Nightwatch on the Hinterlands

by K. Eason

  Gaer nodded. Splayed his hand in a cipher-speak understood.

  “It is imperative,” Karaesh’t continued, “that the altar is found and recovered and its nature studied. Your data said it had seven faces?”

  Right. Not talking about k’bal ruins on Tanis. Talking about the altar. Gaer scrambled to recall the threads of the conversation before Karaesh’t’s contrived interruption and gathered them up in shaky mental fingers. “Yes. Seven faces which appeared to double as sacrificial surfaces.”

  “Perhaps an affiliation with Seven Strike, then. They have some numerological superstition attached to that number.”

  “And seven rumored leaders, if I recall my briefings.” Of which Jich’e’enfe might have been one. Assuming she was dead. Surely she was dead.

  Karaesh’t pushed herself back from the table, to the limits of the chair’s dimensions. “Sacrificial surfaces on the altar, you said. Elaborate.”

  “Sacrifices. Living things made dead. There were blood-gutters. And stains. Jich’e’enfe appeared to be fueling her arithmantic endeavors with some kind of exchange of energy.”

  “Some kind of . . . exchange with another power? As in . . . a god? We’ve got no evidence Seven Strike is anything other than a secular, political organization.”

  “She could be part of one of the other insurgencies. Or”—awful thought—“a new religious organization.”

  Karaesh’t’s face said she’d thought of that, too, and she found the idea no more palatable. “Gaer. I do understand you believe that SPERE cannot function without your oversight, but I assure you—we are looking into such things. Even before your report. Your very overdue report.”

  “My apologies, Karaesh’t. I was remiss. I won’t repeat that error.”

  “Best you don’t.” Report on schedule, her hands told him. Hand cipher didn’t have words for or else. Karaesh’t’s expression, and the acrid sting of her sweat, made that sentiment clear enough.

  Then she thrust the chair back with more force and noise than was necessary. “That will conclude our interview. It’s a long flight back to Seawall, and I do not wish to impose on Aedian hospitality.”

  He inclined his head. Started to stand, hands braced on the table, but she waved him back. “No need. Stay where you are.” Her expression softened (so to speak: a relaxing of eyelids, of jaw-plates), a spangling of genuine sympathy across her cheek pigments. “You really do look awful.”

  * * *

  —

  “K’bal were here? On Tanis?” Corso sat back in his char. He bounced a look between Iari, seated across from him, and massive, impassive Char looming at her shoulder. “That’s a joke. The veek’s joking.”

  He cut himself on the serrated edge of Iari’s scowl. Right. “I don’t mean Gaer is the veek, he’s all right, I mean—”

  Char interrupted. “SPERE Commander Karaesh’t did not seem like a vakar who jokes.”

  Which was ironic, considering the company. Not Char, Corso didn’t expect them to have much in the way of humor. But once upon a time, before the Aedis, Iari’d had a sense of humor. He remembered a much younger version (of her, of him): uncapped tusk, no scars, teasing what-was-his-name, Melhak? Melhik? who’d had an aversion to being dirty and who’d died face-down in the mud that winter. No. It wasn’t the Aedis that’d changed Iari. It was the voidspit, slagging surge and the fucking Brood.

  Now there was clear exasperation on Iari’s face: pursed lips, narrow eyes. Voice cool and hard as Char’s stylized face. “You could shout louder, maybe. I don’t think they heard you all the way at the Aedis.”

  “They didn’t hear me out in the hallway.” Corso’s office looked like neefa-shit, he knew that. But the hexwork was good. Iari knew it, too. Bet that’s why they’d met here, despite the attention her battle-rig got in this district. Her battle-rig, and every hexed centimeter of Char. Iari wanted a face-to-face. Didn’t trust this information to electronic missives.

  She could’ve called him up to the Aedis, though. He would’ve gone. But maybe he wasn’t the sort she could bring through the gates more than once.

  Whereas a P.R.I.S. associated with anyone who walked through his very well-hexed, surveillance-proof (as much as anything could be) door. Even templars outfitted for war.

  “SPERE,” he said, coming back to the point. “Fucking SPERE. They’re your source? The hell are you talking to them for?” Oh. Oh. Now he got it. “That’s who Gaer works for.”

  “You sell that information to anyone, you breathe it outside these walls,” Iari said, light and colorless and entirely earnest, “I will find you and kill you myself.”

  “Wouldn’t tell me at all, you think I’d do that.” The threat stung a little bit anyway. Was a time she’d known him better than that. “Why isn’t Gaer here?”

  Iari’s gaze broke. Found some spot on the wall past Corso’s shoulder and drilled deep. “Because he still has trouble crossing the Aedis courtyard.”

  It was Corso’s turn to look elsewhere. At the patch in Char’s chestplate. “He going to be all right? He getting better?”

  “Yeah,” said Iari. And from Char, “The ambassador is expected to make a full recovery, in time. He is a poor patient.”

  “He know you came to me?”

  Iari’s gaze snapped back to his. Locked on like an arms-turing. “He does. He told me exactly what to tell you, so that’s what I’m doing.”

  Corso grunted. Good. He’d’ve helped her regardless—she knew that, wouldn’t be here otherwise—but he was happier knowing she wasn’t . . . whatever. Betraying Gaer, who’d thrown himself at Brood and at that wichu sorcerer (an old word, pre-Landing, but Corso didn’t have a better one) for Corso’s sake. Gaer had been fucking brave, a fucking hero. He owed Gaer.

  “So SPERE says there were k’bal here during the Expansion, and the Protectorate came and wiped them out, and that has . . . what, something to do with all the rest of that shit?”

  Iari stared at him, unblinking.

  “Right. Never mind. Above my pay grade.”

  “No. We don’t know, Corso, that’s the whole point of talking to you. SPERE tipped us to a k’bal presence on Tanis, probably long gone. Now, that could be bad intel. Gaer doesn’t think it is, but he’s got no proof. If it’s true, then we need to know where they were, and if they left something behind that might’ve been used to make that altar. Records, or, or whatever arithmancers leave behind. Or we need to know if what they left has been looted by wichu separatists intent on bringing on the next surge, and if we can look forward to more encounters like Jich’e’enfe. And if that is what’s happening, or what’s happened—we deal with it.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Yeah.”

  They stared at each other. Corso snatched up a stray stylus and rolled it between his fingers. “You got any leads where?”

  “That’s your job. You’re the one who knows all the pre-Confederation trivia. The stories. The religions, the customs. Find out if there’re folktales. Someone out there’s got a gran who heard stories about when the xenos came. Maybe as monsters, maybe as—I don’t know. Strange shapes in the mist or the forest or whatever. K’bal had multiple heads and cranial vents.”

  “You want me to find out if someone’s grandmother knows stories about k’bal landing on the other side of the continent.”

  “It’s not a big continent. The fissure caused a lot of social upheaval. Whole villages moved, most of them to Windscar.” She grimaced. “I have to tell you this?”

  “No. Truth, Iari, you’d be better off asking a scholar somewhere. The uni in Seawall, maybe. Some professor of obscure literature.”

  “The universities are almost all alwar. Not known for their native ethnographies, are they? And besides. K’bal didn’t land in Seawall. Or if they did, they didn’t stay. The Protectorate wouldn’t have been able to send assassins into the heart of the capi
tal city unnoticed, even before the Confederation.”

  “But the Protectorate can’t cough up coordinates where they did land their assassins. Shorten the job for us?” Us, now. Fuck. She had him doing it.

  “They haven’t so far.” Iari grimaced like she’d bitten something sour. “Gaer thinks maybe the coordinates are too close to the fissure. Or in the fissure.”

  Corso tapped the stylus hard on the edge of his display. Tap-tap, like he meant to crack one or both of them. In the fissure. In it. But that gave him a place to start looking. He put the stylus down and made a fist of his nervous fingers. “Fuck, Iari.”

  “If I were k’bal and running from vakari, that’s where I’d’ve gone. North. Before the fissure, there was nothing out there but a few villages.”

  And Saichi, which had almost been a city before it became a battlefield during the surge. But before that—before the Confederation’s annexation of Tanis—it hadn’t been anything at all. A collection of rocky hills and scrub trees. He’d grown up near there, in a little hamlet that wasn’t there anymore. Still had family, maybe. Friends. Memories. Didn’t want to go back north. Never again, he’d said, after he’d gotten out of the army.

  Iari knew it. Iari knew all of that. And here she was, anyway.

  “You’re asking a lot.”

  “I know.” She grimaced again. Stopped just short of an apology—which was good, because if she’d said I’m sorry he’d tell her get out, get lost, fuck off. She wasn’t sorry. And he wouldn’t tolerate condescension.

  But who else could she ask? He imagined how it’d gone. Someone saying to her, Find out if the veeks are lying about something no one’s ever heard before, go on, Iari, you’re from Tanis, aren’t you?

  And she was . . . but B-town raised, in the Aedis orphanage. Never a foot in the hinterlands—the real hinterlands, the villages and the countryside and the places where no one spoke Comspek on purpose. Iari’s own Tanisian tenju was book-learned dialect, accented.

  Her superiors, that Knight-Marshal of hers—spacer. Human. Even less from here than she was. But they were supposed to save the slagging world, this one and all the others. That’s what templars did.

  And she was asking him to help.

  Corso found himself looking at Char, of all people: patch-welded chestplate, hexes faintly visible, that half-reconstructed arm restoring their torso to symmetry. Char’d lost their original arm up there in Saichi. And most of their division. If he’d been stupid enough to re-up his enlistment after the battle at Windscar, he’d’ve been there, too. Been dead up there, like most everyone else. Like Char’s friends, because he knew now riev could have those. And they had joined the templars, same as Iari.

  Because templars were supposed to save the world.

  So ask why Gaer was doing this. Because it was his job, maybe, but Corso thought there was more. Curiosity. Maybe same reason Corso was going to agree: Iari was asking.

  He’d dodged dying so many times. Run from it. Iari kept dragging him back . . . and dragging him back alive, and more or less well. Maybe he should just give up, give in, go along.

  “If there’s evidence the k’bal were on Tanis, I’ll find it for you.”

  “Good,” said Iari. “Thank you, Corso. I mean that.”

  He waved off her gratitude. Worse than condescension, that. Fuck. Then he made what was probably the biggest mistake of his life, bet he wouldn’t regret it. “But I want in on the investigation. When I find something—when, unless that commander of Gaer’s was lying—you take me with you. You’ll need a guide. A, a translator. Your tenju’s shit. You’ll get yourself lost up there, you templars. Fall into a crevasse.”

  Looking at Char when he said it, because Char was safer. Char offered no argument, which might be deference to their lieutenant, but Corso thought the riev was . . . smiling, though that was impossible. Something in the cant of their head, the sudden glimmer in those tesla eyes. Approval.

  So then he dared to look at Iari. Who sat back. Who blinked at him. “Huh.”

  Not a yes, but not a no, either.

  To Corso, that felt like a victory.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This year, y’all. This year was rough—but everyone knows that. And everyone also knows that writing a book is hard. But this year, everything was extra hard, for so many reasons, and so my gratitude to and for the following folks is even greater:

  To the fantastic folks at DAW for getting this book out into the world.

  To Tan Grimes-Sackett, both for all the brainstorming and for being masochistic enough to keep reading my first drafts.

  To Lisa Rodgers, who wrangles deadlines and emails and phone calls and levels up my writing, every time.

  To Loren, who knows when to switch the coffee out for something stronger.

  And a special shout-out to the Friday Night D&D group, because without y’all, this year of Zoom and Doom would’ve been so much harder and darker.

  Thanks, everyone. You’re the best.

  About the Author

  K. Eason is a lecturer at the University of California, Irvine, where she and her composition students tackle important topics such as the zombie apocalypse, the humanity of cyborgs, and whether or not Beowulf is a good guy. Her previous publications include the On the Bones of Gods fantasy series with 47North, and she has had short fiction published in Cabinet-des-Fées, Jabberwocky 4, Crossed Genres, and Kaleidotrope.

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