by E. E. Knight
That sea-hardened face of his was hiding something. He might just want to spread her out on a lonely beach and use her just to see what sex with an American was like—she’d heard a joke once about a Frenchman making love to a corpse on a beach thinking she was an American—or perhaps he was seeking an in with Sime, though what good either could do the other was beyond her.
“We’ll make you a hamper,” Harald said. “Some wine, too.”
“You are all so very kind. Honestly, this is the big surprise of the trip.”
They set out the next day, early, with her as the only passenger. Thanks to a few delays with the Windkraft, they didn’t actually leave for the lighthouse until it was after ten in the morning.
Only two of his white-pants crew remained on the Windkraft. They were sufficient to handle the boat under Von Krebs’s direction. He let her take the wheel while they adjusted the sails.
He seemed strangely alive. Maybe it was the influence of being at the wheel of his own boat; but if so, why did he employ someone like Stepanek?
They arrived at the island, wooded like the rest of Finland’s Bothnian coast, after an hour’s sailing, thanks to fluky winds. Docks with skewed, weather-beaten planks led up to the edge of the little island settlement like a fun-house path.
The lighthouse island had a steepish, rocky slope up from the beach and the tiny marina. But the navigational tower wasn’t the only sign of habitation. She could just make out some big, barnlike roofs above the trees and weather-beaten old houses. The lighthouse itself was nonfunctional, according to Von Krebs, but still served as a landmark for Kokkola harbor. It was painted in red and white stripes. They had faded over the years, but the contrast was still striking enough that they were the first colors you could distinguish from the blue of the sky and the green of the island.
She’d learned to trust her intuition over the years. The fishy smell on the island unsettled her.
“Wow. I was in an agricultural fertilizer plant once. They used ground-up bits of fish. It’s the same smell.”
“I suspect someone had a catch go bad in the summer warmth. This is a mostly unvisited anchorage. The Kokkola harbormaster would go mad if you dumped your load of rotting fish to bob around in his harbor.”
They skirted the depressingly abandoned buildings and made for the lighthouse. Von Krebs said there were animals living in the abandoned buildings and he feared rabies and hantavirus. So they took a more picturesque path through the trees, climbing the lighthouse hill.
Other than a little more wind than she liked, it was a perfect day, with not a cloud in the sky.
They found a few tables and benches of a design common the world over beneath the striped lighthouse. It had a marvelous view of the bay.
“Here’s a nice spot for our picnic.”
“You’re unhappy here. Homesick?” Von Krebs asked.
“I’d like to head home, to tell the truth. There’s nothing for me to do here, at least nothing more important than what I could be doing back home.”
He looked up, nodded.
Nets, heavy and wet, fell all across her. She struggled, and the more she fought, the heavier and more entangled she became.
They rolled her up in the nets like a rug, with a few kicks for good measure, and she felt herself being hoisted across two men’s shoulders.
Three strong men helped secure her. They had that same horribly fishy smell she’d noticed earlier. They put her in handcuffs before unwrapping her from the nets. She was put into a cheap tube-steel chair, with her arms around one of the metal supports for the wooden back brace.
“What the fuck is this?” she asked.
They were inside the lighthouse, at the bottom. The stairs up reminded her a little of a nautilus with its natural ascending spiral. It reeked of decay, overlain by a fresher, fishier smell, as though someone had just shoveled the day’s catch out the door.
Von Krebs stood as though posing for a photograph with one leg up on a sea chest, leaning forward across his thigh with arms casually crossed at the wrists.
“Are you just an ordinary bastard, or the traitorous kind?” she asked.
He smiled, and the room got a little colder. “You know, I have a great interest in pain. Just how much pain an individual can take before they vomit, void their bladder and bowels, pass out, even die. Yes, you can die from pain, even though the injuries providing the source for the pain are themselves nonlethal. Let me tell you another way I am beyond the sadists of old. I can savor it in ways they could not imagine. I will feed off your aura as it slowly, agonizingly, leaves your body.”
“I gave myself up for dead years ago. I feel like I’ve lost this aura your kind finds so precious. I’ll probably disappoint you.”
He opened the chest, unrolled a small chamois sheet, and began to extract what looked like medical instruments, laying them on the chamois. There were scalpels, probes, clamps, scissors. The stainless steel took on an unnatural shine in the darkness.
He also had rope and surgical tubing. Perhaps he was a vivisectionist.
She noticed her sword-stick was in the corner. No one had investigated it closely, so they hadn’t found the switch that unlocked grip from sheath.
“You three, out. Wait outside the door. You may hear her screaming.”
The fishy-smelling men retreated.
“Meet Chien,” Von Krebs said.
The small nude Asian woman, who had what looked like a barbed octopus with long folds of skin between its limbs riding across her back, descended the stairs from the shadow above. Its limbs engulfed her neck, breasts, and waist, offering a sort of obscene modesty.
One dreadful tentacle reached out and tapped Duvalier, once, twice, three times.
Chien shimmered for a moment, then Duvalier found herself looking into an exact duplicate of herself, down to the smallest freckle and chipped tooth.
“Chien speaks good Midwestern English. Her Spanish is also excellent, but I do not believe she will need that. It’s one of the reasons we selected her when we found out you were coming.”
“When did you learn that?”
“Ah, I never reveal sources. Even to those with but five minutes left to live. Chien, how do you do?”
“Very good,” Chien said.
“See? She does not say ‘very well.’”
“Well, maybe I do,” Duvalier said tightly.
“A risk few will notice.”
“Security won’t let her get much done, unless she’s got a backpack nuke along with that Kurian.”
“Oh, you think the disguise is to work a nasty mass murder of delegates? You could not be more wrong. This disguise is just a temporary one, in order to get in close enough contact to—well, it is best if that stays a secret as well.
“We don’t need the original anymore,” Von Krebs said. “I intend to mix pleasure and pain with you from here until your death. It will only help me evolve into the higher form the Kurian Order has put me on the stairs of becoming.”
He was insane.
She tested the cuffs. He’d put them on too tightly for her to wriggle out. Once an Oklahoma police reservist had taken her into custody and put her in cuffs. When she whined that they were too tight, he loosened them—after all, she was in the back of his car and there was a steel grate between them… .
He was dead within two minutes of loosening the cuffs. She’d straightened the wire necklace she’d been wearing—it was an old coat hanger—and stabbed him in the eye when he turned around to check on her after she faked a bloody nose.
They’d made a mistake. The handcuffs were sound enough, but the chair they’d put her in was a relic. She kicked herself backward, and as she hit the ground the backrest splintered.
She bent her spine, wriggled through the cuffs, a difficult feat for anyone but a young gymnast or a Cat. She got her foot against the chain and pushed hard. A hand came out, bloody.
The pain would only help.
The Kurian doppelgänger backed away. It was o
dd to see herself look panicked.
Von Krebs stepped forward, a long-bladed Liston knife in his hand. She picked up the broken chair and hurled it at him. He ducked just long enough for her to get to the Other Duvalier.
She got nails and teeth into the bitch and the disguise vanished. Instead she was wrestling with a living umbrella of muscle.
Von Krebs came, blade held high, and she rolled, putting the Kurian between herself and the Mitteleuropean. He altered his slash, but still took a chunk out of the Kurian’s back.
That sent a shock through the Asian girl and her face writhed in pain. Well, dance with the devil and he’ll step all over your toes. Von Krebs himself recoiled in horror that he’d injured a Kurian.
No time to let up. She drove stiffened fingers into Chien’s throat and the girl coughed blood like she’d been given the Heimlich.
The Kurian released its grip on the naked girl and humped across the floor. Duvalier stomped hard on its back and it folded up around her leg, clawing. She drove the heel of her foot in hard, dragging it across the floor as she went after Von Krebs, leaving a trail of bloody bluish slime that was the Kurian’s juice. The grip began to relax, but it still had the hook-tipped tentacles in her flesh.
“Stay back,” Von Krebs said, waving the long knife.
“Fuck you. Traitor.”
He probably saw the hate in her eyes. He came at her while the Kurian was still fighting. She dropped and he overshot, tripping over her and dropping the knife.
They both reached for it and she got the handle before he did; his fingers closed on the blade in what turned into bloody agony. She relished the feel of pulling the blade out of his grip, knowing she was severing flesh and blood. She threw herself across him and opened his throat, cutting off his scream with a wet, blubbering cry.
Throwing on her coat, she hurried away from the lighthouse. No telling what kind of alarm had been sounded. Of course, they were expecting a version of her to be returning to the conference… .
Risking a trip through the dilapidated little village that they’d avoided on the way up, she saw a small house under guard. Boards were nailed across the windows and the door had a chain on it. Perhaps the small Finnish garrison was being held prisoner inside.
Why not just kill them and free up the manpower? she wondered.
Perhaps the Reapers needed feeding.
She hurried down to the dock that held the Windkraft.
“Ist das—”
“I’m Chien, you idiots,” Duvalier said tightly.
“Where to?” the one who spoke English asked.
“To Kokkola harbor—where else?” she said.
They looked at each other uncertainly. “Where is Herr Von Krebs?”
“There is a problem with the Finns. He is smoothing things out. Hurry, I haven’t all night!”
They raised anchor and used the pilot motor to move away from the island. Once into a better breeze, they worked the sheets and caught a favorable wind for the harbor. The sleek white vessel kicked up a wake.
Speaking of the wake…
The black thing she’d seen returned, this time multiplied a hundred times over, rising and falling in the bay waters.
“Christ on his cross,” Duvalier said.
The crewmen expressed alarm in German, variants of “what the hell,” it seemed to her.
“Faster!” she cried. “Surprise is essential!”
One of them stood still, looking from her to the pursuers as though trying to figure out the connection.
The lights of the harbor side were distinct now. She could make out details on the dock and wharf.
The black backs of the Big Mouths were gaining. Did this thing have a siren? Fireworks? Anything?
“Have you a flare gun?” She mimicked the firing and sputtering of a flare.
One of the men nodded and pointed to a small box strapped just below the wheel. She took it from its bracket and opened it. It was similar to the ones she’d seen in Southern Command’s arsenal, perhaps a little larger. She aimed it over the pursuers and fired.
Dazzling white light shone in the harbor. She saw, briefly, the details of the Big Mouths, eyes and teeth breaking the water briefly as they pursued.
The sailors moved, trying to shorten sail.
“Don’t,” she said, pointing the empty flare pistol.
Now they could hear shouts over the water.
The crew had had enough. They moved toward her. She drew her sword and struck first, cutting down and across, opening up the first from shoulder to groin. The second saw what had happened to his mate and he turned to run, perhaps for a weapon, perhaps to hide belowdecks. She leaped after, slashing at his legs, and opened the tendons behind his knee. Wanting no delay, she slashed again across the buttocks.
She left him flopping there in a growing pool of his blood.
They were almost at the wharf when she made it back to the wheel.
At the last second she threw the Windkraft hard over. The sails flapped and sagged, fighting to do their duty. The stern came up hard against the wharf, just missing a fender and crushing and splintering woodwork.
She left the wounded crewman to the mercies of the Big Mouths and cat-jumped to the dock. Soldiers, police, and a few Finnish men in civilian clothes were gaping out at the bay. Dozens, if not hundreds of the Big Mouths were rising out of the water and climbing onto the wharf and docks.
“Varo! Varo! Varo!” she shouted, as loudly as her small frame could manage, jumping and pointing out into the bay.
CHAPTER NINE
That same day, just a few kilometers away, Ahn-Kha had his first secret voting session.
As usual, he sat near Sime. Sime was almost Golden One–like in his ability to control his temper in social situations, hide his thoughts so that even his eyes revealed nothing, and moderate his words. If he ever gave up his role as the United Free Republic’s political fixer, he would be welcome among the Golden Ones in Western Kentucky.
The full sessions of the conference had a president presiding over them, though she (in this case) had no powers other than to call votes and announce results. By tradition, the president was the delegate from the host freehold, in this case Finland’s representative of the Baltic League. The president was also the last to cast her vote. With thirty-seven voting delegates, the ability to break ties was her privilege, at least in theory. The votes tended to be massive majorities in favor or against—for example, the first vote of any session was always an all-delegate ceremonial vote to continue the war against the Kurian Order. It passed 37–0.
Treachery Thursday, as it would later be known, began quietly enough. Friday was an official free day for the conference, giving everyone an extra day in the middle of the conference’s three-week official schedule to tour or go on excursions that would take more time. Ten voting delegates were not in attendance that Thursday, having started their breaks early, catching special trains for Helsinki or the ferry to Sundsvall across the gulf, now considered “Little Stockholm” and the capital of Free Sweden.
The president, after a short delay, stepped to the podium and asked for a quorum vote, to make the following votes legal, and a vote to make the proceedings secret. There were a couple of holdouts on both because so many delegates were absent (as the ‘no’ votes explained on the record before voting). Both passed easily.
With the secrecy vote in place, the outside monitors were turned off and security guards moved to the other side of the doors to secure them, two men to a door.
The president read a few dry lines about their duties to keep the debate and, if voted, the outcome of the secret session confidential beyond the official summary that would be issued to the governments they represented. Ahn-Kha approved of the expedient; it allowed the delegates to vote their consciences based on the debate and their own instincts without having their individual votes reported back to the home governments. Though in general he found secrecy ineffective. Enemies usually had the tools and talent to discove
r what was trying to be kept secret; all the classification did was keep the home population from finding out about the matter.
Which led to another problem with the conference, when you came right down to the wheat and chaff of these votes. The Freehold Conference could vote resolutions left, right, and center, but the home government had no obligation beyond technicalities to obey.
Ahn-Kha returned to the president at the podium. She was weary-faced this morning.
“Now, I’d like to introduce a special delegation from the Lifeweavers,” the translator said in his earpiece. “They wish to address the conference about an important development.”
The Lifeweavers entered in single file from a side door just beyond a grand piano that stood opposite the president’s lectern.
Lifeweavers could look like anything they wanted. They could have paraded into the plenary session in the form of giant praying mantises if they chose. In this instance, they looked like an international trade delegation. They all wore blue pants and gray jackets with open-collar shirts of various colors. Their countenances serene, they glided across the dais.
The conference murmured. “So many,” said Sime. “Something must be coming.”
Some of the delegates bowed; a handful even fell to their knees. In any case, all eyes watched the sixteen Lifeweavers move to the center stage.
The audience hushed, not sure what to expect.
“There has been a startling development in our joint war against the Kurian way of life and death,” the Lifeweaver in the middle of the group said. Ahn-Kha discovered that he was speaking Golden One, and glanced around at his fellow delegates, expecting expressions of confusion. But each one was giving the Lifeweaver his undivided attention. Indeed, some had even removed their translating earpieces. Headphone or no, the Lifeweaver had them hanging on every word and gesture.
“There is no way to make this news any kinder with soft words or halting preambles. We have come to an agreement with the Kurians. There will be peace.”
