Nightwatch on the Hinterlands

by K. Eason

  She marched—carefully—across the courtyard and braved the steps to her quarters. Two flights, which lasted forever and hurt every slagging step. She was breathless by the time she got to her door, vision all grey on the edges (and no Char to catch her, so don’t fall). She leaned hard on the wall as she pressed her palm on the door lock and wondered, not for the first time, what happened if a templar lost a hand, or scarred her palm past reading. Did they reset the lock for the other hand, then?

  Keep picking fights with Brood-corrupt riev, maybe she’d find out. Iari ducked inside, shut the door and leaned briefly against it. Locked it again as an afterthought.

  “There you are.”

  Her heart lurched, damn near triggered the syn. Sent a whole new surge of misery into her limbs. She whipped around (too fast, void and dust) and there was voidspit Gaer perched on her workstation stool. Spiky knees drawn up, feet hooked on the rungs. Vakari didn’t do toes on their casual footwear. Bare talons. Had to be miserable in the winter. Stone floors were cold.

  She hoped he was a little bit miserable now.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Waiting.” He held up one hand, palm out and open. In the other, he clutched a tablet with a Five Tribes Embassy logo embossed on the back. “The Knight-Marshal is worried about you.”

  “Tobin did not send you to wait in my quarters.”

  “No. But I am also worried, and so I showed some initiative.”

  “By hexing your way through my lock? Don’t answer that.” Iari shook her head. Regretted the sharpness of the motion. Got angry at that regret and repeated the gesture. She started peeling the skinsuit off, rapid gestures that minimized the time spent balancing on one foot. “You needed to see me, I was down in the hospice.”

  “I know. I don’t go there.” Gaer leaned back, folding his arms in some origami of spikes and joints that managed to look graceful, careless, unconcerned. He tucked the tablet against his chest.

  She didn’t need to be an arithmancer to see nerves all over him. “Neither do I. But you were bleeding, before. You should get checked out.”

  He sniffed. “Nosebleeds happen with arithmancy. Nothing serious.”

  “Don’t be a neefa. The Aedis healers know what to do with your physiology.”

  “Yes. I’m sure. I’m sure everyone with a hint of military background does. You were right, before. I’m not just an ambassador. Special Research. SPERE.”

  “So? War’s long over. Isn’t that what you say all the time? No one’s going to crack you open, even if you’re not really a diplomat.” She kicked the skinsuit off and took the long way around her bed—on which there was a cat asleep, a patchwork fluff that looked like Tatter—and ducked into the tiny WC. Officer’s privilege, getting private facilities, even if she’d seen bigger field privies. But the water was hot. Hell, there was water, not that alchemical mist that did fine for the dirt and did nothing for comfort or warmth.

  Gaer was still there when she got out, a fistful of minutes later. Watching her, eyes narrow, second lid half-drawn in. Probably waiting for her to ask him to leave, or look somewhere else, or some other indication of the taboos he knew he was breaking. The Confederation had a lot of different customs, even within species; but they had a few uniting features, and one of those involved wearing clothes when dealing with foreign ambassadors.

  Well. Let Gaer learn a new thing today, then. Iari had redefined what naked meant to her a long time ago. Her skin pebbled in the chill. She stalked to the fireplace, activated the hexes. Stood there, as fire bloomed on the hearth. The Aedis compound had central heat. But there was something about fire that made warmth seem more real than hot water piped under stone floors. And, well. Fire was an aspect of Ptah. Every living quarters had a representation of the Four, in one aspect or another.

  The warmth felt good on her skin, anyway. She rubbed her hair carefully. Finding new bruises every second, wasn’t she. “Seriously, Gaer. Cut the voidspit. Why’re you here?”

  “Tobin is expecting a report. I wanted to talk to you first. I believe Tobin will be less likely to shoot me if his favorite lieutenant is there.”

  Iari paused, mid-toweling. There were a couple things wrong with what he’d just said. She picked the only one she intended to argue about. “Why in the name of the Four would he shoot you? Gaer. Make sense.”

  “He sent me along with you to prevent this.” Gaer waved a hand at her.

  “What, you think you were there as my protection? Flip that around.” Iari laughed, hell with her ribs. Raw sound, wheezy, scaring Gaer a little. She choked it off. Panted until she caught enough breath to say, “Seriously. What’s the matter?”

  Gaer flared every appendage on his face that would flare. “The riev. Could they do that to you, when you die? Make you into one?”

  Huh. That wasn’t what she’d expected to hear. “There’s a ban on creating new riev. So no.”

  “Could they have, before that ban? Is this what you people did with your dead?”

  “Some of them.” She glanced sidelong. “Wouldn’t have minded. Used to be you could sign waivers in the army. I would’ve done that. But once I joined the Aedis, it’s impossible. Something about the nanomecha and the syn implants makes it so the artificing doesn’t work.”

  Gaer’s facial orifices did a full reverse, narrowing and flattening until his head looked a third smaller. His chromatophores, ordinarily so relentlessly neutral, faded yellow, then red, then soaked back to a dull sepia. Only his eyes widened, that second lid retracting to invisibility, leaving his eyes round and dark and gleaming.

  Oh, blessed Ptah. This was the expression for offended vakari orthodoxy. Which was fine for the civs who never left their own gravity wells, but she’d expected better of Gaer. Iari teetered between irritation and embarrassment. She turned her shoulder to him and got on with dressing. Whatever she’d told Dee, she wasn’t really off duty (unless Tobin said otherwise). That meant a uniform, and that meant armor. Just not a battle-rig.

  Still heavy, though. Still required concentration to settle the chestplate over the uniform shirt and trousers. Required squaring off with herself in the mirror and not looking at an offended vakar.

  He was watching her, though. She felt that attention, heavy and pointed and still somehow fragile, like a massive rock teetering on the edge of a cliff, half a breath of wind from a rockslide.

  “Gaer. I’m losing patience.”

  “It’s just—you have no idea how terrifying they were during the war. How terrifying they are, even now. How they moved together, how we could never intercept any comm signals. They had to be linked in a quantum network, we knew that. But there’s knowing, with facts in hand, and then there’s what you believed when riev ripped through the hatch of your ship, or five of your squadmates. Then, it looked like magic.” He flashed her a vakar grin: narrow eyes, lips sealed, nostrils flared wide.

  “You talk like you were there.”

  “Of course I wasn’t. I’m too young for that war. But I studied a great deal. Vakari—Five Tribes, Protectorate—we all love a good war story. Half the war-vids produced are about the Expansion or the Schism, and if they’re about the Expansion, there’s always riev in them because we’re always fighting the Confederation.”

  “And the other half of the war-vids?”

  “All about the Weep, of course. Brood. Then, it’s mostly you lot getting torn apart while our arithmancers save everyone. The point is—knowing that there was a signal connecting the riev is like finding out the strange noise in the dark is just a neefa, and not, oh, a pack of Brood boneless. And that’s why I’m here. The chip we pulled out of Sawtooth. While you were sitting in medical, I was looking it over. I was expecting, given the levels of Brood contamination, for it to be covered in the same marks we found on that altar. But it isn’t. I think that it’s got hexwork like an Aedian implant. I cannot confirm that, sin
ce I don’t have official access to that data. Or the hexwork. Or the arithmantic theory underlying them. But whatever it is, it successfully circumvents riev security measures.” He shifted on the stool. Moved his face out of her sightline.

  “So . . . ?” She tugged the chestplate ungently into line. “We knew that already. Sawtooth and Swift Runner wouldn’t’ve attacked us otherwise.”

  “Iari.” He said her name a little bit desperately, like a prayer that meant please hear what I’m not saying.

  She wanted to spin around, snap at him, I’ve got two cracked ribs and I’m missing a half a pint of blood and Diran thinks my nanomecha are compromised, so just say what you mean. But that would all be—well, true, yes, but also an excuse. There wasn’t anything wrong with her brain. Nothing wrong with her wits, whatever the stereotypes about tenju intellect.

  She adjusted her chestplate, more gently this time. Centered that crest. Lined up her lieutenant’s pips. Angled herself so that she could see Gaer’s face again in the glass, scrunched up as he was on the edge of the stool. “Circumvent. You’re saying someone didn’t cut through the safeguards. You’re saying someone went around them. That’s significant?”

  “It is. This chip was meant to leave a functioning riev after its installation. That suggests someone with an intimate knowledge of riev hexwork. A wichu artificer certainly would have that expertise. I’m not sure who else would.”

  “You’re saying a wichu did this.”

  “I am.”

  Iari turned around, hell with exactly where her pips sat, and locked eyes with Gaer. “Except the only artificer we’ve had cause to know about is Pinjat, and he’s conveniently dead. He could be responsible for this circumvention, or he could’ve discovered someone else was doing it. Either way, that’d be a reason to kill him. Except that would change who’d have a motive to do it. If Tzcansi commissioned the hack in the first place, seems damned shortsighted to kill him. She gets no more evil riev.”

  “Pinjat might have tried, oh, I don’t know. Raising his prices? Maybe he thought he was too important to kill. Or he was going to sell the technology to someone else, and she found out. My government would pay for the knowledge.”

  Iari’s gaze snapped to Gaer’s tablet. “But they don’t have to, do they, because you’ve got the chip already. You can just tell them. Report.”

  “You understand my dilemma.” Gaer turned his tablet over in his hands.

  What she understood was the more nervous Gaer got, the more syllables he deployed. Like adjusting the bolts-per-second on a jacta, except his vocabulary just got more accurate, where a jacta’s aim went to shit. “I don’t, actually. You know I’ll report what you say to me to Tobin, so you can’t mean to keep it secret. You also know I won’t stop you from sending the information to your superiors. And if you were worried that Tobin would stop you, you’d’ve kept your mouth shut and sent your report, the end.”

  “Right. I would have. This is the sort of thing careers are made on. I report it, I am off this little rocky seedworld with the next voidship. I’m—” He bit off whatever he’d meant to say next. His face flowed through another chromatic shift of distress. “Brood contamination in riev, a mysterious altar, hexwork I don’t recognize. A setatir swarm in B-town that isn’t killing random civilians, but appears to be attacking targets. And this planet’s got its own Weep fissure. That can’t all be coincidence. There’s got to be a connection. Figuring out what that is . . .” Gaer cast a frustrated glance up, as if the answers hung on the ceiling. “That’s bigger than making reports, isn’t it? Or seeking promotions?”

  Now she got it. Like a mallet between the eyes. “So you want to tell Tobin and not Five Tribes Intelligence? Because you’re curious? That’s treason, isn’t it?”

  “That’s discretionary reporting. Yes. That’s treason.” Gaer grinned unhappily. “I need Tobin to work with me on this. I need access to Aedis data. Need it, Iari, because I need to understand how this works. Now do you understand?”

  What would make a man turn on his oaths, just to know something? Arithmancer. Scholar. But priests got like that, too, sometimes, with knowledge. “No,” she told him. “But Tobin might. You can ask him. I’m going to make a report. Come with me.”

  “Now?”

  “Yeah. Now.” She dragged the word out. “Unless you have a reason to wait?”

  “No. But I hope you’re right about Tobin’s reaction. If I get killed over this by your side, I’m going to be disappointed.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  As Knight-Marshal of the B-town Aedis, Tobin was entitled to a double-chambered office in the administrative wing’s first floor, sharing a corridor with the Reverend Mother (or, occasionally, Father) as a symbol of their joint governance. He was also entitled to a secretary minding his schedule and guarding his doorway from frivolous distractions.

  When Tobin had first been assigned, there’d been a mix-up with the departing Knight-Marshal, an overlap of several days that departing Knight-Marshal’s office had not been entirely packed when Tobin walked (limped) down the aethership ramp. And since he had duties to assume, and no leisure to wait, accommodations had been found: on the second floor, somewhat recessed, an office usually relegated to assistants and ranking subordinates. Although the inconvenience had been labeled officially unintentional, there were some (among them the head librarian) who had seen a petty malice in the departing Knight-Marshal’s tardiness, so that her successor would begin his duties sandwiched between Sister Aren of Procurements and Brother Fin, Assistant Alchemist and Associate Director of Chirurgery.

  That Tobin had chosen to stay there once his rightful office was vacant was interpreted as a sign of his humility and approachability (or, alternately and incorrectly, a signal of disunity with Mother Quellis). Iari reckoned he just wanted the quiet and privacy of the second floor, and that he didn’t want a secretary. Tobin’s office was open to anyone who cared to climb those steps and knock. And it was a matter of physical knocking. The B-town Aedis had keypads and updated locking mechanisms, but the doors themselves were hinged monstrosities that required manual effort to open, and so Tobin generally left his ajar when he was inside and willing to talk. Iari had climbed the stairs more times than she cared to count. Ordinarily she didn’t mind.

  Now—now she wished Tobin had taken that first-floor office. Late afternoon sunlight spilled into the hallway from a series of high, narrow windows, horizontal like the pupils of goats’ eyes. It made the hallway seem oddly bright and dim at the same time, light reflecting from the ceiling and washing down to the floor and sifting through dust along the way.

  Iari paused at the top of the steps. Leaned on the wall and chased her breath and ignored Gaer’s concerned stare. She thought her ribs might be hurting a little bit less, finally. Maybe that meant the nanomecha were working and there was nothing wrong with them.

  The other office doors were closed and the hallway was empty. She suspected Tobin’s hand in that. A politely worded be elsewhere this afternoon. She also suspected he could see who came up the stairs from his desk, which meant he’d’ve seen her leaning on the wall. Maybe.

  “Lieutenant,” Tobin said, before she could even knock. “Come in.”

  Shit. She pointed at a stiff wooden bench on the wall between office doors. “Wait out here,” she told Gaer, and pushed the door open.

  Tobin wasn’t even pretending to work on the turing or shuffle documents around on his tablet screen. His stylus sat, neglected, beside his folded hands. “Come in. Shut the door. Sit down.”

  “Sir.” She did all three, choosing the chair closest to his desk. Hrok’s breath, it’d been, what, eighteen hours since the last time she’d sat here?

  Tobin’s face said he was thinking the same thing, and he didn’t much like the changes to her person. He frowned, eyes narrow, looking a little too closely at her face. Probably the eye. “I know what you’re going to say, but
I’ll ask anyway. Are you all right? And before you answer, know that Sister Diran just sent me a strongly worded message regarding your fitness for duty.”

  Of course she had. Iari blew out a breath. “Bruised. Sore. That’s all.”

  Tobin’s lips flexed. His eyes stayed serious. “Sister Diran thinks there’s something wrong with your nanomecha.”

  “There might be. But Dee—Sister Diran doesn’t know what, yet, and she’s got a bucket of my blood to run tests on. When she figures it out, she’ll say. Until then.” Iari let herself sag, just a little bit. The chair reminded her why that was a poor idea. It also helped her find a new bruise, just off-center on her sacrum. Delightful. “I think there is something wrong. I think it’s related to what we found in the warehouse, and what’s happened with the riev. That’s why I’m here, sir.”

  And that fast, Tobin shed Tobin and became the Knight-Marshal. “Tell me.”

  She did, a brisk march through events and pertinent observations that ended when Gaer finished off Sawtooth.

  Tobin did not interrupt, even when his turing beeped. Only after she finished did he glance at the screen. “Ah. It’s Peshwari’s initial report.”

  Iari sat up straight (too straight, void and dust). “What did he find?”

  “Nothing yet. The warehouse is secured. There’s been no attempt by anyone else to access it. He’s cordoned off the basement, and he’s conducting a sweep of the immediate area for further Brood, but so far he concurs with your assessment that the swarm appears to have fled into the sewers. There don’t appear to be any remaining.” Tobin arched a brow. “How fortunate that Peshwari’s comms appear to be functioning. I thought there might be a problem with that part of town.”

  Iari felt her skin warm. Hoped Tobin thought it was fever, or the patch of sunlight trying to bake her in her armor. Might as well hope the sky would open up and rain beer, while she was wishing for the impossible. “My comms came back up after we neutralized the riev. I, ah. Didn’t report back right away. I wanted to chase down a lead before too much time passed.”