There’s a voice in his ear, hot and full of rage: “Like you said, I need you alive.”
Khadse is hauled to his feet, his broken ankle screaming. He feels himself being dangled above the ground, and is suddenly aware of how much larger Sigrud is than him, how much stronger. Khadse’s vision begins to coalesce, the bursting white bubbles fading, and he can see now: he can see Sigrud’s face just before his own, his weathered, scarred features twisted in pitiless glee.
“How happy I am,” says Sigrud, pulling a fist back, “to finally get my hands on you.”
After he’s done with him, Sigrud wipes sweat from his brow and leans up against the wall, still gasping for air. This was his first real combat in over a decade. He remembers it being a lot easier than this.
His gaze trails over Khadse’s split lip and broken nose. Broken ankle and slashed-open hand.
This man killed Shara, he tells himself. This man killed dozens of people just to kill Shara.
And yet—why doesn’t he feel better about what he’s done? Why isn’t he enjoying this more?
Remember what he took from you. Remember what you’ve lost.
An old survival tactic, for Sigrud: to forge a compass from your sorrow, and let it lead you ahead.
He kneels, groaning, picks up Khadse, and throws him over his shoulder. He staggers up the stairs, then winds down through the bowels of the warehouse, the air alight with the smell of coal and blood. At one point he steps through a spreading pool of blood from some corpse lying in the darkness, someone he can barely remember killing now. He makes sure to tread through a pile of coke dust to keep his footprints from being too bloody.
He exits the warehouse and carries Khadse’s unconscious body to his stolen auto, a junky, rambling thing whose headlights keep flickering. He opens the trunk and carelessly tosses Khadse in. The man moans when he falls on the tire iron at the bottom.
Sigrud shuts the trunk, then pauses as he climbs into the auto. He scans the wide concrete lot, listening, thinking. He’s not sure why, but he can’t help but feel someone’s just been here.
He climbs in and starts the auto. The headlights strobe and flicker as he pulls away. He drives off in a different direction from where he came, just to be sure. As he does, the headlights slash over the reeds down by the canal.
Sigrud stomps on the brakes. The auto screeches to a halt.
He sits in the driver’s seat, squinting through the windshield, before slowly climbing back out. He leaves the auto running, the flickering headlights shooting over his shoulder. He walks toward the canal. The concrete crumbles to an end, replaced by muddy grass that slopes down to the thick reeds by the water. Sigrud cocks his head, examining them.
A large patch of the reeds are bent. He looks down and sees footprints in the muddy grass. Recent ones, and quite small—though not small enough to be a child’s. Perhaps an adolescent’s.
Someone was watching me, he thinks.
He looks out at the canal. He suspects they’re still there, crouched in the reeds. If they wanted to attack, now would be the time—he’s winded and Khadse’s out cold. It’d be easy to take a shot from the dark. But whoever they are, they don’t make a move.
Sigrud grunts. When he walks back to his auto, he decides to stick with his original plan—getting Khadse to his safe house—only he’ll make a few alterations to the site, just in case there are any surprises.
A very good thing, he thinks as he opens the door to the auto, that I brought more explosives.
Change is a slow flower to bloom. Most of us will not see its full radiance. We plant it not for ourselves, but for future generations.
But it is worth tending to. Oh, it is so terribly worth tending to.
—LETTER FROM FORMER PRIME MINISTER ASHARA KOMAYD TO UPPER HOUSE MINORITY LEADER TURYIN MULAGHESH, 1732
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?”