by Sam Hawke
“It wasn’t the spirits who did this,” I told her, not sure if that was really a reassurance or only a correction. “This was people. Terrible people.” Sudden wariness filled me. We still didn’t know anything about the woman who had attacked Hadrea and tried to sabotage the rescue except that she was likely the same woman Jov saw at the Hands’ party. She had seemingly been alone, but who knew whether there were other Darfri on their side?
But she shook her head furiously. “We turned our back on them,” she insisted. “The warning signs were there! Our spirits are being murdered, and no one is protecting them! I tried to tell them we are under attack, but no one would listen to me. Now look where we are! Look where we are!”
She let go of my arm and pulled back suddenly, just as I reacted and tried to catch her hands. “Wait, who did you try to tell?” I asked, but she was distracted now, searching the crowd for something or someone, her head moving in jerky, confused motion, probably the result of her bad eye. She pressed her hand against her bleeding ear. “Hey! Wait, what did you mean?”
But she only shook her head at me. “I tried to tell them,” she said. “We have not protected our land or the secondworld. Now they have it. It is too late, much too late!”
Something about her manner, or perhaps what she was saying about not being listened to, struck me inside like a gong, my heart resonating with understanding. We had seen firsthand the frustration, the fear, of trying to explain a terrible approaching danger and either being ignored or having our motives questioned. I would not do the same to anyone. Besides, we needed answers, and perhaps we had been focused in the wrong place, asking the wrong questions. “I’ll listen,” I told her, trying again to catch hold of her hand. “I promise. I want to hear.”
“We are forsaken,” she repeated, but her voice was slurred now. Blood leaked between her fingers from her ear. I looked around for a free physic.
“Sit down, all right?” I said. “Don’t go anywhere.”
“Credola Kalina!” Someone tugged on my shoulder: Karista, disheveled and panting, visibly distressed. “Have you seen any of my family? The explosion, they were sitting…”
I pointed her in the direction of several Lekas, thinking guiltily of both Varina and Arran but lacking the immediate strength to deliver that news myself. Coward, I told myself, but there was just so much pain, I couldn’t dole any more out myself. I turned back to the Darfri woman, but she had disappeared. Shit. Unsettled, I searched the area to try to find her and asked everyone I ran into whether they had seen her, but she seemed to have gone from the zone without being treated. I found Jov instead, washing out some equipment, looking shaken, but before I could tell him about the Darfri woman he spoke heavily. “Those little twins both died.”
I winced. “I thought their burns weren’t too bad.” Oh, honor-down, them too? I’d sent Karista into worse news than I’d even known; the twins were her cousin’s children, and they’d already lost their mother in the explosion, as well as their aunt Varina.
“It must have been shock,” he said. “I thought they were all right, too. And Karista’s sister bled out before they could get her to the hospital.”
“Shit. More Lekas?” The family might be our political adversaries most of the time but there were good people among them, including Varina. For all that Karista had done, no one deserved that kind of loss.
Jov was obviously thinking the same thing. “Honor-down, we’re losing so many.” He looked around the camp, bewildered. I put a hand on his arm and was trying to think of something comforting to say, when a patient, a girl not even old enough for tattoos, started convulsing violently on the pallet nearby. We had to leap out of the way of several physics racing in to help.
“Listen, Jov, there was this Darfri woman here before,” I started, but Jov wasn’t paying attention. He was staring at the convulsing girl, his mouth a little open, his brows tight together.
“She was fine,” he murmured, barely audible.
But it seemed otherwise; moments later she slumped back on the ground, body slack, and despite the frantic efforts of the physic, she could not be revived. I turned away, feeling sick. She was only about the same age as Dee’s brothers.
Jov was still staring as if he couldn’t comprehend what he was seeing. “That shouldn’t have happened. I helped clean those wounds and none of them were that serious. She only needed to be stitched up.”
“She must have had internal injuries,” I said, repeating what I’d heard a physic say when something similar had happened earlier.
“No,” he said, then repeated it more firmly. “No, that’s not right, that’s not normal.”
“None of this is normal.” I gestured around us, slightly irritated. “Look around, Jov. We’re in a bloody war zone but we don’t know who or where the other side is!”
“No, I mean, convulsions like that, that’s not…” His expression had taken on a faraway quality, the one he wore when he was accessing an old memory, or thinking through a problem. Then his focus snapped back on me. “All those Lekas. The twins, Arran, Karista’s sister … how many others from that family have died here tonight?”
“A lot, Jov,” I said, fully irritated now. Sometimes the things his brain could get fixated on were unfathomable. “Not just Lekas, all the Families. The first stand was where most of them were sitting. A lot died in the blast and a lot more were injured. Explosions don’t discriminate, rich people get hurt, too.”
I could tell his mind was elsewhere because he didn’t retort, just touched his fingers together deliberately, and said, almost dreamily, “That’s not what I mean.”
“What do you mean? Because like you said, people are dying, and frankly we have better things to do than dwell on what wounds they died of.”
“I mean,” Jov said, toneless, watching as a stricken Karista crouched, silent, her hands pressed over her mouth, beside the girl’s body, “if you wanted to do as much damage as you could, why stop with just the explosions? That Darfri woman was targeting the people trying to help the survivors, right? Well, here we are, a whole bunch of survivors and wounded people, sitting right where they left us.”
I closed off the sharp retort I’d been about to make. A cold, damp feeling settled over me, like putting on a soaking-wet dress. My brother was still tapping his fingers together thoughtfully, but he had stopped staring at the dead young woman and instead was turning his gaze methodically over the bustling area, from patient to patient, lingering on the physics and the helpers like us. He started walking, almost in slow motion, his weight shifting very slowly, like a hunter trying not to startle an animal. Sweating now, I stepped up next to him and whispered, “What are we looking for?”
“Someone who doesn’t belong,” he replied softly. “Someone checking on patients who are already treated. Anyone who looks like they’re not doing what they’re supposed to be doing.” Up close it was clear his calm demeanor was the product of intense effort and control. His fingers were stiff where he tapped their ends together, his breathing too even to be natural, his step too deliberate. Emotions roiled palpably from him, if you knew him well enough to notice. “Be subtle,” he whispered, his lips barely moving. “Split up. We can’t contain things here.”
I knew what he meant. It was relatively well lit here where we were treating patients, under a number of lamps and out in the open with the bright moon above, but if we had to chase someone into the shadowy, treacherous ruins of the arena seating, we’d lose them easily in the wreckage. If there was another attack going on right under our noses, we had to stop it without losing any of the perpetrators. My mouth dry, I set to combing the area.
INCIDENT: Poisoning of Chancellor Jesso Iliri
POISON: Scourge (dilute)
INCIDENT NOTES: Chancellor Jesso consumed dilute scourge solution when attempting after a coughing fit to drink from a water jug in the apartment of his lover An-Melisa esCaruso. An-Melisa claimed to have provided the jug by accident, believing it to be water and not th
e solution of scourge she had used to clean out her oven. Chancellor attested both parties were mostly asleep (query—narcotics?) and An-Melisa sought immediate medical care. This proofer has reiterated the importance of proper precautions in all situations, and does not intend to pursue further.
(from proofing notes of Credola Stefi Oromani)
17
Jovan
We spread out. I grabbed a stack of bandages and Kalina a bucket and we moved around near the perimeter of the medical zone. I stopped occasionally by a patient and performed some menial, short task, all the while looking for someone, anyone, suspicious.
In the end I saw him not because he looked suspicious. He didn’t. He wore a physic’s blue sash over a plain paluma, stained with blood and soot like everyone else’s here. He was standing, back to me, beside a patient examining a stomach wound, nothing unusual about him. My eyes would have gone straight past if I hadn’t seen the woman on the makeshift pallet flinch suddenly, a whole-body spasm, and then the glint of metal in the man’s hand. Even then, it almost looked as if he was treating the wound, except that instead of continuing to work, he turned casually and moved on toward another patient, while thick, ugly blood spread in a worsening pool at the woman’s waist. “Shit,” I said, forgetting to be quiet, forgetting to be subtle. I had an agonizing second of indecision, then raced to the woman’s side and shoved a wad of bandages against the fresh bulging split in her skin, a mass of terrible wet red parts trying to escape her abdomen. A flash of nauseating, gut-cramping horror almost knocked me to the ground at the sight and smell of it. I pressed the bandages against the wound, hard, trying to keep my eyes on the man’s back as he strolled on, bold and relaxed as anything. I could not lose him. “I need some help here,” I called out urgently, and a physic rushed to my side.
“Fuck.” She practically shoved me out of the way. “What the…?” She leapt into action and I stepped back, shaken, the woman’s blood racing down my wrists from my soaking hands. Honor-down, there was so much of it. I didn’t bother trying to clean myself; the man had disappeared. I couldn’t see him, I couldn’t see Kalina, and I didn’t know what to do. I turned back to the physic.
“Someone’s killing patients,” I blurted out. “There’s someone pretending to be a physic. He did this. Be careful.”
She didn’t even hear me, she was concentrating so hard on trying to bring the torn flesh together again. In despair, I strode over to the next pallet, then the next, trying to find the man again. But all the physics looked alike in the circumstances, or at least equally unalike; few were wearing medical sashes because most had simply been spectators at the closing ceremony, not working, and though I had seen the back of the man, he had been of average height, with average coloring, hair a fraction longer than current fashion.
And just like that, the images locked back into place. I did know that figure. That hair needing a trim. I’d seen it multiple times, and honor-down if he wasn’t taunting me by showing up here where he must know we would be focused on our dead and dying. It was my assassin, the very man I’d been trying to track and identify for more than a month, and he was strolling around our makeshift hospital and killing without effort or disturbance. But now I knew who I was looking for, the game had changed considerably. I scooped up a discarded piece of broken wood and held it in one hand, loose down by my side, a bucket balanced against my other hip, and began to search.
He was targeting people who’d already been treated, so I ignored the line of people waiting to be seen in ragged groups clumped at the edges, and focused on those who were put in a recovery rest here because they could not be trusted to make their way either home or to the hospital, whichever was needed.
There.
My heart felt like it completely stopped when I saw him. I nearly dropped my splintery wooden weapon. I knew that face, would know it in a second. I just needed him not to see me. I dropped my gaze swiftly and got behind the man’s line of sight, then casually, oh so casually, approached.
“What are you doing with that? I need hot water,” a physic said, stepping out from nowhere. I tried to sidestep quickly to avoid losing sight of the assassin but the physic stepped to block me and I accidentally dropped the bucket; it crashed into a commandeered metal food and drinks trolley, now covered in medical tools, bounced off, and then landed on the physic’s foot.
Everything happened at once. The loud clatter and the physic’s cry of pain alerted everyone; faces twisted or rolled toward me, including the assassin’s. He glanced back at the sound, his face familiar but blank, emotionless, and our gazes met. There was a heartbeat’s pause, then he tipped something into the patient’s mouth and ducked away.
Shit, shit shit, exactly what I hadn’t wanted to happen. But there was no time for anything else. I seized the nearest person’s shoulder and shouted, gesturing at the patient, “He needs a purge, someone’s just poisoned him!” Then I leapt after the assassin. He was fast, so fast, and not exhausted from trying to rescue people and clear paths, and he jumped the makeshift cordon easily, already halfway toward the arena seats before I managed to even get out after him. “Help! Stop that man!” I shouted, no longer caring about subtlety at all. He would not get away this time, he would not, could not, get away. “Guards, someone!” I bellowed it loud enough that some of the people milling about between the sprinting assassin and the exit looked up curiously, but none of them moved. Everyone just stared.
He diverted from that cluster of people anyway, and disappeared instead into the darkened wreckage. I followed him, sprinting into a side passage blocked by fallen debris and partially cleared; a few people searched for survivors and bodies in the rubble, their efforts lit by lamps set on the floor at intervals. I’d had my eye off the assassin for a bare moment and yet he seemed already to have been swallowed up by the shadows. No one paid me any attention as I ducked under the collapsed piles of wood and metal, pushing my way in underneath the frame and trying not to disturb any of the balancing debris.
From beneath, the instability of the structure was terrifyingly obvious. The supports that had held up the tiers were completely blown out of the middle, where the explosion had originated, and that center was filled with the wreckage of the collapsed sections above, forming a spreading mound, half of it still alight with sullen fire. The frames at either side were buckled and twisted, unsteady. Though the enormous hole in the roof above let in moonlight, the evil black smoke made it darker than when I had been under the tiers earlier.
A movement up ahead. He had one foot caught up in the rubble and was trying to extract it without making a lot of noise. He glanced over his shoulder at me and tugged harder at his ankle; as I closed the distance he pulled it free and turned to flee. Hard as I could, I hurled the piece of wood at him. It struck him on the shoulder hard enough to spin him around and as he stumbled, trying to maintain his balance on the rubble, I leapt after him, heedless of my unstable footing, fumbling in my paluma to reach something more incapacitating. He would not get away this time.
I barreled into the assassin’s waist, knocking him down. He fell with a heavy uh of pain but still managed to lock his arms around me and twist so I went down with him, and not the way I’d intended. His momentum rolled us down the other side of the mound, and a blow to the back of my ribs knocked the breath out of me. We landed hard, him pressed down on my chest and one of his hard arms across my face, smothering me. I couldn’t see, could only feel the horrible compression, as if my cheekbones might crack under the pressure. But I still had a small packet of stingbark in my fist and I used it now, cramming it up blindly into the man’s face, smearing its contents around his mouth and nose. For one terrible moment the assassin screamed in pain and instead of letting go of me, he arched his back and all of his weight crushed into my chest. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, wedged as I was between debris and his body, but then he was rolling off and I could take a wheezy gasp of air and scramble to my feet.
I kicked him hard in the ri
bs and he fell to his side, still clutching at his face. “I think it’s about time we met formally,” I said.
* * *
It was strange, almost surreal, to have at last in our custody the man who’d haunted me for months. He looked unimpressive close up—though perhaps that was because of his injuries. A faceful of stingbark had left his skin red and angry; he had driven the tiny hair needles farther into the delicate skin of his nostrils and around his eyes by rubbing it. It left him a pathetic sight, trussed up with his ankles and hands tied and face puffy and painful. He had stopped screaming and rubbing the affected patches now, and instead sat still, breathing raggedly, staring at the two of us without speaking.
Kalina stood beside me now, watching him warily. “Is help coming?”
I nodded, still breathing heavily. “Order Guard helped me tie him up, and got us a lamp. He’s gone to get assistance. Shouldn’t be long.”
“You checked him for weapons?”
I gestured to the small pile of knives, the length of rope, and several bottles of suspected poison. “There could be more, but that’s what we found.” He hadn’t exactly cooperated with the search, and even with an Order Guard holding a knife at his throat and having tied him pretty thoroughly while he was incapacitated with the stingbark, I’d been reluctant to stay within his range longer than necessary. I’d cut his sleeves off, both to use as binding and to check for identifying tattoos, and emptied his pockets and shoes, but the Guards would have to fully strip him once they had him secure.
“The famous assassin,” she said slowly, looking him over. “Who are you, then?” If she’d expected an answer she’d be disappointed. He’d yet to say a word or respond to a single thing I’d said. He was right in front of me at last, but he might as well have disappeared again for what I’d learned so far. His appearance was unremarkable. His skin was a similar shade of brown to mine, and his face dark with a short, stubbly beard that looked more like the result of a hairy man who had not shaved for a few days than a deliberate choice. His dark hair was long enough to be tied into a small knot at the base of his neck, but springy enough to be battling that fate. Older than me, fit and strong, muscle sinewy and hard on his frame. I could have passed him any day on the street and but for the impressive raised patches around his mouth, nose, and eyes from the stingbark, he would not have caused a second glance. But then, that was the point. How else would he have been able to slip into so many places and events without standing out? The best assassins in history had always been ordinary.