Nightwatch on the Hinterlands

by K. Eason

  Anger bubbled up in his chest, boiling away the chill. “I know who you are. You’re the slagging arithmancer who—” He shut his mouth hard. If he was right—and his gut said he was—then she was the person who’d blown up Iari, and that meant she had skill enough to get past the veek. Maybe don’t poke too hard at her. Maybe try to figure out, “Why am I here? Why are you?”

  She didn’t answer him. Of course she didn’t. She made a pushing motion at the hex-bubble. “I’m on the wrong side. This needs to go away.”

  He forbore mentioning the very obvious hole in the bubble, on the backside of the Glowing Thing. Was it even slightly possible she didn’t know it was there? That she couldn’t see that? He blinked. Maybe she couldn’t. Maybe he should pretend he couldn’t, either.

  “Wrong side of what?”

  “Terrible liar.” She moved a little left along the bubble’s perimeter. Four abortive little steps and she reversed direction. He would call it pacing, except she was moving like something held together with string and wire and spit.

  And she could tell if he lied. Probably some voidspit slagging neefa-shit arithmancy, because don’t forget that’s what she was, that’s why the slagging veek had said go find her.

  (And remember, for next time: nothing good ever came out of veek territory. Not veek, not wichu. Probably not k’bal, either, but they were all gone so who knew about them.)

  “I see, I don’t know what, some kind of bubble. Some kind of slagging hex. I can’t do hexes.”

  She turned to look at him again. Her featureless wichu eyes caught the Glowing Thing’s redness, borrowed it, made it their awful own. “I don’t need a hex out of you. I need you to cross the ward, from your side to my side.”

  “The fuck would I do that?”

  “Because the riev are coming.”

  That was . . . probably not good. Maybe that’s why the templars had retreated. “Let them get you out, then.”

  “They can’t cross this barrier either.” She held out her hands to him, palms out. They were smudged, dark, as if she’d been rubbing her hands on soot. “It takes someone living. Riev aren’t alive. Let me out, and I’ll keep you safe. But if you don’t, if you don’t: then they’ll come, and they’ll rip you apart.”

  A faint grating sound came from the hatch, like something dragged across it. Corso caught himself turning to look. Blinked and gritted teeth and made himself keep staring at Yinal’i’ljat. “Riev don’t kill people.”

  “I think you know better.”

  That dead wichu artificer, Pinjat, smashed flat by riev. That had been her doing. She’d made that riev kill someone, which should be impossible, because riev only killed Brood and veeks and not even them anymore.

  Great time for a revelation. Corso worked backward up another stair. The chill seeping through the hatch found him again. It prickled over his scalp, through his braids. He reached back and up, right-handed.

  “Don’t,” she said. “You’ll die if you open that hatch. There are Brood. Boneless and slicers. I opened a fissure up there.”

  Cold sweat slicked his face, a fresh wave of it. He sucked air into lungs gone tight and small. “The fuck would you do that? Seems like a bad idea, Brood up there, you down here. Seems like you’re trapped.”

  “Not if you cross the wards. That will break them, and let me out.”

  “What, you going to control the Brood, too, like the riev?” He shook his head. The hooks in his braids scraped over his coat, too loud. “Better work on that. I saw what happened to Tzcansi.”

  Yinal’i’ljat staggered away from the bubble’s edge, back to the Red Glowing thing. She leaned both hands on it. The Glowing Thing redly illuminated the line of her cheekbone, her nose. She looked—not angry, exactly. Frustrated? Grim.

  “I liked Tzcansi. But she got ambitious. I told her, wait, I didn’t have Oversight yet, the riev might be unpredictable, use them for show. Then she smashed up that bar. I said I’d handle Pinjat, she said she could scare him. And then all these fucking templars show up.” Her hands moved over the Glowing Thing. “But I have Oversight now.”

  The fuck was Oversight? Something else Iari probably needed to know. It sounded important. And bad.

  Corso shoved a shoulder against the hatch. The metal shifted a fraction—not resealed, then, just blocked. It was too much weight for him to shift on his own. And the metal was cold as the void. His shoulder ached after, through coat and clothing, all the way down to the bone. Brood up there already. Riev coming. At least riev would kill Brood. Keep each other busy.

  But—templars up there, too. That meant the Aedis would know about the fissure. They’d come. The templars always came. All he had to do was—wait. Keep this crazy bitch talking.

  “I don’t care about Tzcansi,” he said. “Did me a favor, killing her. Not here because of her.”

  Her hands stilled. “Then why?”

  “I got paid to deliver a message. The Five Tribes ambassador’s looking for you.”

  Her lips curled back. Her teeth looked bloody. White stained red by the Glowing Thing. “Always the vakari. Do you know, they used to power their voidships by splitting the void? They thought Brood were just unpleasant side effects. Pests to be managed, contained, destroyed. And then, even after they knew better, they kept doing it. Keep poking. Vakari are the reason we have a Weep. This multiverse would be better off if we eradicated them.”

  “B-town has one fucking veek in residence, one, and you’re trying to tear the place apart to kill him? That’s a little extreme.”

  “B-town is proof of concept,” she said. “You don’t understand.”

  “Then explain it to me.”

  “Come here and cross the barrier. Break it. Let me out, and I’ll tell you.”

  Metal banged overhead, something slamming (being slammed) into the hatch. “Not happening.”

  “There is no reason to help the veeks or the templars.”

  “There’s no reason to help you, either.”

  “Of course there is. Self-interest. I told you. You won’t survive out there, without me.”

  “Then I’ll die out here, and you watch from in there. How’s that?”

  She stared at him. Then she struggled back to her feet. Slowly, slowly—but not like it hurt her to stand. Deliberately, defiantly, the way people accustomed to getting their own way did after someone told them no. She snarled something in a language he did not understand, and the Glowing Thing flared bright as arterial blood. She lurched back toward the bubble’s perimeter, made fists of both hands and punched. The barrier flashed, bright as daylight off mirrors, blinding and whitefire hot. The wave of that impact blew Corso backward, slammed him spine-first into a step, sent a whole new blast of whiteness sheeting across his vision.

  Windscar-winter cold blasted up from the direction of the Glowing Thing. He knew what was coming. Knew, because they had a particular smell, because he’d been in the surge, even if he hadn’t made it to Saichi.

  She was opening a fissure down here. She was calling Brood.

  * * *

  —

  Black fog met them at the warehouse doors. It seeped from the inside, like ink turned to aether. It coiled along the pavement, smoked up the walls. Iari reckoned it was a good half-meter deep in there.

  “The hell.” Luki kicked at the pavement. “Sir, that’s ice.”

  And snow, too—frozen crystals of rain, anyway, spraying white and collecting on the pavement. Iari’s HUD reported a precipitous drop in ambient temperature, from damply unpleasant autumn to the killing cold of a deep winter in Windscar.

  Char, impervious, drifted alongside—not quite point, but not bringing up the rear, either. “Lieutenant. There is a Weep fissure nearby.” Iari could see every line and glowing stroke of the riev’s hexwork.

  “Sss. That’s impossible.”

  Iari grunted. �
�You’re the one who said Jich’e’enfe could’ve made a fissure in her room at the hostel.”

  “I wasn’t serious. Not a real fissure. I just thought she had control of the Brood and oh, setat. What if she can?”

  “Seal your rigs,” Iari said, because that was the obvious order, unnecessary and comforting because of that.

  “Char,” she said. “Get us inside the warehouse.”

  The locking mechanisms were offline: dead grey panels, no spark when Char jerked the doors open.

  Iari raised her shield like she could push back the void, the fog, whatever. Her headlamp stabbed into the murk. Peshwari had set up a wall of crates, presumably meant as a barrier in case someone tried to force entry. Iari hugged close to them, noting the rime collected on the surfaces. She checked her HUD readouts. Still deadly cold out there, but creeping warmer.

  “Peshwari!”

  The fog swallowed the name. There were no movement alerts on her HUD, either. Dread throbbed in her gut. This kind of quiet meant disaster had been and gone already.

  Oh Ptah, oh Hrok, it really was more than a little like Saichi. Then, the fissure-smoke had spread into the surrounding valleys, rendering everything permanent twilight, sending the temperatures into deep winter even though it had been spring. That fog had rendered the aetherships largely useless. That had been high command’s reason for sending a unit of templars into the valley. Reconnaissance, and perhaps some judicious sabotage.

  Both goals accomplished, but at a cost.

  Memory washed red behind her eyelids. The syn responded, sheeting under her skin. She swallowed dust and bitter. This wasn’t Saichi. There wasn’t some hulking Brood in this warehouse, ready to crack her rig.

  “I was wrong,” said Gaer then. “There is a very, very small fissure, over by the trap door.”

  Iari moved that way, around the barrier of crates, and yes, there. The fissure hung near the trap door, several meters over the warehouse floor: a darker-than-black gash out of which the not-fog did not so much spill as coagulate, dripping into gravity and atmosphere. A tunneler—or something like a tunneler, limbless and segmented and apparently blind—lay in shiny coils on the floor beneath. There was evidence all along its body of whitefire damage, of battle, of wounding: segments pried apart, piles of steam and slime where its guts had spilled out. Its hide was already starting to smoke as the atmosphere began eating it away.

  “Oh, Chaama’s bones. Someone’s under that thing.” Luki’s headlamp centered on a fragment of battle-rig just visible under a coil. A greave, looked like, and part of a knee-joint. She knelt beside the tunneler and jabbed it with her sword. The whitefire blade sank a few centimeters into the hide. A little more of its insides came spilling out and spread black and smoking onto the floor.

  “I think that’s Ly’s rig, but where’s the rest?”

  Of Ly, of the rest of the templars. The answer was likely the same. Inside that Brood. Under it. Eaten away entirely in a flood of effluvia.

  Ungentle Ptah. Luki was young enough she hadn’t fought in the last surge. She’d never seen this before. There was no kind way to teach this lesson.

  And no time for mourning, not now. Iari said sharply, briskly, “Get up, Corporal, and stop poking that thing. Those guts touch your rig, you’ll have your first rig-breach. You and Char, sweep the warehouse. See if there’s anyone else.”

  There would be, and they’d likely be dead, too.

  “Yes sir.” Luki lurched away from the fissure, and the tunneler. Char cocked their head—at Iari, then at Luki, at the fissure. Then, no comment, the riev followed Luki.

  Gaer edged around the tunneler. “If that fissure spits anything else out, we’re in trouble.”

  “You think it will?”

  “The temperature readouts indicate it’s warming up, so I guess that means it’s resealing. But truth, Iari, I have no setatir idea. This is not arithmancy of any kind I recognize, wichu or vakari. Perhaps Jich’e’enfe prayed to whatever gods that altar is meant to represent.”

  “Prayer doesn’t work like that.” If it did, if it ever had, Saichi wouldn’t’ve happened. Windscar, either, or the dozen battles won and lost along the fissure in the waning years of the last surge. “Can you do something arithmantic to hurry the fissure’s closing?”

  “Not a prayer.”

  Unfunny laughter clotted her throat. She squeezed her eyes closed. The syn throbbed under her skin, through her bones. Dead templars and dead Brood and a voidspit fissure, and she was still alive. Saichi all over again.

  “Sir!” And then Luki choked on whatever she meant to say next, so Iari knew what she’d found, if not a specific who.

  “By the hatch,” said Char.

  Peshwari’s battle-rig lay across the cellar door, sprawled and twisted in ways neither rig nor body inside had been intended to bend. There was a crack in the plating just under the dorsal power cell. Frost had collected there, where the venting air inside had frozen on its way out. There was—oh, ungentle Ptah, other fluid frozen there, too. A lot of it. Almost black, in spite of Iari’s headlamp’s best effort (still watery, still weak, in the fissure-effect).

  Iari retracted her shield and turned him partway over, gently as she could. Oh, try the impossible. Sometimes the Elements delivered a miracle. “Peshwari? You hear me?”

  Gaer came and squatted beside her. He touched Peshwari’s rig with a fingertip. “No aura.”

  Not today. She’d used up her miracles at Saichi. Tobin’s rig had looked like this, except the runoff there had been liquid, and obviously, unmistakably red as it ran out of him. Iari pressed her hand over the gap in Peshwari’s armor (she had then, too, with Tobin). Crystals of frozen blood crunched under her gauntlet, squeezed up between her fingers. The rig yielded a little bit to her pressing, sank further into the wound. At Saichi, Tobin’s rig had been pierced and then peeled. Claws, not impact. And Tobin had been breathing in there, conscious and issuing orders.

  One of which had not been get me out of here. Peshwari wouldn’t’ve said that, either, if he’d survived the initial hit. The man had been an ass most the time, always a little bit of a bigot, but he’d died fighting. Had, by all evidence, flung himself at something—that tunneler, the fissure, whatever came running out—and been flung back hard enough that he broke on landing.

  She started trying to move him, one-handed—because damned if she’d put her weapon aside with that fissure still open, no matter Gaer’s suggestion it was trying to seal.

  Gaer added his efforts to hers. “It looks like he bent the door when he landed. It also looks”—as Peshwari shifted aside, leaving a smear of bloody ice—“like the wheel was already dogged. Whoever, or whatever, was down there, they were letting it out.”

  Iari darted a glance back, at the fissure. “Luki,” she said. “Char. I need you to stay up here. If something goes wrong down there, or if that fissure tries to get big again, you close this hatch and you make sure it won’t open. Then you get out and report to Knight-Marshal Tobin.”

  “Sir,” said Luki. She didn’t sound happy.

  “Yes, Lieutenant,” said Char. The riev had eyes only for the fissure.

  Iari caught her breath on the last name she meant to say. Gaer was—Hrok’s breath, Gaer was, had been, just her assignment. Someone to escort on his diplomatic (and more often, recreational) forays into B-town. Someone who complicated her evening hours with requests to experience the local culture. It wasn’t his job to come with her into whatever was down there. It was hers. He wasn’t even part of her unit.

  “Gaer—”

  “I know. Yes. I’m with you, you have point.” Lightly, easily, as if this was a small matter not worth his attention.

  “Can’t ask you to do this.”

  “Sss. You’re not. I’m volunteering.” He pointed his visor at her. His tone slid into serious. “Though you should let me go first. I’m
the arithmancer. If you trust me.”

  Iari took hold of the hatch wheel with both hands. “Fine. You take point.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  A gust of cold came out of the hatch. Gaer eased himself through the gap. Not even all the way inside, his HUD lit up with motion detected. Not unexpected, and also not a problem. He had an array of battle-hexes preloaded on the rig for just such occasions, which involved things generally lethal. Then his arms-turing told him it had acquired a target, something his jacta could hit. It couldn’t be Brood, then, because his HUD hadn’t seen them all setatir night.

  Jich’e’enfe, he thought next. Then he saw a whirlwind of hook-studded braids and a fluttering leather coat. Corso—that man had the blessing of all the dark lords, every Element—scrabbling across the cellar floor, careening off pillars. He sprawled flat, suddenly, tripping over apparent nothing, and whipped around to stab (with a monofil?) at what Gaer’s visor said was empty air.

  Which meant Brood. And yes, there, when he squinted past his HUD’s display, using his flesh-and-blood vision: a darker-than-black flicker at the limits of his headlamp, asymmetrical, with a glowing pentad of eyes like malicious moons. Gaer unclipped his jacta and fired a whitefire bolt over Corso’s head—please, let the man keep flat—and missed the boneless, fine, that was expected with Brood, but he startled it. It slewed into the dark, toward the source of the cold, said the HUD, which was where Gaer’s memory placed the altar.

  Gaer tucked his shoulder and dove, skipped all the stairs and rolled back to his feet at the bottom (Iari’s rig wouldn’t do that; but SPERE liked a more flexible frame). He landed almost on top of Corso—who could scrabble very fast, having crossed a swath of cellar floor on hands and slipping boots and sheer terror. Gaer grabbed a fistful of shredded leather coat and hauled him upright. Corso was bleeding, Gaer noted. Nose. Ears. Both hands.

  Then came a flash of an Aedian shield, and Iari shouldered past Gaer and advanced into the cellar. Behind her, the hatch banged shut.