“Huh? Oh, right, all the burning and the killing. No, I guess a clever girl like you doesn’t see much of that, do you?” Hamuy shivered. “You should get out more. See the world. The real world. I highly recommend Persia, if you ever have the chance. A man can go far in Persia. In fact, a man can go wherever he wants in Persia. Taverns. Whorehouses.”
“Can a man in Persia go to work without being set on fire or being stabbed to death?” Taziri slowly let her gaze slip down the far wall to the ruined flesh beneath the gauze wrapped around the prisoner’s head. The words falling out of her mouth were dry, lifeless things. Half of her wanted to explode with rage, but the other half didn’t have the energy to move, so she stayed very still and tried not to feel or think too much. “Because lately that’s become something a concern of mine. Dying.”
Hamuy chuckled and then shuddered. “Dying?” He clucked his tongue. “Don’t see much dying either, do you? I guess you’re more of a talker, eh? Just like the queen, all words and no fight. You like words, don’t you?”
“Not right now, I don’t.” Taziri let her finger slip a little closer to the trigger.
“Mm. You’re still angry about your little friends back in that hangar, aren’t you? Well, if it makes you feel any better, it wasn’t personal. Just a job.” He shivered.
Taziri blinked hard again. “Doctor? Why is he shaking like that?”
The older man roused himself slightly and muttered, “The burns. Nerve damage. Burns can get progressively worse if not properly treated. As the minor burns spread, the pain will get worse. As the major burns spread, the pain will fade away as the nerves die.”
“Oh.” The engineer wiggled her numb finger. “Hey. Hey you.” She kicked Hamuy’s boot and the man looked up. “You can talk all you want but I’m not going to shoot you. I’m going to sit here and watch you twitch. You’re probably going to die soon, one way or another. And whether the marshals throw you in prison, or you just shiver and bleed to death on the floor there in a puddle of your own filth, is fine with me.”
“You know, it must be really nice for you,” Hamuy said. “Nice to have all these other people to take care of things for you. Redcoats, police, soldiers. People in uniforms all over the place, all to tell you what to do. To make the hard calls. To get their hands dirty. For you.”
Taziri looked down at the weapon she was petting. A steel barrel, steel cylinder, hammer, trigger, shells, handle, little scratches and dings here and there, a clear fingerprint where her thumb had been a moment earlier. Cold steel. Only three moving parts, because bullets don’t count. It was all wrong. No warm brass, no clicking gears, no buzzing wires. She wanted copper, shades of sunfire and sand. She wanted power and motion, useful things puttering and whirring, gauge needles turning and signals whistling. The gun offered none of those things, none of the images or sounds or smells she loved about machines. It was too simple. It was a cold, dead thing. Closing her eyes, Taziri tore the gun apart in her mind. It was easy, just like her days in school. All machines are nothing more than their parts, arranged in sequence. Before her mind’s eye, the gun came undone. The screws spiraled backward, plates separated, shells slid out, powder spilled upwards. Then the bits hovered in her mind, lonely and harmless. But she couldn’t hold the image of the pieces apart, she had nothing else to do with them and years of training and habits die hard, and so the pieces slid back together and before she could stop it the image of the gun was complete and it was spewing bullets. At people. At Menna.
Her eyes snapped open and she shoved the revolver off her lap onto the seat beside her with a shaking hand. The old Hellan was snoring again. Taziri slowly let her gaze wander to the bench where Ghanima lay on her side, and then to Hamuy, who was lifting his legs up and preparing to kick the sleeping girl in the head.
Taziri’s hand snatched up the revolver, thumbed the hammer, and leveled the barrel at the prisoner’s chest. “Get away from her!”
Hamuy only grinned and in the darkness Taziri thought she saw his boot move.
The bark of the gun snapped Evander and Ghanima up to sit and stare at each other, their hands clutching the edge of the bench cushions. Hamuy fell on his back, a tiny wisp of smoke rising from his chest. Then he groaned and slowly sat back up.
Incredulous, Taziri stood and shuffled closer. Ghanima turned, looking lost and sick, and then she scrambled down the bench away from the prisoner. Taziri reached up and flicked the cabin light on. Hamuy grinned and coughed. Taziri kept the gun pointed at the man’s chest as she knelt down, still staring and frowning. Behind the wisp of smoke was a dark hole in Hamuy’s shirt, and behind the hole was a ring of light brown skin, and in that ring of flesh was a crushed bullet and the bright silver gleam of steel.
“What is that? What’s under your skin?”
“That?” Hamuy’s grin melted into a cold, flat stare. “That’s the future, girl. And it’s nothing compared to what they did to Chaou.”
Day Two
Chapter 8. Lorenzo
The hidalgo sat high in the saddle, his black greatcoat draped over the horse’s rump, the brim of his hat shielding his eyes from the glare of the sun rising above the rim of the Atlas Mountains on his left. After only a few minutes on the road, they were already beyond the last of the small cottages of Tingis. The cobbled street became a broad dusty highway where a glance to the right revealed the thin black line of the ocean beyond the hills but to look anywhere else was to stare into an endless sea of grass and dust. Stunted trees and gnarled shrubs clustered around the rocky dips in the hills and the occasional spoor on the side of road betrayed the recent passage of rabbits and wild dogs, but to Lorenzo Quesada the wind-stroked plain was as alien and treacherous as the jungles of the New World.
No snow, no ice. Animals everywhere, but no tracks anywhere. He sipped from his water skin and unbuttoned his coat, revealing his white shirt and dark blue vest to the warming air. The pommel and swept-hilt guard of his espada bobbed along at his hip, the blade sheathed in supple oiled leather with a tuft of fur at the mouth to protect the steel from snow and rain, though he did not expect either to fall anytime soon.
To his right and several paces behind rode Lady Qhora astride her monstrous Wayra. The Inca called them hatun-ankas, the great eagles. Striding as fast as a horse could trot and towering nine feet above the ground on its massive talons, the animal bore little similarity to any bird Lorenzo had ever seen. But the beasts were feathered and beaked, and they screamed like eagles well enough. Below the neck their plumage was drab browns and grays, but around the head they wore crowns and masks and collars of red and blue and green, as garish as they were hideous. He had once met a man from Carthage who claimed that there were similar striding birds in the east called ostriches, though they were thin-legged and clumsy. The thought of more of these creatures elsewhere around the world was not comforting to him.
Wayra was not clumsy or delicate. She moved with the same powerful grace as her rider, trotting proudly down the road, her head snapping from side to side so she could study the world with her massive black eyes. Lorenzo guessed Wayra’s beak to be three hand-spans long and half that in width, though he had never dared to measure it. In the Empire he had seen Incan warriors riding the hatun-ankas into battle, the feathered monsters screaming as they raced through the forests and across the hills, their stunted wings held tight against their bodies. When they leapt upon the Espani cavalry, the horses were crushed into the dust beneath talons as cruel as sabers and the riders were torn to pieces by iron beaks that could crush a skull or snap a ribcage in a single thrust. And then the hatun-ankas would feed, bright red blood streaming across their pale golden beaks.
Lorenzo nudged his nervous mare a bit farther to the left. In Espana, Wayra had been confined to a corner of a stable where he had rarely been forced near her. The journey across the Strait in the Mazigh steamer had been tense but brief, and the journey to the capital at Orossa should have been similarly swift aboard the train. But now he counted the hours and days of riding that stretched out before him, hours and days of sitting with his head only a few feet from Wayra’s beak.
With some satisfaction, he saw that Lady Qhora was wearing the dark green dress he had given her last winter. White silk and lace covered her neck and chest and rustled at her wrists, ensuring that no man might see more than was proper. But she refused to ride side-saddle, and so the skirts lay in wrinkled disarray across her lap, revealing her soft riding boots nearly to her knees. She had not cut her hair since coming to Espana and now it hung decadently past her shoulders to mingle with the brilliant golds and greens and blues of her feathered cloak. The
