It took only minutes, however, before he realized he was being followed. Diggery paused at a grocery in front of the stacks of gleaming fresh vegetables and used the reflection of the shop window to examine the crowd. He found them: two Haphans, dressed as civilians, bracketing him from both sides of the street. He saw that they were studying him closely as they paused on the sidewalk.
If they approached him or even addressed him, he would have to answer, and that would not be good. Sesserans were not unwelcome in the Quarter, but they rarely visited without a good reason. Without a good reason they were interesting rarities. He might be bundled away for scrutiny in a cell somewhere, and then who knew what would happen?
Diggery quickly stepped into the grocery and found the owner packing delivery boxes next to his wife. Diggery knew that a Tachba delivery boy would speak to the female.
“La, a cart with the victuals in the back,” he told her self-importantly.
The woman shot her husband an exasperated look.
“No vitties,” the man snapped. “Too late! Sun is down. Heap big trouble. Get going.”
He jerked his head to a door at the rear of the grocery.
Diggery bobbed his head and exited through the rear door. This being an old Sesseran building only superficially renovated, a mere six pointless doors later he was in the throughway where deliveries were received. The Observers club opened onto a similar throughway because the ancient granite buildings of Ville Emsa showed a dizzying lack of variety. At the moment, the predictability helped Diggery make his escape.
The men tailing him would run themselves ragged trying to trace his path through the sieve-like building. Unless they have even average intelligence, Diggery realized, in which case they’re probably sprinting this direction even now.
He strode quickly to the street and crossed it, entering a dress shop. He edged behind a mannequin and peered past its huge, flared hat. Sure enough, his ‘civilians’ trotted up, and one entered the throughway while the other scanned the street.
These were no scrags. With more time to study them, Diggery noticed their heavy boots, which were comfortably broken-in through long use. The toes and heels were anomalously heavy under the slimming tailoring of their pant legs. Diggery could not tell if the men were also armed. There was no melodrama with half-drawn sidearms or hands in the jacket. Had he been seeing them for the first time, he would have thought they were merely lost, looking around for Ville Emsa’s famously absent street signs. After a short discussion, they jogged up the street, away from his hideout.
Diggery thought it interesting, even flattering, to finally be so sought after.
“I wonder if a gentleman might desire to purchase a dress.”
He turned and beheld a pretty Haphan shop girl.
“Exquisite,” he said, making her blush. “I don’t need a dress, but perhaps an ad-dress? Could the charms of such an exquisite sylph also run to navigation?”
“Goodness. Where might a gentleman might wish to be directed?”
“I don’t wish to be indelicate, but I am fresh from the front. I am unpresentable and filthy—” Diggery spread his arms and glanced down at himself, immaculate by Sesseran standards. Nonetheless, the girl glanced at his uniform and gave a start of horror. “I must present to my superiors. I hope an exquisite girl might direct me to the baths, the baths for which Ville Emsa is so famous.”
“Baths!” The girl gave a sage nod but couldn’t hide another flush. “I understand there is a lot of dirt at the front, I’ve read the gazettes. Closest is Handamom’s, in the Handamom building, two streets up. But it is dark and seedy, and you may be accosted by every sort of woman, even the worst kinds. The best choice is—”
“The first will do fine, gem,” Diggery said quickly. “I shall think of you as I relax.”
“Oh.”
Checking the street again, Diggery eased out of the door and walked briskly up the sidewalk. Damned if he would get picked out and chased again before he’d boiled all his lice and met a pretty girl. It would be worth the week’s pay to sit in something hot, drink something cold, and to hear some imperial Haphan language again, complete paragraphs running fluidly off the tongue. Diggery’s accent was northern, but his teachers had been transplants from the capital, and he could mimic the Falling Mountain dialect perfectly. He would not be challenged on that, at least, if someone were gauche enough to ask him a personal question.
At Handamom’s, he stripped and collected his towel from the dowager behind the counter. She looked him up and down. “You must introduce yourself to Trixie. She enjoys disfigurements from the war.”
Diggery gave a long-suffering sigh. “But can she talk?”
“If she’s talking, you’re doing it wrong.”
Diggery spent his first thirty minutes drinking steadily and circulating through the baths, checking every alcove, registering the prettiest women. The working girls were apparently on break because none of his candidates exactly broke a toe rushing over to him. He could not tell which were employees anyway, as the whole submerged interior of the building was also full of regular patrons, even a smattering of nervous Sesserans who merely wanted a soak. Before long, the whole idea of cutting a working girl out of the herd, or worse, impressing a regular woman with his fake accent, seemed depressingly complicated.
He had just started ordering double bourbons when a woman slid in beside him. She was lanky and smooth. Her easing of the whole length of her slim body into the water took several minutes of subjective time for Diggery, so engrossing did he find it. She tipped her head back to wet her hair and gave him a pert look before retrieving her drink from the edge of the pool. If Diggery was on double bourbons, she had a quintuple, and she drank it down quickly.
“I probably should not have put my hair into this mess,” she said, eyeing the water.
“A drink or two more and it won’t matter,” Diggery said.
She liked that. “Is there anything bourbon can’t do?”
Her name was Jephia, and she was categorically not an employee. Her aristocratic twang would have put his own to shame, had he not started forgetting it after the first five minutes. She was obviously some rarefied creature from the upper echelons, perhaps even a peer, and her precise, brittle accent was so far above Diggery’s she hardly noticed when he veered across several castes with each phrase. It probably all sounded like trench-talk to her.
Which made it all the more incredible that she was talking to him. She would not be touched, she warned him, but how dead would she have to be not to enjoy being looked upon as a woman once in a while? By a man such as Diggery? Surely she deserved just that much flattery. Her work—but no talk of work, not here, not now—let’s just say her work kept her engaged. How flattering Diggery’s attention was, but shouldn’t he remember to blink?
Diggery practiced his big words while she giggled in the semi-darkness. Her body was a reflective surface, edge-lit and glittering, all the more enticing for its lack of detail. The Handamom employees finally noticed him, too, thanks to the goddess. She collected girls like a lasso. They paused to stare at the peer and then stayed to listen to Diggery dig his grave.
Eventually Jephia had to leave. When she did, Diggery was astounded to find he had an appointment, and not that kind. He had a date!
“I’ve noticed that front-line boys are so appreciative,” one of the watching girls said.
A week of wages well spent, Diggery thought, sliding her way. This was a huge improvement over the barracks, and after all, he might be dead tomorrow.
“I’m Trixie,” she told him. “And you look…very funny to talk to.”
12
Sethlan
~Planet Grigory IV: is it flat like a pancake, or round like a ball?~
Round, Sethlan said.
~Do you feel it is round?~ the Voice needled. ~In your gut?~
No, Sethlan answered. Every polite creature believes it’s flat. To be round, and to be so large as to seem flat—it’s just coar
se. As if Grigory IV were trying to grab all the conversation in the room.
The Voice paused for a moment. ~That was a joke, wasn’t it?~
Normally it would be. Not with you.
~Tell me, would you have thought of mounting locomotives inside a large ball of train tracks?~
We would call that ‘The Wayward Step of Hubris.’
~That’s a no?~
We call the wayward step the ‘End Step,’ the one that finishes you. It’s a prodigious pride or ambition, one so showy that it builds an engine of war that towers over the tallest building of Ville Emsa. I could not be accused of that kind of innovation. In fact, any kind of innovation is frowned upon because it must be explained so often, and you become the center of attention. What would be the point of that? We’re here today, and dead tomorrow. To want someone to think about you? You’d have to be insane or just incredibly immature.
~I get it. So the answer is no, you would not have thought of the Haphan war-balls.~
And that is why, when we Sessies have a smart pip like an engineer, we hide him away where he can cause no offense. That’s also why we officers are so personable, and we let ourselves get up-talked by the lowliest foot soldiers. We officers can have no pride. The Haphans think we have no control over our soldiers. But really, the soft touch is the only kind of control we can have.
~You cannot plug my intellect with a bolus of information.~
As a people, we aren’t inclined toward writing. Sethlan was enjoying himself. So to pass information, we talk at length and dress it up in nice clothes. It’s more memorable when it’s pleasant.
~The mere fact that you would not have thought of the locomotive war-balls means nothing. A clever Haphan could have thought it up in a day.~
Sethlan turned serious. That is true. A clever Haphan wouldn’t limit himself with any kind of manners. So why do you think it’s wrong?
The Voice went silent for a moment. ~Do you sense that I think it’s wrong?~
Sense? No. But why else would you be filling my head with noise, so that I’m staring at the wall when I could be useful? I can’t even drive you away by being obtuse. Something about me is wildly attractive to you.
~On the contrary, I find you very repellant. But I have a mission…~
Sethlan rolled his eyes. The mission again. Fine: the war-balls are wrong because the war is a hundred years in the trench. Why would there be a new invention now?
~A new invention so obviously devastating, it could have been thought up in year five, or fifty-five, and ended the war once and for all.~
Or at least changed it recognizably. The implication is that we didn’t think this one up.
~By ‘we,’ you mean…~
The Haphans. If they had the seed of this idea, it wouldn’t take this long to bloom. And, had it bloomed somehow, the Haphans would have stifled it. They resist change because the outcome is unguessable, and they like their steady predictable war. So someone forced this innovation.
The Voice seemed to approve of this reasoning. ~I just wonder what’s next, don’t you? After the Southie dreadnoughts, the new writing, the Haphan contraptions, and wireless communication. Now there is a huge assault planned. Two million men and thirty years of industrial output, all moving up to break out through five miles. Never could it be just a conventional high-casualty battle, with waves of bodies running into machine-gun fire. Not anymore.~
Maybe we’ll get flying locomotives.
~How can all this be happening, but you still can’t trace it back to the source?~
Let me re-introduce you to our hundred-year trench war. Sethlan shrugged inwardly. It’s not surprising that we can’t find the source. You can’t find the source of most of what happens. There might be no source at all, at least not a source that is one mind. Millions of pencils scratching here and there, tens of thousands of variable-function brains taking minor decisions, millions of orders issued, read, selectively obeyed, and trashed. If someone wanted to push a pet project, they’d just change a requisition here, a shipment there, put a factory under new supervision, whatever. It would only take diligence, patience, and time.
~From changed shipments and requisitions, you get rolling war machines from the Haphans?~
I should have said it would only take an immeasurable amount of diligence, patience, and time. I mean that the big moves don’t have to come from Local Empress, the Gray House, our Planners, or even a single Happie general. It can be a busy introvert with an agenda, so long as he, or she, knows where to inject the proper changes. The eternal front has its own inertia; it runs on a bureaucracy that would take a lifetime to figure out and generations to change—if the Happies even allowed it to change. The purpose of the artifice is to resist inspection and change. The whole point is stasis.
~You’ve never sounded so subversive.~
Well, I’m in a good mood. The inefficiency is what lets the war work at all. It’s what lets Sesserans act like right Tachba now and then and still get away with it. Anything more organized would blow itself apart, like putting soft cheese into a baxxaxx.
~What—never mind, I’ll skip that. Did your hypothetical group of introverts also manipulate the southern Tachba the same way? Two or more generations of young soldiers, educated to be Planners?~
Well, no, and that’s another reason we won’t find the source in the Haphans, the Planners, or anywhere else on one side of the front. Our source is straddling the lines, manipulating both north and south alike.
~This is useful stuff,~ the Voice said. Then, ~Why are you being so useful? Why are you in a good mood?~
Before Sethlan could answer, there was a knock on the door.
~Never mind, I just figured it out.~
Sethlan opened the door. Nana frowned. “I’m imposing again, aren’t I? You’re not free?”
“This is my welcoming face,” he said drily. “You must come in immediately. There are all sorts of oddities wandering the halls.”
She entered but refused to smile, hanging onto her meek look. “I brought some proper wine, and dinner. The parapraxis has been left at home—should I apologize again?”
“Not if you brought food.”
“And my dress?” She glanced at him over her shoulder. “What is the opinion about today’s dress?”
“I’ll have to think about it. You haven’t worn it before.”
She opened the basket and laid out a meal on the bed. Sethlan couldn’t be sure, but she may have been smiling behind the curtain of her hair. Though pickings were slim in Ville Emsa, mobbed as it was by hordes of officers and soldiers on leave, she had found a jar of something to place next to the regular bread and cheese. Anything that needed more than a day to prepare, and preservation after that in a breakable container, would be a significant Tachba delicacy.
She eased onto the bed next to the food. “Well?”
“Today’s dress is lovely. It suits you perfectly.”
“Hmm.” She frowned but couldn’t hide her blush.
“Then again,” Sethlan said, joining her on the bed. “You make lice powder look good.”
She laughed outright. “Why are you in a good mood? You’re never in a good mood.”
“Happy about the war, I guess,” he said. She lost her smile, and he added, “that was another joke, sort of.”
It was her food, so he could only watch as she tore the bread and peeled off a layer of cheese. She handed it to him, “What’s to be happy about the war?”
“I just deduced that the Haphans are not responsible for what’s going wrong.”
“The Haphans are responsible for everything that’s gone wrong,” Nana said, fixing her own meal. “And answerable for the last hundred years.”
“That, yes. They have their regular failings, but they have not betrayed Sessera or the other provinces. They are still, by and large, upright and deserving of service.”
“Deserving of…!” Nana shook her head, then took a small bite of cheese and skewered him with a look. “How is
your wife?”
~How did you already piss her off?~
“My wife? I don’t know how she is.”
“What’s her name?”
“Ponym Paramadon. Ponym Semelon, I guess, now.”
“‘You guess now?’” she echoed. “How does that work? When were you married?”
“Fifteen years ago.”
“Children.”
“None. I haven’t seen her since our vows, and I won’t see her ever again.”
Nana went still, then turned her eyes to the food.
She’s about to leave, Sethlan thought.
~Why?~ The Voice said too loudly in his head. ~Her strap just fell off her shoulder. Don’t you want to see how this develops?~
She’s thinking I’m effectively a bachelor after all, and she’s a dashta alone with a bachelor.
~And that’s not done?~
There’s nothing wrong with it, generally.
~So she’s being about as illogical as she can fucking be?~
Nana has her own rules.
“I’m surprised,” Nana said slowly. “You seem as safe as a family man.”
Sethlan grinned and tried to make it encouraging. “You think family men won’t make moves on you? Why? Because they’re terrified of having another woman go factory on them? Another two dozen children to feed?”
“Something like that. Sethlan, this has been a wonderful short meal, but—”
~Quick! Ask her for what’s in that jar.~
“What did you bring in that jar, Nana?” Sethlan interrupted smoothly. Voice, why did I ask her that?
~You were staring at it, so I figure it’s rare. If she opens it she’ll have to stay, she wouldn’t waste it.~
“It’s, uh, thalamus,” she said.
“Thalamus jelly? I’ve never had that!”
She looked doubtful. “You’ve never had thalamus jelly.”
He shook his head. “Does that make me more interesting?”
She laughed again, but pinched it off, making her face serious. Sethlan immensely desired to see her smile again. Her hand crept to the jar, lifted it, and peeled away the wax top.
The Eternal Front: A Lines of Thunder Novel (Lines of Thunder Universe) Page 27
