To Hold the Bridge

by Garth Nix

  ‘It’s rented …,’ the manager started to say. Then she looked at the energy projector in Haddad’s hand, the smoking doorframe, and the dead thugs. ‘I mean … it will be ready in thirty minutes.’

  ‘Is there a legal process to be followed?’ Haddad asked, who already knew the answer. ‘Authorities to be alerted?’

  ‘No,’ said the manager. ‘We sort things out ourselves here. As you have done.’

  ‘Where would I find Lerrue the Shubian?’

  Haddad already knew the answer to that as well, but, as always, he wanted separate confirmation.

  The manager’s mouth twitched.

  ‘Lerrue?’ she croaked. ‘The small green dome outside the starport arrival hall. But …’

  ‘But what?’ asked Haddad.

  ‘Lerrue is a Shubian,’ said the manager.

  The Shubians were known to the Imperial Mind. Haddad knew what data the Empire already possessed. Indeed, Lerrue the Shubian had a part to play in the plan, though he didn’t know it yet.

  ‘What does that signify?’

  ‘Shubians set prices, put buyers and sellers together, for a commission. They don’t do stuff themselves. Least, Lerrue doesn’t.’

  ‘You mean that Lerrue did not send these people, but merely arranged their services to be supplied to whoever wanted me killed and robbed?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said the manager. ‘And Lerrue, she’s kind of important here, sort of like the unofficial … uh … governor, or whatever. She sorts things out, like I said, fixes the prices.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Haddad. He had not known Lerrue’s gender, though for Shubians this was not important, as they changed from time to time. ‘Let me know when my new room is ready.’

  The next morning was as greenish and congealed as any other day on Thrukhaz. Haddad finished securing his new room with a few choice devices, then left it via the hole he had cut into the adjacent storage closet. The portable safe stayed behind, hunkered down under a blanket.

  Lerrue the Shubian was easy to find. There was a queue of breath-masked people waiting outside the exterior airlock door of the green dome. Obviously Lerrue didn’t trust an ion curtain to keep the good atmosphere in and the bad atmosphere out. There were a couple of guards stationed outside who were performing a similar function to the airlock, only with visitors.

  Haddad paid them to let him in. They took his sting-guns, and the J-knife from his boot, but only did a cursory scan for other weapons, making his misdirectional shuffle of items around his body purely a drill.

  Lerrue was a nine-foot-tall humanoid with a shiny hide, big eyes, and several flapped holes in the side of her bald head that looked like ears but weren’t. She was wearing a hundred-years-out-of-fashion Imperial evening dress, which only reached as far as her thighs, or whatever Shubians called the part of their legs above their second kneecap.

  ‘You arranged for three men to kill me and steal my traveling safe last night,’ said Haddad.

  ‘I introduced a buyer of death and robbery to a seller of the same,’ said Lerrue. She had two voices that spoke together, one emanating from her mouth and one out of the orifices in the side of her head. The one from the mouth was that of a young human choirboy, pure, clear, and musical. The other voice was reedy and sounded almost mechanical.

  ‘I do not wish to have to kill more murderers and robbers,’ Haddad stated. This was true. Though he had been trained from birth to kill, he did not want to waste his skills on nondesignated targets. He existed as a weapon of the Emperor, and of his Prince. He thought of himself as an entirely different being from the ordinary killers of the galaxy.

  ‘Do you want others to undertake the killing for you?’ asked Lerrue, in that strange double voice.

  ‘I do not want anyone to even attempt to rob or murder me,’ said Haddad. ‘Including whoever paid for the first attempt.’

  ‘Understood,’ said Lerrue. ‘For how long should this state continue?’

  ‘Twelve weeks, local,’ replied Haddad. He didn’t need anything like that much time.

  Lerrue named a sum in one of the credit systems commonly used in this part of the Fringe. Haddad nodded, pulled a ring from his hand, and handed it over. The ring was of no value in itself, but had a sum of money encoded in it that could be drawn on a bank only two wormhole transits away.

  Lerrue scanned the ring and handed back a pile of plastic chips, likewise encoded with credit, in much smaller amounts. Haddad tried not to take them, but Lerrue pressed them on him.

  ‘I am Shubian,’ she said. ‘Exact money always. No exceptions.’

  ‘Fine,’ replied Haddad. He pretended to hesitate. The Shubian was part of his original plan. She could accelerate the process. ‘There is another item of business you may be able to help me with.’

  ‘Specify this business.’

  ‘I am a dealer in unusual and antique weapons,’ said Haddad. ‘While I have my regular stock, on this occasion I also have obtained a very rare and extremely desirable item, a dress dagger from the first solar fleet of the second pre-Imperial epoch. What would you charge to find a buyer for this item?’

  ‘Five percent of sale price,’ said Lerrue. ‘Standard commission. What is the price?’

  Haddad told her the price.

  Lerrue whistled through the holes in the side of her head.

  ‘No buyers here,’ she said. ‘You want me to spread the word?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Haddad.

  ‘Maybe get attention you don’t want,’ warned Lerrue. ‘Prince maybe. They like old-time Earth stuff.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Haddad.

  ‘Send battalion of mekbi drop troopers, you not see any profit,’ remarked Lerrue. ‘Me neither. We both be dead.’

  Haddad hesitated, again for show.

  ‘I just came from Sazekh Seven,’ he said. Sazekh Seven was the closest Imperial world. ‘Apparently two Princes, both collectors, compete to be the new planetary governor. I think that means neither one will let the other use force to take what I have.’

  This part was true, or mostly true. There would be no naval task force, no mekbi troopers. But if all went as expected, Haddad would not be the last Imperial Assassin to come to Thrukhaz.

  ‘I heard this,’ confirmed Lerrue. ‘It will be as you ask. I spread the word.’

  ‘Good,’ said Haddad. He bowed slightly, keeping his eyes on the Shubian and the bodyguard in the shadowed corner of the room, who he knew was there even though he couldn’t see her due to some kind of portable distortion field. But he had noted the absence of presence in a particular pattern, heard her breathing and done a surface Psitek scan of her mind. A human bodyguard, like the other visible employees of Lerrue. It was quite likely the fixer was the only Shubian in the entire sector, or even the quadrant.

  Haddad enjoyed the rest of the week. Though it was not something he had done before, he took to selling his goods like a Sad-Eye took to an undefended brain. Soon, he had sold all the stock he had brought with him, so he started buying as well, both from people who came to his booth in the busy courtyard of the caravansary and from booths or stores he encountered during his apparently random wanderings through the startown.

  The wanderings were not random. Haddad was watching for the opposing Prince’s Master of Assassins, or her apprentices, or for any sign they were using local people despite Lerrue’s aegis of protection.

  It took five days before the first one showed up. An apprentice, fairly junior, Haddad thought, and not sufficiently versed in narrow-cast Psitek interrogation. He felt her peering into the minds of other traders in the courtyard, seeking information about an antique dagger of immense worth. He was surprised that it was not an inquiry about a Pralganian trader. He had made it easy enough for them.

  When his turn came, he felt the intrusion into the compartment of his mind that he had created for his Pralganian identity, and the slight shock, carefully controlled, inside the questioner’s own mind when she ‘saw’ the dagger, the box, the safe, and his roo
m details all hidden there.

  As she withdrew her mental probe, Haddad followed it back into her own mind. Just like a tiny rivulet of water joining the rush of a greater stream, he moved past the Psitek defenses that were meant to stop just such a move, defenses that were not adequately supervised by the apprentice’s conscious mind.

  Haddad saw what he needed to and made a few small adjustments that caused the apprentice to turn and hurry away, knowing only that she had found what her Master had sent her to find. The whereabouts of the dagger.

  At least, Haddad was fairly sure that was all she knew. There was always the chance that he had been suckered in turn, fed a prepared apprentice with a mind compartmentalized like his own for just such an occasion. But he didn’t think so. It took quite some time to mentally prepare in this way, and everything about the plan was designed so that the opponents were reacting, rather than acting.

  So he believed that the apprentice was with a team of only six. But most important, one of those six was Visknim, Master of Assassins to Prince Xerkhan. Which meant the Prince was also almost certainly nearby somewhere, perhaps in orbit, with the remaining eight of Visknim’s apprentices. But significantly, no Master.

  The wasp had been drawn to the honeypot.

  They came that night, as Haddad had read in the apprentice’s mind. An orthodox approach, when the toxic fog was thickest and most still. Two had infiltrated earlier, taking rooms, and these two stunned the door and roof guards. Two then climbed the back wall of the caravansary. Another used a zero-G harness to land on the roof.

  Haddad tracked the five of them from their Psitek chatter, sparse as it was. But he couldn’t locate Visknim, the Master. Haddad had his own spy-specks in place all over the caravansary, but they showed only the apprentices, moving toward Room 125. Five assassins, not six, and everything depended on the Master also being part of the assault.

  The apprentices were converging. Haddad had to decide, to wait or move.

  He moved, cloaked with every artifice of his Psitek, a vision distorter superior to the one used by Lerrue’s bodyguard, and by sheer surprise. Dropping from the ceiling outside room 126, he killed the first two apprentices with his red-handled sting-gun as they opened the door to his room, confident till the very last millisecond that their own Psitek powers showed only a sleeping man in the room.

  It was not a sleeping Pralganian trader they had detected, but a Bitek auxiliary brain in a box inside the safe, asleep forever, grown solely for the purpose of deception.

  Dragging the bodies inside, Haddad shut the door and exited again through the hole in the wall to the storage closet, and from there into the corridor again.

  The other apprentices, and Visknim – wherever she was – would have caught the last, dying Psitek screams and final vision of the two, with the open door. They would think their enemy was inside, and would be more careful.

  At least they should have become more careful. The apprentice who had landed on the roof rushed down the ramp, thinking himself clear of the zone of action, still trusting to Psitek senses that showed no one lurking ahead. Haddad, waiting by the side of the ion curtain, simply stabbed him with an energy stick as he ran past. Straight into his head. He died so quickly there wasn’t even a Psitek squeal. Just a sudden absence.

  Three down. Two to go. And Master Visknim.

  Haddad took the zero-G harness, checked its power status, and put it on. Then he went to the roof and launched himself off, floating silently down until he was halfway to the ground, level with the second floor.

  The two remaining apprentices were shielding themselves properly now, their Psitek locked down. Haddad could not see them with his mind, but they had failed to take proper measures against all his spy-specks. He had strewn several varieties liberally across the ceilings and walls of the hotel, and most had survived the sloppy countermeasures employed by the intruders.

  Consequently, he knew they were crouched on the other side of the wall, probably in a narrow-band mental debate about what they were supposed to do now three of their colleagues were dead.

  Haddad cut their conversation short by tilting his hands back at the wrist to fire the single-shot energy lances that were mounted under his forearms. Two incredibly thin jets of energy, as hot as a sun, bored through the wall and very neatly through the heads of the apprentices, helmets and all.

  Even the decrepit Bitek hazard alarm on the ceiling nearby had to take note of this event, sniffing smoke and sensing ridiculously high temperatures. It shrieked, and its batch-mates, those still alive after a century of inattention, took up the chorus. Very few of the inhabitants knew the detectors were screaming ‘Fire’ in their original manufacturer’s language, but the tone was clear. The caravansary began to stir. People started to shout. Doors and even some windows began to open.

  Haddad dropped to the ground, ditched the zero-G harness, and reentered the building. He still couldn’t feel any mental hint of Master Visknim, and though there was plenty of activity being shown by the spy-specks, all the movement was by people getting out of the caravansary.

  Except for one person. She was going against the traffic, going deeper inside. The manager of the caravansary, heading toward room 125.

  Or was it the manager? Haddad noted that those of his spy-specks that communicated via Psitek were not functioning at all, and only one in six of the Mektek ones were beaming their images back to the screen inside his right eye. Those images showed a woman of the same height, build, general looks, and typical clothing of the manager, but the resolution was low.

  The woman stopped and tapped on the door of 125. Again, the audio was too degraded for Haddad to identify the voice as definitely that of the manager. She tapped again, then used a key.

  Haddad began to creep along the corridor, toward room 125. He stopped using his Psitek completely, depending on sight and hearing. If Master Visknim had assumed the identity of the woman, as seemed most likely, then everything would succeed or fail in the next few minutes.

  None of the alarms or defenses he had placed within his room announced their activation as he drew closer, which only confirmed that the person who had entered the room was not the manager, but a Master of Assassins.

  A Master who would have additional augmentation that Haddad did not, making her as fast as a Prince, perhaps even faster, though not as highly durable. An apprentice, even a senior one like Haddad, could not match a Master in straight head-to-head combat.

  Haddad sidled closer to the room. Visknim would know he was somewhere around, if she had not already located him. But her objective would be to take the dagger, not to kill a single apprentice.

  She was probably already leaving the caravansary with the weapon, Haddad thought. Visknim could have mentally commanded the mobile safe to open in a matter of seconds, then perhaps a minute to disable some of the interior traps, another minute to leave via the hole in the wall, probably pausing to throw some kind of timed explosive back …

  Haddad whirled around and sprinted away from the ill-fated room 125, turning the corner not quite fast enough to completely escape the sudden, ferocious blast of a micromatter conversion bomb. Thrown forward, he skated along the floor till he came to rest in a pile of debris near the front door.

  His red hair was smoldering, his back pricked all over with shrapnel damage, the blood already beginning to ooze. Haddad got to his feet, coming up with the red-handled sting-gun in his hand.

  He got off one dart before a narrow beam of dark energy drilled through his hand, entering near his index finger and exiting underneath his little finger. Haddad threw himself aside, spinning around to get a view of his target, who had to be above him, as his left sleeve vomited fake-out targets, small holoprojectors that filled the air with moving images of himself.

  Not that they would distract even an apprentice. It was just something to do, and even as Haddad twisted and turned, trying to get to the door, trying to get his blue-handled sting-gun in his left hand, he knew that the probabi
lity he wouldn’t survive the mission had surely hit 100 percent.

  If only that meant that the main mission had succeeded as well!

  Another beam of energy glanced across Haddad’s face, and half the world went dark as his right eye was blinded. He fired back in the general direction he thought the attack must have come from, full automatic, crystalline darts spraying up at the ceiling where Visknim would be scuttling like a spider, already gone from her last firing position.

  Then the sting-gun was empty, and Haddad felt something at his neck, on the right side where he could no longer see. It was very sharp, and cold, and he knew it at once. The antique dagger, perfectly positioned, impossible for him to defend against in the microsecond before Visknim pushed it home.

  But she didn’t. Instead, he felt her voice inside his head.

  :Are you relayed here?:

  ‘No,’ croaked Haddad. It was an operational decision that he would not use mindspeech on Thrukhaz. He was alone, without relaying priests anywhere in range, and he had no contact with the Imperial Mind.

  :Then know that Prince Xerkhan was assassinated ninety-four seconds ago:

  The knife left his neck. Visknim sighed audibly and clapped Haddad lightly on the shoulder.

  Her Prince was dead. When reborn, he would demand a new Master of Assassins. Haddad was an apprentice who had succeeded in his graduating mission. He too, would be serving a new Prince.

  For the time being, they were no longer antagonists. Just fellow priests of the Emperor in Hier Aspect of the Shadowed Blade.

  ‘I knew it had to be a diversion,’ said Visknim as they left the caravansary by the back door, pausing before the ion curtain to fit their breath masks. ‘But His Highness insisted he had to have the dagger, come what may, and that I must go and get it. I suppose it is authentic?’

  ‘Copy,’ said Haddad. ‘Made a thousand years ago, though. Valuable in itself.’

  ‘Should it go back to your Prince, I wonder? Your former Prince, I mean,’ mused Visknim.

  Haddad caught the mental whisper as she queried the Imperial Mind, and also received the reply, as relayed by the priests in the now-deceased Prince Xerkhan’s ship in high orbit above.