Nightwatch on the Hinterlands

by K. Eason

  So much for letting him take point.

  Corso howled as the hatch closed, and clawed at Gaer’s wrist. “Don’t, let me out, you can’t—”

  “Corso!” And what should he tell the man, relax, he was safe? Not setatir likely; but, “Iari’s here, I’m here, we’ll handle the Brood.”

  Corso’s eyes—wide, white-rimmed and shot with red—locked onto Gaer’s visor like he could see through it. Sense came seeping back, pushing the Brood-panic aside, letting a whole new flavor of fear rush in. “Don’t let Iari cross that barrier, that’s what she wants, she needs someone to cross from the outside to break it, don’t let her—”

  Too many of the same pronouns, she and her. But Gaer could guess well enough who was meant. “I’ll stop her. Let go, yes?”

  And then Gaer realized, with a sudden queasy twist, that it was still void-cold in the warehouse. That Corso’s sweat-and-blood hands were stuck to his rig’s metal skin.

  Corso realized it too. He grimaced, then ripped himself free. He flung himself toward the steps, feet kicking and slipping in yes, blood, plenty of it, running from under the shreds of that coat, before it congealed in the cold.

  Which left Gaer free to help Iari. She’d put her back against one of the supporting pillars. There was one boneless hanging off her shield, another circling around behind. A third testing the edge of her axe. A fourth in the shadows, trying to flank her.

  Iari’s voice punched through his comms, low and fierce and just this side of gleeful. “I got this. Get her.”

  Right, the other her. Gaer spun toward the altar. Easy to find it: the sole source of light (except for headlamps) in the cellar, red and purple and hazy as dawn fog off the Rust. A shape that looked wichu and female stood at the edge of his wards, which were not the solid bubble they should be. Bits were flapping and fluttering like Corso’s coat. That was unexpected. How would you do that to a perfectly solid ward—ah. Yes. Materialize inside them. Which meant the setatir-m’rri must’ve put her portal signs inside his perimeter, which meant he had been close enough to scan it before, and certainly was now—and yes. There. A modest, sensible distance from the altar, a neat little grid just inside the edge of his wards, visible now that he knew what to look for.

  Spare the self-congratulations. He hadn’t noticed those sigils at the time, not even a glimmer. That was stupid. It was luck that he’d laid his ward around them. (If he had real luck then the wards would’ve cut her in half, and this would all be academic.)

  And wards or not, she wasn’t helpless, obviously, with fissures upstairs and Brood running amok and his ward partly shredded. But how, how—

  Jich’e’enfe smacked the inside of the ward with open palms. White light spiderwebbed away from both points of impact. It looked painful—she appeared to be screaming—and it had to be doing damage to her bare hands, but that gesture wasn’t going to bring down the wards, so why—

  “Gaer!” It was Corso. “Behind you!”

  Gaer whipped sideways, spun and raised the jacta. A boneless, five-eyed and open-mouthed, came slither-running from a section of the cellar he’d thought was empty.

  Gaer launched one of his pre-loaded hexes: bent the light from his headlamp, distilled it to a cutting beam, sent it spearing into the boneless. He caught it in the solid middle of its pentad of eyes. The boneless’s head—the flapping sack on which it kept its eyes and its mouth, there was no skull—shredded outward. Gaer’s HUD reported absolutely nothing to see, no Brood. But it did note a patch of excessive temperature variation, over there, in the cellar’s far corner.

  Gaer spared a look, ran magnification on his HUD, and yes! There was another fissure (which explained where Brood were coming from). Except this fissure had materialized a meter below the plane of the cellar floor, as if the stone had simply ceased to be for a snaggly little gash of nothing. His HUD reported an incremental rise in temperature. That little fissure was already closing, too.

  Jich’e’enfe was watching him, hands splayed, ready to slap the wards again. Ready to, what, open another setatir fissure? Two problems with that. One, she shouldn’t be able to hex anything through the wards, and she clearly was, so she wasn’t just using arithmancy. There was something else to her equations. And two, worse by far, a tesser-hex was meant to bore a tunnel through the void, point to point. The vakari battle-hexes that had made the Weep had been a mistake (no anchoring equations, no destination, just opening void), and here was this setatir Jich’e’enfe replicating that stupidity. On purpose. Weaponizing it. Micro-Weeps on demand, stocked with Brood from their source.

  How rattled around in Gaer’s head, how is she doing this? She’d beaten him at arithmancy twice already, more than twice. Dropped a whole fucking house on Iari, killed Brisk Array, and now she was making fissures past his wards that should have prevented anything. Not because he’d made them, but because of the setatir equations, the math, the numbers that described reality. You could reshape reality (there was a whole Aedian priesthood that made a habit of that), but there were rules, too. Jich’e’enfe was cheating: some setatir trick he didn’t know, some way around every rule of arithmancy he’d ever learned.

  Jich’e’enfe pressed one hand to the inside of the wards. He saw the sparks where flesh touched hexwork. The altar flared briefly, glowing brighter. Then the sunken micro-fissure squeezed out another boneless. It clawed its way out of the void-gash in the floor as the fissure widened a jot and the cold readings on Gaer’s HUD stabilized at damned lethal.

  Then like a jacta bolt (not whitefire, just a conventional, solid projectile) to the forehead, Gaer got it. She was practicing some heretical variant of Aedian alchemy, but instead of taking one sort of thing and making it into some other thing, she was making something from apparent nothing. Except it wasn’t nothing: she was using organic matter as the fuel. Herself, at the moment, her blood. Probably why she’d wanted Corso to cross the wards. If he died on them (because he would have, messily), she could have used his death to widen the fissure to fuel some sort of hex with that altar. Pre-Landing tenju myth was full of things dying in bloody and inventive ways to appease imagined gods. Only maybe the gods weren’t imagined (Vakari heresy, yes, but that didn’t mean it was not true). Maybe something out there took that death-power and gave power back. Or maybe it just really liked blood.

  Whether that something was really the old tenju gods, or whether this time the Brood had answered some heretic prayer instead, or if this was another new and unholy wichu creation—was a matter for further study. Later. After he didn’t die here.

  Gaer retracted his visor. The cold bit in deep. His breath plumed out, crystallized, sprinkled out like snow. Iari shouted something at him, having to do with seals and what the fuck was he doing. He couldn’t spare breath to tell her; he needed his optic unimpeded by a battle-rig’s sensors, when that rig couldn’t even see the setatir Brood right over there.

  He cycled the optic through the layers of aether until living and nonliving and Brood became mathematical abstractions. Equations, variables, formulae. The optic didn’t have all the battle-hexes preloaded. Well. That was all right. He was perfectly capable. He hexed himself a simple energy-dispersing shield on the most outer aetheric layer. Then he walked up to the wards, aiming at Jich’e’enfe, who took a reflexive pair of steps back. He could feel the not-really-heat coming off the barrier. It wasn’t really plasma, manifestation of Iari’s beloved Ptah, but rather electricity, that fifth element that ran through all the states of matter. That kind of power meant these wards could stop his heart, or burn his body from the inside out—and would, unless he managed to match his hexwork shield oscillations to the ward just so, for just long enough.

  Gaer closed his naked eye, and synced his shield equations with the ward’s through the optic, and—

  Flash-white sheeted over his rig, flared behind one closed lid. The same flash made no impression on his open eye behind the optic,
which saw a phalanx of equations slide into each other, mesh, match.

  —stepped through.

  He opened his other eye and stared down at Jich’e’enfe. Blink, and he brought his optic back through the aetheric layers, until her aura blazed every shade of outrage and hatred and—as her feral grin pulled one side of her mouth—fear.

  Wichu didn’t like hand-to-hand combat.

  Gaer sprang at her, swiped—missed, when she dodged (sprawled) out of the way. She landed on her back, shoved herself onto an elbow, and thrust her free hand out at him (the palm shredded, blackened, flesh hanging in strips, like Corso’s). His optic saw the sudden concentration of phlogiston, every setatir particle within the radius of the broken ward coming together at once, at her bidding.

  Oh. This trick again.

  He threw himself sidelong, dropped his visor (too slow, both of those things); closed his right eye and slapped a cobbled-together deflecting hex at the explosion. The phlogiston ignited and ripped away all the breathable air, replaced it with skin-bubbling heat and lung-searing nothing. Gaer felt himself hit the altar (a whole new sensation, a wrongness rather than pain, that started somewhere deep inside bone and organ). Then his faceplate sealed and he could breathe again. The explosion burst against the interior wall of the ward, a ball of lightning and fire that somehow missed Jich’e’enfe entirely.

  Gaer picked himself up. She was a better arithmancer. Fine. But unlike the Brood, she hadn’t hexed herself invisible to his HUD. Which meant his arms-turing could target her.

  He ripped the jacta out of its clip, leveled, fired.

  Jich’e’enfe slapped his first bolt aside with a hex, sent it across the inside of his much-abused ward, punching holes in equations already stretched to breaking. But the next bolt (lock, said the arms-turing) hit her in the belly. Burned through. Smoke, little licks of flame from her shirt, her coat. She screamed and convulsed. Gaer shoved himself off the altar (alert, his HUD told him: radiation spike) and onto one knee. Target: acquired, said his HUD, and he squeezed off a third shot.

  Or almost did. His optic flared blind with alerts, and his HUD did the same a sliver of a second after that with impossible warnings.

  He thought she was making another fissure at first, but then he saw the equations. Oh dust and void, oh five dark lords. She was sketching a tesser-hex, a real one, a genuine hole in the void to some other place. She wasn’t just a better arithmancer than him, she was better than anyone he’d ever heard about, read about. And she was about to kill him, because a tesser-hex made connections between locations in the void, which made a tunneler’s suction seem like baby’s breath, suction against which his dirtside-certified battle-rig would offer no protection, and no atmosphere when his rig came apart.

  That it would kill her, along with him, was no comfort.

  The tesser-hex opened: a whorl of purple-black-blue, a confetti splash of equations and variables and airless, murderous cold. His faceplate ruptured first, the weakest point, blowing outward. He squeezed eyes and nostrils shut against the suck of vanishing atmosphere, and pushed his awareness into the aether, until he could see Jich’e’enfe’s equations, burned white on the backs of his eyelids. And all he had to do was smudge just one of her variables, that was all, and he could close the setatir thing.

  It would take seconds, but he didn’t have those: the tesser-hex was already dragging him in, as it reached for its second anchor, as the nothing tried to fill itself with—

  —Something slammed into him, with speed and force enough to throw him sidelong. Numbers slipped loose from his mental grasp as he landed hard on the stone, partway onto his back, partway under Iari (because it was Iari). He felt the grinding through the plates on his rig, she was going to crush him flat—but she was pushing off him, keeping one knee across his gut, and most of her weight. As if she could hold them down, as if an Aedian battle-rig and a templar could stand against a tesser-hex’s pull.

  And then Gaer realized he wasn’t sliding anymore. And maybe that was partly because Iari’s rig was just that heavy (or that hexed), or. . . The tesser-hex was still growing, reaching, and Gaer snaked his awareness through the aether and roiling equations and yes, there: the second anchor point. There was something like gravity on that side, something that equalized the drag on this location. He chased the numbers a little further, because there must be coordinates, a place on a map.

  He found—no, not void, not that aetherless place where spacers lived in their ships and stations, though it was the same blinding black. This was the layer of the multiverse where Brood lived, the place Gaer had studied most of his adult life. Which meant Jich’e’enfe had what, anchored her tesser-hex into the Weep? That the Weep had actual interior coordinates? That was impossible. All of this was impossible.

  Gaer seized those impossible numbers (one for each dimensional point on the grid, just like any location). He stored them in his optic. In his rig, too, in case. This was data. Important. He was still breathing (somehow), but that might not continue. But if he saved those numbers, maybe someone would recover that data and use it.

  His rig’s alert dragged him back into his body, into the mundane aether, into smeared vision and oh setat, his face hurt. Iari had gotten off him, finally, damn near cracked his armor with the force of her departure. As he tried to breathe (not going well), she raised her shield and crouch-walked toward the gaping hole Jich’e’enfe had punched in the cellar’s reality. He couldn’t see Jich’e’enfe, just this impossible hole. A massive wound, bigger than her fissures, same bottomless dark. That was the Weep, believe that.

  Iari said something, an unidentifiable smudge of sound. (Make note: not much air in the Weep, but some air, for Iari to be audible.) Gaer kept blinking, everything gone smeary and dim. Fingers (tentacles? something) reached over the rim of her shield: boneless and impossibly long and huge and barbed. Iari’s rig sparked, all those heretical hexes coming online, burning the Brood even as its slime chewed into the alloy, even as it wrapped its limbs (so many) around her legs, over the shield and around that wrist. A tentacle coiled up her weapon-arm, sliding like hot tar, raising smoke and sparks. The hexes should have made it let go, but instead its grip coiled tighter, oh setat, like it was going to rip her apart.

  Gaer tried to cycle his optic, to sink back into the aether and gather up numbers and equations and do something. He heard (thought he heard) Corso shouting, and the shriek of stressed battle-rig as Iari tried to twist loose (no luck, the Brood was too big, too determined). But he was watching when she jerked her axe up for one final strike, before the Brood got that arm pinned.

  A brightness started to gather on her axe’s edge, a whiteness as brilliant as the void was dark. Some final build-up of whitefire, Gaer reckoned, that would burn out the weapon, that might make the Brood let her go. Too bright to look at, even through the optic—

  But all of Iari looked like that now, every seam on the battle-rig bleeding that same brilliance, as if the woman inside had gone nova. As if the light was going to split the armor.

  The axe came down, chop.

  A column of plasma erupted, punched up, into (through? void and dust, yes, through) the ceiling, presumably through the floor. Through the Brood. For a heartbeat Gaer saw its silhouette, tentacles and fluttering sucker-mouths, the whole of it (bigger than the cellar, still sliding out of the tesser-hex field) fluttering like a canvas in strong wind. Whitefire picked out every contour of it, lit the Brood from the inside. A web of what must’ve been vessels backlit like a map, and a fistful of pulsating hearts. Then the whitefire leapt even further, and spread across the tesser-hex portal like flames across alcohol, blue and hissing.

  And then came a crack! that Gaer felt all the way to his bones. The plasma column vanished. He was left with the Brood’s afterimage burned on his retinas, and the sick certainty he really was blind now. The tesser-hex closed with an audible bang as the atmosphere rushed into the g
ap it left. Smells came with sound: ozone and petrichor, charred meat (oh setat, was that him?), hot polysteel.

  Gaer’s left eye came back in stages, behind the optic (his right eye stayed resolutely screwed shut). He saw a blank sheet of stone where the altar had been, as if it had been blast-melted smooth. Jich’e’enfe was (of course) gone. The tesser-hex, in its closing, had cut off large parts of the tentacled Brood. What was left seemed more asymmetrical than usual, and very dead. Iari was methodically chopping its remnants into smaller, smoking fragments.

  Her rig had reverted to normalcy. No glowing seams. No blinding light. Just the headlamp and the small constellation of teslas on her backplate, so templars could find each other in the dark.

  Gaer pushed himself onto his side. Then a wobbly crouch. He swallowed. Tried to flare his plates and lost all breath, all vision, for a moment. Something was very wrong with one side of his face. Burn, maybe, from the radiation. Or impact, from when Iari had landed on him. He couldn’t remember it. But whatever, whenever, his optic had taken damage, too: his vision all spiderweb cracks and fracture-white lines, in the only working eye. He tried to say Iari’s name and coughed instead, wheezed, drooled something dark and wet (not unlike that dead Brood) onto the stone.

  Oh, that wasn’t good.

  “Gaer,” he heard, as if down a long tunnel. That was Corso’s voice, Corso pulling at his rig, Corso’s face thrust into his. He must look bad, to earn that kind of look from a man who looked like Corso did.

  “Oh fuck.” Corso turned, all the cords in his neck standing like cables. “Iari!”

  And seconds (forever) later, she appeared over Corso’s shoulder. All Gaer could see was Aedian templar, a rig sealed and glowing with hexwork, and for a heartbeat Gaer was sure she wasn’t under there anymore. That Iari had burned up in plasma, that it was just the rig working out the very last orders it had gotten through the needle-socket from her nanomecha.