But neither of them served Ways and Means any more. Meloku refused to let this go. “There has to be somewhere else to go.”
Osia still did not answer.
Meloku pulled her stolen palfrey’s reins, halted. Osia did not look back, but she could not have failed to notice. She held Fiametta of Treviso tightly in front of her. Fiametta’s head drooped under Osia’s chin.
With Fiametta, Meloku supposed, Osia must have figured that she did not need Meloku. Ways and Means had some stake in this woman. Ways and Means had cut off its jamming field, after all, rather than move it over Fiametta.
Meloku waited as long as she dared, well after Osia had gone out of sight. She hastened to catch up. No matter what she had to put up with, she was not going to go on alone.
She was not sure what Osia would have done if she had gone. Osia needed her to keep their prisoner under control. Meloku controlled their tranquilizers and suggestives. Every night when they stopped to build their campfire and shelter, Meloku introduced more into Fiametta’s bloodstream.
While Osia questioned Fiametta, Meloku ran her wrist launchers through their diagnostic cycles, over and over. Bracing for trouble. Of course, when trouble found them, it would be more than a handful of darts could fend off.
Maybe.
One of the many things she didn’t understand was why Ways and Means was holding back. It had no shortage of weapons. If it wanted them dead – and it was clear now that it did – it could have done so through many means. Yet it had persistently, relentlessly even, used Osia’s constructs or this plane’s natives. The disruption field had been the highest-tech attack so far, and even that had just been a means to allow the natives the kill.
Still no sign of Dahn. Meloku wanted to believe that he was still chasing his own contacts, but he should have reached them long ago. If Ways and Means could deploy that jamming field anywhere, then it could have taken out Dahn without her ever noticing.
Osia did not need to stay warm, but Meloku and Fiametta did. The horses, too. They built a fire. Osia snapped off branches and broke them into manageable chunks, turned logs into seats. Then the interrogation. Osia asked the questions. Meloku just watched.
Every night, after they sat Fiametta in front of the fire, Osia complained, “You need to be using more drugs. She has too much control left. She’s fighting.”
“I’ve done that before,” Meloku said. “It doesn’t accomplish anything. It’s not worth it.” So far, she had only used enough of her drugs to keep Fiametta under control, and then just barely. A few more days of exposure like this, though, and her mind would start to warp itself around the drug – just as Joanna’s had. Meloku did not intend to let that happen again, no matter what Osia told her.
Osia said, “She’s not telling us anything useful.”
“Perhaps she doesn’t know anything useful.”
Osia had not wanted to take more than one prisoner. They had taken Fiametta because she’d seemed most likely to be at the heart of the attempt to kill them. Pulse scans showed listening devices all around, but only one person, Fiametta, with an implant. The company commander and his officers had been commonplace. There was more than one condottieri captain in Italy. Fiametta of Treviso was unique. A woman general, a cult founder. A prophetess. Her influence extended well beyond the company.
Osia asked Fiametta about her background, her history. The orphanage she came from. The pestilence that had taken her family. Meloku remembered that plague well enough. She had spent most of the duration in Avignon, among its communal pit graves, boarded houses, and street corner bonfires.
At the time, she’d had bigger concerns. She’d been cold. The AI she’d once had in her head, who’d been with her for years, had described her as unempathetic, borderline sociopathic. That hadn’t been a criticism.
Most of the time, she’d been able to accept that part of herself. Not always. Not after thirty years of living on this plane, seeing everything that had happened because of what Ways and Means had done, or not done.
Ways and Means had eventually relented, and stopped that plague, but it had been too late. It had not acted until the pest had already killed millions. It had sat at a distance and watched. It had not yet been persuaded. Fiametta’s truncated childhood was one of those consequences.
Meloku had not been in favor of Ways and Means’ intervention. She and the Unity had had too much else to worry about. So did Ways and Means, for that matter.
Fiametta stared into the fire. She spent most of her days on horseback asleep, in a tranquilized doze. Her nights were always at the fire. She would not move without a direct order to do so.
Osia asked Fiametta, “When did you start hearing this ‘inner voice’?”
“I don’t remember. I could have been hearing it for a long time.”
Fiametta fought them. She took any ambiguity in the question as an excuse to not answer. “What is the earliest you do remember?”
“Saint Augusta’s. The day we were taken away.”
Again, Osia asked her about Saint Augusta’s. About the place, the people, her life. Osia was relentless. Every time Fiametta answered, Osia asked again, more insistently. Fiametta shifted, visibly straining. Meloku’s drugs meant Osia’s questions had a physical effect on her. Every time Osia pushed, Fiametta would feel it squeezing her heart. She could not refuse to answer, could not lie. Her voice strained, broke.
Meloku said, “She’s telling you everything you’re asking. You’re pushing too hard.”
“There’s more here. I have to find it.”
“You’re not finding anything. You’re just being cruel.”
Osia said, “We could stand to be crueler. She’s a warlord. Have you listened to her stories? Studied her background?”
“If she’s involved in Ways and Means’ plans, I doubt she’s chosen much.”
Osia did not disagree, but said, “She’s no innocent.”
Meloku did not know why she was defending Fiametta of Treviso. She understood Osia’s contempt. She felt it. Fiametta of Treviso was probably among the worst, the lowest, this world had to offer. Just like Hawkwood and Cardinal Robert.
But they were the pawns, not the players.
Fiametta’s was the kind of misery that invited her to visit it upon other people. She was not being cruel; she was being realistic. She was not ravaging homes or destroying lives. She was conducting business – as business had been conducted unto her. She was the kind of monster this world’s polities were built upon.
Meloku could not stop thinking about Queen Joanna. Whether she had killed her husband or not, she was a sovereign among nations built on toil, murder, slavery, and injustice. She could not have helped but to make choices that, in Osia’s eyes, would have justified any punishment. Osia would not have hesitated to destroy her mind either.
Meloku had not kept count of how many people she had killed, or caused to be killed, across the planes. She was only in her fifties. Osia had centuries on her. She had spent the bulk of that in the amalgamates’ service. She would have killed even more.
Meloku would have hoped that these thirty years would have changed Osia as much as it had her. She had not known Osia well but remembered Osia had sounded like she would expect any of Ways and Means’ crew to sound: hard, cold, aloof. Thirty years ago, Osia’s request that Ways and Means not tamper with this world had shocked Meloku almost as much as Ways and Means agreeing to do so. If anything in Osia had continued to shift during those years, though, she kept it well hidden. Decades of exile must not have meant as much to people in demiorganic bodies.
From the moment the jamming field had released them, Osia had not stopped to ask Meloku her opinion. Had not even thanked her for the rescue.
When she questioned Fiametta, Osia sat so near the flames that an ordinary human would have been burned. Her jet skin reflected yellow and red. Meloku sat or stood to the side, in the shadow.
The interrogation was not torture. Not quite. But it was more than Meloku
or Osia would have cared to be subjected to themselves. To Osia’s credit, she had not ordered Meloku to use more damaging drugs. She must have known Meloku would have refused.
Fiametta’s military campaigns did not interest Osia. She did not care about the what or why of Ways and Means’ meddling with this woman, just the how. Meloku pieced together her goals. She was trying to figure out when Fiametta had first gotten the implant inside her, and who might have given it to her, and why.
What Fiametta called her inner voice was obviously that implant. Pulse scans picked up a micrometer-wide sliver of metal. No sign that it was on, though. Osia said she had disabled it. She would not say how. Even for her, she was cagey about that. She probably had some kind of weapon, classified above anyone of Meloku’s rank, that could disable it noninvasively.
Osia may not have had darts and tranquilizers, but her body had capabilities Meloku was not cleared to know about. When Meloku pulse scanned Fiametta, the implant appeared inactive. They would need to get to a medical suite and a more advanced scanner to find out more. The nearest was aboard Ways and Means.
Ways and Means had a vested interest in all this. The first time Meloku had become aware of the Company of the Star, it had been because Ways and Means had altered her data about it. It had edited down the size of Fiametta’s treasure train, made Fiametta’s company look poorer than it really was. No doubt that had not been the first alteration, just the first she’d noticed. Ways and Means had not wanted its agents to notice the company’s size and success. It wanted them looking anywhere else.
The implant had to have come from somewhere. If it hadn’t been surgically implanted, it would have come from a seed like the one Meloku had given to Queen Joanna. Fiametta claimed that the first time she had ever heard her inner voice had been the day she’d been taken hostage by Antonov’s Company. But it must have been there before.
If she had received it, and her fellow orphans had not, someone must have singled her out. Thought her special. No matter how hard Osia pressed, Fiametta couldn’t remember any incidents where anyone had done so.
“No one ever thought that I was special,” she said.
Osia said, “Someone who paid close attention to you.”
“Mother Emilia threatened to throw me into the woods. I was the only girl she threatened to do that to.”
Fiametta seemed to be enjoying stymieing Osia. Every time she did so, the pressure in her chest would have gotten tighter.
Meloku fit a few things together. Fiametta’s inner voice had told her the story of Saint Renatus. She’d figured that was the case, but it was nice to have it confirmed. Her inner voice seemed to have a well of knowledge about this plane, but it lacked creativity. Saint Renatus’s story so closely paralleled that of Mithras, a god popular among Roman army camps a millennium and a half ago.
Fiametta claimed to have not ever heard of Mithras. But her inner voice, or whoever was behind it, clearly had. It had taken elements of a thousand year-old religion and glued them on to folk Christianity. Her inner voice could synthesize elements of this world’s cultures, but it lacked the imagination for wholly new ideas. In that, it reminded Meloku of an AI. Like her old Companion.
Fiametta’s implant was not looking out for her physical wellbeing. She seemed scrawny in the way that every inhabitant of this plane, even the tall ones, seemed to Meloku. She was malnourished, sallow. She had badly healed scars. Her muscles were shaped by wear and stress rather than proper use and exercise. No doubt those medical scans would reveal intestinal parasites. In the poor sanitation of military camps, fecal-borne diseases were a fact of life. Osia’s scans had already confirmed she had only recently recovered from a slipped disc.
One thing was clear enough: Fiametta’s implant did not exert as complete a control over Fiametta as Meloku’s drugs had over Queen Joanna. Whatever else the implant had done to her, Fiametta had been left with a great deal of independence. She controlled herself. The implant hadn’t controlled her. At least, no more so than having an impossible-to-shut-off voice in the back of her mind would otherwise make her.
Which, Meloku thought, thinking back on her decades with her Companion, might still have been quite a lot. Perhaps that was all the control her “inner voice” had ever needed. No point in going through the extra work of rewiring Fiametta’s brain if she could be manipulated to the same result.
When Fia had rewired Joanna, she had used a blunt knife. Her tools were primitive. A more advanced power could afford subtlety.
Fiametta’s mental condition complicated things. Osia’s scans had also revealed a host of issues that, back in the Unity, would have been diagnosed as susceptibility to schizophrenia, depression, anxiety. Impossible to tell from a scan how those conditions might have manifested with the implant. Even more impossible to tell how the implant had influenced them, too.
Osia asked, “Did you ever disobey your inner voice?”
“Not until recently.”
“How recently?”
“After it tried to kill me.”
Osia, for the first time that night, glanced to Meloku. Meloku shrugged.
To Meloku’s endless frustration, Osia did not dwell on that. She returned to Saint Augusta’s. Meloku lodged a deep growl under her throat, tried to keep it there.
The contents of Fiametta’s mind weren’t bound in a knot but a tangle, and Meloku had no idea how to loosen it. Neither did Osia, though that didn’t stop her from trying.
Osia focused her questions on the days and weeks and months before Fiametta had been taken from her nunnery. Before the moment she remembered first hearing from her inner voice. Searching for the start of it. An instigator. A strange visitor. Someone who’d taken an unusual interest in her. A sharp pain, headaches that might have been the implant growing. Seizures or blackouts. But Fiametta remembered nothing of any of those.
“There must have been a person,” Osia pressed, for the sixth night. “A traveler. A newcomer. Someone who saw something in you that they didn’t in the others.”
For the hundredth time, Fiametta started to tell them about Pandolfo, the old soldier. Osia had already painstakingly gone over Fiametta’s memories of him, and dismissed him. Whatever she was looking for wasn’t him. At last, Meloku lost her patience. “What are you trying to accomplish? Do you even know what you’re looking for?”
Osia allowed strain to creep into her voice. “There must have been a person who gave this to her. An agent. Someone who would stand out.”
Again, Osia was only after who. Not why. Meloku asked, “What does it matter?”
“I can find out who did this to her. If I recognize them by description, I’ll know for sure that Ways and Means is responsible for it.”
Shock settled into Meloku’s bones, cold and numbing. She had trouble finding her voice. “You still don’t believe Ways and Means did this.”
She had figured by now that Osia’s thirty-year exile had left her unbalanced. But not by this far. The why hadn’t been enough because only the who could prove Ways and Means hadn’t done this. “You’re still searching for ways to absolve it.”
Osia said, “Until we have absolute proof that it did this, none of my questions have been answered and no possibilities are closed.”
“You said only Ways and Means could have tried to kill you. You said you found fragments of its code in that virus.”
Osia did not disagree. She did not bother to say anything at all. She stared at Fiametta as intently as Fiametta stared at their fire.
Meloku stood. “I followed you because I thought you might have known what you were doing.” She turned to stalk back to her tent, but, after two steps, changed her mind. She turned, pointed to Fiametta. “Get everything you need to get out of her tonight. I’m not drugging her again.”
Osia at last looked to Meloku. The firelight turned her eyes copper. “I’m the ranking officer.”
Meloku spread her arms. “Charge me with insubordination.” Meloku held up her forearm, pointed t
o the scabbed skin under which all her drugs and darts were stored. “Until you do, I have these. You don’t. You can’t force me to use them.”
Osia had sense enough not to press that point. “You heard what she told us. If she’s not under control, she’ll attack us.”
“Let her. In fact, leave her. It would be better for her.”
“I can’t. She’s important to all of this. If we lose control of her and she attacks us, I’ll have to harm her.”
“If you harm her…” Meloku leveled a finger at Osia’s chest. It hung there an awkward moment. Neither of them needed to hear the threat she couldn’t carry out. She said, “If you harm her, and she doesn’t absolutely deserve it, then you’ll have to move on by yourself. The next time they disable you, you’ll have to fight back alone.”
Osia must not have been accustomed to anyone countermanding her so bluntly. Thirty years on a boat with no one but her toys had left her unpracticed. She sat silent, impossible to read. But Meloku figured she could guess Osia’s thoughts. She was contemplating every means she had left to get leverage on Meloku.
Meloku knew all about getting leverage over a person. She hadn’t left Osia with any means to do it. She hoped.
Meloku stalked back to her tent and sealed the flap. After a long time staring at the top of her tent, she heard Osia speak to Fiametta. More questions.
The same questions.
27
The world did not return to Fia all at once. It spun in fragments, falling into place. It was a whirlwind of snow blowing into her eyes.
She had been in two places at once. A dream and the waking world. The two had been shredded, mixed together, sprinkled under her eyes. Trying to reconstruct them was like reading the scraps of two letters that had been torn to pieces and shuffled together. The meanings had jumbled. She could not help but see shadows of one in the other.
Fia unwove the scraps. She went line by line, matching each word against the other. The images she’d found in the interleave did not go away.
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