Chapter Sixteen

Rebeke pointedly didn't look at the corpse. Nomad considered forcing her to confront it. No use in her trying to pretend she hadn't shot the fellow. If she really wanted to protect her people, this wouldn't be the last man she'd have to kill.

He didn't bother. It wasn't his job to train her. Instead he did a cursory inspection of the corpse—and when he found a treasured picture, obviously drawn by a child, tucked into a pocket, he slipped it back into place without mentioning it to Rebeke.

She was kneeling beside the wreckage of the scout's cycle. "We'll salvage this," she said, then walked to her own cycle, lifted the seat, and pulled out a tow cable stored inside. "Even if it's beyond repair, salvaging this is easier than harvesting metal from the iron fields."

"Iron fields?" Nomad asked, crouching down.

"Places where molten metal coats the surface each rotation," she said, walking back. "One corridor north. We sneak in during the darkness and pry up some of it before the Cinder King's forces arrive."

"And you use this how?" he asked, frowning. "Do you have full fabrication plants on your ships?"

"Fabrication plants?" she asked, cocking her head. "We use the Chorus, obviously. The spirits, like the one that follows you, create the objects we need."

Ahhh, the knight intones. That sounds interesting.

"Stop trying to bait me," he muttered in Alethi, then switched to her language. "Send someone else to salvage this, Rebeke. What is that blinking light there on the dash of the cycle?"

She cursed softly, lowering her towline. She knelt again, tapping a small, green-on-black indicator screen that was cracked but still flickering.

"What is it?" he asked.

"That shows an incoming radio signal," she said. "The speaker is busted, so we can't hear what they're saying. But…"

"But someone was calling this fellow when he went down," Nomad said. "Which means we got out of range of your signal blockers before he died. Damnation. He probably radioed in the moment he had a chance."

"It's what I'd have done," Rebeke said.

"This means they know he's down and that something, or someone, killed him."

"What if they send more troops? What if they send Charred? What if they bring the entire city?"

Nomad stood up, dusting off his hands. "Surely you know the answer to that by now." He started off toward his cycle. In front of him, the brilliant display of erupting earth had subsided, leaving the field pocked with holes and mounds of black lava rock.

"Nomad!" she called from behind. "I don't want this. To be a killer. To be like…like you."

He looked back, and a glib response came to his tongue.

Nomad, she's hurting, Auxiliary reminded him. Please.

He hesitated, seeing Rebeke holding to the towline she'd fetched, looking anywhere but at the corpse. Eyes downcast. He'd noticed, of course. It would be a bright day in the Weeping before Auxiliary read a human's emotions better than he did. Empathy, though…well, he should feel ashamed that a creature that was both dead and inhuman did a better job of that.

"I know," he said to Rebeke, letting his other response go. "Keep that in mind. It might help."

She nodded. He gave her a moment, walking over to his hovercycle to radio back to Contemplation. Perhaps he was supposed to call all three of the Greater Good at once, but their rules were irrelevant to him, and he liked Contemplation. She saw through him.

"Hey," he said. "We got the scout, but it seems likely he radioed home first. You might have company on the way. How's the hunt going?"

"Terribly," Contemplation said. "There doesn't seem to be anything here, though we're in the right place."

"How can you tell?" he asked, curious.

"Celestial navigation," she said. "We can tell from the rings and the stars. Those are the glowing things—"

"I know what stars are, thank you," he said.

"Just checking. Well, they can tell us with reasonable accuracy where we are on the planet. The corridor we're in is easy to determine. Harder to tell the longitude, however. You need—"

"Precise clocks," he said. "Yes. I'm aware of that too."

"Strange, how much you know about the surface world for one who lived his life underneath it."

"Keep asking yourself questions like that, Contemplation," he said, "and maybe you'll eventually realize the erroneous assumptions you've made about me. Either way, we don't have a lot of time left."

"We're repeating our search," she said. "The opening might be buried deeply this time, which would make our readings difficult. Still, we should have found it. This is the longitude where the Cinder King stopped each time to test his key. Several of our people have seen the opening, Nomad. It's real. Yet our prospectors can't find it."

"Well, what do you want us to do?"

"You're taking orders from me now?" Contemplation asked.

"Depends on how stupid they are."

She grunted. "If it pleases you, accept this direction—stay there a little while and see if you can spot anyone coming to check on the scout. Perchance they'll just send a small group in to investigate."

"If this is the region where the door is," Nomad said, "then the Cinder King might have guessed what we're doing. He might realize you've swapped the keys."

"If we've been subjected to such ill luck, expect an entire military force. You will, at your pleasure, please warn us if that's the case."

A good enough suggestion. "We'll do it."

"I am pleased you find my direction agreeable. Did the scout have a sunheart in his vehicle?"

Nomad glanced toward Rebeke, who was already checking on that herself. At his called question, she looked back at him and shook her head.

"Looks like it was running on a battery," he said to Contemplation.

"Shades," she muttered. "We could have used that."

"Your ships are running out of power?"

"We decided not to make new sunhearts," she explained, "though we are low on power. The decision was made instead to try Elegy's plan of getting into the Refuge. Our failures so far have left us strained for resources. They come at a terrible cost, requiring—"

"I know."

"I was to go next," she said, "as were my sisters in the Greater Good. Three others were to take our place. I feel…a burden of guilt, not having gone as was my time. Yet our people need leadership right now. Unfortunately, if we don't find the entrance…we now won't have enough power to last another rotation."

Damnation. "Then you'd better find that entrance," he said, nodding to Rebeke as she put away the towline and climbed onto her cycle.

They left the wreckage and took off, then immediately hid behind a natural merlon at the lip of the crater. Far to Nomad's left, the sky was growing light with a predawn glow. Faintly so—this wasn't yet even what he'd have called twilight on another planet. But sunrise wasn't deadly on other planets, and twilight had never felt quite so ominous to him as it did here.

They powered down the cycles to conserve their batteries and kept watch—ignoring that looming light to the left. The rocks here were dark and glasslike. Obsidian, maybe. It reminded him of another place, another world he'd once traveled. A place where he'd met Auxiliary.

Rebeke dug out bread and sausage, slicing them and making a sandwich, using a spread that looked like oil with herbs. No butter, which he supposed made sense. He didn't know what they hunted for meat, but those flying ships didn't have room for cultivated livestock.

"Contemplation is wrong about you, isn't she?" Rebeke asked, offering him some of the food, which he took. "She thinks you're from some strange underground place, but I think you're from somewhere more normal."

"And where would that be?" he asked.

She nodded her chin up, toward the stars.

"Another world is more normal?"

"We came from another world," she said around bites of her food. Odd, how they even ate with gloves on. "Chased by an ancient force known as the Evil."

"It's still there," he said. "On your homeworld. I've seen it. Well, the manifestations of it." Wild, unchained Investiture, come to life with its own alien will—forming mountain-sized figures with impossible, unnerving features and unknowable motivations. Threnody was not a place one visited to relax.

This comment finally threw her for a loop. She almost dropped her sandwich as he said it.

"Strangely, the Chorus—who hold our history—don't speak of our leaving because of the Evil," she continued. "No, they say it was the quarreling. The infighting that sprang up among our people. Conflict, hatred. My ancestors wanted to escape that, for it was more pernicious than the Evil itself. Strife destroyed our people.

"During our flight from the Evil, there was more bickering among the people. My group…we listened to the preaching of a man: the servant of Adonalsium and the original Lodestar. We left with him to a new land. We chose this."

Nomad grunted, trying his own sandwich, which proved to be terribly bland. What he wouldn't give for at least some chili powder. Half the planets he visited had diets with all the flavor of a cup of water. Storms, back home, even the bread was spicier than this sausage.

Still, it was food, and he forced it down. Investiture could sustain him, but at barely ten percent Skip capacity, he would rather not waste it on mere metabolism.

"We were supposed to be free here," Rebeke said, still watching the horizon. "From each other. I often wonder if the first Lodestar brought us here specifically to keep us running, to give us something to focus upon. A sun that destroys, like the Evil itself, always pursuing us. Until now, it has prevented us from turning on each other."

"You've gone all this time without violence?"

"We had violence," she said. "Crimes of passion. Arguments. But no actual killers. No trained ones. That was the Cinder King's innovation."

Remarkable, the knight says. I can't decide if they're naive or impressive.

"It's not human nature to kill, Aux," he whispered in Alethi. "You must be trained to do it. If you want to be effective, at least."

From what he'd heard, there were as many as fifty groups on this planet, all running parallel to one another in these "corridors." Enough of a population to foster interchange and prevent inbreeding, but it was also a situation begging for a tyrant's hand. Scarce resources. Many small populations unaccustomed to working together.

In that light, it was remarkable that it had taken so long for a Cinder King to arise. Nomad wasn't an ethnographer. As much as his master had pushed him, Nomad's interest had always been in engineering, the nature of Investiture, and the mechanisms one could create by manipulating it. Still, he had training from Wit about the nature of stories and the people who told them. So he recognized that these peoples' stories were bound to be fascinating. Enough so that part of him wished he could stay and learn them.

But the pursuit, the chase, ever loomed. It drove away all other thoughts, like a predator ravaging a once-placid flock.

He couldn't linger.

He had to get away.

So he watched keenly, instead of asking for more information. And well that he did, for he soon spotted a ship coming to check on the fallen scout. A single vessel, larger than most—perhaps the size of a small bus. Its ornamented sides glowed golden in the ringlight.

Rebeke gasped as he pointed it out. "That's the Cinder King's own ship!"