Nightwatch on the Hinterlands

CHAPTER ONE

The scream sneaked into a gap between a barful of shouted intimate conversations and the Kreeshan Blue cover band. Iari almost missed it. Thought she imagined it. Voidspit band with its two stringy alwar-sibs, guess that by their matching noses, howling like they were on fire-and a wild-haired tenju wrestling with an auto-harp. The auto-harp appeared to be winning. It was a big harp.

Then she heard it again. Or thought she did. Or her ears were ringing. She pitched forward onto her elbows and aimed her voice across the table. “You hear screaming?”

Gaer snorted. Long nostrils clamped almost shut, accompanied by a gusty blast of vakari disapproval that Iari couldn’t hear. “They are terrible,” he said, eyes stabbing the alwar. “But he’s got talent. The tusky one.”

“Not a joke.” Iari shoved her chair back, shoved herself halfway to standing. She strained neck and shoulders to catch an eyeful of the door, which was open to the street-to the alley, really-spilling watery yellow light (not unlike the beer) onto waterslick black pavement. One of the bouncers was frowning, staring into the night, with her head tilted, like, yes, she’d heard something.

Not that she’d stuck a toe out to investigate, though, and why would she? Not her job, to go stomping around B-town at night looking for trouble.

Technically it was not Iari’s job, either. B-town had (civilian) peacekeepers to handle local disturbances. A templar handled Aedian business, Confederate business. And Iari was off duty, in any case. This was time she should’ve been up in her room, out of the armor, reading, petting a cat (Tinycat, Tatter, maybe Ghost if he’d bothered to stay in). No, here she was, drinking good beer and listening to bad music with the Five Tribes ambassador while someone had an emergency.

Iari took one last, regretful swallow of the former and heaved herself fully vertical. Now she drew attention, less for her height and breadth-big, but not outside normal parameters for a tenju-than for the templar armor. This wasn’t a real battle-rig, was barely armor at all: no shield, no helmet, no gauntlets, no slagging axe.

Iari looked down at Gaer. Only time she could, when he was sitting; vakari were tall. The pigmentation on his cheeks shimmered in the dim overhead lights, bands of happy cerulean against the charcoal dark of his hide. The optic clamped to the bone-and-scale ridges over his left eye caught the light just so and flared an opaque, defiant cyan.

Gaer’s jaw-plates flared. Flattened. “You’re going to investigate.”

“Yeah. You can stay here.”

His gaze flickered around the pub, gathering up the stares, gauging the attitudes. Reading auras, if she knew him, which she did. He clenched a smile at her.

“Setat. No, I can’t.” His rise was a more graceful unfolding, vakari legs made longer with that extra central joint.

Heads turned.

Truth was, she’d worn the uniform tonight for this reason (besides feeling naked without it). She was one templar, sure, barely armored at all; but the Aedian crest on the chestplate made people-eh, not think, maybe, but at least stop before they did something stupid. It’d been a generation since the Accords with the vakari Protectorate, and anyway, Gaer was Five Tribes, from the friendly side of the vakari front. There shouldn’t be trouble at all, and he shouldn’t need her, or any templar, playing escort.

But truth, come on, he was one vakar on a tenju seedworld in the galactic hinterlands. Might as well float a holo-target over his head, walk around saying express your prejudice here.

Iari put her hand on her own jacta-to make sure no one else grabbed it, because no way she’d fire a weapon in here-and broke a trail through the bar. Another advantage of that armor: people moved for her, too. Expressions shifted: curiosity for a templar (where was she going?), devolving into a twist of distaste for Gaer (oh Elements, is that a vakar? Really?). A little fear, for her or for Gaer (maybe both). At least one wet-eyed admirer of the Aedis.

And then out, finally, past the bouncer, into a late autumn night wet with late autumn rain.

She couldn’t hear any screaming now. Just the gush of full gutters, and the soundbleed out of the club following them into the puddles.

Gaer tilted his head one way, then the other. Rain beaded on the long ridges running from his jawline along the length of his skull. Vakari ears were somewhere under that bone.

“You know, if you wanted to leave, you could’ve just said.”

“Told you, I heard something.”

She kicked into a jog. Slipped in a slick of Ptah-knew-what at the corner, caught herself in the next stride. It was all empty streets out here, but a few streets away, there was a glow on the low-slung clouds that didn’t look like streetlamp teslas. Looked almost looked like the flicker of a housefire, but the color was wrong. Fire was orange. This . . . was white. Blue. Looked cold, but Iari knew better.

Ptah had many facets, all of the Elements did. The fire that warmed also burned; the plasma that powered the voidships and made the stars could also liquefy metal and sublimate flesh. And when you took that plasma and bound it with arithmantic hexes and shoved it into a weapon, you got whitefire, which didn’t stop for rain or void, burned blue, and was entirely illegal except for templars and Confederate troops and very special permits.

The size of the glow and the brightness (and experience with both) told Iari its origin was maybe a block ahead, sharp right at the corner, and they were rapidly covering that distance. Probably where the screams had come from. No. Definitely.

Gaer pulled up beside her, those long vakari legs finding a path over puddles. “That’s whitefire.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“There are peacekeepers to handle this.”

“People down here don’t always call. PKs won’t always answer. You’re armed, right?” She knew he was. Treaty-legal monofil and sidearm jacta fully visible, where treaty said they should be. Arithmancy, less visible, more dangerous.

“Sss.”

“Take that as yes. Stay behind me.”

Iari wished for her shield and her helmet and her axe, and then charged the rest of the way up the street: into the acrid breeze and the whitefire glow.

No one was shooting now. Someone had been, with a whitefire projectile; there were hotspots on the walls where stone still glowed. Big holes. Big weapon. This was an old part of the city, where they used Chaama’s bones for building. Everything since the Accords was plascrete and polysteel, hexed against arson and accident.

Hexes might not stop whitefire. Not much did.

A single lump of something burned in the street. Pavement had softened around it, cupping what appeared to be part of an . . . arm, maybe. A very small arm.

It was hard to see much detail in full night, without moons or stars or much more illumination than the tesla street lights. Gaer would see more, with that optic. Gaer would see, oh, all manner of things with it. Hexes. Glyphs. Maybe an aura, if the arm hadn’t been too long detached.

What she could see was a conspicuously empty street, and doors conspicuously shut. Every window shuttered. It was that kind of neighborhood.

One exception: the house right there, that had no door. Windows smashed out. Most of the front wall spilled into the street where whatever had done for the front door had taken part of the building with it. Probably the origin of the arm.

“We are very much being observed,” Gaer said calmly, clearly. “Every setatir window.”

“Copy that.” Iari dragged her handcomm from its pouch behind her chestplate. A battle-rig kept its comms in the helmet. Blessed Four, she looked like a civ making a call, except her handcomm linked straight to Dispatch with a murmured command.

“Dispatch, got a situation. One person down, presumed dead in Midtown. Looks like there might be a whitefire weapon involved. I’m on site with the Five Tribes ambassador. Please advise. Over.”

Dispatch said nothing. Iari guessed the comms were out again. The quantum hexes had been skiffy since the Weep, some explanation involving dimensional rifts and dense arithmantic theory. Knight-Marshal Tobin had a report, scrolled thick as Iari’s forearm, about why long-range comms couldn’t be trusted. He used it to prop his window open on nice days for a breeze. Said he might hear his templars calling for backup that way. Truth was, comms usually did fine over short distances unless there was Brood around.

Which there were not, in the middle of B-town. Not if there was anyone left alive in the neighborhood.

Gaer made one of those little hisses and pointed at a wedge of fallen wall. “Your screamer’s back there, I think. Down to heavy breathing. You could go coax them out.”

Oh, ungentle Ptah. Almost her whole life spent in the Aedis, first as war-orphan, then templar. What hadn’t been either of those had been spent in the army. She wasn’t good with civilians. Wasn’t good with panic.

Or people, Gaer would have said. She flicked a glance at him, where he squatted beside the corpse and made long-fingered gestures that were probably arithmancy and might be just show for the watchers in the windows. He was an ambassador. He could talk down a panicky civ.

Or make it worse, being a vakar.

Iari hung the jacta back on her hip-scared civs were afraid of weapons, right? right-and pitched her voice toward the tumbled wall.

“Hey. You, hiding back there. You hurt?”

She waited a beat, then went around the edge of the wall, left forearm raised as if she had a shield gauntlet ready to deploy. The person back there might have a rock, a stick, something.

The person had none of those things. Did have a pair of wide eyes, moon round and moon pale, match to the nimbus of wispy hair fluffing off a very small, round head.

Elements defend. A wichu. In this neighborhood.

“My name’s Lieutenant Iari. I’m a templar.” That should be slagging obvious, with the chestplate, but panic made people stupid.

The wichu blinked. Kinda unnerving, the whole monochromatic eyeball thing. Impossible to tell where the attention was.

“Lieutenant,” the wichu-she? he? maybe one of the other genders-said in unaccented Comspek. Hoarsely. They, she, he, whatever, pushed carefully upright, using what remained of the wall for balance. “No, no. I’m not hurt.”

“You have a name?”

“Yinal’i’ljat.”

Two glottal stops: that meant a female. “You want to say what happened? Did you see who did this?”

Gaer made a noise from behind her. One of those gravel-click-in-the-throat vakari laughs. Meant the opposite of funny, and also that Gaer had thought of a cleverness he really wanted to say out loud, and would not, being a diplomat. The wichu stared at Iari like drowning people cling to shipwrecks. “I-there was a riev. I came to see my cousin, Pinjat, and there was a riev inside, and it killed him. Then it ran out, and I thought it was going to kill me, but it didn’t. People were screaming and running and I just hid.”

“A riev?”

Leave off the obvious objection: riev didn’t kill wichu. If Pinjat had been a Protectorate vakar thirty years ago, okay, maybe; but the wichu had artificed the riev to be shock troops for the Confederation. There were safeguards, both hexed and hardwired, that made riev as reliable as sunrise (more reliable, in systems too close to the Weep). They didn’t just go . . . doing this. Any of it.

Yinal’i’ljat sniffed. “You don’t believe me.”

“Didn’t say that.”

“But you don’t.”

“Not my job, rendering judgment.” Not her job, playing local PK, either. Murders were out of her jurisdiction. Templars belonged to the Aedis, and the Aedis defended the Confederation against its enemies, external or internal or interdimensional. Since the Accords, when the Protectorate vakari took themselves off that list, the Aedis only worried about Brood surges.

Riev murders, though, were impossible. That might just qualify as templar jurisdiction.

Iari prodded her handcomm. This time it clicked, very faintly. She felt the hexes try to engage, felt them fizzle.

Knight-Marshal Tobin would say, use your judgment, Lieutenant. He would mean, Damn right, get involved.

“Yinal’i’ljat.” Her tongue tripped only a little bit. “Any idea why a riev would go after your cousin?”

The wichu pinched a smile. Tiny little pearls for teeth. “My cousin is-was-an artificer during the Expansion, Lieutenant.”

A lot of wichu had been. That was no revelation.

“He worked on riev maintenance.”

Ah. Well.

“That’s why the riev came to him. They have, you know, problems sometimes. Need repairs.”

“You also an artificer?”

“Me? No. I’m a linguist. I’m visiting from Windscar.”

“That’s a long way for a visit.” Not inexpensive, either: a half-day by aethership. “Fond of your cousin?”

“I am. I was.” The wichu clasped her hands together, stiff-armed, and stared down at them. She might’ve sniffled.

Oh, ungentle Ptah.

“Did you see what happened?”

“Not exactly. I was coming down the street. I heard noises coming from the house, so I started running, and then there was this flash-“

“What kind of noises?”

“Ah.” Yinal’i’ljat blinked. It was like watching two moons go through a sudden, simultaneous eclipse. “Banging. Crashing. Then I saw the riev run out of the house. It dropped something, and-” She was ramping up again. Mouth working. Eyes all moist and panicky. “I saw it was an arm and-“

“All right.” Iari made what she hoped was a calm-down gesture. She could hear Gaer approaching. Deliberate boot-scuff, so she could track him.

She saw the glint of his optic reflected in the wichu’s eyes. “Lieutenant. The arm belonged to a wichu.”

Yinal’i’ljat made a tiny sound, like she had no air left in her lungs. Another small sound, this one an inhale. Her eyes got even wider, which Iari wouldn’t have guessed was possible. “That’s a vakar.”

Iari grimaced. “Ambassador Gaer i’vakat’i Tarsik. This is-“

“Yinal’i’ljat. Yes. I heard.” Gaer bowed, very slightly, and bared a smile. Vakari teeth were etched and dyed with tribe, mothers, local district. Gaer’s dye was blue, ranging from cerulean to cyan and all of it black in this light. He’d tried to teach her to read the code once. Lost her at the incisors.

Yinal’i’ljat appeared to be fascinated. Wide-eyed, anyway, though that might be her standard expression.

“Ambassador,” she said, and followed his name with a stream of chopped-up Sisstish syllables that sounded a lot like her cousin’s house looked.

Yinal’i’ljat had said she was a linguist. Right.

US