by wildbow
I could read his tone.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I never knew her. Barely knew my cousins. They won the war, but the tools they used were ugly, and somehow my aunt, living in a residential area far from the actual front line of battle, she died.”
I had a sense of what Gordon the Second was doing. Trying to humanize himself. But I didn’t really care.
“I’ve seen some of the messes left behind,” I said. “I’ve seen the red plague up close. Tore it out of someone, even. I’ve seen primordials. I’ve seen a man with the voice of an angel turn into a monster. And I’ve seen child and noble alike die.”
“I don’t think I believe you,” Gordon Two said, his voice soft. “And I’m surprised at myself, because I let myself believe a lot of what you’ve said.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That was a bad idea. Tell me, the layout here is weird. What’s this part of the building?”
“We’re adjunct to the library. I think this area opens up into a part of the library that’s for the really expensive books. Nothing restricted or Academy related, or it would be under guard, kept in classrooms and such, but… actual books. The stairs cut past that area and go down to the ground floor. Conversation and eating and drinking are allowed there, but as you go up to higher tiers of the library, the rules about being quiet are even harsher.”
“Thank you, Second Gordon. But we’re not on the ground floor. So if we go beyond the expensive books are, then we’d be…” I trailed off.
“Second floor means conversations are fine, but laughing or raising your voice would get you frowned at or make people ask you to leave.”
“Got it,” I said. “Let’s let ourselves into the library.”
I earned a few second glances, again, because of the mark on my face, but also because of the standards of my outfit, the fact that my hair was no doubt going to every effort to make itself a mess, and the odd pairing of me with a boy two years older than me.
He’d said I looked fourteen to him. At my worst, I looked fifteen, and I was legitimately a year older, after accounting for my stunted growth. Maybe two years, even.
He’d earned points in my book for volunteering the information and cooperating as much as he had, but he’d indirectly insulted Lillian, Mary, and Jessie, and he had insulted me.
So, all considered, I didn’t mind that I was about to make his bad day worse, and likely ensure he was going to be even later for class, if he attended at all.
The bookshelves in this part of the library smelled like leather and had gold lettering, the shelves very nice. We found our way into the more usual books, with a great deal of boring nonfiction works that Jessie would have been distracted by, and, with me guiding us to move more slowly, we got close enough to see the first of the two men.
Triangulating where the guy was, listening for the sounds of conversation, I could gauge the location of Avis. She was talking to someone in one corner of the library. In anything but a library, I doubted he would have been able to make any of it out.
“Gordon Two,” I said.
“That’s not my name,” he said.
“I know. But consider it a kindness that I’m not using your real name. Because it means I’m willing to forget you exist when all of this is done.”
He nodded. “This is serious, isn’t it?”
“If I said the fate of the Crown Empire hinges on this, would you believe me?” I asked, my voice low.
He shook his head.
“Yeah,” I whispered. “Well, it’s still pretty serious. So listen carefully. I want you to walk up to that man in the white lab coat, and I want you to punch him as hard as you can in the stomach. Solar plexus. And then I want you to keep punching him.”
“You’re insane.”
I whispered “I’m not wholly sane, no, but I’m dead serious. Because the alternative to you doing what I say is that I knife you right here and right now, and then I knife him, or you could run over there and warn him, and then I have to open fire, and you can be sure I’m going to aim one of the bullets at you. And it’ll be messy and others will die in the noise and the chaos.”
“He’s going to shout or kick up a fuss after I hit him,” Gordon Two said.
“No,” I said. “And if he does, I won’t hold it against you. So it might even be in your best interests to hurt him enough to get a noise out of him, you know? But don’t you make a peep, if you can help it.”
“No,” Gordon Two said. “No, I don’t know, not at all.”
“Go on,” I said. “I’m missing out on one really critical conversation while this is going on.”
I moved the gun.
He shook his head, but he turned, walking toward the spy in the white coat.
So very obvious.
Leaning over, I looked at Gordon the First. “Doesn’t measure up to the original.”
“I don’t understand how your head works, Sy,” Gordon said. “But if you’re trying to get a rise out of me, it’s working, and that says bad, bad things about how your brain is put together.”
I smiled.
Second Gordon looked as confrontational as hell as he stalked toward the man in the white coat. I ducked out of sight as his attention drew the man’s attention.
The scuffle was so quiet as to be almost inaudible. I could hear Avis and her conversation partner more than I could hear the struggle. I doubted any proper punches were even landing.
Eyes closed, I put my hand against a bookshelf. I felt for the vibrations of footsteps as much as I listened for them.
With one spy no doubt watching his partner, who listened to Avis, he was no doubt watching the scene unfold with Gordon Two.
His partner had it handled, but the job wasn’t getting done in the meantime.
It was obvious for a distraction, so he wasn’t acting on it. He waited, observed…
Then he moved. I felt the dull sensation of boots on floorboards, on the other side of the wood-backed bookshelf.
I moved around a bookshelf so that if he checked his rear, which he would, he wouldn’t see me.
One grunt, then a gasp.
Then another set of footsteps, moving away from me.
Moving back around and then tracing the path to follow the man through the maze, my own footsteps were light and silent. My strides were long, my feet fell in places where the feet of the heavy bookshelves already pressed floorboards down, so they wouldn’t creak.
His partner was pinning Gordon Two down, and he himself was focused on the flanks, the rear no doubt just checked and confirmed clear. He wore a black coat.
I moved right up behind him before he realized I was there. My knife cut across his hamstrings, and then I reversed the knife and plunged it into his chest as he toppled.
The spy in the white coat watched his partner—the fellow he’d shaved and eaten with that morning—drop dead, while I threw my body between the man and the ground, to keep his impact with the ground from being too heavy. It slowed me down, tangled me up, perhaps a bit more than I’d anticipated.
He moved to rise, while Gordon Two was lying with his back on the ground, staring up and back at me in what would have looked like an upside-down murder scene.
I let the body fall the rest of the way to the ground, and he and I started toward each other, each breaking free of our respective opponents.
Me against a grown man that had at least some inkling of how to fight.
Ambush, surprise attacks, attacking inconvenienced enemies, I could do that. But my talents in fighting were limited to avoiding the fights where I wasn’t at an overwhelming advantage and capitalizing on the ones where I was.
My opponent stopped short as Gordon Two grabbed at his leg, hugging it. He turned, looking down and over, and as I moved, realized his mistake.
I threw my knife at the man while he wasn’t able to freely move around. It sank into his chest, placed well enough that I could see the defeat in the man’s eyes.
“Uuuuuughuuuh,” he
groaned, an inarticulate, long, loud cry that seemed to be his dying rebellion, striving to draw attention to me or warn our mutual prey.
If that was what it was, then he was good.
If it wasn’t, then that was allowed, because dying had to suck.
Elsewhere in the library, well hidden by the rows and columns and corridors of bookshelves, a woman shushed the man who’d groaned so loudly.
I waited, listening and watching, my hand on a bookshelf so I might feel some residual footsteps, and nothing came of it.
I crossed to where the man in the white coat had been standing. I wished I’d been able to interrogate him, but I couldn’t imagine a scenario where he would have cooperated.
Matter of fact was, I was surprised that Gordon Two had acted to help like he had. Until I heard what Avis was saying and realized he’d heard a part of the same conversation.
Previous Next
Bitter Pill—15.7
“You’re asking for a lot, and you’re giving me very little,” the man said. “You’re taking my Academy from me.”
“There’s room to negotiate,” Avis said. “In another place, at another time. Not here. Not in neutral ground. Keep in mind, if anyone overheard you talking like that, it would leave you less room to negotiate, not more.”
“You’ve delayed me three times, now. I’ve played along, I’ve helped keep the pot stirred, I’ve lined up the targets for you to shoot down, but I’m running out of patience. Don’t think I don’t see the direction the winds are blowing, I know what it means that you’re here and things are happening.”
“We never doubted your political sense, Albert.”
“You want my cooperation? You have it. But I won’t be delayed, not when I know that you’re in the final stages, and you won’t necessarily have a place for me when all is said and done. If I wait too long to make sure I get what I need, you’ll move forward and I’ll be left in the lurch with nothing and no leverage to negotiate with.”
“Fine. Shall we move to your office?”
“My office is the last place this conversation should be had. My quarters aside, it’s the one room in this academy where I should feel like I have a modicum of privacy, so it stands to reason I have none at all. We’ll talk in generalities.”
“Or we won’t talk at all?” Avis asked. There was a pause, a non-verbal response. She responded with a quiet, “Very well. What do you want?”
Gordon Two shifted position, slowly moving into a sitting position with his back to the bookshelf that separated us from Avis and her conversation partner. He stared into space like someone who was only beginning to comprehend the great mysteries of the universe: awed, horrified, and confused.
“I want to run my Academy, but I won’t have that, will I?”
“Generalities,” Avis gently reminded him.
“I want money enough to live comfortably for the rest of my life.”
“We’re not equipped to supply that, especially not up front, and I doubt you’d take a promised future amount any more than you’d accept delaying this conversation.”
“Quite right.”
The man I’d thrown a knife at gurgled a death rattle, gases and fluids warring for a place in his throat. It seemed to scare the living daylights out of Gordon the Second.
“I assume you’ll keep asking for the moon, knowing we can’t or won’t deliver.”
“Mmm,” he said.
Avis lowered her voice, and I had to strain my ears and tilt my brain toward the task of hearing her. “I’ll tell you what we can deliver. We’ll move forward with this, you already have some idea of what’s at play, and we’ll cut some individuals out. We know that the stables are… crowded. As the flood occurs, the horse and the pig will be caught out in the cold.”
“The horse and the pig? Oh. Oh, that does tickle my shriveled black heart,” the man said, without speaking any quieter than he had been. He sounded louder, if anything.
“We agreed to pay you a sum that we haven’t and won’t pay them, and we’ll pay you the remainder before anything else happens. It will see you through the next year or two, we hope. Enough time to get back on your feet and find another stable elsewhere. You know my credentials, professor.”
“I do.”
“I’ve seen people rise and fall, represented in pins on a map as well as the addresses and titles on pieces of mail. The number of birds that fly to and from them. While the earthy beasts figure out what’s happening and turn their attention toward finding shelter and surviving the cold winter, you’ll be secure enough to focus on getting ahead.”
“The only reason I’m talking to you is that I know I won’t be getting ahead, dear. I won’t get another, ah, stable. Don’t lie to me and pretend I will. The stable was built on floodlands. It flooded. I’ll be a stablehand elsewhere, not an owner.”
“Somewhere starting with an S, or a W.”
“Thereabouts.”
“Look at me, professor,” she said, lowering her voice even further, to the point that her voice distorted. I leaned closer to the corner to hear better. She went on, “Imagine that I’m a vulture that flies in circles over the dead and dying. Those two places are among them. A morbidly ill beast and another stable of creatures built on floodlands, respectively.”
“You have me so very excited for these prospects, my dear,” the older man said, lacing his words with sarcasm and even more venom.
“We will be in your neighborhood in the future, professor. And in a way that isn’t traceable, a way that isn’t easy to connect to you, we will see that you have a stable of your own to run again. If it is S, that ill beast, then you shall keep it, and we shall nourish it, because it suits your ends, and it suits ours.”
“A small war to bring some life to a warbeast with no purpose?”
“Something of the sort. If you find yourself placed at W, then perhaps we’ll see if we can’t make it a repeat of what you’ll see happen here. Acknowledging that two points make a line, and that line points at you, we’ll furnish you with a more comprehensive exit strategy.”
“No generalities,” the old man said.
“Money enough to make you comfortable for the rest of your life, professor. At that point we’ll be prepared to provide it up front.”
“If that comes to pass. But tempting me with imagined gnashing of teeth on the part of my enemies isn’t changing matters now, is it? You’re still telling me to have faith that you’ll deliver on your promises.”
“Then I’ll give you something concrete. You know what I’m asking. We’ll both set this in motion, and in the earliest stages, you’ll be free to steer it or reverse course. Your ability to do that is why we’re talking to you. We need you to let this unfold. Take the first step, ignore the first mutterings. And you’ll have the horse kicking at your door, clearly upset about this.”
“A nice thought, but hardly enough to make me feel secure about this.”
“I’m not done, professor. You’ll take the second step. People will inquire, trying to find the validity of the rumor. They’ll find it started at the horse’s stall. He’ll be at your door again, angry. He’ll wheel, he’ll deal, but it will be Sisyphean at that stage. And all you’ll have to do to break him is wait until he’s on the brink of saving himself, the stone nearly hauled to the top of the mountain, and you give it one small push, to send it and him down with it.”
The old man chuckled.
Gordon Two was shaking his head. I placed my hand on his shoulder, and he startled, as if he’d forgotten I was there.
“I think we might have a deal,” the old man said. “If I get to see the horse’s back broken and the pig…”
“Crushed in the stampede, I assure you.”
“And all it takes is that I have to hasten a flooding that will inevitably happen? Yes. Worth it to see that happen, if nothing else.”
“You’ll watch it happen as you help us, I assure you, and we will follow through. Even if the damage can’t wholly be stopped at t
hat point, you’ll be placed to rake over some messes and allow certain others. We want you to feel motivated to do that.”
“We have a deal.”
“Allow me to talk to some others. We can ensure the horse is blamed for the break in the floodgates, so to speak. I’ll send someone to you, and you’ll know it’s time. In the meantime, get your house in order. Not too orderly, but know that people will be looking at you.”
“Of course. I’m an old hand at this.”
“It’s why we’re talking to you, professor.”
“How do I reach out, if I need to talk to you?”
“You can use the messenger we send you. I’ll be checking in myself, to fine tune things as they play out. If not me, then my employer will. You know her.”
“I do.”
“Then until our next conversation about stables, floods, and drowned horses, professor.”
“Until our next conversation, my dear.”
I tensed, readying for Avis to come in our direction and find the bodies. I held my gun and my knife ready.
She wasn’t pumped full of combat drugs, and the modifications to her body that let her fly also made her frail. I’d have the opportunity afforded by surprise.
If I could do it without giving her a chance to scream, then I could make it look as though they’d died in a mutual struggle. I could remove Avis from the picture, cause a stir, and use the paranoia of the Academy, Academy staff, and Fray to eke out an advantage.
No, there were a lot of ways this could be done to my advantage.
I met Gordon the First’s eyes.
But the footsteps moved in other directions.
The tension slipped away. I stood, and then I stretched.
I stuck the toe of my boot into the side of the body beside me.
“Come on, Gordon Two,” I said. “We have a lot to do.”
He looked up at me as if I was speaking in tongues.
“The stable is about to flood,” I told him. “I want a good vantage point when it does.”
“It’s not a stable,” he said. “It’s the Academy. What they said before they started talking about stables, the Academy is closing. They didn’t even talk about the students. That bit at the very beginning. We’re a resource to them.”