Nightwatch on the Hinterlands

by K. Eason

  “I mean—” Corso squeezed his eyes shut. “I was fighting a boneless in Wichutown and then there was a flash, and now I’m here, with that thing.”

  “What thing? Do you mean the altar?”

  The—what? “Maybe. It’s glowing. Red. Something’s happening with it.”

  Then came a flash from up there, leaking around the edge of the hatch, lightning quick and lightning bright and maybe imagined, on the cusp of a blink. Corso smelled petrichor, and ozone, and that dead air that meant Brood. Brood up there.

  He wasn’t surprised to hear a third voice, more distant, pitched high and urgent: “Sir!”

  Corso pressed himself against the hatch. Pushed, and thought for a moment he’d get somewhere. But the mechanism jammed on something. Or, or, that voidspit slagging templar was holding it down.

  “Private, what is it?”

  The voice drifted away. Corso tried the hatch again. It was like pushing solid stone. “Hey,” he called through the gap. “Hey, please. I need to get out of here.”

  Nothing. A smear of voices he couldn’t make out. Then the bang of heavy footsteps, coming fast.

  “Stand by,” said the condescending voice, only now Peshwari sounded stretched tight and tense. “You’re safer down there for the moment. We’ll be back.”

  The hatch slammed back into its frame with an echoing bang. The voices, the wisps of fresh air, ceased. Corso was left with his own heartbeat, his own salt-sweat-and-blood on his lips.

  He hooked undecided fingers around the wheel on the hatch. They hadn’t sealed it again. He might be able to push up and get out—

  He jerked his hand back with a hiss. Flexed fingers gone instantly, ominously numb. The skin felt burned. He sampled a fingertip. Felt the pillow-plump of a blister under his tongue. Cold like that came with Brood. And what else would make templars drop everything and slam the hatch on him? Safer down there, they’d said.

  Cold sweat collected on Corso’s forehead, his temples, began carving a path down his cheeks. His heart threatened to crawl out his throat, bring his guts up along with it. This was not, not a battlefield. (Worse than a battlefield: he had no battle-rig, no longcaster). All he had was retreat.

  He half slid, half fell, down the stairs to the cellar floor. He sucked in a lungful of basement-damp air, tasted metal on his tongue. That had to be the Very Bright Red Glowing Thing’s fault, that taste. And now he was stuck in here with it. He looked that way, more from reflex than any hope of new information.

  There was something moving over there. For a stuttering heartbeat, he was sure it was the boneless, that he hadn’t killed it; then sense and vision caught up on the backsurge of adrenaline. A boneless would’ve closed the distance already. Would’ve killed him while he slept. He’d been down here hours at least.

  The reddish glow had tilted toward purple, collecting at the bottom (the belly, Corso thought, it looks like a belly) of the Now Purple Glowing Thing. (The lieutenant had called it an altar.) Maybe it was that color shift that was fucking with his vision. Right. Except color shouldn’t warp the shape of things, shouldn’t make the pillars look like bending elbows. That’s what Brood-presence did. Bent light. Fucked with physics. He’d learned that at Windscar, early on.

  The idea of being down here, trapped with Brood, made his guts crawl into his throat. His heart pounded hard enough he saw white flashes on his vision’s periphery, like plasma discharge.

  Oh, fuck that. More like a fucking stroke.

  The anger helped. Gave him an anchor. Something to hold onto besides fear. He fumbled for the jacta, left-handed, and got it raised and leveled, got it braced with his wounded right hand.

  The hex-bubble-wards around the altar stuttered and flared at irregular intervals, in irregular locations, like something was poking them from the inside. He smelled petrichor again. Smelled something burning. The former pile of cloth was—oh shit—not where it had been. It was over by the Glowing Thing now, more upright, moving around over there, shadow on shadow behind the glow. Rough, uneven movements, like someone tired, or in pain. Maybe both.

  Oh, void and dust.

  Then it moved again, and his eyes carved details out of the purplish glow. A woman. Wichu. Eyes like bloody moons. Maybe the one the veek had sent him after, another victim, what was her fucking name?

  “Yinal’i’ljat,” he blurted, and the shuffling stopped.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Iari took the stairs three at a time and thank you Elements for the stabilizers on her rig. Wichu-sized stairs were shallow. She skipped the last five steps entirely and jumped, landed, pivoted.

  The front desk sat empty and abandoned.

  Blink, look, find Hvidjatte, please Hrok, he hadn’t bolted into a back room, out a back door, was there a kitchen in this place, where—

  Ah, there he was, frozen halfway between the desk and a side corridor like a rabbit caught in the open. He had a coat fisted up in one hand, not yet on his person, clearly snatched in some haste.

  Luki stood a little past the middle of the lobby. The rug rucked up where her rig had skidded across it, delicate little chairs from the lobby knocked askew and scattered around her. Her rig streamed water onto the carpet, made puddles on the floorboards. “Sir,” she said. “He tried to run.”

  “I see that.”

  And Hvidjatte could’ve made it, Iari thought. Even synning, Luki wouldn’t have been fast enough to cross that space before he’d gotten into the corridor. Something had made him lose nerve. Iari followed his stare to where Char filled the narrow doorway, turned slightly sideways to wedge themself through. The lintel sparked where their hexes touched, armor to wood. Char was even less able to cross that tiny space, but even the threat of the riev coming in had stopped Hvidjatte like someone had nailed his feet to the floor.

  The wichu moaned faintly. “Keep it outside. Please.”

  Huh. Iari glanced at Luki—whose expression, now that her visor was up, was pure puzzlement. “Char’s no danger to you, sir, they’re a templar.”

  “Just keep it outside!”

  “All right. Initiate—out, please.” Iari dragged one of the lobby chairs around and slammed it down between her and Hvidjatte. She gestured. “Then sit. We’ve got some questions.”

  “Start with why you tried to run,” Gaer said.

  Hvidjatte wrung his coat and stared at the chair as if it were live snakes. “I’m not under arrest.”

  “Not yet,” Iari said. “But answer the ambassador’s question. Why did you try to leave?”

  “It’s late. My husbands will worry.”

  “Lies are the prettiest green, sometimes,” Gaer drawled. “Like spring foliage.”

  “What? I’m not lying!”

  “Just like caranda buds. That color.”

  Iari tried to catch Gaer’s eye so that she could glare shut up and let me handle it at him. He might be looking back. Hard to tell, in this muted lighting, and his eyes sunk to featureless black. She pointed at the chair. “Hvidjatte. Sit. Now. Or I call Char back inside.”

  Hvidjatte did, clutching his coat to his chest like a shield. “You need a warrant for aura-interrogations. This is illegal.”

  Gaer hissed what she knew was vakar laughter, what Hvidjatte clearly interpreted as an intent to devour the nearest wichu, look at that flinch. “Obstructing an Aedian investigation is illegal. Concealing evidence of Brood activity is illegal. It’s also really stupid.”

  “I don’t know anything about Brood!”

  “Ssss. Not entirely true.”

  “Hvidjatte.” Iari was aware of just how big she was, in a battle-rig. Of just how small Hvidjatte was, perched on a wichu-sized chair in his own hostel lobby, feet drawn up so that he made the smallest target. She thought about crouching down, getting closer to eye-level. Sometimes that worked for building rapport. Sometimes it just made things worse. She remain
ed fully upright. “Were you here when the fire started?”

  A blink, obvious relief. “Yes.”

  “Truth,” said Gaer.

  “Do you know how it started?”

  “No.”

  “You’ve got extensive hexwork in this establishment. What can you tell me about that?”

  “I don’t know anything about hexes! I’m not an arithmancer! I’m not even an artificer.”

  “Half-truth, truth, truth.”

  “I don’t care if you’re the secret heir to the Fyrte-Femte fortune. I need to know what happened up there.”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Technically true.” Gaer squinted. “He’s very afraid. But I don’t think of you. Or even me.”

  “Who, then? Char?”

  “Oh yes, them too. But they are not his primary terror. And it is a terror.” Gaer cocked his head. “Although I think it’s related, somehow. Char and whomever he’s scared of.”

  “All right. Did you see someone go up there, before the fire?”

  “Yes.” Hvidjatte lifted his chin and kept his face pointed at her. Hard to tell where a wichu was looking, with blank white eyes. He might be looking at the wall behind her, for all she could tell. Or side-eyeing Gaer. “There was a braid-wearing tenju thug in a long coat.”

  Oh, ungentle Ptah. Iari breathed past a sudden surge of cold in her chest. That had to be Corso. But never assume—

  “Man or woman?”

  Hvidjatte was definitely looking at her now. “Man. He threatened me.”

  “Sss. No, he didn’t. He was looking for Yinal’i’ljat,” Gaer said, perfect pronunciation, “wasn’t he?”

  Hvidjatte flinched. “Yes.”

  “Truth.” Gaer’s plates flared. “Was she upstairs when the tenju went up? And don’t you lie to me.”

  “Yes.”

  Gaer’s nostrils clamped almost closed. Breath hissed softly through the gap. “She’s the one you’re so afraid of. Perhaps you should tell the lieutenant why.”

  Hvidjatte retreated to the limits of chair, his neck craned as far back as bones would allow. He raised his hands, palms out. A futile gesture. A pathetic one, like a man trying to hold up the sky. “She kept asking about the riev. Where to find them. How many there are in B-town. I thought at first that she was an artificer, which is the only reason I even mentioned Pinjat, said he’d know about the riev since he worked on them. I didn’t know she’d kill him. And then when he ended up dead, I thought if I said something, she’d kill me. Now can I go?”

  “Did she threaten you?” Iari asked.

  Hvidjatte’s face whipped toward her. Wisps of sweat-dampened hair clutched the sides of his face. “Yes.”

  “Partial truth.”

  “No, that’s all of it, I swear—”

  Gaer had been standing a little behind Iari. Now he stepped around her, liquid-quick, so that the syn jolted up her spine and made her lose breath. Reflex made her reach an arm out, half grab, half deflection, which Gaer avoided like she hadn’t moved at all. He thrust his face up close to Hvidjatte’s. His chromatophores had sunk to black, featureless and flat as his eyes. “Try again,” he said. “Setat m’rri—”

  And then came a sudden, surprising flood of Sisstish, danger-quiet, pitched too low for Iari to catch even one susurrated syllable.

  Then a pause, a pregnant moment, punctuated by the rain outside, by Hvidjatte’s sobbing breaths. By Gaer’s slow, through-the-plates-and-teeth exhale. By the rain beating on pavement, on Char, outside.

  Then Hvidjatte answered Gaer, in Sisstish, ragged but fluent, like a man running hard. And at the end, one more word, short and desperately sincere and repeated, repeated, until Gaer hissed and straightened, full vakari height, the top of his helmet a hairsbreadth from the criss-crossing beams. Hvidjatte contracted even more on the chair and shivered and stared, unblinking, at the floor.

  Gaer turned his back to Hvidjatte and leaned close, until all Iari could smell was angry vakar. Until all she could see were his eyes, one hazed behind the optic, the other naked and black and cold as the void.

  “Truth: the wichu pretending to be Yinal’i’ljat has a name. Jich’e’enfe. She told Hvidjatte who she was when she got here and asked for his help, which he gave her in the form of a room and board and someone else’s identity. He knows Yinal’i’ljat, the real Yinal’i’ljat, doesn’t leave Windscar often, and has no contact with her cousin, so he figured her name would be a safe loaner.”

  “He told you all that just now. All of that.”

  “Sisstish is an efficient language.” Gaer’s anger was cold and thin as spring ice. “He sent Corso up to her, expecting that she’d kill him.”

  Iari squeezed her eyes closed. Held her breath. Then she stiff-armed Gaer to one side, stepped forward, and stared down at a crumpled, sniffling Hvidjatte. “Do you know where she, this, this Jich’e’enfe, is now?”

  “No. Please, Lieutenant—” He left the sentence unfinished. Please don’t let that vakar kill me, probably.

  “Is Corso—the tenju who went up there—dead?”

  “I don’t know,” said Hvidjatte. “He wasn’t there after the fire. Neither of them were.”

  “Gaer?”

  “Oh, truth. And you’re right. She has to be the arithmancer, because that’s the only way she could’ve gotten out of that room. She must have hexed herself a portal.”

  Another breath. Two. Three. Iari turned around slowly. Gaer was still standing behind her, arms loose, hands open, a voidspit portrait of control. But his chin had dropped, and his plates were flat, and his chromatophores were a fixed, deliberate grey.

  “Explain.” Iari marveled at her tone. At how cool she sounded, while her vision washed red and the syn clawed along her nerves.

  “It’s a wichu innovation on old k’bal tech, related to the old tesser-hex gates that ships had to use for void-travel. The Protectorate banned the practice on vakari planets on religious grounds. What the wichu did on their territory was their business. Point is, a portal requires fixed points and substantial preparation—having those points already chosen and secure, all the hexes worked out in advance. They’re not something that can be done spontaneously. She would’ve had to have a portal-point already in that room. Which, if she was staying there, she would’ve had time to create.”

  “A portal-point you didn’t find.”

  “Correct.” Gaer cocked his head. “Fire is an excellent way to dispose of hexes that are inscribed on a flammable surface.”

  “Void and dust.” The fire at the public house, the fire at Tzcansi’s, the fire here could’ve all been points on the network, places this Jich’e’enfe had used. “So if she fled, like you think, she needed to have a fixed point already, somewhere else.”

  “Correct.”

  “And is there an easy way to detect these fixed points?”

  “No. I’d have to search for them specifically, and even then my optic might not be able to detect them, if she’s concealed them well. At the very least, I’d have to be in the vicinity. How near depends on how well-concealed the hexwork is. Given what we know about her operations so far, my guess is I’d have to be looking specifically for a portal, which I haven’t been. If I did find one, I might be able to see how many others are on that network, and to trace where they are.”

  “Might. Maybe. Not reassuring me, Gaer.” She took a steadying breath. “Could an arithmancer send Brood through a portal like this?”

  Gaer’s jaw-plates clicked, open-shut, open-shut. “In theory, one can send anything through a portal, although Brood originate in the void, and to cross that, you need . . . oh, setat.” His un-opticked eye widened, the second set of lids fluttering at the corners. “You’d need actual tesser-hexes on the portal.”

  “You found tesser-hexes in the warehouse. So that altar could be a portal-point. Or near one.
”

  Gaer hesitated. It was hard to read him sometimes: those features didn’t move much. But that narrow-eyed, both-sets-of-lids-pulled-halfway expression, that was pretty clear. “Yes,” he said slowly. “That’s possible. But besides the issue of how you’d power a real tesser-hex without a plasma core, which I did not find, I also put up wards. She couldn’t use any portal on that altar now. Unless,” he added, “she’s just better than me again, and she gets through them.”

  Iari let that float unanswered and sealed her visor. Closed her eyes and leaned her forehead against the HUD. “Comm,” she murmured. And when the light greened and steadied: “Aedis dispatch, this is Lieutenant Iari. Patch me through to Corporal Heph, or whoever’s holding the warehouse location.”

  “Copy that. Stand by.” There was a fistful of dead-comm seconds, and then dispatch came back online. “Sorry, Lieutenant. I can’t raise them.”

  She stepped around Gaer, around Luki. Char moved aside as she poked her head through the doorway and looked up at a storm-blackened sky. Lightning flickered up there, slivers of blue in folded shadows. “Storm interference?”

  She could almost hear dispatch shaking her head. “Possible. You’re coming in clearly, but Lieutenant Peshwari’s in Lowtown. Might be some local storm intensity. Or, you know. Just normal trouble.”

  “Peshwari’s on duty tonight?”

  “Yes sir. But it’s been quiet. No alerts.”

  “Copy.” Iari hesitated. “Try to raise them for me again, will you? And patch me through to the Knight-Marshal. Urgent.”

  “Copy that, Lieutenant. Stand by.”

  A moment of dead comms, and then Tobin’s voice filled her helmet.

  “Lieutenant. Report.”

  “Sir. We’re in Wichutown.” She told him, in brief strokes, what they’d learned. What they guessed. “Not sure where this Jich’e’enfe is now, sir. We think maybe in Lowtown.”

  Or wherever Corso was. Guilt gnawed at her, and worry, and anger.

  “Copy that, Lieutenant. Stand by,” Tobin said. A moment’s dead-comm silence, enough for, oh, one Knight-Marshal to speak to the other one in his office. Then Tobin came back. “Are you sure of the name? There’s no Jich’e’enfe”—almost no mangling—“on the artificer registry.”