Book II. Chapter 146. Debriefing

At last, Ardan was in clean clothes. The old ones had absorbed the smell of several weeks on the road to Yellik with perhaps the largest caravan since the War of the Birth of the Empire, then another six days aboard the Crown’s high-speed train, where there had been no real chance to bathe or wash up, either. He simply reveled in no longer reeking of dried, crusted sweat, acrid and almost acidic, or of the dust that had become something worse: the grime of a journey that had dragged on and on.

After all, if he hadn’t been able to send letters from Yellik, Ardan would have had to deal with unmistakable worry from Tess and from his friends, to say nothing of his family in Delpas. The message wouldn’t reach them for several more days, of course, but even so, it should put their minds at ease and take the edge off their worry.

“Colonel…” Milar began. He looked a little thinner than he had when Ardan had last seen him, nearly four months earlier.

“Don’t even start, Captain.” The Colonel held up a finger, leaned back in his chair, and fixed Ard with gray eyes that were blank and distinctly unpleasant. “All right. One thing at a time, Corporal. Let’s go over everything again from the very beginning…”

Ardan sighed and began reading his report aloud for the second time. Thankfully, he’d had almost three weeks to write it. Enough time to weigh everything with painstaking care.

And if they were going to take the word “beginning” literally, they ought to begin with this: Miss Shpritz had been wrong. She had realized it maybe a couple of seconds before Ard did.

“That fucking Colonel… He used us both, Ard. Both of us…”

“Sometimes, Captain, I think we could use civilians to get what we want.”

Could Miss Shpritz, even with her considerable, far-reaching network of contacts, have duped the Colonel and forced the Black House to serve her own interests? In theory, yes, but it would have been a tremendous stretch.

In practice, though, she had only managed to catch the Colonel’s attention. Like the Puppeteers, he never did anything unless he believed it would benefit the cause in several ways at once.

The simplest possibility Ardan considered on the way home was that the Empire really did intend to learn something about the Winged-Horned. Most likely, it really did hope to use their natural abilities to solve some aeronautical problems. Still, it was hard to believe that the Crown, including the relevant Guilds and the Second Chancery, had gone all in on the Winged-Horned alone.

Staking the entire future development of airships and gliders on finding creatures that were practically mythical? It sounded as dubious as could be.

Then why all the trouble with the expedition?

“How long do you think an investigation by the Grand Magisters’ Lodge will take, Captain?”

There was the answer: an expedition like this, which had dominated the front pages of most newspapers for nearly a month, drew an enormous amount of attention. And not only from the Hunters’ Guild. The Colonel had simply used the Winged-Horned as bait.

For the Puppeteers. For foreign spies. For homegrown terrorists, or any other ruthless people with no scruples.

While he was at it, the Colonel had decided he might as well test Miss Shpritz’s theory about corruption in the Hunters’ Guild. And if it proved to be nothing but hot air, then… the Black House would gain a very useful asset, though one with a rather vulgar manner of speaking.

“I’m glad you worked all that out, Corporal.” The Colonel took the lollipop from the ashtray and put it back in his mouth. Like Milar, he seemed to have lost a little weight, but he was still nowhere near his old lean, imposing build. “Then let me get this straight: what happened to Senior Magister Varvara Ostrozhskaya?”

“Unknown,” Ardan answered honestly.

“But you’re assuming that…”

“She was taken captive.” Ardi nodded.

“Mm-hm,” the Colonel said. Without betraying the slightest emotion, he jotted down a brief note and sent it by air post.

Ardan and Milar exchanged a look. Ardi might have known the Colonel for only two years, but by now he’d spent enough time with him to know when the Colonel was pleased and when he wasn’t. And right then, His Imperial Majesty’s left hand was just shy of ecstatic.

The Colonel never did anything without a reason.

How did the Puppeteers keep outplaying the Black House? Inside information. So Miss Ostrozhskaya might not even have started playing her part in this game yet, assuming she even suspected there was a game at all.

“And what’s Miss Ostrozhskaya been up to, Colonel?” Captain Pnev asked with studied nonchalance, drumming his fingers on the folder.

Milar, thank the Sleeping Spirits, had moved from his wheelchair to a regular chair, though a heavy cane, far too thick, was propped against it. Something told Ard that the lacquered cherrywood cane was actually a sheath with a sharp blade concealed inside.

Just as he’d promised at the Black House hospital, Captain Pnev hadn’t shied away from the grueling rehabilitation. Now he could once again get around without the wheelchair, though he still needed support.

Ardi’s thoughts went to the scars hidden beneath his clothes, the places where bullets, knives, and buckshot had left their marks. He wished he could say the same for himself. But Nazar Glarkin, an endocrinologist Ardi suspected of being one of the Black House’s specialists in Firstborn physiology and perhaps mutant physiology as well, had warned him time and again that the matabar race had barely been studied and that, for perfectly valid reasons, each half-blood was an exception to the rules, with a biology all their own.

Put simply, no one knew how long Ard’s body would need to rid itself of the mutant’s venom. That, in fact, was precisely what Mr. Glarkin had warned him about.

“Don’t pretend we’re all speaking different languages here, Captain.” The Colonel waved a hand, closed the box containing the air post tubes, and went back behind the desk. “Miss Ostrozhskaya was chosen because she’s a prominent specialist in chimerology. And we needed some way to either confirm or refute the Corporal’s theory that the Puppeteers are planning to create some kind of hybrid. Their interest in Ostrozhskaya lends the Corporal’s theory a little more weight.” The Colonel looked wistfully at his cigar and let out a heavy sigh. “As for the Senior Magister, she’s alive. At least for the time being.”

“Are we sure?” the Captain asked.

“As sure as we can be, assuming Lieutenant Dagdag and his eggheads are to be believed.”

Milar’s eyes blazed with unbridled excitement.

“So that means we—”

“We still don’t have anyone inside the Puppeteers’ ranks, Captain,” the Colonel cut in. “My guess is that they keep their hired researchers on a short leash, for one thing. For another, Miss Ostrozhskaya is a civilian scientist. She’d be sure to give us away. So we get what information we can from her, all without her suspecting a thing.”

Stripped of Black House jargon, it meant this: Dagdag had found a way to track Ostrozhskaya’s location. And perhaps something else.

“And where is she now?”

Looking grim, the Colonel picked up a pointer and jabbed it at the map.

“The Dead Lands in the north of the Theocracy? In the Ralsk borderlands?” The Captain’s eyebrows shot up. “But how did they get there so fast?”

“I’m not sure that’s exactly what should concern you right now, Captain.” The Colonel shook his head.

Milar frowned for a second, then his eyes widened.

“The underground complex they discovered there . . . does that mean it’s connected to the Puppeteers after all?”

“Most likely,” the Colonel said, confirming Milar’s suspicion. “At any rate, that’s what all the latest reports indicate. But it’s still too early to say. Let them putter around down there, and we’ll see how they play their hand. Or, in the Corporal’s words, what pieces they move across the board.”

Did Ardan feel used? Ardan thought he was taking part in Miss Shpritz’s investigation. Miss Shpritz, for her part, thought she was trying to expose a certain Corporal Egobar. Meanwhile, the Colonel was pulling the strings, deftly manipulating them both, and . . . Ardi drew a salary for it. Plus the chance to pursue any research he pleased, all the research literature he could want, and nearly unrestricted access to military accumulators as well as Lord Aversky’s Stables.

So no. He didn’t feel used in the least. That was simply the nature of the job. And Ard really had grown used to it.

“What can you tell me, Corporal, about…” The Colonel shifted the papers and narrowed his eyes slightly as he studied Ard’s cramped handwriting. “A certain Onton?”

“Most likely an Aean’Hane, Colonel.”

“An Aean’Hane specifically, not a Speaker?” the Colonel asked.

“Yes,” Ardan confirmed.

“What makes you so certain of that?”

Ardi picked up the pointer from the desk and pointed it at the photographs pinned to the wheeled blackboard, now parked in the Colonel’s office.

“At first, I thought a demon or some other entity had latched onto Mr Tikhonov, may the Eternal Angels judge him fairly, and done away with Mr Zvonkov and Mr Shosa. But then I decided that was needlessly complicated,” Ardan rattled off. He really had had plenty of time to think it all through, down to the last detail. “Why complicate matters when the answer is right there in plain sight? But even a powerful Speaker couldn’t have handled a task like that. So the conclusion is obvious: Onton is an Aean’Hane.”

“A Dark One?” the Colonel asked.

Ardan sighed and shook his head.

“No. I didn’t sense any Dark Names.”

“Just as you didn’t notice that same entity inside Magister Tikhonov.”

“That’s right.” Ardan made no attempt to deny the obvious. “But the entity had been hidden, just as it had been in the Striga case. You can’t pull off the same trick with Dark Names, or rather, with the consequences of using them, and—”

Ardan broke off. It had once been considered impossible for a demon to hide from a Speaker’s senses. But the Puppeteers had changed that. Could they have changed this other certainty as well?

“I see,” the Colonel drawled as he sent another short message by air post. Ard didn’t need to say aloud what he had just thought. The Colonel’s insight and quick thinking were truly frightening. “All right. What about the Winged-Horned?”

Ardan looked at the broken government-issue clock ticking in the little box where he had put the rest of the items recovered from the Black House. While still on the train back to the Metropolis, he had realized he wouldn’t be able to hide both secrets at once. To hide one, he would have to give up the other.

He only had to decide which one to start with.

The Winged-Horned might pave the way for airships and other aircraft, each with its own Paarlax Field that, most importantly, would be stable. But first the Winged-Horned would have to be found; years of research would follow.

The possibility of a Ley-bomb had crystallized into a theory in Ard’s mind. Building one would require two keys: transmutational runic links and Multidimensional Seals. And Ard had no illusions about his own genius or anything of the sort. Once he handed over the core formulas, any Senior Magister in Star Seal Engineering, let alone a Grand Magister, would need less than a month to recognize that the formulas pointed the way to those two new, still-uncharted fields. With the combined intellectual might of the Mages’ Guild behind the effort, transmutational runic links and Multidimensional Seals would be developed in only a few years. And those advances would bring a weapon unlike anything this world had ever seen.

Of course, that theory had one obvious flaw: Lord Aversky, may the Eternal Angels receive him, and the work he had done at his testing grounds. It had required no new discoveries at all. Just the right way to combine and use what was already known. But for many decades, nothing of the kind had occurred to anyone but Edward.

But Ardi couldn’t take a risk that large. He couldn’t gamble on being exceptional. That wouldn’t be overconfidence bordering on narcissism; it would be plain idiocy.

And if he tried to hide both secrets at once… at best, Ardan would end up on a horse, far from Lieutenant Kornosskiy; at worst, in the same place where Corporal Alice Rovnev had spent a couple of weeks. They were hardly likely to treat him as gently as they had treated her.

“Before he died, Magister Tikhonov told me where the Winged-Horned herds were.” Ardi slid a sheet across the table, a topographic map he had marked with his calculations. “But I’m afraid the herds may have moved after everything that happened.”

“Most likely, that’s exactly what happened,” the Colonel agreed. Even so, he immediately used the air post for the third time. “But I believe the mere fact that they exist is reason enough for our operatives to handle the search for Anomalies themselves.”

The Colonel didn’t look especially enthusiastic as he said this, which only reinforced Ardi’s theory that the Empire’s scientists had other avenues of research as well, all meant to put the vast reaches of the sky under humanity’s command.

“So.” The Colonel worked a hard candy into his cheek and steepled his fingers. “What does that leave us with, in plain, objective terms? First, the positives. Miss Ostrozhskaya is exactly where we need her if the Puppeteers take an interest in our little venture. By the way, Captain, you lost.”

Milar spread his hands helplessly. He slid a two-ex banknote across the table to Ard.

“They didn’t tell me the whole story until after you’d left Yellik,” he whispered.

And Ard didn’t need to listen to his partner’s heart to know he was telling the truth.

“I assumed she’d refuse to cooperate.”

“I believe, Captain, that she agreed before she even left Metropolis. Otherwise, someone else would be in her place.” The Colonel gave a slight shrug. “That’s because we’ve also confirmed corruption in the Hunters’ Guild, and everyone involved will be held accountable. Miss Shpritz included.”

Milar grimaced.

“Just so you know, Ardi,” Captain Pnev said, still whispering. “They’ve sent her to the embassy in Seyros as an attaché. Ferreting out something or other there for her upcoming report, which won’t be quite so independent now. And I wouldn’t call that much of a punishment.”

Ardan allowed himself a faint smile. Knowing Miss Shpritz as he did, he understood that serving anyone but herself would be a punishment worse than most. As for the argument that, on the whole, she had done nothing at all to deserve punishment, Ardi would leave that to citizens who didn’t wear black. And no, that had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that she’d cost him nearly four months of his life. As Ardan now understood perfectly well, he would have been sent north regardless.

Why?

Because sending that particular corporal was the only way to convince the Puppeteers that the Colonel was sincere and draw their full attention.

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“I can tell by the look in your eyes, Corporal: you’re already deciding exactly what to pack for your journey to the Ralsk borderlands.” The Colonel’s eyes glinted faintly once more. “But don’t worry. We won’t have to deal with that for another year, perhaps even a year and a half. And this time, you won’t be going alone. But let’s continue.” Colonel Sukhov, the de facto head of the Black House, picked up several more pages from the reports. “Besides securing continued access to a valuable asset like Miss Taisia Shpritz, we now also know about the Winged-Horned. And now for the lesser matters: several bandit groups eliminated; irrefutable evidence that our northern neighbors aren’t honoring their agreements on border security; a certain necromancy laboratory destroyed. Speaking of which.” The Colonel set the page aside and looked at Ard again. “Any bright ideas, Corporal?”

“None.” Ardan turned his hands over, palms up.

And he was being completely honest. Ard had wrestled with the problem from every angle, but he still couldn’t devise even the shakiest working theory. The laboratory had no connection to any of the people or factions they were investigating: not to the Puppeteers, not to the foreigners, not to anyone else at all.

“Just because professional deformation keeps everyone here from believing in coincidences doesn’t mean coincidences don’t exist.” The Colonel pulled the hard candy from his mouth with a wet smack and set it back in the ashtray. “Let the appropriate departments sort it out. Now for the cost. The worst of it is that we lost almost a hundred people, one Pink mage, and three Yellow mages. I say three because Varvara Ostrozhskaya either betrayed the Empire, though she’ll serve us against her will, or… Milar, what about her family and friends?”

“They’re under surveillance,” Milar reported crisply. “Constant. Around the clock. Every account, every transaction, every movement. Nothing will get past us.”

“Good… And Magister Tikhonov’s family?”

“His wife has been questioned, but she doesn’t know anything.”

“Are we sure?”

Milar nodded.

“Corporal.” Without warning, the Colonel turned to Ardan. “What do you propose?”

Ardan nearly choked.

“Forgive me, Colonel. In what… sense?”

“In the most straightforward sense.” Not a single muscle twitched in the Colonel’s face. “We can either charge Magister Tikhonov with treason after his death and exile his family to one of the Empire’s territories still in need of settlers, or we can keep that fact quiet. If we do, Shema Tikhonov and her children will receive a decent survivor’s pension, as the family of a man who died in service to the Empire. It’s up to you.”

Ardi pulled his shirt collar slightly away from his neck.

“You have the coordinates the Magister supplied for the Winged-Horned.”

“Yes,” was the Colonel’s only answer, his stare still drilling into Ard.

He knew with absolute, unshakable certainty that the Colonel wasn’t bluffing. Whatever Ard said now, the Colonel would see it done. And so…

“I believe moving so far would be an ordeal for small children,” Ardan said quietly, but with as much confidence as he could muster. “Their home is here.”

“The pension, then.” The Colonel’s expression did not change. He dispatched another letter by air post and continued as though there had been no hitch at all. “We also failed to capture a single person from the other side alive. That is deeply discouraging, though not surprising. And…” The Colonel finally sighed and massaged his forehead with his fingertips. “…now for the elephant in the room we’ve been studiously ignoring.”

Milar grunted and seemed to sink a little lower in his chair. As for Ard, he had nowhere to run. There was no point anyway.

“The city, Corporal,” the Colonel said dryly. “An entire damn city this time?”

“Colonel.” Ardan pushed a separate folder across the table, filled with notes he had written while traveling with the enormous caravan and later on the train. “I should point out that, legally, First Station was classified as one of the Hunters’ Guild’s assets, so all minerals extracted from the surrounding territories belonged to the Guild as well. That is how we ended up with the corruption we all know about. Now that the Station has effectively ceased to exist, the Crown can challenge that claim and build a city of its own, one that will in time replenish the Treasury. I should also point out that my decision fully complied with the Black House charter, honored my oath, and was proportionate to the threat. If I had not acted, far more people would have been harmed, and the Treasury would have faced incalculable losses, and…”

“And if all this weren’t obvious, Corporal,” the Colonel cut in, raising his left hand to stop him, “you’d already be riding quietly across the steppe, stripped of every decoration, to meet your old acquaintance. The Emperor and I are less interested in why than in this: how, by the Eternal Angels, did you manage to wipe more than a hundred houses off the face of the earth across an area many times greater than anything modern strategic Star Magic can cover?”

Ardan tried not to let it show, but inside he sagged with relief. All that free time had paid off: he had long since used Skusty’s teachings to work out exactly what he would say, down to the last word and inflection.

“A perfect storm, Colonel,” Ardi said, spreading his hands. “Any number of things might have caused it: devices the Puppeteers had detonated, or some peculiar anomaly whose documentation was lost when the city was first captured. But serious disturbances arose in the Paarlax Field. Perhaps it was all those things together. I didn’t know exactly how to put those disturbances to use, but I felt a certain kinship with an overheated generator. So I built a small device that essentially replicated a Ley-power supply circuit, then used my skills as a Speaker. It’s difficult to describe exactly what I did in Star science terms, but it was akin to a tempest in a teacup. I was the spoon.”

The Colonel looked Ard in the eye. Though the de facto head of the Black House had no unusual abilities, Ard still felt as if he’d been turned inside out. The feeling was so vivid that Ardan even did as Atta’nha had taught him: he pictured himself standing in the midst of the Alcade peaks, listening to the Teacher growl.

“I hope you described this situation in far greater detail in your report.” The Colonel glanced away.

“Yes, of course,” Ardan answered at once and pushed a fat folder full of densely written pages across the desk.

Fortunately, it was no great challenge to set this half-truth down in writing, though not one word of it was a lie.

Had Ard put himself in the same company as Leah Morimer and Magister Tikhonov by keeping his theory about the Ley-bomb from the Colonel, now that hard evidence had borne it out?

That was a problem for tomorrow.

“In that case, that settles it.” The Colonel put the explosion report away in a desk drawer. “So, Captain, what have you got on the horizon?”

Milar promptly opened his notebook.

“We’re waiting to see what Arthur ‘Dandy’ Belsky does about his deal with the corporal,” Milar said, going down the list. “We still have a lead on the Ragman in connection with the incident at the Museum, and, of course, there are the Ralsk Foothills and the Dead Lands.”

“Set the Foothills aside for now.”

“Then we’re down to just two threads.”

The Colonel steepled his fingers again and fell silent for a moment.

“From what we know, the Ragman won’t be back from his travels before winter, and Belsky himself is unlikely to get it done before autumn.” With obvious reluctance, the Colonel pulled an envelope bearing the seal of the Imperial Chancery from a different drawer. “No order or medal for you this time, Corporal. Be glad you’re getting off without any disciplinary action at all… but His Imperial Majesty is pleased with your service. You are hereby granted special leave, unpaid and subject to recall if necessary, until, well, the end of the month of Saints…”

“Maybe I ought to blow up some city too, so they’ll give me nearly half a year off as well,” Milar grumbled sourly.

“That will be all for now, gentlemen. Captain. Corporal.”

“Colonel.”

“Colonel.”

The partners answered in unison as they got to their feet; Milar leaned quite heavily on his anything-but-ordinary cane.

At the doorway, Milar paused for a moment. Then he turned to the Colonel, who was already immersed in his papers.

“Colonel, just out of curiosity, what damage figure did they come up with this time? I’m actually more interested in the digits after the decimal. In kso, I mean. Not exes. And another thing…”

The Colonel looked up at them, his gaze holding a decidedly unpleasant promise.

“Got it.” Despite his limp, Milar vanished into the corridor before Ardan could even reach the doorway.

***

A ringing silence filled Bruce’s Jazz Bar, as it always did during the day. The bulbs in their curved shades winked a little forlornly, and every so often, if you listened closely, you could hear the low hum of the generator laboring in the basement. Aside from the generator and a few red-skinned orcs playing Sevens at a table in the back, there were only two other people in the bar.

Arkar, a half-blood orc wearing no jacket but an expensive silk-backed vest, polished a glass with a clean cloth. He stood a little over seven feet tall and had shoulders broad enough to pick a fight with a doorway and win. His eyes, however, were far too human.

Across from him sat Ardan, a spare young man, almost painfully thin. He was considerably shorter, yet still tall enough that in any crowd he would be looking down at the tops of people’s hats rather than staring at their backs.

He ran a finger around the rim of a cup half-full of aromatic cocoa.

“Want a refill, Ard?” Arkar asked, his low, guttural voice almost a growl.

Ardan looked up at his very strange friend, who, in Ard’s line of work, should have been an adversary. But a friend nonetheless. And perhaps his friendship with Arkar was nothing like the one he shared with Boris and Elena. But then, he only had to think of Bazhen and Milar.

Somehow, with each new season he spent in the Metropolis, Ard discovered more and more of what had been hidden from him back in the Alcade forests, on those long evenings by the fire with cowboys and the steppe wind for company.

Sometimes Ardi missed those days. They had not been easy, exactly, but they had been simple. Their story was long, yes, but so unhurried. Now he was always rushing somewhere, running late, and often charging ahead blind, feeling his way forward by touch alone.

“Then don’t,” Arkar answered his own question and went back to what he’d been doing. Once the Overseer of the Orc Jackets and now their new leader, Arkar always said that simple, hands-on work calmed his nerves, though he described it with a word he couldn’t pronounce: elementary.

They remained silent a while longer, each absorbed in his own thoughts.

“Arkar.”

“Mm?” Arkar grunted.

Ardan didn’t look away from the cocoa. Brown and viscous, it coated the inner walls of the ceramic cup, laced with white streaks left behind by the milk foam. For some reason, as Ardi stared at it, he couldn’t get the image of First Station’s streets and the trails through the Park out of his head.

“How did you cope with it?”

Arkar probably should have asked, “With what… with this?” Or made a joke of it somehow. Maybe even told Ard outright that he needed to get some sleep, hug his wife, and stop talking nonsense. But Ardan knew Arkar would do none of those things.

Instead of doing any of that, Arkar looked down the bar, still new but already marked in all the usual ways. A short distance from the man who’d recently shown up looking to hire Arkar’s boys for a strange job, a lone rolled-up newspaper lay on the counter. A bold black headline stood out against the gray front page: “Scandal Between the Crown and the Brotherhood of Tazidahian: Witnesses Say Bandits from the Empire’s Northern Neighbor Were Operating at First Station.”

Arkar turned back to Ard. For a moment, Arkar thought he saw the shadows that inhabited the bar’s corners and huddled beneath its tables and chairs suddenly reach toward Ard. They tried to latch onto his shoulders and slide down his bright green cloak, but every time, something seemed to stop them.

Arkar shook his head, and the vision vanished.

“Is it just because we’re Galessians?” Ard whispered. “I saw…” Ardi closed his eyes, planted his elbows on the counter, and covered his face with his hands. “Why… why is it like this…”

Arkar said nothing. He sensed that Ardi still hadn’t said everything that had been building inside him.

“When you’re sitting in a classroom…” Ardan said. He drew his hands away from his face and stared into empty space; whether he was looking at the bar or somewhere inside his own mind, Arkar couldn’t tell. “And when you read about the horrors of the wars between Ectassus and Galess, the War of the Mercenaries, the Northern War, the Fatian Massacre, and all the rest, it all seems so strange. Even a little stupid. Hating someone so fiercely just because your language and your history are different. And then…”

Ard paused for a second.

“They really did believe what they said,” Ard continued, his voice much quieter than before. “We weren’t even animals to them. Not even insects. Just… inanimate things that could talk. You couldn’t even call us dolls… I don’t know… How… how did you cope?”

Ard looked up at Arkar, his eyes a bright amber. Arkar set the glass aside, tossed the rag over his shoulder, and turned away for a moment.

“When Arseny and the rest of us, may the Eternal Angels he believed in so damn much welcome him, crossed the border…” Arkar sighed. “For a long time, I was itching to kill, Ardi. I’d seen what they’d done to my mother and father and… honestly, I didn’t care how many of them died. As long as a lot of them did. And preferably by my hand.”

Arkar leaned against the bar and winced for a moment.

“And then a man from the northwestern Shangrad borderlands was transferred to Arseny’s company. The Armondans had brought the same horror there too. They tied him up, tortured him, and when they’d had their fun, they made him watch while they did to his entire family… what nomads do. The old folks…” Arkar drew a hand across his throat. “And the women and children, Ardi, the little children, they…” Arkar didn’t finish. Ard didn’t need him to. Not anymore. “That was when I realized I still gave a damn, Ard. But he didn’t. Every time there was an assault, he was the first to volunteer. At some point, they stopped even asking. Just a rifle in his hand, a bandolier, a couple of grenades, and off he went. And you know, he almost never fired. The Armondans don’t bother much with fortifications. They barely dig trenches. What use are trenches when you’ve got horses, right? But in the wooded sector where we were fighting, the nomad tribes were dug in, and they knew a thing or two about earthworks. So… he’d be the first to throw himself into the trenches. And he’d beat, stab, and hammer everyone he came across.”

Arkar shuddered. Even now, almost a quarter of a century later, he found it hard to forget what he’d seen on the northeastern border.

“When you’re in a trench, especially an enemy trench, you don’t think much about anything,” Arkar continued. He made a gun with his fingers and “fired” into empty air. “Either you do the killing or you get killed. Better to be the one doing it. And somehow we didn’t pay much attention to that poor bastard. Then they sent us to clear out an Armondan encampment. We’d more or less driven off their warriors, but what was behind their lines? Only the demons know. They always drag the whole family along with them. They roam, after all.”

Arkar sighed, reached under the bar, and pulled out a bottle of whiskey so strong it would have sent a human to the hospital after the very first swallow. He splashed a generous measure into the same glass he’d just been polishing and drained it in one gulp.

“Our blacksmiths, the artillerymen, I mean, pounded them hard back then. So most likely no one had time to make it back to the encampment with word of the disaster.” Arkar poured another measure and drank again. “And there were tents. Some kind of tents. All that nomad crap. What I remember is the smell, Ardi. They were roasting a beaver. Can you imagine? They had strange habits, sure, but somehow that spit is what I remember, clear as if it were right in front of me. But that’s not the point.” Arkar dismissed it with a wave and drank again. “I jumped into the nearest tent and swung my saber in a backhand cut. You never know. And then I remember a scream. A long, drawn-out one, Ard. Something animal about it. There was a boy in front of me, Ard. Just a little kid. Maybe ten years old. And he’s standing there, screaming, with two fountains of blood where his hands should be. Blood spurting in every direction. And there’s a doll lying on the ground. Maybe his. Maybe his little sisters’. Their ma was hiding them behind her back. An ordinary woman, Ard. Decked out, of course, like all nomads, but ordinary.”

“They—”

“Yeah.” Arkar nodded, cutting him off. “They mistook us for their own. Thought we’d come back victorious. And the kid was only trying to give his papa a toy, and I…” Arkar waved that away, pushed his glass aside, and took a pull straight from the bottle. “Something in me just went haywire. I don’t even remember what I used to tie off his arms so he wouldn’t bleed out and end up with the demons. Meanwhile, I’m thinking, like it’s happening to somebody else, ‘Why the fuck are you helping the enemy?’ I was so disgusted with myself. I stood there, drenched in blood, exhausted and hungry, but something gave way inside me, Ard. Something cracked.” Arkar gave a crooked smile and tilted the bottle. “I couldn’t see them as beasts anymore. I couldn’t… Then that poor bastard comes bursting in. Eyes like a crazed bull’s, ready to pop right out of their sockets. Without even thinking, he lunges at the mother with a knife, and I already know he won’t stop. He’ll send them all straight to their fucking Heavenly Prairies.”

Arkar pushed back his sleeve and ran a fingernail along the long, broad scar.

“Later, we reported that an enemy had knifed him. We even buried him with honors. After all, how do you put it? It wasn’t really his fault, Ardi. How can you blame him? Until you’ve stood where he stood, until you’ve swallowed the same shit, how can you blame…” Arkar gave a bitter smile. “So I don’t know, Ard. How do I manage to remember that the ones on the other side of the hill, on the other side of the border, I mean, are people too? Damned if I know. Now I just don’t think about it. No need to. But back then? You think I didn’t lose control again after that? Oh, I lost control, all right. Just like all of us. Sometimes we managed to stop ourselves in time. Sometimes a commander’s shout helped. Sometimes it didn’t. But that’s war, Ard. Anything can happen in war. What matters is that you don’t bring it home, all right? Out there.” Arkar nodded toward the street. “Leave it outside the door, along with all that fucked-up ugliness, where it belongs. Don’t drag it home.”

Arkar knew why Ardi was still sitting here, going on three hours now, instead of hurrying back home to his Tess.

“I don’t just mean the Tazidahians,” Ard said without warning. Arkar narrowed his eyes a fraction. “All for money, Arkar… stupid money… so much pain… so many broken lives…”

Arkar felt the cold slowly biting into his forearms. Patterns of frost snaked across the tabletop, and a small cloud of breath escaped his lips. The staff stood some distance from Ard. Then it shimmered with strange symbols Arkar had never seen on it before. They seeped up from within the wood, spreading outward in a magical glow.

“Sometimes I get so tired, Arkar…” The shadows climbed higher and higher over Ard’s shoulders. As Arkar watched, they gathered into a broad, dark veil that draped the bar in gloom. “So tired of holding myself back…” Ard clutched at his chest, his fingers clenching. “Shanti’Ra… the Puppeteers and their pawns… everything I saw in Larand and on the shore of Angel’s Tear… in the sewer tunnel… those boxes… How much more can there be, Arkar…”

The Dark, like a scrap of starless night sky, suddenly slipped from Ard’s back to the floor. Ice Flowers bloomed wherever it touched the boards.

“Tess never tells me what happened when she was kidnapped. I know she wasn’t physically harmed, but when I think of the horror she had to endure… She was a little child who’d simply drawn the short straw and been born an Orman… and someone… for money…” Ard’s eyes flared with orange fire, and the bar counter hissed and gave off black smoke where the staff touched it. “I know I can find them, Arkar. Find every one of them. They’re still… every one of them… living their lives… just like those who managed to get away from First Station… That deputy sheriff and his wife didn’t, but they did… And I’m sure Husk’s accomplices survived too… And they’ll go on living, Arkar. Do you understand? They’ll go on living… Why? By what possible right? Because we’re not like them? Because we’re better? But does that make things any better for everyone left at the Station? And what did it lead to, Arkar? Maybe… maybe I was wrong to… maybe I shouldn’t hide anything, Arkar… maybe I should give the Colonel all the calculations… maybe I shouldn’t hold myself back, Arkar…”

Arkar turned toward the window where his men should have been sitting, but saw only two motionless statues, their eyes rolled back. Their skin was already almost entirely covered by a solid crust of snow.

“Ard…”

Then, all at once, everything went still. The Dark dissolved around the lightbulbs as they began to flicker again, and the bouncers went on playing cards as though nothing had happened. The only signs anything had happened were wet streaks on the countertop and melted varnish.

“But I know Tess wouldn’t want that.” Ardi brightened with a sudden smile. His eyes softened as he looked toward the house next door. “Sorry for dumping all that on you so suddenly, Arkar. You’re right. I should probably get a little sleep. And anyway, exams start tomorrow. And Bazhen’s sure to give me hell about the pharmacy. I’ve spent four whole months who knows where. Eorsky’s going to eat me alive. And I ought to go see Boris and Elena! Sleeping Spirits, Arkar! So much to do! Sorry! See you tomorrow!”

And Ard, as though nothing had just happened, as though someone else entirely had been sitting across from Arkar only moments ago, snatched up his staff, said goodbye to the bouncers, and ran out into the street. Arkar, meanwhile, stared at the empty chair and finally mustered enough strength to uncurl his fingers from around the grip of the shotgun strapped beneath the bar.

Once he’d caught his breath, he raised the bottle to his lips again and took several generous swallows.

Whoever had just been pretending to be Ardi was not the perpetually absentminded, always warm, slightly dreamy Ardi. By the Sleeping Spirits, Arkar had no desire to meet him again.

Arkar watched his friend disappear into the entryway of the building next door.

“I know Tess wouldn’t want that.” The words wouldn’t stop echoing in Arkar’s ears.

***

The door hinges creaked.

“You’re back, Ardi the wizard.”

“Yes, Snowflake, I’m home,” Ardi replied, and for the first time in a month, he felt he could breathe freely again. At last.