CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I don’t know how long I stood there. Probably only a couple of seconds, but it felt like a dip into eternity. I stared back at the tenshes, my mind flashing back to Fourth of Three taking Selene off for her tour, remembering how the tenshes accompanying him had gone into back-arched threatening mode the instant I made a move toward him.
Rozhuhu had assured us that the animals were tame. But even if he’d been telling the truth—and I wasn’t exactly brimming with confidence at Ammei honesty—that didn’t mean the ones in the abandoned part of the city weren’t dangerously feral.
And I knew full well that there were plenty of ferret-sized creatures in the Spiral that were extremely dangerous, especially when they gathered into hunting packs.
“Why do you stop?” Uvif demanded in my ear.
“That,” I said, nodding toward the silent watchers.
He made a strange sort of choking hiss. “What are they?”
“The Ammei call them tenshes,” I said. “Seem to be little furry sidekicks.”
“Are they dangerous?”
I opened my mouth to tell him, no, at least not according to the Ammei.
And then, just in time, I realized there was a much better way to play this.
As my father used to say, If you end up in the center of unwanted attention, try to find something that worries them even more than you do.
“If you could see their teeth and claws better you wouldn’t ask that,” I said grimly. “Damn. They look like they’re there to stay, too.”
I frowned. They did look like they were there to stay, come to think about it. In fact, as I looked more closely, I saw that they weren’t focused on me at all, as I’d first assumed. Instead, those beady little eyes were all focused lower, specifically on the half-rotted, one-by-two-meter porch stretching out from the back door. Like they were Earth cats, and some very interesting mouse was hiding under there.
And then, I finally got it.
I shifted my gaze to the section of floor Uvif and I were standing on. Like the rest of the main house, it was constructed of more of the same wood planking. There were gaping holes in the boards, particularly at the edges and around the nail holes, but there were plenty of mostly intact chunks mixed in.
Stretching outward from where I was standing to the door’s threshold was exactly what I needed: a mostly solid, meter-long board five centimeters wide and maybe three thick. “I guess we’ll just have to move them,” I said, motioning Uvif back from the door. “A couple of steps, if you would?”
“What do you think to do?” Uvif asked, his eyes still on the silent tenshes as he and the Iykams complied.
“Like I said, persuade them to leave,” I told him. Crouching down, I slipped my fingers through a couple of conveniently placed holes and got my fingers under the edges of the board. I braced myself and carefully pulled upward. There was a muffled snap, and two thirds of the board came up in my hands. Beneath the house, I could see now, was a shallow crawlspace maybe fifteen centimeters deep separating the building from the ground below.
“There we go,” I said briskly. I straightened up and swung the board back and forth, pretending I was testing its weight and balance. “Yes. This will do nicely.”
But even as I waved the board around in an attempt to draw my companions’ eyes, my own attention was on the hole I’d just made in the floor. If I was reading the geometry right, the crawlspace should also extend beneath the porch that the tenshes were so interested in.
It did. Just as I swung my board in a particularly imposing arc I saw something stir right at the edge of the hole, presumably arriving from the porch area. Two somethings, actually.
Pix and Pax.
I breathed out a quiet sigh of cautious hope. Ixil had said he would stay on Nexus Six while McKell went back to Icarus to report, but Kinneman could easily have ordered that the Kalix instead return to Icarus, an order that would likely have been delivered by a few Marines.
But Ixil was still here. More than that, he’d apparently witnessed my unplanned disappearing act and moved his outriders close enough to hear at least some of what Fearth and Circe were planning.
Unfortunately, that still left a couple of crucial gaps in my knowledge. Did he have an extraction plan ready for me? Or was he leaving that up to me and had simply sent in Pix and Pax on the off chance I could find a use for them?
As my father used to say, Close friends are the ones you can always rely on. Make sure you’re always your own closest friend.
I studied the little creatures sitting in the darkness staring up at me. I had a use for them, all right. The question was whether I could get them to understand what I needed.
There was only one way to find out.
“Okay,” I said, finishing my practice swings and turning back toward the door. “You three wait here. I’ll go clear us a path.”
“Stop,” Uvif said quickly. “If they are servants of the Ammei, will their masters not be close at hand? If so, an overt attack will draw their attention.”
“Good point,” I agreed, taking a half step forward into the doorway where I could get a clearer look outside and also block Uvif’s own view. With Pix and Pax no longer having a staring contest with the tenshes from under the porch’s edge, the other animals were starting to lose interest and wander away. “But we can’t just stay here, either, especially not if there are Ammei nearby patrolling the streets. I guess we either use the front door or give up on getting our hands on all that silver-silk.”
“There are Ammei also on the other side of the building,” one of the Iykams spoke up.
“Right, but their main job is to make sure no one goes in or out one of the portals,” I reminded him. “Still, we might have to do something about them.”
I looked straight down at the hidden outriders. “A shame we don’t have some knockout pills or something that we could use to put them to sleep,” I added. “But since we don’t, we’ll have to go”—I leaned just slightly on the word—“with something different.”
I’d hoped Pix and Pax would get the message. They did. Before I’d even finished my sentence they were off, disappearing back through the hole and presumably out the porch end. Briefly, I wondered if they would have to run a tensh gauntlet, then put it out of my mind. I’d seen no signs that the tenshes had attacked them before; hopefully, they wouldn’t do so now.
“What do you plan?” Uvif asked.
I suppressed a smile. At this stage, faced with a sudden shift in the tactical landscape, Circe would probably already have a couple of alternate plans in mind. Huginn would probably have three or four. Uvif, in contrast, seemed completely clueless on what came next.
“I need to rig up a diversion,” I told him. “I think everything I need is back in the other room.”
He muttered something under his breath. “Be quick about it.”
We returned to the relatively spacious room where we’d spent so many hours together earlier. While Uvif and the Iykams watched from the doorway, I busied myself pulling together whatever odds and ends I could find: bits of broken ceramic, a few splinters from the baseboards, and some yellowish powder that had collected in one of the corners. I wrapped all of it in a piece of the black mesh that had been left behind when the silver-silk had been harvested. I pulled out my flashlight, shone it briefly through the side of the mesh, and nodded as if satisfied.
“Okay,” I told Uvif, surreptitiously checking my watch. All in all, I’d burned through about fifteen minutes. Hopefully, that would be enough. “I’m ready.”
“What will that do?” Uvif asked, peering doubtfully at my masterpiece.
“You’ll see,” I said, walking toward them. Again, they moved aside to let me pass.
And as they did so, I gently stroked my left thumbnail into mirror mode. Cradling my junk collection in both hands, I angled my thumb to look at the floor behind me.
I’d worried that I hadn’t given the outriders enough time to get back to Ixil, upload the memory of my knockout-alternative comment, and download any new instructions. I’d also worried that Ixil wouldn’t remember his off-hand comment back in Alpha when this whole thing first started and wouldn’t catch what I was trying to tell him.
Both concerns had been for nothing. In my mirrored nail I saw Pix and Pax lurking motionless in the shadows near the back door, their full attention on me. Their noses seemed to twitch as Uvif and the two Iykams followed me into the corridor and we headed for the front door.
My last look, before I again repositioned my hands, was of the two outriders moving stealthily along the floor toward us.
“This is where it gets a bit tricky,” I said, stopping a meter back from the door and peering out. “When the sky above the beacon is clear—like it is right now—the area’s pretty dark. It’s when there are clouds directly above the Tower that we get the kind of city-wide reflection we don’t want.”
“Then we should wait until there are first clouds, then no clouds,” Uvif suggested. “The guards’ low-light vision will be most impaired at that time.”
“Exactly,” I said, impressed in spite of myself. Between my encounter with him at Landon Station and his single-minded demands for my death here I’d come to think of him as brutish and vindictive but not especially intelligent. That suggestion showed that he did have at least a modicum of tactical ability.
I felt my stomach tighten. It was exactly that sort of flawed snap judgment that could bring a bounty hunter to a very quick and very lethal end.
As my father used to say, Always assume the other guy is smarter, faster, and a better shot than you are. If you’re wrong, you’ll be pleasantly surprised. If you’re right, at least you won’t be taken down by an obvious sucker punch.
“You three wait back here,” I continued, taking another step toward the door. Now, more than ever, I needed to make sure my moves and timing were exactly on their marks. “I’ll take a look.”
That single step was all I got. Uvif snapped an order, and an instant later I was yanked to a halt, both upper arms gripped in an Iykam hand. “Hey,” I protested, half turning to glare at Uvif over my shoulder. “What the hell?”
“You do try to run?” Uvif growled, his voice heavy with suspicion.
“I do not try to run,” I growled back. At the bottom of my peripheral vision, so far unnoticed by anyone else, Pix and Pax skittered forward and plopped themselves down directly behind the Iykams, pressing solidly against the heels of their boots. “I try to give you information about silver-silk, remember? Let go.” Turning back to face forward, I took a long step backward, dragging the two Iykams with me.
Or rather, I’d have dragged them along if their feet had been free to match my backward step. But with Pix and Pax keeping that from happening—
The alternative, Ixil had said about my knockout pills, was for you to sneak up behind each one, crouch down, and let one of us push him over you.
The Iykams went down like a matched set of falling trees, letting go of my arms in a frantic but futile attempt to somehow get their hands in position to break their fall. But there was no time, they were facing the wrong direction, and they landed flat on their backs on the rotten wood with soggy-sounding thuds. The impact jarred loose one of the corona guns, sending it skittering across the floor. The other Iykam managed to keep his grip on his weapon, though only until I bent down and twisted it away from him.
“Or we can continue our discussion later,” I said, waving the corona gun casually in Uvif’s direction. “Just relax. No one has to get hurt.”
“You will die, human,” the Patth said, his voice going dark and quiet. “I will kill you myself.”
“We can talk about that later, too,” I said, watching him as I crossed the room and retrieved the other weapon. “Right now, we’re heading over to that wonderfully engineered hidey-hole Expediter Huginn set up for us. On your feet, Iykams. Let’s go.”
I had no doubt that any of the three of them would have tried something desperate if I’d given them the slightest hope that an attack would have even a slim chance of success. I made damn sure not to give them any such hope.
A minute later, they were tucked away behind the collapsed ceiling section. A minute after that, I’d closed the flap behind them and wedged the power pack of one of the corona guns into the opening in a way that would prevent the catch from disengaging. “I suggest you wait until Circe comes to fetch you,” I called softly through the panel. “Shouting for help now would only mean coming up with a good story to tell the Ammei.”
There was no answer. I hadn’t expected one.
Pix and Pax were waiting for me by the back door. The earlier crowd of tenshes had vanished, leaving nothing but derelict buildings visible in the soft glow of reflected beacon light. “Okay,” I muttered to the outriders. “Let’s go home.”
* * *
In some ways it was like a replay of the previous night, when I’d slipped out of our designated room and skulked around the ruined city.
But for that excursion I’d waited until the beacon had shut down, the result being that I’d had to fumble my way around the area in near total darkness, painfully aware that if I ran across an Amme I would probably run headlong into him before I even knew he was there. Now, with the beacon blazing its light into the wispy overhead clouds, I could see much more clearly. It made the city easier to navigate, but also made the ghost-lit ruins that much creepier.
But even better than light, this time I had guides.
Not just guides to wherever Ixil had holed up, either. Three times during our meandering trip through the debris one or the other of the outriders suddenly spun around and ran his body into my shin. Luckily, I was fast enough to take the hint, stopping dead and dropping into a low crouch. The first two times it was a group of Ammei striding purposefully through the city thirty meters or so away, possibly hunting for me, possibly just on routine patrol. The third time it was a roving pack of tenshes like the ones who’d thought earlier that they had Pix and Pax trapped under the porch. One of the creatures at the edge of the herd paused for a long look at us, then turned back and hurried to catch up with his companions.
I grimaced as I watched them go. If the tenches could make the same neural connection with the Ammei that Kalixiri outriders could make with their masters, the alarm was going to go up the minute any of that pack found someone whose leg they could climb up. I needed to get under cover, and fast.
Fortunately, that was our last encounter with any of the locals. Two minutes later, accompanied by the gentle rippling sound of the nearby river, we reached the half-demolished two-floor building that was our goal. The outriders slipped nimbly through cracks in the western wall; I found a half-broken door and maneuvered my way through the gap. I walked a zigzag path through a long corridor that had been rigged with impromptu light baffles and entered an inner room…
“Welcome,” Ixil said, rising from his seat on a box in one corner and giving me a quick visual once-over. “I trust you’re unharmed?”
“Thanks to you, yes,” I told him, frowning a little as I looked around. This room seemed awfully familiar. “I’m a little surprised to find you way out here. I didn’t give Pix and Pax that much time to bring you my plan.”
“Oh, no, I was much closer to you then,” Ixil explained. He snapped his fingers twice, and Pix and Pax detached themselves from my sides and trotted over to him. “I moved back here to our base after I gave them their instructions. I assume it went well?”
“Very well,” I confirmed as the two outriders climbed up Ixil’s jacket and settled on his shoulders. “See for yourself.”
He nodded, a sort of distant look crossing his squashed-iguana face as the outriders’ memories flowed into him. “Interesting,” he murmured. “What did you do with the corona—? Oh, I see. You think they’re hidden well enough that that Ammei won’t find them?”
“They’re buried pretty deep under that wood pile,” I said. “I also took out the power packs before I dumped them.”
“Yes, I see,” Ixil said, his eyes coming back to focus. “Hopefully, that’ll be good enough. If not, we’ll at least learn something about Ammei sensor and search capabilities.”
“Speaking of which, if the tenshes we passed report in fast enough, we’re probably well within the search radius,” I warned. “We might want to relocate.”
“I don’t think that will be a problem,” Ixil said, giving each of his outriders a brief pet. “They don’t seem to have that capability.”
“You sure?” I asked, eyeing the outriders. “Because if they can’t search the way Pix and Pax do, what good are they?”
“I don’t know,” Ixil conceded. “Still, Pix and Pax seem to have come to a certain tacit agreement with them.”
“I hope you’re right,” I warned, thinking back to the silent mass of tenshes blocking our way out the back door. “The crowd that had them pinned down under the porch seemed pretty unfriendly.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Ixil said. “I would say they were more bemused than belligerent. Intrigued, perhaps. You saw that they didn’t attack, even though they could have fit through the same gaps the outriders did, and that they didn’t impede their return to me after hearing your instructions.”
“I suppose,” I said reluctantly. “That still doesn’t explain what the Ammei see in them.”
“That, I agree, is still unknown.” He gave me the Kalixiri equivalent of a smile. “Still, there’s something to be said for simple companionship.”
“The Ammei don’t strike me as the cuddly type.”
“I would tend to agree.” He waved me to a more or less flat chunk of wood that might once have been the top of a cabinet. “But that’s a mystery for later. For now, let’s start with what exactly happened after Huginn set off that smoke bomb.”
* * *
I gave him the complete rundown of Huginn’s smoke-screen gambit, from the time we left the Tower up until Ixil’s outriders made their appearance at my impromptu prison. “I assume Huginn and his Iykams set all this up before the Ammei caught them,” I finished. “Planting gear where Huginn could get it on last night’s midnight stroll. What his end game is, though, I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“He does seem to play his cards close,” Ixil murmured, absently stroking the heads of the two outriders crouched on his shoulders. “But some parts are clear enough. For one thing, the Patth apparently know a great deal more about the Ammei than we do. Certainly more than Huginn has let on.”
“Yeah, that one’s pretty obvious,” I conceded. “On the other hand, there’s one thing we know that I don’t think he does.” I waved my hand around the room. “This room. The room Huginn picked for Circe and Fearth to hide me in. The room by the river, probably, except it’s too wrecked to tell. They’re all the same design.” I raised my eyebrows. “And they all had silver-silk baseboard linings.”
“Which means?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But it can’t be a coincidence, which means it has to be important.”
“I agree,” Ixil said thoughtfully. “Possibly more so than you know, in fact. Do you remember back to when Nask first captured you and Tera? Among other things, he talked about the Patth legend of Orammescka.”
I searched my memory. I’d had far more pressing concerns at the time, but I vaguely remembered the incident. “Isn’t he the one who captured fire and brought it back before the sun killed him? The Patth version of the Greek Prometheus?”
“That’s the one,” Ixil confirmed. “Except that the sun didn’t kill him, he just fell to his death.”
“Dead is still dead.”
“True,” Ixil said. “At any rate, during Tera’s later debriefing she mentioned being oddly impressed by the conversation, that she sensed an earnestness in the way Nask talked about Orammescka.”
“Well, we know he’s big into mythology,” I pointed out. “Anybody’s mythology, actually. Just look at the way he names his Expediters.”
“I agree,” Ixil said. “At the same time, Tera wondered if there might be some actual history buried in the legend. With that in mind, she, Jordan, and I decided to take a deeper look at some of the other Patth myths.”
“Harmless enough hobby,” I said, keeping my reflexive skepticism firmly in check. Most legends I’d run into in my travels struck me as wishful thinking at best and meaningless froth at worst. But there’d been times when I’d found a buried nugget or two in the stories. “You find anything interesting?”
“Possibly,” Ixil said. “There’s a story of a Patth named Arammika who infiltrated the lairs of the silver and black spiders. He stole magic webs from each of them and brought the webs to the people.”
I looked over at the wall, a chill running up my back. “Silver-silk intertwined with a black mesh,” I murmured.
“Interesting, isn’t it?” Ixil agreed. “You told us that the Ammei don’t use silver-silk ornamentally?”
“Not that I’ve seen,” I said. “Do the Patth use silver-silk in any industrial processes?”
“We don’t know,” Ixil said. “But given how closely they guard their technology, it’s certainly possible.”
I snorted. “I think when you put components of your stardrive system into your pilots’ faces you’ve gone way beyond closely guarded.”
“I stand corrected,” Ixil agreed. “Still, we don’t have any actual evidence of such uses.”
“Maybe we do now,” I said, frowning suddenly. The myths had the common theme of someone wresting control of a vital resource from a higher power.
But if I’d heard Ixil right, there was more similarity than just that in the two stories. In fact…
“Gregory?”
I shook away the thought. I needed to do a little more research of my own before I shared such an odd thought with Ixil or anyone else. “Something I didn’t tell you earlier,” I said. “There’s a big room in the Tower across from the library with shuttered windows where the Ammei are building something out of Icari metal. Selene says there’s also silver-silk in there.”
“Is that where the material they’ve harvested from the various houses has been taken?”
“That’s our assumption,” I confirmed. “No idea whether the silver-silk is being used directly in their current project or just being stored. Have you had a chance to look around the city?”
“We’ve done a cursory examination of some of it,” Ixil said. “Anything in particular you’re looking for?”
“I’m wondering about the distribution of these larger houses,” I said. “Or maybe more specifically, the distribution of these silver-silk rooms.”
“And?”
I hesitated. Ixil was used to me trotting out wild theories, but this one had even less of a solid foundation than most of them. “I’m wondering if—”
I broke off as Ixil suddenly lifted a finger for silence. I strained my ears.
And felt my mouth go dry. From somewhere outside had come the soft clink of a foot against a rock.
They’d found us.