It either wouldn’t have done that, or it couldn’t have. Both options traced an incomplete outline of its secrets.
Ways and Means had tried to kill her, yes, but it had killed her constructs first. It could not have done more to provoke her had it consciously tried. She had to consider that. Ways and Means could be pushing her in a direction that it could not say it wanted her to go.
She could not quite make herself believe that. Had she been a little slower, Ira would have killed her. What few fragments of the virus she had been able to examine had not revealed any instructions to hold back.
She needed somebody else to talk to. Not necessarily even to hear her, but another person around to think of, to be aware of.
The weather soured, turned gray. Storms lashed at her. Days and weeks spun together, knotting tight around her thoughts. Choking them.
The Pyrenees sank behind her. She crossed fields and streams, and then roads and rivers. She submerged in the rivers, sometimes allowing the current to carry her for kilometers before stepping onto the other shore.
She had spent a lot of her time aboard her boat thinking of herself as alone. Her constructs had done more than she’d cared to credit them with. She saw that in flashes of memory – Coral questioning her, Ira provoking her just to make her answer. Even Braeloris kept her uncomfortable. They had kept her thinking, reacting, active.
Ways and Means had given them to her. It had not needed to do so. She had not asked it. Had it been human, she would have considered that a sign it had cared for her. She had never quite known what to make of its relationships with its crew.
She had become sure, over her years with it, that it kept its crew on for more than just practical purposes. They were more than just their jobs. Yet Ways and Means was not sentimental.
She wondered if it would resurrect its backup of her. Like all of Ways and Means’ crew, she stored her memories and personalities aboard it for safekeeping, in the event of disaster. The last time she’d updated her backup, though, had been thirty years ago. She no longer believed in backups. It was hard to imagine that she would want these years back, if she lost them.
Maybe Ways and Means thought the same. Maybe it was giving her up as lost, rebooting her. If she died here, it could restore her old self, before her self-imposed exile, with a clean conscience.
More of this world was wild than not. She spent most of her time sidling along forests or trudging through prairie. She passed into and through Germany, onward and eastward. Her path carried her farther east than north, but nights gradually became colder, and the days drier.
The first snowfall still caught her by surprise. It had been so long since she’d lacked perfect information about the weather that she had forgotten what it was like to be caught off guard. The seasons had advanced, but this snow was still early.
The patina of snow and frost made her take things slower. Her slim feet and their long fingers worked well for gripping bulkheads in zero gravity, but they did her no favors on ice. Her injury and the lagging response time from her legs did not help.
She had hardly been in the snow for a day when she discovered that she was being pursued again.
They did not bother to conceal themselves. She did not need to pulse scan. Her passive scanners caught the radio emissions of their electronics while they were twenty kilometers away. It was just static nonsense, encrypted short-range leftovers.
Their signals scattered off the atmosphere. The source of the transmissions was just underneath the horizon, too far to see. She did not need a precise position, though, to know they were headed right at her.
She was an easy quarry. Even if, for whatever reason, Ways and Means refused to use its sensors to aid them, she had left tracks in the snow for kilometers. Unique, inhuman tracks. She could not slow to scuff her tracks and still outpace them. Since they did not care about letting themselves be noticed, she doubted she would have been able to outrun them regardless.
She wished she had Coral here, though Coral would not have helped.
She stood on a dead prairie that the snow had turned into a brown-bristled tundra. She looked about. A knot of trees bristled out of the horizon, an ugly patch of fur on a bare scalp. They were cover, though. Shadows and cover were the only advantages she had left.
If she had to fight, it was a better place for it than any other.
21
Fia did not dream well.
Her dreams were not hers.
She dreamt of the night sky wrapped around her, unbounded. She looked below her and saw only a deep field of stars, the scar of the Milky Way. It took her too long to realize that there was no such thing as up or down.
She was not alone. There was something here that did not belong. She could not see it, but she felt it. Iron-cold, sharp-edged.
The darkness was more than the absence of light. It was a cloak, drawn over it. Sometimes there was not even that.
But it was always there.
The Company of the Star now consisted of just four hundred officers, riders, and foot soldiers. It shed more every day. Many of the remaining condottieri were contracted only to stay until the company reached the borders of Florentine lands.
Fia pulled her reduced treasure train closer to the body of their army. They no longer had the men to protect it elsewhere. Nor was there as much to protect. The most important of her contracted condottieri had already departed. They’d taken their shares with them.
Fia and Antonov had paid out most of their property to support the siege of Siena. They had astonishingly little.
Antonov told her, in their empty pavilion, “I rose with less.”
“You’re going home,” Fia said. “You don’t intend to keep fighting.”
“You can stay if you want.”
That evening, she watched their camp settle into the night. After dark, she could not tell that anything was amiss. The spread of cooking fires outlined the barricades. Herds of stolen sheep, goats, cattle dimpled the horizon. They might as well have been settling down for winter quarters as fleeing a fight they could not win.
The company had gone to ground before. It was a good condottieri tactic. Whenever a league of Italian cities emerged to fight them, they would melt away until infighting tore the league apart. They had never needed to wait longer than a winter.
It would take a lot longer for the papacy to lose interest. Fia did not know when they would be able to emerge, or if it would be worth it when the time came. Maybe ten years from now. Maybe never.
Hawkwood was giving desultory chase, staying a hundred miles behind. He would not follow her out of Italy. He no longer wanted to fight. His heart, for whatever reason, had fled him.
She had not taken Siena. She had lost her chance to make her gains any more permanent than the silver and wine in her treasure train. They would flee her just as quickly.
She had failed. The Cult of Saint Renatus would survive, but it did not need her as a leader. It never had, not really. She had been a figurehead, a preacher, but the only company she had ever led had been her own. She had thought she had wanted to change the world, but what she really imagined was leading that change. Change without direction was pointless.
Antonov had told her about the frosted forests and long nights of his home. It was still a long journey away. She did not figure that she would accompany him all the way. Yet she did not know where else she was going.
Warmth fled the dry air quickly. She walked a circuit around the barricades. It seemed shorter every night.
By the time she returned to the pavilion, Antonov was gone. But she was not alone. Her inner voice found her most often in the dark, when she was vulnerable.
Her dreams started the same way.
I can share more.
The starry void had no edges. It was no celestial sphere as the nuns had taught her. There were no glass-smoothed edges – but endless space in all directions. White-hot suns shone through it.
The idea of the infinite, the eternal, was something the nuns had taught her could only apply to God. Not to anything material. This was infinite, and only material.
She was without a body. She was just dreamstuff. But the stars felt real, livid-hot.
I share this with you to empower you.
She had no idea what her inner voice was trying to say at first. Not until it returned to this place, over and over. Wearing her down. She had to see it on her own.
The shadow-shape loomed above everything, disguising itself. She could cut her fingers on its invisible edges. It lurked at the edges of her awareness, just tangible.
This is the enemy.
She could feel every edge of the shadow-shape as though she were running her hands across it. But she had no hands, and the shape was wider than she could have stretched her arms. Miles. She did not know how she had figured its size. She sensed it as if she had felt it, though. She dreamed in naked sensation.
See what I can share with you?
She had no throat, no tongue. She did not know how she had learned to speak, but her voice was clear. She suspected she could only speak because it wanted her to. “You tried to kill me,” she accused.
Yes.
“Why should I have anything to do with you?”
What else have you ever had, other than me?
Had she a body, she would have shuddered. “Lots.”
You did not have the truth. I’m sharing it.
Even had she said “no,” she doubted she could have stopped it from showing her what it wanted.
Her inner voice seemed to have resolved the confusion that had clouded it since the battle. It had a plan again. “Why share this now and not before?” she asked it. “What changed?”
Circumstances, it said.
Things it was not prepared to tell her, she understood. If she forced it to say, it would lie.
She had heard her inner voice scream as the black hawk had cut across the sky. It could have just said that was what had changed. But she woke before she could say so.
Most of the Italians left the company as soon as it departed Venetian territory. They already had a new contract. Venice had hired most of them to defend itself against Hawkwood’s army.
Their contracts were said to last for as long as papal forces remained in Italy. That was an unusually open-ended term for condottieri. If they made a habit of taking contracts like that, they might as well have become a standing army.
Fia tried to put them out of her mind. Hazard of the profession. She could not help but see betrayal everywhere.
She was not at a loss for distraction. The terrain ahead was not as fraught as Italy, but danger was everywhere. No city wanted the trouble of the company raiding its lands. Even with their reduced numbers, they could do a great deal of damage to countryside unprepared for them. No city wanted the trouble of refusing their safe conducts, either. As usual, Fia dispatched multiple requests for safe conduct along their path, both to disorient their recipients and to make them more difficult to track.
Fia was left with one hundred and ten men, mostly Russians and Hungarians, and about as many camp followers to manage their herds. Fia had traveled with fewer before, but never with so few prospects. The Russians were all old hands like Antonov. Also like him, none of them intended to turn back when they reached their home.
They dragged around the edges of cities, unmolested. The soil hardened and the wind turned vicious. Fia could hardly stand to ride for the dust that blew into her eyes. She walked beside her palfrey.
Caterina led her horses. Through some miracle, she had weathered her fever. She had gotten on her feet far sooner than she should have. She remained paler than Fia had ever seen her. Her hands shook even in baking heat. A black, ugly, pitted scar ran down her arm. Incompetent suturing had not helped. She favored her uninjured hand, had trouble lifting with the other. Fia suspected her fingers did not work as she was accustomed.
She had lost her own tent sometime during the battle. She slept alongside Fia in her pavilion now. She always lingered in sight, trying to look like a shadow.
Fia did not want to let her go much farther, either.
She could have been as Caterina was. In any of the early battles she’d fought, she could have fallen. She would not have received even a morsel of doctoring. She had not bothered to be afraid of all of the deaths she could have found along the way.
After those first few weeks, Caterina never showed the pain. Only the sallowness of her face gave it away. Her lips were set. She was always watching Fia. Whenever their gazes met, Fia looked away first.
Fia wearied. She was accustomed to hard travel, but she had not marched in one direction so long in all her life. She had never gone farther west than Venice. Italy had been her world, and now it was behind her. She’d imagined leaving it one day, but not so soon, and not as a fugitive.
Antonov had told her about his home. It had always seemed another world, impossibly distant. He told her how, every winter, his toes would turn black. He had lost three of them. He had a divot in his ear he joked had happened when his mother had grabbed his ear, and a frozen brittle piece of it had snapped right off.
The life of the condottieri meant not knowing where she would end up next campaign season. She thought she was built to withstand uncertainty. She’d been standing on firmer soil than she realized. She trusted her thoughts. Her inner voice.
The only thing she had left was her belief in the gospel of Saint Renatus. The parts of it that didn’t include a literal belief in the man, anyway.
In her dreams, she was always falling, deeper into the starry void. It had taken hours, days, to get used to it. But she’d had plenty of time.
Her inner voice said, There are more worlds connected to yours than drops of blood in your body.
Her inner voice seemed to think it was introducing her to a wider world. Helping her open her eyes.
Fuck that.
“I don’t care,” she said.
You can’t imagine the scope of the universe you live in. That’s why I’m showing you, rather than describing it. Perceiving is believing.
“Still don’t care.”
You could make this easier and listen.
She could not stop it from speaking. She had no ears to plug. Eventually, not by choice, she began to hear.
She did not care about its cosmology. Unlike many fellow condottieri, she did not consult the stars before battle. She did not need this dressed-up astrology, either. Intellectual curiosity had never earned her anything before. Her inner voice pushed through her. It seemed to believe that it was granting her some vast and terrible insight. It most wanted to impress upon her the scope and incomprehensibility of infinity.
It would show her some huge object, a planet, a sun, let her wrap her imaginary hands around it. It would make her feel every inch, every drop of water or lick of fire. And then it would pull back. It would show her something larger still. A cloud of dust. A nebula. Farther still. A galaxy. A chain of galaxies. More and more words that she’d never heard outside of these dreams.
The universe was larger than the distance light could travel in all the eons of creation. It was infinite. There were more universes unevenly folded over hers, like rings and whorls in lumber. Those universes were infinite, too. It spiraled beyond her comprehension.
The human imagination is not made to accommodate these things.
It seemed to think that this would change her. Maybe it did. A little. She had bigger problems on her mind.
It got around to those.
There are invaders, it said. The distances between universes were perhaps not as vast as they should have been. Some monsters could jump the gaps. Her world had been visited many times before. The one that had come now was different.
It let her feel it again. A silhouette, occluding the stars. A sharp, razor-spined surface. Cold ran through her whenever her senses brushed it.
It had seeded spies throughout her world. It had pitted its people against each other. Its alienness was a spike under her scalp, behind her eye. It hurt to think about.
“I still don’t care,” she told it, but she could not help but be shaken.
Her inner voice knew how she felt, and did not believe her.
The next day, the pain came from more than dust biting her face. She did not realize how cold she was until she lost feeling in her fingertips. Winter was settling on them.
She rode forward ahead to Antonov. As always, Caterina stuck close.
“The campaigning season is gone,” she said. Even had she stayed in Italy, they would no longer be fighting. “We’ll need to take winter quarters soon.” There would be no luxury this time, no idyllic rural estate. No banquets. But they still needed shelter.
Antonov no longer trimmed his beard, and its raggedness made him look even more tired. “We can’t afford to strain our provisions. And you don’t want to winter here. There’s nothing to eat but boiled grass.”
“You think I’ll be any happier at your home?”
“No,” he said. “But I will be.”
“You don’t know what you’ll find.”
He claimed he knew where he was going. The next time she had a chance to catch him in their pavilion, she had him sketch a map of what he remembered of the towns and roads ahead. She had trusted too much of this trip to him. She scoured it by candlelight, with an ache of exhaustion set deep in her bones. She searched for opportunities she might have missed, traps that they could avoid. Excuses to stop, to turn around.
You can still help.
She did not want to listen to her inner voice, not after what it had nearly done to her.
She had fallen into this kind of depressive rut before. Her inner voice, ironically, had pulled her out of it. It had tugged her onto the long path to the person she had become. A soldier. A warrior. A person who mattered.
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