by K. Eason
“Sss.” Gaer drifted close to Iari’s shoulder. Brought that whiff of burned sugar, and a slightly louder, “That’s a lie. And she’s worried about something. Some . . . one? A certain P.R.I.S. maybe?”
Good thing Elin couldn’t shoot jacta bolts from her eyes—at Gaer, at Iari. “What did he tell you?”
“What did who tell me?”
Elin pressed her lips flat. “Nothing. Never mind. If that’s all, Lieutenant.” She pushed the file through the slot in the window: unfolded, stiff, screen off. “Here are your files.”
Iari took a breath. Let it go slowly as she picked up the tablet. “Thank you.” She woke the screen and flicked through the pages. Wasn’t too hard to find Yinal’i’ljat’s name. Chief witness, interview as yet unconducted, current address and contact information—
Ptah’s flaming left nut. “This isn’t complete.”
The Chief Inspector had begun to turn away. She froze, with the promptness of the guilty. She stared resolutely at the wall. “Of course it is.”
“Yinal’i’ljat. The murdered artificer’s cousin. Your primary witness? There’s no contact information here.”
Elin controlled the flinch. Arlendson didn’t.
Gaer drifted close to Iari’s shoulder. Brought that whiff of hot metal, and a slightly louder, “Apprehension. Recognition. Guilt. That’s interesting.”
The inspector puffed up like an affronted cat. “I don’t know how you think you know that, Ambassador, but—”
“He’s an arithmancer, and he’s reading your aura.”
Elin recoiled. “Get out.”
Iari put on her best I’m rational mask. “I can’t leave without information about Yinal’i’ljat, Inspector. I think you know that. Last known address, comm channel, anything you might have. This woman is linked to both cases.”
“You’re linked to both cases,” Elin snapped. “That vakar is, too. You have your files, Lieutenant. Everything pertaining to the investigations the Knight-Marshal requested.”
Iari gathered up the frayed remains of her patience. “I can file an official request, and we can waste time, or you can help me now and maybe save some of those B-town lives we’re both responsible for.”
Behind her, behind Gaer, the wind gusted, as if Hrok, too, was exasperated. And then no more wind, and a faint vibration through the floor tiles, as two large, heavy shapes—riev and battle-rig, more or less equally massive—came all the way inside. Rain rattled on the door like a tossed fistful of pebbles. Iari stared at the alloy window until she could make out the faint reflection of Char and Luki behind her.
“Problem, Lieutenant?” Luki asked, mildly enough.
Char said nothing. Char wouldn’t have to.
Iari blinked her focus back through the window. Elin remained adamantly, furiously unimpressed. Arlendson, however, looked nervous. That chin-jutting arrogance had given way to lip-nibbling. Maybe he knew something about the missing information. Or maybe it was just the Aedian battle-rigs, the Aedian sigils, the recollection of what templars were designed to fight. And, yeah, probably Char.
Iari drilled her stare into Arlendson. “Anything you can add, Officer, would be appreciated.”
Arlendson coughed. He slid an apologetic glance at Elin. “We had a last known address for Yinal’i’ljat, Lieutenant, and a comm-sign, but there was a fire at her hotel. We don’t know where she is now. Comms aren’t responding.”
“Another fire?”
Elin cut Arlendson off. “There was no sign of Brood, and no fatalities. You want access to that file, Lieutenant, you go make your official requests.”
“That’s also not totally true,” Gaer said. “She’s not sure no one died. She’s afraid someone did. That’s the source of her guilt.”
Elin stared at Gaer, incredulous and indignant. “All right. There were no confirmed fatalities at the hotel. But we haven’t been able to contact everyone registered there. This Yinal’i’ljat is one of those missing persons.”
Gaer’s optic flashed like a mirror in sunlight. “There’s someone else missing, too.”
And oh, Iari wanted to ask who, was it Corso, was this straight-backed Chief Inspector feeding information to a P.R.I.S. on the side, maybe for bribes, maybe for friendship or personal reasons or whatever. But if it wasn’t, name Corso to this woman and she’d chase him down, find him out. Jack up all his clandestine business.
If he wasn’t already dead somewhere, he wouldn’t thank her for that.
So Iari chewed her worry back down, swallowed it. Waited until it hit her gut like a hailstone and sat.
“Thank you,” she said. “Now, please. We’ll need the address.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
The rain had intensified into a fully formed storm by the time they reached Wichutown, blown sideways in sheets by a wind that, had Gaer been unrigged, might have threatened his balance. As it was, he felt . . . wet, which was simply impossible. His battle-rig was sealed against—well, not atmosphere, exactly, it wasn’t an e-rig, but certainly rain. But it still felt damp inside the armor, and cold, like this wretched rock of a planet’s even more wretched weather had somehow wormed past the environmental seals.
He balanced what he knew—no leaks, no breaches in his seals—against what he felt—constricted, short of breath, and occasionally blind—and kept walking, slogging (splashing, sometimes) through run-off beyond what the gutters could manage.
His HUD kept track of Iari (in front), Luki and Char (in the rear), on the occasions they’d turn a corner and a malevolent gust of wind-water would smear his visor blind. Then he gritted his teeth and waited until the hexes did their job, his visor cleared, and he could once again follow Iari by sight: the blurred light from her headlamp smearing the pavement, the tiny white teslas marking points on the back of her armor, the wet gleam of her rig—Aedian red turned black in the storm light. She’d said exactly nothing since leaving the Peacekeeper annex, except for a call back to the Aedis informing the Knight-Marshal(s)—because Keawe would be listening—of this new wrinkle in the investigation. Gaer imagined that he could see her aura through her rig (red, oranges). She was so buttoned-up angry he’d bet that her rig was working hard to keep her cool.
Then the storm took a breath and almost stopped, wind and rain both, for one of those pockets of false-calm, and Gaer got his first look at Wichutown.
Oh, wichu. So neat. So precise. Every setatir building square with the next, symmetrical. Everything just a little too small, a little too . . . wichu-y. They had been the pre-eminent architects in the Protectorate, before their betrayal. Gaer had seen pre-Schism 2Ds and video footage of Kikitar, the vakari homeworld and Protectorate capital. The streets had looked a lot like this, scaled up for vakari. Gaer wondered if they’d torn those buildings down after the wichu defection, or if they’d left them as a lesson about trusting one’s client-species too far and relying on them too much.
You could argue—and scholars had—that the wichu defection during the Expansion war had led directly to the Schism. No one argued at all that it was wichu ingenuity behind the first nanomecha—some biological weapon that attained something like sapience and fused with a human physiology—that had become, in less than a generation, the slagging Aedis. And that had certainly led to the Weep; so maybe it was all their fault, everything wrong in the multiverse, those industrious wichu.
Their destination was obvious: lit by flood-teslas, marked off by the blue glowing borders of holotape, a two-story structure with a gaping hole in the second floor. Gaer was gathering breath to observe that any evidence would’ve already washed away when he noticed the faint shimmering dome over the charred, open space.
“Force-shield,” he said, on the exhale. “That’s . . . unexpected.”
“Huh.” Iari did not sound particularly cheered. “That’s standard procedure for ongoing investigations. Keeps things reasonably undisturbed. T
hey’re PK, Gaer, they’re not idiots.”
Let that comment go, yes, he would. Iari was in no mood. She stomped—even in the battle-rig, it was obvious she was using more force than necessary—to the hostel entrance. The signage was dim, off, sulking over the doorway. The name was written in plain Comspek, but the lettering was far more ornate.
Iari raised a gauntleted fist and banged on the door and waited, while the storm came rattling back for another round of itself. Gaer, glad of his visor’s protection, peered up at the force-shielded open wound of a crime scene. From street level, he couldn’t see much. The lightning flashes only showed him blast-white glimpses of blackened walls, broken furniture.
Broken. That was interesting.
“Note the sign’s design, Ambassador.” Char moved up on Gaer’s side with considerably less sound than Iari’s rig had made. “It mimics wichu script. Note particularly the shape of the double-s.”
Which looked very much like the k’bal script on the altar, yes, they’d established a wichu had written it. Void and dust. “Are you saying I told you so to me, Char?”
“I am drawing your attention to the pattern, Ambassador. That is all.”
He heard, with half his attention, the door open. Heard Iari’s voice—“Hvidjatte? I’m Lieutenant Iari, B-town Aedis”—unfiltered by the helmet comms, which meant she’d raised her visor. Gaer wasn’t sure her face would be less alarming to whoever answered the door than a visor. Wichu weren’t brave. And he was along, which wouldn’t help.
But the wichu who answered—on the high side of middle-aged, in a jacket that looked as if it were made of flower petals—did not blink, at Iari, or Gaer, or at all. He bowed, showed the top of a wispy-haired head.
“Of course, Lieutenant. Inspector Elin commed ahead to tell me you were coming. Please, come in, any assistance I can render—ah.”
The wichu was staring at Char. That would have been unremarkable—that patchwork skeleton of an arm, the Aedis badge, worth staring at—but the look on his face, and the monochromatic yellow of his aura, was stark fear.
Well.
“Problem?” The rain had gotten into Iari’s helmet, streamed down her face in rivers as she turned to follow the man’s stare. Might’ve been cast from the same metal as Char’s face, for all her expression.
“No. Except—I do not think the, ah, stairs will accommodate the, ah.” Hvidjatte blinked unhappily at Char’s badge. “The templar-initiate.”
Oh, wichu manners. Gaer grinned, behind his visor.
“Then the templar initiate and the corporal can wait downstairs.”
Hvidjatte wrung his hands. “It is a small space, Lieutenant!”
“Oh, for the love of—fine. Corporal. Char. Wait out here.” Iari glared down at Hvidjatte. “The ambassador stays with me. I trust your stairs can accommodate him.”
“Yes, Lieutenant.”
Hvidjatte retreated back into the hostel then, fast as a fish. By the time Gaer ducked under the setatir doorjamb, stupidly short, and followed Iari inside, he had taken up a defensive post behind the reception counter.
Gaer raised his visor, now that they were out of the rain. Peered around the lobby, which was arranged with chairs, a table, a vase with cut flowers. Peered at the stairs, which looked even more wretchedly narrow than the door. Hvidjatte hadn’t exaggerated. Char wouldn’t fit.
“I’m surprised the peacekeepers are letting you stay in residence during their investigation,” said Iari. She, too, was looking around. Up, mostly, at the ceiling. Gaer followed her glance. Elaborate scrollwork carved into the beams—wichu did everything with ornamentation—criss-crossed the plaster, interrupted by drop-down tesla fixtures that looked like some kind of colorful, bulbous fruit.
“They’re being reasonable.” Hvidjatte sniffed loudly, from rain or cold or indignation.
“I meant because of the likelihood of structural damage from the fire. But I don’t see any from down here.”
Another sniff. Hvidjatte blinked very large, very pale eyes. “The damage was very limited.”
“You must have excellent fire-suppression hexes, then.” Iari flicked a glance at Gaer.
Gaer cycled the optic. A web of equations sprang up, marching over the scrolls and the teslas, glowing in every corner. “Yes, he does.”
Hvidjatte stared at Gaer with a mix of fascination and loathing. “I—yes, Lieutenant.”
“What kind of damage did you sustain?”
Another flurry of sniffing and blinking. “This is all in the peacekeeper report.”
“I’m leading a separate, Aedis investigation. What kind of damage?”
The wichu looked like he wanted to argue. One puffed-up moment, cheeks starting to bulge, eyes round. Then Iari leaned forward, and he crumpled.
“One room entirely destroyed. Minor damage to the two surrounding rooms.”
“We need to see them.”
“Of course.” Hvidjatte leaned across the desk and pointed. “Up the stairs, on the right. The teslas are off on the second level, though. It will be dark.”
“Not a problem,” said Iari. “We can manage.” She stopped mid-turn, as if snagged by an afterthought. “Just one more thing. There was a woman staying here, Yinal’i’ljat. You know the name?”
“That would be in the records, which I turned over to the investigators.”
Oh, liar. Such pretty greens in that aura, like the rainforests on Harakai. Gaer snorted. “He recognizes the name.”
Hvidjatte shot him a poisonous glare (yellow aura, with a bit of malevolent red). “Ah, yes. I recall her now. I’m sorry. Your accent confused me.”
“Oh, well done. Insult the lieutenant and lie to her.”
Iari ignored him. “I’d like the keycode to her room, too, please.”
“I—can’t give it to you. I mean, you don’t need one.” Hvidjatte looked back and forth between Gaer and Iari, fear and confusion as bright on his face as in his aura. “There’s no door anymore to her room. That’s where the fire started.”
* * *
—
Gaer followed Iari up the steps, leaving behind the bulbous-fruit lamps and watery teslas in reception, ascending into a murky dark night punctuated by flashes of lightning. It was a slow, cramped climb. Iari was moving like she expected Brood to come leaping out any second.
Well. That might be a fair worry. Gaer rocked up on his toes and peered over her shoulder at the walls, the floor, the ceiling. “Hvidjatte was wrong. This staircase would hold Char’s weight, if not their breadth. It’d hold a hundred riev. I also see the expected fire-suppression hexes. And anti-insect, anti-fungal, anti-leak, anti-everything. Point is”—because Iari had cranked her head around to glare at him, her headlamp blinding white—“there shouldn’t have been a fire at all. There are a great many very good hexes here.”
Which were giving him all five hells of a headache, not helped by the blinking alert lights on the rim of his helmet. That particular cadence and sequence meant his rig sensed an excess of arithmancy, no surprise and not helpful. He didn’t need machine confirmation of the obvious.
Also obvious: where the fire had begun and ended. The visible damage began perhaps a meter from the afflicted doorway. Blackened bits of wall-frame jutted out like broken bones. Iari rubbed her fingers over one spar. Gaer squeezed around her—not easy, in wichu-sized spaces—and stepped into Yinal’i’ljat’s room. There were even more hexes in here, laced and layered over every surface. Bright, too. He squinted, as if against sunlight.
Iari thrust her hand in front of his face. “What do you see?”
Gaer screwed his left eye all the way shut, both sets of lids, and cocked his head at her. “I see a battle-rig glove and a very scowly templar.”
“Void and dust, Gaer, look.”
“I am looking. For arithmancy. Of which there is a great deal, as I already mentione
d—ah. I see. There’s no soot on your glove.”
“Right. And there should be, if there was a fire.”
“There was definitely a fire. Look around.”
“Yes. I see lots of blackened plaster. Lots of lumpy black things that could’ve been furniture.” Iari panned her headlamp across the debris. “And a lot of really jagged edges. I think something happened in here before the fire, and I think the fire happened just fast and hard enough to scorch things, and probably burn off any organic residue, and why is your eye closed?”
“Because these hexes are too bright. Because my optic is either malfunctioning or—” Or. Gaer hissed and snapped the helmet’s visor back up. The blinking yellow light on the helmet’s rim bloomed into a whole HUD of hex assessments, analysis, and counter-measures.
Iari was still staring at him. Bits of her hair stuck to her forehead, plastered by sweat or rain or both. “Or what?”
“I am an idiot. These are battle-hexes all over the room, in the sense that they’re meant to scramble equipment. Specifically my equipment. Specifically my optic, which means someone knows I have it, which means someone’s seen me or knows about me, and that same someone expected us to come here.”
“The arithmancer from Tzcansi’s place?”
“Fake Yinal’i’ljat. Yes.”
“We don’t know for certain they’re the same person.”
“Sss. True.” Gaer rebooted his optic. Flash, then blank, then a slow, dawning sparkle. “But they know how to scramble vakari arithmancy. Give me half a minute.”
Half a minute was generous: ten seconds, no more, because the arithmantic interface on his battle-rig was more powerful than the optic’s, if somewhat less precise, like the difference between throwing a rock into a pond and lobbing a boulder. Gaer’s awareness expanded (punched through) half a dozen aetheric layers simultaneously. He sifted through the ripples, chasing the glowing hexwork back to their exact layer—one of the thinner ones, harder to access. Fine work, very precise, very exact. Also very delicate, when attacked by a set of SPERE counter-hexes.