Terminus

by Tristan Palmgren

  She said, “I don’t mean to stay in Italy forever.” Opportunity-rich as it was, Italy was not large enough. She had crossed it five times over.

  Antonov said, “Our brief is to focus on Italy.”

  “You know their interests won’t stay confined to Italy.” Just as they had not remained confined to Greece, or Serbia, or Dalmatia, or the burning lands pincering Constantinople.

  “Then what’s next for Fiametta of Treviso, after Siena?” he asked. He did not have to say assuming we outmatch Hawkwood. “The papacy? Raiding Avignon?”

  The answer should have been easy. Without this war to support, they had riches aplenty. Enough gold and silver to pay for lavish lifestyles, to make themselves patrons of towns or of the arts. They could have scholars writing paeans to their name, musicians playing every night. They pulled so much wealth behind them that it was a burden just to carry.

  Antonov talked about retirement, but he had not retired yet. Instead, their funds kept getting funneled back into war. They made war to support their wars. There was always another target to seize, a long-standing grudge to settle.

  There were other reasons, too, that they hadn’t told their men. Some of them suspected. Fia had, long before she’d learned the truth. Antonov had another employer, in the east. That employer wasn’t interested in seeing him settle down.

  Fia said, “I aim to go east.”

  Smoke encompassed all of their horizons now but for a single clear arc on the other side of the Via Francigena. It was like being in the bowl of a crater. Or the bottom of a lake.

  She gave Antonov all the time he needed to digest what she’d said. There were not many things she could have meant.

  “If you mean those words,” he said, at last, “they’re going to cause you a lot of trouble. Breathe them to anyone else, and you put yourself in danger.”

  “I know.” She and her inner voice discussed that frequently.

  The best part of her doctrine, the one she believed in more than any other, held that soldiers were so often used and discarded by men who did not deserve respect, let alone loyalty. Soldiers deserved better. She deserved better. The Company of the Star’s paymaster was no different than so many others.

  All her life, she’d felt a fire in her belly. A fire to escape the orphanage. A fire to become a soldier. To protect her friends from the company. To join the company. And now to change the world, to batter down the injustices that treated the company as the company had once treated her. She felt it burn as strongly as she’d felt any of them.

  Her inner voice asked, Are you sure this is a good idea to tell him?

  He would have to find out eventually, Fia thought to it.

  Antonov said, “I would call you foolish. But I think you already know how you sound.”

  “Do you believe in Saint Renatus?” she asked him suddenly, sparing no warning.

  She held his measure until finally he said, “I believe in what you’ve told me. About soldiers and rebirth.” It was the most she could have expected.

  “I don’t believe in Saint Renatus either.” She had never said it aloud to him, but he knew. Caterina, too. “But I believe in what Saint Renatus said. Look how much those words have brought us. When I decide on a path, I won’t be led away from it. There’s power in what I say.”

  Antonov asked, “You think nonbelievers and infidels will adopt a Christian saint?”

  There were plenty of Christians living east of them, but they both knew she hadn’t meant them. “Saint Renatus is not just a Christian saint,” Fia said. “He’s a saint of all soldiers.” She had discovered, while composing the life of Saint Renatus, just how many of the lives of other saints had been reconfigured from those of pagans. “Going to war is a holy act no matter what creed a man was born into.” Birth was not as important as rebirth.

  “You have a great deal of faith in yourself,” he said. The barb was unsubtle.

  “I think I have enough. Word of Saint Renatus has spread much farther than anyone else expected it to.” Every society of condottieri in Italy, France, and Hungary numbered some believers among them. Mercenaries were not the type to hew to religious orthodoxy. Threats of excommunication did not bother them. Most of them had been excommunicated before.

  “You might succeed in spreading word farther,” Antonov conceded.

  “Then you’ll support me in this,” she said.

  “My support?” Antonov’s response startled her. He yanked his palfrey’s reins, halted. “Hasn’t it crossed your mind that you won’t have my support for long?”

  “Oh, cut the self-pity. You’re not so old that you don’t have more campaigns in front–”

  “It’s not a matter of age. You have taken all of me there was to give. All I had, when we met, was the company.”

  They sat in silence. Fia couldn’t remember where they should have been going.

  “If you want to go east,” he said, “you can deal with it. This has been more your war than mine. It has been for years.”

  7

  Meloku’s shuttle dropped out of moon-haloed clouds. The deck shook. She was accustomed to keeping the monitors in the shuttle’s control cabin off. She turned them on, had them show her their compound-eye view of the shuttle’s hundreds of exterior cameras, just to soothe her stomach.

  She had not come to the monastery to investigate, Meloku told herself. She was just here to take a look.

  The shuttle blanketed itself in stealth fields: cushions of air to mute the thunder of the engines, sheathes of light to blur the air. Below, the shuttle looked like a shimmer in the dark overcast, a heat hallucination. The stealth fields were not strong enough to cloak the shuttle in full sunlight. Ways and Means had prohibited flights during the day.

  Her shuttle hovered meters above the earth. She stepped down the boarding ramp. Seen from within the bubble of its stealth fields, the shuttle looked spidery, bladed. It had been built sturdy, intended to fly through a solar corona or the sludgy depths of an ammonia sea as easily as terrestrial atmosphere. Now, like the rest of them, it was stuck on this world.

  When she turned back, the shuttle seemed to be looking down on her. It was intelligent in its way, piloted by an NAI.

  After a moment regarding her, it rose and whispered into the night. It would come back when she called it.

  The monastery hadn’t changed much since she’d watched the raid. The gates remained barred. Smoke from a dozen refugee campfires mingled with the dark haze lingering over the ash fields. Behind the walls, someone was yelling in spite of the late hour. A headstrong male voice, on the verge of breakdown. Her demiorganics’ audio discrimination ability struggled to pick out his words. Something about fire, and God.

  Though her eavesdroppers and satellite feeds provided her with an abundance of information, they could not substitute for presence. Ash slipped into her shoes. Bone-white burned wheat stalks crunched under her soles. She could not clear her nostrils of the smoke. Already, the smell had soaked into her costume.

  The Company of the Star had done everything but salt the fields. Terror was part of their plan. Overawe the locals, drive refugees to the cities to spread stories and burden municipal food stores. She had trouble wrapping her imagination around suffering on that scale. The first time she’d come to this plane, she hadn’t even tried. She hadn’t wanted to. But she was getting better at it, whether she tried to be or not.

  Her skin goosebumped with cold fury.

  Companion, with the carefree candor of an AI, had once told her that she had suffered a shortage of empathy. Her social skills were slow to develop, slow to manifest. Growing up, it had kept her aloof, made her cold-blooded. It had also made her an ideal agent for the amalgamates. They gave her work someone with a faster conscience would have balked at.

  She wondered what Companion would say now. Probably the same thing. She was slow to empathize with anyone, for any reason.

  She’d been on this plane long enough, though.

  Retinal infrared show
ed her the blobby radiant heat of the monastery’s watchmen. The Company of the Star had long since moved on, but the locals expected a raid at any moment. As far as they knew, the condottieri were just over the horizon. Their world was alien, unknowable, full of long shadows and hidden threats.

  She stepped carefully across moonlit shadows. She crouched against the outer wall’s sloped earthen barrier. After five minutes of silent movement, she reached the divot in the wall where she had planted her first eavesdropper. She dug it out. It was the size of her fingernail, and about as remarkable to look at.

  She hadn’t needed to come and retrieve it so soon, not really. Though Ways and Means had curtailed resupply flights for fear of the disruption they caused, she had thousands of them stored underneath her hideaway.

  She turned it over in her palm. Her diagnostic programs reported no software tampering. There were no footprints in the dirt. It was the same with the others she’d placed at other points around the wall. Nothing wrong, nothing remarkable.

  If there had been any tampering, it would have to have been done remotely. Once again, that narrowed her suspects.

  She watched the stars. Their radio signals hummed.

  The sky was full of satellites. If she was being watched closely, then whatever power was doing it must have figured the real reason she’d come here.

  She waited for a cloud to obscure the moon and hide her from the watchmen. Then she slipped away from the walls, toward the ash-covered road on which the Company of the Star had left.

  The shuttle found her a safe distance from the monastery. She sat hard on the boarding ramp. Her security programs were top shelf. No human could have beaten them, not even another agent. She only knew of two powers capable of it. The first was Ways and Means.

  That would have been bad enough, but the second was even worse.

  It was a monster. Her encounter with it had left her with scars, deep and physical, along her neural tissue. It had attacked her, burned out her demiorganics. She had gone into treatment for post-traumatic stress, blocked off parts of her memories. But she could not erase all of them and still retain herself. It was impossible for any functioning human psyche, whether healthy or otherwise, to come away from that without a healthy fear of further trauma.

  This creature had exiled Ways and Means to this plane, and broken apart the Unity. Alone, Meloku stood no chance against it.

  It was not a human intelligence. It existed between the planes. It did not see the multiverse as a set of discrete planes but as gradations of the infinite. It did not believe in death because it always, somewhere, perceived the dead on another plane. That perspective had left the creature free to kill as much as it liked. And it had killed a lot. Millions of Unity citizens had died.

  That creature had been responsible for a plague that had swept the Unity, as devastating there as this world’s black pestilence had been here. Ways and Means and the other amalgamates had surrendered rather than allow the slaughter to continue. They submitted themselves to exile.

  Though the creature didn’t believe in death, it did have a kind of ethics. It didn’t like empires like the Unity. Colonization, assimilation, erasure offended it. It had seemed afraid that, given the opportunity to sufficiently advance, the amalgamates would come to colonize it.

  It might have been right to fear the Unity. Inside or outside the bounds of the Unity, there was little that the amalgamates had not seen fit to control or manipulate. Ways and Means had defined itself by its empire. By wreathing themselves in empire, the amalgamates believed that they had the resources to best anything that might harm them.

  Ways and Means and the other amalgamates had been among the most unique sentient life they had ever encountered in the universe. They were thousands of AIs, melded together. They had been forged in vicious wars. They had crafted an empire to control and manipulate humans and other lesser species, and made itself secure in a multiverse that was largely alien to it.

  They had built themselves planarships, vast and powerful, capable of escaping to anywhere, and stocked with the Unity’s best weapons and defenses. They had seeded backups of their minds in inhospitable corners of the planes, and guaranteed their immortality. But it was their empire, they believed, that had given them their best means of preserving themselves.

  But now the empire was gone. She had no idea how Ways and Means aimed to define itself now. Its sentence of exile would last for another twelve hundred years. After that, it had been forbidden to assemble an empire like the last. The creature would be watching.

  The amalgamates had manipulated Meloku her whole life, and she knew it. She had embraced it. Until she got here. Until she had lost Companion. Until Ways and Means had pulled back from settling this world. She had not spoken to Ways and Means for years. She hadn’t particularly wanted to.

  And she wouldn’t now. Ways and Means was almost certainly responsible for this. If she contacted it, she would tip it off to how much she knew. Far better to do as she was now, trust her own eyes and ears. Look into the situation.

  That didn’t mean fight. That didn’t mean resist. It didn’t necessarily mean investigate, as she kept telling herself. If Ways and Means had gone out of its way to hide the size of a mercenary company’s treasure convoy, it might have a good reason. She just wanted to know why this was happening.

  There was only one person she trusted to speak with about this. The problem was that that person didn’t want to speak with her. She might as soon throw a punch as talk, in fact.

  Meloku felt the same way about her.

  A line of thick, dark clouds walled off the Adriatic. The shuttle bounced and juddered through the cyclonic trailing edge of a thunderstorm. Lightning lashed its port side. All of the camera images flared white. The sound penetrated even the shuttle’s sound-cushioning fields.

  Meloku asked her demiorganics to dampen the anxiety squeezing her stomach. Numbness spread across the center of her abdomen.

  The shuttle burst through the storm and dove toward the coast. It outpaced the rain. By the time the shuttle settled on dirt, the skies had dried. The storm would catch up before long. The wind already battered the pebbly gray foothills in which Dr Habidah Shen had established herself.

  Dr Habidah Shen had never forgiven Meloku for being who she was. Habidah had been the leader of the team of extraplanar anthropologists. Meloku had joined her team under false pretenses. She had pretended to be one of those anthropologists, but had been sizing this plane up for colonization and exploitation.

  To Habidah, discovering Meloku was a spy had come as a personal betrayal. History had brushed Meloku’s and Ways and Means’ plans away long ago, but not Habidah’s memory.

  Meloku strode down the boarding ramp. The shuttle’s wingtip thrusters glowed hot. Steam poured from them. Meloku bunched her sleeves over her arms to protect them from the wind. Scores of old thruster burns betrayed where other shuttles had landed. There were more of them than Meloku had expected. Many more.

  Ways and Means had curtailed shuttle flights and surface visits to reduce disruptions to the natives’ lives. Meloku suspected this was an excuse. Ways and Means’ crew was not happy with its decision to remain minimally uninvolved. They wanted a world. The moment they stepped off a shuttle, Ways and Means’ options for controlling them diminished. Even after three decades, Ways and Means had only dispatched a few hundred agents to the surface.

  But Ways and Means had not balked at the flights that supplied Habidah’s home. This in spite of the fact that Habidah was hardly fond of Ways and Means. Habidah had said she would not, would never, work for it.

  Nevertheless, Habidah and her anthropologist partner Kacienta were, like Meloku, valuable to Ways and Means. Unlike the rest of its crew, they were fully human. They could infiltrate and interact with this plane’s people in ways that its crew couldn’t.

  Habidah must have known the supplies that Ways and Means sent came with a price. It was tapped in. Any data she collected, it saw too.


  A loose, pebble-strewn trail led along a short ridge, and faded into the side of a short hill. As Meloku approached, a sliver of the hill recessed. Not even a trickle of dust or dirt fell.

  Meloku hadn’t tried to hide from Habidah and Kacienta’s sensors. The stealth fields might have tricked an unaugmented eye, but not their scanners, and they kept a careful watch for natives. They would have known she was coming as soon as her shuttle dipped into the Adriatic.

  Kacienta stood on the other side of the door. Kacienta was a short woman, but just broad enough to block the door, even with her arms folded. She was one of the anthropologists who’d come with Habidah. The other surviving member of their original team, Joao, was gone. He’d packed his belongings and trekked into the wilderness. Only Ways and Means knew where he was. Ways and Means no doubt tracked him, but no one else had heard from him since.

  Meloku did not fail to notice that only Kacienta had come to see her. Kacienta told her, “You don’t need to be here.”

  Meloku said, “You don’t even know why I’ve come.”

  “No,” Kacienta said, and nothing else.

  “I’m not here on Ways and Means’ behalf,” Meloku said.

  Kacienta studied her; no doubt she was using retinal infrared to watch the flow of heat under Meloku’s cheeks. “You’re a liar,” she said. Meloku’s own retinal infrared caught her uncertainty.

  “A good liar,” Meloku said. “But not this time. I don’t have a reason to lie.”

  Somewhere behind Kacienta, Habidah spoke. “You’re not going to talk her into leaving.”

  Kacienta grunted, but didn’t budge.

  “Good to see you again too,” Meloku told Kacienta. It had been years. She forced her way past Kacienta. Kacienta still didn’t move.

  Kacienta and Habidah shared quarters no larger than those Meloku did with Dahn. It would have been rougher for them. They both had to bathe and eat and sleep. They both sweated and stank and were irritable and restless. As unnerving as Dahn was, Meloku couldn’t have tolerated sharing space with him if he were fully human.