City of Miracles

4. Don’t You Know There’s a War Going On

Sigrud can tell when Khadse awakes. The man’s breathing fluctuates, very slightly. A minute later he swallows, snorts.

Sigrud, sitting on the filthy floor, finishes stitching up the tremendous slash Khadse put in his arm. He sets the needle and thread back on the rickety wooden table, then grins at Khadse. “Good morning,” he says.

Khadse moans. Sigrud can’t blame him. He has the man stripped to the waist and hanging from a meat hook in the ceiling, and he beat Khadse so thoroughly that the man’s face swelled up grotesquely, his cheeks and brow bulging, his lip split open, and his chin dark with blood.

Khadse snuffles for a bit. Then he does what Sigrud expected: he starts screaming. Loud. He howls and howls, screaming for help, screaming for someone to come and save him, that he’s been locked up in here by a madman, and so on, and so on….Sigrud grimaces at the sound, wincing as Khadse sucks in breath to scream louder, until the screams finally subside.

Silence. Nothing.

Khadse glares at him, breathing hard. “It was worth a shot.”

“I suppose,” says Sigrud. “You knew I would put you somewhere far from prying eyes. And ears.”

“It was still worth a shot.”

“If you say so.”

Khadse glances around. They’re in a long, thin room, almost as dark and decrepit as the coal warehouse. A track of hooks hangs from the ceiling, and the concrete walls and floor bear dark stains of old blood. Sigrud’s hung oil lamps from a few of the hooks in the room, casting a dull orange light over everything.

“Slaughterhouse, eh?” Khadse snorts, coughs, and spits out a mouthful of blood. “Cute. So I’m still on the waterfront. Probably in the same neighborhood as the warehouse….Maybe someone could come calling.”

“Maybe,” says Sigrud. Though he’s already prepared the site against any intruders. He holds up Khadse’s coat. “What is this?”

“A coat,” says Khadse.

Sigrud gives him a flat stare.

“How the hells should I know?” says Khadse. “I didn’t know it could stop bullets. If I had known that, I would’ve had a lot more fun.”

Sigrud rips the lining out of Khadse’s coat. Inside is something remarkable. It looks like bands of black sewn into the fabric, and though the human mind and eyes insist this is impossible, they’re different shades of black. Sigrud looks at it closely, and the longer he looks at it the more he believes that the bands of black are writing, tiny snarls of intricate designs.

“Huh,” says Khadse. “I didn’t know that was in there.”

“This is a miracle, Khadse,” says Sigrud. “You have been wearing a miraculous item. Do you know how rare that is? There are almost none of these anymore, beyond Olvos’s. Or there should be none anymore.”

Khadse doesn’t react.

“But you knew that, didn’t you,” says Sigrud. “You knew it was miraculous.”

Nothing.

“You knew something. Where did you get this?”

Khadse’s face goes strangely closed. Sigrud can tell he’s trying to think of a way to bargain for his life. “I’ll tell you that,” says Khadse slowly. “And then some. I have information you will find valuable.”

“I know. I found this on your person.” Sigrud holds up the black envelope. “A list, it seems, on very curious paper. In code. Probably what this whole evening was about—yes?”

Khadse narrows his eyes. “You have the message, maybe, sure. But I have the code.”

“Your life for the code?”

He nods.

“Not a bad trade. But you were out a very long time, Khadse, and I had time enough to work at it. I guessed it was the same code as you used in your telegrams—the Bulikovian partisan code—and found I was right.”

Khadse’s jaw flexes, but he says nothing.

Sigrud opens the letter, and says aloud: “Bodwina Vost, Andel Dusan, Georg Bedrich, Malwina Gogacz, Leos Rehor, and”—Sigrud glances at Khadse—“Tatyana Komayd. Shara’s daughter.”

Khadse’s growing pale now. His brow is wet with sweat as he tries to think.

“Names. What is this, Khadse? Who are these people?”

“How should I know?” said Khadse. “I only heard them just now. That’s how information exchanges work—one usually hands off information the other guy doesn’t know.”

“All Continental names. Are these your next targets? Are these the next people you were to hunt down?”

“I’ll tell you everything,” says Khadse. “If you let me go.”

Sigrud lets the silence linger on for a long while.

“Why did you kill Shara?” he asks softly.

“You’re not going to like the answer.”

A deadly stillness falls over Sigrud. “Tell me. Now.”

Khadse snorts. “Same damned reason most people do things. Because I got paid to. Paid a lot. More than I’d ever been paid in the whole of my life.”

“By who?”

Khadse is silent.

“I do not want to torture you, Khadse,” says Sigrud. “Well. That is not quite true. I do. But I don’t have time for such games. Yet I will make time if I must.”

“We were both trained to withstand torture,” growls Khadse.

“That’s true. But I spent seven years in Slondheim. And there they taught me many things about pain, things the hoods in the Ministry could never dream of. If you will not tell me, why…I could teach you what I have learned.”

Khadse shudders. “I always hated you,” he says. “You and Komayd, dallying about on the Continent as if it were a fucking university trip. You never really served Saypur, never really valued honor, the job. You just did what you liked and played at being historians.”

“The name,” Sigrud says, standing. “Now, Khadse.”

“I can’t give what I don’t have!” he snarls. “The lunatic bastard went to extreme lengths not to meet me, and I him!”

“Lunatic?” asks Sigrud. “A lunatic gave you a miraculous coat?”

“He’s got to be,” says Khadse. “He thinks the walls have eyes, thinks the world’s out to get him, and he’s willing to pay a damned fortune for my services! More than the Ministry ever thought them worth, anyways.”

“What were your services, Khadse, besides Shara?”

“The…The first time he hired me to find a boy. A Continental boy, living in the city. That’s all. No murder, no tradecraft, no nothing. Just wanted me to hunt the little bastard down. Though it wasn’t easy. All he gave me was a name. But old Khadse got the job done. I found him, and that was that. He must have liked how I worked, because he kept coming back to me.”

“Who was this boy?”

“Some damned Continental name or another. Gregorov, I think. Sulky teenager. Adopted, apparently. Nothing special about him, I thought.”

“What happened to him after you located him?”

“Oh, that….Well, that’s trickier. I don’t quite know. The boy vanished, apparently. But I know little Gregorov’s parents met an untimely end. Just before his disappearance. Auto accident, it seems. Plowed them over in the street. And then suddenly no one knew where little Gregorov had gotten to. It was about then, Harkvaldsson, that I decided that this new employer of mine was not one to fuck about with.”

“What then? What did he have you do next?”

“Many, many nasty things,” says Khadse. “Which all came to an end when Komayd moved into the Golden. That put a scare in him. Or he acted like it did, I don’t know.”

“Then he sent you out against Shara,” says Sigrud quietly.

“Yeah. Maybe he got tired of her. Or maybe he got something out of her, stole it from her operation. That list in your damn hand, perhaps.”

Sigrud glances at the piece of black paper. He remembers the line from the message to Shara: This city has always been a trap. Now he has our lists of possible recruits. We have to act immediately.

Khadse’s controller steals a list of possible recruits from Shara, thinks Sigrud, then tells Khadse to target all of them…But why is Tatyana on this list?

He thinks for a long time. “And your controller,” he says. “That is who gave you this coat.”

“For the Komayd job, yeah. And the shoes.”

“The shoes?” Sigrud looks down at the pile of Khadse’s clothing on the floor. He picks up one shoe, turns it over in his hands. There doesn’t seem to be anything odd about it. Then he picks up his black knife, wedges it into the sole of the shoe, and pries off the heel. Underneath, nailed into the very sole, is a thin piece of tin, and engraved in the tin is a very curious glyph of some kind, complicated and…shifting, perhaps. It’s a little hard for his eye to make sense of it.

“Huh,” says Khadse. “I didn’t know that was there either.”

Sigrud holds the piece of tin up to the light. “I know this….I’ve seen this before, when we were tracking black marketers outside of Jukoshtan….This is one of Olvos’s miracles. A blinding light in the snow, or something. It prevents people from following you, throws obstacles into their way, keeps them from seeing you properly.”

“Then how did you find me?”

“I didn’t track you. I knew where you would be. You came to me. These things follow strict rules.” Sigrud thinks back, remembering the miracles at the doors of the Golden, on the streets outside….He knows from their fight tonight that Khadse’s coat acts as protection. But what if Khadse’s coat could protect against more than knives and bullets? What if Khadse’s employer had given him the coat so that he could slip past all of Shara’s wards and defenses and place a bomb as close to her as possible?

But that’s the least of his questions right now.

“Why is Komayd’s own daughter on this list?” asks Sigrud. “Why does your employer wish you to locate Tatyana Komayd?”

“That’s above my pay grade,” says Khadse. “Maybe you should ask Komayd’s people. She was doing the same thing.”

“Same what?”

“Finding children. That damn charity she had, the orphanage thing or whatever?” He cackles. “It was a load of shit. Had to be. She was finding recruits. Putting together networks. Training Continentals.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a private army. And maybe little Tatyana was going to be her colonel. Who knows?”

“Except your employer wanted to get to these people first.”

“Again. Above my pay grade.”

Sigrud is silent for a long time. “Have you ever met your controller, Khadse?”

“I told you, no.”

“Ever talk to him, perhaps on a telephone?”

“No.”

“Then how do you make contact?”

“I receive telegrams indicating where contact will be made. Then I go to that location, doing exactly what the controller says, and once I’m there I…” He shuts his eyes. “I perform a ritual.”

Khadse then describes a miracle Sigrud’s never heard of before: a hole of perfect darkness, awaiting Khadse’s blood, and something sleeping at the bottom—something that releases a letter to him.

Sigrud looks at the letter in his hand. “This letter…was belched up from a miracle?”

“Yes. Maybe. Whatever. You and Komayd always knew a sight more about the Divine than we ever did.”

“And you have no idea who put this…this darkness there, or placed the letter there for you to find.”

“No. I don’t think it works like that. I think…All the times I’ve done it, it’s like the hole connects to somewhere, someplace. Only it’s like the place is under everything, or behind everything…I don’t know how to say it. And I’m not fucking sure I want to know.”

“How odd it is,” Sigrud says softly, “that you, a man who despises the Continent so much, are willing to use Continental tricks to kill a Saypuri.”

Khadse shrugs. “Like I said—he pays.” He spits out a mouthful of something bloody and reeking. “Maybe my controller is a nutter, sure. Maybe he’s some Continental hood who got his hands on a bunch of relics. But that’s how it is. It’s the game we’ve played since we were young pups, Harkvaldsson. The powers that be play their war games. And we pawns and grunts, we struggle among the trenches to stay alive. If things had gone but a bit differently, it could be you chained up here, and me with the knife.”

Sigrud considers that. He finds he agrees.

He turns and carefully stows the list of names away in his pack. Then he pries off the other tin plate from Khadse’s shoe, takes them both and Khadse’s coat, and stows them away as well.

“Robbing me, eh?” says Khadse. He spits again. Something tinkles to the floor, possibly a tooth. “I don’t blame you. But now we come to it, don’t we? Now you decide how to end me. How to usher old Rahul Khadse off this mortal plane. You bastard.”

“Not yet.” Sigrud looks at him. “You know more about your controller than you’re saying, Khadse.”

“Oh, you want to go after him?” says Khadse.

Sigrud says nothing.

Khadse cackles. “Oh, really. Really. Take your best shot! He’ll grind you into pieces, big man!”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean he’s not the sort to be trifled with. Me, I just have a name. Along with the rumor that whoever says this name…Well. They don’t stick around.”

“Your employer kills them? Just for saying his name?”

“Hells if I know. No one knows what happens to them. But they don’t come back from wherever they go.”

Sigrud cocks an eyebrow. “What you are describing,” he says, “sounds like a story created to scare children.”

“And I just put my bloodied hand in a hole in reality!” says Khadse, laughing. “And you just shot me and saw the bullets fall to the ground! I don’t know what to believe anymore, but I believe that it’s wise to be careful.” He grins madly. “I’ll tell you the damned name if you want, Dreyling. I’ll do it gladly. And it’ll be the end of you.”

Sigrud shakes his head. “I have never heard of any miracle or Divine creature that could hear its own name being spoken from across the world. Nothing short of a true Divinity could do that—and unless you’re about to tell me Olvos is your controller, it means you are quite wrong.”

“I guess you’ll find out.” Khadse’s smile fades. “And after I tell you the name,” he says, “it’s the end of old Khadse. Isn’t it.”

“You would have done the same to me.”

“Yes. That’s so.” He looks at Sigrud, his eyes burning. “How are you going to do it?”

“If it were twenty years ago, I would have disemboweled you. Left you here with your intestines dangling out. It would have taken hours. For what you did to Shara.”

“But today?”

“Today…I am old,” says Sigrud, sighing. “I know I do not quite look it. But we are both old men, Khadse, and this is a young person’s game. I’ve no time for such things anymore.”

“True enough.” He laughs weakly. “I thought I was going to get out. Retire. But these things don’t let you run away quite so easy, do they.”

“No. They do not.”

“At least it’s you. You and not one of these stupid young bastards. You didn’t just get lucky. You earned it.” Khadse stares off into space for a moment. Then he looks at Sigrud and says, “Nokov.”

“What?”

“His name,” says Khadse, breathing hard as if each syllable pains him, “is Nokov.”

“Nokov? Just Nokov?”

“Yes. Just that.” He leans forward. “You’ll die, you know. Whatever he does will be a thousand times worse than anything you’re about to do to me.”

Sigrud furrows his brow. Never in my life, he thinks, have I heard of a Nokov—neither in the world of tradecraft or the Divine.

Sigrud stands, unsheathes his knife, and gently lifts Khadse’s chin, exposing the thread of white scar running across his throat. He places the blade of his black knife to the scar, as if following the cutting instructions on a child’s piece of paper.

“And you’ll deserve it,” says Khadse, staring into Sigrud’s eyes. “For all you’ve done. You deserve it too.”

“Yes,” says Sigrud. “I know.” Then he whips the blade across Khadse’s throat.

The splash of blood is huge and hot and wet. Sigrud steps back and watches as Khadse chokes, coughs, and gags, his chest and stomach flooded over with his own blood.

It doesn’t take him long to die. No matter how many times he’s seen it, Sigrud is always struck by how only a few seconds separate life from death.

How many seconds, he wonders, watching Khadse’s body quake, did it take for Shara to die?

Khadse’s head slumps forward.

Or Signe?

He stops moving.

The room is silent now except for the patter of blood. Sigrud, wiping his hands on a rag, sits down on the floor and pulls back out the list of Khadse’s targets.

He stares at the last name on the list: Tatyana Komayd. A girl he’s seen only once in his life, and perhaps the only piece of his friend that still persists in this world.

The pale Continental girl watches the slaughterhouse from the reeds by the canal. She slowly starts creeping up to the edge of the property, mindful of any movement in the windows. Thankfully the big man didn’t take Khadse far, just a few miles downriver. As no one watches this stretch of the river, it was easy enough for her to follow, though she’s now soaking up to her knees.

She doesn’t know who this big man is, but she knows she doesn’t like him much. It took months of work to track down Khadse’s movements, months of work to tap into Khadse’s communications, months of work to get this close to figuring everything out. It was especially hard since Khadse often had some kind of miracles on his person, something that made him hard to see, hard to follow—yet she’d figured out how to get around them.

And then this big, stupid man with his guns and his knife has to go in and ruin everything, swooping in at the last minute to haul Khadse off like he was a sack of damned potatoes.

She crept in after and saw the bodies. Saw what he’d done to them. Whoever he is, she doesn’t want someone like that near her plans.

Dawn is slowly breaking, but it does nothing to lighten her mood. She looks around at the ruins of the slaughterhouse. She doesn’t like this place. It’s ugly and decrepit, sure, but mostly it’s because she doesn’t like its past.

And for her, the past is a thing she can see at any given moment.

She shudders. This was once a place of tremendous death. If she’s not careful its past leaks through to her, and she glimpses giant herds of cattle or goats milling about in the fences, anxious and fretting, wondering what will happen to them. Sometimes she can hear them bleating and bellowing and screaming, smelling blood up ahead and knowing what’s coming. She can hear them now, hear them shrieking in the slaughterhouse….

She shakes her head, banishes such sounds from her mind. She considers her options. The big man took Khadse somewhere deep within the slaughterhouse, and she’s not willing to exercise her abilities to locate him, not yet. It could put her at risk. But she must get something out of this. She can’t have watched Khadse for days and weeks for nothing.

Then the light begins to shift. She looks around, confused. The orange rays of dawning light filtering through the slaughterhouse yards stutter, flicker, and finally fade.

“Oh, no,” she whispers.

She looks up. The sky is darkening directly above, black hues bleeding through the pale blue, bringing cold, glittering stars in their wake. The patch of darkness intensifies and spreads, a curious, dark dawn in the center of the sky.

How could he have found me? How could he be here?

Then she realizes that the patch of night in the sky is not really above her: it’s above the slaughterhouse, and presumably above the two men within.

She realizes that, whoever the big man is and whatever he wants, he likely has no idea what’s coming for him.

She debates what to do.

“Fucking hells,” she mutters. Then she stands.

Sigrud sits on the floor, thinking.

This isn’t good. None of it’s good, of course, but some parts are worse than others.

For starters: how did Khadse’s employer get his hands on miraculous items? All the original Divinities—he frankly can’t believe he’s having to debate this again—are very dead, except for Olvos. But most of Olvos’s miraculous items were lost when Saypur’s secret warehouse of them burned down eighteen years ago. Sigrud knows that, because he was one of the people who burned it down. So even those should be incredibly rare.

Was there another secret storeroom of them? He scratches his chin. Or—worse—has someone found a way to make more of them? That shouldn’t be possible without Olvos’s help. At least, he thinks that’s the case. He’s well out of his league here.

He looks back at the list of names. He wishes there were more information, especially their locations, for one. But if they had locations of these people, he thinks, odds are they would already be dead.

He only really knows the location of one: Tatyana Komayd, whom he read had been living in Ghaladesh with Shara.

He folds up the list again and puts it in his pocket.

So what’s the next move? There’s one idea he’s gravitating toward, though the concept frankly terrifies him.

He tries to think of any alternatives. Try to track down this Nokov? Ferret out any more contacts from Khadse’s associates? Start pounding pavement and looking up these names?

He doesn’t think any of these options will bear fruit. And none are more pressing than the task before him:

Someone is targeting Shara’s adopted daughter. And odds are no one in the Ministry knows about it.

He needs to go to Ghaladesh. Ghaladesh, the capital of Saypur, the richest, most well-protected city in the world. The place with perhaps the most security in the civilized nations—and thus the place that he, a fugitive from Saypur’s justice, is most likely to be caught, imprisoned, tortured, and possibly—or probably—executed.

He’s not quite sure what he’d do if he was to find Tatyana, though. Warn her, get her somewhere safe, then get out. Yet Sigrud has seen what happens to people who fall within the shadow of his life. He has no desire to allow such a thing to happen to Tatyana.

But he must do something. It pains him to wake each day and know that he was not there when Shara needed him most. To imagine allowing the same thing to happen to her child…The idea is abominable to him.

Then Sigrud pauses. Listens.

There’s silence, but something’s…wrong.

He glances over his shoulder. The room stretches out behind him, the train of oil lamps dangling from the track of hooks. He cocks his head.

He’s pretty sure he lit nine oil lamps when he first brought Khadse here. He found a giant cupboard of them in the south end of the slaughterhouse, so he figured he’d make use of them. Yet now there are only six lit, as if the three at the far end of the room have fizzled out. But there’s no breeze in here.

Are they burning out? That’s odd….

He watches as the farthest lamp dies. There’s no noise, no hiss, no smoke. It’s just…gone, with only five lamps remaining. And as the lamp dies, that whole end of the room fills with impenetrable darkness.

Then he hears footsteps. Someone is walking across the long, darkened room to him. He narrows his eye, peers carefully, but he can’t see anything in the shadows. Whoever they are, they’re not trying to be stealthy: they’re walking with a quick, measured pace, like someone trying to make the next meeting.

Sigrud stands, grabs his pack, and pulls out a pistol. “Who is there?” he says.

The steps don’t slow.

The fifth lamp dies. The wall of shadow grows closer.

Sigrud throws his pack over his shoulder, raises the pistol, and points it down the long, thin room. “I’ll shoot,” he says.

The steps don’t slow.

The fourth lamp dies. The darkness grows closer.

He gauges the position of the footsteps and pulls the trigger. The retort is incredibly loud in this confined space. The muzzle flash does nothing to illuminate the darkness. And though he’s firing into a small space, the bullet doesn’t seem to hit anything, or intimidate whoever’s out there—because the steps just keep coming.

The third lamp dies. Just two left, hanging just above Sigrud. The wall of darkness is very close now, as are the footsteps.

Then he sees it.

Something penetrates the penumbra of darkness, only a dozen meters away now. But it’s…impossible.

There at the edge of the light is a shadow, a shadow surely cast by two legs, walking toward him. But he cannot see anyone casting the shadow. There is the light from the lamp, and the shadow of a human figure walking toward him—but no actual human to project this shadow.

“What in all hells,” says Sigrud.

The footsteps stop. The shadow of the human figure stops advancing as well.

Silence.

Then a man’s voice, high and cold and brittle. It doesn’t seem to come from any one place—not from the shadow of the person before him, nor from the wall of darkness beyond—but rather it seems to be coming from all the shadows in the room, as if they were all vibrating at once, creating this…voice.

The voice says: “He’s dead.”

Sigrud glances over his shoulder at Khadse’s corpse. He says, “Uh.”

“I know this one,” says the voice. More footsteps. The second lamp dies, and the shadow advances across the floor, swirling as the invisible person—whoever or whatever he is—walks around the final remaining lamp. “Khadse, wasn’t it? He was a good one.” The footsteps stop, and the shadow hangs on the floor in a position suggesting that the invisible person is standing directly before Khadse’s body. The voice says softly, “He did as he was told. He didn’t ask questions. I hate when they ask questions….I always feel obliged to answer them.”

A long silence. Sigrud wonders if he should attack, or dive away, or…what. But one thing he suddenly, fiercely believes is that he should not leave the light. He’s not sure why, but he feels that if he crosses that border of shadow—which suddenly seems so firm, so very hard—then he’s not coming back out.

“I had wished to do it myself,” says the voice with a faint tone of regret. “Not wise to have a man walking around with so many secrets in him. But oh, well….”

More footsteps. The shadow of the human figure rotates as he circles around the lamp. The shadow falls across Khadse’s corpse….

And then it’s gone. It’s as if the man’s passing shadow wiped Khadse’s being from existence, like a rag wiping away a spot on a windowpane.

Sigrud glances around at the tiny island of illumination at his feet, cast by the one remaining oil lamp. Do not leave the light.

The next thing he knows, the shadow of the figure is gone, blinking out.

Sigrud grasps the radio transmitter at his belt with his free hand—part of the preparations he’d put together in case someone tried to ambush him. It wouldn’t do any good here, so far from the entrance, he thinks. He puts the idea aside, wondering what to do.

Then Sigrud feels it: a sudden attention, as if all the darkness in the room is turning to look at him and examine him.

There is a low, awful groaning in the darkness, like the sound of tall trees slowly shifting in the wind. His left hand suddenly aches, aches horribly, as if the scar there were made of molten lead.

From what sounds like a distant corner, the voice whispers, “And who are you?”

Sigrud lowers the pistol. He’s not quite sure what to do in such a situation—being addressed by a wall of shadow is not something he was trained for—but questions, well, those he knows how to handle.

He instinctively resorts to the cover story that corresponds with the Papers of Transportation in his pocket. “Jenssen,” he says.

There’s a silence.

The voice says, puzzled, “Jenssen?”

“Yes.”

“And…what are you doing here, Mr. Jenssen?”

“Looking for work,” says Sigrud determinedly. “In Ahanashtan.”

A much, much longer silence. Then a rhythmic tapping from his right, like the twitching of a snake’s tail. And slowly, slowly, he thinks he can see light in the darkness….Tiny pinpricks of cold light, like terribly distant stars.

“I am not sure what this means,” says the voice softly. “You are either stupid, or you are lying, which is still quite stupid.” Then, closer to him: “But you called me. You did, or he did, or both of you did.”

Sigrud looks down. The circle of light is slowly contracting. Sigrud is reminded of a water rat being suffocated by a python.

The voice whispers, “Are you working for them? Are you one of theirs? Tell me.”

Sigrud doesn’t know whom the voice is referencing, but he says, “No. I am alone.”

“Why did you kill Khadse?”

“Because…Because he killed a friend of mine.”

“Hmm…But it should have been quite hard, shouldn’t it? I arrayed him in protections, in defenses.” A brief, soft burst of cheeping, like crickets in a vast forest. Sigrud wonders—Where am I? Am I still even in the warehouse? Yet he sees the oil lamp still hangs above him.

The voice continues: “You should not have been able to follow him, should not have been able to wound him. And yet I sense the protections I gave him are in your bag…”

The circle of light contracts a little more. Sigrud’s one eye widens as he realizes what the voice is saying. Is this…this thing, he thinks, Khadse’s employer? Could this thing be…Nokov?

“And I smell about you,” says the voice in the darkness, “my own writing, my own list, passed through my own channels. A letter. My letter.”

Sigrud swallows.

“You are lying to me,” says the voice. “I don’t believe you could have killed Khadse without some help. Their help.”

“I did it alone.”

“So you say. Yet I don’t believe you.”

A long silence. Sigrud feels something shifting out there in the shadows, a dry rustling, a hushed shuddering.

“Do you know who I am?” whispers the voice. The border of shadow is just inches from Sigrud’s toes now. He stands up very straight and tall, trying his hardest not to allow an elbow or knee to enter that veil of shadow. “Do you know what I can do to you?” says the voice. “You killed Khadse, certainly—but what I can do will make murder feel like a wondrous blessing.”

A sigh beside him. The scrape and scratch of something being dragged across the concrete floor. His hand hurts so much he can’t stop making a fist.

“Wandering forever in darkest night,” whispers the voice, now on his other side. “A vast, black plain, underneath distant stars…You’d walk and walk and walk, walking for so long, until you’d forget what your own face looked like, your own being. And only when this had happened—when you’d forgotten your own name, the very idea of yourself—would I breach your isolation, and ask you questions.”

Something hisses before him. A chuckling sound—certainly not a sound made by a human throat—comes from behind him.

“And you,” whispers the voice, “sobbing, would tell me.”

The shadow inches closer. Sigrud feels like he’s standing in a tiny tube of light.

A murmur in his ear, as if the thing in the darkness is just beside him. “Do you wish me to do this to you?”

“No.”

“Then tell me if…”

The border of shadow trembles. Sigrud waits for the first blow to fall.

Then the voice makes a noise of peculiar discomfort: “Unh.”

Sigrud cocks an eyebrow. “Unh?”

The circle of light at his feet expands, as if whoever—or whatever—is out there is losing their grasp on it. The voice says, “Who is…Who is doing that?” It sounds as if the speaker is suffering a terrible migraine.

Sigrud glances around. “Doing…what?”

The circle of light keeps expanding. And then he hears the cows.

The world shifts, changes, contorts.

Sigrud opens his eye all the way in total surprise.

He’s not sure when things changed—last he knew, mere seconds ago he was in the darkness, being threatened by that…whatever it was. But he’s sure they definitely have changed.

Because right now Sigrud is standing in a concrete hallway, staring at a giant herd of cows, all milling around and mooing in mild discontent. Bright white sunlight is pouring over his shoulder. He looks behind him and sees what appears to be a wooden gate to a livestock yard. Obviously at some point the gate will open, and the cattle will be herded out, but for now the cattle are all stuffed together into the hallway, and they vocally don’t appreciate it.

Sigrud, personally, does not appreciate not understanding what in the hells is going on. It feels strange to say it, but the last time he felt at all sure of his reality was when he cut Khadse’s throat. Now everything’s gone…soft.

A woman’s voice: “Hey!”

Sigrud turns back around. A young woman is dodging through the cattle to get to him. He finds he recognizes her: short, pale, and Continental with a strangely upturned nose….

“You,” says Sigrud faintly. “I know you….”

The young Continental woman dances her way past the last few cows. “What in the fuck is wrong with you?” she demands.

Sigrud has no idea how to respond. He stares at this young woman, just five and a half feet tall, with a tremendous mane of black hair and a taut, pugnacious mouth, as if some acerbic comment is swilling around on her tongue.

Yet there’s something off about her eyes: they’re pale and queerly colorless, as if her eyes were the color of miscolored porcelain—not quite gray, not quite blue, not quite green. He feels like her eyes were created to see something…else.

“Did you say his name?” says the woman. “Did you say it out loud? What is wrong with you? Did you want to get everyone killed?”

Sigrud raises a hand like a child trying to answer a question at school. “I feel I must say here,” he says, glancing at the cattle before him, “that I do not really understand what is going on.”

“I’ll say you don’t! Did you kill the assassin? Khadse?”

“Yes?”

“Why?”

“Because he killed Shara Komayd,” says Sigrud. “And I could not abide that.”

The woman gives a long, slow sigh, as if this was the answer she expected but didn’t want to hear. “Well. Damn it.”

“Why?”

“Because that,” she says, “was the same reason I was looking for him.”

“What’s going on? Who are you? Where are we?”

“The same place. The slaughterhouse. Just in a slightly earlier time, before they added onto it, so there was daylight nearby. I can get you out of here—maybe—but w—”

“Wait a minute,” says Sigrud. “Wait. Are you saying we’re in the past?”

“Something very akin to it, yes,” says the girl. “Far enough into it so that the past’s daylight can filter through to the present. He’s most powerful where shadows are, and though this makes him strong, it has its limitations as well. Where light is, he isn’t.”

Sigrud tries to understand this. Then he pales, and asks a question he never expected to say in his life.

“Are you a Divinity?” he says quietly.

The woman laughs ruefully. “Me? No. Him, well…He’s trying his hardest. You don’t know a damn thing, do you? Don’t you know there’s a war going on? Now we have to—aagh!”

She falls to her knees, her face twisted in pain. Sigrud looks up and sees a trembling at the walls of the slaughterhouse, and then the world seems to contract inward….

Darkness floods in, until finally it’s like they’re not in a slaughterhouse, but rather inside a tiny bubble of light floating in a sea of shadow. Inside this bubble is a piece of the slaughterhouse—Sigrud is reminded of looking at something through a telescope, allowing in only a tiny circle of an image but excluding everything else.

“What’s happening?” asks Sigrud.

“I’m losing, is what’s happening,” growls the woman. “Part of us is still in the slaughterhouse, in the present, with him. He can beat on the walls of the little bubble of the past I’ve built. And he’s breaking them open.” She blows a strand of hair out of her face and sets her jaw. “Do you want to get out of here?”

“Yes.”

“Then follow me. Closely. You slip out of the bubble, you’re gone.”

“To what?”

“To him. Into the night. Outside of this bubble is the present. Which is where he is. And you don’t want to be out there with him.”

She begins to walk away, stepping through the cattle. As she does, the bubble moves with her, slipping through the darkness, as if she’s projecting it around herself. Sigrud, startled, hops to it and stays close.

“I’ve been watching Khadse for days, even weeks,” says the girl, shaking her head. “And then you come here and shoot up the place….”

“What do you know about Khadse and Shara?”

She glances at him. “Oh, like I trust you. The one bellowing his name out loud.”

“Do you mean N—”

“Don’t! Do you want to invite him in? In here, with us?”

Sigrud begins to understand. “No.”

“Good! Keep your mouth shut before you cock up anything else.”

They turn the corner and see two stairways down. One is lit with gaslight, the other is dark. “Let’s hope this one leads us out,” she mutters as they approach the lit hallway.

A man in a bloodstained apron walks up out of the lit hallway and passes them without a word. Sigrud stares at him, bewildered. He saw these doorways not more than an hour ago, and both were almost collapsing. “Are we…Are we really in the past?”

“Somewhat. Pieces of it, parts of it. They won’t see us. The past doesn’t change, it’s hard and durable. Makes it easy to move across, walking from second to second like a frog jumping across lily pads. Do you notice?”

“Notice what?”

“The bridging between the seconds?”

“No?”

“Then I’m doing a good job. Let’s just hope it holds long enough for us to get out….”

They begin down the stairs. Then the borders of the bubble tremble again, and the young woman cries out and stumbles like she’s been stabbed.

Sigrud kneels to help her up. “Again?”

“I…I can’t keep this up,” she gasps. “I thought I could, but he’s stronger than me now. I put myself at risk, saving you. He’s killed so many of us, and now he might have me….”

Sigrud doesn’t understand much of what’s going on, but he’s starting to understand the crude dream logic of what the girl is suggesting. “So…You mean to lead us down through a past version of the slaughterhouse…and then once we are outside, in the light, return us to the present?”

The girl cries out again in pain, fingers to her temples. “Yes!” she cries. “Are you slow?”

“But you won’t make it that far,” says Sigrud.

She shakes her head, tears leaking out of her eyes. “I don’t think so.”

Sigrud looks down at the radio transmitter hanging from his belt. “I had an exit strategy in place, in case the building was stormed…but it will do little good here.” He does some quick thinking.

What tools could possibly be of use against that thing? What tools do we even have?

Then he has an idea.

“Can you at least get us to the first floor?” he asks. “Maybe close to the entrance?”

“Maybe. Possibly.”

“All right. Second question…” He rummages around in his pack and pulls out the pieces of engraved tin from Khadse’s shoes. “Do you know what these are?”

Her eyes widen. “These…These are the miracles the assassin was wearing, weren’t they? They kept me from seeing him properly, from following his movements. Sunlight on Mountain Snows…”

Sigrud snaps his fingers. “That’s the name. I couldn’t remember. Here. Put these into your shoes. Fast. Hurry.”

“Bu—”

“Now.”

She sits on the steps and does so, cringing and wincing as if hearing a painful noise in her ears.

“Good,” says Sigrud. “Now. Third question. Whatever it is that, uh, you are—can you be harmed by an explosion?”

She stares at him. “What?”

“I will take that,” he says, “as a yes.”

By the time they get to the bottom of the stairs it’s become so bad the girl can barely walk. Sigrud has to nearly carry her. “This is bad,” she says, woozy. “I’m not sure if I’ll even be able to run away.”

“You’re going to have to,” says Sigrud. “Just get us close to the door. Then we light the matches, and then you let the bubble fall—put us back in the present, I mean…”

“Yes, yes! I understand that!”

“Good. Then, after that, you move.”

They limp through the lower warrens of the slaughterhouse, some kind of packing and loading area, where trucks and carts once arrived and departed. The border of the bubble quivers and rattles, as if someone on the outside is beating on it, and each time the girl moans a little more.

“Who are you?” asks Sigrud. “Are you a friend of Shara’s? Of Komayd?”

The girl is silent.

“Are you…M? From Shara’s letter?”

She laughs morosely. “Aren’t you a clever one. Listen, killer—you are a tiny fish in a very big pond. Odds are if you survive today—which I think unlikely, frankly—then you’ll just be caught next week, or next month, or maybe tomorrow night. And when he catches you, he’ll pull out every secret you’ve got hidden away in your guts. I don’t intend for any of my own to be in there.”

“And if I do survive?”

“If you survive, and I see you again…Maybe I’ll reconsider.” She eyes him suspiciously. “Maybe.”

They’re near the entrance to the slaughterhouse now. Sigrud gently sets her down. Their little bubble of the past is shaking quite hard now, like gates splintering before a battering ram. “Hurry,” she whispers. “Please hurry…”

Sigrud reaches into his pack and pulls out a box of matches and Khadse’s coat. Thank the seas, he thinks, that I still smoke. He stuffs his arms into Khadse’s coat, which barely fits, but that’s the least of his problems. Then, moving carefully and smoothly, he lights one match. He hands it to the girl, then makes a bundle of half of the remaining matches and hands them to her as well. Then he strikes another match and picks up the other half of the remaining matches, so they’re both holding a lit match in one hand and a bundle of unlit matches in the other.

He looks the young woman over: she’s breathing hard, both in pain and in terror.

“Ready?” asks Sigrud.

“Yes,” she says.

“Then do it.”

She shuts her eyes. At the same time, they both hold their lit matches to the unlit bundles. The matches flare bright, sending shafts of light shooting into the darkness.

The bubble of past around them trembles. Shakes.

Dissolves.

Darkness comes spilling in, roaring and cheeping, the wild, strange sounds of the forest at night….

But it comes to a halt just around them, held at bay by the flickering matches in their hands. It’s so dark it’s difficult to tell that they’re still in the slaughterhouse, but Sigrud can see the dawn light filtering through the cracks in one of the bay doors in the distance.

The girl nods at Sigrud and slowly begins to move toward the door, the flame flickering in her fingers.

Then the high, cold voice whispers in his ear, quivering with rage: “Where is she? She’s here, isn’t she?”

Sigrud suppresses a smile. So the miracles in Khadse’s shoes are working, he thinks. He can’t properly see her….

“You are working with them,” says the voice. “I knew it. I knew it. Your little light won’t last long, you know. And then I’ll have you.”

“I’ll tell you everything,” says Sigrud. “Right now.”

A pause. Sigrud can see the girl has almost made it to the door.

“Tell me what?” says the voice.

“About Komayd. The ones on her list. I know where they are.”

This is, of course, fabulous bullshit. But the voice in the shadows seems to be considering it.

The voice purrs, “If you have something to say, say it.”

“I worked with Komayd,” says Sigrud. He makes sure to talk as slowly as possible. “I worked with her for a long, long time. Even if she didn’t know it, I worked for her and waited for her—right up until her death.”

A soft clinking and clanking as the girl slides the door open.

Then the voice speaks again, this time next to Sigrud’s other ear. “And?” it says, suspicious.

“And she was a careful person,” says Sigrud. He watches as the flame crawls down the matchsticks. “But even the most careful person makes mistakes. As you know.”

Sigrud watches as the girl slips away to safety. She doesn’t look back.

“Once we were in a safe house, doing an interrogation,” says Sigrud. “But it was interrupted. Our enemies stormed in, you see, and almost took us prisoner. And from then on, I insisted on taking precautions in case it happened again. She hated it. But it was a very simple system.”

Sigrud takes a breath.

He picks up the radio transmitter, holds it up, and says, “It looks like this.”

He drops the matches, pulls the coat up over his head with his left hand, and presses the button.

Then there’s a bang.

Sigrud does not really hear it. He hears maybe the first .0001 second of the bang. Because then he’s slammed to the ground so hard he briefly blacks out.

Light. Heat. Noise. And smoke.

He comes to, gasping and blinking, fire dancing all around him, and dimly realizes he’s not in any pain. The coat is still over his head, and his back and skull—which should have struck the floor at a lethal speed—have no pain at all. The coat must have stopped him from striking the floor, but, much like someone’s head snapping around in an auto accident, it didn’t slow his brain down any.

He shakes himself, dazed, and sits up. The incendiary mines have done a good bit of damage: the shadows have been rent to shreds by a thousand little flames flickering all throughout the slaughterhouse. He looks for his assailant—this Nokov—but can’t see anything.

Except…

In the far corner of the slaughterhouse bays is a form, a shadow cast on the wall, though there’s no one to cast it. The shadow looks like the person, whoever they are, is bent over, hands on their knees, as if recovering from a stunning blow. Then the shadow shifts, and turns to look at him…

He sees eyes in the shadow, cold and glimmering like distant stars.

“Look what you did!” shouts the voice, outraged and bewildered. “Look what you did!”

Sigrud stands and sprints for the doorway out, though he reels slightly like a drunk. As he runs he sees that his handiwork is not quite what it used to be: only two of the three incendiary mines he planted down here have gone off. He must have botched the third charge, which was the largest. Odds are that the receiver for the third charge was damaged in the explosion, but as he runs he covers as much of his body as he can with Khadse’s coat and clicks the transmitter over and over again, hoping it could sputter to life.

He sees the shadows roiling, swarming, swirling behind him, thousands of little pools joining together to snatch him up before he can reach the daylight outside.

Sigrud is twenty feet from the door, then ten. He can see the Luzhkov River just beyond, rippling in the sunlight.

“No!” cries the high, cold voice behind him. “No, no!”

Sigrud’s thumb makes one last frantic beat on the transmitter button: clickclickclickclickclick.

Then there’s a light on the walls, hot and orange, coming from somewhere behind him. A burst of searing heat washes over him.

The next thing he knows, Sigrud is shot through the doorway like a bullet from a gun.

Time seems to slow down. Sigrud slowly tilts ass over head over the surface of the Luzhkov, which allows him to see his handiwork: a bright ball of flame shooting out of the entrance of the slaughterhouse, licking at the waters like the tongue of a dragon.

Sigrud looks down—or, as he’s upside down, up—at the water surface hurtling at him.

This, he thinks, is not what I wanted.

He tries to pull the coat around him, but then…

Impact.

The world goes dark and all his senses are reduced to a tinny eeeee­eeeee­ee in his ears. When he comes to he’s instantly aware that he’s underwater, that bubbles are streaming from his nose and mouth and, actually, there’s quite a bit of water in his throat.

Do not panic. Do not panic….

He begins thrashing, kicking, throwing himself up at the shimmering light above him, red and wicked orange. He bursts through the surface of the water, coughing and gasping, and is so relieved he nearly sinks back underneath again. He claws himself back up, his arms and legs working to tread water, and swims over to the far shore.

Finally he feels soft mud under his boots, and he hauls himself up the riverbank, gasping with exhaustion. There’s a tremendous crack behind him, and he turns just in time to see the slaughterhouse begin to collapse.

He frowns. He had intended just to make a lot of flash and heat, not bring the whole building down. I really do need to brush up on my explosives skills.

He watches the building collapse. He wonders if that thing—Nokov—died in the fire, perhaps trapped in it. He doubts it. He saw a Divinity take a few dozen artillery shells to the face in Bulikov eighteen years ago, and it didn’t even get a nosebleed.

But was it—he?—a Divinity? He sticks his pinky in his ear, trying to free a bubble of water. And what was the woman? What exactly have I stumbled into?

He remembers what the young Continental woman said: Don’t you know there’s a war going on?

He looks down at himself. Khadse’s coat has been torn apart—not by any outside force, but apparently from Sigrud’s very large arms pinwheeling and thrashing about in a coat about five sizes too small for him. Sighing, he pulls the shreds of it off of him. He would have dearly liked to keep such a device, but he reflects that it’s probably unwise to trust a miracle, especially one you’ve never seen before.

He stands and begins to limp away. Now to find his way back to his apartment and his cache of money and papers. And then to get the ever-living hells out of Ahanashtan.

And from there, on to Ghaladesh, he thinks, to keep Tatyana out of the hands of whatever that thing was.

Though he will need a local resource. But he has an excellent one in mind. One whose home address is a matter of public record.

Let’s just hope, he thinks as he trudges over to the road, she doesn’t shoot me on sight.