Sigrud is silent for a long time. “Have you ever met your controller, Khadse?”
“I told you, no.”
“Ever talk to him, perhaps on a telephone?”
“No.”
“Then how do you make contact?”
“I receive telegrams indicating where contact will be made. Then I go to that location, doing exactly what the controller says, and once I’m there I…” He shuts his eyes. “I perform a ritual.”
Khadse then describes a miracle Sigrud’s never heard of before: a hole of perfect darkness, awaiting Khadse’s blood, and something sleeping at the bottom—something that releases a letter to him.
Sigrud looks at the letter in his hand. “This letter…was belched up from a miracle?”
“Yes. Maybe. Whatever. You and Komayd always knew a sight more about the Divine than we ever did.”
“And you have no idea who put this…this darkness there, or placed the letter there for you to find.”
“No. I don’t think it works like that. I think…All the times I’ve done it, it’s like the hole connects to somewhere, someplace. Only it’s like the place is under everything, or behind everything…I don’t know how to say it. And I’m not fucking sure I want to know.”
“How odd it is,” Sigrud says softly, “that you, a man who despises the Continent so much, are willing to use Continental tricks to kill a Saypuri.”
Khadse shrugs. “Like I said—he pays.” He spits out a mouthful of something bloody and reeking. “Maybe my controller is a nutter, sure. Maybe he’s some Continental hood who got his hands on a bunch of relics. But that’s how it is. It’s the game we’ve played since we were young pups, Harkvaldsson. The powers that be play their war games. And we pawns and grunts, we struggle among the trenches to stay alive. If things had gone but a bit differently, it could be you chained up here, and me with the knife.”
Sigrud considers that. He finds he agrees.
He turns and carefully stows the list of names away in his pack. Then he pries off the other tin plate from Khadse’s shoe, takes them both and Khadse’s coat, and stows them away as well.
“Robbing me, eh?” says Khadse. He spits again. Something tinkles to the floor, possibly a tooth. “I don’t blame you. But now we come to it, don’t we? Now you decide how to end me. How to usher old Rahul Khadse off this mortal plane. You bastard.”
“Not yet.” Sigrud looks at him. “You know more about your controller than you’re saying, Khadse.”
“Oh, you want to go after him?” says Khadse.
Sigrud says nothing.
Khadse cackles. “Oh, really. Really. Take your best shot! He’ll grind you into pieces, big man!”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean he’s not the sort to be trifled with. Me, I just have a name. Along with the rumor that whoever says this name…Well. They don’t stick around.”
“Your employer kills them? Just for saying his name?”
“Hells if I know. No one knows what happens to them. But they don’t come back from wherever they go.”
Sigrud cocks an eyebrow. “What you are describing,” he says, “sounds like a story created to scare children.”
“And I just put my bloodied hand in a hole in reality!” says Khadse, laughing. “And you just shot me and saw the bullets fall to the ground! I don’t know what to believe anymore, but I believe that it’s wise to be careful.” He grins madly. “I’ll tell you the damned name if you want, Dreyling. I’ll do it gladly. And it’ll be the end of you.”
Sigrud shakes his head. “I have never heard of any miracle or Divine creature that could hear its own name being spoken from across the world. Nothing short of a true Divinity could do that—and unless you’re about to tell me Olvos is your controller, it means you are quite wrong.”
“I guess you’ll find out.” Khadse’s smile fades. “And after I tell you the name,” he says, “it’s the end of old Khadse. Isn’t it.”
“You would have done the same to me.”
“Yes. That’s so.” He looks at Sigrud, his eyes burning. “How are you going to do it?”
“If it were twenty years ago, I would have disemboweled you. Left you here with your intestines dangling out. It would have taken hours. For what you did to Shara.”
“But today?”
“Today…I am old,” says Sigrud, sighing. “I know I do not quite look it. But we are both old men, Khadse, and this is a young person’s game. I’ve no time for such things anymore.”
“True enough.” He laughs weakly. “I thought I was going to get out. Retire. But these things don’t let you run away quite so easy, do they.”
“No. They do not.”
“At least it’s you. You and not one of these stupid young bastards. You didn’t just get lucky. You earned it.” Khadse stares off into space for a moment. Then he looks at Sigrud and says, “Nokov.”
“What?”
“His name,” says Khadse, breathing hard as if each syllable pains him, “is Nokov.”
“Nokov? Just Nokov?”
“Yes. Just that.” He leans forward. “You’ll die, you know. Whatever he does will be a thousand times worse than anything you’re about to do to me.”
Sigrud furrows his brow. Never in my life, he thinks, have I heard of a Nokov—neither in the world of tradecraft or the Divine.
Sigrud stands, unsheathes his knife, and gently lifts Khadse’s chin, exposing the thread of white scar running across his throat. He places the blade of his black knife to the scar, as if following the cutting instructions on a child’s piece of paper.
“And you’ll deserve it,” says Khadse, staring into Sigrud’s eyes. “For all you’ve done. You deserve it too.”
“Yes,” says Sigrud. “I know.” Then he whips the blade across Khadse’s throat.
The splash of blood is huge and hot and wet. Sigrud steps back and watches as Khadse chokes, coughs, and gags, his chest and stomach flooded over with his own blood.
It doesn’t take him long to die. No matter how many times he’s seen it, Sigrud is always struck by how only a few seconds separate life from death.
How many seconds, he wonders, watching Khadse’s body quake, did it take for Shara to die?
Khadse’s head slumps forward.
Or Signe?
He stops moving.
The room is silent now except for the patter of blood. Sigrud, wiping his hands on a rag, sits down on the floor and pulls back out the list of Khadse’s targets.
He stares at the last name on the list: Tatyana Komayd. A girl he’s seen only once in his life, and perhaps the only piece of his friend that still persists in this world.
The pale Continental girl watches the slaughterhouse from the reeds by the canal. She slowly starts creeping up to the edge of the property, mindful of any movement in the windows. Thankfully the big man didn’t take Khadse far, just a few miles downriver. As no one watches this stretch of the river, it was easy enough for her to follow, though she’s now soaking up to her knees.