City of Miracles

1. Fallen Trees

The young man is first disdainful, then grudgingly polite as Rahul Khadse approaches and asks him for a cigarette. It’s clear that this is the young man’s break, his chance to relax away from his duties, alone in the alley behind the hotel, and he’s irritated to have his moment violated. It’s also clear that the young man’s duties must be something serious: one just has to glance at his dark, close-cut coat, his black boots, his sun-darkened skin, and his black headcloth to see he must be military, or police, or some enforcement arm of some authority. Perhaps a Saypuri authority, or perhaps Continental—but someone paid to watch and watch carefully, surely.

Yet the young man does not watch Rahul Khadse with much care, only polite contempt. And, indeed, why would he care about Khadse? Why would he care about this old man, with his smudged spectacles, his tattered briefcase, and his headcloth so musty and poorly arranged?

“All right,” says the young man, giving in. “Why not.”

Khadse bows a little. “Thank you, sir. Thank you.” He bows again, lower, as the young man complies with his request, reaching into his coat to fetch his tin of cigarettes.

The young man does not notice Khadse glancing into his coat, glimpsing the butt of the pistol holstered there. The young man doesn’t notice Khadse gently setting down his briefcase, or his right hand reaching back to his waist as he bows, slipping out the knife. Nor does he notice how Khadse steps very slightly forward as he accepts the cigarette.

He doesn’t notice, because he’s young. And the young are always oh so foolish.

The young man’s eyes spring wide as the knife smoothly enters the space between his fifth and sixth ribs on his left side, spearing his lung, tickling the membrane around his heart. Khadse dives forward as he stabs him, placing his left hand on the young man’s open mouth and shoving his head foreward, the back of the young man’s skull cracking against the brick wall of the alley with a dull thud.

The young man tries to struggle, and though he’s strong, this is a dance Rahul Khadse knows all too well. He steps to the right of the young man, hand still on the handle of the knife, his body turned away. Then he slides the knife out of the young man’s chest and steps away, neatly avoiding the spurt of blood as his victim collapses against the alley wall.

Khadse glances down the alley as the young man gags. It’s a rainy day here in Ahanashtan, foggy and dreary as it often is this time of year, and very few are out and about. No one notices this fusty old man in the alley behind the Golden Hotel, peering over his spectacles at the streets beyond.

The young man chokes. Coughs. Khadse sets down his knife, straddles him, grabs him by the face, and slams his head against the wall again and again, and again and again and again.

One must be sure of such things.

When the young man is still, Khadse pulls on a pair of brown gloves and carefully searches his pockets. Khadse tosses away the pistol after unloading it—he has, of course, brought his own—and rummages about until he finds what he needs: a hotel key, to Room 408.

It’s quite bloody. He has to wipe it off in the alley, along with his knife. But it will do just fine.

He pockets the key.

That was easy, thinks Khadse.

Yet now comes the tricky part. Or what his employer said would be the tricky part. Frankly, Khadse has a lot of trouble figuring out which orders from his employer he should worry about and which ones he should ignore. This is because Rahul Khadse’s current employer is, in his own estimation, absolutely, positively, stark fucking raving mad.

But then, he would have to be. Only a mad person would ever send a contractor like Khadse after one of the most controversial political figures of the modern era, a woman so esteemed and so notorious and so influential that everyone seems to be waiting on history to get around to judging her so they can figure out how to feel about her tenure as prime minister.

A person made of the stuff of legends. Both because she seemed to come from legends, and because it is public record that she, personally, has killed a few legends in her day.

Perhaps Khadse was mad to take the job. Or perhaps he wanted to see if he could do it. But either way, he means it to be done.

Rahul Khadse walks down the alley, glances around the Ahanashtani street, and then turns right and climbs the stairs of Ashara Komayd’s hotel.

The Golden Hotel remains one of the most lauded and celebrated places in Ahanashtan, a relic of an era when the nation of Saypur was free to intervene in Continental affairs as it wished, throwing up buildings and blockades and embargoes on a whim. Walking through the doors is like walking into the past, a place where all the imperial grandeur of the Saypur that Khadse used to know has been impeccably maintained, like a stuffed bird in a wildlife exhibit.

Khadse stops in the lobby, appearing to adjust his glasses. Marble floors and bronze fixtures and palms. He counts the bodies: the doorman, the host of the restaurant, the maid at the far corner, three girls at the counter. No guards. None like the one he just killed in the alley out back, at least. Khadse’s an old hand at this, and he and his team did their homework: he knows the guards’ schedules, their number, their stations. His team has been watching this place for weeks, arranging every step of this delicate ordeal. But now the final deed is Khadse’s alone.

He mounts the stairs, his dark coat dripping with moisture. It’s all going very smoothly so far. He tries not to think about his employer, the man’s mad messages, and his money. Usually Khadse would delight in thinking about the money on a job, but not this time.

Mostly because the money is unimaginable, even to Khadse, who’s very good at imagining lots of money and in fact spends much of his free time doing so. This isn’t the first job he’s done for his employer, but this payday is an order of magnitude larger than the last. Enough money to make a man worry.

But the wardrobe requests…that’s odd. Very odd indeed.

For when Khadse went to pick up the most recent installment of his payment, he found the money came with a folded black coat and a pair of black, well-polished shoes. Both came with strict instructions: he was to wear these articles of clothing whenever he performed his contracted duties, with absolutely no exceptions. The instructions suggested that if he did not do so, his very life would be in danger.

At the time, Khadse simply thought—All right. My new employer is mad. I’ve worked for madmen before. It’s not so bad. Yet then he tried them on, and found that both the coat and the shoes fit perfectly well—which was very strange, as Khadse had never met his new employer, let alone told him his shoe size.

He tries not to think about it as he climbs the stairs to the third floor. Tries not to think about how those articles of clothing—so neat, so dark, so perfect—are of course what he’s wearing right now. He tries not to think about how spectacularly strange all of this is, or about how his employer specifically requested Khadse go alone for this job, without his usual team in tow.

Khadse climbs to the third floor. Very close now.

I wouldn’t even be doing this damned job, he thinks, if it weren’t for Komayd. Which was fairly true: when Ashara Komayd came to be prime minister, oh, seventeen years ago or so, her first order of business had been clearing out all the hardliners from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Hardliners like Khadse, who saw a lot of action in those days, plenty of it very nasty.

He can still remember her memo, ringing with that self-important, priggish tone Komayd was always affecting: We must remember not only what we do, but how we do it. As such, the Ministry will be going through a period of reorganization and reorientation as we make adjustments for the future.

Ashara Komayd was cleaning house, cutting everyone recruited by her aunt, Vinya Komayd—and Khadse had always been a favorite of Vinya’s.

And suddenly, there he was. Cut loose in Ahanashtan after a decade of service, and promptly forgotten. He tried to find some pleasure when Komayd herself was booted from Parliament, what, thirteen years ago now? But politicians always have their parachutes. It’s the grunts like Khadse who have the harder landings. Even Komayd’s personal thug, that lumbering, one-eyed oaf of a Dreyling, even he’d gotten a plum retirement, some kind of royal position in the Dreyling Shores—though he’d also heard the fool had found some way to cock it all up.

I’d be doing this for free, Khadse thinks, seething. Twelve years of service, and then so long, Rahul, good-bye to you, good-bye to you and all you worked for, all you fought for, all you bled for, I’m off to spend the Ministry’s coffers on worthless idealism and leave the intelligence world a smoking crater behind me.

He walks down the fourth-floor hall. Another guard, a woman, young and trim and dressed in black, stands at attention at the corner. As Khadse expected.

Khadse shuffles toward the young guard, his face the very picture of doddering befuddlement, holding a smudged piece of paper with a name and a hotel room on it. “Pardon me, ma’am,” says Khadse, bowing low and emanating obsequiousness, “but…I seem to be on the wrong floor, perhaps?”

“You are,” says the guard. “This floor is off-limits, sir.”

“The fifth floor is off-limits?” says Khadse, surprised.

The guard almost rolls her eyes. “There is no fifth floor, sir.”

“Oh, no?” He stares around himself. “But what floor is…”

“This is the fourth floor, sir.”

“Oh. But this is the Golden Hotel, yes?”

“Yes. It is.”

“But I…Oh, dear.” Khadse drops the piece of paper, which flutters to the guard’s feet.

The guard, sighing, reaches down to pick it up.

She doesn’t see Khadse step lightly behind her. Doesn’t see him whip his knife out. Doesn’t have time to react as the steel bites into her jugular and severs it wide open.

The spray of blood is phenomenal. Khadse dances away from it, careful to avoid any spatter on his clothing—he reflects, very briefly, that avoiding bloodstains is one of his oddest but most valuable talents. The guard falls to her knees, gagging, and he dances forward and delivers a devastating side-kick to the back of her head.

The guard collapses to the ground, pouring blood. Again, Khadse puts down his valise and dons the brown gloves. He wipes and sheathes the knife, then searches her. He finds a hotel key—this one 402—grabs the guard by the ankles, and hauls her around the corner, out of view.

Quickly now. Quick, quick.

He presses his ear to the door of 402—they’re all suites up here—and, hearing nothing, opens it. He hauls her in and dumps her body behind the couch. Then he wipes off his brown gloves, pulls them off, and exits, delicately picking up his valise on the way.

He almost wants to whistle merrily as he steps over the bloodstains. Khadse always was good with a knife. He had to learn to be, after an operation in Jukoshtan when some Continental took objection to the way he was walking and tried his damnedest to slit Khadse’s throat. Khadse walked away from the experience with a lurid scar across his neck and a predilection for working close and dirty. Do to the Continentals, he used to say to his colleagues, as they would do to you.

He walks to Room 408—which is, as he expected, right beside the King Suite, where Ashara Komayd has set up her offices for the past month. Doing what, Khadse isn’t sure. The general word is that she’s managing some charity or other, something about locating orphans and finding homes for them.

But from what Khadse’s employer said, it’s a lot more than just that.

But then, thinks Khadse as he silently unlocks Room 408, the mad bastard also said this hotel was covered in defenses. He opens the door. But I don’t call two soft young eggs like those a very rigorous defense.

Again, Khadse tries not to think about the coat and shoes he’s currently wearing. Tries not to think about how his employer suggested that such articles of clothing would serve as tools against Komayd’s defenses—which, of course, would suggest that Komayd’s offices are covered in the sort of defenses Khadse cannot see.

That, he finds, is a very disturbing idea.

Horseshit, is what it is, he thinks, shutting the door behind him. Mere horseshit.

The hotel suite is empty, but its arrangement is deeply familiar to Khadse, from the weapons on the distant desk to the security reports on the bedside table. Here is where the guards prepare for their assignments, there is the telescope they use to watch the street from the balcony, and here is where they doze in between their shifts.

Khadse stalks over to the wall and presses his ear against it, listening hard. He’s almost positive Komayd’s over there, along with two of her guards. An unusual amount of security for a former prime minister, but then Komayd’s received more death threats than almost anyone alive.

He can hear the two guards. He hears them clear their throats, cough very slightly. But Komayd he doesn’t hear at all. Which is troubling.

She should be in there. She really should. He did his homework.

Thinking rapidly, Khadse silently pads over to the balcony. The doors have glass windows, veiled with thin white curtains. He sidles up to the windows and glances out sideways, at the balcony next door.

His eyes widen.

There she is.

There sits the woman herself. The woman descended from the Kaj, conqueror of the gods and the Continent, the woman who killed two Divinities herself nearly twenty years ago.

How small she is. How frail. Her hair is snow-white—prematurely so, surely—and she sits hunched in a small iron chair, watching the street below, a cup of tea steaming in her small hands. Khadse’s so struck by her smallness, her blandness, that he almost forgets his job.

That’s not right, he thinks, withdrawing. Not right for her to be outside, so exposed. Too dangerous.

His heart goes cold as he thinks. Komayd is still an operative at her heart, after all these years. And why would an operative watch the street? Why risk such exposure?

The answer is, of course, that Komayd is looking for something. A message, perhaps. And while Khadse could have no idea what that message would contain or when it might arrive, it could make Komayd move. And that would ruin everything.

Khadse whirls around, kneels, and opens his briefcase. Inside his briefcase is something very new, very dangerous, and very vile: an adapted version of an antipersonnel mine, one specifically engineered to direct all of its explosive force to one side. It’s also been augmented for this one job, since most antipersonnel mines might have difficulty penetrating a wall—but this one packs such a punch it should have no issues whatsoever.

Khadse takes the mine out and gently affixes it to the wall next to Ashara Komayd’s suite. He licks his lips as he goes through the activation procedure—three simple steps—and then sets the timer for four minutes. That should give him enough time to get to safety. But if anything goes wrong, he has another new toy as well: a radio override that can allow him to trigger the blast early, if he wants.

He dearly hopes he never needs to. Triggering it early might mean triggering it when he’s still too close. But one must be sure about such things.

He stands, glances out at Komayd one last time—he mutters, “So long, you damned bitch”—and slips out of the hotel room.

Down the hallway, past the bloodstains, then down the stairs. Down the stairs and through the lobby, where all the people are still going through their dull little motions, yawning as they page through the newspapers, snuffling through a hangover as they sip coffee or try to decide what they’ll do with their vacation day.

None of them notices Khadse. None of them notices as he trots across the lobby and out the door to the streets, where a light rain is falling.

This isn’t the first time Khadse’s worked such a job, so he really should be calm about such things. His heart shouldn’t be humming, shouldn’t be pattering. Yet it is.

Komayd. Finally. Finally, finally, finally.

He should walk away. Should walk south, or east. Yet he can’t resist. He walks north, north to the very street Komayd was watching. He wants to see her one last time, wants to enjoy his imminent victory.

The sun breaks free of the clouds as Khadse turns the corner. The street is mostly empty, as everyone’s gone to work at this hour. He keeps to the edges of the street, silently counting the seconds, keeping his distance from the Golden but allowing himself a slight glance to the side….

His eyes rove among the balconies. Then he spies her, sitting on the fourth-floor balcony. A wisp of steam from her tea is visible even from here.

He ducks into a doorway to watch her, his blood dancing with anticipation.

Here it comes. Here it comes.

Then Komayd sits up. She frowns.

Khadse frowns as well. She sees something.

He steps out of the doorway a little, peering out to see what she’s looking at.

Then he spies her: a young Continental girl is standing on the sidewalk, staring right up at Komayd’s balcony and violently gesturing to her. The girl is pale with an upturned nose, her hair crinkled and bushy. He’s never seen her before—which is bad. His team did their homework. They should know everyone who comes into contact with Komayd.

The gesture, though—three fingers, then two. Khadse doesn’t know the meaning of the numbers, but it’s clear what the gesture is: it’s a warning.

The girl glances around the street as she gestures to Komayd. As she does, her gaze falls on Khadse.

The girl freezes. She and Khadse lock eyes.

Her eyes are of a very, very curious color. They’re not quite blue, not quite gray, not quite green, nor brown….They’re of no color at all, it seems.

Khadse looks up at Komayd. Komayd, he sees, is looking right at him.

Komayd’s face twists up in disgust, and though it’s impossible—From this distance? And after so long?—he swears he can see that she recognizes him.

He sees Komayd’s mouth move, saying one word: “Khadse.”

“Shit,” says Khadse.

His right hand flies down to his pocket, where the radio trigger is hidden. He looks to the pale Continental girl, wondering if she’ll attack—but she’s gone. The sidewalk just down the road from him is totally empty. She’s nowhere to be found.

Khadse looks around, anxious, wondering if she’s about to assault him. He doesn’t see her anywhere.

Then he looks back up at Komayd—and sees the impossible has happened.

The pale Continental girl is now on the balcony with Komayd, helping her stand, trying to usher her away.

He stares at them, stupefied. How could the girl have moved so quickly? How could she have vanished from one place and suddenly reappeared across the street and four floors up? It’s impossible.

The girl kicks open the balcony doors and hauls Komayd through.

I’m blown, he thinks. They’re on the move.

Khadse’s hand is on the remote.

He’s much too close. He’s right across the street. But he’s blown.

Nothing more to do about it. One must be sure about such things.

Khadse hits the trigger.

The blast knocks him to the ground, showers him with debris, makes his ears ring and his eyes water. It’s like someone slapped him on either side of the head and kicked him in the stomach. He feels an ache on his right side and slowly realizes the detonation hurled him against the wall, only it happened too fast for him to understand.

The world swims around him. Khadse slowly sits up.

Everything is dim and distant. The world is full of muddled screams. The air hangs heavy with smoke and dust.

Blinking hard, Khadse looks at the Golden. The building’s top-right corner has been completely excised as if it were a tumor, a gaping, splintered, smoking hole right where Komayd’s balcony used to be. It looks as if the mine took out not only Komayd’s suite but also Room 408 and most of the rooms around it.

There’s no sign of Komayd, or the strange Continental girl. He suppresses the desire to step closer, to make sure the job is done. He just stares up at the damage, head cocked.

A Continental man—a baker of some kind, by his dress—stops him and frantically asks, “What happened? What happened?”

Khadse turns and walks away. He calmly walks south, through the streaming crowds, through the police and medical autos speeding down the streets, through the throngs of people gathering on the sidewalks, all looking north at the column of smoke streaming from the Golden.

He says not a word, does not a thing. All he does is walk. He barely even breathes.

He makes it to his safe house. He confirms the door hasn’t been tampered with, nor the windows, then unlocks the door and walks inside. He goes straight to the radio, turns it on, and stands there for the better part of three hours, listening.

He waits, and waits, until finally they begin reporting on the explosion. He keeps waiting until they finally announce it.

…just confirmed that Ashara Komayd, former prime minister of Saypur, was killed in the blast…

Khadse exhales slowly.

Then he slowly, slowly lowers himself to sit on the floor.

And then, to his own surprise, he begins laughing.

They approach the tree in the morning, while the mist still clings to the forest undergrowth, carrying axes and the two-man saw between them, tin helmets on their heads, their packs strapped to their backs. The tree is marked by a single blob of yellow paint that drips down its trunk. They survey the area, gauge where the tree should fall, and then, like surgeons before a delicate operation, they begin.

He looks up at the tree as the others scurry about. To convince this grand old thing to fall, he thinks, is like carving off a piece of time itself.

They begin the face cut with the two-man saw, he on one end and a partner on the other, ripping the saw back and forth, its curved teeth slashing through the soft white flesh, peels of wood speckling their hands and arms and boots. Once the bottom of the face cut is established, they chop at it with axes, swinging like pistons in an engine, down and in, down and in, hacking off huge chunks of wood.

They pause to wipe their brows and consider their work. “How does it look, Dreyling?” the foreman asks him.

Sigrud je Harkvaldsson pauses. He wishes they’d use the name he gave them—Bjorn—but they rarely do.

He kneels and lays his head sideways in the face cut, vaguely aware of the several tons of wood suspended directly above his skull. Then he squints, stands, waves to the left, and says, “Ten degrees east.”

“You sure, Dreyling?”

“Ten degrees east,” he says.

The other men glance at one another, smirking. Then they resume with this slight adjustment in the face cut.

Once the face cut is complete, they move to the opposite side of the tree and begin again with the two-man saw, slicing through the wood in agonizing strokes to grow close, but not too close, to the face cut.

When the man at the other end of the saw tires, Sigrud just waits, silently, for someone else to take up the other end. Then they resume sawing.

“I damnably do swear, Dreyling, are you an automaton?” says the foreman.

He says nothing as he saws.

“Were I to open up your chest, would I find naught but gears?”

He says nothing.

“I’ve had Dreylings on my teams before, and not a one of them could work a saw like you.”

Still nothing.

“Youth, perhaps,” the foreman muses. “To be as young as you, aye, that’s the ticket.”

Still Sigrud says nothing. Though this last statement troubles him deeply. For he is not a young man by any stretch of the imagination.

They pause periodically in their sawing, listening: listening for the deep, complaining cracks, like a shelf of ice collapsing. He is reminded of an argument, an old friend reluctantly coming round to your position: Perhaps you’re right, perhaps I should fall….Perhaps I should.

Then, finally, they hear it: a pop-pop-pop like massive harp strings snapping. The foreman screams, “She falls!” and they scatter away, tin helmets clapped to their heads.

The old, groaning giant tumbles over, branches snapping as it ploughs to the ground, sending up a great plume of soil. They creep back down to it as the dust settles. The pale circle of wood at the truncated end is bright and soft.

Sigrud looks at the stump for a moment—the only thing that will mark this tree’s decades of existence here—and notes its countless growth rings. How odd it is to think that such a colossus could be eradicated in a few hours by a handful of fools with axes and a saw.

“What are you staring at, Dreyling?” says the foreman. “Are you in love? Start buckling the damn thing, or I’ll scramble your brains even more than they already are!”

The other loggers chuckle as they straddle the fallen tree. He knows what they think of him: that he is slow, demented by some childhood accident. That must be, they whisper among themselves, why he never talks, never takes off his gloves, and why one of his eyes is never quite looking at anything, but rather just to the right; that must be why he never tires at the saw—surely his faculties must not register that he is fatigued. No normal person could silently withstand such punishment.

He does not mind their chatter. Better to think less of him than too much. Too much attention draws eyes.

He raises his ax, brings it down, and shears a branch off of the trunk. Thirteen years moving from little job to little job. He does not relish the idea of moving yet again, nor does he wish to alert any authorities to his presence. So he stays quiet.

He focuses on thinking the same question to himself, over and over again: Will she send for me today? Will today be the day she tells me to come alive again?

The logging crew bags their quota, so they’re all in high spirits come nightfall when they start the journey back to the logging camp, the campfires visible from halfway up the mountain. They make their way down through clear-cut forests, stark wastelands pockmarked with sullen stumps, their tool cart clinking and clanking over the bumps. They hurry as they grow near. Their logging range is not too far outside of Bulikov, so the sack wine is decent even if the food is abominable.

But as they near the camp, the air is not filled with the usual shouts and songs and raucous cries, celebrating the survival of another day stuck to the handle of an ax. The few loggers they see are clumped together like visitors at a funeral, sharing whispered words.

“What in all the hells is the matter tonight? Ahoy, Pavlik!” says the foreman, calling to a passing logger with a drooping mustache. “What’s the news? Another casualty?”

Pavlik shakes his head, his mustache swinging like the pendulum of a long-case clock. “No, not a casualty. Not a casualty here, at least.”

“What do you mean?”

“News came of an assassination in Ahanashtan. There’s talk of war. Again.”

The loggers glance at one another, unsure how seriously to take this.

“Pah,” says their foreman. He spits on the ground. “Another assassination….They say such things so gravely, as if the life of some diplomat were worth so much. But at the end of the day they’ll all back down again, just you wait.”

“Oh, I’d agree, if it were just some diplomat,” says Pavlik. “But it wasn’t. It was Komayd.”

A silence falls over the crew.

Then a low voice speaks: “Komayd? Komayd who…who did what?”

The logging crew parts to look at Sigrud, standing up straight by the cart. But they notice that his glance seems much brighter and clearer than they recall, and he stands straighter and taller than before—very tall, in fact, as if he’s unpacked three more inches from somewhere in his spine.

“What do you mean, Komayd who did what?” says Pavlik. “Who died, of course.”

Sigrud stares at the man. “Died? She was…She is dead?”

“Her and a bunch of other people. News came through the telegraphs just this morning. They blew her up along with half of a fancy hotel in downtown Ahanashtan, six days ago, lots of people ki—”

Sigrud steps closer to the man. “Then how are they sure? How are they sure she is dead? Do they really know?”

Pavlik hesitates as Sigrud nears, until the big Dreyling is looming over him like the firs they fell each day. “Well, uh…Well, they found the body, of course! Or what was left of it. They’re planning a big funeral and everything, it’s all over the papers!”

“Why Komayd?” says someone. “She was prime minister over ten damned years ago. Why kill someone out of office?”

“How should I know?” says Pavlik. “Maybe old grudges die hard. She pissed off nearly everyone when she was in office; they’re saying the list of suspects goes twice around the block.”

Sigrud slowly turns back to look at Pavlik. “So they do not know,” he says quietly, “who…did this to her?”

“If they know, they aren’t saying,” says Pavlik.

Sigrud falls silent, and the look of shock and horror on his face gives way to something different: grim resolution, perhaps, as if he’s just made a decision he’s been putting off for far too long.

“Enough of this,” says the foreman. “Dreyling, quit your damn foolery and help us unpack the cart.”

The other loggers scurry into action, but Sigrud remains still.

“Bjorn?” says the foreman. “Bjorn! Damn you, get your ass into gear!”

“No,” he says softly.

“What? No? No to what?”

“No to this,” says Sigrud. “I am not this, not anymore.”

The foreman strides over to him and grabs his arm. “You’ll be whatever I damned well say you a—”

Sigrud turns, and suddenly the foreman’s head snaps back sharply. Then Sigrud twists him, turns him, and slams the man down on the ground. The foreman lies on the ground clawing at his neck, choking and coughing, and it takes the other loggers a moment to realize the Dreyling struck him in the windpipe, a single, quick blow that was so fast the eye could hardly perceive it.

Sigrud walks to the cart, grabs an ax, and walks back to the sprawling foreman. He holds the ax out with one hand until the tip of its blade hovers before the foreman’s nose. The foreman stops coughing and stares at it, eyes wide.

The ax hangs in place for a long time. Then Sigrud seems to deflate a little, shoulders slumping. He tosses the ax away and strides into the night.

He packs up his tent and belongings before they gather enough sense to come after him. He makes one final stop on the way out of camp, filching a spade from the camp’s wares. He can already hear his foreman’s shouts echoing over the campfires, his voice crackling like wax paper: “Where is the bastard? Where is the bastard?”

He sprints across the clear-cut fields to the lower forests, a scarred moonscape of ravaged trees, pale and gray in the bright moonlight. He slows down only when he falls into the shadows of the firs. He knows these grounds, knows this terrain. He knows how to fight in these conditions far more than the loggers do.

He stops briefly at the top of a gully, boots perched on a coiled root. His heart is hammering. Everything feels faint and distant and horribly wrong.

Dead. Dead.

He shakes himself, trying to compartmentalize it. He feels tears on his cheeks and shakes himself again.

She can’t be dead. She simply can’t be.

He cocks his head and listens: the loggers aren’t following him, or at least not yet.

He looks up at the moon and gauges his location. He skulks through the forest, all the old tradecraft returning to him: his toes find soft needles rather than brittle, snapping twigs; he keeps to highways of crisscrossing shadows, mindful of any glinting metals on his person; and when the wind rises, which it rarely does, he is careful to sniff the air, searching for any foreign scents that might betray a pursuer.

He spies scarred trees, amputated branches—landmarks he left behind to guide him back to what he left here. To lead him back to the man he buried, or tried to.

He comes to one leaning, dead pine tree, a long, sloping scar on its face. He sets down his pack and starts to dig. He’s in shock, he can tell, and he digs faster than he means to, using up precious energy that he should be saving. Still he digs.

Finally the tip of his spade makes a quiet clunk. He kneels and scrapes the rest of the soil away. Inside the hole is a leather-wrapped box, about a foot and a half wide and a half a foot deep. He pulls it out, hands trembling, and tries to unwrap the leather, but his ax gloves are too unwieldy. Glancing over his shoulder, he removes them.

The bright, shining scar on his left hand seems to glow in the moonlight. He winces at the sight of the scar, which almost has the look of a brand, a sigil seared into his flesh, representing two hands, waiting to weigh and judge. It’s been months since he’s seen it, since he’s revealed it to the waking world. An odd thing, it suddenly seems, to conceal a part of one’s own body for days on end.

He unwraps the leather. The box is dark wood, its clasp still bright and clean. He’s moved this package several times, whenever he had to move to a new job, but never opened it.

The trembling in his hands grows as he unclasps the box and lifts the lid.

Inside the box are many things, any one of which would cause his fellow loggers’ eyes to pop clean out of their heads—most notably, probably, the seven thousand drekel marks wrapped into tight little bands, probably three times what a logger makes in a year. These he goes about stuffing into various hidden places in his clothing: the cuffs of his shirt, his coat, his pants, the false bottom of his pack that he personally stitched into place.

Next he tends to the seven different POTs wrapped in wax paper: papers of transportation, allowing the holder free passage throughout the Continent and Saypur. He unwraps them, shuffling through the names and identities—all Dreyling, of course, as he can’t exactly hide his race, though he has shaved his head and beard in an effort to distance himself from his old life—not to mention purchasing a false eye. Wiborg, he thinks as he rifles through them, Micalesen, Bente, Jenssen…Which one of you is compromised? Which one of you will they watch for, after all these years?

He wonders briefly why he’s doing this, what his next step is. But it is easier to just keep moving forward, hurtling through the motions like a stone rolling down a hill.

Beside the POTs is a bolt-shot pistol: a small, crossbow-like device that falls well short of a true weapon of war, but should be capable of a single silent, lethal shot, provided it has held up in the months underground. The next item at first appears to be a bundle of lambskin, but as he slowly unwraps it, it proves to be an old, well-cared-for knife in a black leather scabbard. He carefully folds the lambskin and stores it away—one never knows what one might need—and pulls the knife out of its scabbard.

The blade is as black as oil. It has a wicked sheen to it, the glint of metal that has tasted a great deal of blood.

Damsleth bone, he thinks. He holds up a pine needle and swats at it with the knife, using the barest amount of force; the needle parts cleanly, splitting in half. Retains its edge, he thinks, for decades and decades.

Though now, he knows, all the damsleth whales are surely gone: some due to whaling, which he himself pursued as a young man, and others either moved away or perished from the changing climate, the cooler waters killing off or dispersing all their food sources. He’s never seen another damsleth weapon besides his own, nor has he ever heard of one still in existence.

He sheathes the knife and buckles it to his right thigh. The motion comes back to him in an instant, and it brings with it all the memories of those days in the field, waging silent, shadowy warfare against countless enemies.

And memories of her, the woman who was always by his side for all of it.

“Shara,” he whispers.

They were closer than lovers—for love, of course, is a flighty, mercurial thing. They were comrades, fellow soldiers whose literal survival depended on one another, from the moment she dug him out of that miserable little jail cell in Slondheim to the days of reconstruction after the Battle of Bulikov.

He wilts a little, crumpling over at the edge of the hole.

I can’t believe it. I simply can’t believe it.

Sigrud had always felt that, despite his long years in fugitive exile, Ashara Komayd—or just “Shara” to her friends—would reach out to him one day; that she’d somehow ferret him out amidst all the lowlifes and roustabouts he worked alongside, and he would receive some secret message, some letter or a postcard, maybe, saying she’d done her work and cleared his name, and he could come back to her, he could go back to work on one last operation, or perhaps return to his home.

It was a romantic idea. One she herself often warned against. He remembers her sitting at a window in a checkpoint outside Jukoshtan—thirty years ago, probably, working a dull assignment—blowing steam off her teacup and saying softly: We are neither of us essential, you and I. To what we do, who we work for…She turned to look at him, her dark eyes wide yet hard.…Or to each other. If I am forced to choose between you or the operation, I will choose the operation—and I expect you to do the same for me. Our work asks us to make terrible choices. But make them we shall.

He smirked then, for at the time he’d always thought as such, resigned to brutal pragmatism; but as the years went by he found himself softened, perhaps by her.

He looks at the moonlight reflected in the black blade. Now what am I waiting for? Whose call do I wait for now?

He returns to the box. Hesitates.

I do not wish to see this, he thinks miserably. Not this.

But he knows he must.

He pulls out the last remaining artifact: a cutting from a newspaper, brown with age. It is a photograph, depicting a young woman standing on the deck of a ship, looking at the photographer with a mixture of amusement and measured disdain. Though the photograph is in black and white, it’s clear the woman’s hair is bright blond, and her eyes a pale blue behind the strange pair of glasses fixed on her nose. On her breast is a company crest with the letters “SDC.”

The caption reads: SIGNE HARKVALDSSON, NEWLY APPOINTED CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER OF THE SOUTHERN DREYLING COMPANY.

His one eye grows wide as Sigrud takes in the face of his daughter, rendered in the crude stippling of newspaper print.

He remembers the way she looked when he last saw her, thirteen years ago: cold and pale and still, her face frozen in a look of slight dissatisfaction, as if the exit wound in her chest were a source of only minor discomfort.

He remembers her. Her, and what he did to the soldiers afterward in a fit of wild rage.

I was not there to save you, he says to the photograph. I was not there to save Shara. I was never there for any of it.

He stows the newspaper clipping away in his pocket, then gives the pocket a reassuring pat, as if ushering the memory back to sleep.

He grips his knife in his other hand. His grip is tight, his knuckles a bright white.

Sigrud lunges forward and stabs the dead pine, his knife sinking in almost to the hilt. A sob nearly escapes his mouth, but he retains the sense to strangle it before it can give away his position.

Wretched is the creature, he thinks, that is not even allowed to weep!

He flexes his entire body, trying to push the knife in deeper and deeper, his fingers crying out in pain. Then he relents and hangs there, gripping the tree, breathing deep.

His instincts take over. It was bad, what you did back there in the camp, he tells himself. Cover blown. Again. What a stupid creature he is, driven by rage and emotion.

Focus. Nothing to do but move on. Move on and keep moving.

He pulls his knife out, sheathes it, and picks up his pack. Then he starts up the hill into the darkness.

Hours of silent stalking, of careful movement through the midnight darkness of the deep forest. When the trees break he looks up, measures the stars, adjusts his course, and moves on.

Somewhere close to daybreak he remembers.

It was in Jukoshtan, he thinks, back in 1712. Someone in the Ministry had been blown and blown quite badly, all of their assets and networks thoroughly compromised by Continental agents, and no one could gauge just how bad it was.

He and Shara were forced to part, for the Ministry suspected a mole within their ranks—and Sigrud, as a foreigner, was high on the list of suspects. I’ve made all your arrangements for transportation out of the city, Shara told him on the last day together during that rocky stretch, and from there on out you’ll be left to your own devices. Which I think should be quite sufficient.

He grunted.

I’ll go back and tell them it wasn’t you, Sigrud, she said. I’ll go back and tell them everything they want to know. I don’t know if they’ll listen, but I’ll try. And I’ll find you and reach out to you the second everything’s clear.

He listened to this coldly, for he assumed she thought of him as little more than a tool in her armory. And if that does not work, he said, and if they lock you up or cut you down?

Then a rare gleam of passion flared in her eyes. If that happens…Then, Sigrud, I want you to walk away. I want you to run away from all of this, run away from this life and go live your own. Go find your family if you can, go start all over again if you wish, but just…Go. You’ve paid enough, you’ve done enough. Forget about me and just go.

This surprised him. They had spent so much time together, two lonely people waging a solitary, lonely war, and he assumed she never thought about a life beyond tradecraft—especially for him, her grim enforcer, the one down in the weeds with a knife clutched in his teeth. Yet she was not content to let him go on being her thug.

She cared for you even then, he thinks, standing still in the darkness. She wanted you to be something better.

He looks down at his hands. Rough and scarred and filthy. Most of those scars came not from lumber work, but from nasty, brutal battles in the dark.

He thinks of Shara. His daughter. His family. All of them lost, all of them separated or dead.

He stares at his scarred hands. What an ugly thing I am, he thinks. Why did I ever believe I could wreak anything but ugliness in this world? Why did I ever think that those near me would meet anything but pain and death?

He stands alone in the forest, then looks up at the pale moon above.

What else is there to be? What else is there to do?

He bows his head, and knows what is left.

The fawn is easily tracked, easily caught, easily killed with a single bolt from his bolt-shot. Sigrud was not sure his hunting skills would hold up, but these deer are truly wild creatures up here in the Tarsils, unaware of men or their tricks and traps.

He carries it over his shoulder to the hilltop. He will not eat this creature, for to eat it would be to make use of it. The point of this ritual—one he has not performed himself in over forty years—is desecration and violation, the creation of a terrible wrong.

In the dawning light Sigrud strips to the waist. Then he carefully beheads the fawn, disembowels it, and props its carcass upright so that it appears to be pleading to the sky, begging the heavens for…something. Perhaps mercy, perhaps vengeance. His hands are strong and ruthless, breaking open the delicate bones, tearing the tendons, the ligaments. He places the fawn’s organs in a pile before its open body cavity with its tiny, beautiful heart on the top.

Then he places twigs and sticks around the organs and body. He lights the kindling with a match and watches as flames slowly crawl across the bloodstained earth around the grotesque scene, the heat scorching the bloody hide of the once-beautiful, fragile creature.

He thinks back to when he last did this, when his father was murdered. The Oath of Ashes. Do they even know such a thing in the Dreyling Shores anymore? Or am I such a relic of the cruel, ancient days that only I remember?

The flames begin to die as the sun dawns. The remnants of the fawn are black, twisted fragments. Sigrud leans forward and pierces the moist, hot soil with his fingertips. He takes a clump of the earth there, soaked with blood and hot with cinder, and smears it on his face, on his chest, on his shoulders and arms.

A desecration has been done, he thinks. And I am touched by it.

Then he reaches into what’s left of the pile of organs and plucks out the charred remains of the fawn’s heart. He holds it in his hands, brushing off the ash. It queerly reminds him of the feeling of a child’s hand in his palm.

Weeping, he takes a bite of the fawn’s heart.

And I shall do more desecrations yet, he thinks. Until justice is done, or I am spent.