by K. Eason
The glowing equations twisted, loosened, wisped away. Left the muted normalcy of the hotel’s already extensive hexwork in place. Well. Except for the holes.
“There shouldn’t have been a fire in here at all,” Gaer repeated. “But our arithmancer took the protective hexes apart. I don’t mean disabled. I mean dismantled. And then, when the fire was over, she cleaned up by putting her own equations in place. You asked about the soot. Well. Yes, it was scrubbed. And so was everything else in here. That’s what these new hexes were doing: removing all traces of the occupants. The PKs won’t find any evidence because there isn’t any left to find. Maybe, if they’d had a good arithmancer with them in the first few hours. But not now.”
Iari turned around slowly, panning her headlamp over every surface. “So there might’ve been Brood here.”
“There might’ve been a setatir Weep fissure in here. Or a Kreeshan Blue concert. These hexes are that good.” The back of Gaer’s throat burned like he’d swallowed acid. “I’m sorry. I keep underestimating this arithmancer. We’re not just dealing with a professional. This is military-grade expertise. I’d say it was setatir SPERE work, except it can’t be another vakar, for all the reasons I told Keawe. But it’s someone who’s done war-work.”
Iari had been peering at what had been the bed (a slagged lump of synthetic fabric fused to the sootless, splintered frame). Now she straightened and turned, with that deliberate slowness that said thinking. “How long would these hexes take to finish erasing everything?”
“I don’t know. Evidently less than two days.”
“And you’re sure this is the same arithmancer who blew me up?”
“Pretty sure. Unless there are two of them this skilled.”
“Yinal’i’ljat could be a victim here.”
“A victim who assumed someone else’s name and just, what, happened to be at the site of Pinjat’s murder?”
“A victim and not someone who lied to us both, to our faces. We had her, Gaer, and we let her walk.”
“Be fair. We didn’t know. We couldn’t know. I wasn’t even reading auras that night—”
“Good as she is, she might’ve been able to lie to you anyway.”
Gaer had been trying not to read Iari’s aura. Now it was hard not to. That particular shade of suspicion, the jagged pattern, like a plasma core going critical. He squeezed his left eye closed again. Iari settled back into a single dimension. Scowling, lip curled, eyes narrow. Apparently angry, but he knew her better.
Gently, carefully, as if probing a wound: “We don’t know if Corso even made it this far.”
Iari made a fist, raised it, threatened the wall. And stopped. Her aura settled, so rapidly and vividly, that Gaer blinked and suspected his optic again. She began uncurling her fist, one finger at a time. “No. And we also don’t know why, if this arithmancer is so good, she would leave hexwork so obvious that you wouldn’t miss it if you came here, actually tailored to your rig, and then make it easy to remove.”
“Easy?”
“Easy. If this neefa’s as good as you say, she could’ve made it harder to detect the hexes. Certainly harder to remove. We’re supposed to be congratulating ourselves right now on having found something, instead of noticing what we haven’t found.” Iari might’ve been Char, stiff-faced and cold-eyed. “The owner Hvidjatte knows something. Maybe who Yinal’i’ljat really is. Definitely if Corso came up here.” Her voice caught, steadied. “Whether he told the PKs or not, he’ll tell us. You just make sure he tells me the truth.”
“I assume that means read his aura, and not something more, ah, physical?” Knowing how she’d answer that, even before she grimaced at him.
But before she could say the expected void and dust, Gaer, of course just the aura, her helmet-comm squealed. Luki’s voice squeezed out, thin and thready with distance.
“Lieutenant? You need to get down here!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Corso thought at first that he was dead. That was only because it was dark—really dark, no light-at-all-dark, eyes-gouged-out-oh-fuck-I’m-blind dark—and the impression only lasted a heartbeat. Because then came the second heartbeat, and all the proof of not-dead came flooding in. Aches and sharp pains and a sticky metallic certainty of a mouth that had been full of blood. That was dry now, saliva gone thick, like he hadn’t had any water in a long time.
How long?
A good question. The blood had come from his nose, mostly—sniff, swallow, nasty—but also from his lip. He checked, mapped the contours of chin and cheek. Yes, that was some kind of gash and fuck yes, he’d broken a tusk. But all that blood was old, dry. Crumbling under his fingers, except when he snagged a scab and got a fresh source.
His fingers told him, when he checked—carefully, because what the fuck would he do if he found empty holes?—that his eyes were still there. They strained at dark nothing, sure, but they blinked. He probed gently around the sockets, pressed the quivering lids. Didn’t feel like damage. But fact was, he couldn’t see a slagging thing.
The first sour panic sloshed up the back of his throat. He held it down, only just, with deep gulping breaths and by holding tight to the guardrails of Confederate militia training that told him the fastest way to die in a battle was lose his shit first.
Not that this was a battle. But there had been one. He had very clear recollection of the boneless ricocheting off the wall at him. Very clear recollection of firing his jacta until the whitefire core overheated. (That explained the sting on his hand. Burn.) He’d—had he held onto the weapon? He patted the area immediately around him. Cold stone, rough on his palms (especially the burn-raw part). No jacta in the immediate circumference. He licked his lip—more old blood—and patted himself down.
No jacta, but he had his monofils. The small one in the sheath on his chest, for quick stabbing, and the larger one stashed at the small of his back, under a coat that was still mostly there. He fingered the shredded hem. That was the boneless’s doing. He remembered firing at it, and missing. Remembered stitching whitefire across the walls and the bed. Remembered the bloom of flame.
So there’d been a fire. The scratchiness in his throat, the raw feeling under the blood-slick and metal—that could be smoke or heat damage, or both, in addition to dehydration. He wasn’t hungry, but he had that hollow-skull ache and lingering nausea that said post-fight.
A fight he’d won, evidently, if he was waking up at all. So where had the boneless gone? He was pretty sure he hadn’t killed it. This place, this very dark place—damp air, stale and cool, no breeze, a faint liquid gurgle—could be full of Brood, except it if was, they’d’ve gotten him by now. They wouldn’t be waiting for him to figure his shit out. He dragged his legs under him, into a squat. Started listening—held his breath, turned his head, sniffed like an alley rat looking for scraps. He smelled smoke and petrichor. A strange chemical tang he didn’t recognize. And echoes, like the room was big and stone-walled. Not the cramped little warrens of Wichutown. Not even a regular room.
He crouch-crawled, balanced on hands and balls of his feet, until he found what he thought was a wall, rising out of the floor. Also stone, also cool, also damp. But it wasn’t a wall. It had rounded edges. It was a slagging pillar, just a little bit wider than he was. He followed his hands up the side, straightened slowly, was relieved to discover he could stand all the way upright. He kept reaching, feeling for the top. He thought from the way the circumference expanded as it got taller that the ceiling must be close, even if he couldn’t quite touch it.
He had a good idea where he was, in the most basic sense. Old-style stone building, the kind with the domed ceilings to bear all that weight, which meant the oldest parts of B-town.
How he’d gotten here from a second-floor Wichutown hostel remained grimly mysterious.
Corso leaned against the pillar. Felt better, having his back against something solid. He probed
his lip again, and the tip of the broken tusk. Oh voidspit, that hurt. He couldn’t remember when that had happened, either. Seemed like he should. Might’ve come from a faceful of stone floor when he landed here. The nosebleed could have come from that, too. Like someone had dropped him, or thrown him, without much care for his landing.
His eyes were beginning to adjust, or at least, they were trying to make sense of the darkness. That might be a less black area over there. Corso pushed off the pillar and shuffle-slid along the floor: push a foot out, feel around, then commit the other to joining it. Repeat, repeat, until yes, that was a vague blacker-than-black shape rising off the floor. He dropped back into a squat and hop-shuffled toward it. The floor sloped a little bit here, and the liquid gurgle was louder; probably a drain. His throat spasmed—not quite a swallow. There might be water. That’d be nice.
But light coming out of a cellar floor made no sense. A drain didn’t glow.
His skin tightened, prickled. His braids, stuck to his head and each other with sweat and blood, seemed to lift off his scalp like raised hackles.
Corso froze, mid-step. Swallowed his heart back down his throat and felt with cold fingers for his larger monofil. His hand didn’t want to close on the hilt: a combination of flesh scorched raw and aching joints. So he drew the monofil with his left hand, and swept out with the blade—slowly, carefully. Wouldn’t want to hit something solid on the edge and break the slagging thing—
The tip of the monofil poked into something, not solid at all, which at first yielded and then seemed to solidify and then actually pushed back. Sparks burst from that point of contact, momentarily blinding, showering Corso’s wrist and hand with little pinprick burns. Light rippled out from that same initial point like he’d dropped a rock in a pond: a patchwork of symbols, numbers, all briefly and brightly glowing, moving as if stitched to a whole, transparent cloth.
He kept hold of the monofil and blinked hard, trying to clear the flash. He’d just poked a set of hexes, clear enough. Didn’t need to be an arithmancer to figure that. Some kind of ward, behind which sat something darker than black, something with alien angles that didn’t reflect any light. Something that made Corso’s breath dry up in his throat.
He dropped into the smallest possible crouch and jabbed the wards again with the tip of his monofil. This time the ripple of disturbed hexes went all the way round, sketching a bubble perimeter of wards around that blacker-than-black thing on all sides—or no. Not quite. It was a broken perimeter. There was a hole in it, ragged, undulating on the edges as if it were laundry on a line caught in a breeze. He saw more sparks on the far side, a raw cascade of white and blue light, ozone and petrichor and something charred.
Corso thought, in the moment before the light exhausted itself, he saw a second shape on the floor beside the very black thing. An unmoving, raggedy shape, like a pile of clothing.
Or like a body, albeit a small one. Maybe a child, or a diminutive alw, or a wichu.
Corso took another deep sniff of the stone-and-damp. Smelled himself, sweat and blood. But not a lot of blood, like there would be if that heap of cloth had a bled-out body under it. If that pile of cloth was a body and not just stuff, they hadn’t died like Tzcansi had.
Or they hadn’t died at all.
Corso retreated from the Very Black Thing and the lump of rags and the broken ward in more or less the direction he’d come, shuffle-slide-step. Past the place where he’d landed (he thought, counting steps), and then farther. He found his jacta finally, by tripping over it, and picked it up, stuffing the monofil back in its sheath. Paused in his retreat to check the charge. Its indicator teslas were faint, two bars of seven and those two flickering. That meant he had maybe a handful of shots left in the cartridge.
He finally stopped when he reached a set of stone steps. He couldn’t see any light-leak from the top. Either they went up a very long way, or it was dark on the other side and he didn’t need to go running up and brain himself on a trap door. He pushed himself up one step at a time, his burned hand raised overhead and leading the way, his left curled tight around the jacta, pointing it in the direction of that Very Black Thing in case something moved over there. He kept looking that way, too—because you looked where you pointed your jacta (one of the early lessons) and because he couldn’t see much anyway.
His mind, his eyes, tried to fill in the darkness. Tried to tell him that something was moving over by the Very Black Thing. His ears told him better. No scraping. No rustling. Just quiet. Brood made noise when they did things. Slime-slick slapping, whispers, scratching sounds. There wasn’t anything happening across the cellar, no matter what his traitor eyes said. No matter how hard his heart beat and how many flashes it sent across his vision. Those were panic-lights. Those weren’t anything real.
Until his eyes settled on a consistent message. Red, they told him, dim red, like the charge teslas on your dying jacta. Corso squinted. Blinked. Pushed himself up another step, blinked, and tried again.
Definitely a faint red glow over there. The Very Black Thing had become the Dull Red Glowing Thing.
Corso shoved himself up the last couple of steps fast and discovered they were the last few steps when his hand bumped into a solid surface. Metal, from the texture and chill. A trap door? He took eyes off the Dull Red Glowing Thing long enough to look (uselessly) into the absolute dark and pressed his raw right hand on it—pain and rising panic, potent combination—and pushed. No. So he tucked the jacta into his coat and added a second hand, and his shoulders, and all the strength that he had.
The trap door wouldn’t budge.
Because, oh void and dust, it was a hatch, a real fucking hatch. His hands found the outlines of a metal wheel at the door’s relative center. Corso grabbed hold of the wheel and threw his whole weight into the twist. Got nothing at all, not even a squeak, which meant either he was weaker than he thought, or it was braced on the far side.
Because, think, idiot, whoever had thrown hexwork around the Dull Red Glowing Thing had damn sure locked the hatch when they left.
Which meant someone had thrown him down here—a theory supported by the bruising, the bloody nose, the broken tusk—and then they had locked him in.
He made a mallet of his fist and banged, hard, on the metal. The impact rattled the bones of fist and forearm. Bruised the flesh of his hand. And made a noise. Muted and meaty, but clearly audible.
Please, please there was someone up there.
Corso liked the idea of the old religion well enough. The Elements and the Aedis were so fucking antiseptic, so inclusive, like a tenju was exactly the same as an alw, no difference, all part of the ubiquitous Four. And maybe that was fine for the alwar and the humans and even the responsible tenju: spacers, all of them, who’d invented the Aedis in their voidships and stations. But he was Tanisian, dirtsider-born tenju, and all that aether-liquid-solid-plasma voidspit didn’t speak to him. He and Iari had argued about it, long and hard and irreparably. But, truth: banging on a hatch, trapped in a cellar with something bad, Corso didn’t call on those old tenju spirits, the iotun or Inanak or Axorchal One-Eye. Just please, thrown at large into the multiverse, to whoever, whatever, was listening.
He struck again, one-two-three. Then rest, then again, one-two-three. Then a rest, then one, hard and solitary. Then repeat, repeat, repeat. It was Confederate code, a pattern, to be used with light or sound or whatever lay closest at hand. Acute distress, render aid, for the love of all good things, help.
He beat out the distress pattern again. Then he stopped and pressed his ear against the hatch, the boltwork biting patterns into his cheek, whitefire pressure on the broken tip of his tusk. Then he started again.
And someone hit back.
The clang shook the hatch in its frame. Rang like a bell through the cellar’s close confines. Something far heavier than a man’s hand coming down on the hatch from above, damn sure. Like a battle-rig�
�s fist. And no one wore battle-rigs in B-town except the Aedis.
Corso shrank away from the hatch. Stuffed his bruised fist between his knees. Shot a look at the Dull Red Glowing Thing. There was also no way templars had thrown him down here. They were up there, that meant they were watching the place, that they knew about the Dull Red Glowing Thing, which was exactly the sort of neefa-shit the Aedis concerned themselves with. So then they were going to open that hatch and ask him how the fuck he’d gotten down here, and he wouldn’t be able to tell them.
Because—how had he gotten down here? Or had he been down here long enough that templars had just discovered the place? Void and dust. Didn’t matter. Templars up there might, might, let him call Iari. Or the veek. And they might know how he’d gotten down here, and more importantly, what to do about the Dull Red Glowing Thing, which was rapidly becoming the Bright Red Glowing Thing, and acquiring edges and a crouched silhouette that made Corso’s guts turn cold and watery.
The hatch overhead grated, metal on metal. Corso retreated a step down. Cast a nervous (oh, truth: terrified) look back at the (now) Very Bright Red Glowing Thing. Slagging templars were taking their time up there.
The hatch seal cracked. Cool air leaked through the gap. Sound came with it: a battle-rig’s metallic whine in close proximity, raised voices.
“The Knight-Marshal’s orders are not to open this, sir.”
“I’m aware, Corporal, but there’s someone down there.”
“But how, sir?”
“We can ask when we get them out.”
Corso wedged his face into the gap of fresh air. “My name’s Corso Risar. I’m a P.R.I.S. on retainer for Lieutenant Iari.”
“All right, Risar, easy.” A human voice, male, pitched low and condescending and kind. “I’m Lieutenant Peshwari. How’d you get down there?”
“I don’t know. But there’s something else down here, and—”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
