by Linda Nagata
Would it be tonight then? she wondered. Would this be the night she lost someone?
“I advise you to retreat.”
“Can’t do it, Delphi.”
It was the expected answer, but she’d had to try.
Nervous tension reduced her to repeating the basics. “Expect them to underestimate how fast you can move and maneuver in your exoskeleton. You can take advantage of that.”
The shooting subsided. In the respite, audio pickups caught and enhanced the sound of a tense argument taking place at the distant farmhouse. Then a revving engine overrode the voices.
Karin said, “The other truck, with the machine gun, it’s on the move.”
“I see it.”
A check of his setup confirmed he had the feed from the surveillance drone posted on the periphery of his visor display.
He used gen-com to speak to his squad. “It’s now. Don’t let me get killed, okay?”
They answered, their voices tense, intermingled: “We got you . . . watch over you . . .”
Valdez’s window-set centered, cutting off their replies. “Delphi, you there?”
Her voice was calm, so Karin said, “Stand by,” and swiped her window-set aside.
“. . . kick ass, L. T.”
Shelley’s window-set was still fanned, with the live feed from the surveillance drone on one end of the array. Motion in that window caught Karin’s eye, even before the battle AI highlighted it. “Shelley, the machine-gun truck is coming around the north side of the ruins. Everybody on those walls is going to be looking at it.”
“Got it. I’m going.”
“Negative! Hold your position. On my mark . . .” She identified the soldier positioned a hundred-fifty meters away on Shelley’s west flank. Overriding protocol, she opened a link to him, and popped a still image of the truck onto the periphery of his visor. “Hammer it as soon as you have it in sight.” The truck fishtailed around the brick walls and Karin told Shelley, “Now.”
He took off in giant strides powered by his exoskeleton, zigzagging across the bare ground. There was a shout from the truck, just as the requested assault rifle opened up. The truck’s windshield shattered. More covering fire came from the northwest. From the farmhouse voices cried out in fury and alarm. Karin held her breath while Shelley covered another twenty meters and then she told him, “Drop and target!”
He accepted her judgment and slammed to the ground, taking the impact on the arm struts of his exoskeleton as the racing pickup braked in a cloud of dust. Shelley didn’t turn to look. The feed from his helmet cams remained fixed on the truck parked between the ruined walls as he set up his shot. The battle AI calculated the angle, and when his weapon was properly aligned, the AI pulled the trigger.
A grenade launched on a low trajectory, transiting the open ground and disappearing under the truck, where it exploded with a deep whump!, enfolding the vehicle in a fireball that initiated a thunderous roar of secondary explosions as the rocket propellant ignited. The farmhouse became an incandescent inferno. Nightvision switched off on all devices as white light washed across the open ground.
Karin shifted screens. The feed from the surveillance drone showed a figure still moving in the bed of the surviving truck. An enemy soldier—wounded maybe, but still determined—clawing his way up to the mounted machine gun. “Target to the northwest,” she said.
The audio in Shelley’s helmet enhanced her voice so that he heard her even over the roar of burning munitions. He rolled and fired. The figure in the truck went over backward, hitting the dusty ground with an ugly bounce.
Karin scanned the squad map. “No indication of surviving enemy, but shrapnel from those rockets—”
“Fall back!” Shelley ordered on gen-com. Powered by his exoskeleton, he sprang to his feet and took off. “Fall back! All speed!”
Karin watched until he put a hundred meters behind him; then she switched to Holder, confirmed his ambush had gone off as planned; switched to Deng who was driving an ATV, racing to cut off her own insurgent incursion; switched to Valdez, who had finally joined up with another squad to quell a street battle in an ancient desert city.
• • •
“Delphi, you there?” Shelley asked.
“I’m here.” Her voice hoarse, worn by use.
Dawn had come. All along the northern border the surviving enemy were in retreat, stopping their exodus only when hunting gunships passed nearby. Then they would huddle out of sight beneath camouflage blankets until the threat moved on. The incursion had gained no territory, but the insurgents had won all the same by instilling fear among the villages and the towns.
Karin had already seen Valdez and Holder and Deng back to their shelters. Now Shelley’s squad was finally returning to their little fort.
“Is Hawkeye done?” he asked her.
She sighed, too tired to really think about it. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“I never liked him much.”
Karin didn’t answer. It wasn’t appropriate to discuss another handler.
“You still there?”
“I’m here.”
“You want to tell me if this was a one-night-stand? Or are you going to be back tonight?”
Exhaustion clawed at her and she wanted to tell him no. No, I will not be back. There wasn’t enough money in the world to make this a good way to spend her life.
Then she wondered: When had it ceased to be about the money?
The war was five thousand miles away, but it was inside her head too; it was inside her dreams and her nightmares.
“Delphi?”
“I’m here.”
In her worst nightmares, she lost voice contact. That’s when she could see the enemy waiting in ambush, when she knew his position, his weaponry, his range . . . when she knew her clients were in trouble, but she couldn’t warn them.
“You want me to put in a formal request for your services?” Shelley pressed. “I can do that, if you need me to.”
It wasn’t money that kept Karin at her control station. As the nightmare of the war played on before her eyes, it was knowing that the advice and the warnings that she spoke could save her soldiers’ lives.
“It’s best if you make a formal request,” Karin agreed. “But don’t worry—I’ll be here.”
A Moment Before It Struck
He felt death coming a moment before it struck.
In the lingering gray twilight, Smoke lay on his bedding, eyes not quite closed and mind adrift, only half-aware of the sounds of the encampment around him: steel on whetstone, the rattle of dice, a soft song, and loud bragging. The soldiers huddled together under a tent canopy raised against a misty summer rain. From the mountains in the north there came a sound of distant thunder.
When they’d settled in, Ekemion had invited him to play a game of dice, which he usually enjoyed, but this time he’d declined with a sheepish grin. “I don’t have my coin purse. It’s gone.”
“Again?” Ekemion demanded, incredulous. “Smoke, that’s three times now.”
Smoke shrugged. He was just seventeen, tall and lean, with honey-brown hair that he’d left loose around his shoulders after washing it clean of soot and Lutawan blood. His green eyes glittered with their own light as evening shadows gathered. “Fresh coin is easy enough to come by.” In the aftermath of battle, they gathered it from the dead.
“You won’t find any Lutawans to kill tonight,” Ekemion said, reaching into his pocket. “So I’ll give you some of my own coin to play with.”
Smoke arched an eyebrow. “And then complain when I win the rest of it? No. I’ll play another time.”
So Smoke lay alone at the edge of the canopy, his sword in its scabbard cradled in his arm, and the misty rain sometimes wandering in to cool his face of the summer’s heat.
The war had been ongoing for generations, pushed by the Lutawans, whose king was resolved to overrun the Puzzle Lands, and enslave the Koráyos people. Smoke had been sent to war the summer before, when he
was sixteen. His demon nature let him slaughter the men of Lutawa with no remorse—and often with pleasure—but whether he liked it or not, it was his duty to fight.
That night his thoughts drifted as he listened to a whispering, pleading murmur of prayers spoken in voices no one else could hear: the voices of women from the borderlands of Lutawa whose lives had grown unbearable.
Lutawa was a vast land, strange and twisted, where women were kept as slaves and traded like coin, and if they protested, their protests were soon silenced, but their hearts still simmered and sometimes overflowed. Then they called to him in prayer: Come, come avenge me.
It was in his demon nature that he could hear them.
On the far side of the tent, Dehan the Trenchant spoke strategy with Chieftain Rennish. His murmured words should have been impossible to pick out past the conversation of the soldiers, but Smoke’s senses were acute, and when Dehan’s voice grew softer still, the shift caught his notice. “And what of my demon son?” Dehan asked Rennish, his distaste plain. “Does he still serve you well? Is he true to his murderous nature?”
Rennish hissed. She was commander of the irregulars, the stealth troop that slipped like ghosts deep into the Borderlands, striking without warning against Lutawan soldiers and any farmers and villagers who supported them. “His sword is chipped and dull from use. Be wary, Dehan, if he ever turns against you.”
Dehan’s chuckle was easy. “He’s a flawed creature, but he’s still Bidden. He exists to serve the Koráyos people as all the Bidden do. There is nothing else for him.”
A torch was lit. Its red flame glistened against Smoke’s eyelashes as he allowed himself to be lulled again by the prayers for vengeance that whispered in his mind. The Trenchant Dehan didn’t know he heard the prayers; no one did. It wasn’t Smoke’s way to reveal what could be hidden. Later tonight, when the Trenchant had returned to the army’s main encampment, and the other soldiers in his troop had given in to sleep, then Smoke would slip away to answer one of the prayers, or maybe two.
Avenge me.
So many prayers, he could never answer them all, but their bloody need entranced him—so much, that he didn’t sense death’s approach until a taut, quivering hate rushed in upon him along the threads of structure that underlay the world.
His eyes opened.
From the misty twilight outside the tent a glint of steel flashed. His hand closed over his scabbard, and as the knife slashed toward his chest he dissolved into a swirl of gray vapor, sliding away from death along the threads that made up the weft and warp of the world-beneath—for that was his nature, a spirit creature who could take a man’s solid form.
The knife struck the mat where he had been. His assailant made a low cry of shock and drew back, stumbling away into darkness while Smoke took a man’s form again, standing poised at the edge of the tent. Ripping his sword from its scabbard he thrust into shadows, feeling the shape of his quarry in the threads. Only as he did so did he realize she was a woman and that she was not alone. His own sister, Takis, stood beside her.
“Smoke, no!” Takis shouted—too late.
The tip of his blade dived toward the woman’s heart, and as it struck her, a bolt of lightning shot across the sky. Its flickering light caught on the edge of a glittering knife that flew out of the woman’s hand, and revealed to Smoke her familiar face, marked with a dagger-shaped stain on her right cheek.
Thunder slammed down on the camp, demolishing any further protest from Takis and leaving Smoke with ringing ears.
Behind him, someone brought a torch. Its ruddy light fell across a woman coiled in the wet grass: the young wife of a Lutawan farmer, dressed in the same simple skirt and blouse she’d worn that morning when the irregulars had stormed her home and Smoke had slaughtered her husband. He stared at her in astonishment. He’d struck her hard and her shoulders jerked as she fought for breath, but she wasn’t bleeding. A coin purse hung on a string around her neck. The coins in it had stopped the sword from piercing her heart. She’d been knocked down, her breath knocked away, that was all.
Takis reacted first, drawing her own sword, holding it lightly in her experienced hand, her gaze fixed on the fallen woman. She wore brown trousers, a neatly tailored tunic, fine boots, and an etched leather jerkin. Full black hair framed a stern face that reflected her experience on the battlefield. Ten years older than Smoke, she was used to command and would become Trenchant, charged with the defense of the Puzzle Lands, when their father Dehan passed from the world.
“Takis,” Smoke said to her in wonder, “did you see it? The Dread Hammer wouldn’t let me kill her.”
The Lutawan woman struggled to her knees, though she remained hunched over her bruised chest.
Takis turned to Smoke, her head cocked and her gaze suspicious. “She was found by a patrol and brought to me, just another Lutawan woman seeking sanctuary in the Puzzle Lands. So I thought. Then I saw she carries your coin purse, the one I gave you after you lost the other. When I asked how she got it, she begged for a chance to return it to you.”
***
Long ago, the people of the Puzzle Lands had prayed to the Dread Hammer for aid against the cruelties of the Lutawan king. A forest spirit named Koráy heard their prayers and felt bidden to answer them. She devised many spells in defense of the Puzzle Lands, not least that her partly human descendants, who were called the Bidden, would always be bound to serve the Koráyos people.
Smoke was more a spirit creature than any of his Bidden kin. He alone could slide into the world-beneath and ride the threads as Koráy used to do, traversing the land with the speed of the wind . . . and appearing out of nowhere among the enemy—an ability that made him most useful to Chieftain Rennish.
On that morning, very early, Smoke had ridden with the irregulars, following Rennish deep into the Borderlands. As dawn’s first flush brightened the eastern sky, their patrol had stood ready to attack a farmhouse where a troop of Lutawan soldiers had been quartered for the night.
The Koráyos had let it be known that they would kill any farmer who sold food to Lutawan soldiers or gave them shelter, while the Lutawans had promised to kill any farmer who did not. It was a bad time to be a farmer in the Borderlands and many had fled south. More should have.
Smoke had gone in first as he always did, the only sign of his coming a plume of gray vapor that went unnoticed even by the farmer’s dogs. He materialized in the farmhouse, to find the soldiers there still asleep, six on the kitchen floor and nine more in the sitting room. Only a faint light seeped through the shutters. Outside, a single man kept watch, his footsteps a slow rhythm as he paced the porch. Smoke stood in the doorway between the two rooms, his sword in hand, listening. When his keen hearing picked out a distant rumble of hooves, he knew the rest of the irregulars would soon arrive. So he set to work.
He saw well in the dark, and his first stroke neatly removed the head of one of the sleepers in the sitting room. There was no outcry, only the thump of the sword and wet splatter of blood against the walls. His next stroke opened the throat of a man who had just begun to rise, and then he cut down two more before the others were sufficiently awake to arm themselves. When the Koráyos irregulars kicked in the door, Smoke turned to vapor again and moved into the backrooms, where he found two men scrambling to escape through a window. By their look and their plain clothing these were the farmers—not that it mattered to him.
As they vaulted from the window, he reached for the threads, passing as vapor through the wall. Behind the house was a grassy farmyard overrun with worried geese and chickens. Two sheds squatted beside a stable, with several cow pens close by. Farther out, a grove of broad-leafed trees, no doubt kept for firewood, stood dark against a brightening sky.
Smoke materialized in the middle of the yard, right in front of the farmers as they ran. Two strokes of his sword put them on the ground and then he turned to see if there might be another that he’d missed.
That’s when he saw her standing in the half-light:
a young woman, younger than him, with what would have been a strong, comely face, except that her left eye was blackened, her lips were swollen and bruised, and on her cheek, a dagger-shaped mark branded her skin with a color like half-dried blood. Despite this evidence of a recent beating, she was dressed neatly in a pale linen blouse and a full skirt that reached her knees, with her heavy, dark hair pulled back and tied behind her neck. Dust covered her bare feet, but triumph gleamed in her eyes as she looked at the two men bleeding out at Smoke’s feet.
Too soon, a horse came cantering around the farmhouse, carrying Chieftain Rennish on its back. She held in her hand a burning torch that trailed an ugly gyre of black smoke. The young Lutawan woman fled.
Smoke waited several beats of his racing heart to see where she would go. If she made for the fields, he’d let Rennish ride her down—but somehow she knew better. Holding her skirt above her knees, she sprinted hard for the shelter of the stable.
Smoke grinned. “I’ll take care of her!”
Rennish looked at him with a suspicious gaze, and Smoke knew at once what was on her mind. Koráyos soldiers were merciless when it came to dispensing death, and in these raids the Trenchant had ordered that no one be spared—men, women, children—all must be slaughtered, and the buildings and fields burned. Rennish would see to that, but like all Koráyos women, she would not tolerate rape.
Smoke bared his teeth, offended at her suspicion. She just shrugged—“Take this, then”— and tossed him the torch. He caught it. With his bloody sword in one hand and the torch in the other, he strode across the farmyard, a flock of confused chickens fleeing before him.
Dawn’s light had not yet found its way into the stable, but the torch’s uneven flame cast a bloody glow on two plow horses. They tossed their heads and snorted, circling in their stalls. The young Lutawan woman stood beside the farthest stall. The mark on her cheek soaked up shadow, looking darker, grimmer, as she faced Smoke with defiant eyes. “I know who you are, death spirit! I have heard the stories, and I prayed for you to come avenge me, but you would not.”
