Nightwatch on the Hinterlands

by K. Eason

  Luki sounded a little pale, behind her visor. “What happened to him? I mean, ah.” Her voice steadied. “That doesn’t look like a normal murder.”

  “Well, it’s certainly not riev. Looking at how shredded he is, I’d say—”

  “He looks like Tzcansi. Boneless did that.” Iari’s voice was as bleak and pitiless as her headlamp, blasting the body into stark relief.

  “Except I’m not getting any Brood readings on my rig. Are you?”

  “No.”

  “No,” Char echoed. The riev had drifted—how did something that big move so quietly?—into the alley mouth.

  “Is this some new voidspit hexwork?” Iari retracted her faceplate. Her aura spilled out: a resolved cobalt marbled with crimson, only barely flecked with a queasy chartreuse. “Maybe something off that altar, Gaer? Some reason our rigs are blind?”

  “Maybe.” He cycled his optic through the aetheric layers. “There are more fragments here, made of the same hexwork as I saw on the street last time we were here. Amateur, black-market arithmancy. I can say, though, that these fragments weren’t part of a riev-trap. It was definitely a shield of some kind, probably personal, meant to turn aside impacts. Presumably that means jacta bolts. I’m not sure this one would’ve turned a well-thrown stone. But it shattered because something hit this man with a great deal of force.”

  Iari’s voice was cold as the corpse, and as ragged. “That fits. Boneless attacks come fast and hard.”

  “Not this hard, unless someone threw the boneless at him, or otherwise propelled it at very high velocity. Or dropped it.” He looked up. Got a faceful of rain before he remembered he’d raised his visor. He blinked and blew water out of his plates. “Truth, Iari, I don’t know how this happened.”

  “Thrown, dropped. The boneless still tore this guy apart.”

  “There is something across the street, in the lee of that building,” Char murmured. “I do not sense any Brood, and I cannot see anything moving, but I am certain there is something there.”

  Gaer avoided—narrowly, fortunately—the edge of Iari’s shield as she whipped around. She was as fast as any SPERE op he’d ever trained with. As fast, damn near, as the riev.

  Synning. Bet she was synning.

  “Gaer? How many?”

  Gaer bit back a how the setat should I know that because, well, he already had an idea. He pointed his rig where Iari wanted and sifted through the aetheric layer. As far as he knew, no one had ever bothered to check whether Brood had auras. No one had needed to . . . but in fact, yes, now that he was looking—they did. Or something did, back in that alley. The colors were . . . wrong. Off in their texture, their intensity, as if they’d been diluted with petroleum, colors breaking down on the edges.

  “Got one something,” he said, “and it’s angry. It’s also scared.”

  “Good.” Iari stepped into the alley mouth and raised her shield.

  For a moment the boneless hesitated. Then its aura flared bloody fury, and it covered the width of the street in one liquid leap. Touched down with three of six limbs (the center three, one of them folded almost in half) and leaped, this time into an arc meant to bring it over Iari’s shield.

  Which was low, too low, she had to know better—

  Iari tilted the shield at the last moment, came up under the boneless and caught it solidly on the shield. For a split second—point-seven-three seconds on the chrono on Gaer’s HUD—the boneless paused there. Then the shield’s hexwork flared, recognizing what was in contact with it. Equations flooded Gaer’s optic.

  The boneless, realizing where it had landed, bunched its limbs, turned that five-eyed head back the way it had come, tried to jump. Iari yielded, knees flexing, and the boneless slipped on the shield instead. Sparks and Brood effluvia sprayed onto her rig, onto the pavement. Then she brought her axe around, one hard slice, and the boneless came off the shield. Came off four of its six legs, too (all the biggest ones); they slid straight to the pavement. The boneless tried to catch itself on its remaining limbs. Crashed onto its . . . did they have chins? Onto its face, then. The part with the eyes and the mouth. Iari came after it, syn-quick.

  And then it was over. Iari chopped down one more time and stood over the smoking puddle.

  Luki, who had been charging forward, lowered her (full-length, double-edged, interspecies-universal-shape-for-a) sword, having almost gotten close enough for a strike. Gaer imagined she looked somewhat chagrined behind her faceplate. He did.

  Iari prodded the boneless with her axe. “My rig’s still not saying it’s real. But it is, right? Not some voidspit hologram?”

  “No.” Gaer dragged the word out. “My optic registers something recently dead—auras sort of smoke when something dies. And I can see that there’s non-native material on the pavement. Organic, almost.”

  “Same. Luki?”

  “Nothing, sir, on my HUD.”

  “Char?”

  “No.” Char, Gaer noted, had not even moved from their post on the corner of the alley. Either they had a great deal of faith in Iari’s warfare skills, or—

  “Char,” Gaer asked. “Did you see the boneless?”

  The riev paused. “No.”

  Iari retracted her visor again. Squinted at Char as if her plain biological eyes could see more than battle-rig sensors. “Something wrong with your hexes?”

  “Unknown. But it is likely the same phenomenon affecting templar battle-rigs.”

  Char’s aura was laced with fear; Iari’s was a vivid blend of vigilance and trailing anger.

  “Dispatch. This is Lieutenant—oh, Hrok’s fucking breath. Luki, your comms dead?”

  A breathless moment, behind Luki’s visor. Two, three—“Yes sir.”

  Iari flicked a look sideways. “Gaer?”

  He tried, even knowing, from the grey little tesla, how useful that try would be. “Dead as that boneless.”

  “Right. So no backup. No way to detect Brood except by looking with our fucking eyes,” Iari said. For Luki’s sake, Gaer thought. Certainly she was looking that way, as if she could see through her corporal’s faceplate.

  “Maybe not,” said Gaer, and both Aedian headlamps turned on him like malevolent suns. “Char knew there was something down here.”

  “I did not know. I suspected. With no evidence.”

  “That’s called intuition. Congratulations. You’re the first of your kind to develop it, that we know of.” Gaer stepped around the boneless, around Iari, into wide open, rain-slashed streets. “I don’t know what the setat this effect is, but it’s affecting everyone’s technology. Let’s suppose it’s working either by alteration of natural law, or—well, this isn’t necessarily not that same thing—some kind of hexwork I’ve never seen. Something Char’s never seen. Something the priest-alchemists who designed your templar battle-rig never imagined. What fits that description?”

  “The altar,” said Iari. “And if it’s working, then Jich’e’enfe’s already there and so much for your wards.”

  “My wards might be working. You don’t know. Perhaps we should be buried in boneless right now. Or a small family of tunnelers. My wards might be all that stands between us and the void itself.” Pure neefa-shit, that; templar weapons, templar shields, and Char were far more likely to be their saviors.

  “Well,” said Iari, after a considered moment. “If it’s the altar causing all this, we know where it is. Come on.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The syn crackled up her spine. Iari pushed it back down, imagined it sinking back into bones and away from muscle and nerve. An arithmancer who could do what Jich’e’enfe could required a more nuanced approach than shield-bash-and-slice. She concentrated on the ache in her leg, which the syn had (almost) erased. Pain was an anchor. Right now, she needed the focus. The syn slowly withdrew its chemical courage, like the ebb of sunlight at dusk.

&
nbsp; Very poetic. Iari grimaced at herself. The thing was that her HUD chrono said it was crawling toward dawn now. There should be some kind of brightening in the sky. But instead it seemed even darker.

  And it wasn’t just the sky. The streetlamps, too, had been growing steadily dimmer the nearer they got to the warehouse, as if the grid that powered them was weakening. This was not, thank the Four, a residential district. But still. There should have been more activity, even this time of night. It was as if everyone knew to stay away.

  Or, awful thought, the Brood had already moved in and done their work. Every shadow could be stacked with them, swarm and boneless and slicer—

  Except no, no. That many Brood—surge-level numbers—wouldn’t just stay inside. It was dark, it was raining, they’d be out. They’d’ve spread into Midtown. There’d be noise. There’d be evidence, beyond the odd corpse in the street, of their presence.

  Besides. Gaer could sense their auras.

  That meant there weren’t many, and they weren’t ranging far. Someone was controlling them. That, as much as the failed rig sensors, told Iari there was some arithmantic, alchemical hexwork at work.

  “What’s wrong with the teslas?” Luki pointed with the tip of her sword at a flickering streetlamp. “Is that more arithmancy?”

  “It is not.” Gaer’s helmet glowed with dim, dark blue light, at the far edge of comfortably visible. “Note that all of the teslas are losing force. Your headlamps, for instance. Mine, too. It’s like a fog.” He pointed his faceplate at Iari. Her (yes, dimmer) headlamp flared back its reflection like a dying sun. “I’ve studied the effect, but not as closely as you have.”

  “The hell are you on about?”

  Gaer did not answer; Char did. “Lieutenant. It feels like Windscar. It feels like Saichi.”

  Which meant: the last push of the surge, when one of the massive, intelligent Brood had come through the fissure, bringing with it a dozen smaller, semi-intelligent sub-commanders and legions of boneless and swarm and slicers. Brood only fought at night; but that day, at Saichi, they’re brought the night with them. The sun had gone dim like an eclipse made of black fog.

  Except there was no fissure in B-town.

  “Lieutenant.” Char had stopped again. Was looking backward, drawn up and stiff. No, not looking. Listening.

  “What is it?” Gaer asked. “And tell me it’s not the thundering footsteps of twenty-some riev coming at us.”

  “No.” Char took a careful step. “But it is battle.”

  So they didn’t go straight to the warehouse, after all: they diverted instead up a side street and from there into an alley, Char on point and leading the way, until Iari saw the flash of a whitefire weapon through the unnatural dark, and the glint of a shield.

  Oh, here were the slicers. A whole pack of them, and they’d gotten themselves around a—how many? Iari’s HUD lit up with contact, friendly, and a scrolling list of designations that Iari didn’t have time to read. She counted, instead, the flashes. One, two, three, four templars, one of them showing as down in the HUD, all their vitals yellow and dropping toward red.

  “On me,” she said, because she had people to lead now, and Elements help them.

  Then she triggered the syn and charged.

  * * *

  —

  After the fight—because there was always an after (there wouldn’t be, one day, but not this one)—Iari scuffed through slicer guts and Brood slime and her rig’s yellow toxic environment flash-warning.

  The templar down was a private named Goran; he’d been on point, and the slicer pack had triple-teamed him. But he was still alive, and therefore lucky.

  Iari didn’t say that out loud. Said instead, “Well done,” and “Report,” and squeezed as much information out of the templars as she could. Out of Heph, mostly, who snapped his faceplate up at the first opportunity and tipped his face up into the rain and gasped like he hadn’t been breathing.

  Iari murmured, “Gaer,” on the private channel, and “Aura,” as Heph reported.

  Heph and his team had been out on patrol when all the streetlamps, all the windows, had gone dark. There’d been a flash from the warehouse first, or maybe just after.

  “He’s not certain of that,” Gaer murmured, private-comm. “I don’t think he saw it.”

  Heph had tried comming back to Peshwari (the lieutenant, Heph said, the lieutenant, like there was no other), but those comms had been down, too. He’d tried to go back to the warehouse, but—

  Heph shook his head. “You see what we found, sir.” His eyes wandered over Char, who was systematically stomping slicer skulls into paste on the pavement. “Something’s wrong with my rig. I can’t see the Brood. I didn’t even know they’d hit us until Goran went down.”

  “We’re having that same problem,” Iari said. “Is Peshwari still there? In the warehouse?”

  “Far as I know, sir. Madi—Corporal Madi—was on comm with me. Said they’d heard someone in the cellar.” Heph’s eyes bulged a little bit, white on the edges.

  Gaer cleared his throat on the ex-comm, which sounded like an eruption of static. “Tell me, Corporal. Did Lieutenant Peshwari open that cellar hatch, do you know?”

  Heph turned those fish-round eyes on Gaer. “No—ah. Ambassador? I’m not sure. Madi didn’t say.—Sir, we have to get back there.”

  “We’re not leaving anyone,” Iari said, and Heph’s eyes resumed normal proportions.

  The how of that personnel retrieval might be tricky. The templars had been attacked in the middle of a small cross street maybe ten minutes (at a walk; at a templar-jog, say half that) from the warehouse. The wounded templar, Goran, was back on his feet, propped up in large part by the wall and one of his squadmates. The slicers had breached his rig at the knee joint. Private Goran wouldn’t be walking around much without help, and that help took another templar out of the action. Luki was over there, on one knee in the muck, slapping a patch on the rig, acting as if this sort of thing happened every day. Iari’s mouth quirked behind the visor. Her new corporal was working out just fine.

  She rounded on Heph. “Collect your squad and move out. I want you to follow this route.” She shot him a map, HUD to HUD. “You see that? We just came that way. There shouldn’t be any Brood to slow you down. You get clear of the comm-block, you call up to the Aedis, you report to the Knight-Marshal. Clear?”

  Heph wanted to argue. His neck stiffened. His chin came up. Iari retracted her faceplate. Stared down at him through the curtain of rain and the lingering smoky gloom that Brood carried with them. “The Knight-Marshal needs to know what’s happening. Private Goran needs medical attention. You get to where you can transmit, you call code red, and you report, Corporal.” Iari made eyelock. “We’ll get Peshwari.”

  He believed her. She didn’t need Gaer’s whisper-soft affirmation of that. Conviction damn near glowed on Heph’s face, faith. Corso would sneer at it, had sneered, when he’d taken his discharge and she’d joined the Aedis instead.

  Only thing you should trust is yourself. Can’t believe you haven’t figured that out yet. Thought you were smarter.

  And some other sentiments, mostly shouted, mostly profane.

  Well, faith or training or stupidity, Heph was moving out, and taking his people with them. Her orders. Which left her, and Luki, and Char, and Gaer, and—

  “Someone in the cellar.” Gaer drifted alongside her. “You might be, ah, right, about Jich’e’enfe getting past my wards. Could be her down there.”

  “More worried about what she’s doing with that altar. I don’t think all these Brood and this Weep-fissure dark is coincidence.” Iari rolled the syllables in her mouth—you need to handle it, Gaer, you’re the arithmancer—and swallowed them. He already knew. Behind that oilslick shell of a faceplate, she’d bet his face was a rainbow of worry.

  “And here you are, sending away half o
ur fighting force.”

  “Yeah. Tobin needs a report, and if they do run into leftover Brood up there, they need to survive it. They need all their numbers for that.”

  Gaer’s comm clicked. Or maybe that was his jaw-plate. Click-click, disapproval, something unvoiced. “Why not send Char with Goran? Keep the rest of them with us.”

  “I’d rather have Char.” Iari side-eyed the gleaming black visor. “You don’t have to come. You go with Goran, make sure Tobin gets the report, and then I’ll keep Heph and the other two with me.”

  “Ss. I’m worth more than those three, if there’s arithmancy. And there will be.”

  * * *

  —

  Yinal’i’ljat came around the side of the Red Glowing Thing. Touching it, looked like, leaning on it. Corso controlled a reflexive shiver. Nothing on this side of the aetherless void would induce him to touch it. Rather stick his arm in a vat of hot oil. Or into a hungry swarm. Or wrestle that tunneler he’d seen at Tzcansi’s, which he’d fucking tried to do before that veek had stopped him.

  Instead the veek had sent him after Yinal’i’ljat, and now here he was, having found her.

  “Who’s there?” Her question sounded so normal, so expected, he wanted to answer. Almost did, before cold sense (fear) slapped him silent.

  Corso sucked himself into the smallest possible shape. He shouldn’t have said anything, slagging stupid to do that. Hope, pray (to the Elements, the old gods, whomever) she could not see very well through that ward.

  “Are you one of Tzcansi’s people? I thought the templars had chased everyone off.” She swayed forward. Touched the bubble and flinched back. He heard a hiss like water on hot metal. Smelled burning meat.

  Her pain made him brave. He bared his broken grin at her. “I am a templar.”

  She laughed. Laughed, high and sharp as the sound glass makes when it smacks into stone. “No. I don’t think you are.”