Sweep in Peace

by Ilona Andrews

  “Where are you going?” Gaston called out.

  “To see the muscle merchant,” I told him and shut the door.

  Wilmos’ shop was an island of calm in the chaos of Baha-char. As I stepped into its cool depth, the soft lilting melody of a now dead planet wound about me like fragrant smoke from an incense burner. Gorvar, Wilmos’s huge lupine monster, lay on the floor, sprawled on a pelt of long golden fur that no doubt once belonged to some ferocious creature. Gorvar glanced at me with his orange eyes, but decided moving wasn’t worth the trouble. I didn’t present enough of a threat.

  Wilmos emerged from the back room, wiping his hands with a rag.

  “You sent him to Nexus.”

  “I’ve been expecting this conversation.” Wilmos pointed at a horseshoe shaped couch. “Let’s sit.”

  I sat. “You said he was your life’s work. Then you sent him to Nexus to die.”

  Wilmos growled under his breath. Yellow light rolled over his irises. “I didn’t send him. I tried to talk him out of it.”

  “Not hard enough.”

  “It wouldn’t have mattered. It was the impossible job. The one that killed every creature that took it. He had to have it.”

  “Why?”

  Wilmos sighed. “It’s complicated.”

  “Try me.”

  “Soldiers aren’t born. They are made. Under the right conditions, most people can be forged into soldiers. They follow orders, they respect the chain of command, and when occasion calls for it, they will perform heroic deeds for the good of the many. But at heart those soldiers hope there is no war. Given a chance, they prefer to avoid combat and when they fight so they can eventually go home. Sean isn’t just a soldier. He is a warrior. War is a thing he does as naturally as you breathe. It draws him like night insect to a flame.”

  “But why this war? Why not any other war, the kind with an expiration date?”

  “Because he wanted the roughest job I had and when I offered it to him, it had an expiration date. A six month tour. He did it for many reasons. He had to test himself. To know that he could stand shoulder to shoulder with his parents. In some way, if he proved to himself and them that he could cut it in the roughest war, it would mean that everything they went through to give him life was worthwhile. He wanted to make them proud. He wanted to be able to look his reflection in the eye and prove that all his skills and power meant something. You want to be the best Innkeeper you can be. He wants to be the best soldier he can be. I was a contributing factor to this. I told him to his face that he was the pinnacle of my work. That’s a hell of a lot of expectation to put on someone and if I wasn’t old and stupid, I would’ve recognized this. He wanted to show me what he was capable of. Sean hates to disappoint. You were a factor.”

  “Me?”

  “I asked him if he was leaving anyone behind. He said he met a girl with stardust on her robe, and when he looked into her eyes, he saw the Universe looking back.”

  “He said that?”

  “He did. I asked him if he thought this girl would wait for him and he said he wasn’t sure.” Wilmos sighed. “How do you think he felt when he met you? If I give you an obscure sentient species, I bet you can tell me their favorite color. You walk the streets of Baha-char and bargain with Merchants, you open doors to planets thousands of light years away, and you use complicated technology like you grew up with it, because you did. He knew nothing except what he learned on Earth. You weren’t equals.”

  “But I never wanted him to…”

  “I know. He knows, too. He wanted to learn everything in a hurry. He learned, alright. If you ever have trouble with an armored rover or your particle cannon, he’ll fix it for you.” Wilmos dragged his hand across his face. “Once he got to Nexus, biology took over. He was designed to withstand the siege and protect civilians. That idiot Nuan Cee loaded Nexus with exiles. There are whole families there, hiding out in the colony bunkers. Sean couldn’t walk away from them. Biological programming isn’t everything, but you can’t discount it either. In this case, his programming aligns with his ethics. That’s a powerful urge.”

  “Sean Evans won’t walk away from someone who needs his protection.” I had learned that when our neighbors were attacked.

  “Yes,” Wilmos said. “And he proved whatever he set out to prove. He is the best there is. He lasted a year and a half on a planet where seasoned mercenaries died in days. He doesn’t have the manpower to win, but he sure as hell isn’t backing down. He is what we envisioned when we created his parents.”

  I exhaled. “He traded a lifetime contract to save me from dying when I was poisoned.”

  Wilmos grimaced. “It doesn’t surprise me.”

  “It surprised the hell out of me. Wilmos, we spent a week together. One week. We flirted. We kissed once. Where is this… devotion coming from?”

  The veteran werewolf studied me for a long moment.

  “What?”

  “I’m trying to figure out a way to explain it and not screw things up between the two of you. I’ve done enough damage as is.”

  “Why don’t you just say it straight?”

  Wilmos took a deep breath. “You’re young.” He made some uncomfortable motions with his hands, as if he were trying to juggle something and failing. “Just… try not to take it as a blow to your ego. When the night is long and dark, you picture dawn in your head and you wait for it. It sustains you and gives you hope. In a war you search through your memories and you find that one thing, that anchor that tethers you to home. You are that to him. You are everything that is clean and peaceful and beautiful. You are someone who would cry if she heard he died. Soldiers do this. Sailors and long-range space crews, too. Men, women, doesn’t matter. We all wish for someone at home who might be waiting for us. It’s not always fair to those who stay behind, but that’s the way it is.”

  Gorvar rose and trotted over and Wilmos patted the big wolf’s head.

  “Sean is no fool. He knows there wasn’t anything solid there, but he thinks there might be if he ever made it off Nexus. He thinks there is a chance. When he fought his way through that dark night, covered in gore and with no end in sight, he thought of you. He thought of coming home and seeing you smile. You are worth living for. You kept him going. He couldn’t let you die, Dina. I knew this was a long shot. I hoped that if worse came to worst, you’d let him down gently, so he had some piece of a heart left. Now it doesn’t matter anymore. He will go to his fate knowing that he kept you out of harm’s way and he will be perfectly content.”

  “He won’t be going anywhere. I’m going to save him,” I told him. I would deal with being Sean’s dawn later. Now I had to keep him alive.

  “You can’t.” Pain brimmed in Wilmos’ eyes. “The only way to save him is to bring about peace on Nexus. It is impossible. I know the Arbiters are trying, but it can never be. They’ve been enemies for far too long. That’s why the Office of Arbitration gave it to some greenhorn Arbiter nobody ever heard of.”

  Nice to know this was George’s first try. I leaned forward. “You said yourself I have stardust on my robe and the Universe in my eyes. I want to save Sean. After I saved him, I’ll decide if I am going to give him a chance or not. Right now that’s still up in the air.”

  Wilmos’ eyebrows crept up.

  “I’m not an angel who will soothe all his wounds, I’m not his dawn, and I’m not his perfect sweetheart who is waiting for him to come home from the war. He’ll figure it out very quickly, if he doesn’t know that already, and then he will have to decide if he wants to let go of that and work on getting to know the real me. But none of this can happen until I pry him out of the Merchants’ contract. Are you going to help me or not?”

  Wilmos stared at me for a long time. “What do you need?”

  I passed him a piece of paper. “There are many bounties on this person.”

  Wilmos glanced at the name and raised his eyebrows. “Yes.”

  “I need to know if any of those contracts came off
the market after 2032 Standard.”

  “I can check that.”

  “And I need the psy-booster.”

  Wilmos leaned back. “The psy-booster has to be fed with life energy.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s agony. One of the worst pains known to a human.”

  “I know.”

  Wilmos thought it over. “Okay. I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  So did I.

  After the heat of Baha-char, the cool interior of the inn was more than welcome. And I could finally stop rolling the bag. The psy-booster wasn’t something I wanted close to my skin, so Wilmos’ dealer had packed it into a large wheeled bag. The bag was cumbersome and made for an easy target. I had dragged it through a mile worth of Baha-char streets, worrying that some enterprising thief was going to make a play for it. But I was finally home. I strolled through the hallway, with the bag rolling behind me, and opened a screen to George. “Meet me in the Grand Ballroom.”

  He nodded.

  This wasn’t going to be a pleasant conversation, but I didn’t really care.

  I walked to the back of the ballroom. Where would be a good place… To the side? No, I’d want them to be in a circle around me. I stopped in the center, where the mosaic floor offered a depiction of Gertrude Hunt circled by a stylized broom. This had to be the best spot.

  A hole opened in the center of the mosaic, small, but growing larger and larger, swallowing the mosaic pieces. That was okay. I would redo it later.

  George walked into the ballroom.

  “So this is your first assignment,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  The hole was now three feet wide. Good enough. I raised my hand, coaxing one of the inn’s bigger roots out. Thinner roots wouldn’t work. They were capillaries and I need a nice thick vein, a direct access to the heart of the inn. This would take a while.

  “Was this supposed to be a feather in your cap? Your first assignment, which you must accomplish without any regard to the cost to everyone else?”

  “Feathers are for people who seek recognition,” George said. “Recognition does not matter to me.”

  “People don’t seem to matter to you either. You came here and appealed to my trust. You pretended to know nothing about the inns or how they worked. Then you systematically manipulated the events and chipped away at my resolve until you brought me to this point.”

  “You wouldn’t have reached it unless you were desperate,” he said.

  “Yes. Did you know Sean was Turan Adin and he and I had a history?”

  “Yes. There was a chance that his presence would give you that final push. Nuan Cee was growing increasingly frantic. His back is against the wall. Both the Holy Anocracy and the Horde are martial cultures, and the lees are not. The prolonged war is harder on them than on any of the others. Ancestral worship is so ingrained in the lees’ society, they’ve killed each other over the privilege of taking care of their elders. Nuan Cee is half-exile; his obsession with forging the cast-outs into a clan has dominated his business strategies for the last twenty years. He did take the time to cover his tracks, but when you examine his financial maneuvering with his ancestry in mind, the pattern emerges quite readily. When he finally acquired the rights to Nexus, it must’ve felt like a triumph. Finally he could make his people whole. He jumped the gun with colonization. It was quite possibly the most emotion-driven decision of his entire career. Then he saw it all fall apart. Without peace, there is no clan, no shrine, no closure. He wanted to bring Turan Adin into the negotiations, because he is their biggest weapon. I just needed to give him an excuse. With the negotiations breaking down and the Khanum’s eldest son having died on Nexus in the past year, she would need the Autumn Festival. It was her only chance to see her son again. She would do almost anything for it. So I suggested to Robart that sometimes people do not truly understand the situation until they had a chance to see it through their own eyes. His budding alliance with House Meer was tenuous; he was blinded by grief over his beloved. House Meer understood this and placed very little confidence in him, so when he offered them a seat at the metaphorical and actual table, they jumped on the chance and sent three of their finest to ruin the negotiations.”

  “When?”

  George arched his eyebrows. “When what?”

  “When did you suggest that to Robart?”

  “On the second day of the peace summit.”

  I stared at him.

  “It was the kind of seed that needed to be planted in advance. Robart is a sensitive man, possessing an unfortunate combination of nobility of spirit and certain inborn belief in the fairness of the world. His instincts tell him that if only he does the right thing and makes sure that everyone around him does the right thing, life will respond in kind and reward him for his efforts. He is a more sophisticated version of the proverbial knight in shining armor who believes that if he slays the evil dragon, he will rescue a beautiful princess who will love him forever and they will live happily ever after in their castle. He worked so hard, he had fought his way past the dragon, but his princess is dead and his castle stands hollow and empty. He’s come to learn that life is a bitter bitch. She is inherently unfair. She took his happy future and crushed it, grinding it into dust. That realization is too much for him; he is emotionally volatile, swinging from one extreme to the other. A man in that emotional condition isn’t able to make quick, reasoned decisions. I had to give him time to process the nudge, until his emotions finished churning. Meanwhile, the interaction with his opponents began to foster some sympathy in him. He had come here with the desire to burn everyone and everything to the ground, and yet here he was, feeling compassion toward his enemy. This created a conflict within him, one he wasn’t capable of resolving, so he did what I suspected he would do – he reached out to his allies, hoping that they would assess the situation and point him in the right direction, eliminating his doubts. He came to the inevitable conclusion that the Meer should witness the summit for themselves.”

  He couldn’t possibly be human. No human being could calculate the odds that far in advance.

  “The rest fell into place,” George said. “The poisoning was a wild card, but it worked in our favor. Given a choice, I wouldn’t have poisoned you, Dina. It was too risky. I need you for the final act to this drama and I am genuinely fond of you. For all of my ruthlessness, my friends are very dear to me. That’s why I have so few. I try not to form friendships.”

  “Because you might have to kill people you know?”

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  A thick root slid out of the opening in the floor, wrapped in a network of thinner shoots. I let it rise about three feet and opened the bag. A round white jewel sat inside, as big as a soccer ball and rippling with all the fire of a diamond. The thinner roots bent toward it, scooped the gem, and pulled it to the main shoot, wrapping tightly around it, forming a cocoon. The psy-booster was in place. Hopefully Gertrude Hunt would bond with it in the next few hours.

  “I understand the Khanum, Robart, and Nuan Cee.” I shook my head. “I still don’t understand you.”

  George sighed, his handsome face resigned. “Very well. I owe you that much.”

  He raised his walking stick and gently tapped it on the floor. A huge projection burst out of the top of the cane, curving in front of us, taking up almost the entire half of the ballroom. Jagged mountains thrust through the barren brown and green soil, their yellow cliffs reflecting the light of a green sickly sun, puncturing the sky like an infected wound. Nexus. Hot during the day, cold at night, ugly at all times, yet hiding immense mineral wealth just beneath its crust.

  “I was five when my grandfather died,” George said. His voice was hollow. “He was a pirate, a swordsman, and a vagabond. He told the best stories. He was the best grandfather a child could have. Our mother was dead, our father had abandoned us, so it was just my older sister and my grandparents. So when he died, I was very sad.”

  On the screen George walk
ed into the desolation of Nexus. He wore plain pants and a simple white shirt. His loose blond hair streamed around him. His face was serene and so beautiful… He was almost angelic, a strange haunting mirage conjured up by a planet wishing for something other than a wasteland.

  George’s voice was soft, intimate, the kind of voice that reached deep into your soul. “I was so sad, that I called him back to life.”

  The other George kept walking. The jagged cliffs parted and a vast valley, its floor rough and uneven, stretched before him.

  “Everyone thinks the dead rise as mindless monsters. It is always that way for necromancers. The dead rise without the burdens of their past lives, without mind, and without pain.”

  I sensed what was coming and braced myself.

  “The thing that came back wasn’t my grandfather. It had claws and fangs. It devoured stray dogs. But it could speak and it knew my name.”

  On the projection George stopped. His blue eyes blazed with a pure white light. He raised his right hand, his fingers pointing up like claws. A wind stirred his hair.

  “It remembered me,” George said. “It remembered how the man it used to be died. It remembered the pain of his passing and it mourned the love he had lost.”

  The ground broke around George’s feet, as if the dry crust of Nexus’ desert turned liquid. Bodies rose, some rotting, some skeletal, but all reaching to him, hundreds and hundreds of corpses, their limbs held out, as if pleading, and then I heard it, a muted, desperate wail, coming from hundreds of creatures at once, so terrible, I wanted to clamp my hands over my ears and run.

  “They say the dead have no memories and know no pain.” George’s voice was barely above whisper, but somehow it was louder than the pleas of the corpses. “It’s not that way for me.”

  The dead cried out, louder and louder, grabbing at George’s clothes, begging. George stood in the center of this maelstrom, his eyes brimming with pain. Tears wet his face. He wept and the dead cried with him. White lightning tore out of him. The corpses fell as one. He stood alone.