Quietus

by Tristan Palmgren

  Fallard and Galien exchanged a look. Fallard sighed. He said, “We’ve traded news with passing travelers. A holy man and his flagellants nearby, delivering a sermon. My men wanted to watch.”

  “I don’t care. We’re leaving now.”

  “Half of them have already gone.”

  Damn. An infrared sweep would have told her that immediately. She’d assumed most of the men were still in their tents. The soldiers of this plane were an undisciplined mess, to be sure, but this many of them wouldn’t have wandered off on their own without their captain’s tacit support.

  She glared at Fallard. He stared back evenly. She had been a sensation for Avignon for so long that she’d nearly forgotten what it was like for the natives to treat her with anything but awe and fear.

  She said, “I want them ready to leave in fifteen minutes.”

  Fallard said, “You might as well shout it to the trees as tell it to me. There’s no gathering them up until they decide to come back.” He tossed the burnt rind of his bacon into the fire, and walked, casually, toward his tent.

  Companion had never been talkative. But there had always been a part of Meloku that had known it was there: watching, judging, ready to intercede if she made too many wrong choices. Her instinct now was to wait until Companion told her what she could have done better, and what she needed to do now. More than once, Meloku dreaded to hear what Companion thought of her.

  She’d known before that she had become dependent on Companion. She hadn’t realized how badly.

  She blew air through her lips and started walking. She didn’t know where she was going until a minute later, when she figured that she was intent on rounding up her wayward soldiers. She didn’t have any other resources. Lacking her internal armaments, intelligence from Ways and Means’ satellites, or even Companion’s guidance, she couldn’t count on overpowering Habidah. But Habidah couldn’t withstand a company of mercenaries. Habidah’s demiorganics weren’t combat-rated. Nor were the field base’s doors designed to resist battering.

  That, at least, had been the plan. Aside from his lack of social graces, she’d figured Fallard and his mercenaries to be steady. They’d done a good job of standing at attention and looking sober while she reviewed them and explained their job. But without infrared to read the flow of heat under their skin, she discovered she was a poor judge of character.

  She was used to controlling men. Taking their reins should have been an afterthought. But from the moment they’d left sight of the papal palace, they had treated her insolently, ignored her repeated requests to march faster. They had covered half as much ground as Meloku could have alone.

  She didn’t need enhanced senses to tell her where her men had gone. She followed trampled grass to the dusty trade road, where their bootprints told an even clearer story. They’d headed to the farms whose hearthfires she’d spotted last night.

  She kicked a stone out of her way. Already the day was unbearably hot. It was going to be miserable marching. Meloku only hoped Fallard’s men had strength left when they reached the field base. Then again, the more energy they spent, the less they would have for disobedience.

  Her mood darkened further when she approached the farms. There was indeed some kind of performance going on. There were far too many natives about for them to all be locals. Her men were among the visitors.

  She strode to the nearest soldier. She laid a hand on his shoulder. He started, spun as if to strike, and stopped only when he saw who she was. He gave her a surly-lipped stare.

  “Find the others,” she said. “Get them back to camp.”

  “I don’t know where they are,” he said, and turned back to the center of the crowd.

  Meloku peered over his shoulders to find out just what was so captivating. A troupe of robed and hairshirted strangers stood or lay bent over each other. She stared. They’d been beaten and whipped bloody. A tall, mustachioed man strode among them, rhythmically flashing a three-tailed whip. Blood streamed over them, soaked the grass. Their clothes were torn and stained with old blood.

  Meloku grimaced. She didn’t have to study her men closely to see that she was not going to be able to pull them away. They were spellbound.

  Rather than listen to the cries, she strode up a small hill, where two young girls had gone to sit and watch. They didn’t even glance at her. She sat and scanned the crowd, counting her men. She could at least keep an eye on them. She would have rather tuned out the mustachioed man’s sermon, but, without her demiorganics’ audio discriminators, she had no choice but to pay attention.

  He shouted about sins, as so many of these people did. His sins, his troupe’s sins, their unworthiness in the eyes of their God. How it was only through the grace and mercy of the Virgin that their world had not already been cast into Hell. His display was an eye-catching form of fearmongering, certainly, but typical enough in its substance. These people responded easily to threats of divine vengeance.

  The mustachioed man extracted a scroll from his robes. It was a letter, purportedly written by Jesus, discovered on the altar at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Meloku frowned. This was starting to sound less like a sermon and more like a challenge. This man was no ordained priest. His words about Jews in particular struck hard against papal doctrine.

  Companion said, “This movement will threaten your power base if you’re not careful.”

  Meloku jolted upright. An electric current jammed her nerves, kept her from answering. She was belatedly aware that the two girls were staring at her.

  Her jaw trembled. “Where did you go?”

  No reply. Companion’s voice had sounded strange, like an echo. She checked her demiorganics for any response. Even the emergency diagnostic routines remained silent.

  She struggled to answer as she imagined Companion wanted to hear: “This movement isn’t my priority. I have to figure out what Habidah’s done, what happened to you, alert Ways and Means.”

  “If you focus on the short-term at the expense of the long-term, you’ll lose sight of the purpose of your project–” She stopped with a horror. She knew its words before it did. Companion had never spoken at all. She’d just put her own words in its voice. She had segued into mouthing them.

  She sat heavily, her pulse pounding. Somewhere, distantly, she was aware that the crowd had started to mingle with the performers. Companion chattered in the back of her head. She could hear it. She rested her head in her hands and tried to banish it.

  The shadow of Companion’s presence remained a part of her even when Companion itself had gone. She was more the amalgamates’ creature than she’d ever realized. She couldn’t escape its voice any more than she could escape her heartbeat, or a headache. For a dizzying moment, she wondered if she’d ever imagined its voice while it was around.

  When she looked up, her vision was blurred. The shapes and colors of the crowd ran together. Everything that had happened since she’d lost Companion was catching up with her at once. She blinked fiercely until she could see again. The natives were laying hands on the flagellants, smearing the blood on their cheeks and foreheads, dipping cloths into the wounds. Again she heard Companion. It calculated the likelihood of fatal infections and spreading diseases. But that had to be her voice.

  If she’d known that this was what she would come to, she never would have gone into the amalgamates’ service. On Mhensis, she’d had nothing to pride herself on but her independence and clear-headedness. Now she couldn’t begin to figure out what to next, or what she would have to do to fix things. Without them, she was falling apart, hallucinating.

  What had happened at the field base? She couldn’t imagine Habidah had access to the kind of technology that could do this to her. Not unless she’d become an agent for a force that rivaled the amalgamates. “I can’t face that kind of power,” she said aloud. “Not alone.” If her neighbors answered, she didn’t hear it.

  She forced herself to breathe evenly. The mustachioed man had taken up his whip and was h
aranguing his audience for tolerating Jews, and atheists, and fornicators.

  That was enough time wasted. She unfolded her legs and stood. She scanned the crowd again, counting all of Fallard’s men whose faces she remembered. She tallied only seven. There had been at least twice that many missing this morning. She wiped her eyes clear and scanned the horizon.

  Her eyes caught on the nearest of the farmhouses. The door hung open. Shadows moved inside. She doubted it was any of the locals. They were all here.

  Robbers. Looters.

  “Fuck,” she breathed. Her missing mercenaries.

  She checked the other farmhouses. More open doors, more intruders. The performers were too wrapped up in themselves to notice, but some of the locals were stirring, looking from house to house. Some of them had started to break away.

  She raced down the hill, toward the soldier she’d spoken with earlier. Too late. A woman’s cry of alarm alerted the rest of the crowd.

  As one coordinated action, Meloku’s soldiers revealed knives concealed beneath their leathers. They surrounded the crowd. Meloku jerked to a stop. Without her demiorganics to help her keep her balance, she nearly stumbled to her knees.

  One of the locals rushed to his home, heedless of the knives. One of her mercenaries struck him a backhanded blow, knocking him flat. Another soldier slashed a disfiguring cut across his neighbor’s face with no provocation.

  Meloku scrambled backward. Her soldiers were too busy corralling the locals to look in her direction. The girls who’d been beside her had vanished. It didn’t take much thought to see that their only hiding place was behind the hill. Keeping low in the grass, she ran after them.

  The girls were back there, all right – huddled and crying. She swept past them. The dusty road was just ahead. It ran through a dusty shallow, just deep enough to provide cover if she crouched as she ran. She had to. Without her demiorganics, she was as defenseless as any of the natives.

  It was so obvious what had happened that she didn’t want to think about it. Fallard and his men hadn’t just had a reputation for banditry, like most mercenaries. They were bandits. They’d come to Avignon to trade loot, and accepted her job as a convenient, quiet back way out. They must have figured that Clement would pay a steep ransom for her safety. She’d been stupid enough to fall for it.

  The only circumstance that had saved her had been the fact that Fallard’s men weren’t organized. Fallard certainly hadn’t expected her to march out of camp alone, or he would have put guards on her. He’d probably seen her as a court pet, too delicate to run away. Her labored breathing during yesterday’s march must have reinforced that image.

  She shaded her eyes and peered further down the road. The camp and her few supplies lay in that direction. Why was she heading there? Why did she need it? She asked herself those questions expecting an answer, but even her memory of Companion’s voice was silent. She was acting on reflex.

  She should have fled, moved on to the field base alone. Her answer for going back finally came, unbidden: Galien. She’d overestimated him enormously. And she’d left him with Fallard and his monsters.

  Thankfully, Fallard had insisted on a campsite with some cover. Brush, a hill, and several trees disguised Meloku’s approach. No one accosted her. They were all too busy pillaging to maintain a watch. They didn’t expect serious opposition.

  She crouched in waist-high brown grass. Her tent stood fifteen meters away, apparently unmolested. Fallard’s cookfire still smoldered, but of Fallard himself, she saw no sign. Nor Galien. His tent stood not far from hers. The flaps were closed.

  She reached her tent without a cry raised against her. She crawled under the flaps, making as little noise as possible. Her fox-fur-trimmed ermine coat was missing. Her bag had been split open and what remained of its contents – perfume, toiletries, underclothes – spilled across the ground.

  Thankfully she hadn’t been a complete dunce: that had been a decoy bag. She dug underneath her blankets until she found her real kit. She’d packed a nine-centimeter ivory-handled knife (a gift from some cardinal, now her only weapon), a signal booster box in the event that her demiorganics began working, and several plastic-wrapped ration bars. The rations were made to keep her on her feet for days, but, of course, they were intended for someone with a demiorganic-boosted metabolism. She had no idea how long they would last her now.

  Shouting and scuffling alerted her to the fact that some of the men had returned. She crouched by the tent flap. She heard an outraged grunt, a low and frightened moan, and a snicker, but she couldn’t even count the number of men out there. Audio discriminatory abilities would have come in handy. This was like being stricken blind, deaf, and dumb.

  She crawled out the back of the tent, and peered around it. Fallard and two of his men encircled Galien, who stood with his arms in the air. Fallard’s men patted him down. One ripped a coin pouch from a pocket in his robe sleeve. Another pulled his felt hat from his head.

  Quaking, Galien said, “When Julius Caesar was captured and held for ransom by pirates, he told his captors he would pay his ransom and then return to crucify them all. They laughed. They didn’t believe him until he raised a fleet and–”

  Fallard, with apparently little effort, smacked Galien across the jaw. Galien was flung into the arms of one of his searchers, who dropped him into the mud, laughing. He sputtered until one of them kicked him.

  Meloku shook her head. It was difficult to believe that she’d once thought Galien practical. Maybe he was, but only in the esoteric world of ecclesiastical politics.

  Fallard pointed to the cookfire. “Put him there until we can round up a few other ransoms to keep him company.” He stalked away. One of the mercenaries followed. The other grabbed Galien by the back of his collar and hauled him, scrabbling, toward the fire.

  Meloku peered about the edge of the encampment. It seemed free of sentries. That wouldn’t last, not once the others returned from their looting. She crawled, staying low in the grass. She stopped three times to look for any sign of Fallard. Nothing. Either she had gotten lucky, or she was missing something.

  By far the most sound decision would have been to retreat, far and fast. One of the virtues of her new state of mind was that she didn’t have the time to consider this excessively. She was too focused on stifling her breathing. Her instincts pushed her on. And they said that Galien was her responsibility.

  Companion never would have agreed. She could hear it pestering. But Companion spoke in her voice now. Her voice had always been much easier to ignore than its.

  She circled the fire, positioning herself behind Galien’s guard. But she must have made too much noise. The guard spun round. Meloku sprang out of the grass, knife in her left hand. She swung, clumsily. Deliberately so. A feint. He dodged it, stepping right where she intended – into the blow from her right fist, which landed deep in his windpipe before he could make any noise.

  From there, it was as simple as drawing a diagram. A knee between his legs to disable him. A half-step around him. She wrapped her arm under his chin and drew her blade across his throat, as easily as if she were slicing beef. She released him, choking and dying, into the dirt.

  Her missing demiorganics may have afforded her grace and neatness, but, here, those were just niceties, and superfluous. She didn’t need her demiorganics to remember her training. She flexed her fingers to check for broken bones. Her knuckles didn’t even hurt.

  Galien gaped at her. She waited for him to say something until it became clear that he wouldn’t. She offered him a hand. He stared at the blood soaking her sleeve.

  She asked, “Do you have enough breath to run?”

  “Mother of Jesus,” Galien said, at last.

  Meloku grabbed his arm and yanked him toward the cover of the nearest slope. At first, she feared she would have to drag him, but he found his footing. He stumbled more than ran.

  “They’re going to come after us,” Galien panted. “They’re going to find out what you did, a
nd hunt us–”

  “They’re going to come after you,” Meloku said. “They’ll just find him dead. They have no reason to think I was involved.”

  Galien’s step faltered again. Meloku tightened her grip. She was going to have to cut off her sleeve soon. The blood was starting to stick like glue.

  She aimed for the distant foliage of a forest, both to help cover their tracks and in the hope of finding running water. The shadows of the trees closed around them. He didn’t say anything for forty minutes, until they’d put enough distance between them and the camp that Meloku felt safe slowing. “I don’t understand how you did any of that.”

  “Of course you don’t,” Meloku muttered, and then, louder, said, “You saw it happen. What of any of it was unclear?”

  “You. You’re… you wouldn’t…”

  “I’m no more the person you thought than Fallard was.”

  That struck him mute. Meloku stepped lightly through the brush, trying to leave as few signs of their passage as possible. Insects bobbed and weaved around her arm.

  “Do you truly believe in God?” she asked. He didn’t answer, just looked at her. “I hope you do. Only a god could guide your world out of all these wars and plagues and famines. Otherwise it will always look like they did back there, and at Avignon. It will never get better than that without help. That’s where we’re going – to pray for help.”

  She couldn’t tell if she was speaking with Companion’s voice or her own, but she meant it all the same.

  As the trail narrowed and the forest thickened, Galien said at last, “We need to turn. Avignon is in the other direction.”

  “We don’t have the time for Avignon.”

  “But where are we going?”

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll take care of you until I can get someone better.”

  36

  To distract him from the shuttle’s shaking, Niccoluccio kept a close eye on Habidah. Her lips were drawn in a tight line. Her eyes were always red, as if she had held them open for days.