And she fell.
There followed a tumbling broken interval of pain, Kai’s self held by an enormous hand, her body broken. Somewhere in that scream she found a door, and, though she could not move, she knocked.
Tara Abernathy stood on the other side, panting, bloodslick from her elbows down, her own blood mostly. Wounds carved her over and over, on arms and legs and flank, always in the same pattern: four deep parallel cuts and one slightly slant, as if she’d been caressed by hands made of knives. Behind her towered a sharp-toothed shape Kai tried not to think about.
“It’s time,” Kai said.
Abernathy swallowed her heartbeat, and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she seemed cool and calm. “Good. I wasn’t getting much rest anyway.”
They met at Gavreaux Junction in the waking world just before dawn, Tara in a light gray suit, Kai in dark. The freight elevators ran full capacity, one container every five minutes, and behind thick walls capped with barbed wire machines ground and stevedores called to one another in a coarse tradesman’s dialect of Talbeg. Kai knew the sounds and smells from the industrial port back home, where deepwater container ships deposited their wares and police reviewed the cargo for smuggled gods and joss. This was bigger, though, and at least some gods were welcome.
“Tickets” was the first waking word Tara spoke. She did not mention the puppet Kai she’d seen in her dream, and Kai said nothing about hands that were knives, or a gray-eyed woman made of glass. And yet Kai realized that for the first time, in her own head, she was calling the other woman by her given name. “This way.”
They bought tickets in a bare concrete hall lined with bare concrete pillars, from a drowsing Iskari kid still high from the night before. Kai followed Tara past long benches and patches of floor where families slept on unfolded newspaper, waiting for a train.
“Bound for points south?” Kai nodded toward the families. Tara stopped at a magazine stand, tossed the vendor a coin, and selected an Iskari daily from the rack. “I thought most of these people would be coming from trouble, not going toward it.”
Tara opened the newspaper. “I missed these. We don’t have them back home.” Realizing she hadn’t answered Kai’s question: “They aren’t headed for the troubles. They’ll take the costal line east to Apophis, and from there, they can reach Dhisthra, Zur, anywhere on the Ebon Sea, the Shining Empire if they want. People only stay here if they don’t mind the Iskari.”
“Sounds like there’s no love lost between you.”
Tara tucked the newspaper under her arm. “The Iskari are a god-fearing people, emphasis on the fearing.”
“You work with gods in Alt Coulumb.”
“Alt Coulumb is different. And better, though don’t tell our esteemed allies I said so.”
“Yet you’re cooperating.”
“Path dependency makes strange bedfellows. Take the two of us, for example.”
Whoever designed the Southern Express waiting room had expected it would be the station’s focus. Broad concrete steps climbed to a mezzanine for no reason Kai could see, beyond giving the architect an excuse to raise an enormous arch in the shape of an Iskari modernist Lady Progress, broad strong arms spread to embrace the huddled masses below. Progress shed rays of concrete light—or tentacles. This, Kai realized, passing underneath, was the first representation of a human being she’d seen in Agdel Lex. Which sent a different message: this place was not made by, or for, locals.
Fewer people waited in the lounge atop the stairs, and none of those slept on newspapers. Seven tall, knife-thin persons in identical black suits read copies of the same newspaper on the same bench. A woman in a floral print dress checked her wristwatch. The overhead clock chimed six. Pink light seeped through high, smoked station windows. Tara passed their tickets to the golem and led Kai through the turnstile, outside. This was all old hat to her, nothing worth a second glance.
But even Tara stopped when she saw the train.
The stairs they’d climbed seemed to have a purpose after all: raising them above the train’s wheel bed. The passenger car curved over them, a dark metal hill glistening in morning light. Kai had seen dragons smaller. To her left bloomed the metal fungus of the locomotive, and to her right, perspective shrank even these enormous cars to a point. A few cars lay open, unhinged like waiting jaws as cranes lowered boxy shipping containers inside. The insects that swarmed the train’s surface were, of course, people. Kai watched one freight car snap shut around a shipping container, slow and inevitable, terrifying mass driven by great hidden engines.
“Wow,” Kai said.
“Neat, isn’t it?” Looking at the train, Kai felt a kind of holy awe: this was a thing beyond any scale human minds evolved to comprehend. She read another emotion in Tara’s thrust-back shoulders, in her smile: pride. “Most of those containers are empty—they fill them south of the Wastes. Those double walls hold the insulation that lets them pass through the Wastes unharmed. Otherwise the gods out there, what’s left of them, sneak into the cargo, and when they make it to the wider world—” She pinched her fingers together and opened them quickly, like a flower blooming, faster. “It’s good to be careful.”
“And my sister plans to rob—this.”
The Craftswoman shrugged. “It’s a rich target.”
“Does she have an army? Two? You said those containers were empty.”
“Most of them.” Hands pocketed, newspaper under one arm, Tara marched to the passenger car. A conductor waited by the open door, navy blue uniform, white cap, shined shoes, military insignia, mustache. He clicked his heels as Tara passed; the Craftswoman did not stop or speak. He clicked his heels for Kai, too, and Kai smiled at him. The conductor’s face didn’t seem to have moved since the nineties.
As she climbed the long stairway through the passenger car’s insulation, Kai thought about cargo, and the depot south of the Waste, in the heart of the Gleb, and the conductor’s military bearing, and the thin identical personages in identical black suits. “We’re carrying joss, aren’t we? Liquid souls, gems, palladium—raw and untraceable. You’re not trading with miners. You’re trading with warlords.”
Tara stopped at the top of the stairs. “Ms. Pohala.” Her voice was sharper than the moonlight knife Kai’d seen her wield. The shadows in the stairwell darkened, and glyphs glimmered beneath the other woman’s skin. The Blue Lady curled Kai’s nerves tight and whispered, run. “I don’t trade. My employers’ church and Iskar have an old relationship, which has been nothing but trouble since before I started, and if people listened to me around the office, we’d have cut through this knot a long time ago. I came into this mess with a single goal: to see your sister’s project through. And, in the midst of your moral indignation, ask yourself what the, sure, call them warlords, do with the fortunes the Iskari toss their way. Might they, just possibly, end up back home on good old Kavekana, funding your bonus?”
Kai stopped on the steps. “I’m trying to change that.”
“We’re all trying,” Tara said. “Whether we’re trying hard enough—that’s the question. Meanwhile, the joss is likely your sister’s target. If she is here.”
“She is.”
Tara shrugged, and disappeared around the corner.
Designers, decorators, and Craftsmen had molded the passenger car into a perfect illusion of a normal train cabin. Every surface shimmered with inlaid brass and polished wood. Light issued through translucent panels approximating windows. Even Kai, who’d seen no windows outside the enormous smooth plane of the insulation tanks, mistook that light for day at first, so well were the ghostlamps tuned. Compartments bordered the aisle on the left, half occupied, most with single passengers dozing on the lush leather cushions, shades pulled down over the fake windows. By the time Kai caught up with Tara, the Craftswoman was seated in their compartment, reading the paper.
She settled across from her. Tara turned the page. A tea cart rolled down the hall outside. “I’m sorry,” Kai said. “It’s horribl
e. I mean. I have a friend who comes from—” She stopped herself. “This is gross.”
The page turned. “I agree.”
“Do you ever think,” Kai asked, looking out the not-window though there was nothing outside to see, “about games?”
“Not often.”
“Or sports?”
“No.”
She tried anyway. “Good players depend on the rules of the game. Tollan’s the best ullamal player in the world, but if she got, I don’t know, zapped back in time and to another country, to the Shining Empire, say—would it matter?”
“If mystery plays are to be believed,” Tara said, “she would teach the locals to play ullamal, have a series of madcap adventures, overcome her arch-rival in the Shining Empire, find a predictable focus-group-tested romance, and ultimately stay in the past because she found true friendship and love of the game there, as opposed to returning to our crass fast-paced world in which she’s rich, universally beloved, and functionally a goddess. Which development would make sense to the audience, for”—she waved her hand vaguely without looking up from the stocks page—“reasons. Probably because it reinforces the carefully packaged narrative that rich people are inherently unhappy, so you poor folks in the provinces should just stay in your seats and buy another ticket.”
The tea cart came again, and Kai bought tea with milk and sugar, and wished they had coffee. Tara took her tea black and bitter. “You want power,” Kai said, “so you play the game. You learn its rules and use them. But what if the game’s wrong?”
The train shuddered. Footsteps padded over the thick hall carpet. Tara glanced over the top of the newspaper and Kai, for a moment, felt herself seen through—not, for once, seen as the person she wasn’t, but seen beneath her flesh and past, seen as a soul wrapped in a Lady’s web. She felt naked and raw beneath that gaze, and she crossed her legs and clutched the hem of her skirt.
Tara folded the paper, and set it down beside Kai’s milky tea. She looked like she was about to ask a question, or say—something.
The compartment door opened. “We’re fine,” Kai said, automatically, expecting the tea cart again.
“I would expect nothing less,” said Lieutenant Bescond.
Chapter Forty
ZEDDIG’S CREW—and they were Zeddig’s crew for this job, she’d made that much clear to Ley before they left, Ley might be the mission specialist but Zeddig gave the orders, which Ley, with slantwise smile, accepted: “You’re the boss”—reached the train station before dawn, clad in coveralls and weaponry. Raymet might have been a calliope for all the jangles that followed her as she moved. Ley sported blades at every limb, and others out of sight. Gal bore only a band of twisted blue cord around her arm.
“A shield?” Raymet asked on the way, pointing to the armband. “Or curse? Whip? Lightning garrote?”
“Good luck charm,” Gal replied, as if she had not noticed she was wearing it and expected no one else to notice either. “My mother gave it to me. I assumed it was for luck.”
“What does it do?” Raymet adjusted her belt, trying to balance the heavy repeating crossbows strapped to her hips.
Gal tilted her arm and examined the braiding. “Looks nice?”
“We’re bound into the Wastes, I’m loaded for God, and you’ve brought a good luck charm.”
“I like luck.”
Raymet unbelted one of the crossbows and shoved it stock-first at Gal. “Here. You carry this one.”
So Gal wore the crossbow and the cord, and carried a duffle bag large enough to hide a small body. They walked through the service entrance, and Zeddig knocked on thick safety glass. The clerk behind the glass glanced up from yesterday’s half-filled crossword. A dictionary lay by her hand. “What?”
Zeddig gestured to her companions. “Four for detail.” She drew papers from her coverall, flattened them with gloved hands, passed them through. This wasn’t the critical moment—there were too many chances for this whole operation to go to shit for Zeddig to call any one critical—but it was a critical moment.
“ID?”
Those, too, she had. Stamped and official-looking scrip, sharp as Vogel’s pass man could make them, which, Raymet had assured her, was sharp. She could spot the difference, but they’d pass the security checkpoint.
Fighters came to Agdel Lex from the world over, tight landless mercenary groups, each with resumés of villages saved, justice imposed through heroic adversity, and many more tales they did not tell, of other less convenient villages put to the sword or abandoned, of monsters that could speak dispatched. They washed blood off their hands, and got paid. The Northern Gleb was a good market for their skills, and so was the High Steppe, and getting from one to the other required passage through the Waste, and tickets cost more capital than hobo mercs tended to have after they spent their roll on body mods, reagents, and weapons. Fortunately—though Craftsmen claimed there was no such thing as fortune, only invisible fingers sorting out demand and supply—the Southern Express needed guards who wouldn’t ask for worker’s comp. Bribe your way through a background check, and you were good to go.
So the woman behind the security glass waved them through, and, after a jog down twisting corridors too well-lit to inspire trust, and a longer elevator ride, they reached the guard trough atop the seventh car from the back. Techs sprayed them down, tested the seal, and locked the warding glass roof in place.
Gal sat cross-legged, back straight, and prayed. Raymet paced, glanced at Gal, paced more. At last she sat down beside Gal, legs crossed likewise. She closed her eyes, breathed, opened her eyes again. Gal didn’t seem to have noticed. She shrugged then, and took out a book.
Ley removed her coverall and mask, double-checked her materials, and, satisfied, set up a chess game.
“That’s it?” Zeddig said. She hadn’t stopped pacing. “One review, and you’re ready?”
Ley curled around two sides of the chess board like a cat, and propped her cheek on her fist. “I’ve reviewed past the point of nausea. At this point I’d rather trust my plans and wait.”
“That’s delving for you,” Zeddig said. “Boredom punctuated by bursts of brief, near-fatal excitement.”
Ley stretched her arm over her head until the shoulder popped. She sighed, as if she’d been waiting for that pop for weeks. “I prefer my industry. Art is constant near-fatal excitement—and if you win, you never have to wait for anything again. You pay other people to wait for you.”
“Sounds selfish.”
“It is—solipsism, creamy and rich, like burrata. I recommend it to everyone.”
“Solipsism,” Zeddig said, “would be a kind of hell, if you weren’t perfect. Which you’re not.”
“Sit down, then.” Ley slapped the floor across the board. “Play me. Show me different.”
Zeddig was up a pawn when the train shuddered to motion and scattered their chess pieces. One, bouncing, landed in Raiment’s book. She tossed it back overhand, and struck Ley on the skull.
They passed through the wall, and the sky changed.
The squid-certainty of Agdel Lex fell away, as if carved off by a knife. Sharp wind curled through the high places of their souls. Insulation churned and pumped and gurgled in the walls, and thin pipes of the stuff set into the foot-thick warding glass ceiling gushed green. Ice webbed the crystal. Wind shook the train on its tracks. A bird cried in the distance. Zeddig tried not to think about what birds might survive in the Waste, what they might eat, or how loud that cry must be to pierce the thick walls.
Zeddig and Ley drew their next game, and the next, and after that even Ley lost heart. She sat to wait, and watched her watch.
An hour passed. Two. An enormous hand made of ice and salt struck the ceiling, which shuddered, but held. Nails as broad across as Gal was tall scraped the roof, bent and splintered to powder as they failed to gain purchase. The hand slipped away, leaving streaks of melted rainbow ichor. The train rolled on. Gal had not moved. She sat cross-legged and gangly, praying. Ray
met stared up into a sky green as old bone, and waited for the hand to come again. She breathed shallow and fast, like a rabbit.
Gal did not open her eyes, but she extended her hand, and Raymet accepted, squeezed it tight. Her breath stilled.
Zeddig checked her watch. “Ley?”
“It’s time.” They gathered close as she opened the blade, forming silver fractals. This time Zeddig was ready for the shift, as her mind came unmoored and Ley’s web caught them all. The train steadied.
The wheeled access hatch to the cargo container below was locked tight, set to open only and automatically in the event of disaster below. Raymet pried up floor plates with a chisel, breathed deeply, and wriggled into the thrumming mechanisms. “Sapphire spanner,” she called up, and Gal passed the tool down. “The other one.” Gal got it right on the third try.
Ley packed her chess set and watched Raymet work, squeezed between pistons and gears and pumps circulating insulation sludge. A wrong move might cause a leak, or open the access hatch before vacuum pumps drained the insulation, venting godsludge into their cabin. They might survive, if that happened. There had been known cases.
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