Fifth Quarter Page 2

  * * * *

  One moment she was asleep, the next she knelt on the shoulders of a young recruit, her dagger point hovering over the wildly rolling surface of his left eye. As her brain caught up with the responses trained into her body, Vree could hear Corporal Emo and several others howling with laughter, could see the terror on the boy’s face, and could smell the result of his fear.

  She flipped the knife in the air, caught it, sheathed it, and stood. “You joined us just before we left the garrison, didn’t you?”

  The boy stuttered out an affirmative as he scrambled to his feet.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Avotic.” He noticed the moisture spreading over the front of his kilt, realized suddenly what it meant, and flushed a deep red. Although he had to be at least fifteen to have been posted, embarrassment dropped his age a good four years. “Th-they call me Tic.”

  Vree shook her head. “Let me give you some advice, Tic. When a corporal orders you to shake someone awake who wears a black sunburst …”

  Tic swiveled his head to stare down at her pack. Scuffed and faded from years of use, the six sunbursts stamped into the worn leather still showed they had once been dyed black. His eyes widened and he swallowed, hard.

  “… you tell that corporal to stick his head up his ass and salute it.” She had to raise her voice to be heard over the laughter. “Do you understand what I’m telling you, Tic?”

  “Y-yes.” It didn’t seem to matter that he was at least a foot taller than the woman he faced.

  “What?”

  “If I wake you up again, you’ll kill me.”

  Watching from his bedroll, Bannon snickered and Vree tried not to smile in response. “Close enough. Go clean up, you stink.” As the kid ran off, she turned on Emo. “One of these day, I will kill one.”

  “Not a chance.” Wiping streaming eyes, the corporal heaved a satisfied sigh. “You’re too good. And now the little shit knows he can die. Thanks to me, he’s a better soldier.”

  “Thanks to you?” Vree snorted, bending and dragging her kilt out of her pack. “Which brings up another question,” she continued, buckling the limp, blue pleats around her waist. “Why am I always chosen to give these little lessons of yours?”

  “Because you look so sweet when you’re asleep,” Emo told her, secure in his rank. Those of the Fourth Squad standing closest to him made exaggerated movements away. “That pointy little face of yours goes all soft and you have the cutest habit of cupping your cheek with one hand.” His voice lost its false, syrupy tone, and he snorted. “Your brother, on the other hand, looks dangerous only while he sleeps.”

  “That’s because I’m dreaming of you, Emo.” Bannon stood and scratched at the triangle of brown hair in the center of his chest. His nose wrinkled at the smell of unwashed bodies, latrine trenches, and great vats of boiling mush. “Life in the army,” he murmured. “Gotta love it.”

  “ ’Cause you can’t do shit about it,” several voices answered in unison.

  * * * *

  “Vree? You going out tonight?”

  Vree turned her head and stared incredulously at the woman standing just beyond weapons’ reach. “No, Shonna. I was feeling bloated and I thought I’d check if my black breeches, my black tunic, and my black ankle boots still fit.”

  Shonna shrugged and rubbed the back of her neck with one hand while the other traced circles in the night air. “Yeah, well, I mean …” She sighed deeply and started again. “Look, do you think that maybe, on your way back you could pick up a chicken or something?”

  “I’m on target, Shonna.”

  The other woman looked uncomfortable but dragged up half a grin. “So kill a chicken, too.”

  The food provided by the seven armies was nourishing but monotonous. A number of establishments outside the perimeter took advantage of that and for a price no one had to live on mush, black bread, and sausages.

  “You lost at dice again.” Vree knew her too well for it to be a question.

  “Yeah, but I’ll come around. It’s just …”

  “It’s just more of the same. And the answer’s no.”

  “Then lend me a crescent.” Shonna took a step forward, hand outstretched. “Until payday.”

  “No.”

  Shonna’s hand dropped under the weight of Vree’s response and she wiped her palm against her kilt. “I thought I meant something to you.”

  A few hours of pleasure, an attempt to raise a barricade around other desires … “Not after you tried losing my money at dice.”

  “I should’ve known better,” Shonna muttered sullenly. “Your kind doesn’t have feelings.” Her voice straddled the line between challenge and insult.

  Vree merely stared, expressionless, until the other woman nervously began to back away.

  As she turned and stomped toward the center of camp, sandals slapping against the packed dirt, Bannon separated from the shadows to stand at Vree’s shoulder. “She wasn’t good enough for you, sister-mine,” he said softly. “But then, who is?”

  Her gaze pulled around by his tone, Vree caught a glimpse of an expression she couldn’t identify and wondered, not for the first time, how much he knew.

  * * * *

  The Sixth Army had camped close enough to Ghoti to intimidate and far enough away to maneuver, leaving a large expanse of scrubby ground to be crossed under the eyes of enemy sentries perched on top of hastily erected earthen defenses. Fortunately, shadows were plentiful and the sentries were distracted—not only by the might of the Empire arrayed against them but by the growing fear that they just might have made a fatal mistake.

  Access to the town was limited but far from impossible.

  Did they honestly think that would stop us or do they just not think? Vree wondered as she followed her brother into the wedge of darkness between two buildings. She sifted the night, searched the sights and sounds and smells for threat, and signed, “All clear.” The town could be empty of life for all the notice it took of them. When Bannon nodded, she led the way down a garbage-strewn alley toward the governor’s stronghold.

  In this, the southernmost part of the Empire, walls were made of formed mud, broader at the bottom out of necessity and angled gently upward toward a red-clay tiled roof. By sunlight, the city was an attractive patchwork of orangebrown. By starlight, the vibrant colors had muted to shades of gray. The smell of chilies fried in oil lingered in the shadows and through the shutters that closed off one deeply recessed window, Vree could hear a low voice singing to a fretful baby.

  “… I will feed you bits of rainbow/red for laughter, blue for sorrow …”

  … yellow kisses, green tomorrows. Their garrison-mother had been fond of the song, and Vree wondered if she’d been from Ghoti or if the lullaby had traveled across the Empire. She glanced at Bannon to see if he’d heard and found him waiting for her to confirm that no danger lay concealed in the open market they had to cross. Calling herself several kinds of fool, she slapped her mind back to the job at hand. The danger in an easy target came from falling off the edge.

  The governor’s stronghold—an octagon-shaped wall enclosing a tall central tower and a number of squat outbuildings—was both the oldest structure in Ghoti and the only one made of stone. The wall showed signs of recent reinforcing and the massive gates were shut, barred, and guarded.

  Vree gestured to her left and Bannon nodded, slipping past her to take point. She could feel herself responding to the new level of danger, could see the same response in the way her brother moved.

  Over the last few months of rebellion, Governor Aralt had swept clear the area around the stronghold, destroying anything that might provide shelter for the enemy should they force him back to a final stand. The darkness, combined with one of the eight angles, provided all the shelter that Vree and Bannon needed. Fingers and toes found purchase in cracks a lizard would have ignored. Head to head, pressed flat against the wall’s rough capstones, they scanned the enclosure, hidden by the uneven
ridge of an unfinished and unusable sentry box. They’d come this far once before, but from now on, every move would be the first move.

  “Aralt’s no fool for all his posturing. He’ll be expecting the attempt.”

  Vree touched her brother lightly on the shoulder. He winced as he saw the three heavily armed and wary rebels march across the court and disappear behind one of the outbuildings. Up in the tower a trio of shadows bristling with weapons carried a flickering lamp past a narrow window.

  Patrols, he mouthed.

  She nodded. It looked like Aralt was, indeed, expecting them.

  The stone grew warm beneath them as they watched.

  No pattern, Bannon signed at last.

  They both knew that a pattern would eventually emerge; that people were incapable of sustaining truly random action. A pattern would make their job easier, safer, but could take several nights to determine. A delay would please no one except, perhaps, the governor.

  As yet another three-rebel patrol paused directly below them, Bannon nudged her and flicked his thumb up. No surprise, Vree mused. In five years, he’d voted they turn from the target exactly twice. The first time, they’d returned the next night equipped to deal with the unexpected, four-legged guards. The second, they’d gone in farther than they should have, started back too late, and ended up trapped together for a full day in a hidey-hole barely big enough for one of them. Unable to move, barely able to breathe, it was the only time Vree had ever had more than enough of her brother and had found herself, after hours of his chin digging painfully into her shoulder, wishing that she worked alone. And why am I dwelling on old failures now?

  She spat on her palm to chase away bad luck.

  Staring down at the skinny, dark on dark silhouette of a teenage boy, his spear held tightly across his body, trembling angles announcing that he’d rather be anywhere and doing anything else, she finally nodded.

  * * * *

  The interior of the tower was vastly more complicated than it appeared from the top of the wall. Over the years, countless divisions had created a jumble of small rooms and crooked corridors that followed no logical course. Cloaked in darkness, the assassins avoided two patrols and then were very nearly discovered by a grumbling servant stomping around complaining about all the noise.

  “… up at dawn and ’spects me ta sleep wi’ all this racket …”

  Bannon mimed slitting her throat. Vree rolled her eyes and motioned for him to get moving. The old woman hadn’t seen them; there was no need to kill her.

  Their information—and they knew better than to ask how Commander Neegan had gotten it—put the governor’s quarters on the top floor of the tower. Hugging the inner wall of a wide curved hall, they found a flight of stairs, climbed seven steps, and emerged onto a carpet so plush they could have marched the entire Sixth Army across it without making a sound. The room contained only a trunk beneath a high arched window and across from it, a pile of cushions broken into squares of shadow by the night. Opposite the door they came in was another, the beaded curtain hung across it so thick that it appeared from a distance to be a solid barrier.

  “Sandalwood,” Bannon murmured, his breath brushing the word against her ear.

  It took her a moment to understand what he meant and then another to separate the scent of the beads from the scent of him.

  There were no sounds coming from the other side of the curtain; no sounds, no light, no patrol. As Vree used the back of her wrist to lift the strands nearest the door frame away from the polished stone, Bannon slid through the narrow opening. Vree counted three heartbeats, moved to follow, then froze. From the other side of the curtain came the flicker of an open lamp and the sound of marching feet.

  A patrol. They’d have to go back. She turned and suddenly realized it wasn’t one patrol she heard but two. They couldn’t go back. The leading edge of approaching lamplight already threw three grotesquely elongated shadows against the stone just outside the room. The short flight of curved stairs had hidden the second patrol until it was almost too late.

  Heart pounding, Vree dove for the tiny angle between the bottom cushions and the wall. Face pressed against the tile floor at the edge of the carpet, she squirmed into the only shelter the room had to offer. The patrol was on the threshold when she realized Bannon wasn’t going to join her.

  Too late to join him.

  He’s hidden on the other side. There was no question about it, but she didn’t like discovering that they’d separated. Not alone. Just apart. Barely breathing, she listened to the footsteps grow louder, then suddenly stop as the carpet caught the sound and held it.

  Then she heard the rattle of sandalwood beads closely followed by a muffled curse.

  “Blow it, Eline, I could’ve killed you.”

  “Had to hit me first,” a second voice growled. “Whacha so jumpy about anyway?”

  “Place looks different in the dark.” This new voice was young, not quite settled into adult depths, and Vree found herself thinking of the boy with the spear.

  Eline snorted. “Gotta lamp, doncha? Hardly dark.”

  “Where have you just come from?” This was the first voice again. She still sounded irritated.

  “Storerooms, if you must know.”

  “Did you see anything?”

  Eline, Vree realized, had come through the curtain. You didn’t see anything…

  “Lotta dark. Nothin’ else.” He yawned, noisily. “Don’t expect to neither. Fool’s hunt this.”

  “At least they’ve put a fool on it.”

  “Up yours, too,” Eline told her genially. “Come on,” he snarled at his silent companions. After a moment, Vree heard the stone pick up the scuff of their footsteps.

  “What is it?” The boy’s patrol was still in the room.

  “Something’s not right …”

  “That’d be Eline,” muttered a second woman.

  The first snickered and agreed.

  Vree waited until the beads stopped whispering warnings against each other, then rose swiftly to her feet, cushions tumbling forward. Although training and instinct both told her she was alone, exposing herself a little at a time would do no good if someone had been left behind.

  No one waited in the gray wash of starlight that spilled though the arced window.

  No one.

  She crossed the faint trail dragged through the air behind a heavily sweating body and stood by the curtain.

  No sound.

  Bannon …?

  There was nothing on the other side except corridor. Stairs curved down the outside wall to her right, gray shading quickly to black, and a narrow hall disappeared in darkness to her left.

  Bannon! She’d have heard it if he were captured or killed, but knowing that didn’t stop the sudden erratic beating of her heart. Patrols coming at him from two directions. He can’t go back because the curtain keeps him from seeing how close the danger is. The only thing he can do is go on. Her back pressed against the wall, eyes useless in the total lack of light, Vree followed. They’d planned for separation the way soldiers planned for the loss of an arm or a leg in battle.

  A change in air currents drew her to the other side of the corridor where questing fingers found an arched and open doorway. With a patrol on his heels, Bannon would’ve gone through it. She slid one foot forward and the toe of her soft boot nudged up against a step. The governor’s quarters were on the top floor of the tower. Bannon would’ve gone up these stairs. Fully aware she’d be trailing him, and as much able to put himself in her place as she could put herself in his, he’d wait for her the moment he found a hole secure from passing patrols.

  The stairs, barely wide enough for two to walk abreast, rose straight from darkness to the gray outline of another door and offered no security.

  Halfway to the top, Vree grunted as the stone dipped first to the right then the left and the height of the risers abruptly changed. Any intruder who ran up these stairs would be in for a rude shock and a painful stumble if
not an out-and-out fall. It was a simple precaution but—on other occasions with other intruders—an effective one.

  The stairs ended at a balcony set into the side of the tower. A pair of narrow windows looked out onto it and a low stone balustrade separated it from the night. Nowhere to hide, no choice but to keep moving. As Vree crawled rapidly toward the far end, the large, complicated set of chimes hanging between the two windows caught her attention. Shrine to the winds. South wind, she amended, glancing over her shoulder at the position of the stars.

  Flat on her belly against the cool tiles, she slid sideways and carefully snagged the lowest of the pale blue ceramic disks. Although she wore Jiir’s medallion around her neck, the Goddess of Battles had never insisted on exclusive worship and Vree firmly believed in taking every possible precaution. Overhead, bits of paper and fabric hung limp in the still air. With nothing to tie to the shrine with her prayer, Vree smudged a bit of charcoal across the center of the disk. Then she smiled. The bottom curve had already been marked.

  Bannon.

  Another long flight of stairs, identical to those she’d just climbed, finally brought her to the top floor of the tower. Flames danced in the copper bowls of open lamps set into the wall all down the short corridor and more light spilled out through an open door halfway down one side.

  The governor’s apartments. If there’d been a guard, Bannon would have waited in the darkness at the top of the stairs. He’d know she was close behind him and that it was vital the guard not give the alarm. But he wasn’t waiting. So there hadn’t been a guard. With no cover in the corridor, he’d be waiting just inside the first room.

  Why hadn’t there been a guard?

  Squinting, senses straining, Vree moved toward the light. The banded wooden door had not only been left open but secured back. She frowned. An open door was an invitation to enter. A trap? Possibly.

  Where was Bannon?

  The room was empty. No furniture, no brother, no governor. Only green and white tiles, a large hanging lamp, and yet another open door.

  Something was wrong.

  The hair on the back of her neck lifted and she was halfway across the room before she realized she’d moved. Fists clenched against her thighs, she forced herself to be still, to listen…