by Timothy Zahn
“Ground rule number two: when we do catch him, I’m the one who’ll interrogate him,” I continued. “This guy is smart and well funded, and there will be some fairly ugly layers we’ll need to dig through to get where we’re going. You can sit in on the conversation and offer suggestions, but I’m the one who’ll handle all the actual questioning.”
A shiver ran through the Juri’s body. “I have heard stories of Human interrogations. I will not interfere.”
“Good.” I hadn’t actually been talking about torture, but it probably wouldn’t hurt to let the Modhri think that I had. It probably wouldn’t hurt to remind the killer of humanity’s bloody past, either, when the time came. “Ground rule number three: I decide what to do with him after we’ve finished putting him through the spin cycle. I doubt the Spiders are set up for either executions or long-term prisoner storage, and there are already two different governments that have legitimate claims on his scalp. Depending on who and what he turns out to be, we might end up with three. Based on the interrogation, I’ll make the decision as to who gets him.”
“Agreed,” the Modhri said. “How do we begin?”
I yawned. “With some sleep,” I said. “The rest of the train’s already settled down for the night, so there’s no point trying to find anyone to question. And I’m way too tired to think straight, anyway.” I gestured to him. “Sleeping on the table that way isn’t doing your walker any good, either.”
“Very well,” he said. “Osantra Qiddicoj practices meditation several times a day. During those times, he allows his mind to empty itself.”
I felt my stomach tighten. “And you’re conveniently there to refill it?”
“It will be an opportunity for us to discuss matters and formulate a plan,” the Modhri said. Apparently, he’d missed the irony in my tone.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll have a couple of other things to deal with first tomorrow—mainly following up on tonight’s little adventure—but I should be able to touch base with you by early afternoon at the latest.”
“And if the killer strikes again this night?”
“He’s been lying pretty low since Usantra Givvrac’s death,” I reminded him. “There’s no particular reason for him to come out tonight.”
“No reason that you know of.”
“True,” I conceded. “If it’s any consolation, I don’t think he’s specifically targeting you.” I stood up. “But I’ve been wrong before. Pleasant dreams.”
SIXTEEN
I half expected Bayta to be waiting for me when I returned to my compartment, her eyes blazing, her arms folded across her chest, demanding to know what I’d been off doing. But she wasn’t. Apparently, the server Spider at the bar hadn’t sold me out. Yet. Five minutes later I was climbing into bed, sleep tugging at my eyelids and my brain.
But even as I adjusted the blankets around my shoulders, I had a nagging sense that something significant had happened this evening. Something so subtle that I hadn’t picked up on it on a conscious level.
For a minute I fought against sleep, trying to get a handle on the feeling and whatever it was that had sparked it. But it was an uphill battle, and after that single minute I knew it was hopeless. Tomorrow, when I’d caught up on my sleep, I would make another effort to track it down.
———
Once again, tomorrow arrived earlier than I’d expected it to.
And yet, at the same time, it nearly didn’t arrive at all. At least for me.
I’d been asleep barely two hours when I was jarred awake by something soft and vague; a distant, eerie whistling sort of sound that was as much felt as it was heard. For a handful of heartbeats I lay still, my eyes wide open in the darkness, my ears straining against the silence as I waited for the noise to come again.
But it didn’t. I’d just about decided it had been an artifact of my sleeping brain when I heard another sound.
Only this one wasn’t vague and ethereal the way the first had been. This one was real, solid, and very close at hand.
Someone was scratching on my door.
I rolled silently out of bed and into a crouch on the floor, fighting against the mental cobwebs as I tried to figure out just what in hell was going on. There was a perfectly good door chime out there, not to mention equally good hard surfaces all around that anyone with working knuckles could knock on. There was no reason why whoever was out there should be scratching away like a pet malamute who wanted back into the house.
Unless he was too weak or too sick to do anything else.
I slid my hand along the floor until I found my shoes. I picked up one of them, getting a good grip on the toe. Holding it over my head like a club, I walked silently to the door and keyed the release.
To find that no one was there.
Frowning, I stepped out into the corridor and looked both directions. No one was visible along the car’s entire length.
But someone had been there. At the rear of the car, the vestibule was just closing.
My first thought was that whoever this was, he must have exquisite timing to have been able to get out of sight just as I was opening my door. My second thought was that whatever game he was playing, it probably boiled down to being a trap.
My third was that there was no way in hell he was going to get away from me.
I ducked back into my compartment, grabbed my other shoe and my shirt and headed out after him, making sure my door closed and locked behind me. I got my shoes on as I jogged down the corridor, and by the time I reached the vestibule I had my shirt on as well. Bracing myself, I keyed the door release.
The vestibule was empty. I crossed it and opened the door to the next compartment car, again preparing myself for whatever lay beyond it. But again, the corridor was empty. Hurrying past the closed compartment doors, I went through the vestibule and into the first of the first-class coaches.
Compartment cars didn’t really lend themselves to ambushes, given that the only place you could launch one from was one of the compartments themselves. But coach cars were another matter entirely, as I’d already learned the hard way on this trip. Most of the seats scattered around the car were canopied, their occupants long since in dreamland, though there were a couple of quiet conversations still going on in various corners. But none of the conversationalists were near my path, and in fact didn’t seem to even notice my presence, and I continued on through and into the dining car.
And nearly ran into my old Modhran pal Krel Vevri as he staggered out into the corridor from the bar end. “Compton,” he breathed as he stepped into my path.
“Did you just scratch on my door?” I demanded, coming to a halt in front of him.
For a moment he just stared at me in silence, his body weaving a little, his eyes apparently having a hard time focusing on me. To all appearances he was as drunk as a goat. “Compton,” he said again. “There’s trouble.”
I felt a tingle go up my back. Drunk Juriani nearly always slurred their words. Vevri wasn’t doing that. Stepping close to him, I leaned forward and sniffed his breath.
One whiff was all it took. Any alcohol he might have poured into his system earlier that evening had been burned away hours ago. Whatever had put Vevri into this state, it wasn’t anything the Spiders had served him.
Our poisoner had struck again.
“Understood,” I said, taking his arm and trying to turn him around toward the dispensary three cars back. “Come on—we’ll get the Spiders to call a doctor—”
“No doctor,” he interrupted, throwing off my grip with an unexpected burst of strength. “Hypnotic—dizzy, but not in danger.”
“We should at least try to figure out what it was,” I insisted, trying to get a grip on his arm again. “Or wasn’t it you?” I added as it belatedly occurred to me that Vevri himself might be completely unscathed, that the hypnotic or whatever might have been administered to one of the other walkers and merely be affecting the Juri via their shared mind.
But once again, he pull
ed away from my grip. “Not in danger,” he insisted. “The prisoner. He’s the one in danger.”
I stared at him. “Emikai? What does the killer want with him?”
“Don’t know,” Vevri said. He wobbled suddenly and had to grab the edge of the archway to regain his balance. “Don’t call Spiders. Warn him—warn him off. Never find him then.”
I looked over his shoulder down the corridor. “Did you see the killer?” I asked Vevri. “The killer, Krel Vevri. Did you see who he was?”
Vevri shook his head. “He’s on his way. Already on his way. You must stop him.”
“Yeah,” I said, gazing hard into the Juri’s face.
And not believing it for a second, because this whole thing stunk to high heaven. Even if I actually trusted the Modhri—which I damn well didn’t—it would still smell like a setup.
But I had no choice but to play along. If the killer really did want Emikai silenced, for whatever reason, the Filly was a sitting duck back there. The two twitters on duty might get a glimpse of the killer, but that would be pretty small comfort to Emikai himself.
Besides, knowing it was a setup gave me certain advantages, especially if the killer didn’t know I knew. “Okay, I’ll go take a look,” I said to Vevri. “You stay here and keep an eye out in case he doubles back.”
Vevri nodded. “I will. Good luck.”
Slipping past him, I continued on my way. Knowing you were walking into a trap could definitely be helpful in beating that trap.
But it never hurt to also hedge your bets.
I had covered another two cars and was passing the line of shower compartments before I finally ran into a conductor tapping his way along on some errand or another. “Hey—you,” I said, catching up to him. “You—Spider.”
“Yes?” he said.
“I want you to call Bayta,” I said. “Tell her I’ve had word that Logra Emikai is in trouble, and I’m heading back to check on him—”
“Bayta is asleep.”
“Then wake her up,” I snarled. “Tell her I want her to do a running track on me—conductors, servers, mites, and anyone else who’s available. You got that?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Good.” I started to go, then turned back. “And she’s to stay put,” I added firmly. “Whatever happens, she’s to stay in her compartment and not open the door. For anyone.”
“Yes,” he said.
I gazed hard into his silvery globe for another moment, the way you might underline the seriousness of an order if you were talking to a real, actual person, then turned and resumed my jog. If Bayta could mobilize enough of the Spiders to monitor the action, we had a chance of bringing this thing to an end right here and now.
The baggage car seemed quiet enough as I slipped through the vestibule doorway into the gloom. Setting my back against the nearest stack of crates, I paused for a moment to take stock of the situation. No shadows seemed to be moving out there, at least none that I could see from my current vantage point, and I could hear nothing above the muted clickity-clack of Quadrail wheels.
Was the killer still here? Or had he been and gone, leaving a fresh corpse where I’d earlier tied up a prisoner?
Only one way to find out. Taking a deep breath, I headed off through the maze of stacked crates.
The attack came without any warning, in spite of all the care I had been taking with corners and crate tops. An arm suddenly appeared from behind me, snaking around my neck and yanking me backward. I tried to twist sideways, to get my throat turned into the crook of his elbow where there was a little extra space, but he was already on it, his other hand snapping up to link into his choking arm and simultaneously push the back of my head forward.
Reflexively, I kicked backward. But my foot hit only air, and before I could bring it back for another try a foot slapped into the back of my other knee, just hard enough to break my balance.
And barely a second after the attack had begun, I found myself kneeling on the floor, the tiny prickly hairs of a Filly snout pressed against my right cheek, his chokehold ready to squeeze the life out of me.
I tried to reach up toward his head, in hopes of reaching his eyes or ears. But the arms wrapped around my throat and head blocked any such path. I switched direction and jabbed backwards with my elbows, landing solid blows against his torso. He grunted with the impact, but his grip didn’t loosen.
So this is how it ends, the thought flitted through my mind as I continued my futile efforts to break my attacker’s grip. I wondered distantly what Bayta would do without me, and what the Chahwyn and Spiders would do after I was dead.
It was only then that it belatedly dawned on me that the arm pressed against my throat, which should have been squeezing ever tighter, cutting off my air and choking the life out of me, was doing no such thing. In fact, it wasn’t all that tight even now, more of a controlling hold than a killing one.
Was he just waiting so that I would sweat some more? Or did he genuinely want to keep me alive, at least until he could get something else out of me?
Bracing myself, painfully aware that if I was wrong, it would be the last gamble I ever made, I brought my pummeling hands and elbows to a halt.
He didn’t press his attack. But he didn’t let go, either. He just stood there, towering silently and motionless behind me.
I cleared my throat, which turned out to be a lot harder in my present condition than I’d expected. “If you’re trying to make a point,” I croaked out, “consider it made.”
“What point is that?” he asked.
I grimaced as I recognized his voice. My assailant was none other than Logra Emikai himself. “That you’re the greatest escape artist since Houdini?” I suggested.
“That I could have killed you,” he corrected. Abruptly, the pressure against my throat disappeared as he let go of me and stepped backward. “And that I did not,” he added.
I turned my head, massaging my throat as I looked up at him. He was just standing there, his arms hanging loosely as his sides, gazing back at me. “Interesting demo,” I commented, getting back to my feet. “Of course, as has already been noted, you’re on a super-express Quadrail with nowhere to run. Killing me would be kind of stupid.”
“Agreed,” he said. “But he who freed me apparently was not concerned with such questions of logic.” He paused. “He who freed me, then ordered me to kill you.”
“Did he, now,” I said as casually as I could. So our killer was starting to sharecrop his business. “Did this helpful passerby have a name or face?”
“I’m certain he had both,” Emikai said grimly. “Unfortunately, I was asleep when he freed me.”
“And when he gave you your marching orders?” I asked, frowning. “What did he do, leave a voice message in your dreams?”
“You are actually not far off,” Emikai said, for the first time seeming a little uncertain. “The words came to me in …it’s hard to describe. It was a distant, whistling sort of voice. I’m afraid I cannot explain it more clearly than that.”
“That’s okay,” I assured him, a prickling sensation running up my back. A distant, eerie whistling sort of sound was the way I’d characterized my own recent wake-up call. “How long ago did all this happen?”
He shrugged. “An hour. Perhaps a bit more.”
Just enough time, in other words, for someone to make his way back up to the front of the train, dose a sleeping Modhran walker with hypnotic so that he could play shill for me, and call me awake so he could send me to my death.
In fact, with this added bit of information, the late-night conversations I’d noticed as I passed through first class suddenly took on an entirely new aspect. Odds were that one of those conversations had been the killer talking to one of the Modhri’s other walkers, getting ready to feed Krel Vevri’s lines to him by remote control. That was a capability of the group mind that had never occurred to me. “So why didn’t you kill me?” I asked.
Emikai snorted. “I do not murder on anyo
ne’s demand,” he growled.
“Glad to hear it,” I said, rubbing my throat again. “So what now? We let bygones be bygones and I let you go back to your nice comfy Quadrail seat?”
He cocked his head. “Do you think that would be wise?”
My estimate of his competence, which had already been pretty high, rose a couple more points. Most citizens would have leaped at the offer. But Emikai was either more thoughtful or more canny than that.
Which led directly to the bigger question of who or what this horse-faced enigma was, and whose side he was on. If anyone’s. “Unfortunately—unfortunately for you, anyway—no, I don’t,” I said. “I’m thinking it could be highly interesting to see what kind of reaction we get when I not only don’t turn up dead, but you turn up back in irons.”
“I expected you would say that.” Emikai looked around us. “I presume this time you will have watchers present in the event that he attempts this again?”
“Absolutely,” I promised, keeping my voice even. “If you’re ready, let’s go ahead and reset the stage.”
He eyed me another moment, then nodded. “Very well,” he said.
Five minutes later, with Emikai once again tied to his perch, I was on my way back to the front of the train. And this time, I was moving with a lighter, quicker step.
Because though Emikai didn’t know it, there had been watchers present during his abortive rescue: the two twitters Bayta had left on guard.
It was going to be highly interesting to find out what exactly they’d seen.
———
What they’d seen, it turned out, was exactly nothing.
“That’s impossible,” I growled, glaring at Bayta from my seat at her computer desk as she sat stiffly on the edge of her bed. “You left them there. You ordered them to watch. How can they not have seen something?”
“I don’t know,” Bayta said. Her voice was as stiff as her posture. “They just froze up, somehow.”
“How does a Spider freeze up?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Bayta repeated tartly. “Something happened to them. Something I’ve never heard of happening before.”
