He freezes.
The shadows on the street outside begin to shift. Darkness floods the skies, as if night itself is manifesting right above him.
“No!” he says. “No, it can’t be!”
The mother and infant laugh hysterically behind him. He can feel the joy in her, feel the pain in her stomach from laughing too hard, all her senses flooded over with merriment.
He wants to stay here. This is what he is, what he does, what he loves. But he has to move on yet again.
Farther this time, he thinks. Go and keep going.
He shuts his eyes. Finds the next laughter, the next bright spark of joy.
The world shifts.
He’s in a house on the outskirts of Bulikov. A man sits on the kitchen floor with a giant pot of pasta spilled all across the tiles, the yellow sauce bright against the white surfaces. His face is red with laughter, and his wife stands at the doorway, howling in amusement.
“I told you it was too heavy!” she says, gasping for air. “I told you it was!”
The boy laughs too, the laughter tasting of shameful glee. Then he shuts his eyes and searches again.
The world shifts.
He’s in a dormitory room beside the university. A young woman sits on the bed, nude and convulsing with laughter. Were you to glance at her it’d be difficult to see what’s so funny—until you saw the young man’s head buried between her thighs, the rest of his body concealed by blankets.
The boy cackles with her. Her laughter is like sunlight and flower petals raining down in his mind. But he knows he must move on.
He shuts his eyes. Reaches out.
The world shifts.
A ball game in an alley, with one young man lying on the ground, clutching his crotch and gasping after a pitch went awry. The other children laugh uproariously, unable to contain themselves, while the young man says, “It’s not funny….It’s really not funny!” but this makes them laugh all the harder.
He smirks. This laughter has a crueler edge to it, the taste of copper and blood. But he knows he must move on.
He shuts his eyes. Searches.
Again, things shift.
He’s in a courtyard. An elderly man and woman sit in wooden wheelchairs in the sun, their legs covered with blankets. They chuckle weakly as they remember some ancient story from days long, long gone.
“She really told me that!” says the woman. “ ‘Hotter than a stiff cock,’ that’s what she said, right in front of everyone. I swear it!”
“I know, I know!” the man says, wheezing but smiling. “But who could ever believe it?”
Laughter of wistful incredulity, basking in the joy of two lives well lived. His heart sings to hear it, to taste it in his mouth. But he must move on.
I am laughter, he says, shutting his eyes. I am wherever there is glee. So he can never catch me….
He reaches out. Another tangle, this one sloppy and drunken and warped, the silvery laughter of someone well sotted.
Any port in a storm, thinks the boy, and he grasps it, pulling himself to it.
The world shifts…
He opens his eyes. He expected to be in a bar or someone’s room, but…this appears to be a basement. A dingy basement with one table and one chair.
In the chair is a cackling Saypuri man, but it’s clear he’s not laughing of his own volition: his eyes have a glazed look to them, and there’s a smear of drool on his chin. Despite this, he has the look of a soldier to him, as does the Saypuri woman standing over his shoulder, who’s holding an empty syringe. They both wear headcloths, for one, which is common to the military, but they’re also trim, muscular creatures, people who have made weapons out of their bodies, especially the woman: there’s something to her hard, dark face and amber-gold eyes that suggests a history of command and lethality to her.
The boy stares at them. But then the woman with the syringe does something very strange: she looks right at the boy, her expression somewhat apologetic. This should be impossible—when the boy shifts he becomes laughter incarnate, the spirit of merriment, invisible to mortal eyes—yet the Saypuri woman just smiles at him with a touch of regret and says, “Hello there.”
“Wh-what?” says the boy.
“He figured that if he kept you jumping you’d come here eventually,” says the woman. “Just had to keep someone laughing long enough.”
The boy then senses something riddling the clothing of the two people, forces and designs and structures woven into the fabric.
The boy blinks. The two soldiers are wearing protective miracles, Divine miracles—but they’re of a type he’s never seen before. So who could have made them?
The Saypuri woman looks at something behind the boy. “Ah. Well. Here we are, then.”
The boy turns around.
Behind him is a wall of darkness—not just shadow but the night itself, a wall of vast, endless black shot through with coldly glittering stars….
A voice echoes out of the darkness, a voice as cold as the light of those stars. “WHERE ARE THE OTHERS?”
The boy screams.
A rattle, a roar, and the train emerges from the tunnel.
Sigrud wakes. It takes longer than it ought for him to remember where he is, what’s happening. He rubs at his eye and glances around at the other passengers on the train, all relaxed or bored. They ignore him, thinking him to be another shiftless Dreyling dockworker, dressed in his blue peacoat and knit cap.
What an odd thing it is, he thinks, to don civilization again as if it were an old jacket, lying unused for years at the back of a closet. Perhaps civilization never truly suited Sigrud, but he must feign it now, after so many years in the wilderness. And after what happened in Voortyashtan, over thirteen years ago now, he is still very much a wanted man. As someone who once worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, one thing he knows full well is that the Ministry does not forget.
Nor should they. He remembers that moment as a blur of shadows and screams—he’d been raving mad with grief and fury after the murder of his daughter—but fragments of what happened in Fort Thinadeshi still sear bright and hot in his mind.
Grabbing a soldier’s sword, using it to cleave off the man’s arm below the elbow. Ripping a bayoneted rifling away from another and thrusting it deep into her abdomen.
I didn’t even know their names, he thinks, huddled low. I still don’t even know their names.
The train rushes on.
Back when Sigrud worked as an operative on the Continent, it would have taken two to three weeks to travel from the outskirts of Bulikov to Ahanashtan. Today it seems you can simply buy a ticket, go to a train station, and all the world will shift around you until you find yourself where you wish to be in but a handful of days.
He focuses on his goal. Ahanashtan, he thinks, remembering what he read in the papers. The Golden Hotel.
And then what? he wonders. What will he do there?
He looks at his reflection in the window. The only thing I know how to do anymore.
Sigrud je Harkvaldsson stares at his reflection. He takes in the scars, the wrinkles, the bags under his eyes. He wonders if he has it in him to do this. It’s been years since he worked as an operative—over a decade.
Perhaps this is foolish. Perhaps he’s an old dog insisting he can still perform old tricks.
Yet there’s something curious in his face, something that’s concerned him for a while, something he’s tried to dismiss. But now that he’s faced with mirrored surfaces time and time again—for mirrors were rare in the logging camps—he can tell something is wrong with his appearance.