by Pierce Brown
They are all young, but none are beautiful like Freihild. Her face, though tattooed with subtle black markings, is unscarred. Her cheekbones are sharp, her eyes slanted and as close to dark blue as Obsidian black. All the skuggi are more slender than Valdir or the brutish Valkyrie, more like deer than elk. Freihild even has the eyelashes of a deer. Valdir notices too, don’t you, boy?
“Teach them what exactly?” I ask. “I’m no assassin. They’re the best.”
“We are not,” Freihild says in a slow, mocking voice. “The Howlers and Gorgon are the best. It is truth.”
“Good thing you kept one of them as allies, eh?”
Freihild is amused.
“My skuggi are orphans from ruins of shattered tribes,” Sefi says. “They promise their spirits to their Queen. Their loyalty is beyond the flesh, so their wombs are stripped, their seed made infertile by my shaman. But do you know why my skuggi are not the best?” She motions for Freihild to step back. “Not because we do not know how to walk with the silent shadow, or bring the long death, but because Howlers and Gorgons are more than assassins. My skuggi are not. They provide one solution: death. Practical creatures provide many solutions. For Red Hand death works. Skuggi have hunted them these last weeks. Six thousand they have killed for me. Red Hand flees. The Republic was too soft on them. Soon they will be no more. But I will need my skuggi to beat the Gorgons, to beat the Howlers if necessary. Teach them to be…freelancers. To melt into city. To exist behind enemy lines. To gain allies. To sow discord.” She points a long finger of her gloved hand at me. “You stole the Sovereign’s child. You will give us your knowledge.”
If she wants a kingdom, she knows she’ll have to play dirty like all the rest.
With a grunt, Valdir bursts to his feet and stalks away. Sefi watches him go with a strange expression. “My mate believes we are mistaken to leave the Reaper. He does not wish us to change or practice shameful arts. But he is just a man. Men are impulsive and blinded by the snake between their legs.”
“Won’t argue that.” Then I say with narrowed eyes, “Skuggi are sacred to your people. Servants of Allmother Death, yes? Valdir won’t be the only one pissed. Your braves know it might’ve been Gold that held the chain, but Gray was the chain. You hate us even more than you hate them.”
She makes a dismissive motion.
“Your Majesty, I’ve seen berserkers rape wounded legionnaires on the battlefield as they scalp them. Your berserkers. I don’t have any loyalty to the legion. But those Grays were my people. Gold might be scariest. You might be biggest. Red might be toughest. Gray…we got the longest memory.”
The idea of teaching the skuggi to become even more effective makes me nauseous. This is selling my soul in a way I never considered.
“That world is past. Not all of the clans believe as I do. They resist change. But they follow strength. I am strength.” Sefi runs a long finger over the rim of her wine cup. “You are cunning. You made fool of Lionheart and the Fox Lords. I want that cunning. I know how this world works. I am willing to make you a very rich man.”
“And if I say no?”
“You are guest. When safe, you will be free.” Free to be tossed off a high cliff by Valdir, more like. “But a man on his own is nothing. You will be hunted by Syndicate, Julii, Lion, Republic…Goblin. You will be noman. No hearth. No blood. No aeta. No hands to carry your cold body to the sky when they find you.”
“Cat’s got nothing on me.” I lean forward with a feline grin. “I got a thousand lives. They can each have one. Anyway, Mars is for suckers. I got business on Luna.”
“You speak of your woman.” Her eyes glimmer as I flinch. “Volga Fjorgan is on Luna no longer. Xenophon.”
The White steps forward. “Six weeks ago, two known members of the Horn Gang were abducted from Augustan property and are currently on Phobos, pending transfer to Mars.”
I glance up at the twin moons moving over the city.
“Nah. Citadel is impenetrable. Place is crawling with heavies, tech even I’ve never seen. The Minotaur got chewed up with a full century of Peerless. Real Peerless…” I squint at them. They don’t look like they are capable of bluffing. “Who?”
“The Julii,” the White says.
“She doesn’t have the skill set.”
“But she has something better. Money,” Sefi replies.
Xenophon explains. “Ignorant of Virginia’s deal with you, she employed the freelancer known as the Figment to collect your gang members as leverage against you after frontal confrontation with the Sovereign promised to escalate.”
“That psycho?” A chill goes through me, but it makes sense. Birds of a feather, and all that. I squint at Sefi. “You said two. Who’s the extra?”
“The Red,” Xenophon replies. “Your inside woman.”
“Lyria? Lyria of bloodydamn Lagalos?” I can’t even laugh. I thought she was a cooked little rabbit. I lean back over the railing, mind whirling like a rubicon wheel. Get out, oldboy. Save your precious skin while you can.
But this voice is quieter without the Z. Lyria of Lagalos and Volga Fjorgan, alive after all, and above Mars. What a thing. That settles it, even if I pretend it doesn’t. Of course I have to throw a fit first, but I’d have had to agree anyway just to survive the meeting. Now I actually might stick around, till I get what I need.
“How do you know they’re alive?” I ask. “If the Julii took them—”
A holo appears in Sefi’s long hand. It is of a cell. Inside, Volga rocks back and forth. The poor girl. I see her smiling on race day in Hyperion. Laughing at the bar. Offering me a cocktail. She was just a kid when I pulled her in. I was all she had. But she didn’t have me. Not really. I bite my tongue bloody so I don’t belt out into tears. Without the Z valve, it’s all so much. Her image flickers away.
The cold bitch Queen stares at me. “The Julii does not waste resources. I told her I would pay her for their release. If you pledge fealty to me, they are yours.”
Don’t do it, oldboy. She’s gonna die bad. Dreamers all do. Don’t you know?
But some greater, hungrier part of me scrambles after this new flicker of hope. Volga, I’m gonna save you, Snowball. Treat you like the queen you are.
“What’s the Julii paying you for the kids?” I ask, trying to distract myself and them. “Gotta be a big nut.”
“That is not your concern,” Sefi says. “Your answer.”
Time seems to thicken. I find myself nodding.
“No fealty,” I say. “I’m no one’s dog, and I’m sure as Hades not dying on Mars. You draw up a contract with Amani Guild specs—”
Xenophon produces a holodocument from a datapad and flicks it to the table. Sefi smiles. She knows who she’s doing business with. Clever girl. I glance through it. It’s Amani Guild specs all right, not some savage blood oath. Maybe the world is changing.
Sefi sips her wine as I eye the particulars. Three-year sunset clause. Contract void if I take zoladone. What is it with everyone? Recognition of skuggi deathmark on my life if I skip out. That’s fun, and probable. I breeze to the remuneration and feel my toes tingle.
The girls in six weeks. A quarter kilo of grade-A diamonds in a Martian month, a ship with the deed, a signing bonus of twenty-five million credits. Fuck me. They’re overpaying by a kilometer.
“I want the girls on signature.”
“No,” Xenophon says predictably. “You are a flight risk.”
“Then double the monthly salary. A half kilo plus expenses. Gonna be killing my neutral reputation throwing my lot in with blackops spirit killers, and my girls need retirement money.” The White begins to say no, but I cut it off. “Listen, milky. You’re the one with the scarcity problem. Fixed my leg up. Spared me from the Howlers. You need me for something you can’t do. And I’m betting it ain’t just teaching skuggi.” None of them react, but that’s not sa
ying much for these folk. “You can’t move your army from Earth without showing your cards. I get it. But that means something’s coming. You’ll tell me when I need to know. That’s fine. But I’m getting hazard pay, because I’m sure it’s gonna be manic.”
“You think highly of your talents, Mr. Horn,” Sefi says. “Or very little of your life…”
“Now it’s one kilo. Wanna go for two?”
I put my hand out for the kill.
Sefi’s entourage tenses at the insult. Even gibbering blackteeth know Obsidian rules of contact. But then she surprises me. My hand disappears beneath her seven gloved fingers.
“To a fruitful endeavor,” she says. “One more task. The Reaper’s boy is fond of you. He resists us. Bring him close. We may need insurance.”
“Sure, yeah, whatever.”
I grin as she releases my hand. I got you, Snowball. Just hold on and I got you.
“LISTEN UP, AND LISTEN GOOD,” I say just like my tessarius did half a life ago.
Two hundred black-eyed assassins watch me inside the empty hangar with suspicion. Taken from the remnants of tribes shattered by Gold after Sefi joined the Rising and formed into one of the most feared assassin groups in the war, they are all prime specimens, and not one of this skuggi band is over thirty.
Some, like their leader, Freihild, are barely taller than I am. Others are built like tree stumps, others taller even than Ragnar Volarus. Others spindly and clever-faced. Each wears their bone-white hair in a topknot and a pale blue sleeveless tunic with the Alltribe’s winged crest tattooed in black on either shoulder. Those will have to go.
“My name is Ephraim ti Horn, and I was once considered the third-best freelancer in Hyperion, which means I was the third-best freelancer alive. Two months ago, I became the best. Those rumors you’ve heard? They’re true. I stole the heir of the Reaper and the Sovereign, and the hellspawn of the Goblin and Victra au Julii. And I stole them twice, with nothing but a Red, a Green, and an Obsidian. Oh, and the second time I did it solo.”
They’re skeptical. Good. They take their cues from Freihild, who looks at me as I’d look at Volga trying to teach me how to use a coffeemaker. I glance at Ozgard, who stands beside me nodding along as if I spoke the greatest wisdom ever known. Since my fateful meeting with Sefi, he’s shadowed me like a somnolent ghost, eating walnuts, sleeping outside my door and sometimes in my room with absolutely zero understanding of personal space, private property, or hygiene. Somewhere in that time, he claims to be teaching Pax and Electra the ways of the Obsidian, but frankly I doubt it. I know drug addicts, and he smacks of one.
“Now, you lot have done some killing. You know that business. You’ve fallen in Rains, stormed breaches, killed Golds and a whole lot of people that looked just like me. You know asymmetrical warfare, direct action, and reconnaissance like the top of your bleached pubes. But your natural talents are not enough. Your Queen is of a mind that the world is changing, and you must change with it.”
Freihild yawns. I jab a finger at her. “You. What’s the best way to take out a killsquad of fully armored Gold?”
“When they stop to piss,” she answers. There’s laughter.
“Wrong. With a high-powered neodymium magnet.”
“That would not kill them,” she says.
“Killing ain’t your mission anymore. Your queen wants a kingdom, so she needs operators focused on the mission, not the kill.”
“EMP would be better,” Freihild says.
“Wrong, moron!” I say, irritating her savage sensibilities. “Unless it’s nuclear powered, you ain’t gonna do shit to that new armor. You’re two years late. If you’re not reading mechanical specs, you’re not doing your job. When was the last time you read a spec report, skuggi?”
Freihild doesn’t answer.
“Thought so. I will teach you unconventional domestic warfare: Soc Legion spycraft, surveillance, countersurveillance, how to dance a laser grid, subvert security systems, foster insurrection on enemy soil, groom assets of every Color without beating them to a pulp, talk about anything for ten minutes, use neodymium magnets, hot-wire anything with an engine, manipulate anything with a prick or gash, and how to do it all without anyone knowing you were ever there. You will become ghost soldiers of the city jungle. You will not just become part of the underworld. You will own it. And I will make you appreciate the works of the Spanish Surrealists. Because they are the best artists the world ever conspired to create, and they are unappreciated by modern society. Are there any questions?”
They stare back blankly.
Ozgard clears his throat. “Ephraim.”
“Yes, Ozgard?”
“Forgot to mention. Only half speak Common.”
I close my eyes. “I hate you.”
“—AND IMMEDIATE CESSATION OF federal tax-shelter provisions for unionized labor, guilds, and other collectives deleterious to the will of the free market. This brings us to proposal six point three…”
Senator Britannia ag Krieg has period marks for eyes, and a widow’s peak that could chip ice for my nightly bourbon. Chief negotiator for the Zenith Ring, the Silvers’ common interest federation, Krieg stands in the center hollow of their halo table located within Sun Industries’ Zenith Spire. Stained by city lights, the clouds form a carpet far beneath the spire. At fifteen unnecessary kilometers in height, it is the tallest building in all Hyperion, dwarfing the memory of the old Society military headquarters. Another apt metaphor for its creator as well as our time.
There are no senators present, save Britannia. The kept pets are sequestered downstairs, awaiting the orders of their true masters. Thirty-three Silver trillionaires of the Zenith Ring sip tea from Ionian porcelain in smug satisfaction that they don’t visit the Sovereign, she visits them. Heralding from asteroids, planets, moons, and deepspace trade stations, they share only four common virtues: their Color, their religious conviction in their definition of the free market—not that they mind the government being their chief customer—their obsession with individual autonomy, and their determination to act, at all times, like complete assholes.
Not one of the oligarchs, save Quicksilver, was rich before the war. Now they represent the machine of war—Drachenjäger factories, shipyards, textiles, pharmaceuticals, rubber plants, shipping interests, silicon products. Without their companies, which I admit they did build against intense competition, we’d fight with sticks and stones.
Quicksilver, the lone quadrillionaire, doesn’t bother sitting at a place of prestige. He’s off to the far right of the asteroid-diamond table, sandwiched between a munitions supplier and the asteroid-mining magnate who donated the table and deducted it from his taxes.
The slump-shouldered, ham-fisted titan of industry doesn’t look like the man who, along with Fitchner, engineered the destruction of the Society. He is more concerned with the sugar in his tea than Senator Krieg’s outrageous demands. He knows he’ll get what he wants, because I don’t want to fight with sticks and stones, because I need their Silver votes, because without his helium, the ships he builds us will sputter and die.
Even the eerie silver orb robot that floats ever-present over his shoulder couldn’t make him aware of my promise to Publius. If he knew, he’d be beating me in private with verbal uppercuts and haymakers. He has been an enigma of late. His demands increasingly peculiar and opaque. Which leads me to consider the possibility that he knows something I don’t.
I interrupt Krieg’s soliloquy to gesture behind her. “What the devil is that?” The artwork beyond the ring table is a fifteen-meter-tall vanity of unrefined metal morphed into a shape roughly mimicking a winged heel.
Britannia looks back at it in irritation. “That is the Dawn of Hermes. Sculpted from fused Oort Cloud dust by the Master Maker Glirastes of Mercury. The honorable Regulus ag Sun acquired it two years ago at an Ophion Guild auction for a record purchase p
rice of ninety-four billion credits.”
Roughly the cost of two destroyers, or enough food to feed the Cimmerian assimilation camps for forty-six and a half months.
The industrialists clatter their teaspoons on their teacups in salute.
Krieg continues her ransom demands. It is not the first time I’ve wished for her to be infected by the agonizing intrusion of a parasitic organism. I should have introduced her to my brother when I had the chance. By the sound of Nakamura’s shifting armor behind me, I can tell she agrees.
A middling account executive for silicon goods before the Rising, Senator Krieg made her fortune negotiating buyouts of liberated mines from Red clans for Sun Industries during Quicksilver’s mad dash to buy up the majority of the h-3 market. What I released from my family’s holdings to Reds, he purchased not two months later.
The Reds were properly represented by the White Guilds and chose gross proceeds instead of a one-time buyout. The contracts were thorough. It was all perfectly legal. But so is murder during wartime. Who possibly could have expected there to be no gross proceeds, because the immensely rich helium mines still, according to the books, operate at a net loss?
Me, namely. But the Reds, like everyone else in our Society, suspected I acted in self-interest and thus paid no heed to my warnings.
“…resetting automation limits to their former levels, and concluding with an elimination of Senator Caraval’s ‘flesh and bone’ quotas…” Her words devolve into a faint buzzing, and I yawn as she progresses to the last demands before finally reaching her denouement.
“…an oral agreement will suffice for now, but amendments must be placed on the bill before the vote. Not all, naturally. We don’t want to kill it, but certain provisions so that we can feel comfortable moving forward in good faith. These are our…recommendations.”
The teacups tinkle, and the industrialists sit back in smug satisfaction to wait for my usual reluctant agreement. But I’ve been saving up my chips. I uncross my legs and put my boots up on the table. Quicksilver sees and tilts his head in interest. I extend a hand backward. Nakamura hands me my apple. I strip small pieces away with my bootknife and watch the Silvers as I eat.
