Whoever their enemy is, they penetrated not only Shara’s tradecraft practices, but also the Divine barriers she’d put up around herself in the Golden. Not someone to trifle with, then.
And whoever wrote this message was trying to warn Shara, trying to tell her the sharks were closing in. But it never got to her.
Yet the little Saypuri hood…That rings a bell.
He rereads that line again and again. Sigrud worked with all kinds of Saypuri hoods and operatives and hardliners in his time in the Ministry.
An aging Saypuri hood with a scar on his neck…
The blood on the floor. Dirty work, silent and close—knife work.
The memory of a face comes swimming up in his mind: a thin, wiry, short Saypuri man, with high, sharp cheekbones, a starved face, and burning eyes. And just below his chin, nearly hidden in his collar, a bright, lurid, white scar, running across his throat.
He remembers the man tapping that scar once and saying, I got this in Jukoshtan. Fucking Kolkashtani took exception to the way I was walking. Too much pride for a Saypuri, he said. But I survived. Found him later. Gutted him like a pig. Never forgot that he tried to do that to me. Whenever I get a contract for a Continental…Why, I grab my knife, and remember…
“Ah,” he says. “Khadse. Of course.”
Lieutenant Rahul Khadse of the Saypuri Navy. Sigrud remembers him. Nasty little man, one of Vinya’s pets. When Shara took the prime minister’s seat, he’d been one of the first to go. But if it’s him—and Sigrud only has this mysterious testimony suggesting so—then it seems he found a home here in Ahanashtan, practicing his grisly trade.
Sigrud puts down the handwritten note and looks at the copy of the coded message. It appears to be a copy of a telegram, which would have been sent through the normal channels—so the date is there in plain text at the top. It looks like it was sent the week before Shara’s death.
He sighs and scratches his head. I thought I’d never have to decrypt anything again, he thinks, yet here I am once more. He rummages around in his room for a pencil and paper. How I hate codes.
It takes him the whole morning to decrypt it. He tries some standard methods, but none make any headway. He tries some systems Shara devised, but those don’t work either.
I should sleep, he thinks, rubbing his eyes. I must sleep….
But whenever he thinks of sleep, he remembers the sight of the Golden, its walls ruined and torn, and he has no appetite for rest.
It’s only when he starts really thinking about who this message was intended for—Khadse, likely—that he has any ideas.
If Khadse was the hood that Shara’s enemy was working with, then he probably would not have his own encryption team. Maybe he would have twenty years ago, when he was still in the folds of the Ministry and had access to resources—but not now. So he’d need something familiar. And what sort of code would be familiar to Khadse?
After one more hour, he stops, thunderstruck.
He knows this. He’s used this code before.
He tries out one key.
The first few lines of the original order begin to materialize:
ONCE CONFIRMED KOMAYD HAS BEEN ELIMINATED…
“Shit,” says Sigrud. He can’t believe it. It’s a code that was used by Bulikovian partisans twenty-five years ago, when the capital of the Continent occasionally resisted Saypuri rule. He can’t blame Khadse for using it—it’s an obscure one, one broken by the Ministry long ago, and used in a region fairly far from here. It’s likely any contemporary Ministry operatives would be stumped by it. But Khadse likely didn’t think there’d be any aging operatives like Sigrud on his tail.
He decodes the rest of the message, and reads:
ONCE CONFIRMED KOMAYD HAS BEEN ELIMINATED NEXT TARGET LIST WILL BE PROVIDED 12 DAYS LATER STOP
EXCHANGE WILL TAKE PLACE 1300 HOURS 28TH OF BHOVRA STOP
SUVIN WAREHOUSE FACILITY REMAINS MOST SECURE LOCATION STOP
MAINTAIN HIGHEST POSSIBLE SECURITY FOR EXCHANGE STOP
Sigrud rereads the message, then reads it a third, fourth, fifth, and sixth time.
The 28th of Bhovra…He has to do some math, since he usually thinks in Saypuri months, not Continental months—but he eventually realizes that’s in three days. So he still has time. Not much, but some.
He has a time, a date, and he knows one half of who will be there—Khadse and his team. Likely a lot of them, judging by the last sentence—“highest possible security.”
He looks down at his hands. Scarred, worn, ugly things—the left, especially, its palm brutally mutilated using a Divine torture method long, long ago. I was only ever meant for one thing, he thinks.He slowly makes fists. The knuckles pop and creak unpleasantly. Meant to practice one art. How just it feels that now I shall do so.
He goes to bed, and sleeps deeply for the first time in weeks.
The Suvin Warehouse proves to be an old coal facility, situated on a stretch of docks on the eastern end of Ahanashtan—very sketchy, very dangerous, very old and dilapidated. An odd choice for an exchange: usually they’d pick someplace more accessible.
No simple dead drop, then, he thinks. Whoever is giving this information to Khadse, they mean to make him work for it.
But if Khadse is being put through his paces, it means there’s much, much more to protect. Shara was just one facet of all this, and Khadse was but a tool in a larger game.
I must meet this employer of Khadse’s, he thinks. And ask him many, many questions.
He walks along the perimeter. Bolts, he thinks, looking at the niches and shadows. Radios…Rope…Explosives, perhaps. He looks around at the nearby crumbling lots. And I’ll need a safe house. And probably to steal an auto too.
He has work to do, things to buy, things to make. And not much time to get them.
He returns to the streets to find his way home. But as he does he checks his periphery, doubles back, and performs some quick maneuvers to see if he has a tail.
He doesn’t. But he could have sworn he saw a familiar face: the pale, young Continental woman with the upturned nose and queerly colored eyes.
He shakes himself.
Time to go to work.
It’s silly, but I still worry about miracles. We tell ourselves that they’re all dead, but I’m never quite reassured enough.
Pangyui writes that, in some ancient texts, miracles were described not as rules or devices but as organisms, as if Saint So-and-So’s Magic Feet or whatever they called it was just a fish in a vast sea of them. As if some miracles had minds of their own.
This bothers me. It bothers me because organisms focus on one thing: survival. By any means necessary.
—MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS VINYA KOMAYD, LETTER TO PRIME MINISTER ANTA DOONIJESH, 1709
Rahul Khadse glowers out the auto’s window at the night sky. He shivers. Just nerves, he tells himself. That’s all it is. But he can’t help but admit that the evening has a bad taste to it.
He sighs. How he hates this particular job.
His team clutches their coats tight around their shoulders as they sit in the idling auto, as if they could seal out the creeping, chilling damp. It’s a hopeless cause. “How is it,” mutters Zdenic, “that this damned city gets both the hot summers and the cold winters?”