by Mark Johnson
They were a common topic of fascination. Children’s stories were filled with possible things that the hideaways could have been. Every hideaway she’d ever been in had been a broken, dank and depressing affair. But this one was the way the stories said the hideaways should be. Full of unspoken potential.
She lowered herself onto a section of the ancient wooden bench that ran the main room’s circumference, and through the smaller attached spaces that may have once been bedrooms.
Dinner was a picnic on the floor: Dried meat, fruit and nuts supplemented by honeyed rice supplied by Drool. The hideaway’s temperature tended toward a middling warmth, somehow maintained by technology she could only wonder at. She soaked in every detail. One day, hopefully soon, she’d tell Pella she’d slept in a working hideaway with designs, lights, and polished, age-darkened wood. A few weeks before she’d left Armer, she and Pella had used cushions to make a hideaway all their own, cutting out paper suns and stars and sticking them to the pillows, playing pretend.
She made polite conversation with Patzer. Drool listened, never contributing. In fact, Drool listened intently to everything she said. When they’d finished eating, he lifted a nearby seat—a work of remarkable craftsmanship concealing storage underneath. He brought out some murky liquid in a fine glass carafe, fancy even for a native Sumadan and unheard of for a refugee.
The two men lifted their glasses to her. “This mission of yours,” Patzer said, “is more important than you realize, Head Saarg. Whenever true progress is made, evil, waiting in the shadows, swoops in to destabilize your efforts. We know all about that, don’t we Drool? Yes, and we mustn’t be caught unaware, must we? The Enemy will appear from nowhere and take apart your dreams. But we have steadfastness of purpose on our side, do we not, Head? Yes, we do!”
Terese sipped. The familiar taste of brandy lightly burned the back of her throat, as did a cool taste she didn’t recognize. They drank slowly, Patzer regaling them with a tale of how he once tracked a man who was a master of disguises and who’d fooled him several times.
Terese mopped at her brow. How odd, she’d begun sweating. The room wasn’t warm enough for that. Drool brought out a small hourglass with blue sand and set it upright.
Patzer’s voice jerked her from her thoughts. What had she been thinking of? Something blue? She’d not had that much brandy, surely.
“I said, I think it’s time for that story, Head,” he repeated.
Well, of course. The mission brief, finally.
“I was on duty the night the Royal hologram came in, and I led the mission out to a buried chamber, lower than Swallowing depth. Somehow hidden from Polis. An Investigator had gotten there before us and we explored it together.” Her head was filled with a familiar cotton wool and an unfamiliar optimism, unlike the other times she’d been drunk. She shook her head, but it didn’t clear.
She continued, telling the whole story: The missing Sumadan generator that had powered the Immersion Chamber, the odd religious inscription on the wall, the hundreds of bodies in the suspension sacks beyond, how she’d learned the four renegades had survived, and how Polis Armer had Swallowed it. She told how the Seekers had gone hunting the renegades, learned their quarry had fled Polis Armer. A complement had been thrown together with her as its head and sent to track, find and kill the renegades, who were probably infected.
She left out her involvement in the Immersion Chamber program. It wasn’t difficult, for nothing linked her to the Chamber, except the renegades. Everything she said had been the truth. And he hadn’t asked her for the whole story, or if she’d known more about the Immersion Chamber than she’d said. For some reason she’d wanted very much to tell him.
Patzer nodded thoughtfully. “Why were you convinced they worshipped the Darkness, or were infected?”
“Because there’s something sinister about them. Remember the families they aren’t connected with? There’s a reason. Morgenheth is the leading suspect in his girlfriend’s and father’s murders. Separate events, but no evidence. Rortiin broke his clan’s finances, deliberately. Only, the bankruptcy forced out some allegations of their… abuse of girls. The Inspectors were about to descend, but then the ‘suicides’ happened. Turned out he was the only one who could have had access to the records sent to the authorities. Then there’s Dantet, whose mother and stepfamily suddenly went insane. His mother had some sort of meltdown and went into a nunnery. The others ended up in an asylum. And the worst is Lethrien, who, at eight years old, killed his whole family. There was a thorough autopsy, but no cause was found, and I wonder if—”
“Oh, I know the cause, Terese.” Patzer interrupted her with an uncharacteristic quiet chuckle, not blinking or smiling. She decided that this sedate manner chilled her more than his manic outbursts. “That’s him, is it? Repaan Lethrien. And four of them, from Armer. Very clever. Well done. Clearly, we wasted our time, searching other places, Patzer. But forget we said that, Saarg.”
That he’d said… what?
Patzer swirled his brandy in his glass. “Right. They’re what brought you here. I see. So why are you really here, Head?”
Drool leaned forward.
“To purify infected renegades, Patzer,” she said, sighing. That was the truth.
“No,” he said quietly. “You are not here for that. What are you really doing in Sumad? It just doesn’t sound that simple. To come all this way for infected? Why not just be glad they’re gone and forget them?”
“Patzer, it’s a high-profile case. Politicians and Royalty showed an interest, and so did the newskeepers. If we didn’t send someone to hunt them down, my Holder Moorcam would have looked bad. Everyone has a master who doesn’t understand their subordinate’s job. When citizens expect things of politicians, the politicians take to bothering the Holders for results. You think I wanted to leave my daughter… for this?” She pointed upwards. Again, he hadn’t asked about the Immersion Chamber. Maybe he’d ask her now?
“So why couldn’t you take the infected if you did everything right?”
“Oh? I tried. I failed. The whole chapterhouse think I’m an idiot because I messed a taking. Once they were contained, even. Now my squad don’t even dare talk to me in public!” Patzer kept looking past her, at Drool, who nodded at Patzer in agreement. Strange, but then Drool was a strange man. Patzer had specifically asked why she was in Sumad. Why didn’t he ask about the Immersion Chamber?
“So, you wouldn’t have let them go on purpose?”
“Why would I do that? I’d prefer to be home, tucking my daughter into bed and listening to a story on the waves. Instead, I’m sent on this idiotic hunt looking for something that can’t be found.”
“Hm. Why can’t they be found, Terese?”
He knew her first name?
“I’m not sure what they are, but I’m the best Armer Stone has got, and if they break my restraints on a perfect take, then… they’re something other than infected.”
Patzer burst into laughter, for the first time. “Of course they’re not infected, woman! And if you’d had any damned sense, you’d realize that!”
“What? How do you—”
“Forget I said that.” His tone had changed back to that oddly calm one.
She must have had too much to drink, because she had the impression time had passed, though she couldn’t remember what had filled it.
“So that’s why old Lijjen’s at you, is he? Thinks you’re holding back?”
She nodded. “He must think I’m conspiring with them because we tracked down infected who aren’t infected halfway across the world, let them escape and then let them hold me hostage and ask questions I can’t answer about that damned Immersion Chamber.”
An hourglass. Next to Drool. The bottom half was getting bluer by the second.
“But they didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. They wanted me to tell them what’d happened t’them. How’m I s’posed to know?”
Because I was there when the mindlocked guardsmen w
ere brought to the Immersion Chamber and put in the Immersion Pods, not when they escaped!
Her tongue was thick against her cheeks and teeth. He wasn’t asking the right questions. He had no interest in the Immersion Chamber, but total interest in what came after. Surely he wanted to know about it. Who wouldn’t?
“But I knew no one’d believe me,” she continued. “Gods, I don’t believe me! But can you imagine that? Running back to Holder Mathra and saying, ‘Never mind. They’re not infected. They’re rilly powerful and rilly angry and rilly hate Seekers an’ talk to each other in their minds, so good luck with tha’. No idea what they are or how they do it, but goodbye an’ ’ave a nice life.’ Who would’ve believed me?”
She blinked. Momentarily, there had been two of Patzer and Drool. Yuck! One of each was enough.
“And Armer Stone sent us here, and I led it. Lots of currency wasted on Sumad Reach t’ accommodate a full Head’s complement. Imagine tellin’ the newskeepers back home that. Imagine my name bein’ used first. Imagine Holder Moorcam trynna explain that t’the Governors’ Council that run the Armer Seekers? And the Royals? My mission, he said, was to reduce fallout from th’ Immersion Chamber. It’s an embarrassment from one end to t’other. We want it to all go away.”
Patzer’s eyebrows had scrunched close together and his mouth was open. Drool nodded again.
Ice cream. Right then, she really missed ice cream. They didn’t have any in Sumad because there were fewer cows than in Armer, but there were some plants here that…
“So why did you come to Sumad?” Patzer’s voice was loud. “Did you happen to track a Sumadan traveler with a crate, coming from Armer?”
“Wha? No. I was tracking the renegades.”
“You tracked them all the way here? And how, exactly, did they—and you—know Polis Sumad was truly the Immersion Chamber’s origin?”
She clicked her tongue with disapproving impatience. “The enormous hollow metal generator? The one with th’ Sumadan hexagon this big, imprinted on the side? You think they or me dinna see that? Oh, and how about th’ Sumadan Invocation, written ten feet tall onna wall? No, that wasn it, Patzer. I jus’ put a world map on the wall, threw a dart annit landed on Sumad Reach!”
“Ah, yes. No, no. It all seems… surprisingly logical,” Patzer said. He seemed disappointed.
Ha, disappointment. Try the last year of my life Patzer. That’s disappointment.
He pursed his lips. “But this is very important, Terese. Why did you choose Sumad Reach as a host chapterhouse?”
“Wha? I just looked at the map fer th’ chapterhouse nearest the refugee areas. ’Cos I thought they’d wanna hide where there’s others with skin our color. Turn out I was right. For all the good it’s done me. Do you know, I once took two cadvers, by mehself, in a farmstead, outside—”
“So, you aren’t interested in Sumad Reach Chapterhouse? You don’t wish to know more about it? You hadn’t heard anything about it?”
“Patzer, I want brain damage so I can forget the place. See Drool nodding? He doesn’t like ’em either!”
“Don’t worry about Drool. You haven’t an interest in the chapterhouse, then?”
“Nah.” Something dripped in her eyes, salty, making her blink. “I’d rather move into a Wall. I’ll do it. Watch me. I’ll work the looms th’ way their women do for nine more months and…”
“What about the renegades? What else can you tell me about them? Tell me something important. Quickly Terese!”
She paused to wonder. “They shouldn’t be able to fight like that. I mean they’re jus’ guards. And they’re gonna stay here, I think.”
“And why are they here? Why do they stay?”
She rubbed her head. When had she begun sweating? “Revenge? I dunno.”
Drool sighed.
“The renegades wanted revenge,” Patzer said. “Right.”
What did his expression mean? She couldn’t place it. Unless… “Wait. ’ave you met them already?”
Patzer fixed her with a glare, then tilted his head sideways. When he spoke, he’d changed to the calmer, observant tone. “You are not the only one, Head Saarg, who has suffered setbacks at their hands, here in Sumad.”
“Wha? Why diddnyu say? Wha did—”
“Forget I said that,” he said loudly.
Forget he’d met… who?
What was Pella doing right now?
“What was responsible for that massacre back in the hinterlands? The one you found with your two friends but didn’t want to mention to me?”
Drool pointed to the hourglass, which had almost drained.
“No idea.” She felt sleepy. “It looked like a hit. Or a clean-up. It’s probably something to do with the Immersion Chamber, but there’s no way t’ prove it, but I wasn’ there that night and I’m glad or I’d be dead and my daughter would ’av to live with my parents ferever because her father’s a cowardly, lazy…”
“Drool,” boomed Patzer, “it’s time the Head had something from the green bottle.”
There was a green bottle? She felt something cool against her lips. Oh, her eyes were closed. She opened them.
“Drink this,” said Drool firmly. His first words. She hadn’t expected a firm voice. He seemed like one of life’s willing followers. She drank something and…
Oh Polis, why was she so hot and thirsty?
Patzer was laying her down on the bench, patting her head and telling her how she couldn’t handle Sumadan brandy. She didn’t want to talk to him anymore, which was probably a good thing because she’d never been good at opening up to strangers. What had they been talking about?
“Well, that ‘drink’ you polished off cost me some expensive favors. And it appears we didn’t even need it. So, the trail’s cold. Yes Patzer, it appears so. It appears we must visit the hills after all.” A sigh, then a firm tapping on her shoulder. “But I think you’ve had a little too much to drink, Terese. We’ve had quite the evening, indeed we have. Especially having spent all evening talking of quarry hunts, cadver fights and… oh, I don’t know, just general strategy. Of course, you’ve drunk too much to be able to recall any of the details. Remember that, though. We had quite the professional exchange of ideas and opinions.”
Yes. Strangely enough, they’d talked long into the night of the hazards of hunting things and people who wanted not to be found. That thought comforted Terese all the way down to a restful oblivion.
8
The dining house was too poorly lit for Terese to see the opposite end of the mud-brick structure. The table between her and Patzer was barely wide enough to keep their knees from touching. Terese tapped it to emphasize her point.
“Almost a month, and this is the largest monk hill community in the Territories, Patzer. You said that if the renegades had passed through anywhere, it would have been here. They have not. I’m the only person with an Armen accent these monks have ever… met.”
Terese’s last words were lost in a cough. She wished she had a spare cloth to wrap around her face to keep the oil lamps’ smoke from her lungs. The lamps created just enough light with their vegetable oil and thick cotton wicks to allow sight of blurred faces across the room, but little more than that.
Patzer reluctantly toyed with his meal of dried fruit, nuts and skinleaf while casting longing glances at their packs, where the dried meat strips were stored. Meat was forbidden this close to a monk hill, though alcohol was allowed. Back home, the sacred groves – the equivalent of Polis Sumad’s monk hills – allowed meat, but no alcohol.
“My sources were insistent,” Patzer said, not for the first time that night, or that month. “Not just one source, but many. They’re at a hill somewhere, Saarg.”
Patzer and his bloody ‘perfect’ sources!
“Look, it’s not surprising they’re not here”, she said. “If cadvers avoid monk hills, infected will too. Perhaps they changed their minds about hiding out at one after speaking to your informants.”
Patzer gave h
er a speculative look, then smoothed his face. Over the weeks they’d spent wandering the Refugee Territories, she’d wondered if Patzer even believed the renegades were infected. It wasn’t anything he’d said, so much as the hunting strategies he’d employed, which seemed very much typical bounty-hunter methods for finding ‘normal’ criminals and fugitives, not infected.
“Saarg, lass, the hills are still their destination. Perhaps they came at night when everyone slept, or perhaps they all put on accents.” He rolled his eyes. “Or maybe they wore dresses to pass as women. They could have gone to one of the hills maintained by the nuns.”
“Do you think you might be avoiding a simpler explanation, Patzer?” She spoke as diffidently as she could. The man had a temper and snapped when confronted with facts he disliked.
Days after they’d met, she’d watched him beat a confused and babbling powerhead who could neither understand Patzer’s questions about the renegades, nor so much as repeat their names back to him. Patzer had left the addict lying in a crumpled heap, barely breathing. He’d stormed off and snapped at her to follow, and she’d decided then and there not to argue with him.
“Listen lass, I’ve spent a lifetime developing my sources. Better than any in the entire bloody Territories. I’ll wager my life they’re at a monk hill.”
“Maybe, maybe. But it’s been weeks. The newest sightings are over three months old and have them at the border, trying to cross over. Is it time to…”—she changed what she was going to say—“… think differently?”
Patzer sucked fervently from his clay cup. “There’s something I’m not seeing. Something blindingly obvious. They’ll be at a monk hill, somewhere, somehow. Yes, Patzer, they will.”
She’d almost gotten used to him speaking to himself in the third person.
Who were these sources who’d somehow known where the renegades would be? How was he so convinced of this one stubborn fact?
“Perhaps just an ordinary hill? Not one the monks worship at.”
“No, Saarg!” He was growing testy, again. “They specifically wanted monk hills. Fat lot of good it’ll do them. They don’t let Cenephans up these stupid things. They think it offends the imaginary spirits singing campfire songs along with them.”