Nightwatch on the Hinterlands

by K. Eason

  Gaer switched strategies, then. He partitioned off a slice of awareness, awaiting the return of hostile battle-hex, and began to hex protection for Char. He started to layer equations that described stagnant aether, all gaseous motion slowing, chilling, maybe condensing some of the molecules into liquid (water might be helpful, what with the fire). A setatir Aedian alchemist-priest would be useful, about now. Two priests, one for liquid Mishka, one for solid Chaama. (One for Iari’s beloved Ptah, because if anyone deserved death by plasma, it was that setatir arithmancer.)

  Char continued to fling debris aside. A twisted bit of metal. A scorched and black lump of wood. (Please, let it be wood.) Gaer started imagining the force and the heat of that blast, weighing it against what he knew about Aedian battle-rig tolerances. He shut it down. Wouldn’t help, no, he kept thinking like that and he’d be joining Char up there, soaking up Brood emissions and getting third-degree burns and not helping Iari because he’d be killing himself.

  So trust his wards, pray (Chaama, right? Stone mother and all that? I think this is your province), and wait. At least it seemed the setat-m’rri Brood-loving, pyromaniac, murdering arithmancer had stopped throwing hexes. Had maybe run off.

  Corso was just now dragging himself onto hands and knees and coughing like he might have something cracked in his chest. The dying Brood’s suck was working on him, too, pulling the shredded remains of his coveralls into a waving fringe of canvas. Gaer lurched over and grabbed a fistful of that coverall and hauled Corso upright. He expected—not thanks, Corso was tenju—but at least a few more moments of man-folded-over-and-hacking. Instead Corso twisted in his grip like a furious cat, fingers clawing for purchase on Gaer’s skinsuit. Cracked nails snagged on the polyhide.

  “You veek fuck, you did that—”

  “I did not.” Gaer forced his jaw-plates apart. Forced his vision back to wide-angle from tunneled hunter-lock, stand down, however much he wanted to show Corso exactly what a vakar could do in close quarters to a soft-skin with delusions of formidability. “Listen, you rabid mammal. There was another arithmancer here.”

  That stopped Corso. Wide-eyed, “What?” and a sudden surcease of struggling.

  “You heard me. That person blew up the house. And I think they’re gone, but if not, I am the only one who can stop them from taking out Char. Until the templars get here, that riev is Iari’s only help.”

  Corso’s face changed when Gaer said Iari’s name. All that rage taking a sharp turn, finding a new focus. Gaer tightened his grip, anticipating the—ah, yes, there—sudden jerk and pull.

  “Let me go!”

  “Listen. I can protect Char. Riev have their own hexwork, all I have to do is support that. But there is not enough arithmancy in the multiverse to render you fireproof, you hear? And there’s a setatir tunneler dying in there. You get that? You go after Iari, you die.”

  “I—feh.” Corso stopped struggling. His eyes were wide, round, white on the edges; but sense was beginning to leak back. “But we can’t just stand here.”

  “We can. Iari’s rigged. She called a code red. Templars are coming. If she’s not dead yet”—and Gaer’s chest hurt like someone had put a fist through it—“then they’ll get her out. We can’t. We’re not armored. We’re not shielded. The riev is both of those things, so let Char do their job.”

  Corso grimaced and batted at Gaer’s hand. Surly with anguish: “Fucking let me go. I hear you, all right? I’ll let the riev handle it.”

  The whole world shivered suddenly. The ground underfoot, the air, like a curtain moving in a sullen breeze. And then a stillness, a sense of right returning.

  “The tunneler,” Gaer said, because Corso looked like he needed to hear something reassuring. “It just died.”

  Corso did not look reassured. Corso stayed stiff and still, ribs heaving like he’d sprinted all the way from the Aedis. The look on his face matched the contours of Gaer’s guts.

  “Fuck you,” Corso muttered, without direction or force. “Fuck you, fuck you. You know where that arithmancer went? Because I want that fucker’s head.”

  “If something happens to Iari”—and even if she’s fine—“you’ll have to share that head with me. Deal?”

  “Deal.” Corso sagged back a step, feet braced wide, shoulders sloped. He watched Char with bleak, grim eyes. “I found Tzcansi dead in that house. Brood killed her. Boneless. Not the tunneler.”

  Gaer looked both ways up the street. There were residents coming outside now, trickling out to their steps. Faces visible in the windows. Human, mostly, with a few alwar mixed in. They seemed disinclined to venture far from their doorways. Their auras marched between bright bands of alarm and more muted curiosity and fear.

  Those weren’t the auras of people who’d seen Brood. “Very well-behaved boneless, then, to stay inside one house. To kill exactly the person we needed to see.”

  Corso’s shoulders tightened. He turned, very slowly, and tried to pin Gaer with eyes almost as black as Gaer’s own. “What are you saying, veek? I know what I fucking saw.”

  “I’m sure you did.” Gaer touched his skinsuit pocket. Felt the contours of his tablet, please it had not gotten smashed or corrupted or otherwise compromised. He glanced up at the Aedis, brooding on the hilltop. There weren’t that many templars inside its walls. One full-strength unit that belonged to Peshwari, a portion of whom were at the warehouse already. A scattering of others, like Iari, not part of a formal unit. That didn’t leave many to send on a code-red rescue.

  Whereas the PKs were plentiful, and likely closer, and very likely to arrive first. Someone would’ve called them by now. And what would they see when they got here, hm? A vakar and a tenju dressed like a service worker standing in close proximity to a burning, exploded structure, with a one-armed riev standing on it and throwing debris into the street.

  “PKs will be coming,” Gaer murmured. “How do you think they’ll like us?”

  Corso blinked. “You better not be saying we run.”

  “No. We won’t. You, yes.”

  “Fuck that.”

  “Listen. They can’t do much to me.” Not entirely true. They could shoot him. The group who’d shown up to Pinjat’s had seemed so inclined. “I’m a setatir vakar. I have diplomatic identification. The templars will show eventually, they’ll bring priests, someone will know who I am, and I’ll be fine. You, however—you’re Iari’s agent, and she’s somewhere under that rubble. You want to help her, you keep chasing leads. And the only way you do that is by staying out of custody.”

  He could always send Corso after the arithmancer. Get him to start looking around, at least, though if he found his target, he’d probably die. And while Gaer didn’t anticipate shedding tears on the tenju’s behalf, Iari might be perturbed (if Iari survived, but don’t think about that). And more than that, being practical, Corso was an asset, and you didn’t waste assets just because they were bigoted neefa.

  Might be Corso’s not the only one of those, Gaer, think of that?

  “Listen,” Gaer said again. “I have someone for you to find. Yinal’i’ljat. Wichu. The dead artificer’s cousin.”

  Please, Corso didn’t ask why.

  “Why?”

  Of course. Setat. “Because whoever our unseen arithmancer is, he knows a little bit about artificing.” And bending natural law like warm noodles, but never mind that. “That says wichu to me. Maybe Pinjat had a friend or an apprentice. His cousin might know. I can’t go looking for her. She’s in PK jurisdiction. I’m betting you have friends there. And you know wichu. They’ll all go hide under the bed and call for help if they see a vakar. But you can look. You can ask around. So find Yinal’i’ljat, get her a message that I want to talk to her, and call me. Can you?”

  Corso was looking at him now, narrow eyes, red-rimmed eyes, sense seeping into them. His aura flared, sullen with fear and fury and a bitter joy at the chance
to do, and not wait.

  “All right. Find Yinal’i’ljat.” Corso handled the syllables well enough. “Pass on a message. Call you. But you call me when Iari’s all right. Hear?”

  “Done. Deal.” There were sirens approaching now, thin, mecha-voiced wailing from one end of the street. “Go.”

  Corso started walking the other direction, smoothing his braids with their hooks and ornaments, tugging his shredded coveralls into order.

  Gaer gritted his teeth. Hissed through his plates. His skull felt three sizes too small already, and he was about to do another hex. He sliced off another wafer of awareness. This equation, at least, was relatively simple. He bent the light around Corso. The shadow rolled up first. Then the tenju’s legs blurred, then his hips. Then he smeared into fuzzy obscurity, like a flicker in the corner of an eye that you couldn’t identify when you actually looked for it.

  The hex wouldn’t work if someone was actually watching Corso, and it wouldn’t last much past the end of the block. Gaer was contemplating some sort of public performance—screaming, collapsing, something to draw everyone’s eyes to him, but without distracting Char (if such a thing were possible)—when the peacekeepers rounded the far corner. Jogging, longcasters held ready, a sharp-legged battle-mecha clicking in their wake like an overfed and overly large insect.

  Oh, setat. The PKs who’d responded to Pinjat’s murder hadn’t had one of those.

  Gaer jammed his monofil back into its clip and set himself square in the street. He held his arms out, hands splayed and empty. Let there be no doubt he was a vakar, let everyone see his hands nowhere near his weapons. Let that actually matter; the PKs were heading for him, not the smoldering structure, and they were raising their setatir weapons and shouting at him to stop, hold, don’t move. The mecha, which clearly had emergency medical equipment on it, and fire-suppression hexes, raised a forelimb tipped with prongs strung together with quivering bolts of electricity and waved it at him.

  “I’m the Five Tribes ambassador,” Gaer called. “There’s a templar in that burning house.”

  He might as well have been speaking Sisstish, or not speaking at all, for all the effect his words had. There was a joke somewhere in there, about a diplomat for whom talking failed. Iari would laugh, if he ever got the chance to tell her. Or at least she’d grunt and roll her eyes.

  And if she died because of these neefa-brained m’rri, so help him, all dark lords. So help them.

  The PK’s mecha was getting closer now, edging wide, like it meant to creep up on his flank. The PKs themselves held back a little. At least they weren’t running after Corso.

  “Listen,” Gaer started to say. But then a shadow blotted out part of the street, at the same time his optic—stretched to the limits of its hardware—warned him of incoming hexes, major arithmancy, alert, alert.

  An Aedian hopper crested the roofline and began its descent to the street, its belly glowing with hexwork, its side panels folded down and gleaming with templar shields (one, two, five of them!) and, oh thank you whoever is listening, at least two armored (but not battle-rigged) priests. The hopper stopped maybe one and a half meters off the pavement, deliberately positioned between the advancing PKs and Gaer.

  That was what Iari’s code red conjured up, evidently.

  Gaer almost let his hands drop, he was so relieved. He took a deep lungful of ozone and soot. The hopper didn’t make noise, exactly; it throbbed and vibrated and made his ears feel both overwarmed and wrapped in padding.

  Whatever communication was going between Aedis and peacekeepers, it was happening on closed comms. One of the priests—small-framed, petite, probably alwar, her armor sashed with healer blue—wormed past the hedge of templars and squatted on the lip of the hopper and then, after a teetering moment, dropped down. She landed in a hard crouch. The flexible panels of her armor, so much lighter than a battle-rig, caught the fire-glow and gleamed like chrome. Then she stood up and, with barely a look at Gaer or the PKs, trotted toward the burning house and Char. Gaer could feel the cold in her wake as she slowed down the roiling aether, condensed it. Could see, through his optic, her alchemical heresies drawing the oxygen out and choking the fire to ashes.

  You forgot, sometimes, that the priests were almost as formidable as the templars.

  He noted, with half an eye, the PKs falling back (and their mecha with them, in a flutter of limbs).

  And then Char shouted, “Ambassador!” and Gaer snapped his whole body that way. And saw the upthrust forearm, laced all over with glowing hexwork and ash and Brood slime. And at the end of that forearm: a hand, flexing. Reaching.

  Iari was alive.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  For the second time in the recent past (without a chrono, she couldn’t say how recent), Iari woke up in medical. Not a klaxon-alert, jarring wake-up out of deep sleep, but a slow slide into focus, like blinking through fog until everything acquires sharp edges.

  Smooth stone ceiling overhead crossed with tracks so the med-mechas could go where they were needed. She turned her head. Curtains on three sides. Stone wall on one. No window. She rolled her head on the pancake of a pillow. A single, lonely stool stood vigil near the bed, beside a metal stand with a bag of clear liquid hanging from it. Tubes leading—ugh, into her. Antiseptic burned in the back of her nose. And it was cold, because she wasn’t wearing anything under the ungenerous blanket and rough-spun sheet, not even one of the wretched gowns.

  All of which told her that this was the hospice trauma wing, adjacent to the courtyard, so that when the hoppers and aetherships delivered the severely injured from the front, there wasn’t far to move them. Close to the main gates, too, in case of a more conventional delivery of wounded. Which way she’d come in—

  She didn’t know.

  The first hint of panic soured the back of her throat. She breathed past it. Steady, solve it. Work backward, from what she did know. She’d been injured, badly enough to end up here. But it was quiet in here. No voices, no beeping mecha, which there should be. Templars didn’t fight alone.

  Unless everyone had died. Saichi had been like that. Just her and Tobin left, two of twelve.

  Except—remember!—she was not part of an assigned unit now. This was peace time, between surges (everyone knew there’d be another one; when was the point of disagreement). The last time she’d flown in by aethership had been after Saichi, with Tobin (then Captain, not yet Knight-Marshal). And he’d been the one in the bed, staring up at the mottled stone and the hovering med-mecha, while she’d slept on a pallet on the floor. A shortage of beds, in those days (a lot of noise in the trauma center, voices and sobbing and screams), and her injuries had been minor things. Bruises, burns, exposure: what you got, fighting Brood in the field.

  No. What you got most often was dead. She and Tobin had been lucky.

  Iari couldn’t remember coming in by aethership this time. Couldn’t remember much of anything. She hurt like she’d been through a battle, but the surge was over, and templars didn’t get into street-brawl fights. Serious injuries were confined to training accidents or the mundane damage that people did to each other with jacta and monofils. Or accidents: rockslides, avalanche, people caught out in winter. And the nearest med-mecha hung two meters over, on the border between curtained cubicles, its limbs drawn up like a dead spider’s, its optical array blinking on standby. If she were really serious, it would be on her, over her. Involved.

  Iari gritted her teeth, braced for pain, lifted her head, was pleasantly surprised when that didn’t hurt. Encouraged, she levered up on her elbows and oh, that did. Ribs, loudest and sharpest. A smaller twinge in the crook of her left arm, which had a fat patch of bandage on it, holding a needle in her flesh, trailing a tube leading into that bag of clear fluid. She squinted at the bag’s label. It was written in alchemical, priest-speak Comspek, which might as well have been High Ancient Sisstish for all the sense she could make of
it.

  She studied the afflicted arm. Seemed intact, except for the needle jammed into her vein. Some bruising on the hand and the wrist. She turned her head carefully and looked at the other arm. It seemed to be in similar condition. The blanket had slipped a little bit off her shoulders, showed her the leading edge of a gorgeous palette of bruises trailing down her torso. Probably be even prettier if she sat all the way up. Probably hurt a lot more, too. She took an experimental breath, deep and slow and voidspit daughter of a neefa, she had a lungful (left side) full of knives. But she could inhale fully. And she could stay propped on her elbows. So she was probably fine, or on her way to it.

  She remembered the ribs. A gift from Sawtooth in the basement of the warehouse, where she and Gaer had found that altar. And after that, she’d come back to the Aedis and reported, and then—back into the city, back to that altar, and then—?

  And then something had smashed her flat a second time.

  Corso. Corso was involved, somehow. Her memory painted an image of him, wearing gardener’s coveralls and holding a jacta and pointing it—

  At her? No. That didn’t make sense. Nor did the coveralls. He’d resigned his army commission after the Windscar campaign, before the surge was even over, before Saichi, and sank himself into the B-town slums to be angry and live on the fringes of law and society and not, no voidspit way, to take care of other people’s gardens.

  So he wasn’t a gardener. He was a P.R.I.S. Right. And she’d asked him to help her find Tzcansi. And somehow that’d ended her up here, in a windowless room in the hospice. Because—because . . .

  Iari gritted her teeth, held her breath, and shoved herself upright. Her vision tunneled down to a single white light. Sweat prickled hot, then cold, all over her skin, and her gut indicated it might want to heave up whatever might be left in it. But a couple of cold, disinfectant-bitter breaths and it settled, and her vision widened, settled back into color.