Terminus

by Tristan Palmgren

  She released him. He did fall silent as he ran, but he did not look back, either. The others joined him. Their infrared blurs were impossible to pin down, but they were receding. The fire in their head and down their muscles, the screaming, their man’s terror, and their horses’ flight had finally been too much for them.

  Meloku’s throat burned. She crouched, breathing hard, and spat. She was too exhausted to spit straight, had to wipe half of it off her lip.

  They would not be gone forever. She staggered to the body half-buried under the snow. The infrared shadow, even in flashes, was near enough to be familiar.

  “Should’ve fucking figured it would be you,” Meloku said, brushing snow off its face. She hitched its arm under her shoulder. “Come on. Help me out if you can.”

  Osia was cumbersome, but she weighed less than a human. Her demiorganic body was not small, but the materials were lighter. Osia sagged, feet drooping. Her skin was cold and slippery. Her mottled brown eyes, the only human thing about her, did not regard Meloku kindly.

  Meloku headed away from the Company of the Star. After a dozen steps, she stopped.

  She turned, followed her footsteps. Without her internal compass, it was the only way she could tell where she was going.

  When she’d hauled Osia up, she’d thought Osia couldn’t speak. But Osia spoke now. Her words were clipped, truncated. “The fuck?” The jamming field was affecting her even worse than Meloku.

  Meloku said, “This jamming field, this bomb, whatever’s doing this, is blanketing the area. If we run, whatever’s made it will just follow us. They’ll do it again.”

  “They’ll have us,” Osia said. “Surrounded.”

  Meloku shook her head, “I bet there are still all kinds of electronics in Fiametta of Treviso’s camp. Some either survived my EMP, or Ways and Means planted new ones. That’s how Ways and Means is controlling those men. That makes the camp our best way out. We go in there, they’ll be disrupted too.”

  She and Osia would be in a better position. Not much, but battles were fought in increments. They cleared the trees. Meloku stagger-stepped, trying not to think about Osia’s weight, the ninety soldiers waiting ahead.

  Osia still did not answer. Maybe the plan was a terrible one. Osia didn’t seem to have the energy left to say.

  The condottieri camp’s fires made a pillar of light in the falling snow. Meloku pressed on, slippery step after slippery step. No horses or soldiers darted out at them. No crossbow bolts fell. Osia’s silence wore on her nerves.

  A ribbon of fire ripped down Meloku’s spine.

  Meloku would have bet anything she’d had left that Ways and Means would choose to keep its disrupting field in place. Even had it lost control over of its soldiers, there were still ninety of them. Meloku and Osia would have been stuck there, hardly able to fight, unable to leave. The outcome would have been elementary.

  A tide of information poured into the back of her head. Her vision briefly vanished under a multispectrum haze, her demiorganics running through startup checks. She stumbled. The pain had hardly begun before nerve blocks kicked in, dampened the worst of it. Her control still faltered. She rolled sideways into the snow.

  Osia jolted, jerked. She fell off Meloku’s back.

  A headache burned between Meloku’s temples. Her nervous system could only take so many shocks in one day. But this one hadn’t been fatal.

  Osia stood. She brushed the snow off her arms. It sloughed off her without leaving so much as a dusting. If she was in pain, she did not evince it. Meloku remained shaky, but she stood too.

  The jamming had ended, all at once. Ways and Means had chosen to give her and Osia control of themselves rather than lose its influence over the Company of the Star. Another hint of something going on here that Meloku did not yet understand.

  Her wrist launchers sped through rapid diagnostics. The outage had inflicted no lasting damage. All her darts and tranquilizers were loaded, ready.

  Osia still did not speak. She could have, but must have felt she didn’t need to.

  She tilted her head at the war camp.

  Meloku nodded.

  24

  Fia’s inner voice stopped speaking.

  She set her mutton leg down on the raw wood of the table. The voice had been carrying on one-sided conversations while she tried to focus on dinner. One of those conversations petered out in the middle of a thought.

  She, Antonov, and Constantin Laskaris were alone at the table. That had become their habit. There were no dinner readings from Livy these days, no scribes or accountants or officers. They stewed in their mutual silences. Caterina hunched by the tent wall, cleaning one of Fia’s boots.

  Her inner voice was still there, somewhere. This wasn’t like the battle with Hawkwood. She could feel its weight, round and warm, in the center of her mind. It had just stopped speaking to her.

  A shout of alarm broke the night. Though the pavilion walls muffled the cry, it sounded like it had come from the edge of their camp. A moment later, two more cries joined it.

  They were dressed for dinner rather than war, but none of them were ever unarmed. At once, Laskaris had his dagger in hand. Antonov grabbed his weapon, but stayed back. Laskaris had only just reached the flap when someone pulled it back for him.

  The creature outside came from the stories of robbers and murderers the girls of Saint Augusta told each other at night. It was solid black, a shadow – a blur of nightmare. It shoved Laskaris before Laskaris could step back.

  The shadow was strong as a bull. Laskaris wheeled into the dinner table.

  Fia grabbed her own dagger. Antonov was ahead of her. He roared and rushed the shadow. He moved faster than Fia had seen in years.

  Someone stepped through behind the shadow, a woman. Fia gaped. It was one of the laundresses, a new woman among their camp followers. Fia had seen her but never spoken to her. She must have been a spy.

  She held an arm out, fingers splayed down, like she was showing off rings. Her knuckles were bloodied. The skin of her wrist had split, gaping wide and dark.

  A whistle like a crossbow bolt sliced the air, ended in a thunk, a gasp.

  Antonov jerked. His momentum took him forward another pace. He reeled. Like a weaving drunk, he took an unsteady step back, grappled for the table. He didn’t find it. He fell hard on his side.

  The laundress turned her arm to Fia. Fia stared into the shadow of her open flesh. Her sense of time slowed, and stilled.

  With a shriek like Fia had never heard, Caterina bowled into the laundress. Caterina latched onto her arm. She and Caterina staggered toward the pavilion wall.

  As Laskaris drew to his feet, the shadow brought its fist crashing into his forehead. Fia’s blood was rushing in her ears, but she would have sworn she heard a crack. Laskaris fell, instantly limp.

  Then the shadow turned to Caterina. It grabbed Caterina’s arm – and in one swift, brutal motion, wrenched her backward, dislocating her shoulder from its socket.

  “No!” Fia cried – together, she was surprised to hear, with the laundress.

  Caterina let go. The pain had not yet time to register, but her mouth was wide in shock. The laundress stepped as if to intercede between Caterina and the shadow.

  Fia did not leave time for anything worse to happen. Fury seized her. Before she realized she had moved, she had launched herself. She dove at the shadow, leading with the tip of her dagger.

  She did not see the shadow move.

  In an instant, a crushing pain enveloped her hand. She could not breathe. Icicle-smooth fingers wrapped about her throat. She couldn’t remember dropping the dagger, but felt the hilt bouncing off her boot.

  Fia’s rage had not been arrested with her momentum. She pried at the fingers pressing her airway. She drew her other hand back, and punched the shadow with more strength than she figured she should have had left.

  The shadow’s head gave way, but only like a branch to wind.

  The shadow turned back to her. For t
he first time, Fia saw its eyes. They were human. Brown. Its grip tightened. Pain mounted on pain.

  The laundress set her hand on the shadow’s arm. She was trying to restrain it, Fia realized. To pull it back. The shadow must have felt her, but it was pretending it hadn’t.

  With a sigh, the laundress gave up. She set her hand on Fia’s shoulder.

  A jolt jammed through Fia’s body, an involuntary spasm, followed by a rapidly spreading numbness.

  The shadow’s gaze held Fia’s eyes rigid. Fia could not look away. She did not see the darkness gathering around her until she plunged into it.

  Part Three

  The Company of the Colossus

  25

  Fia did not know why, or how, she had come back to Saint Augusta’s.

  She had not thought of the convent much, at least not with the intent to do so. Now here she was again, walking through the wheat, trailing her fingers through the stalks.

  It was not real. The last she remembered, she had been far away from here, her camp under attack. She was not oblivious enough to think of this as anything but a passing fancy, a hallucination – perhaps of a dying woman.

  The thought did not scare her.

  It was daytime, maybe. In most places anyway. The sun was overhead and her shadow underfoot, but the ridge upon which Saint Niccoluccio’s monastery rested was as darkened as it would have been at sunset. It was a warm season, before second harvest, but she was cold. Painfully cold. She felt snow under her riding boots, but when she looked, found only dirt and wheat. Nor did she have boots. She was barefoot.

  Her legs ached from long days of riding, though she could not remember them, and there was no horse in sight. The nuns had owned only oxen, no horses.

  This had to be a dream. The problems with it were manifold.

  For one, she was an adult. On those few times when, of her own volition, she thought back to Saint Augusta’s, she never imagined herself this old. The wheat only reached her knees. Her knees and back ached as they never had when she was young.

  She rubbed her knuckles for warmth. What warmed her hands was not friction, but fire. She could not see it, but it was there. She held her palm open to it.

  She was tired. She thought of entering the convent, finding the abbess’s quarters and taking them for herself. Maybe from there things would start to make sense.

  The convent never got any closer. But neither did it move to the side. She tried to change course but Saint Augusta’s did not fall away.

  She was being held in space, held in time, even as she pushed ahead.

  It was deeply frustrating, but even her frustration came muted. It was an echo from the bottom of a well.

  Somewhere else, she sat heavily on a hard wood surface.

  Fire warmed her face, her cheeks, though Saint Augusta’s was not burning.

  She craned her neck, warming her face in the sunlight. The sunlight, though, could not have provided the crackle of wood sparks, the whipping smoke.

  She did not understand why she was here. She had left Saint Augusta’s long ago. She had thought of it from time to time, but never for long. Her nostalgia had died many, many times, and many, many years ago.

  She was being asked questions about this place. Someone was trying to find answers. They would not find anything. This place meant nothing to her. However important it had been once, it was nothing now.

  She tried to say this, but her tongue was numb. The words were trapped. She could not say anything without first being asked.

  She could not say what her questioner did not want to hear.

  Questions, questions, questions.

  She pushed them to the back of her mind, where the answers were. If she was going to be asked about such unimportant things, then unimportant things were all she was going to give in return. She answered without thinking.

  This time, she was no longer in the fields. She walked up and down Saint Augusta’s empty dormitory, running her hand along the walls, feeling the knots of the wood.

  She was being told to touch and smell everything. As if that would jog her memory, or make her say something untrue. She bent and smelled the ashes of the firepit in the kitchen. Then the pile of soiled sheets outside the dormitory. The cold air streaming through the dormitory’s broken window.

  The floorboards, in those places where there were floorboards, did not carry her weight well. They popped like the abbess’s knees.

  Without meaning to, she sized up the place for value. There was old furniture. Plentiful iron tools. Some bread, vegetables, wheat. Likely still the oxen. No valuable hostages. The inhabitants were clearly all gone. The returns on capturing them would not have been worth the effort, as Antonov’s Company had discovered.

  Antonov had made a mistake in coming here. This place was out in the middle of nowhere. There was no fortune to be made here, and that was all.

  She answered as much.

  For a while afterward, there were no questions.

  She paced the convent’s narrow hall. From the dormitory, past the kitchen and buttery and pantry, to the cells where the nuns lived and worked. And then back again. She stopped again by the dormitory’s firepit. There was no wood beside it. This was not the season for fires.

  All she needed was the flint firestriker for what she planned. But it wasn’t there. She stalked to the kitchen. There was nothing there either. Sooner or later she’d find something. She didn’t need a wood pile to start a fire.

  She would burn this place down herself, if she had to.

  Her inner voice had been taken from her. She did not know how she knew this, but she felt it as sure as she would have any other wound. There was a cold spot inside her head, a vacuum.

  It would have taken surgery to remove. A skull chisel, a surgeon’s scalpel. The blade must have bisected some deep and vital artery, but blood would not rush to fill the cold.

  That should have killed her. But here she was.

  She knew this had become an actual dream, her own, when the torch appeared in her hand. The flame had burned down so far that it singed her fingers, but she held on, white-knuckled.

  There was nothing to see. She whirled around. The universe was a tangle of darkness. She still did not drop her torch.

  Without it, she would have been blind.

  It didn’t matter that there was nothing to see. Without her torch, she would have imagined shapes in the dark, creatures about to attack. Substance that didn’t exist. Purpose where there was none.

  If she could hold on to the torch long enough to bring it back to Saint Augusta’s, she could burn the whole place down.

  Memory returned to her, bits at a time. After the ambush in her pavilion, she had walked out under her own power. She remembered this only distantly.

  Her captors had taken only her. Antonov and Laskaris would have both been valuable hostages too, but they’d left them. She had no idea what had happened to Caterina, but neither of the intruders had gone back to check on her. They didn’t care at all.

  The camp should have fought their egress at every moment, but Fia remembered no opposition. The next thing she knew, she was hitching herself up and onto her riding palfrey. The shadow climbed up behind her, holding her. The laundress stole another good riding horse.

  Fia did not remember leaving.

  Every night of traveling, they built a fire. Fia sat numbly in front of it, staring.

  She was also at Saint Augusta’s. The shadow-woman kept taking her back there. Her words were puissant, magical. When the shadow told Fia that she was at Saint Augusta’s, she was there. She saw it, felt it.

  The shadow had her describe what she felt. Fia gathered that was to make it seem more real. To jog her memory. The shadow kept delving through Fia’s childhood, trying to find something that wasn’t there. The other woman, the laundress, kept Fia drugged.

  Fia would kill them.

  The shadow asked her what she intended to do with her future. It was too open-ended a question. It had unfroze
n her tongue, given her the opening to answer. She told them they were both dead, their time marked, their clocks ticking. She would find a way to murder them.

  The shadow had stared at her. It was impossible for Fia to read any expression in its face, but she already knew how the shadow felt about her.

  The next time she went back Saint Augusta’s, she still found no firestrikers in the kitchen. Someone had taken them. Everything else was in place as if people had lived here just that morning. Cups out and unwashed. The milk ready, covered in thick skin. Fresh rushes on the floor, scattered as if by footsteps.

  Someone had taken the firestrikers deliberately, to spite her.

  The campfire seared her eyes. She could not blink the heat away. The shadow had robbed her of even that much control.

  She didn’t have her sword. Not even the dagger she’d worn to dinner. She did not know if the shadow would be hurt by those things. It didn’t matter. She was going try anyway.

  The kitchen’s rushes would be fuel enough for a fire. She just needed to light them. She’d do it even if she had to use twigs and her bare hands.

  She would burn down Saint Augusta’s.

  She would kill them.

  26

  Osia seemed to know where she was going. Meloku did not trust her choice of destination.

  The other woman had only said that she had a friend among Ways and Means’ surface agents. A communications post operator, Xati. E would be able to spread word about what was happening. Meloku was surprised to hear that Osia still had friends among the crew. When she pressed, though, Osia admitted that she had not spoken to this friend since she had left Ways and Means.

  Had Meloku been walking, she would have stopped. Only the fact that her horse wanted to keep going carried her forward.

  “This is a fucking terrible plan,” Meloku told her.

  Osia kept riding. That was mostly how she answered Meloku – with silence. No doubt she did not feel she had to explain herself. Osia had never been dismissed from Ways and Means’ service, only gone on voluntary leave. Technically, Osia outranked Meloku.