Nightwatch over windscar, p.30
Nightwatch over Windscar, page 30
Char tightened their focus. Even at this slower pace, the captain was running like someone who ran all the time, easily and unbothered. Her features were disorganized, suspended between exaggerated distress, which Char knew must be false, and an eye-darting appraisal of the surrounding terrain.
With another unpleasant jolt, Char realized Iari must be looking for them (plural)—Winter Bite, Char, the corporal. Then Char realized that was wishful thinking; Iari could certainly not know that Char was near this location. Iari began altering her course toward an obviously shallower patch of hillside, as if she were tired or seeking an easier ascent. Char thought that this was a ruse: Iari was putting more of the group between her and Leader (and also moving away from Char).
Iari also had the entire group’s attention now; Char scanned all the faces twice, to be certain. Their expressions were curious, mostly. No one seemed suspicious, except Leader, who was already pushing through the group to intercept Iari as she achieved, then crested, the ridgeline. She ran another ten meters or so before stopping, so that she would no longer be visible from the camp.
Leader, realizing what she had been doing, also moved over the ridgeline. And like a herd of neefa, the rest of the group followed.
Leader’s grip on the ’caster shifted again, from loosely two-handed to business. Char heard the whine as he-she-they primed it.
“Stop there! Right fucking now.”
Char decided they needed to show some more initiative. They muted their audio feed to all but emergency alert. Then they moved for the first time in eighteen hours, shaking the snow off their armor like diamonds.
• • •
This wasn’t going to end well.
Iari stopped (right fucking now). Stared past the business end of a longcaster and at the guy holding it. Some snaggle-toothed tenju, unshaven, threadbare braids full of hooks, swaggering with delusions of drill sergeant. Iari had heard him yelling on her run up, little snatches of abuse caught on the wind. He might’ve been ex-army, but her bet was he’d watched too many war dramas.
She had everyone’s attention now. Exactly not what she’d wanted. A dozen pairs of curious eyes. At least it looked like everyone had followed her over the ridge. If Snaggle shot her here, Corso wouldn’t see it.
She flicked her gaze around. Lot of nothing back here, open snowfields and rolling hills. She had been hoping for a culvert. A convenient fold in the hillside. Somewhere to drop down and hide. All she saw was a flattish area with a berm set up on one end—a practice range, probably this lot’s original destination, and it was on the opposite side of the group from where she was. She could try turning around, hoping for a convenient culvert, and make a run for it. Probably get Snaggle’s bolt in her back if she tried it.
Right. Try talking, then.
“Sorry I’m late, Geltrannen sent me.” She raised her hands with exaggerated slowness. “Geltrannen,” she repeated, and then remembered to gasp like she’d run out of breath. “She. Sent me?”
Snaggle stepped away from the group, still pointing his weapon at her. “What’s your name?”
“Iari.”
“Iari. Iari. I-ar-i. Nope.” Snaggle smirked. Lifted the ’caster to his cheek. “Gel didn’t mention you, Yar-ree.” He put a Windscar accent on it, like he needed her to know her name was southern, three syllables instead of two.
That was when Iari decided he was performing badass for his audience, that he didn’t mean to shoot her as much as he did to scare her and probably humiliate her. This neefa-shit was her cue to gibber and apologize, and his cue to yell more abuse at her.
Sure. She could do that.
Or she could syn the short distance between them, take the fucking ’caster out of his hand, and feed the first bolt to him.
Iari beat the syn back, gulped a breath, tried to look dismayed. “But she said—I’m supposed to go with the group leaving after meal for ’caster practice? That’s you, yeah?”
Snaggle’s expression said she hadn’t quite sold it. (Because she wasn’t Corso.) “That’s us. Yeah.”
They stared at each other. Iari heard wind, the whine of a primed ’caster. One quiet voice in the faceless group say “oh shit” with undisguised anticipation.
And then: “Wait, no, Fergil—I know her. Hey, Iari.”
Elements bless. Or curse. That was Bersk’s voice, and Bersk pushing her way through the crowd, all cold-flushed skin and manic eyes. She looked—huh. Curious. Intrigued. Because, right, Bersk’s Iari had been taciturn, Bersk’s Iari would’ve just stared at Snaggle instead of offering up excuses.
Corso had been right. Terrible plan. So much for Hrok’s passing unseen. She could try Ptah’s fire and mayhem.
Iari let her hands drop. The knife she’d shoved up her right sleeve slid down a little. Not enough. She pulled her fist into her coat, began working the sweater cuff. She’d wanted that voidspit blade to stay secure and not come falling out, and it was doing exactly that, and fuck.
“She came in with Corso,” Bersk was saying. “I told you about Corso. Iari’s his cousin, from B-town. She’s a surge-vet, too.”
“B-town. B-town.” Snaggle said the name like it tasted bad. “The fuck we need a southerner for.”
Bersk trilled a laugh. “Oh, come on, Fergil. She can shoot. Corso said—”
Fergil stood there, making doubtful noises every time Bersk took a breath. Iari avoided his gaze and stared instead past him, the whole group, while she kept working at the knife. The last time she’d crossed this terrain, she’d been marching after Geltrannen. Her impression then: a winter’s worth of snowfall made things look smooth. The buried reality was bumps that caught toes and surprise dips that sank you to your hip, then tried to steal boots. Daylight (greylight) didn’t improve her opinion. But it did look like just over this ridge, to the west, that flattish area she’d seen—either had very regular, even snowdrifts stretching one side, or a series of snow-covered berms. Looked like a place that you went to shoot ’casters. To the southwest, a steep-sided creek bed trailed out of the camp valley. That was a place she could hide. If she could get to it. Which she wouldn’t, because even if she talked Snaggle into letting her join this party, she’d never talk him into letting her walk away again.
Yeah. Terrible plan. She’d tell Corso so, if she lived through it.
And she also didn’t know where Dodri, Winter Bite, and Char were, and that was starting to worry her. Either they were very good at hiding, or they weren’t here at all. She had visions of Brood coming at them, leftovers from Ettrad, and—
Snaggle lunged at her.
Iari dropped her hips, bent her knees, started a deflective shield-arm deflection before her brain caught on that she was probably supposed to act startled. Maybe trip and fall backward. Instead she fought the syn back to stand down and stayed where she was, left arm outstretched. The movement was enough to finally dislodge the voidspit knife in her sleeve. She felt the sheath slip, and the handle bumped into the heel of her curled right hand.
Someone in the group said, “Heh.”
“See? She can fight, too.” Bersk looked thoughtful. “I think Corso said she was cartel, back in B-town. Right, Iari?”
Oh Elements, had Corso said that? Iari hitched her shoulder, noncommittal. The syn kept trying to focus on Fergil, reading him as the threat. And then it caught a new motion, dragged Iari’s attention that way—
Ptah’s burning eye.
Char burst up out of the snow just below the crest of the hill to the east and started running toward Iari. No, charging. Silent, though, like a snowslide, if snowslides ran across and up hills.
Iari snapped her gaze back to Fergil.
Who sneered, “Huh. Well. All right, but where’s your badge, Yar-ee?”
Iari made a decision. Terrible plan, getting more terrible.
“Templar!” Iari said, and pointed, left-handed, at Char.
Everyone looked.
Iari shoved forward, slammed her right shoulder into Fergil and sent him reeling, same time she grabbed his ’caster with her left hand, close to the stock, and jerked it out of his hands. She reversed direction and cracked the butt into his face. Fergil fell back—dead, unconscious, didn’t matter, just bleeding and blessedly quiet.
The group had not been tight to begin with; now they were spreading out more as they saw something running at them. Templar had gotten a couple to prudently drop onto one knee, trying to sight their ’casters on Char. Maybe a third of them had elected to charge, baying like wolves after a wounded bear. The rest weren’t sure what to do. Milling, looking at each other and the approaching Char, who was beginning to take on bipedal dimensions.
Except Bersk. Bersk was looking at Iari, and her eyes were hard and bright.
“I knew it,” said Bersk. “I knew—”
Iari didn’t wait to hear what Bersk knew. She threw Fergil’s ’caster at Bersk’s head, drew the knife out of her right sleeve, flipped the blade and folded it against her forearm. She followed her throw and slammed into Bersk, bore her over. Coats and sweaters were no kind of armor, but they’d tangle a blade. Iari jammed her right forearm into Bersk’s chest, slid it up, caught Bersk’s chin and pushed it back. Then they landed, Iari on top, and Iari flipped the knife again and buried it under Bersk’s jaw.
Fast. Quiet. No one even turned around.
Iari left the knife there, shoved to her feet. Someone had started firing; she could hear the pop of ’casters, please they couldn’t hear that down in the voidspit camp, or she’d have the whole place rushing up here. She swung Corso’s ’caster off her shoulder, and then she let the syn go and charged right at Char.
The snow wasn’t any less grabby on her boots, she still sank deep, but it didn’t matter. The syn protected her from fatigue, carried her over the hollow awareness of how long it’d been since food or sleep. She had a bad moment where, in the churned-up clouds of snow, she thought that it wasn’t Char coming at her. That it was some other riev, mad-eyed like Sawtooth, rotting with Brood. But then she saw the polysteel graft that was Char’s right arm, and the red flash of hexwork on Char’s armor as the ’caster bolts slewed off and burst in the snow. As she got close, Iari dropped onto her hip, digging up snow in a furrow and sliding, scrubbing off speed and staying out of the line of stray bolts.
Char pounded past her. Behind her, Iari heard stray yelps of “Riev!” quickly, ominously, cut off.
Then friction did its work and Iari twisted and flipped back onto one knee, primed Corso’s ’caster. Raised and sighted and fired, just as Char met the first line of attackers.
Swift-running Mishka.
Iari had joined the army during the voidspit surge. You trained to fight, sure, to kill, sure—that’s why there were sims. It had been Brood on the other end of her ’caster then, and Brood had a way of warping the best shots out of true. The Aedis trained you to fight more than Brood, but even then—you had to get spaceside postings, patrols in the void wastes where pirates and smugglers hid, to meet people in combat. She never had, until the ruins; and then she’d killed in the battle-rig, with her axe and her shield, like they were Brood. Bersk had been her first hand-to-hand fight. And these very clearly people were the first she’d ever shot.
But the sim training held. Mishka’s mercy, she didn’t flinch, didn’t miss.
She had a moment’s panic for Char; riev couldn’t kill people, the wichu had artificed that directive after the Accords—but Char didn’t seem to be struggling with it. Maybe the templar oaths counted as their primary programming now. Or the wichu had lied. (Gaer would say that, when she told him about this.)
(No. Gaer would say the riev had been made to kill people. His people.)
Char was not having trouble, and Iari’s hands and eyes knew what to do. They did their work, picking off those in the rear, the ones who’d come late to the charge. The ones who realized that there was a riev, and they should go back and get help. The ones who finally realized one of their own had turned on them.
At least this had happened over the ridgeline. The only person left alive now was Fergil, limp in the snow. (Maybe dead. Maybe she’d hit him that hard.) And he could stay there and freeze.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Corso told himself he wouldn’t look back. That Iari could handle herself. That she’d be fine, even if the whole of her plan rested on finding a place to hide when she crested that hill before the people she was pretending to chase saw her coming. The hiding part wouldn’t be easy; Windscar was a lot of empty. But it was the part before that had him worried.
So he kept stopping every few meters and finding an excuse to look up and back. Which meant that he saw when the exiting group stopped on the ridgeline, right on it, so that no one who looked up could miss them. He swore under his breath and made himself walk a little more before he looked back again. Iari had made contact, which she hadn’t wanted to do; now she’d have to talk her way through, which—oh ancestors and Elements. Iari wasn’t a talker. But she was marching right at the group, so maybe she’d at least get them over the ridge before anything happened.
And there was not a voidspit thing he could do from here.
At least the guards walking the camp’s perimeter who’d been yelling and pointing at her had stopped; they’d all gone back to their business. That was something.
The first ’caster shot made him jump, and he looked again—but the group had moved over the ridgeline. There were a couple more shots, but no one down here seemed upset, and beyond that, he had no idea. The ’caster fire continued: methodical, regular, like someone practicing shots. Which . . . all right. Maybe that’s what was happening. It didn’t sound disorganized enough to be shoot-at-a-fleeing-Iari.
Corso turned around again, last time, jammed his hands into his coat, dropped his chin. As for his plan: keep walking. Go back to his tent. Shit, he’d given up his ’caster. Everyone else had a ’caster. He weighed the wisdom of going back to the quartermaster against seeing if anyone here was stupid enough to leave their weapon alone and untended. Bet on the latter. He’d seen cartel needle-dens with more discipline that this place.
He tried his assigned tent first. Got his nose in the flap and realized the place was occupied. He retreated, and no one called after him.
The ’caster-fire had stopped. No one seemed concerned. No one came running over the ridge. Whatever had happened over there, it was over. Iari was fine, and when they got out of this, she’d tell him how her terrible plan had worked, and he’d pretend to be irritated but really, he’d be fucking ecstatic.
Corso spent the next hour or so prowling the camp, trying to avoid anyone who might recognize him—Bersk, Gel, the poor kid at the mess—and generally trying to look like he had places to go and was going there. What he learned was the whole camp of Axorchal One-Eye looked like it was coming apart. Not physically, but—there was a distinct lack of people in charge doing people-in-charge things. A lack of structure. Too much idle time for the people in the camp. There were a lot of dice games. Card games. People just standing and talking, wandering around, drifting into and out of conversations that Corso heard in snatches.
Some of it was the same voidspit he’d heard from Bersk and Trammen—anti-Aedian, anti-Confederation. One woman expounding at length about the time she met Axorchal, which got Corso to stop and listen. It sounded mostly like neefa-shit, until she described the altar, and how she’d seen a great hole open up over it, and seen people on the other side. She’d claimed to have seen her brother over there, beckoning to her—and he’d died in Rusak when a pack of boneless attacked. (“He was a believer, he was,” and she clutched at her badge.)
That sounded like a portal, though Corso had doubts about the risen dead on the other side. Unfortunately True Believer’s Sister didn’t have much to say about Axorchal himself, except her admiration for his power. Corso wanted to ask if she knew how those portals opened—that the altars ran on blood, and unless there were a bunch of neefa or goats around here he hadn’t seen yet, that blood was probably people.
He didn’t, of course. He drifted away from that fevered recounting and attached himself instead to a dice game conducted on a crate in the alley between rows of tents, like people were trying to hide, but not really.
He watched a few games. Then, when he was pretty sure no one was worried about him, he leaned down and asked, “You know what’s going on?” like he expected them to know what he meant. (That worked more often than it should. Either people did know, or what they thought he meant proved instructive.)
“Nope,” said the winner, who was busy counting the coins in their palm. They cocked a dark eye at him. “All I know, the watchers aren’t watching.” They tapped their left eyebrow.
Okay. Guess that could indicate a One-Eye helmet. Corso repeated the gesture. “We know where they are? I mean, did they go somewhere?”
Winner shrugged. Loser snorted. “Into Axorchal’s yurt a couple days back, and they didn’t come out, so I hope they’re ripping the shit out of Windscar right now.”
Because a handful of mutant tenju would take down an entire Aedis. Then Corso thought about Homer, and hoped he saw Loser again later.
And shit, he still needed a ’caster. He was going to walk away then, when one of the other spectators said, “Yeah, but someone came back. I heard yelling in the yurt. And then they dragged people out. I think they were templars.”
“Neefa-shit,” said Winner. But his eyes sharpened like spears.
“Templars?” Corso dragged the word out. “What, in their battle-rigs? That’d be heavy. And anyway, the fuck would they even get here?”
“If we got ’em,” said Winner, clearly not interested in the how of things, “I wanna see ’em staked out and dyin’ slow.”
Corso drifted away then, leaving the dicers and their audience to argue about what one should do with captive templars. The cold knot he’d been carrying in his guts thawed a little. Iari thought Luki and Llian had survived, but now Corso had found someone else who thought they had, too. That didn’t explain how two presumably pissed-off templars been moved from the yurt to the outbuilding (if that’s where they were; that was still Iari’s hunch he had to confirm), or where their battle-rigs were. And yeah, the whole story could be voidspit, but—he didn’t think so.
