by Monte Cook
MONTE COOK & SHANNA GERMAIN
The Night Clave
A Numenera Novel
To those who love what they fight for and fight for what they love.
You know you’re on the right side if the people love you.
– Rillent Boure
1. Every Death Starts with a Very Good Plan
Kyre had no guiles about their purpose here. They’d come to kill a man – not just a man, an Aeon Priest, a clave leader – and there was no way that he, not even he, with his ability to push things into ornate words and pretty boxes, could find another container to put that in.
What would it be like to see Rillent after all of this time? Not just see him, but…
“Kill,” Aviend said from where she was crouched beside him. They were taking a breather, halfway up the outside slope of the crater. Every step, rubble trembled and threatened to fall, to give away their position. They’d practiced this a hundred, two hundred times. Still, pebbles shifted. Dust clouds rose beneath their feet and threatened to call attention to their movements. Slow and careful. Slow and careful. “The word you’re thinking about is kill.”
“Reading my mind again?” he asked.
Most of Aviend’s form was wrapped in a brown and grey sleeksuit. Even her usually wild hair was tucked beneath the suit’s hood. Only her face showed as she cast a glance at him. Her eyes were a deeper brown than the fabric, flecked with gold. Aviend’s typical smile was a cautionary thing, only one side of her lips curving, as if her mouth was always trapped between joy and worry. The one there now was a full curve, both sides. Not comfort, but a delight to finally be doing something beyond practicing for this day.
“Nothing else to read around here,” she said.
It was an old joke between them, a leftover from a younger, more innocent time. Despite what she’d tried to convince him of when they were kids, Aviend couldn’t actually read his mind. Or anyone else’s. She just had an uncanny knack for knowing what people were thinking. “It’s in the cheekbones,” she’d said once, but that had made no sense and he hadn’t known whether to believe her. It was disconcerting sometimes, the way she could look at him and know what was going on in his head, but it also meant a lot of words he didn’t have to say. Over the years he’d grown to appreciate that about her. Like so many other things.
“Gloaming,” Aviend said, lifting her chin toward the sky spread out above and before them. “Right on time.”
It was, and it was. Night was falling the way it often did over the Stere: slow, as if this was the only place in the world where the coming of the dark did not matter, where its very presence was made unnecessary by the dark-leaved woods, the neverending umbrage continually caught trunk-to-trunk. He knew without turning that behind them the endless forest had already gone to pitch, shadowbacked by its thickness and depth.
From here, clinging to the side of the rise and looking upward, the view was daunting. Day lingered, trying to keep its hold along the edges of the far-off mountains, as night slowly spread its grey and purple over the sky’s pale skin like a fresh bruise. If all went according to plan, the light would stay long enough to see them to the top of the rise and disappear just when they needed it to.
There was a lot riding on the phrase “if all went according to plan”. But it was a good plan, maybe even close to a perfect plan. It was also their only plan. If it succeeded, a man would be dead and they would be safely away before anyone was the wiser. If it failed…
“It won’t,” Aviend said. She didn’t wink – it wasn’t her style – but she did a thing, maybe without even realizing it, where she shifted her lips sideways and lifted a brow. It was, he thought, the same as a wink. A reminder of the secrets between them, the promise of things to come. An acknowledgment of how hard they’d worked for this very moment.
“Time,” he said to her unasked question.
As one, they moved. Together they crawled up the remainder of the slope, low through the rubble, hands and knees, sometimes elbows and thighs. Staying flat. Staying tight.
They didn’t talk. They didn’t have to. They’d been working on this plan long enough that he couldn’t remember when they hadn’t. For so long, their lives – his, Aviend’s, Delgha’s, Thorme’s – had been filled with devices, maps, time plans, and the shared dream of Rillent Boure’s end. Everything – every piece of equipment, every late night of planning in the base, every risk they’d taken to learn a schedule or a secret – it all led to this moment. For good or for ill.
As Kyre climbed, he did a mental equipment check. He’d done it once before they’d left the base, but there was no such thing as too careful. He touched each object with his mind the way others might touch it with their fingers.
Obedient rope coiled at his hip. It would drop him down the inside of the crater they were climbing and then pull him back up when he was ready. He disliked the rope. Its semi-sentience made him wary, but he was not one to disregard a good tool just because its attributes made him uncomfortable.
Polarizer glasses. Lenses off. All he had to do was say the word and they’d come on. At least that’s what Delgha had promised him.
Long-range launcher, strapped to his back. A gift from one of the many people they’d helped escape from Rillent’s trenches.
Corrosion projectile sealed in an organic sheath, and tucked into his pocket. There was no way to keep the projectile’s coating from eating away at the launcher. So the timing of removing it from the sheath, loading it, and firing it was going to be paramount. He’d done it a thousand times with a regular projectile. But they only had one of these.
The piece of equipment he didn’t want, but he checked off his mental list anyway, because he always had it with him and would have it until the day he finally had to use it: a silver and red nodule on a strip of leather that looped his neck. It snagged and pulled as he moved, as if to remind him of its presence, of its purpose. The nodule was last resort. Or whatever came beyond last resort. Putting that cypher in motion meant everything had gone horribly, irrevocably wrong. He’d only come close to using it once. He hoped he’d never have to.
The small things came last. Two shortblades in the sleevesheaths on his arms, med kit, ceramic detonation cypher (because you never knew when you’d need to blow something up), the stronglass-and-steel ring that he never took off.
By the time he finished the list, they were nearly at the top. The sloped side they were climbing, the broken bits of buildings and statues and walls that shifted and tumbled beneath their feet, had once been their home. Before the kubrics. Before Rillent. Before there was even an inkling in his mind that they would plan to take another man’s life in cold blood. That he would plan to take another man’s life in cold blood. That he would become a killer. A killer, like the man he had to kill.
What luxury they’d known, before the ruin. Worrying over ghosts and small affairs and whether Aviend’s mother would approve of him. It was silly and horrible and he missed it with every fiber of his being. That complex simplicity of less dark times.
Not everyone thought of what had happened as the ruin, of course. For Rillent and his pseudo-clave and his believers, everything that had happened was not the end, but the beginning. Rillent had told Kyre more than once that you knew you were on the right side if the people loved you. Rillent’s people loved him, without question. Every night at the drop of dark – just a few minutes from now – they would chant his name and tell him so. They would show their gratitude for everything he’d given them, for their lives and their loves, their homes and their sustenance. Not knowing there were two people climbing up the outside of the crater who were about to take all that away from them.
As they neared the top of the ridge, Kyre smelled it, that mingling
of scents that rode over each other rudely and cut each other off, like so many sentences in a conversation. Meat, fresh and rotted, sweating too hard and too long in the sun. Intercut with the sweetness of wolflilies, their honeyed rise made all the more piquant by the putrid undercoat. Rillent had the fuchsine flowers planted all over the forest, a failed attempt to disguise the stench of death.
And the scent that Kyre only knew as belonging to the kubrics themselves, one that was more in the back of the mouth than in the pull of the nose. Shuddery, metallic, a bite of metal and stale air. It made him want to cough, or puke, or both, and so he pulled the back of his gloved hand across his mouth. The pressure against the fabric released a soft hiss of less-foul air captured from kinder places than this.
Kyre took a moment to swallow down his reaction and the fresh air that followed, then glanced at Aviend. She’d pulled the neck of her hood up over her mouth and nose, but mostly seemed focused on watching the sky intently. Any minute now.
From inside the dugout crater that was once the town of Ovinale, their childhood home, came the slinging sound of a large device powering up. A bluish light flickered hot then faded, pushing its light into the darkening sky for a blink before it went black again.
That spot of light got them moving. Silent as shadows, on their forearms and forelegs, slithering forward as much as anything, moving themselves their final few feet to the top of the rise without so much as a single shift of stone or statue.
“Steor,” he whispered, and the polarizers warped his vision for a blink before they settled. Once they activated, he could barely tell the difference.
He and Aviend reached the top just as night reached them. Just as the light from below rose, blue and bright, to momentarily obscure everything but a long metal strip that jutted out from the building. Just as Rillent Boure, the man they’d come to kill, stepped out onto the raised walkway into the shine.
Next to him, Aviend’s breath caught and then released in a barely audible curse.
“Don’t let him see you,” Kyre said. An unnecessary caution. Even as he spoke, he could feel her pulling back slightly, lowering her body down to the ground next to him. Becoming shadow inside shadow.
Rillent believed Aviend was dead. They needed to keep it that way.
To Kyre’s eyes, Rillent looked like the same man he’d been when Kyre had still believed in him. Imposing in his stride as he moved toward those gathered below him, Rillent was wrapped in a purple robe, garnished with gold, that covered and nearly concealed his thinness. He carried his long silver weapon with the loose hand of a man who understood that he was strong enough not to need it.
A broad gold wrap crossed his forehead, cleverly concealing the implant embedded at his hairline. Kyre had only seen it once – a quick glimpse of the half-buried black device that Rillent believed was the key to his power – but he knew he’d never forget it. It was that device that he and his launcher needed to focus on. In the shadows it was hard to see Rillent’s features but they weren’t ones that Kyre would easily forget. The broad hooked nose, the thin lips, his oddly purplish eyes.
Just behind him, the nonhuman shape of Rillent’s trusted shield. Faleineir. Kyre swallowed back the acetic swell that rose in his mouth at the portentous movements of the tall, angular varjellen.
He moved his gaze elsewhere. Shadowed figures on the edges of the thin strip matched Rillent’s long, sure strides. Their lights both highlit and masked, focused and diffused. One moment, Rillent’s face was shone upon, visible in its every crevice and scar, its every puncture and piercing. The next, he wore a mask of cerulean shadow and smoke.
Rillent seemed small in that moment, but Kyre knew it was only because of the vastness of the structure upon which he stood. One of the five identical and ancient kubrics that had lain fallow under the forest’s floor for who knew how long. Until Rillent had arrived in the Steremoss and begun to uncover them. Until Kyre had helped him do so.
The kubric rose and rose, twisted in its beauty, all leading the eye in toward the pathway upon which Rillent now strode. The structure was wide as a dozen ravage bears, end to end. As tall as a hundred men stacked head to foot, and that was just the part already dug from the earth. Who knew how far down into the earth it went, to its end? If it had an end. When he’d been inside, he’d begun to think it was endless, puncturing the very planet itself.
Who knew what original purpose these giant devices held? Or what the long-ago creators had in mind when they’d built them? He didn’t. He didn’t think Rillent did either, nor did Rillent care; they were merely a means to an end. A power source for his plans.
The blue light behind Rillent flickered, then streamed upward, lifting the sky from marengo to a blue shine that took away Kyre’s breath. It made his nose tingle at the edge and his eyes water. He’d forgotten, even as he thought he remembered, the light’s pulchritude. Even through the polarizers, the angled shape pulled at him like a drug, like an old friend, like the long gone comfort of his mother’s arms. It was a call he thought he’d forgotten, but the shine forced him to remember with a sudden, uncomfortable blaze. He couldn’t, for the moment, think of anything else. Couldn’t see anything else. He knew that Aviend was beside him, somewhere, but he couldn’t sense her presence, couldn’t tell if she was calling his name.
Kyre lowered his body until it rested flat to the ground, and pressed his chin hard to the rubble. It cut and scratched, but he didn’t care. It forced his head to stay upright under memory’s pull of Rillent’s easy promises and Kyre’s own desire to believe them. Kept him from caving, the way his body ached to. His muscles strained, drove the skin and bones of his chin and throat into the edges of the debris.
Through the otherworldly din of the light, Aviend’s touch came against his shoulder, a reminder of something real, something true. He didn’t believe he could move into it, though he needed to. Somehow, she knew and came to him instead, and a moment later, it was the length of her pushed to him, armor and weapon and the side of her face, and her voice saying, “Aviend.”
Why she said her name and not his own he didn’t know, but it was the right thing. He could turn his head and see her. Her features were painted with a sheen of blue, afterimage of the device. He blinked the color away.
“Stay here,” she said, pointing a finger toward her face. He did. The pull of the light called to the corners of his eyes, the movement of his blood, but he stayed. He watched the blue flicker across the row of silver piercings up her ear and touch upon the green flecks in her eyes. He stayed and breathed again when he could.
“Rougher than you anticipated,” she said, her eyes flicking along his face. “Even with Delgha’s lenses.”
“Yes.” He thought about it for a moment. Remembering the hook and tug of it set his teeth on edge. “But also, it’s gotten stronger somehow, I think.”
“The pull or the light?”
“Both.”
“That means Rillent has gotten stronger too,” she said.
Aviend was looking right at the light. He could tell by the way the blue moved between the edges of her teeth, filled in the white of her eyes. It sank into each tiny hollow of her skin and lay there, dormant and dark. And yet it didn’t draw her. Didn’t talk to her or ask anything of her. A wash of jealousy at her ease trembled and broke along the edges of his skin. He reminded himself that everything he’d chosen – for good or for ill – had led to this moment. And that she had pulls of her own.
“If we have to switch, we know the risks,” Aviend said. “They’re not… insurmountable.”
“They’re not good, either,” he said.
Where the pull of the light beckoned to Kyre’s mind, it was Rillent himself who beckoned to Aviend’s. And Rillent was stronger than the light by magnitudes.
“We go as planned then,” Aviend said. It wasn’t a question, not really.
“We go as planned.”
When Aviend’s mother, Nuvinae, had been the leader of their clave and someone came to
her with a problem, she was fond of saying, “You’re the one who talked to the philethis. There are seventeen ways this could go, and all of them are yours.” It was a sentiment he hadn’t understood when he was younger – although the first time she’d said it to him directly, it shook him so hard his teeth rattled. But now he thought he might have a glimpse of what she’d meant to convey. They had opened this door. Whatever happened next was on their shoulders.
Aviend nodded, no more questions, and scooted back a bit more. She had her own job here, one that was at least as important as his – making sure that they got out of this alive.
Kyre pulled the launcher from the strap that held it to his back. It was already a long thin thing, lighter than it should have been to carry, but heavy as it needed to be when you held it steady and looked through the scope. He twisted the small key at the end, stretched it longer. It ratcheted out with a series of tiny clicks. He would have preferred to carry it on his back down the slope, leave his hands totally free, but no matter how many times they’d tried it, he couldn’t get the launcher set up and loaded in time. This was the only way that guaranteed him a shot.
He didn’t muse on the obvious. That he’d never killed anyone before. That he had no idea what it would be like to lift that scope to his face and see another person through it. To pull the trigger and kill a man.
Not a man. A monster. But also still a man.
He uncoiled the cable at his waist, then held the end in the air. The first time he’d tried to rappel from the obedient rope, he hadn’t been sure he could trust it to hold him. Now he didn’t even have to think about it. He spoke a few words to the end of it and released it into the air just at the edge of the cliff. It hung there, unmoving even when he tugged on it. The rope would hang there until he asked it to come down. He peered over the crater’s lip. Down below, just where the rope ended, was a ledge, an outcropping of some once-useful piece of material that had gotten shoved into this hill with everything else. It was slick as ice, and nearly as transparent, but it was just big enough for him to stand on. Hollowed out to give him coverage from the light. And angled perfectly for Rillent’s dais.