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.”