by K. Eason
She scraped up some patience. “You been in any of the other rooms up here?”
“Yes.” He was still hovering in the doorway. “Told you. I looked through the house. It’s empty.”
“Vent-covers on the floor? Or in place?”
“I—fuck. Stand by.” His footsteps retreated. The floorboards creaked an audible map of his progress. “Vents are intact.”
He reappeared in the doorway. He looked a little less nauseous. A little more focused. “That kitchen window, though. That was open. There could be Brood out there.”
“It’s still daylight, so if there’s Brood, they’re still in here. Brisk Array! Clear the downstairs. Make sure there’s no Brood.”
“There aren’t.” Corso was not looking at Tzcansi as hard as he could. Scowling, apparently furious, drilling his stare through Iari. “If there were, they’d’ve got me.”
“Maybe they don’t want you.” Iari took a lungful of blood-soaked air and gestured at what was left of Tzcansi’s body. “Maybe they just wanted her. Maybe someone got to her before we did.”
“Brood did this, not some damn gang enforcer. They aren’t picky.”
“They have been lately. Last death was at Tzcansi’s orders, so why come here now? And where’d they go?” Iari thrust her chin at the window and the late (very late) afternoon light. The residents in this neighborhood might ignore tenju in coveralls. They wouldn’t ignore a boneless in the yard. Assuming they saw it. Assuming it didn’t just slice its way through the whole neighborhood the moment the sun dropped.
That was the stuff of bad dramas and scare-the-kids-into-behaving stories, not experience. Someone had gotten the boneless in this house in the first place. Those things didn’t just walk anywhere.
“Lieutenant!” Brisk Array’s voice boomed up from below. Vibrated through the floor, echoed off the plaster. “There are three more casualties in the cellar. Female alwar, one adult and two adolescents. There is also another drain in the floor. The grate has been removed.”
Iari clamped her teeth tight. “Thought you said there was no one else here, Corso. You remember any fucking thing they taught us about clearing a building?”
Color crawled up his cheeks. “I did look. I checked all the rooms.”
She raised both brows, and his skin darkened.
“I fucking checked! I didn’t see a damn cellar door!”
He was still standing in the doorway. Bigger than her, broader, some of his muscle turned soft, maybe, but still strong. She had a battle-rig, so she’d win any kind of shoving match; she just didn’t want to have one. He wasn’t infantry anymore. Wasn’t, well, anything. P.R.I.S. That meant civ. Templars didn’t hit civs. Find Tzcansi, she’d told him, and he’d done that. He didn’t deserve her anger, or her contempt.
“All right. Fine. You did fine. I got it from here.” She raised her arm like a bar and Corso yielded ground, retreated backward into the hall. She keyed her comm. “Dispatch. This is Lieutenant Iari. I need Knight-Marshal Tobin. Code red.”
“Copy, Lieutenant, this is dispatch—”
And a searing crackle as the comms died.
Ptah’s left fucking eye. “Dispatch! You copy?”
A tremor rippled through the floor. Not the sudden twitch of an earthquake, but something slower, more deliberate, like the coils of a massive serpent sliding past each other.
Iari dropped her visor. The HUD was lit with Brood alarms (those hadn’t changed) and comm-out alert (no surprise) and directionless proximity alert as if trouble was coming from all sides, or was just too big to pinpoint.
Or, third unhappy thought, it was coming from underneath the house. The cellar with an open drain in the floor.
Plasma shot down her spine, hot and awful and oh blessed Four, that was her nano clawing back online, finding the needle in its socket, making contact with the rig. Firing the syn. Her limbs moved and never mind the ribs, the aches, the solar-flare agony where her needle linked up with a rig not calibrated to her nervous system. She shook her wrist and deployed the shield (against what, templar? what?) as she took the stairs in a single rig-rattling jump.
She skidded across the living room rug, gouging new lines in the floor, and through the doorway into the kitchen. There was a narrow door at the far end, looked like a pantry—and obviously wasn’t, because that was where Brisk Array must’ve gone. So forgive Corso for not opening what looked like a pantry. The floors and the walls vibrated in here, accompanied by the occasional boom of Brisk Array’s frame hitting metal. The hell was down there that was metal, though—
Oh. Shit. This was a post-war house. It’d have central heat, which meant a phlogiston furnace in that cellar. Metal, those furnaces, scribed with protective hexwork to keep them from blowing up.
Brood emanations wrought hell on civilian hexes.
She glanced down at her shield. Its whitefire was hexed not to react with phlogiston or other flammables, but if the priests who’d been scribing that day had been just the littlest bit wrong in their hexwork, she could set the whole kitchen off. And if whatever was beating all five of Gaer’s hells out of Brisk Array in that cellar ruptured the riev’s shields, well. Same effect, fireball; but there’d be a dead riev, too.
Dear Ptah, ungentle Ptah, lord of fire and plasma and things that burn: stay your hand.
Her rig beeped a proximity alert. The HUD display showed Corso coming up on her flank. He clutched his jacta in his right hand, fingers as tight as his jaw. Her chest spasmed, partly the syn shooting her full of adrenaline, partly because that jacta was a projectile model and therefore five kinds of useless against Brood and Corso knew that. He should be running out the front door right now.
Whatever he’d forgotten about clearing buildings, don’t leave your squadmates was burned too deep to forget.
Then the floor heaved, spars jabbing up like broken bones. The wall of the kitchen adjacent to the cellar door collapsed, spilling inward and down into a gaping wound in the floor. Darkness welled up out of the hole, bruise-black, EM bending and warping, refusing to show the details of what was moving there. Brood, the big ones, did that: warped this layer of the multiverse, subjected it to their own plane’s physical laws. Tiny fingers of plasma arced from point to point, as if the aether itself was charging (it might be; that happened too, sometimes, with Brood). Brisk Array, though, she could see: flashes of limbs, the brighter blue lines of riev hexwork, all lit, all glowing, all engaged.
She whispered another prayer to Ptah:
Stay your hand.
And one to Hrok:
Help me now, lord of the aether.
And jumped.
CHAPTER TWELVE
It was, Gaer reflected, creepy enough being halfway under an altar so reeking of Brood he could taste it. But to be sitting right next to a Brood-soaked altar while a large, one-armed riev stared at him was just a little too much.
“You don’t need to be down here.”
Char ignored him. Or at least, they didn’t answer, but Gaer thought he saw their tesla-eyes snap toward him.
“I mean, unless you can help with this.” He turned his tablet. “Not the k’bal itself, because I don’t think you’re that old, but maybe you can tell me who did write it, because I would bet my optic and the eye underneath no k’bal ever touched this setatir thing.”
If Char heard his sarcasm, they ignored it. They leaned over the tablet. “The k’bal language predates the Aedis, and you are correct, it predates me. But there are discrepancies in the formation of the third and fourth double-s variants in the script that suggest whoever wrote it was educated in the last forty years and was also wichu.”
“How the setat do you know that?”
Now he did feel the weight of Char’s stare. Setatir unpleasant, that cold and unblinking blue. “I have served with many wichu. Their fingers are smaller than other people’s and so the flourish
es on the k’bal double-s will be flatter and less full than another hand would produce.”
“Perspicacious of you. Now perhaps you have a theory why a wichu would be writing in ancient k’bal dialects?”
Char’s aura shifted slightly, banding oil-slick pink and blue. “Because whatever she needed to say could only be expressed in that language.”
“You’re being clever. I didn’t think riev could do that.”
“It is a day for discovery, Ambassador.” Char’s aura settled again. Deep purples, a cobalt core. A band of worried chartreuse on the border like the healing edge of a bruise. “To offer explanation to your initial complaint: I am down here because in the lieutenant’s absence, I have assumed her post.”
“I would think another templar should do that. I mean, you’re not technically part of the Aedis.”
Char’s aura spiked briefly sienna. The color told Gaer that the feeling was old, and deep as a scar. “But you want to be.”
An organic—all right, a fully organic—might’ve objected, or protested, or blustered. Char said only, “The templars above do not understand the possible threat to you down here. I do.”
“You mean Brood coming out of the drain. Funny. I thought that’s what templars are for. Dealing with Brood.”
That stylized tenju face—so unlike Iari’s broken features, and yet so familiar—could not purse its lips or roll its eyes. Char gave that impression anyway, with a subtle dimming of their teslas, with a new sharpness to their gravel tones. “In event of a Brood incursion through that drain, the templars would respond, but first they would have to come down the stairs, and the delay could be fatal to you.”
“So you’re protecting me, not keeping an eye on me.”
“There is no distinction.”
“Because I thought you were down here to hurry me along.”
Char’s eyes brightened slightly, from a merely bright blue to searing. “Is that likely?”
“My progress does not depend on your presence, no. However, it does depend on the resources in the Aedis library.”
Char’s regard was as flat and heavy as a voidship’s polysteel deckplate. “So you are finished in this location.”
“Not quite. I’m under orders to secure the altar. You did read that part of the order, too, right?”
“Corporal Heph’s rig was blocking that particular passage from my sightline.”
“Well then, you will have to trust me.”
Char was summoning the wit to retort, yes, Gaer could see that. But then the drain under the altar gurgled. Wet sound, which would be normal for drains, except this drain had not made any watery noises at all in the hours of Gaer’s observation. It emptied into the run-off tunnels, and was not part of the network of plumbing and sewage. And since there was no rain falling, and the Rust wasn’t cresting its banks, there should be no noise coming out of it.
The drain gurgled again. The liquid—please, five dark lords, it was just water down there—sloshed further up the pipe.
Char made a noise in their chest like crumpling metal. “Brood.”
Oh, setat. Of course it was. There was hexwork on Char’s face, he realized: a dusting of glyphs and equations on their cheeks, around the sockets of their eyes. All glowing faintly, to his optic, all throbbing and angry and red.
Gaer twisted around until he could peer down the drain. Warnings spangled his optic like faint stars.
“It’s an echo,” he said. “Like shouting in a tunnel. Something large and unpleasant is down there, but it’s someplace else, and the displaced water is washing back this way. I’m seeing effluvial particles in that water, not any actual Brood.”
“You are certain, Ambassador?”
On another day—yesterday, actually—the idea of a riev asking any question would’ve been a source of amusement. Now Gaer just thought Oh, of course, it’s Char and snapped, “Yes, I’m certain.”
He stood up and waved his fingers. “Give me room. I was going to ward this setatir thing anyway. I’ll just make it proof against something coming up from the inside, too.”
Char stepped back almost delicately, certainly soundlessly, and watched with head-tilted interest as Gaer sketched a perimeter around the altar with the stylus from his tablet. It left no visible marks to an organic eye. What Char could see, with their artificed sight, was Char’s to know. Gaer, looking one-eyed into the third layer of the aether, saw a bright white line composed of equations. His equations: hexes to prevent penetration in either direction by liquid, by plasma, by solid. By Brood and void. And, after a moment’s consideration—by aether, too, in case something noxious came wafting up out of the drain. Brood didn’t usually bother with aether-borne toxins, but usually didn’t seem to apply lately.
The altar began glowing. Faintly at first, so that it looked like a trick of bouncing light, something to blink away and laugh at oneself for imagining. Until that glow turned pronouncedly crimson, like live coals, around the altar’s base. Gaer knew better than to interrupt arithmantic workings to stare, so he didn’t; he finished his final circuit, sealed his circle, and then looked.
One set of symbols was brighter than the rest. One set, repeated at intervals in the script. He hadn’t noticed the pattern before, black scraping on black iron, no spaces between words, a dialect of a dead xeno language (oh, make excuses, he should have seen it). He cycled the optic back to the shallower layers of the aether. His hexwork receded from bright white to faint grey, a lattice-work dome around the altar, the drain, sinking just a talon-tip into the floor. The symbol-set on the altar kept glowing—brighter, even, on this plane than in the deeper aetheric layers.
Gaer tilted the tablet at the altar. Cycled special filters, took a 2D, stored it. Then he looked at Char. “All right. Now we’re done.”
Char gestured him toward the stairs. The riev remained where they were, all their attention pointed at the altar. Call it suspicious glaring, with their unblinking tesla eyes and their unmoving mask of a face. Call it a scowl. Char waited until he was halfway up the steps to leave off and follow, in case something should come boiling out of the drain, or the altar itself should do something.
If it did, Gaer wanted to say, his hexwork would hold it; but there was something comforting in the big riev’s suspicion, and definitely something comforting in their bulk at his (very unarmored) back.
Comfort. From a riev. Reality was crumbling.
He climbed up into the warehouse expecting—well, if not fanfare, at least notice. But Corporal Heph had his face pointed elsewhere. Voices trickled up out of Heph’s comms, out his open faceplate. Human, sounded like; and pitched up and sharp.
“What is it?” Gaer dusted his palms together in what he hoped was a casual no threat here gesture. “Something wrong?”
Corporal Heph was within his rights to say slag off, veek (and Gaer expected it, though with a more polite phrasing). It was Heph’s aura he wanted to see. Mouths lied. Auras did not. Heph’s was a shifting palette of sunset and fireballs all threaded through with a yellow, twisted worry.
“It’s not your concern,” said Heph, dry-voiced, and the aura slivered green.
“It is,” said Char. “I heard the lieutenant call in a code red.”
That meant Brood contact. Oh setat.
Gaer powered down his tablet, rolled it, and jammed it into a hard-sided hip-panel on his skinsuit, which tented over a particularly inconvenient set of spikes. That extra reinforcement was only fabric. Not armor, nothing like armor. It would protect the tablet from casual impact. It would not protect anyone or anything from, oh, Brood.
“All right.” Gaer looked at Corporal Heph. “You’ll need an arithmancer. That’s me. Where are we going?”
“Sir. We aren’t. We’ve got orders to hold this location. There are more templars en route to the lieutenant.”
“You’re closer than they are. Oh,
setat, never mind. Char! With me.”
“Yes,” said Char. They moved for the door, all stomp and momentum. The templars gave way like sensible beings. No one even reached for a weapon.
Gaer attempted to follow. Heph made a grab for him. “Sir. You can’t—I mean, you’re not authorized—”
“To walk out of here? I am. I am an ambassador from the Five Tribes, and you, Corporal, cannot detain me.”
Corporal Heph was too young to have been weaned on anti-vakari sentiment. Only standard-grade Confederate, Aedian superiority in his eyes, no particular fear or loathing, no particular need to thwart and dominate, just a deep puzzlement when someone didn’t respect his authority. “Sir—”
“I’m going after the lieutenant to render aid. Yours would be welcome. But if you can’t, well, that”—and he pointed at Heph’s hip—“would be helpful to me.”
Gaer did not expect Heph to hand over his weapon. He did, however, expect Heph to reach for it on reflex, for his eyes to drop, for his whole attention to shift that way, just long enough for Gaer to get past him. Long vakari legs had their uses.
He caught up to Char in a double fistful (the vakari finger-count) of strides. The riev was moving at the infantry trot, a gait between jog and march.
He matched it easily enough. “Do you know where we’re going?”
“Yes.”
Gaer waited through thump-thump-hard-right-around-a-corner before he realized that no more explanation was forthcoming. Where was the obvious question; but follow Char, and he’d find that out. Which left:
“How do you know?”
Thump. Then: “I heard the address Corso Risar gave to the lieutenant.”
Through comms in someone else’s helmet. Gaer revised his understanding of riev aural sensitivity. That the Confederation hadn’t repurposed riev into spies was a tragic waste of resources. Or a very fortunate one, for the Protectorate and the Five Tribes. Something else for his reports, if or when he ever sent them.
If he didn’t die this afternoon. He was running at Brood for the second time in one day, only this time without a battle-rig. He should’ve worn one down here, except then he wouldn’t’ve fit under the altar. The five dark lords did have their sense of humor.
