“This may be our last warm night of the year,” said Megan the next evening. “It pleases me to see you enjoying it.”
Armiger smiled at her. He stood in the center of the clearing next her cottage. The sun had just set, leaving a rose band across the western horizon. The moon Diadem was rising. The moon received its name from the scattering of brilliant white craters on its surface, which made it a dim oval studded with diamond-bright pinpricks of light. On other nights Armiger had praised or cursed those gleaming points, depending on whether night-visibility was to his army’s advantage or not. Tonight, possibly for the first time, he was able to admire the sight for its own sake.
He felt content. He knew it was because he was free from all responsibilities during this convalescence.
“Strange,” he murmured.
Megan looked up at the moon, then back at him. “What?”
“I should be dead,” he said.
She touched his shoulder. “Your wounds were terrible. But they’re healing quickly. Isn’t that normal for a morph?”
“I’m not exactly a morph,” he said wryly. “Just something like one. But yes, you’re right.” The lie came easily to his lips. Then he thought about it. Could he explain this to a mortal? He would never have thought he had an obligation to try.
Armiger lowered his eyes from the moon, and studied Megan in the pale light. She was a creature he didn’t understand. His plans had rarely included women. But she stood next to him now, easy in the cricket-song and darkness, and played none of the dominance games males played. She took her own obligation to him, the wounded soldier, for granted.
“My link to my higher self,” he began, then stopped. “It was more than love. We shared an identity. When… she died, I should have died too. Because there was only one of us. Or at least that’s what I believed.”
Megan nodded. “We all think that of our life’s love. But one carries on.”
At first Armiger thought she had simply not understood him. Then he thought of another possibility: Megan knew his experiences were not like hers, but she was making an effort to translate them into terms she could understand.
It surprised him to think that she might be spending her time with him doing such an odd kind of work. For it would be work, finding commonality with a stranger’s experience. Armiger himself did so only as a way of anticipating the next move of an opponent.
If she’d kept her conclusions to herself, he might have believed she was doing that too. But she shared them.
“Was she killed in the war?” Megan asked.
He started to say no, since this local brushfire he had been involved in had nothing to do with the interstellar conflict that had resulted in his greater self’s demise. But he could play the same game as her: what would make sense to her, on an emotional level? “Yes,” he said.
“You won’t go back to being a soldier, will you?”
He barely heard her. Why am I alive? When his Self died, he should have been extinguished, or at least turned back into an aimless machine.
“I thought I knew what I was,” he said. Armiger had pretended to be human since arriving on Ventus. Before that, he recalled bright light and deep vacuum, vision encompassing 360 degrees, radio song in his head, and others’ thoughts as well. In that existence, there had been no distinguishing his own mind from those of his companions, the other servants of 3340. And the god’s will was the same as their own. The part of that vast identity that was Armiger thought of himself as an extension of the greater whole. He had assumed that when he thought, it was 3340 who was thinking, and when he acted, it was the god acting. It had always been that way.
No, not always…
Suddenly the presence of this woman at his side felt threatening. Something ancient, a memory perhaps, made him turn away from her. “I need to be alone now,” he said. The harsh tone of his own voice surprised him.
“But—” she began. Then she seemed to think better, and turned and walked away quickly.
Armiger glanced back. Humans were biological creatures—mortal animals. For a second there, though, he had touched on some deep-buried feeling within himself. Megan had loomed in the darkness as real as 3340 itself. For an instant, he had… remembered? Remembered standing with someone, a human being, who was every bit his own equal. A creature like himself.
A woman.
And there and then a memory unfolded within Armiger like a long-dormant flower: of himself walking and laughing, a young man with a young woman on his arm, on a world with two moons. On a night like this.
That memory was a thousand years old.
Had he once been human himself? That could explain why 3340 had chosen him for this job. On the other hand, the god could have crafted his personality from the remnants of captured human minds. After all, a memory was nothing more than a synaptic hologram. He was sure 3340 could manufacture any sort of memory for its agents.
Armiger stalked through the long wet grass, swiping at it absently with his hands. The moon and the warmth of the night were forgotten now. He came to the edge of the woods, and turned to pace back the way he’d come, scowling.
If that had been a manufactured memory, why should it remain submerged for so long? He would have expected the god to make only useful memories, and provide them all to his agent’s consciousness.
This memory… her hand in his… was an alien thing. He couldn’t fit it into his purpose or identity as 3340 had given them to him.
He realized he had been kicking the grass out of his way as he walked, tearing it up by the roots. Armiger stopped, and glanced back at the cottage. Megan stood silhouetted in the doorway.
He ran his hand through his hair. Well. Evidently there was some fragment of human mentality in him. 3340 would not have sent him on this mission were that not the case. It could explain why he was still alive: for some reason 3340 had given him the same instincts for autonomous self-preservation as biological creatures had.
He told himself not to jump to conclusions. He had yet to really take stock of himself. Hitherto the overwhelming fact of his bereavement had kept him from exploring what was left to him. Maybe it was time.
He walked back to the cottage. Megan still stood in the doorway, a frown on her face. “I can’t say I haven’t done that myself,” she said. “I’m sorry if I reminded you of things you didn’t want to think about.”
Armiger felt tired, in body and mind. “I need to thank you, actually,” he said. “You’ve provided me such a safe haven here that I can finally face some of these things.”
Megan beamed. She seemed to struggle for something to say. “Oh,” she managed at last. Then, slyly, “then I can take your ripping up the garden as a good sign?”
“Garden?” He glanced back at the darkened field.
“You tromped right through one of them a minute ago.”
“Oh.” What to say? “I’ll repair the damage in the morning.”
She laughed. “Just do your best. I can’t picture you as a gardener, whatever else you may be.”
Awkwardly, he tried a grin in reply. Megan combed her fingers through her hair and bumped her shoulder against the doorjamb a couple of times.
“I’ll heat up some stew if you’d like,” she said at last.
“Thanks. I’m going to sit out here and meditate a while.”
“Okay.” She ducked back in, leaving the door open to the fragrances of night.
Armiger sat down stiffly on the uneven boards of the cottage’s small porch. There was just enough space next to Megan’s rocking chair for him to sit in full lotus. He gazed out over the breeze-runnelled grass. Diadem’s light cast shadows like nodding figures under the trees. He closed his eyes.
Armiger decided to avoid a full neurophysiological exam for now. He just wasn’t psychologically strong enough to take an objective look at how much intelligence, memory and will he had lost with 3340. He could treat his body dispassionately, however, so he started with that.
His resources were painfully low. The gossamer nanotech that made up his real body had unfurled from its usual position at the spine, and spread throughout this human form, right to its extremities. Nearly all his energy was devoted to shoring up the body’s ravaged immune system. He had manufactured nano to move in and repair the dead cells of his own corpse, and until a day or so ago he had been warm and breathing only because the nano had replaced normal cell processes with their own harsh metabolism. Now the nano were easing out of revived cells and were being reabsorbed into his filamentary body. His strength was growing, but very slowly. At this rate it would be many months before he recovered fully.
He regretted having been so profligate with his power when he arrived. To think he had detached parts of his own gossamer and implanted them in humans, just to use them as remote eyes and ears…
Armiger opened his eyes. He had completely forgotten about the remotes. It wasn’t surprising, with everything that had happened; they had always been a minor part of his plans, the mental equivalent of posting picket sentries around a camp. They did contain valuable nano, however. He could considerably speed up his recovery if he recovered some of that.
If it hadn’t been too badly damaged by the catastrophe, he should still have links to each remote. They operated on superluminal resonances, undetectable on the electromagnetic spectrum; he had set up the links this way to prevent the Winds from homing in on his position. It was still possible to trace the signal back from one of the remotes, but that would require an understanding of human physiology and psychology that he knew the Winds didn’t possess. Superluminal links were always two way—what affected one station affected the other. Armiger knew of no Wind capable of exploiting the fact to turn one of his remotes into a receiver, so he had felt safe in making them.
Shutting his eyes, he called up their perspectives. The system was weak from damage and disuse, but after a few seconds the remotes began to respond.
There should have been twelve. By the time the system was fully up, Armiger could see through only six pairs of eyes.
Even that was nearly overwhelming. Somewhere in the catastrophe he had lost the ability to process multiple sensory inputs. What came to him now was a chaos of sensations: blue cloth waving near a fire, water down a horse’s flank, the feel of stone on his bare back, a warm hand on his belly—
—Pounding heart and ragged breaths gulped into a tight and painful chest.
He recoiled in pain. It was too much to take all at once. After opening his eyes and breathing quietly for a minute, he resumed, this time singling out one remote’s perspective.
This other’s hands smoothed the chestnut flank of his horse one last time, then turned away. Armiger saw he stood in a small stable, the sort attached to country inns all across Ravenon. This perspective belonged to an engineer who travelled the country repairing and updating the heliographs in royal signal towers. He saw a lot of the country in his travels, and more than once Armiger had used his perspective to gather intelligence.
Tonight he was idle, walking slowly out of the stable, through a light drizzle to the door of a thatch-roofed inn. Armiger stayed with him only long enough to see him slide aside the curtain to a private closet; a candle already burned next the small cot there.
Armiger turned his attention to the next perspective. This man was in bed already, but not alone. Several people sat on hard wooden chairs next to the bed in his small plaster-walled bedroom. Armiger’s remote was talking to them.
“…Came at me like that out of nowhere. Why? What did I do to deserve this?” He gestured at his leg, which lay exposed above the bedding. It was thickly wrapped in bloody bandages.
“How many did you say there were?” asked a man wearing the crimson ribbons of a priest.
“Five, six. I don’t know! It all happened so fast.”
“Well, you must have done something to offend them.”
“Not necessarily,” said another man. “Maybe someone else did. Matthew was passing by. He was a handy target.”
“I don’t understand,” whined the man in the bed. “How am I going to work now?”
“Don’t worry. We’ll help you.”
Armiger left this perspective for the next.
Still on her back. Cold stone and pebbles ground against her hips. Her legs were wrapped around the broad torso of the man who moved against her. Past his shoulder, Armiger could see bright stars.
He moved to the next remote.
Stumbling in the blackness, he went down on all fours. His own breath was a rasping rattle in his ears. This man stood, staggering now from a broad scrape down his leg, and ran.
Through leaves and dancing branches he ran—down a hillside, recklessly, barely keeping to his feet above prancing stones—and into an orchard. The limbs of the well-tended trees stretched skyward like supplicants’ arms to heaven. He barely glanced up at them. After weaving his way down an alley between the trees, he allowed himself to slow, then to pause, and look behind him.
Nothing pursued him in the darkness. He looked up.
The night here was overcast, making the darkness near total. But past the crest of the hill he had just come down, above the clouds, light shone as though men with lanterns rode some causeway there. The lights were coming closer, with apparent slowness.
He gave a cry that was more a painful gasp, and turned to run again. A cottage was visible now at the end of the rows of trees. Low, stone, with a goatpen attached, it glowed with internal firelight, warm and inviting. He renewed his run, breathing harshly.
Armiger felt the boards under him dip as Megan came out onto the porch. She said something. He raised one hand to still her.
The runner had reached the cottage. “Lena!” he cried, then flung himself to hang on the fence around the goatpen. He shuddered.
“Perce?” A young woman appeared in the cottage’s doorway—uncannily silhouetted as Megan had been earlier. “Perce! What’s wrong?”
“They’re coming! Just like the old man said they were.”
“No. That can’t be. He’s crazy, we all know it—”
“Look!” He reeled around, and pointed at the glowing sky.
She screamed.
“What’s going on here?” An older man and woman appeared behind the girl.
“Perce!” She ran to him. Perce reached over the fence as she threw her arms around him. “What’s going to happen?”
“The old man said they wanted to take me away.” Perce laughed giddily. “We never believed he really spoke to them, remember? All those years… He said they’ll take me. And I’ll never see you again.”
She buried her face in his neck, crying. He could see her parents standing in awkward confusion nearby. They were staring at the sky.
“I came to say goodbye.”
“No,” she said, muffled. “You can hide here. We’ll take care of you. They’ll go away.”
“I tried hiding,” he said. “They found me—started to pull the stables down around me! I ran to the river—dove in and let the rapids take me awhile. That’s the only way I got as far ahead as I did. If I stay they’ll kill you to get at me. But I couldn’t go without saying goodbye.”
She shook her head.
“There’s so much I want to say,” he mumbled. “Something—I wanted to say something to let you know how much you mean to me.”
He pulled away, leaving her reaching for him over the fence. “All I could think of was when we were twelve. Remember when we played hide-and-seek in the orchard? That day? I dream about it all the time. Have, ever since.”
Turning away to face the darkness, he said, “That’s all—I remember that day. Goodbye, Lena.”
She screamed after him but he ran with renewed energy. Armiger deduced he wanted to get as far from the cottage as he could before whatever was coming found him.
Perce ran around the goat pen and down a laneway that led between more orchards. Low fieldstone walls lined the laneway, and in the darkness they closed in claustrophobically. Perce’s eyes stayed down though; he seemed to know what in the dark he was afraid of, and it was nothing that might lurk behind those walls.
He had gone perhaps half a kilometer, and was beginning to stagger desperately, when he heard a ripping sound overhead. It was a sound almost like a flag in the wind, almost like the blurred noise of a sword on the downstroke, but it went on and on, rising to a deafening crescendo. Dust leapt from the laneway around Perce, and he coughed, and stopped helplessly.
Giant claws crushed him. He shouted blood as they spun him around and pulled him into the sky.
Perce saw his hands reaching down to the receding lines of the laneway, then he saw the jewelbox perfection of Lena’s cottage glowing below him. It was intact. Drops of blood trailed off his fingertips and fell toward it.
Darkness fell over him like a cloak.
Armiger cursed, and opened his eyes. Megan stood above him, her expression quizzical.
Something had severed his link to the remote.
“What is going on here?” he asked himself.
Megan laughed lightly. “I was about to ask you that myself. What are you doing?”
He shook his head, scowling into the night. Suddenly the shadows Diadem cast across the clearing didn’t look so benign.
I have to leave, he thought. But, looking up at Megan, he found he didn’t want to say that to her. In its own way, that was as disturbing as the vision he had just had.
He pushed the heel of one hand against his forehead, a gesture one of his lieutenants had favored.
“You’re a mess,” Megan said sympathetically.
Armiger thought about it. Then he squinted up at her. “Dear lady,” he said, “I believe you are right.”
*
Returning from exploring the local town, Axel found the road to the Boros estate blocked by a number of wagons. They sat listlessly in the hot sun, waiting for some obstruction ahead to clear.
His horse snorted and turned to look at him. Axel stretched and grinned. “You hate to wait, don’t you?” he said to her. She swung her head away again.
He had gone into town to look for discrete lodgings for August, and to buy a good pair of horses for Calandria and Jordan. He’d found the lodgings, but not the horses. It was a good start.
He cantered over to the wagons. “Making camp?” he inquired of the driver of the wagon that sat square in the middle of the gateway. The man looked at him wearily.
“Everybody’s a comedian. Sir,” he added, noting the way Axel was dressed.
“Seriously, what’s the hold-up?” One very large wagon blocked the wrought-iron gates to the estate. Axel supposed he could ride around through the underbrush. He didn’t, but leaned forward as the other man pointed down the road.
“Breakdown up ahead.”
Axel laughed. “Some things never change. Any chance you can move that cart a meter or two and let me by?”
“Yes, sir.” The driver urged his horses forward a bit. Axel’s own steed balked at the narrow opening between the stone gate post and the side of the wagon, so he dismounted and led it through.
Six or seven wagons waited on the roadway ahead. He didn’t bother to mount again as he passed them.
Funny, he thought, but these wagons looked awfully familiar. Then he looked past them, and understood why.
Turcaret’s steam car sat wreathed by smoke and mist a little down the road. The controller himself stood next to it talking to a pot-belled man in greasy velvet robes. Axel passed the lead wagon and walked up the center of the road to meet Turcaret.
When he spotted Axel, Turcaret turned and casually waved. He was a tall man who appeared forever to be posing for his own portrait. He wore a red velvet riding jacket, and spotless black boots. He stood ramrod straight and held his chin high so that he could look down his long, pointed nose at Axel.
“Ah, the wandering agent of Ravenon,” he said. “I see you made use of my suggestion to visit the Boros. How is the lady May?”
“Never better, sir.” Axel peered into the pall of smoke around the steam car. He hated Turcaret. “Having a little mechanical problem?”
“Nothing we can’t fix. I’ve sent a man ahead to tell Yuri we’re arriving. I trust you’ve found the Boros’ accommodating?”
“That we have.” What was Turcaret doing here? He had outlined his travel itinerary at length in several tiresome dinner conversations prior to their arrival at Castor’s. Cal had decided to take up the hospitality of the Boros family precisely because Turcaret was not expected to come here. The fewer people to compare notes about them the better.
Might as well admit surprise, he thought. “And what brings you here? I thought you were heading straight for the capital after Castor’s?”
“Oh, I was.” Turcaret smiled one of his strangely infuriating, smug smiles. “But then I was given some information that I thought Yuri simply must know about. So I thought it best to come here directly.”
Axel felt his smile grow a bit wooden. “Information? What information?”
“Oh, that would be telling,” said Turcaret.
“Yes, well… I hope to see you at dinner, then?” Axel remounted his horse.
“Oh, you’ll be seeing me, Mr. Chan, count on it.” Turcaret smiled again, and turned back to inspecting his steam car.
This can’t be good, Axel thought as he spurred his horse to a trot. He’d had a very good time here at the Boros estate, but the worm was in the apple now. What would happen if Turcaret and Yuri compared notes? Maybe nothing…
But he would start packing anyway, he decided, just as soon as he’d told Calandria the news.