Nightwatch on the Hinterlands

by K. Eason

  “Of course you are.” He peered down at Yinal’i’ljat. She was on the small side of an already small species. She barely came up to Gaer’s chest. “I’ll stay here with Yinal’i’ljat.”

  “Fine.” Iari grimaced at him. At Yinal’i’ljat, too—the top of her head, anyway—in passing. “I’ll be right inside.”

  She took another stab at the comms. “Dispatch, listen. We have one dead in B-town, a wichu artificer, and one witness who says it was a riev. I’m going into the house—oh, voidspit.”

  Blood spattered the walls in broad arcs, almost all the way to the ceiling. In some places, there were wide smears. There was one identifiable limb—a left arm, a hand—near the door. Iari stared down at it. The fingers still gripped a stylus. The wichu had been hard at work when this happened. Unsuspecting. Bits of the wichu’s insides dangled from the ceiling, where they’d hit hard enough to stick. Be a mess when they dried and came down. More of a mess.

  Blessed Elements.

  The Aedis had commissioned riev to kill vakari. Hexed them to repel whitefire, hexed them to repel vakari battle-arithmancy. But really, riev were supplemental troops for the infantry, engineered to peel a vakar marine out of their battle-rig, armored to be impervious to vakari talons and spikes and mildly toxic body fluids. Riev were made to take vakari apart.

  And vakari were a lot bigger and meaner than wichu. Yinal’i’ljat’s cousin wouldn’t have stood a chance. At least it had gone fast. Hard to say if he’d even had time to scream.

  Hard to say where his head was, for that matter.

  Iari clamped her teeth tight. She’d seen worse than this in the last surge of Brood. Or at least, if not worse, comparable. It wasn’t nausea crawling up her throat. It was anger. Because Ptah’s burning eye this was obscene, in the same way Brood attacks were.

  Iari picked her way through the wreckage of the front room. It wasn’t a living space. Cabinets and storage lockers lined the near wall. There was a workbench, upended and twisted in the corner. Equipment consistent with an artificer’s trade—the styluses, the presses, the printing tiles, the small bottles of acid for etching the hexwork—spread around the floor. Some of the bottles had smashed, their contents steaming and hissing their way through the rubber mats underfoot. A tesla generator sparked in one corner, attempting and failing to ignite the acid-soaked tile beneath it.

  Iari squatted and dragged a small sheet of plain metal out from the edge of an overturned cabinet. There had been four neat columns of sigils on it, and carefully perforated divisions. A standard hex of some kind, stamp-produced, ready to separate, charge, and sell. She set the sheet aside.

  And saw, gouged into a floor tile (local stone from the quarry, flecked and grey and hard, same stuff the Aedis compound was built from), a footprint, as clear as if the floor had been soft ground. Took a lot of force to make a mark like that. Took a hex to make stone act like mud, same kind of hexes artificers put on the soles of riev feet, so that big metal bodies kept traction.

  There were, now that she looked, more of those footprints. Places the riev had planted its weight to—do whatever it was doing. Bracing to rip a cabinet out of the wall, or upend a workbench, or rip something (someone) into smaller pieces.

  Or it’d been looking for something, flinging objects aside, tossing the room like a looter.

  An odd thought. Riev didn’t have much use for things. But riev didn’t engage in random acts of destruction, either, or shoot whitefire.

  Iari straightened. Took an unwholesome lungful of blood and shit and spilled chemicals and let it out again. The smell turned itself to taste and clung to the inside of her mouth. The blood was appalling, but it wasn’t excessive. One body’s worth (a small body). That might be another limb over there, in a smear-and-pool at the edge of the room. And there, yes, that was most of a head, smashed against a door that presumably led to the back rooms, to a staircase that went up to the second floor. To the back alley.

  A closed door. An undamaged door.

  She pivoted again to look at the ruined front wall, at the wreckage of door and frame. All of that spilled out, consistent with something large and violent leaving the premises. Not tearing its way in.

  Yinal’i’ljat said her cousin had been an artificer who worked on B-town’s decommissioned riev. So a riev could walk up to that front door and get no special notice. The riev could’ve knocked, and Pinjat would have let it in.

  And it didn’t make sense that—

  “Iari.” Gaer sounded a little too loud, a little too sharp.

  For the love of Hrok and Ptah. Iari whipped her head around, aimed a shout backward. “Keep her outside, Gaer.”

  “I need you out here, actually.” And then Iari heard the whine of a jacta coming online, and she understood why before Gaer even finished saying, “The peacekeepers have just arrived.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  “I think they might’ve shot Gaer, except Yinal’i’ljat got in the way. Then they wanted to detain him, and I got in the way.”

  Knight-Marshal Tobin leaned back in his chair, fingers steepled, lips level. A neutral expression, that the unwary or unwise might mistake for detached, disengaged, even disinterested.

  “And that settled it?”

  Iari had served a long time with Tobin. She knew what that stillness meant. “Might be a complaint coming. I wasn’t polite.”

  He let his breath go gently, and she knew what that meant, too. “No might. I already have a protest on my turing.”

  Oh, sure. Voidspit quantum-hex comms didn’t work, but the hard-cable turing-net did. Iari winced. “I’m sorry, sir.”

  The Knight-Marshal filled the obligatory city council post for the local Aedis representative, which was always a templar, which always caused tension with local PKs. Tobin made a point of letting B-town do its own enforcement. Of being the epitome of reason, of calm, the velvet glove over Aedian fist, interfering only when necessary.

  Looked like Tobin wanted to go bare-knuckle right about now. “You’re not, and you shouldn’t be. If the peacekeepers on duty were half as prompt in doing their jobs as they were about filing complaints, you wouldn’t have been there at all.”

  “Sir.” The knot in her chest loosened. She let her weight shift just a little, heels to ball of foot and back, left to right.

  Tobin pointed with his chin. “Sit down, Lieutenant.”

  “I’m fine, sir.”

  “My neck isn’t. It’s tired of looking up at you. Sit down and tell me what happened.”

  “Gaer’s writing the report.”

  A handsome man, Tobin, as humans went. Square jaw. Medium brown hair streaked grey at the temple. Dark eyes, almost as dark as Gaer’s, set deep above cheekbones as high and sharp as an alw’s. Those eyes narrowed now. “And when I am desirous of polysyllabic discourse and highly theoretical arithmantic speculation, I will read that report. Until then, sit and talk to me.”

  “Sir.” She hooked a foot around the chair and dragged it forward. The office furniture was a matched set, antique, local wood, heavy and serious, decorated with unpleasant ridges that found every knob in a woman’s spine, if she wasn’t armored. Gaer claimed not to mind, but Gaer had his own set of unpleasant spinal ridges.

  Tobin cocked her a wry half-smile. He knew what those chairs were like. His own wasn’t much kinder. Wider, with armrests. That was the difference.

  Iari sat carefully. “What I think is a riev really killed that artificer. Place looked like an abattoir, but it was—wrecked. Like a whole platoon of tenju went berserk in a barfight. Gaer found what he thought was a trail—bits of what was presumably Pinjat, accompanied by dents in the walls, or broken street tiles. Looks like the riev ran into the Lowtown warrens, into the alwar section. Before we could go after it, the PKs showed up. They seemed more interested in detaining Gaer than in following the trail, so.” She shrugged. “Rain last night probably wa
shed what was left down to the river.”

  “Riev don’t butcher people. That’s.” Tobin stopped short of saying impossible. “Unprecedented.”

  “Then I think we need to look into it, sir, because one of them did.”

  Tobin took the first muscle twitch on the road to a smirk. Stopped and held that position. “We. You think this is an Aedian matter.”

  “I think it has to be. Sir, it’s riev. We built them. We turned them loose.”

  Tobin’s smirk changed sides and turned grimace. “They were never under Aedian authority. They were never even leased to the Aedis. The Confederation commissioned and deployed them as supplemental military equipment, and the Confederation decommissioned them. As such, their management legally falls under local Confederate ordinance.”

  Heat boiled up in Iari’s chest, scalded its way past good sense and propriety and out her mouth. “That means the PKs? Or the city council? Right now B-town treats riev like they’re cheap mecha labor. But just because riev can sling cargo or run messages doesn’t change what they were made to do. That’s kill people.”

  Tobin raised both brows. “There are members of the Synod who disagree with that.”

  “That the primary function of riev is killing?”

  “That riev can serve in peace as well as war. That they have other purposes. Ranking members, Lieutenant.”

  “Lots of people outrank me, sir. Doesn’t make them right.”

  The corner of Tobin’s mouth twitched. “What makes you think you are?”

  Iari started counting off fingers. “It wasn’t a rampage. It was a targeted hit. If it was just a single riev’s hexes gone bad, it should’ve killed other people, or torn up other things. It didn’t. It went all the way to this artificer’s house, it tore up one room and it killed one person. Either we’ve got a rogue riev with a very specific grudge, which means they can have grudges—and that’s something else supposedly impossible—or we’ve got someone who wanted that particular wichu dead, and who can give riev orders that override their decomm no-kill directives. And there was whitefire damage. Riev lost their weapons when they were decommed, so someone’s arming them before sending them out to kill people. That person might do it again, so we need to deal with it. The Aedis. Because the PKs aren’t equipped to deal with that. Ah. Sir.”

  She ran out of breath and fingers. Sat back and waited, while Tobin stared at her. Then he sighed. Closed his eyes. Lines spread out from the corners like crazing on porcelain. “Teach me to ask your opinion, won’t it?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “No. It probably won’t. Because I agree with you.” Tobin leaned forward, elbows driving onto the desk, leaving new scuffs on the wood. His armor—polished, sure, but real. The scoring on his right bracer: she remembered the Brood who’d done that. Remembered pulling it off him. “Iari, listen. This incident is still legally B-town council oversight. I can’t order an official Aedis investigation without more evidence.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  “However.” He flicked a glance at the turing. “As a consequence of your actions tonight, you’re relieved of duty tomorrow. Go find that evidence. Wear a battle-rig and take the appropriate weapons. And be careful, Lieutenant. We don’t want a panic. And we don’t want any more bodies. Especially not yours.”

  She battered the grin off her face. “Yes sir.”

  * * *

  —

  Gaer perched on the top of the Aedis compound, on a wall halfway between watchtowers, and looked for the Weep.

  Well, not the actual Weep. That was an electromagnetic maelstrom, a rip in the actual fabric of the void, and it was a couple of star systems over there. Which was fortunate for this little cold rock of a planet. Tanis had missed the worst of a four-dimensional (maybe more than four; the arithmancers argued such things) rupture. It still had its star and its sibling planets. It also had a Weep fissure an observant vakar might see from the top of the B-town Aedis wall. On a good night, the fissure would be barely visible. He’d tuned his optic to its limits to detect Weep emanations. Which were really not emanations so much as anti-emanations. An absence of, well, anything. It was popular to say void was the absence of matter and energy, but that was so much neefa-shit. The Weep wept anti-void. It was a constant leak of nothing-something into reality.

  Things—molecules, atoms—tended to fray, where Weep touched them. And the study of that fraying—the how, the what, the what-do-we-do-about-it—was part of why Gaer was here, now, perched on this wide block of Aedian stone on a raggedy planet in the galaxy’s hinterland, freezing his spines off.

  That was not, of course, the official reason. No, he was an ambassador, if one checked his credentials. But he was also Five Tribes Intelligence, SPEcial REsearch (SPERE: oh, command did love its acronyms), and what made the little planet Tanis interesting wasn’t just its convergence of Confederate species, but its own little Weep fissure that had somehow sliced through the planet without actually slicing through anything and which, as all fissures did, vomited out periodic Brood surges. All of the fissures did, all along the Weep, more or less in concert. No one had figured out a pattern, but it was known there would be another surge. It was just a matter of when. SPERE wanted reports, through channels other than diplomatic, of everything that went on here. Ostensibly to predict the next surge, sure. Some truth to that. More truth to spying on the Aedis, and figuring out what they knew.

  Though, admittedly, the view from the top of the wall was pretty enough, if you didn’t mind rustic. Little spots of color in the little windows of little buildings. Any one piece of the Aedian compound—temple, garrison, armory, hospice, library, barracks—was larger than the biggest building in B-town.

  But the wind was intolerable, opinionated. Tugging his jacket this way and that, jabbing its fingers under his hood and gusting into his ear canals no matter which way he tried to turn.

  Iari would say that was because he’d offended Hrok, Element of the Aether, more locally called Lord of the Storms. She might even mean it. Gaer could usually tell what the soft-skins were thinking—everything made their faces move—but Iari was almost vakari in her impassivity. And she was from Tanis. And she seemed to believe the Aedian Catechism.

  “I’m sorry, Hrok,” he muttered. “For whatever I’ve done to offend.”

  The wind, unimpressed, switched direction and plucked at the spines on his elbows. Whistled around the edge of his jaw-plates. It wasn’t a good night for emanations. He hadn’t seen any. And really, that absence made it a good night. No one wanted an active fissure, except maybe the stupidest templar recruit (or, be fair, stupid arithmancer academics looking for the next publication. Smart SPERE operatives wanted boredom). Gaer shifted on his perch. Flexed his toes, the tips of which his boots left uncovered (“those aren’t boots, Gaer, those are socks”), and found new traction on the stone.

  Real stone. Real quarried stone, not plascrete. Who did that? Why, the Aedis, as a way to honor Chaama, their Element-goddess of Solids (otherwise known as stone), just like there was real fire in the temple braziers and water in Mishka’s temple fountain.

  It was just past Chaama’s time now, local midnight. The Aedis quartered the day, marked each quarter with a service dedicated to one of the Elements and a relentless session of bell-ringing before and after. The services were officially voluntary, as duty schedules permitted; but you weren’t going to sleep through them, whether or not you attended. Midnight bells seemed especially loud.

  And they were real bells, not recordings. Gaer had seen them, on his second official tour of the compound. Iari—he’d known her only as Lieutenant, then, a twice-met stranger—had made a point of marching him to the top of the tower and, while he caught his breath in thin atmosphere, his limbs aching with life in a gravity well for the first time in, oh, years, she had recited what sounded like a tourist infodump about the history of bells in the Aedis, the part
icular calibrations of frequency that made it impossible to say I didn’t hear them for any recalcitrant initiates.

  There was no place, she’d added, watching him try to find breath and dignity and not shiver too much in the wind, that you could go in the Aedis and not hear them. Even the library. Even the sub-basements. Even—and here she’d smirked at him, first time for seeing those tenju tusks on display—the ambassador’s quarters.

  Bells. Who wasted resources on mining and casting big metal conics meant only to deafen with their racket? Who didn’t use, oh, comms like a civilized people?

  But as those first few days bled into weeks, and Lieutenant became more familiar Iari, and he actually left the compound and went into B-town, Gaer realized how spotty the comms actually were, outside the Aedian walls and their formidable hexes. The bells were immune to Weep interference, and they were audible throughout B-town, should the Aedis require an alarm system. It was an old-fashioned sort of communication, but it worked.

  Also old-fashioned: the Aedian watchtowers, strung along at intervals linking B-town and the smaller, northern Windscar garrison, so that there was effectively a line of Aedian outposts running the length of the fissure. If anything came out of it, the Aedis would know, and mobilize, and deal with it, whether or not they had comms.

  That ready-and-willingness was enough to make Gaer forgive the setatir bells and their four calls to prayer and, yes, even the capricious, malicious wind. He edged along the wall, mindful of gusts, until he could see the main temple doors. Midnight prayers were sparsely attended. Only priests of Chaama, usually, with occasional crops of templar initiates, who had to attend all the services for one month of their training.

  There were a few regulars, though. The devout. The devoted. Iari was one of those.

  Gaer had devoted some small effort to figuring out what sort of person he’d been assigned as his escort. The sort who went to every service on purpose. The sort who didn’t mind missing sleep. She emerged from the side door of the temple, looking small from this vantage. Looking frail, without either battle-rig or uniform. She wore plain clothes, dull and dark and practical. She tugged her coat closer as the wind gusted. A priest shuffled past her, head down, arms tucked close, scuttling for another doorway. Iari looked up instead, as if she expected to see Brood coming over the walls.