The heat of the sun became the heat of the fire. The trail along the fields that led to Bandino’s shed turned to mud and soft snow and brown grass.
The shadow-woman lived in the abbess’s cell. From the pulpit of the convent’s too-tiny church, she delivered her sermons. Hellfire glimmered in her eyes. She threatened to throw Fia into the forest.
When Fia wasn’t sure what she saw was real or not, she had only her memory as an aid. But memory was unreliable. It told her things that couldn’t be true.
Memory insisted that two women, or a woman and a monster, had assaulted her camp, abducted her, and stole two palfreys – all without any of her soldiers posing more of a challenge than an insistent breeze. Memory saw Laskaris fold over, broken. Antonov crumpled to a crossbow bolt that wasn’t there and could not have been fired.
Memory said that she had gone along with her captors, riding unresisting for days. The shadow-woman, Osia, held her arm around her.
She had been captured. Abducted – again. The hostages’ coffle had become the march to this wasteland of snow and awful cold, where her nostrils froze every time she breathed in.
In the end, it had not been her who had set fire to Saint Augusta’s. It was the mercenaries once again. Saint Augusta’s burned. She stared at it unblinking, as she did the campfire. The shadow-woman Osia had been there, watching the convent burn.
Osia sat by the campfire, watching her now with those same copper-sheen eyes.
She could not make sense of this silence. The mechanical clocks in the back of her head were silent. It was stifling. A kind of madness.
Fia looked at her half-frozen hands. She flexed them against the fire. It took her a long while to figure out that she was moving them on her own. It was not just something that was happening to her.
This was new. She considered the implications.
She kicked her log seat away, lunged at Osia.
Darkness followed. Minutes passed, probably.
Fia sat in front of their fire, holding her hands up for warmth. Osia stared at her. The firelight turned her eyes every color between burnished copper and gold.
Fia remembered knocking her seat into the snow and the mud. But memory was unreliable. Her seat was dry. It was just cold. Damned cold. Cold as everything else.
She could not explain why her wrists hurt. Both of them, in exactly the same way, whenever she rotated them. They were not marked or bruised.
Casually, she reached for her dagger. Or where her dagger had been, days ago.
Osia watched her move. Fia bunched her fingers, charting her recourses to violence. There were no means of attack that she could see. All she had was a water pouch. Her lips were so dry it hurt to set its lips to hers.
She asked, “Did you hear what you wanted to get from me?”
“No,” Osia said.
This fire, the campfire, was real. The fire eating Saint Augusta’s was not. But she could touch Saint Augusta’s fire. Burn herself, if she wanted.
The other woman, the human, Meloku, said, “We’re done with our questions. That doesn’t mean you can’t tell us more.”
Fia laughed. If she could have, she would have stood, walked away, but her head swam in other worlds. She would have lost her balance in this one.
She could not look away from the fire. Something about the heat on her eyes had become comforting. Saint Augusta’s was still burning.
The years between now and then had been bridged. She saw the fire through a hot blur. She’d spent so long at Saint Augusta’s now that the years afterward had become fractured. She clamped down on that thought, hard as she could.
No. She was not that girl. Her shoulders ached from strain and from age. Her skin was latticed with scars, dry and cracked as the leather of her saddle. There was no girl left in her. In bringing her back to that nightmare, the shadow-woman had robbed her of her rebirths.
“Did you kill my inner voice?” she asked.
Osia did not answer. She kept her silence about too many things. In this case, it seemed as good as an admission that she had killed it.
Osia seemed to want to leave it at that, but Meloku said, “Interesting that it let us do that. Whoever attacked Osia and me let us stay on our feet rather than risk you losing it.”
Fia had managed some eavesdropping during her long spell. Their words were labyrinthine, but she did not get lost easily. She gathered the shadow-woman had been the quarry her inner voice had sent her after. Osia and Meloku had both been struck down by some hammer of God. They seemed to think that, by being near her, they had saved themselves. That hammer could have struck them again, but not without hitting Fia and her inner voice too.
Fia’s inner voice had been silent, dead and gone, since they’d come for her. Since that very hour. It had gone silent, suddenly, in the middle of one of its now-customary monologues. It had been right before these two came to steal her.
That timing didn’t match. Something was off. However much more these two might know than her, their thinking was muddled. It was plain that they were trying to match wits against something greater than them, and they weren’t up for it.
Fia pushed that to the back of her mind. That would be a die to roll later. “If you had killed it, I was going to thank you,” she said, after a sip from her water pouch.
Meloku tilted her head, plainly surprised. “It helped you get where you were.”
Fia said, “It tried to kill me. Or get me killed. Whatever difference that makes.”
From what Meloku had said, John Hawkwood, too, had been under the control of whoever had made her inner voice. It didn’t take a stretch of imagination to figure out, then, what her inner voice had once planned. After it had killed her, Hawkwood would have been there to replace her. The remnants of her allies would have joined him.
Meloku said, “You don’t need to talk. We’re not making you.”
It would have been easy to stand, to walk over and throttle the life out of her.
Those thoughts came to her unbidden. They were difficult to control. As difficult as it was to convince herself she was here and not at Saint Augusta’s.
“Horseshit,” Fia said. “It still feels like you’re drawing the words out of me.” Whatever poison they’d given her still coursed through her blood.
Meloku said, “That will go away,” though she sounded less than certain.
“Does it bother you that it’s not?” Fia asked. She had eavesdropped even when she had not consciously tried to. She knew just how to play them, and where to jab. Fia blinked at Meloku, affecting innocence.
“No,” Meloku said.
Fia’s career had brought her into contact with all kinds of confidence artists and flatterers. This woman sounded like a practiced liar. But she had flubbed that one.
Osia said, “You ought to be terrified of us.”
Fia snapped, “I’m not afraid of idiots.”
Osia’s voice took on an edge it had been missing. “You can’t imagine who we are.”
Fia said, “You’re from another plane of creation.”
Fia enjoyed the silence that followed. A brief but telling moment of power. Fia said, “My inner voice told me as much.”
“Now?” Meloku asked. She looked to Osia.
“No. It’s gone.” She felt its absence in her head as keenly as if it had been physically removed. All that was left was a hole. “It went days ago. Right before you took me. It must have known that you were about to abduct me.”
If she enjoyed anything about this, it was these silences. She had caught them off guard. They were not so much more powerful than her as they had imagined.
It was a feeling they all shared.
Perhaps if the shadow woman had bothered to ask about this, rather than endlessly revisit Saint Augusta’s, she might have learned.
A sharp rock lay near the firepit. It was sized well enough for her palm. It would have been satisfying to crack that over one of their heads. But only satisfying, nothing more.
&
nbsp; She was after bigger game than satisfying.
Fia said, “So tell me what you think you’re going to do.”
It took time to coax a glimmer of truth out of them. They kept talking above her, like she was a child. The fire had burned through most of its fuel before she pieced together an impression of their plan.
These two were fugitives, but they were not alone. They had help, or at least imagined they did. A friend, somewhere ahead. A friend who could get them in touch with other friends.
It was a thin plan. A desperate one. Fia decided they were right to try it, though. It was the only place they could start. They couldn’t do anything without friends. That was the first lesson Fia had learned when she joined the company. She was great, she was mighty, yes. But without Antonov, the company’s corporals, and her network of condottieri throughout Italy, she could not have built that into anything useful.
This was the best they could do.
Fia slept under the thin shelter of a canvas tent that, to her intense displeasure, she shared with Meloku. The tent, she was sure, had not been packed in her palfreys’ saddlebags. Osia and Meloku must have taken their leisurely time stealing it, too. Another indictment of the company’s lax readiness. Or a measure of these women’s power.
In the morning, the tent was empty. When Fia emerged, Osia sat where she’d left her. Meloku was chewing desultorily on her salt pork. She stopped when she saw Fia.
Fia took down her tent quickly, efficiently, and bundled it to her horse’s side. Someone had hobbled her palfrey. Unnecessary. Idiocy. If these two had any experience with horses, they would have known that the horses wouldn’t stray. They preferred to stick together. This wasteland left them no other temptations.
She told Osia, “This is my horse. You’re going to have to walk now.”
Osia looked to her. As usual, she said nothing.
Fia asked Meloku, “How much farther do we have to go?”
Meloku blinked. “You don’t want to go back to your company?”
“How far have we traveled?” Fia asked. She hadn’t been lucid during most of the trip, but she had a vague recollection of vast tracts of snow and brown grass.
“No farther than you could travel on your own if you had a mind to do it.”
Fia did want to see Caterina, make sure she was healing. And Antonov. Laskaris, too, if he lived – she had traveled too long with him to be able to leave him without feeling. But they were it. The rest she could leave. They didn’t mean as much now that she knew what she did.
The Company of the Star wasn’t hers any more. It hadn’t been since the battle with Hawkwood. Even if she could wrestle it back, replenish its ranks, sign new contracts, bring new condottieri – even if she could do all that, she wouldn’t be able to do with the company what she wanted. She could not seize a city. She could not reshape Italy as she had imagined, with the lords and doges and popes ripped from their thrones.
She could be hired. She could loot and ravage. She could burn, but not build.
Fia said, “I thought you two had decided you needed me, or whatever had knocked you down would do it again.”
Meloku said, “Your company isn’t chasing you. There’s no one around to take advantage of us falling.”
Osia said, “If it needs a way to kill us, it will find one regardless.”
Fia did not ask how they had figured out that her company had given her up. She did not want to know. The knowledge still stuck hard in her stomach, a razor-edged icicle.
Meloku said, “Besides, she and I are done with you. We’ve gotten what we need.”
Her palfrey sniffed at Fia’s shoulder. It nosed into her coat, hunting for food. Fia pushed it away. Her shoulders shot through with pain as she hitched up and onto its saddle. Once she’d settled, her bowed legs felt natural, like she’d been born with them.
She urged her horse closer to the campfire’s embers. Osia never took her eyes off her. Waiting for an attack, Fia realized.
“Go on,” Meloku said. “Go wherever. You’re free.”
Fia asked, “How far do you still have to go?”
The three people Fia wanted to return to could wait. All her life she’d lived with the simple fact of her inner voice. Until recently, she’d heard that voice as akin to divine inspiration. Now she had more questions than, just days ago, she’d known how to ask. Those answers weren’t behind her. They were ahead.
She had been drawn into this, these people, long ago. She was owed an explanation. And an explanation would only be a down payment on her debt.
Her real enemy had never been John Hawkwood, or the Pope, or Siena’s priors. The orchestrators of all this had been hidden, until now, out of sight and beyond the sky.
Meloku said, “It wouldn’t be a good idea for you to follow us.”
Fia said, “I don’t know why this isn’t clear to you yet. I’m not following you. You’re leading me.”
Again, that silence. Osia and Meloku looked to each other. Their silences said more than their words. If they were going to stop her, she knew, it would be now.
The moment passed, and Fia remained upright.
She nodded at Meloku’s breakfast pans, and said, “Get your shit packed. We’re wasting light.” She drew up her reins.
28
Osia’s anger manifested as a feeling of heat in her cheeks. It was psychosomatic, of course. She had no blood vessels there to inflame.
Meloku transmitted, “I could tranquilize her.”
“We couldn’t leave a fire going long enough until she came out of it. She’d freeze to death.” Though Osia was near to convincing herself that shouldn’t be their problem. Fiametta of Treviso had done far worse to people. “Besides, it would be best to keep her until we find a better means of examining what’s in her head.”
“Sure about that?”
The last time they’d taken a native man and examined his head, it had nearly killed them. That monk, Niccoluccio, had been carrying a virus. If Ways and Means had put Fia’s implant there, it could have placed a trap too.
If it had been concerned about anyone discovering its subterfuge, it would have.
But their lives were already in constant jeopardy. Osia said, “It will probably be more productive to keep her with us.”
Once she’d gotten too far away, Fiametta reined in her horse. She looked back, impatient.
Osia said, “But keep the tranquilizer ready.”
Osia did not mind walking. She had only stolen the second palfrey so that she could support Fiametta. Her long, loping stride hardly cracked the surface of the long-frozen snow. What she minded was being given an order.
Meloku rode behind Fiametta, her face a somber mask. She did not bother to hide it. Her guilt was plain to see. She had been among these people for too long.
Fiametta traveled well past dusk, hopping off her palfrey to lead it. She kept her distance from Meloku and Osia. At night, they set up camp without speaking to each other about anything other than necessities.
Osia and Meloku could have carried on without her. Osia did not need to sleep. Meloku’s demiorganics managed her brain chemistry so efficiently that she could manage with two hours a night.
Meloku spent her long hours awake warming herself by the fire. Quiet. Osia stayed still, legs folded, eyes open. She did not like many of the things she had to think about.
Meloku had thought her a fool for focusing so much on trying to find the person who had given Fiametta’s “inner voice” to her. She had stopped listening. She hadn’t thought hard enough about what Osia had found.
Pandolfo, the traveling Venetian merchant Fiametta had mentioned, was their only real suspect. His work, maybe his cover story, had given him an excuse to range across a wide area. He had demonstrated an interest in Fiametta. He had spoken to her, extensively, about his history as a soldier. The first time Fiametta reported hearing that voice, she had confused it for his. He could have slipped her the seed of her implant with a touch to
her shoulder, her arm.
Pandolfo was no agent that Osia recognized. His body type didn’t match. She had a catalog of all of the shapes and sizes of the crew’s demiorganic bodies, from the many-legged spiders to her own bipedal body. Cut off from the Unity, Ways and Means did not have the facilities to manufacture new bodies.
Meloku thought Osia was trying to exonerate Ways and Means. Maybe she had been. Whatever the truth of that, Osia had been convinced that Ways and Means was responsible for this. Until then.
Fiametta’s memories of Pandolfo were thin evidence, she knew. The real culprit could have passed Fiametta entirely unnoticed. They could have, with the aid of that implant, wiped or altered Fiametta’s memories. Or Ways and Means could have gotten control of Pandolfo in the same way that she and Meloku had controlled Fiametta.
She would not change Meloku’s mind. She had not even changed her own – not really. What Meloku thought did not bother her. This plane was full of fools, and Osia and Meloku were only slightly wiser. They were all being played some way or another.
All of her stakes were on the table. She only had a few bets left to place. She was close to making her last wager.
For days, there had been no trees on the horizon. Osia had thought the land could not get any more blighted. Now the last of the grass was dead, even where it wasn’t covered by ice or snow. The mud was gone, replaced by rock-hard dirt. The horses found poor footing. The few creeks were frozen and easy enough to cross, but that made it much harder to water the horses.
Osia could have reached the station weeks ago. She had survived thirty years alone with her constructs. This month of traveling was more alienating by far. After what had happened in that forest, and what had probably happened to Meloku’s partner Dahn, it wasn’t safe to travel alone, but that did little to stifle her aggravation.
At last, though, the horizon dimpled and rose. A sign they were getting close. Xati’s station was at relatively high altitude, as far away from civilization as it could reasonably be placed. By day’s end, the horizon had grown teeth.
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