the stairs. Down the stairs and through the lobby, where all the people are still going through their dull little motions, yawning as they page through the newspapers, snuffling through a hangover as they sip coffee or try to decide what they’ll do with their vacation day.
None of them notices Khadse. None of them notices as he trots across the lobby and out the door to the streets, where a light rain is falling.
This isn’t the first time Khadse’s worked such a job, so he really should be calm about such things. His heart shouldn’t be humming, shouldn’t be pattering. Yet it is.
Komayd. Finally. Finally, finally, finally.
He should walk away. Should walk south, or east. Yet he can’t resist. He walks north, north to the very street Komayd was watching. He wants to see her one last time, wants to enjoy his imminent victory.
The sun breaks free of the clouds as Khadse turns the corner. The street is mostly empty, as everyone’s gone to work at this hour. He keeps to the edges of the street, silently counting the seconds, keeping his distance from the Golden but allowing himself a slight glance to the side….
His eyes rove among the balconies. Then he spies her, sitting on the fourth-floor balcony. A wisp of steam from her tea is visible even from here.
He ducks into a doorway to watch her, his blood dancing with anticipation.
Here it comes. Here it comes.
Then Komayd sits up. She frowns.
Khadse frowns as well. She sees something.
He steps out of the doorway a little, peering out to see what she’s looking at.
Then he spies her: a young Continental girl is standing on the sidewalk, staring right up at Komayd’s balcony and violently gesturing to her. The girl is pale with an upturned nose, her hair crinkled and bushy. He’s never seen her before—which is bad. His team did their homework. They should know everyone who comes into contact with Komayd.
The gesture, though—three fingers, then two. Khadse doesn’t know the meaning of the numbers, but it’s clear what the gesture is: it’s a warning.
The girl glances around the street as she gestures to Komayd. As she does, her gaze falls on Khadse.
The girl freezes. She and Khadse lock eyes.
Her eyes are of a very, very curious color. They’re not quite blue, not quite gray, not quite green, nor brown….They’re of no color at all, it seems.
Khadse looks up at Komayd. Komayd, he sees, is looking right at him.
Komayd’s face twists up in disgust, and though it’s impossible—From this distance? And after so long?—he swears he can see that she recognizes him.
He sees Komayd’s mouth move, saying one word: “Khadse.”
“Shit,” says Khadse.
His right hand flies down to his pocket, where the radio trigger is hidden. He looks to the pale Continental girl, wondering if she’ll attack—but she’s gone. The sidewalk just down the road from him is totally empty. She’s nowhere to be found.
Khadse looks around, anxious, wondering if she’s about to assault him. He doesn’t see her anywhere.
Then he looks back up at Komayd—and sees the impossible has happened.
The pale Continental girl is now on the balcony with Komayd, helping her stand, trying to usher her away.
He stares at them, stupefied. How could the girl have moved so quickly? How could she have vanished from one place and suddenly reappeared across the street and four floors up? It’s impossible.
The girl kicks open the balcony doors and hauls Komayd through.
I’m blown, he thinks. They’re on the move.
Khadse’s hand is on the remote.
He’s much too close. He’s right across the street. But he’s blown.
Nothing more to do about it. One must be sure about such things.
Khadse hits the trigger.
The blast kn
ocks him to the ground, showers him with debris, makes his ears ring and his eyes water. It’s like someone slapped him on either side of the head and kicked him in the stomach. He feels an ache on his right side and slowly realizes the detonation hurled him against the wall, only it happened too fast for him to understand.
The world swims around him. Khadse slowly sits up.
Everything is dim and distant. The world is full of muddled screams. The air hangs heavy with smoke and dust.
Blinking hard, Khadse looks at the Golden. The building’s top-right corner has been completely excised as if it were a tumor, a gaping, splintered, smoking hole right where Komayd’s balcony used to be. It looks as if the mine took out not only Komayd’s suite but also Room 408 and most of the rooms around it.
There’s no sign of Komayd, or the strange Continental girl. He suppresses the desire to step closer, to make sure the job is done. He just stares up at the damage, head cocked.
A Continental man—a baker of some kind, by his dress—stops him and frantically asks, “What happened? What happened?”
Khadse turns and walks away. He calmly walks south, through the streaming crowds, through the police and medical autos speeding down the streets, through the throngs of people gathering on the sidewalks, all looking north at the column of smoke streaming from the Golden.
He says not a word, does not a thing. All he does is walk. He barely even breathes.
He makes it to his safe house. He confirms the door hasn’t been tampered with, nor the windows, then unlocks the door and walks inside. He goes straight to the radio, turns it on, and stands there for the better part of three hours, listening.
He waits, and waits, until finally they begin reporting on the explosion. He keeps waiting until they finally announce it.
…just confirmed that Ashara Komayd, former prime minister of Saypur, was killed in the blast…
Khadse exhales slowly.
Then he slowly, slowly lowers himself to sit on the floor.
And then, to his own surprise, he begins laughing.
They approach the tree in the morning, while the mist still clings to the forest undergrowth, carrying axes and the two-man saw between them, tin helmets on their heads, their packs strapped to their backs. The tree is marked by a single blob of yellow paint that drips down its trunk. They survey the area, gauge where the tree should fall, and then, like surgeons before a delicate operation, they begin.
He looks up at the tree as the others scurry about. To convince this grand old thing to fall, he thinks, is like carving off a piece of time itself.
They begin the face cut with the two-man saw, he on one end and a partner on the other, ripping the saw back and forth, its curved teeth slashing through the soft white flesh, peels of wood speckling their hands and arms and boots. Once the bottom of the face cut is established, they chop at it with axes, swinging like pistons in an engine, down and in, down and in, hacking off huge chunks of wood.
They pause to wipe their brows and consider their work. “How does it look, Dreyling?” the foreman asks him.
Sigrud je Harkvaldsson pauses. He wishes they’d use the name he gave them—Bjorn—but they rarely do.
He kneels and lays his head sideways in the face cut, vaguely aware of the several tons of wood suspended directly above his skull. Then he squints, stands, waves to the left, and says, “Ten degrees east.”
“You sure, Dreyling?”
“Ten degrees east,” he says.
The other men glance at one another, smirking. Then they resume with this slight adjustment in the face cut.
Once the face cut is complete, they move to the opposite side of the tree and begin again with the two-man saw, slicing through the wood in agonizing strokes to grow close, but not too close, to the face cut.
When the man at the other end of the saw tires, Sigrud just waits, silently, for someone else to take up the other end. Then they resume sawing.
“I damnably do swear, Dreyling, are you an automaton?” says the foreman.
He says nothing as he saws.
“Were I to open up your chest, would I find naught but gears?”
He says nothing.
“I’ve had Dreylings on my teams before, and not a one of them could work a saw like you.”
Still nothing.
“Youth, perhaps,” the foreman muses. “To be as young as you, aye, that’s the ticket.”
Still Sigrud says nothing. Though this last statement troubles him deeply. For he is not a young man by any stretch of the imagination.
They pause periodically in their sawing, listening: listening for the deep, complaining cracks, like a shelf of ice collapsing. He is reminded of an argument, an old friend reluctantly coming round to your position: Perhaps you’re right, perhaps I should fall….Perhaps I should.
Then, finally, they hear it: a pop-pop-pop like massive harp strings snapping. The foreman screams, “She falls!” and they scatter away, tin helmets clapped to their heads.
The old, groaning giant tumbles over, branches snapping as it ploughs to the ground, sending up a great plume of soil. They creep back down to it as the dust settles. The pale circle of wood at the truncated end is bright and soft.
Sigrud looks at the stump for a moment—the only thing that will mark this tree’s decades of existence here—and notes its countless growth rings. How odd it is to think that such a colossus could be eradicated in a few hours by a handful of fools with axes and a saw.
“What are you staring at, Dreyling?” says the foreman. “Are you in love? Start buckling the damn thing, or I’ll scramble your brains even more than they already are!”
The other loggers chuckle as they straddle the fallen tree. He knows what they think of him: that he is slow, demented by some childhood accident. That must be, they whisper among themselves, why he never talks, never takes off his gloves, and why one of his eyes is never quite looking at anything, but rather just to the right; that must be why he never tires at the saw—surely his faculties must not register that he is fatigued. No normal person could silently withstand such punishment.
He does not mind their chatter. Better to think less of him than too much. Too much attention draws eyes.
He raises his ax, brings it down, and shears a branch off of the trunk. Thirteen years moving from little job to little job. He does not relish the idea of moving yet again, nor does he wish to alert any authorities to his presence. So he stays quiet.
He focuses on thinking the same question to himself, over and over again: Will she send for me today? Will today be the day she tells me to come alive again?
The logging crew bags their quota, so they’re all in high spirits come nightfall when they start the journey back to the logging camp, the campfires visible from halfway up the mountain. They make their way down through clear-cut forests, stark wastelands pockmarked with sullen stumps, their tool cart clinking and clanking over the bumps. They hurry as they grow near. Their logging range is not too far outside of Bulikov, so the sack wine is decent even if the food is abominable.
But as they near the camp, the air is not filled with the usual shouts and songs and raucous cries, celebrating the survival of another day stuck to the handle of an ax. The few loggers they see are clumped together like visitors at a funeral, sharing whispered words.
“What in all the hells is the matter tonight? Ahoy, Pavlik!” says the foreman, calling to a passing logger with a drooping mustache. “What’s the news? Another casualty?”
Pavlik shakes his head, his mustache swinging like the pendulum of a long-case clock. “No, not a casualty. Not a casualty here, at least.”
“What do you mean?”
“News came of an assassination in Ahanashtan. There’s talk of war. Again.”
The loggers glance at one another, unsure how seriously to take this.
“Pah,” says their foreman. He spits on the ground. “Another assassination….They say such things so gravely, as if the life of some diplomat were worth s
o much. But at the end of the day they’ll all back down again, just you wait.”
“Oh, I’d agree, if it were just some diplomat,” says Pavlik. “But it wasn’t. It was Komayd.”
A silence falls over the crew.
Then a low voice speaks: “Komayd? Komayd who…who did what?”
The logging crew parts to look at Sigrud, standing up straight by the cart. But they notice that his glance seems much brighter and clearer than they recall, and he stands straighter and taller than before—very tall, in fact, as if he’s unpacked three more inches from somewhere in his spine.
“What do you mean, Komayd who did what?” says Pavlik. “Who died, of course.”
Sigrud stares at the man. “Died? She was…She is dead?”
“Her and a bunch of other people. News came through the telegraphs just this morning. They blew her up along with half of a fancy hotel in downtown Ahanashtan, six days ago, lots of people ki—”
Sigrud steps closer to the man. “Then how are they sure? How are they sure she is dead? Do they really know?”
Pavlik hesitates as Sigrud nears, until the big Dreyling is looming over him like the firs they fell each day. “Well, uh…Well, they found the body, of course! Or what was left of it. They’re planning a big funeral and everything, it’s all over the papers!”
“Why Komayd?” says someone. “She was prime minister over ten damned years ago. Why kill someone out of office?”
“How should I know?” says Pavlik. “Maybe old grudges die hard. She pissed off nearly everyone when she was in office; they’re saying the list of suspects goes twice around the block.”
Sigrud slowly turns back to look at Pavlik. “So they do not know,” he says quietly, “who…did this to her?”
“If they know, they aren’t saying,” says Pavlik.
Sigrud falls silent, and the look of shock and horror on his face gives way to something different: grim resolution, perhaps, as if he’s just made a decision he’s been putting off for far too long.
City of Miracles Page 2
