Although the B-town Aedis was the second largest on Tanis, possessed of a finer library than even Seawall, B-town itself was considered a bit of a cultural backwater. Mostly human and tenju, agricultural, not even a working wall, the city squatted on the banks of the Rust River, flanked by the Barrowlands on one side and a coniferous forest that spiked into rocky foothills on the other. The Weep fissure sat at a comfortable distance, carved deep through Chaama’s bones. Its emanations were visible in the aether only on clear nights from the top of the wall. They got brighter before a surge. Plenty of warning. Plenty of time to prepare.
It had been almost nine years since the end of the last surge. The fissure vomited up only the odd slicer or boneless these days, almost all of which were detected and dealt with in Windscar. And still, every templar initiate in B-town prayed one would get through, come to B-town, be discovered on her watch.
Iari prayed otherwise, having been a fighting part of that last surge. And because she (and the Knight-Marshal, and a handful of clergy) actually attended the inconvenient midnight and dawn prayers, she hoped the Elements gave her wishes a little more weight. She prayed for no Brood, obviously and always, but this morning’s prayer had included an addendum:
Let me find this riev fast.
Then she spotted a tall shape leaning on the wall just inside the gate, a distinctly vakari shape, and Iari amended her prayer again:
Let that not be—oh hell.
So much for the power of prayer.
Gaer wore a vakari battle-rig, a motley collection of what looked like fins on both gauntlets and greaves where armor tented and angled to cover the spikes. The jacta for which he had special diplomatic permission hung off his hip. Dressed for business, Gaer. Dressed for trouble. Dressed to go with her, clearly. He detached himself from the wall with lazy grace.
“Iari.” There was an implied good morning.
Iari kept walking, chin up, eyes front and fixed. The very junior templars staffing the main gate snapped to attention. Iari scowled and snapped a return salute and waited, soul of patience and fortitude, until she and Gaer were out of their earshot.
“What are you doing?”
“Taking a walk on this fine morning—”
“Gaer.”
Condensation gleamed on his rig like frost. Vakari ran a little bit hotter than the other sentients. Steam leaked through his teeth and from the gaps in his jaw-plates. “Going with you, obviously.”
Iari took her own lungful of early morning. Humid, cold, smelling like yook trees and the river and wet pavement and maybe rain, later. “Dear Ptah. Please tell Gaer to go back to his apartment right now. Tell him I’m working on something other than escorting him around B-town today.”
“Do you actually expect your imaginary personified plasma to talk back?”
“How many imaginary vakari void-lords are there? Remind me. Nine or five?”
“There are five, you degenerate mammal.”
“Some of your fellow bird-lizards say otherwise.”
His nostrils squeezed flat, turned breath to a trickle. “Setat i’mekkat the Protectorate.”
That was real anger, cold and sharp and reflexive. The civil war among the vakari was over, officially. After the Weep opened, no, get the word-order right: after the Protectorate opened the Weep, priorities realigned. But that didn’t mean forgiveness on anyone’s side. Not the Five Tribes, not the Protectorate. Not the Confederation, either, who’d fought all vakari during the Expansion, and then, after the Schism, found their work somewhat easier with a heretical Five Tribes third of vakari as allies.
Allies. Huh. “Knight-Marshal Tobin.”
“Is that a question?”
“Not really. He asked you to come.”
“Yes.” He dragged the word out. Clipped it off on a puff of breath and blew. “If there’s a rogue riev out there, something’s gone wrong with its hexes.”
“You’re not an artificer.”
“No,” like the very idea smelled bad. “I am an arithmancer.”
“Riev are resistant to arithmancy. And they like killing vakari.”
“Which is why I have this.” Gaer patted the jacta. “And you. Tobin asked me accompany you and assist the investigation, which I take to mean read auras as necessary. In exchange, he will grant me full access to your library and the archives. Anything not classified, anyway. Though I am disappointed. Your library is woefully deficient in riev technical manuals.”
“That’s proprietary information. The wichu won’t release it, even to us.”
“Setatir wichu.” Gaer sounded more contemptuous than angry. The wichu had been Protectorate clients (read: annexed, colonized, two steps above slaves) once. They’d switched sides partway through the Expansion War, joined the Confederation, loaned their considerable expertise to the war effort. Their defection had made the first crack in the Protectorate’s alliance. Had led to the Five Tribes heresy and the Schism, which had led to the Protectorate arithmancers ripping a hole into another layer of the multiverse.
And, in a very roundabout way, to Gaer’s presence here on Tanis: ambassador and arithmancer (and probable spy, if Iari thought it through, which she had). Point was, Gaer wasn’t inconspicuous, and B-town’s streets weren’t empty, even at this hour. People would note a templar and a vakar walking together, both battle-rigged. People would wonder. People would talk. And it was a very long walk to get where they needed to go.
B-town had been built on a hill. In the very earliest days, it’d been a tenju village, a collection of yurts surrounded by neefa herds and the piles of dung that came with them. You could imagine the chieftain’s yurt on the crown of the hill, that eventually turned into a hut, then a fort, as the tenju mastered the art of stonework. They’d even built a wall around the hill, partway down.
Then came agriculture, industry, and before the tenju had managed to drag themselves out of Tanis’s gravity well, the first alwar landing. (Though not here: in Seawall, where the town-building endeavor had gone rather more largely, and thus been visible from orbit.) Then the humans, and the voidport in Seawall, and peace-and-trade. B-town’s wall and the city gates fell into disuse. And then, when the Protectorate ripped the multiverse, the fissure had arrived, and suddenly what had been a fistful of yurts and some neefa herds became the Aedis compound, which occupied the top third of the hill. B-town spilled down from there in concentric spirals and raggedy lanes of varying width all the way to the river’s edge. Hightown, Midtown, Lowtown, unimaginative in their designations. The Aedis had widened the streets immediately around itself, had carved a straight line to the four gates of the city, built into the old tenju walls. Those streets could, in emergencies, accommodate vehicles (troop carriers, to get templars in and out); but the bulk of B-town was still a pedestrian zone.
Iari led Gaer across Hightown until she got to the East Road. You could see the Rust River from here, looking silver if you felt poetic, grey if you favored realism. The river mirrored the dull pewter sky, the red clay bed for which it’d been named invisible from this angle. The bleeding sunrise had gotten lost in the clouds. The aetherport’s silhouette hunched like a sulking cat, partly obscured by the curve of the hill. The aetherport had largely replaced the docks as a source of transport before the Weep. Now since aetherships were still legally conscripted to Aedian service, and since Seawall had the only functioning off-world voidport, the docks in B-town were making a comeback.
Or, if you didn’t want to float your commerce: on the other side of the Rust stretched the grasslands, rippling with the barrows of a thousand years of tenju chieftains, crosshatched by highways. Some of those were overgrown now; the Weep fissure, which split the northern plains and curved down like a knife scar toward Seawall, had disrupted more than aether-travel. You could build bridges over (through? Iari wasn’t sure of the physics) some of the smaller fissures. Most of the time you just went around them, wide as possible, to avoid their unpredictable effects.
Gaer, who had mercifully held his opinions about B-town’s architecture this time (having waxed loquacious about the superiority of vakari cities, spires and towers and glass and steel, during previous visits), appeared to have reached his limits on silence.
“Where exactly are we going?”
Iari considered a terse, “You’ll see.” Considered not answering at all. Considered the half-dozen visible heads with visible ears who were already side-eyeing the templar-vakar combination with curiosity. This was still Hightown. Rumors floated up slower than they ran down, as a rule.
She drifted to the edge of the street and pointed with her chin. “There.”
“The river.”
“The docks. There.” She flicked her eyes at him. Snagged his attention and turned and pointed with her stare. “See? That open area, that’s where the decommed riev go and stand around waiting for someone to offer them work. Records say we’ve got twenty-seven, although sometimes they sign on with caravans going overland. A few might be out of town. Or we might have a few new ones.”
“Ss.” Gaer’s optic shimmered. Turned briefly opaque, pale and blue as a cataract. Then it cleared, and Gaer’s void-black eye rolled back her direction. “Twenty-seven. The Confederation’s best weapon, and you have them unloading boats and guarding boxes.”
“War’s over. So’s the surge.”
“Yes. But they’re not exactly retired, are they? Decommissioned isn’t the same as dismantled.” His jaw-plates flared wide. “Why do docks always smell like rotten fish?”
“Because there are rotting fish.”
“You’d think somebody could find them. Clean them up. Feed them to stray cats or something.”
There was Gaer-normal-running-monolog, and then there was Gaer-clearly-nervous-and-babbling. No, this was more than nervous. Say terrified, just not out loud. Vakari pride was pricklier than vakari silhouettes. What Gaer hadn’t asked yet was the obvious why are we going down here, and not back to Pinjat’s to try asking his neighbors what they’d seen. Maybe Gaer had figured the answer to that part out already: that this wasn’t an official investigation. She couldn’t ask civilians anything without aggravating the PKs more than she already had.
But riev, now. Riev, she could ask. And maybe Gaer had followed that trail of thinking right to the edge of the cliff, to that vast emptiness of ask them what and what do you think they’ll be able to say. Because, truth, she’d fought with riev all her life—two years regular army, ten more after turning templar before the end of the surge—and she’d never held conversation with one. It hadn’t occurred to her try. Riev were not quite mecha, one step up from that, but they were still not quite people, either. Not legally. They were former people. Repurposed people. Whoever they had been, before the rieving, had been artificed out of them.
Maybe she’d just start with hello.
They were past the last inhabited streets of Lowtown now, well into the warehouses that lined the riverside. Everything was brick, made from local mud. Reddish brown, worn and pocked with weather. Slick, too. She felt the rig’s traction-hexes ripple through the needle-socket at the base of her skull. The streets were wider here, crowded with all manner of traffic, from a-grav lifts to conventional hand-carts to the occasional mecha.
Iari tried to imagine how Gaer would see this place, with so much manual labor. Vakari didn’t tolerate invasive personal biotech—Gaer’s optic bumped right up against heresy, with permanent surgical hardware, but it had nothing neural—no, but they did love automation. For transport, manufacturing, agriculture, all sorts of industry. The vakari had perfected mecha while the alwar had still thought combustion engines marked the pinnacle of engineering.
Riev weren’t mecha, though. Riev were . . . well, riev. Metal and dead meat held together with alchemy and reanimated with galvanics. Protectorate doctrine said they were abominations, further proof of the Confederation’s moral pollution. The Five Tribes, with its gentler regard for heresy, excused the riev as a by-product of war, and certainly less horrific than the Protectorate battle-hexes that created the Weep. The Confederation had, after all, ceased production of riev after the Accords were drawn up in rare political haste, when everyone decided the Brood were more of a threat than doctrinal disagreements. The remaining riev stock proved useful for killing Brood, which was enough to overcome all but the most orthodox Protectorate squeamishness, and even then—no Protectorate force had ever said, oh, no, we’ll handle this Brood, keep your riev to yourselves.
Gaer, of all vakari in the poor, tattered multiverse, was among the least orthodox, the least hidebound, the most curious. Iari thought that curiosity might’ve gotten him down here, gotten him to agree to Tobin’s request, as much as any promise of library access.
Ask if he was regretting that now.
Gaer had gone silent. His head moved in little jerks, responding to sound, to motion. Reminding everyone looking at him that vakari had been (still were) their native biosphere’s apex predators, before they’d found arithmancy and literature and art and the stars and become apex predator to the galaxy.
The B-town riev were congregated into a vacant lot that had been a warehouse, before the last surge. The Aedian forces had met the Brood here by the river, turned them back from the city, and in so doing, turned most of the dockside district to cinders and mud and pockmarked eruptions of stone. Commerce had come back, along with the buildings. But this place remained vacant. It was almost a pen, a corral—almost, because there was no gate or barrier to keep riev in, or people out. Just a line where the street’s pavement ended and packed clay began, and the windowless walls of occupied structures around on three sides.
Iari’s neck prickled. It felt like Brood back here, that gut-sense that you learned to trust even when your HUD said all clear. That hollow, cold, acid-up-the-back-of-the-throat certainty something was about to go very wrong.
But there were no Brood. Just twenty-odd riev turning their heads in near unison, all looking at Gaer. Eyes and eyestalks and varying sensory structures, all angling toward him. Riev base-code said protect the Confederation, and vakari had been a threat before there was ever a Weep.
Iari’s heartbeat kicked up and her syn responded: lightning sheeting under her skin, behind her eyes, as the nanomecha in her blood came online. Those nanomecha, in turn, talked through the needle in the base of her skull to the battle-rig on the other side of that needle, and the arms-turing in her right gauntlet began searching targets. She took a deep breath and locked the syn back down. Sent the arms-turing back to standby.
Say hello.
“Hi,” she said. “Ah. Good morning, riev.”
One of the riev—a big one, built on a tenju frame-core, missing most of a right arm, detached its attention from Gaer. Riev couldn’t help but stand straight. This one seemed to draw itself up even straighter as it squared to face her. “Lieutenant. Good morning.”
Iari blinked. “Stay here,” she told Gaer, and went over to talk to it. Ptah’s ungentle regard, but it had seen battle. Its plating was scarred, patched, scuffed in places and worn bright in others. Its artificer had remained faithful to its biological source: its features were tenju, stylized into flat planes and sharp edges. Cheekbones, wide jaw, what were clearly meant to be tusks jutting up from the curve of a lower lip. That kind of artistry marked the riev as old, dating from not long after the wichu’s break with the Protectorate. Void and dust, this one might’ve really killed vakari.
But that arm, gentle Mishka, that was Brood damage. It looked like something had snapped the limb off just above the elbow. Big Brood could do that. The ones with the scythes for hands, the ones with the disproportionate jaws. There were deep gouges above the riev’s arm-break, the metal blackened, pocked and corroded that way polysteel got when exposed to Brood guts and pure void. That would’ve been the riev’s weapon hand. That wound must’ve come late in the last wave, or the artificers would’ve grafted another arm, or grown a replacement from the stump and fused new armor onto that flesh. Instead, they’d capped the damage, a rude patch-weld, and proceeded with its decommission.
End of the surge. Huh. Iari rode a hunch and jabbed her chin at the stump. “Where did that happen?”
There was no expression possible on the riev’s features, or in the steady plasma-blue glow of its eyes. But there was something in the deep, machine-sexless voice—coming out of Elements, somewhere between throat and mouth, some hidden speaker—that sounded like shame.
“The Saichi peninsula.”
Almost ten years ago, give or take a month. Autumn rains giving way to winter sleet. Mud halfway up a battle-rig’s knees. Tobin—only a knight-captain then—and a newly commissioned Private Iari and the rest of a unit that was all ghosts now. They’d crossed the Rust to go after one of the Brood generals. Twenty against, well. A lot more than twenty.
Iari blinked the memories back.
“Saichi,” she said. “I was there. West rim.”
The one-armed riev looked at her. “Southern shelf,” it said finally. “Fifth Army, Third Battalion, First Company.”
First Company had taken the brunt of the Brood assault. “And the army didn’t repair you.” Not asking, because void and dust, proof was right there that they hadn’t.
The riev took a beat too long to answer. “The objective was achieved. The Confederation won the battle. There was no need for repair.”
Iari ground her teeth together. Tobin had said that same thing, we won, the one time he’d talked about Saichi with her after everyone else had been—not buried, there hadn’t been anything left to bury—but after they’d put up the marker. It had been just the pair of them at the end, once the priests and the families had gone home.
We won.
She’d thought then—sure, call it winning. Tobin’s new Knight-Marshal rank on his dress uniform, the long skirt of which hid the casts and the bandages and the hex-and-patch ruin of his hip and thigh. She hadn’t had a name for the feeling, then. That hollow, corrosive heat in her chest. An amalgam of grief and anger and a grim satisfaction. This was the job. This was the price for it.
All of that might be beyond riev capacity to feel. Or it might not. Iari lifted her chin and saluted, right fist to left shoulder. Riev had no rank. Didn’t get salutes. But soldiers did, should, and what else was this riev if not that?
Another silence, for long enough Iari’s ears ached. The sun was making some progress on warming the world. It punched a hole through the overcast and cut a blinding swath through the square. Dropped a curtain of watery light behind her and blasted the one-armed riev into harsh relief. Every scar on its armor, every scuff, turned suddenly visible. The Confederate stamp on its breast, almost like a templar’s crest. Almost.
Then the clouds reasserted themselves, and the riev lifted that ruined right arm and reached the stump for its left shoulder. “Lieutenant. How may Char serve?”
Iari let her breath go in a plume. Huh. She hadn’t supposed riev would have names. Alphanumerics, for easy record-keeping—but names would make more sense on a battlefield, if you had to shout. She wondered if it was the artificers who named them after their forging, or if there was some bureaucratic office of riev name generation. Didn’t really matter, though, did it? Riev had names.
“Char,” she repeated. “I’m Lieutenant Iari.” Templars gave up their surnames, their ties to family. Only Iari. Only Char. “I’d like to ask you some questions, if that’s all right.”
Char’s attitude shifted again, from defense into neutral. Maybe a centimeter’s adjustment, a settling up and back. No one asked riev for permission, either. Bet on that.
“Please ask, Lieutenant.”
And now what? Void and dust, she hadn’t thought this far. Like how you ask, Which of you ripped a wichu apart last night?
So start safe, for some value of that word. A question for which she knew the answer, because she could count. “Is this all of the riev who live in B-town?”
“No. Three are not present.”
That matched Iari’s numbers. “And do you know where they are?”
“Yes. Neru has accepted employment with a caravan which departed this morning to Windscar. Swift Runner has been absent for five days, and Sawtooth has been absent for three. Their locations are unknown.”
Two riev unaccounted. Elements defend.
“Do any of you know the artificer Pinjat? Wichu. Workshop in Lowtown.”
The back of Iari’s neck prickled again, an eyeblink before she heard the riev moving. Converging. Surrounding her in pneumatic whispers of joints worn out of true and the subliminal whine of power cores in want of recalibration.
“We know the artificer Pinjat,” said Char. It—no, they, because Char had a name, that made them some kind of not-it—seemed like they were about to say something else, but their attention shifted.
“Excuse me. Coming through.” Gaer drifted into Iari’s periphery. Back and to the left, to leave her weapon arm clear.
“I told you to stay back in the street, didn’t I?”
“You did. I chose to ignore you. Odds aren’t good for you, surrounded like that.”
“Char can remove this vakar.” The big riev’s voice dropped and softened. “Char would be happy to do so.”
Iari’s heart lurched again. The syn sent plasma-hot fingers along her spine. An offer.
“No. This vakar is”—a pain in my ass—“with me. He’s an ambassador to Aedis. An ally. Hear me? Not an enemy.”
The riev tilted just a little bit back toward Iari. “Understood, Lieutenant.”
Iari let a little breath go. “Good. Char, this is Ambassador Gaer i’vakat’i Tarsik. Gaer. This is Char.”
“Hello, Char.” Gaer had his teeth bared. A vakari greeting. A vakari challenge. Hands conspicuously clear of his weapons, but then, he was an arithmancer. He didn’t need weapons.
Char said nothing. But Char’s remaining hand, which had been curling into a fist, uncurled. “You are Five Tribes.”
Gaer drew up, straight and startled. “You read vakari cipher?”
Char did not answer. Their body canted again toward Iari. “Lieutenant. Riev visit artificer Pinjat for repairs. His fees are reasonable.”
Repairs. Shame twinged in Iari’s chest, and then anger, and then just cold grim. Minor repairs, bet that. Replacing an arm would cost, and how hard would it be to earn enough without that arm in the first place? “Did Sawtooth or Swift Runner visit Pinjat recently?”
The riev did not answer. None of them. That creeping dread feeling returned, like the silence had something waiting on the other side, wanting to rip through.
Then Char said, with obvious reluctance, “They did.”
“Were they damaged?”
Expecting a yes, which would lead to a query about the sorts of damage, and then—
Except Char did not say yes. Instead, Char said, “No,” closely followed by, “They were attempting to reacquire Oversight.”
You could hear the capital letter. And you could see that Char expected something for having used the word. Like they thought Iari would punish them, or, or yell at them. Or something.
Iari felt like an idiot asking, but she hadn’t served with riev. Just near them. “What’s that? What’s Oversight?”
Char turned their head slightly. Then slowly, every word ground out at the lower limit of their volume, “Oversight made riev we.”
“You don’t just mean a common comm channel, do you? You mean an actual link. Sss.”
Iari was about to ask what that even meant, but Gaer held up a finger, hush, wait.
Vakari faces didn’t have much in the way of expression. Plates open, plates closed, nostrils flat or wide, teeth showing or not. The second set of eyelids, once in a great while. Gaer was expressive, for a vakar, always flapping this or flattening that. But now his face was entirely still, classic vakar. His optic winked as he turned to Iari.
“A mystery of the war,” he said. “Solved. We always wondered why we couldn’t disrupt riev communications. Yours, we could, but never theirs. And that was because they had their own setatir network. Probably quantum, linked up to those power cores of yours. Am I right, Char? Was Oversight some kind of quantum hex?”
Void and dust, yes, please, evoke the Expansion in front of riev. Ask them about their own engineering. “Later,” she told him.
Whatever Oversight was, the Synod, the Parliament, someone had decided riev couldn’t keep it. Riev had lost their armaments after decommission, sure, that made sense. But removing their communication network seemed . . . cruel. Or paranoid. Oversight, capital O, was something like wartime weaponry. Something dangerous. Something proof against arithmancy. Or something that, without small-o oversight, might be dangerous. Riev as we. Riev moving together. Collective intelligence, maybe.
And whatever the case: “I don’t care about that,” she told Char. “Whatever Swift Runner and Sawtooth were trying to do with Oversight and Pinjat. I just need to know where they might be now. The artificer was murdered last night, and it looks like a riev did it.”
She paused, waiting for a protest. Riev couldn’t. Riev don’t. A chorus of no, or that is impossible or whatever passed for strenuous objections among beings whose basecode discouraged complaint. Instead, silence. Stillness.
“I need your help. I need—” Iari pivoted on her heel. “Any information you have. I can ask the Aedis for compensation, usual rates, whatever you usually ask for.”
A ripple passed through the riev. Then one of the smaller scout-class models worked their way through the ranks, came and stood beside Char. The artificers had replaced the top of their skull with an array of flexible sensor stalks that waved a little bit like grass in a breeze, if grass were a deep pewter-black. Half of the array aimed at Iari’s face, the other half drooped and dipped in what felt a lot like a once-over.
“Lieutenant,” the riev said. “This one is Brisk Array. Swift Runner finds regular employment in the deep Warren. Two days ago, Swift Runner asked Sawtooth to go with them. Brisk Array saw Swift Runner and Sawtooth meet with an alw.”
“An alw! Well. There aren’t many of those in B-town, are there?”
“Gaer. Shut it.—Could you identify that alw again, Brisk Array?”
“Yes.”
“Then—”
“Wait, now.” Gaer put a hand out. “Did Pinjat succeed in restoring Oversight?”
“Gaer. That doesn’t matter.”
“It does.” Gaer turned to look at her. Tilted his head in the direction of all the riev. “If they’re on a network, they could be talking right now.”
“There is no Oversight.” Char’s voice deepened, slowed. Sounded both thoughtful and condemnatory at once.
“Thank you.” Iari shot a shut up look at Gaer. “Brisk Array. Will you show us where you saw Swift Runner and Sawtooth meet the alw?”
“Yes.”
“Iari.” Gaer leaned over and put his mouth near her ear. “That’s all very fascinating. But it might be good to know where Brisk Array wants to take us, before we commit to going. There are parts of this city where I’m, ah, even less welcome.”
She resisted an urge to prod him back with her elbow. Ducked her shoulder instead, and turned her head to make eyelock. “Parts where I am, too. And probably that’s where we’re going.”
“There are two of us.”
“And Brisk Array to lead us. So three. You’re rigged and armed. So’m I.”
Elements, the look on his face. Every orifice clamped down until she wondered how the hell he was breathing at all. His chromatophores had turned almost black. “Against a possible two riev who have already killed someone. Perhaps we could even those odds.”
All right. Point. Iari pivoted back to Char. “Will you accompany us? A request, Char. Not an order.”
Char took a careful step. The ruined left arm drifted up. “Lieutenant. I am—”
“A veteran of Saichi. Yeah. So you said.” She wondered what it’d cost to get that arm repaired. If there were mecha parts back in the Aedis, or if Tobin knew where to find an artificer licensed for riev repair. “Will you come with us?”
The riev hesitated. Then, “Yes, Lieutenant.”
“Good. Then Brisk Array, you’ve got point. Let’s go.”