The Aether Chronicles

The Hunted

The lie about the lightning lasted four days.

I know because Dax counted. He had a habit, which I found annoying at the time and now find unbearably moving, of keeping a tally of everything on the inside of his belt with a thumbnail: days since the vault, days since Marat, the number of times Orin had said no. On the fourth evening he knelt beside the fire in the hollow where we had made camp, looked at the marks, and said in a voice I had not heard from him before:

"Somebody talked."

"How do you know?" said Lyra.

"Because I'm a thief. I know what it looks like when a rumor gets legs." He rubbed his thumb along the leather. "Two farmers on the road asked me today where the god of the shattered bronze could be found. I said I'd never heard of him. One of them had a very good knife and a very bad accent. He was not a farmer."

CHARGE: 11%. ECHO: 19%.

I did not need to look at the number to know it. The fragment had begun to knit itself into the machine the night after Marat, and the work had cost more than either of us had expected. Reintegration, the Interface called it, in the tone of a man discussing a particularly expensive bout of illness. It had drawn thirty percent of the Core's reserve before I woke on the second morning, and it was not finished. There had been no choice. A fragment cannot be left half-joined. The machine had said so, and I had believed it, and so we had spent the days since walking south with the best weapon in the world and a battery as empty as a beggar's cup.

"Orin took eight men to the coast," I said. "He's two days away. That leaves us with four soldiers, Dax and Lyra, and me."

"And a very small amount of Charge," said Lyra.

"Eleven percent," I said. "One second of augmentation is nine."

"I would advise," said the Interface, "that you do not spend it."

I looked at the fire. I thought about what Dax had said, and about the farmer with the good knife and the bad accent, and I realized that a part of me had been waiting for this since the square. A man does not take a stone out of a priest-king's hand and expect to be left alone.

"They'll come at night," I said. "Six or eight of them. They'll want the fragment and they'll want me alive. Dax, you know the temple's killers. What are they called?"

"The Quiet Hands," said Dax, and his usual grin was not there at all. "Ushar keeps them in the cellars under the temple. They don't talk. They don't take bribes. And they never, ever come in the front."

I nodded slowly. I was already thinking.

"Then we won't make it easy for them," I said, "and we won't use the machine."

I chose the place myself. Two miles back, in a fold of the hills, there was an abandoned charcoal burners' camp: a ring of stone clamps, a pair of collapsed huts, and a narrow gully with sheer sides leading up from the road. It was the only defensible ground within a day's walk, and it was also the only place that had, in the middle of it, a small forgotten limekiln.

I had passed it on the way south and noticed it the way a smith notices everything, and I had filed it in the back of my head for a rainy day. It was a rainy day.

"I need quicklime," I said. "All of it. And the water barrels."

"Why?" said Dax.

"Because water on quicklime makes heat. A great deal of heat, very fast. And the dust is poison to the eyes."

Dax gave me a long, slow look, the kind a man gives a stranger who has said something both wonderful and horrifying.

"You're a terrible person," he said, delighted.

"One percent," said the machine, when I asked it to check the kiln's flue. "The chimney is intact. The draw is strong. If the kiln were lit, it would exhaust through the northern vent."

"Good. Lit isn't what I want." I turned to the four soldiers, who had been standing awkwardly in a row waiting to be told what to do. "I need you to carry stones. Big ones. Flat ones. And rope. As much rope as you can find."

By dusk we had done what could be done.

The gully's single approach ran uphill between two walls of loose rock, wide enough for three men abreast. Where it narrowed, we set a line of old charcoal clamps, stacked and tilted, held in place by a single peg driven into a crack. A man who walked beneath them and kicked the peg would find himself under half a ton of slate. Beyond that, where the path turned, I buried the kiln's last sack of quicklime in a shallow pit and ran a clay pipe from the nearest barrel to its edge. If a man trod on the pit, the cover would fall, and the barrel's stopper would pull. The dust and the water would meet at about the level of his face.

Across the top of the gully, hidden in the grass, we laid a line of cord soaked in pitch from the burners' leftover pots.

"This is horrible," said one of the soldiers softly.

"It's engineering," said Dax, with deep satisfaction.

I sat down against the wall of the nearest hut and let myself breathe. My hands were shaking. It had been hours since I had eaten anything. Lyra came and sat beside me without a word and handed me a heel of bread, and I ate it in three bites.

"You're afraid," she said.

"Yes."

"I thought you might be." She looked at the gully, black against the stars. "I used to think the stones made people into gods. I think now they just make them brave. Or stupid. I can't tell which."

"Neither can I," I said.

They came at the second bell past midnight.

I heard nothing at all. Dax saw them first, a shadow shifting against a rock that had not been shifting a moment before, and he touched my arm and I felt the whole camp go still. Then there was a long silence, and in the silence the thin whisper of cloth against stone.

There were six of them.

They moved like cats. Each wore a plain dark robe, wrapped close, and a veil that covered the lower face. They carried no torches, no lanterns, only short curved knives. They came up the gully in single file, soundless, and I held my breath as the first of them reached the line of tilted clamps.

He did not look up. He did not think to. The peg was beneath a hand's breadth of leaf, and he stepped on it, and the whole stack came down.

The sound was extraordinary. There was a deep, grinding crash, and a cloud of black dust, and a scream that cut off abruptly. When the dust cleared there were two men under the stone, and the rest of the line had scattered like startled birds.

"Now," I whispered.

On the ridge above, the first soldier hauled on his rope.

The second assassin was quicker. She was a lean figure with a scarred hand, quick and light, and she dodged the falling clamps and went up the east wall of the gully like a spider. I saw the silver of her knife. I heard Dax curse. And then she dropped down at the bend, directly onto the buried pit.

The cover tipped. The stopper pulled. And the barrel, with a hollow sound like a swallowed word, spilled forty gallons of water onto sixty pounds of quicklime.

I have never forgotten the noise. It was not an explosion. It was a long, vicious hiss, as of a thousand snakes at once, and out of the pit rose a cloud of white steam and white dust, boiling and billowing, with a smell like burning stone. The woman made no sound at all. She went down on her hands and knees, clawing at her eyes, and the men behind her stumbled and fell back into the pitch-soaked cord.

Somebody dropped a torch.

The line caught with a soft whump, and the gully burned.

For a few minutes I thought we had won.

I will not forget the sight of it: the black walls of the gully lit orange, the white smoke boiling out of the pit, the shapes of men running and screaming through it. I saw three of the Quiet Hands go down. I saw one of the soldiers, the youngest, whose name I never learned, take a knife in the arm and fall against a rock. I saw Dax leap from the roof of a hut with a hatchet and a high, wild whoop, and bring down a dark shape in the middle of the path.

"Four assassins incapacitated," said the Interface, in a very small voice. "Two unaccounted for."

"Where?"

"I do not—"

Lyra screamed.

It came from the old charcoal hut behind me, thin and sharp and cut off almost at once. I spun. The door was open. The shadow that came out of it was tall and slow, in a gray robe, with a scarred hand holding a long bronze knife, and with its other arm around Lyra's chest.

I had not seen her go. None of us had. The woman who had been on the path, the one I thought I had blinded, had not been the leader at all. She had been a decoy. She had let herself be taken by the pit.

The leader stood in the doorway with Lyra clamped against her chest, and I saw the knife lie flat across Lyra's throat, and I stopped.

"That's far enough," said the Hand.

Her voice was low and strangely pleasant. She pulled her veil down with her free hand, and I saw a face as plain and weary as a washerwoman's, with a long white scar down one cheek.

"I am Anhet," she said. "Mistress of the Quiet Hands, in the service of the priest-king Ushar and the sky-fire. You have taken a thing that does not belong to you. I am here to bring it back."

I have had many chances in three thousand years to look back on that moment, and I will tell you exactly what I felt.

I felt the number.

CHARGE: 11%.

It sat in the corner of my sight like a coin I could not spend. Nine percent bought one second of augmentation. One second was enough to cross eight paces and break a wrist. I could do it. I could do it before she saw me move.

And in the thin place behind my eyes, soft and warm and reasonable, something said:

Do it.

She'll kill her. Do it now. You can afford it.

It's only nine percent.

I felt my right hand begin to rise. I felt my mouth open. And I heard, somewhere very far away, a quiet voice say, "Kael. Please."

I closed my hand into a fist.

"Lyra," I said.

I said it out loud. I said it again, harder.

"Lyra."

The whisper stopped. It did not go quietly. There was a long, bruised silence, like a door slamming at the other end of a very long hall, and then the static was gone, and I was standing in the firelight with my hands empty and my knees shaking and my own thoughts, clear and cold and mine.

Lyra's eyes found mine over the edge of the knife. She was very pale. She was also, I saw with a jolt of awful understanding, perfectly calm.

Don't, she said, with her face. Please. Not the stone.

"Give me the fragment," said Anhet. "And the girl will live."

"I don't have it," I said. It was almost true. The fragment was in a rag on a ledge in the hut, behind her. She knew that. She would find it in a moment, and I would be standing here with nothing.

"Then you'll be easy to follow," said Anhet gently. "You'll come. Ushar will want you. He'll be generous, I think. He is very curious."

"Let her go."

"No."

Behind her, Dax stirred in the dust, groaning, with a cut across his ribs. One of the soldiers staggered to his feet. Anhet's knife did not waver. She stepped backward, out of the hut, with Lyra locked against her, and I saw a pale horse standing in the dark beyond the huts, saddled and waiting. I had not heard it come. I had not heard anything.

She mounted, with an ease that spoke of a lifetime's practice, one arm still locked around Lyra's waist. She did not hurry. She turned the horse to face me, and for a moment, in the red light of the burning gully, she looked almost sorry.

"You did well," she said. "You hurt us more than any man has in ten years. I will tell Ushar so."

"Where are you taking her?"

"Home." The horse turned. "He will trade, I think. The girl for the fragment. Karesh. Three days. Come alone, and bring the stone, and no one will be harmed."

She was gone before I could speak. The dark swallowed the horse's hooves, and the sound faded, and then there was only the crackle of the dying fire.

I stood very still.

Behind me, Dax was swearing steadily and creatively. The surviving soldiers were dragging the wounded into the huts. Somewhere in the gully a man was moaning, and the smell of burning pitch lay over everything, thick and sweet.

I looked at the number.

CHARGE: 8%.

I had spent three percent on analyses. I had not spent the nine. I had not spent a single second of augmentation. I had won the fight with limestone and rope and stubbornness, exactly as I had promised, and I had saved every grain of what I had.

I had also lost Lyra.

"Kael," said the Interface, very softly. "You did the right thing. Had you used the Core, you would have been unable to run. The fragment would have been taken regardless. And—"

"Don't," I said.

"I only mean that—"

"I know what you mean." My voice cracked. "I know what the number says. I know what it would have cost. I saved eight percent of a machine, and she's on a horse in the dark."

The machine said nothing. It had learned, in a short time, when to be silent.

I sat down on the ground beside the hut, in the ashes, with my head in my hands, and I did not cry. I will say that for myself. I did not cry. I only sat there, and counted, as I had learned from Dax, with a thumbnail along the inside of my belt.

Day one.