The sun burned, and she sweat through the shirt beneath her jacket. “I was in an accident,” Kai said, “a while ago. I got hurt, badly. As I healed, they made me do all these exercises—hardly any weight, you know, they seemed so pointless. They hurt, and they helped. But while I was recovered, I thought, maybe this is all I’m good for now. Easy things that seem so hard.” She stopped for breath. “But that’s not true. We can do more.”
The bucket reached the top. Tara unhooked it—two-thirds full, the excess slopped down in its violent rise—and filled the empty can. Sunlight made diamonds in falling water.
“You didn’t know,” Kai said. “Did you? What they were planning.”
Tara set the bucket down and leaned against the well. Kai remembered how Tara leaned against the window at the bank, and wondered if this woman would ever learn how it felt to fall.
“No,” Tara said. “When I was a kid I thought the Craft was the best tool for fixing the world: free intellect, unlimited potential, subtle and flexible. Anyone with will could learn. Smart people could run the world better than Gods. Gods chain people. Gods make you something you’re not. Then, in Alt Coulumb, I started to think, maybe that was wrong. Gods emerge from human communities, working together to solve common problems. Nothing wrong with that.”
“And then you came to Agdel Lex.”
“And then,” she said. “Yes. I knew the histories. But the histories don’t include everything.”
“They wouldn’t.”
“What happens when a city becomes its own problem?” She exhaled. “Alt Coulumb wanted—” She stopped, shook her head, tried again. “We needed to listen to the stars.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We wanted to hear what was going on out there in the black beyond our world. We didn’t know how. The Church of Kos has contacts in the Iskari Defense Ministry—and those contacts described your sister’s project, in general terms, as an orbital listening device. It was built to hear people on the ground; if we expanded the project we could make it sensitive to subtler voices from beyond the stars. So we funded the project, and I came to watch it work.”
“And now that you know what’s going on here, you wish you hadn’t.”
“I’m bound,” she said. “By our alliance. By my agreement—my mistake.” She waved her hand, including the broken courtyard and the sky. “Alt Coulumb has been allied with Iskar for centuries. The Iskari call themselves saviors, but they’ve destroyed as much as saved here. More. And this whole scheme disgusts me. But we signed on to help them.”
“They lied to you.”
“They didn’t lie. They just didn’t tell us everything.”
“The agreement can’t hold.”
“It does,” Tara said.
“So you’ll let them die.”
“No,” Tara said. “On launch day, I’ll go to the wall and reject Agdel Lex. I’ll hold off the Wastes as long as I can, give Alikand’s people time to evacuate to the Iskari city before the Wastes roll in. I’ll save everyone I can.”
“By yourself?”
“If I have to,” she said.
“Warn people first.”
“I’m bound to confidentiality. I can discuss this with you, because Vane has—but I can’t work against the project. If I did manage to break the bond, Bescond would kick me out of the city and launch anyway.”
Kai always chose her words carefully, because you never knew who might be listening, or what they might want to hear. She sifted through everything she could have said next, like seeking the right piece of a jigsaw puzzle. “But I know about this. And I never signed anything.”
An answer just as measured: “That’s true.”
“If something happened to the launch—”
“We’d lose the listening data.”
“You’re still worried about that, with everything else that’s at stake?”
“I can worry about many things at once,” Tara said. “That’s basically my job.”
“Even with a city at stake?”
Tara didn’t answer. Her silence said too much. The morning closed warm around them, and Kai felt suddenly aware of just how much planet she stood upon, and how fit it was for human life: how good water tasted, how calm and comforting the weight of rock, and how much cold vastness lay above.
“Gods,” Kai breathed. “What’s up there?”
“We don’t know for certain. Yet.”
Chapter Sixty-one
THE LIGHT IN THIS godsforsaken place never changed, so Raymet counted heartbeats, breaths, and circuits of her cell. At what she thought was the end of the day, the door opened and the Wreckers dragged Gal back in.
She hung limp from their rubbery arms. The Wreckers bore the muscled length of her like dead weight. Gal’s bare feet trailed over the chitin floor. Her head lolled from side to side like a newborn’s no one cared to cradle.
“Gal!” Raymet ran from the corner of her room, where she’d crouched waiting for her own interrogators, scheming how to fight. All those plans, the games she’d play, the tricks she’d try—she cast those husks aside and thrust her arm through the bars. Her fingers rasped against a Wrecker’s rough cloak, but the monster pulled away before Raymet could get a grip.
Gal’s cell bars sheathed into the smooth white floor with the wet noise of retracting claws. The Wreckers tossed Gal in, like tossing trash, and the bars caged her again. The Wreckers sloughed out.
The door closed.
Gal lay still. She breathed.
“Gal?”
Breathed: her chest rose and fell, oxygen into the lungs, from lungs into the blood. Raymet had never seen the other woman sleep, she realized, only pray. She slept now. She was not so still, asleep, as when she prayed: she shuddered and twitched with memories of pain, or with the Wreckers’ sharp sick ecstasy. Blood mixed with spit leaked between her lips and pooled on the floor. The pool shrank as Raymet watched. At first she thought the blood and spit were drying, but no residue remained. The floor was drinking her.
“Gal?”
Her eyelids fluttered, settled. She had long lashes, golden, with a slight curl like the tail of an exponential decay curve. Raymet did not often want to hurt people, rhetoric to the contrary. She wanted to hurt herself, now. She wanted to hurt the person who made Gal bleed.
“Gal.”
She had thought of Gal as “the other woman.” A technical descriptor, of course, there being the two of them in the room—but Gal had always seemed a creature of her own kind, divorced from gender. Thinking of her as being the same sort of being as Raymet required an exercise of imagination Raymet felt beyond her.
Gal woke. Her eyes were blue, beneath. Raymet rarely noticed eye color the way books made it seem people did. But Gal’s eyes were pale, bright blue, and she noticed them now.
Gal pushed herself off the floor one-handed. She took her time, and reviewed her bones and joints like a clockmaker reviewing the naked guts of a watch. Tested one shoulder, then the other. Stood, slowly. Stretched. For the first time, Raymet heard cracks and pops from that well-oiled machine.
“Hi,” Gal said. “What did I miss?”
Raymet’s mouth opened and closed without help from her conscious mind. She made a few sputtering noises before sentences formed. “Nothing. They left me to think about you being tortured. Maybe they hoped imagination would soften me up.”
“It could have been worse,” Gal said.
“How?”
She wiggled her fingers: long and slender, blunt-nailed.
“I don’t take your meaning,” Raymet said. Then: “Oh.”
“There are advantages and disadvantages to direct neural stimulus,” Gal said. “On the one hand, stimulus can make you feel any amount of pain, or pleasure. Sufficiently advanced practitioners can control your sense of time, remove your ability to speak, make you think you’re dead—you know, the usual.”
“That’s usual?”
She shrugged, though the motion made her wince. “In the lo
ng term, it can be debilitating. But if you remember it’s not real, you deprive the interrogator of a primal tool: their ability to deprive you of options, to mark you forever.”
“They could, though. I mean, if they wanted to start taking—” Raymet shuddered. “Fingers. Gods.”
“They won’t. As representatives of the Iskari church, they are bound by the Rift Accords, which detail interrogation techniques that may, and may not, be used on prisoners. Any violation would void my duty to comply with their custody.”
“Which would change things?”
Gal shrugged.
“You’re a foreign national, though. They might do it to me.”
“It’s unlikely,” Gal said.
“How unlikely.”
She didn’t answer.
Raymet cursed. She paced the cell, kicked the wall. It discolored under the kick, then flushed white again. She cursed a second time, which did not help.
When she turned back, Gal was stretching.
“I’ve never done this before,” Raymet said. “Any pointers?”
“You will talk,” Gal said. “Find a truth you’re comfortable telling. Stick to that.”
“Truth?”
“Truth ensures consistency. I’ve known Knights who could spin elaborate stories under torture, but that’s a high art. The risk, with a lie, is that if you lie to them they won’t believe the truth when you do break—so they’ll keep going. Then you’ll start telling them anything they want to hear, to save yourself, and after that, you’ll believe what you think they want you to believe.”
“What did you tell them?”
Gal bent forward at the waist and hugged the back of her calves. Her white shirt fell down to expose the ridges of muscle that flanked her spine. “Why I came to Agdel Lex.”
Raymet stared across the hall that separated their cells. Far beneath the floor, something like a heart beat.
Gal finished her waist bends. She stretched her obliques, and her hamstrings, and then noticed Raymet was staring at her. “Yes?”
“You never told me that story.”
Confusion, on that golden mask. “You never asked.”
“I thought you were just being private.”
“I did not think you wanted to know. I stand with Zeddig, and with you. Does it matter what came before?”
“Does it matter?” How could she ask that question so calmly, as if of course it would not matter, as if nothing about her could possibly be of the slightest interest to Raymet. That quiet calm self-assured ignorance, that blindness. Breathe. Count. Recite yourself a sonnet. Gal had not moved. “It matters.”
“I’m the same person either way.”
“It bothers me,” Raymet said, choosing her words with tweezers, keeping close watch over the rising gauges of her anger. “It matters that the Wreckers know more about you than I do.”
“Okay.” Gal sank, sat. Touched her mouth with the back of her hand, and wiped away blood. She smiled, sadly. “I come from a noble family in Camlaan, about which the less said the better. I am the eldest daughter of my mother’s house; I would have been an alliance-maker, perhaps with the new Deathless Kings, or I might have become a person of some importance in the church. But I wanted to be a Knight. I trained in secret, against the family’s wishes. I made vows and pacts to my Order and to the gods. By the time my family found out, it was too late—and I went out to save the empire from its arrayéd foes.”
Her voice changed when she said that last, as if quoting. Raymet did not recognize the reference.
“That did not go as I intended.”
“What happened?”
“I—” Gal blinked. She blinked just like normal people did, but this one lasted long enough for Raymet to make note. Were her eyes brighter, wetter than usual when she opened them? “I did not think this would be harder to tell you than the Iskari.”
She said, “You don’t have to,” but meant, I’m listening.
“The empire still exists, though it takes a different form now we have ceded sovereign rights to much of our old territory. Camlaan thrives through its bonds with Schwarzwald and Dhisthra and the Deathless Kings of the Northern Gleb. On my first mission, I fought pirates and slavers on the Shield Sea, and that was a good fight, and they died in battle. My second mission, we traced the pirates’ suppliers to an enclave south of Apophis, and fought them, and that was a good fight, and they died in battle. My third mission, we followed a lead from those suppliers to a group of what our questmasters claimed were rebel demon-summoners plotting to overthrow the Apophitan serpent congress. Yet I saw no demons, no plots. I saw scared people driven from their homes. I saw children. And my brother Knights hunted them. So I fought my brother Knights. They bested me, in the end, but before they did, many of those we had come to kill escaped. My—the Queen saw fit to offer me a kind of mercy. My missions had been secret, as are all Knights’ missions these days, but my execution for treason would be public, because of my family, and they did not wish the scandal. So the Queen granted me a quest, from her mouth directly, a mission that could not be denied. I was to find an enemy who could best me, and die in honorable combat. I was banished from Camlaan, and I came to Agdel Lex, seeking my death.”
“What,” Raymet said, “the fuck.”
“I survived. I have been surviving ever since.”
“That’s why—Gods. You’ve been trying to kill yourself.”
“Not at all. My vow forbids suicide. Death at my own hand would embarrass the Queen. A prodigal daughter, dead on foreign sand, fighting for the crown, a tale to drum up vim and jingo—that’s what my”—and again that slight pause—“the Queen prefers. Good press. I hoped the Wreckers might kill me, but they will not cooperate.”
The only words Raymet could find were: “I don’t want the Wreckers to kill you.”
“Thank you,” Gal said. “I don’t want to die either. But the quest remains.”
“That’s fucked up. Your own Queen doing that to you.”
“I have made mistakes,” she said. “So did she.”
“But you’re the one paying for them.”
“I saved her, in a small way, from herself. I stopped an atrocity that would have been committed in her name. I could not have done that if I stayed home.” Gal cupped her palms in her lap. “It remains to be seen whether the Iskari will contact Camlaan, and if so whether Camlaan will acknowledge me—or let me disappear inside this cell. They cannot use my disappearance quite so well as they might use my sacrifice, but it will serve.”
“Escape, then.”
“There’s no honor in escape from rightful imprisonment,” Gal said. “And I must seek an honorable death.”
All the words Raymet wanted to say were too sharp, too angry, too sad. Gal’s tremors subsided, and she sat, perfect, this beautiful tall strong work of art some evil faraway Queen wanted to break, and because she was herself, she would let herself be broken. This was a gross world, and Raymet wanted to tear it apart with her hands, but here she was, small, weak, stuck behind bars Gal could have shattered in an instant. Because of a quest, because of honor, she’d let people who weren’t worth the ground beneath her feet bind her.
She could not hurt the people she wanted to hurt, so she focused on her breath instead.
“Why did you come back for me?” Gal asked, after a while.
And still Raymet could not find the strength to answer.
Chapter Sixty-two
VOGEL DIDN’T BRING ANYONE home that night: no bed companions, not even a few easygoing philosophical kids to leave sleeping on the Telomeri leather sofa under the chrome-and-gold zodiac mobile in his living room. There had been so much work in the last few days, and little of it the work he loved, the taut messy human dance of dealmaking and strong-arming that led up to the big score. Vogel wasn’t a hardworking guy, not even when alive. That made him a good crook: he took his time to plan sharp, sure things, and if he planned right, they came off with hardly any effort at all.
Cle
anup, he could do without.
Big operation this time, the train job, and big operations left so many little loose ends to tie and braid and splice before a boss could sleep. For one thing, there was the actual score, the joss he’d employed good hardworking Zurish boys to convert to liquid soulstuff. Contracts got Krieg’s team their twenty percent, and the toughs who escaped split thirty among their crew, leaving Vogel with a comfortable fifty—but you couldn’t just bank that glistening glorious fifty, couldn’t invest it in magesterium wood futures and Zurish oil, imprudent even to spread it around among your bed partners and your easygoing philosophical kids. You had protection fees to pay, not to mention all the little subcontractors: the forgers of papers, the guards on the southern gate who gave Krieg’s wagons only the most cursory check when they arrived on the post road. Working with Bescond made some parts of the deal easy, but you could never be too sure.
And even after you did all that, you weren’t done. Big jobs, and big flows of soulstuff, upset the social order—made overbosses worry you might be setting up to come for them, made underbosses see you as a target. When you won big at a casino, you bought drinks for the table, and tipped well; same principle here. Once your funds cleared you did the rounds, touched base with relevant entities, drank too many bad coffees and ate too many meals in sacrifice-dodge restaurants, and made sure you were well liked. All that niceness drained a body. At day’s end you just wanted to stagger upstairs, leave your bodyguards at the door, stumble past the sofa and the chrome-and-gold zodiac mobile, into your bedroom, and kick off your shoes and drop face-first onto the fluffy white comforter, heedless of the flakes of dead skin or muck you shed onto the high-thread-count cotton. Who cares? You’re rich. Anyway, that’s what bleach is for.
So he wasn’t at all ready for the hands that seized him, the tape that covered his mouth, the jacket pulled down to trap his arms. He wasn’t ready for the steel cords with which they bound him, or the violence with which they threw him back against the headboard he’d paid a visiting Imperial artist to carve into a frieze of writhing dragons.
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