Nightwatch on the Hinterlands

by K. Eason

  Gaer waved, to be sure she saw him. She was always looking. She didn’t wave back. Folded her arms instead, in a way that had nothing to do with keeping warm, and cocked her head. Waiting, but not for him.

  For—him. The Knight-Marshal, one of the other midnight regulars, emerged from the door. Most nights (because Gaer was up here most nights, he saw things) Tobin and Iari walked back to the officer quarters together, a monkishly proper distance between them. The officer and her mentor-superior. Gaer wondered what they talked about. If they talked at all. If they did more than walk-without-speaking when they got back to quarters. He thought not; mammalian sexual signals and protocols were tricky, but the whole Aedian fraternization rules, now, those were explicit and clear. And those two, of everyone, would follow them.

  Tonight, however, Iari and Tobin didn’t walk together. He said something to Iari, and then they both looked up at Gaer, and then Iari turned and started across the courtyard, alone. While Tobin—oh, setat. Tobin was coming this way, heading for the nearest of the staircases bricked onto the side of the wall. Looking up at Gaer, making very clear his intention.

  The Knight-Marshal wanted a conversation. Now. That couldn’t be good. The man’s aura was as hard to read as an arithmancer with a full hex-shield, all stoic and muted and steely blue-grey. But there was a spidering of chartreuse tonight.

  Gaer spread his jaw-plates. Tasted woodsmoke (because of course these rustics burned organic matter for heat, never mind the pollution) and the threat of autumn rain. Tasted his own suspicion, sour and thin in the back of his tongue. Tobin wanted to talk about something to do with tonight’s drama, no doubt. That dead artificer, the witness and her improbable tale, Iari’s emphatic refusal to let the peacekeepers arrest him. Tobin might be unhappy about that. Might want to suggest the ambassador confine his spiny posterior to the inside of the Aedis for a time.

  But no. Chartreuse in the aura meant worry, not anger.

  Gaer slid off the wall, leaned against it, and watched Tobin limp up the stairs. The Knight-Marshal’s right leg glowed to Gaer’s optic, from the hip to just past the knee, in a throbbing fusion of hexwork and metal. The prosthetic hadn’t mated up cleanly to bone and muscle. That kind of scarring meant Brood damage, something too awful for Aedian priest-healers or templar nanomecha to completely repair.

  Something that probably should’ve killed Tobin outright, and hadn’t, probably because of that Aedian nanomecha. Gaer thought about meeting him halfway down the steps, sparing him the climb. Discarded the idea in the next exhale. The Knight-Marshal could’ve summoned him to his office, whatever the hour. That he wanted to talk on the walls meant something unofficial, off the record. Something worth the discomfort to Tobin of climbing up here.

  Something interesting.

  “Knight-Marshal,” Gaer said. Best to fire the first volley. That was the vakari way.

  “Ambassador.” Tobin didn’t smile. Barely even a bow.

  “Iari did nothing wrong tonight.”

  Tobin cocked his brows. “The peacekeepers think otherwise. You are, in their words, a person of unknown motive.”

  “That just means I’m the xeno no one likes.”

  “I know what it means. So did the lieutenant. She’s not in trouble with me and that’s not why I’m here.”

  “No? Well. It is a nice night for a walk on the wall. Join me?”

  Tobin looked back, unblinking, unspeaking, and Gaer clipped his teeth together. Felt a ripple of heat in his chromatophores, was glad that human eyes wouldn’t notice the color change in the dark.

  “I need you to do something for me.”

  Gaer noted the omission of his title. Tobin didn’t just forget things like that. Oh, the interesting things were just stacking up. “A personal favor, Knight-Marshal? I’m happy to help where I can.”

  Tobin’s eyes narrowed. “A personal favor. Yes. Which you’re free to refuse.”

  Which about guaranteed that Gaer wouldn’t. He grinned, vakar-style. “Just tell me what you need.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Although the B-town Aedis was the second largest on Tanis, possessed of a finer library than even Seawall, B-town itself was considered a bit of a cultural backwater. Mostly human and tenju, agricultural, not even a working wall, the city squatted on the banks of the Rust River, flanked by the Barrowlands on one side and a coniferous forest that spiked into rocky foothills on the other. The Weep fissure sat at a comfortable distance, carved deep through Chaama’s bones. Its emanations were visible in the aether only on clear nights from the top of the wall. They got brighter before a surge. Plenty of warning. Plenty of time to prepare.

  It had been almost nine years since the end of the last surge. The fissure vomited up only the odd slicer or boneless these days, almost all of which were detected and dealt with in Windscar. And still, every templar initiate in B-town prayed one would get through, come to B-town, be discovered on her watch.

  Iari prayed otherwise, having been a fighting part of that last surge. And because she (and the Knight-Marshal, and a handful of clergy) actually attended the inconvenient midnight and dawn prayers, she hoped the Elements gave her wishes a little more weight. She prayed for no Brood, obviously and always, but this morning’s prayer had included an addendum:

  Let me find this riev fast.

  Then she spotted a tall shape leaning on the wall just inside the gate, a distinctly vakari shape, and Iari amended her prayer again:

  Let that not be—oh hell.

  So much for the power of prayer.

  Gaer wore a vakari battle-rig, a motley collection of what looked like fins on both gauntlets and greaves where armor tented and angled to cover the spikes. The jacta for which he had special diplomatic permission hung off his hip. Dressed for business, Gaer. Dressed for trouble. Dressed to go with her, clearly. He detached himself from the wall with lazy grace.

  “Iari.” There was an implied good morning.

  Iari kept walking, chin up, eyes front and fixed. The very junior templars staffing the main gate snapped to attention. Iari scowled and snapped a return salute and waited, soul of patience and fortitude, until she and Gaer were out of their earshot.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Taking a walk on this fine morning—”

  “Gaer.”

  Condensation gleamed on his rig like frost. Vakari ran a little bit hotter than the other sentients. Steam leaked through his teeth and from the gaps in his jaw-plates. “Going with you, obviously.”

  Iari took her own lungful of early morning. Humid, cold, smelling like yook trees and the river and wet pavement and maybe rain, later. “Dear Ptah. Please tell Gaer to go back to his apartment right now. Tell him I’m working on something other than escorting him around B-town today.”

  “Do you actually expect your imaginary personified plasma to talk back?”

  “How many imaginary vakari void-lords are there? Remind me. Nine or five?”

  “There are five, you degenerate mammal.”

  “Some of your fellow bird-lizards say otherwise.”

  His nostrils squeezed flat, turned breath to a trickle. “Setat i’mekkat the Protectorate.”

  That was real anger, cold and sharp and reflexive. The civil war among the vakari was over, officially. After the Weep opened, no, get the word-order right: after the Protectorate opened the Weep, priorities realigned. But that didn’t mean forgiveness on anyone’s side. Not the Five Tribes, not the Protectorate. Not the Confederation, either, who’d fought all vakari during the Expansion, and then, after the Schism, found their work somewhat easier with a heretical Five Tribes third of vakari as allies.

  Allies. Huh. “Knight-Marshal Tobin.”

  “Is that a question?”

  “Not really. He asked you to come.”

  “Yes.” He dragged the word out. Clipped it off on a puff of breath and blew. “I
f there’s a rogue riev out there, something’s gone wrong with its hexes.”

  “You’re not an artificer.”

  “No,” like the very idea smelled bad. “I am an arithmancer.”

  “Riev are resistant to arithmancy. And they like killing vakari.”

  “Which is why I have this.” Gaer patted the jacta. “And you. Tobin asked me accompany you and assist the investigation, which I take to mean read auras as necessary. In exchange, he will grant me full access to your library and the archives. Anything not classified, anyway. Though I am disappointed. Your library is woefully deficient in riev technical manuals.”

  “That’s proprietary information. The wichu won’t release it, even to us.”

  “Setatir wichu.” Gaer sounded more contemptuous than angry. The wichu had been Protectorate clients (read: annexed, colonized, two steps above slaves) once. They’d switched sides partway through the Expansion War, joined the Confederation, loaned their considerable expertise to the war effort. Their defection had made the first crack in the Protectorate’s alliance. Had led to the Five Tribes heresy and the Schism, which had led to the Protectorate arithmancers ripping a hole into another layer of the multiverse.

  And, in a very roundabout way, to Gaer’s presence here on Tanis: ambassador and arithmancer (and probable spy, if Iari thought it through, which she had). Point was, Gaer wasn’t inconspicuous, and B-town’s streets weren’t empty, even at this hour. People would note a templar and a vakar walking together, both battle-rigged. People would wonder. People would talk. And it was a very long walk to get where they needed to go.

  B-town had been built on a hill. In the very earliest days, it’d been a tenju village, a collection of yurts surrounded by neefa herds and the piles of dung that came with them. You could imagine the chieftain’s yurt on the crown of the hill, that eventually turned into a hut, then a fort, as the tenju mastered the art of stonework. They’d even built a wall around the hill, partway down.

  Then came agriculture, industry, and before the tenju had managed to drag themselves out of Tanis’s gravity well, the first alwar landing. (Though not here: in Seawall, where the town-building endeavor had gone rather more largely, and thus been visible from orbit.) Then the humans, and the voidport in Seawall, and peace-and-trade. B-town’s wall and the city gates fell into disuse. And then, when the Protectorate ripped the multiverse, the fissure had arrived, and suddenly what had been a fistful of yurts and some neefa herds became the Aedis compound, which occupied the top third of the hill. B-town spilled down from there in concentric spirals and raggedy lanes of varying width all the way to the river’s edge. Hightown, Midtown, Lowtown, unimaginative in their designations. The Aedis had widened the streets immediately around itself, had carved a straight line to the four gates of the city, built into the old tenju walls. Those streets could, in emergencies, accommodate vehicles (troop carriers, to get templars in and out); but the bulk of B-town was still a pedestrian zone.

  Iari led Gaer across Hightown until she got to the East Road. You could see the Rust River from here, looking silver if you felt poetic, grey if you favored realism. The river mirrored the dull pewter sky, the red clay bed for which it’d been named invisible from this angle. The bleeding sunrise had gotten lost in the clouds. The aetherport’s silhouette hunched like a sulking cat, partly obscured by the curve of the hill. The aetherport had largely replaced the docks as a source of transport before the Weep. Now since aetherships were still legally conscripted to Aedian service, and since Seawall had the only functioning off-world voidport, the docks in B-town were making a comeback.

  Or, if you didn’t want to float your commerce: on the other side of the Rust stretched the grasslands, rippling with the barrows of a thousand years of tenju chieftains, crosshatched by highways. Some of those were overgrown now; the Weep fissure, which split the northern plains and curved down like a knife scar toward Seawall, had disrupted more than aether-travel. You could build bridges over (through? Iari wasn’t sure of the physics) some of the smaller fissures. Most of the time you just went around them, wide as possible, to avoid their unpredictable effects.

  Gaer, who had mercifully held his opinions about B-town’s architecture this time (having waxed loquacious about the superiority of vakari cities, spires and towers and glass and steel, during previous visits), appeared to have reached his limits on silence.

  “Where exactly are we going?”

  Iari considered a terse, “You’ll see.” Considered not answering at all. Considered the half-dozen visible heads with visible ears who were already side-eyeing the templar-vakar combination with curiosity. This was still Hightown. Rumors floated up slower than they ran down, as a rule.

  She drifted to the edge of the street and pointed with her chin. “There.”

  “The river.”

  “The docks. There.” She flicked her eyes at him. Snagged his attention and turned and pointed with her stare. “See? That open area, that’s where the decommed riev go and stand around waiting for someone to offer them work. Records say we’ve got twenty-seven, although sometimes they sign on with caravans going overland. A few might be out of town. Or we might have a few new ones.”

  “Ss.” Gaer’s optic shimmered. Turned briefly opaque, pale and blue as a cataract. Then it cleared, and Gaer’s void-black eye rolled back her direction. “Twenty-seven. The Confederation’s best weapon, and you have them unloading boats and guarding boxes.”

  “War’s over. So’s the surge.”

  “Yes. But they’re not exactly retired, are they? Decommissioned isn’t the same as dismantled.” His jaw-plates flared wide. “Why do docks always smell like rotten fish?”

  “Because there are rotting fish.”

  “You’d think somebody could find them. Clean them up. Feed them to stray cats or something.”

  There was Gaer-normal-running-monolog, and then there was Gaer-clearly-nervous-and-babbling. No, this was more than nervous. Say terrified, just not out loud. Vakari pride was pricklier than vakari silhouettes. What Gaer hadn’t asked yet was the obvious why are we going down here, and not back to Pinjat’s to try asking his neighbors what they’d seen. Maybe Gaer had figured the answer to that part out already: that this wasn’t an official investigation. She couldn’t ask civilians anything without aggravating the PKs more than she already had.

  But riev, now. Riev, she could ask. And maybe Gaer had followed that trail of thinking right to the edge of the cliff, to that vast emptiness of ask them what and what do you think they’ll be able to say. Because, truth, she’d fought with riev all her life—two years regular army, ten more after turning templar before the end of the surge—and she’d never held conversation with one. It hadn’t occurred to her try. Riev were not quite mecha, one step up from that, but they were still not quite people, either. Not legally. They were former people. Repurposed people. Whoever they had been, before the rieving, had been artificed out of them.

  Maybe she’d just start with hello.

  They were past the last inhabited streets of Lowtown now, well into the warehouses that lined the riverside. Everything was brick, made from local mud. Reddish brown, worn and pocked with weather. Slick, too. She felt the rig’s traction-hexes ripple through the needle-socket at the base of her skull. The streets were wider here, crowded with all manner of traffic, from a-grav lifts to conventional hand-carts to the occasional mecha.

  Iari tried to imagine how Gaer would see this place, with so much manual labor. Vakari didn’t tolerate invasive personal biotech—Gaer’s optic bumped right up against heresy, with permanent surgical hardware, but it had nothing neural—no, but they did love automation. For transport, manufacturing, agriculture, all sorts of industry. The vakari had perfected mecha while the alwar had still thought combustion engines marked the pinnacle of engineering.

  Riev weren’t mecha, though. Riev were . . . well, riev. Metal and dead meat held together with
alchemy and reanimated with galvanics. Protectorate doctrine said they were abominations, further proof of the Confederation’s moral pollution. The Five Tribes, with its gentler regard for heresy, excused the riev as a by-product of war, and certainly less horrific than the Protectorate battle-hexes that created the Weep. The Confederation had, after all, ceased production of riev after the Accords were drawn up in rare political haste, when everyone decided the Brood were more of a threat than doctrinal disagreements. The remaining riev stock proved useful for killing Brood, which was enough to overcome all but the most orthodox Protectorate squeamishness, and even then—no Protectorate force had ever said, oh, no, we’ll handle this Brood, keep your riev to yourselves.

  Gaer, of all vakari in the poor, tattered multiverse, was among the least orthodox, the least hidebound, the most curious. Iari thought that curiosity might’ve gotten him down here, gotten him to agree to Tobin’s request, as much as any promise of library access.

  Ask if he was regretting that now.

  Gaer had gone silent. His head moved in little jerks, responding to sound, to motion. Reminding everyone looking at him that vakari had been (still were) their native biosphere’s apex predators, before they’d found arithmancy and literature and art and the stars and become apex predator to the galaxy.

  The B-town riev were congregated into a vacant lot that had been a warehouse, before the last surge. The Aedian forces had met the Brood here by the river, turned them back from the city, and in so doing, turned most of the dockside district to cinders and mud and pockmarked eruptions of stone. Commerce had come back, along with the buildings. But this place remained vacant. It was almost a pen, a corral—almost, because there was no gate or barrier to keep riev in, or people out. Just a line where the street’s pavement ended and packed clay began, and the windowless walls of occupied structures around on three sides.