Warp World (54 page)

“Seg, I didn’t mean—”

“I know.” He rubbed a hand across his forehead. “And I know I didn’t kill them, but I underestimated the man who did.”

“Fi Costk?”

“I don’t have any proof. I suspect no one does.”

Ama tasted bile in her mouth as she remembered the old Shasir priest Fi Costk had tortured.

“You think he took down the shield and murdered all those people just to get to you?” Ama reached for the canteen and gasped. Now that the pain in her head had subsided, she was reminded of all her other bodily complaints.

“We should at least try to bandage your arm and feet until we find an auto-med,” Seg said. He shrugged off his dress coat, groped for the knife, and started cutting the fabric into strips. “This was probably not entirely aimed at me, but this is very much multiple tasks converging to a single priority. Give me your arm.”

Ama held out her arm and tried not to flinch as Seg fastened on the makeshift bandage.

“What do you mean
multiple tasks
?”

“I mean—” He apologized as he tightened the bandage and she cried out. “The CWA has been trying to usurp the Guild’s power and take over our function for centuries. By destroying Old Town, Fi Costk is able to exact some revenge on me and also deal a significant blow to the Guild. There’s more to it than that, of course.”

“He’s a demon,” Ama said.

“According to the Kenda definition of that term, I am inclined to agree.”

Ama heard the knife slice through the coat again.

“Foot,” Seg said.

She shifted sideways and offered the first victim. He was as gentle as he could be considering the state she was in. When both feet were wrapped, he wet a piece of the fabric and used it to wipe the blood and dirt from her many abrasions. He finished with a fresh piece of cloth to her face. She could have done this herself but she didn’t say anything. This silence and closeness was as close to peace as she had been for far too long.

When he was done, Seg sat back once more, against the hard concrete. “I made an oath to Brin. Those men were my brothers.” Perhaps it was the dark, and she his only audience, but Seg spoke without any of his usual composure and control. Whatever anger she still harbored fell away at the sound of his voice breaking. “You should hate me.”

“I did,” she said. “When they put me into that place and I thought you’d abandoned me, I hated you. Then, Gressam, what he did …What
I
did.” She paused for a moment before continuing. “I didn’t just hate you because of what I thought you had done to me, but because you were a part of all of it. All of the cruelty, everything that your people do. I thought: Seg helps them, he helps them take slaves and destroy other worlds. And I hated you for it.”

Seg remained silent.

“But then, tonight, I saw that priest at the auction and I realized I helped too. I gave you the Shasir, the Damiar, the Welf. They weren’t people to me. All I cared about was the Kenda, saving my own. Just like you, just like your people. Worse, maybe, because I wanted our enemies to pay for what they’d done to us. But that priest, he was just a man, a frail old man. I helped make him a slave. How many people will spend their lives suffering because of what I did? It has to stop. Somehow, I’m going to stop it. I’m going to destroy the system.”

“Good,” Seg said.

She reached for his hand and intertwined her fingers with his. A small gesture that pulled down the stones of the wall between them.

“Can your people change?”

“Change or die. We’ve been stagnant for too long and we’ve been losing ground at the same time we’ve been building our moral ignorance. Change has to start somewhere.”

“Maybe it started tonight. Maybe you brought change to them,” Ama said.

He laughed a harsh, grating laugh, then coughed. “I started a riot. Accidentally, for the most part. It will fizzle. What will come is beyond my control. I’m so far into debt that capturing Julewa was my only hope of recovering, the equipment I paid for is being destroyed over our heads, and my people are gone. We might as well run to the wastelands after we get out of here; our prospects are better there.”

“I can’t ever go back there, to Cathind, can I? No matter what?”

He reached into his pocket and found the controller for her collar. He studied the faintly glowing display for a moment, then tapped a memorized sequence. Once the Storm had passed, an alarm would sound to alert the wardens, and likely Efectuary Akbas, and Facilitator Certine, but it made no difference now. With a slight metallic clink, the collar automatically unlocked. “You’ll never go back there. And I’ll never let them hurt you again.”

Ama gasped. By the dull glow of the controller, he watched her pull the foul thing off, with shaking fingers. It tumbled from her hand and rattled against the floor. She wrapped herself around him, and he circled his arms to draw her closer.

“I failed you,” he said.

“You tried to warn me not come here. I didn’t want to listen. I wanted to be with you.”

“I wanted the same. Jarin told me to leave you behind but—” He broke off there. “It doesn’t matter. Whatever comes, we’ll face it together now. There’s nothing left to lose.” He wrapped his arms more tightly around her, brushing a thumb over her dathe and down to where the collar had been.

Together.
The word sounded impossible somehow. Unattainable. Just speaking and hearing it spoken filled him with a rare sense of foreboding.

J
arin unfastened his formalwear as he rushed down the corridor of the Cadet Instructory Facility; Gelad hurried step-for-step beside him.

“So, I’m not sure he believed me, but I got the message out,” Gelad said.

“And then the comm died?” Jarin asked.

“Which we didn’t get word on.” Gelad spread his hands. “We got lucky to have any warning before we lost comm. No time to get riders going, nothing. We just got full comm service back up a few minutes ago.”

Jarin halted at his office door. “Stand by in the comm center and inform me of any critical developments.”

With a nod, Gelad strode away.

“Maryel, Ansin,” Jarin said, by way of greeting, as he stepped in and tossed his coat on the desk. “Where is Shyl?”

“En route,” Maryel said, her eyes glancing to Ansin as she spoke. “There were problems outside her residence.”

“I’ve warned her, more than once,” Ansin said.

Behind the two, a newsfeed played. Images of Cathind flashed in quick succession, though not Cathind as anyone had seen it before. Smoke, flames, angry crowds, lines of wardens and raiders. Maryel directed Jarin to the feed as a separate comm feed played in the background, a babble of terrified voices transmitting from Old Town.

“The shield is down! Down!”

“Help us!”

“…rescue the Creche, there are three hundred children here.”

“The newsfeeds don
’t even
mention Old Town,” Maryel said. “Only the riots.”

Jarin stepped forward and mashed a finger on the button to kill the audio comm feed. “Old Town is lost. There’s nothing to be done there until the Storm passes.”

“How did the shield fail? That should be impossible,” Ansin said.

“Unless it is deliberately sabotaged.” Jarin held up a hand. “I have an agent in position, but no hard proof—if we can get it at all.”

“This is an act of war!” Ansin surged to his feet and slammed a fist on the desk.

“Is it?” Maryel studied the images of the Cathind riots on the screen. “Sabotage, as Jarin described it. This is sabotage. We may find proof of Fi Costk’s hand, but that’s doubtful. At best, the CWA would pass the disaster off as the actions of a single member, leaving us no recourse. And what do the People care of Old Town? We will find no public support for retribution, especially in light of this evening’s events. Fi Costk has played this brilliantly.”

“I understand how the public will view this, Maryel,” Ansin said. “But this is the most direct action the CWA has ever taken against us. This
is
war, and the Council must be made to see that, even if it is a war of shadows.”

Jarin’s desk-comm chimed. “
All council members are summoned to emergency session in ten minutes
,” the voice of the Guild Accountancy announced.

Jarin snatched a digifilm from his desk. “Four minutes from here to the chamber, approximately. We must have our preliminary position by then. Where in the Storm is—” he stopped as the door opened.

“
It’s a party!”
Shyl said in a grim imitation of Ansin’s words from their previous meeting.

“Now is not the time for this,” Ansin said.

“What in the name of the Storm …” Maryel exclaimed over top of him.

Shyl pulled off her coat, which was ripped across one side, and used it to wipe away dried blood from a cut over her eye. “Rioters outside my residence. I was caught in the melee.”

“It was your decision to reside outside the Guild compound,” Ansin said.

“Ansin, comport yourself,” Jarin said. “Shyl, to bring you up to the present, this was a CWA operation. The shield, that is. The riot was Segkel. We have a full Council meeting in ten minutes. I expect the priority will be, and should be, dealing with the spreading riots.” He glanced at the digifilm. “Theorist Marsetto has already begun contracting raider units in-city for riot suppression. That will be bloody work. Beyond that, we have to wait for the Storm to pass before we can go to Old Town and search for survivors. I will inform the Council that the CWA is responsible for the shield failure but I lack the hard evidence that would allow us to pursue open redress.”

“Our position on the behavior of your student?” Ansin asked. “The whole World watched him stir that mob.”

“At present, damage control,” Jarin said. “Recriminations can come when Segkel is located and returned to the compound to answer for his behavior, but it should be handled in-house. As you say, we are at war. We will not hand our enemies any leverage. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” Maryel said, almost without thought.

Shyl turned to Jarin. “Where
is
Eraranat?”

He waved toward the screen—crowds hurled debris as wardens attempted to restore order.

“Out there.”

In the shelter beneath the warehouse floor, there were no means to tell if it was day or night but, above ground, there was only silence, and Seg was restless. Restless enough to risk his solitary piece of electronic equipment. He pulled his digifilm from his pocket and turned it on—the crono function indicated it was morning. As much as he hated to disturb Ama’s hard-won sleep, he was anxious to get back to the World and assess the Storm damage.

Her head rested on his lap and he placed a hand on her cheek, which felt too hot. All the more reason to get out of the shelter; they needed to find a functional auto-med for her wounds.

She woke slowly, returning to a black, painful reality. “I was swimming; there was a man with glowing blue eyes.” Her voice was thick with sleep, half lost in a dream.

“Time to go,” he said.

She nodded and shifted to free his legs.

Seg climbed the ladder and twisted the latch to open the lid but it refused to budge. He maneuvered himself in the small landing area and brought his legs to bear on the bent metal of the cover to their hideaway. Whatever had pounded it had left the door warped and stuck in place. He kicked once, twice, the impacts jarring up his legs, but the metal finally popped loose.

He stuck his head above floor level and looked around. Rays of morning light slanted down through the line of broken windows high above. The building was still standing, but the crates were shattered and destroyed. The goods he had spent his entire fortune, and more, accumulating were in pieces—another reminder of his impending demise in the society of the World.

He cleared a spot on the floor with his boot and reached down to offer Ama a hand up. She sucked in a breath at the motion. In the pale light he could see that the perasul bite wound on her arm was leaking through his improvised bandage.

He didn’t have to see her feet to know they were almost as bad; Ama had never moved so slowly.