I picked up the heavier of the two envelopes and allowed it to empty itself on the bed. The sharp-edged, intricately shaped pieces that fell out of it seemed to invite me to fit them together. I could feel the thing squeezed into my palm, ready to be used. It would be difficult to see; pearly in colour, like opaque glass.
Or diamond.
‘This is a blocking move,’ I said to Amelia. ‘You’ve immobilised me now. I may be taller and stronger than you, but there’s nothing I can do at this point which won’t cause me a lot of pain.’
She looked at me expectantly. ‘What now?’
‘Now you take the weapon from me.’ I nodded down towards the little trowel we were using as an ersatz weapon. She removed it from my grip softly with her free hand, then flung it away as if it were poisoned.
‘You’re letting go too easily.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘With the pressure you’re putting on that nerve, it’s all I could do not to drop it. It’s simple biomechanics, Amelia. I think you’ll find Alexei even easier to deal with.’
We were standing in the clearing before the chalet in what passed for late afternoon in Hospice Idlewild, the central filament of the sun turning from white to sullen orange. It was an odd kind of afternoon because the light always stayed overhead, imparting none of the flattering face-on glow and long shadows of a planetary sundown. But we were paying it little attention anyway. For the last two hours I had been showing Amelia some basic self- defence techniques. We had spent the first hour with Amelia trying to attack me, which meant touching any part of my body with the edge of the trowel. In all that time she had not succeeded once, even when I willed myself to let her through my defences. No matter how hard I gritted my teeth and said that this time I was going to let her win, it never happened. But at least it demonstrated something, which was that the right technique would almost always beat a clumsy assailant. She was getting closer, though, and things had improved when we reversed roles for the second hour. Now at least I was able to hold back, moving in slow enough for Amelia to learn the right blocking moves for each situation. She was a very good pupil; achieving in an hour what normally took two days. Her moves were not yet graceful — not yet hardwired into muscle memory — and she telegraphed her intentions, but neither of these defects would count much against an amateur like Brother Alexei.
‘You could show me how to kill him, too, couldn’t you?’ Amelia said, while we took a breather on the grass — or rather, while she caught her breath and I waited.
‘Is that what you want?’
‘No; of course not. I just want to make him stop.’
I looked across the curve of Idlewild to the tiny, dotlike figures toiling in the cultivation terraces on the far side, hurrying while there was still enough light to work in. ‘I don’t think he’ll come back,’ I said. ‘Not after what happened in the cave. But if he does, you’ll have an edge on him — and I’m damn sure he won’t come back after that. I know his type, Amelia. He’ll just fixate on an easier target.’
She thought about that for a while, doubtless pitying whoever would have to go through the same thing she had. ‘I know it’s not the sort of thing we’re meant to say, but I hate that man. Can we go through these moves tomorrow again?’
‘Of course. In fact, I insist on it. You’re still weak — although you’re well ahead of the curve.’
‘Thanks. Tanner — do you mind if I ask how you know these things?’
I thought back to the documents I had found in the envelope. ‘I was a personal security consultant.’
‘And?’
I smiled ruefully, wondering how much she knew about the contents of that envelope. ‘And some other things.’
‘They told me you were a soldier.’
‘Yes; I think I was. But then almost everyone alive on Sky’s Edge had some connection to the war. It wasn’t something you stayed out of easily. The attitude was, if you weren’t part of the solution, you were part of the problem. If you didn’t sign up for one side, you were considered by default to have sympathies with the other.’ That was an over-simplification, of course, since it ignored the fact that the aristocratic rich could buy neutrality off the shelf like a new outfit — but for the average non-wealthy Peninsula citizen, it wasn’t so far from the truth.
‘You seem to be remembering well now.’
‘It’s beginning to come back. Having a look at my personal possessions certainly helped.’
She nodded encouragingly and I felt the tiniest stab of remorse at lying to her. The pictures had done very much more than just jog my memory, but for the moment I chose to maintain the illusion of partial amnesia. I just hoped Amelia was not shrewd enough to see through my subterfuge, but I would be careful not to underestimate the Mendicants in any of the moves that lay ahead.
I was, indeed, a soldier. But as I had also inferred from the slew of passports and ID documents in the envelope, soldiering was nowhere near the end of my talents, merely the core around which my other skills orbited. Not everything had come into absolutely sharp focus yet, but I knew a lot more than I had the day before.
I’d been born into a family at the low end of the aristocratic wealth scale: not actively poor but consciously struggling to maintain any facade of wealth. We’d lived in Nueva Iquique, on the south-eastern shore of the Peninsula. It was a fading settlement buffered from the war by a range of treacherous mountains; sleepy and dispassionate even in the war’s darkest years. Northeners would often sail down the coast and put into Nueva Iquique without fear of violence, even when we were technically enemies, and inter-marriage between Flotilla lines was not uncommon. I grew up able to read the enemy’s hybrid language with almost the same fluency I read ours. To me it seemed strange that our leaders inspired us to hate these people. Even the history books agreed that we’d been united when the ships left Mercury.
But then so much had happened.
As I grew older, I began to see that, while I had nothing against the genes or beliefs of those who were allied within the Northern Coalition, they were still our enemies. They’d committed their share of atrocities, just as we had. While I might not have despised the enemy, I still had a moral duty to bring the war to a conclusion as swiftly as possible by aiding our side in victory. So at the age of twenty-two I signed up for the Southland Militia. I wasn’t a natural soldier, but I learned quickly. You had to; especially if you were thrown into live combat only a few weeks after handling your first gun. I turned out to be a proficient marksman. Later, with proper training, I became an exceptional one — and it was my extreme good fortune that my unit happened to need a sniper.
I remembered my first kill — or multiple killing, as it turned out.
We were perched high in jungle-enshrouded hills, looking down at a clearing where NC troops were off- loading supplies from a ground-effect transport. With ruthless calm I lined up the gun, squinting into the sight, aligning the cross-hairs one at a time on each man in the unit. The rifle was loaded with subsonic micro-munitions; completely silent and with a programmed detonation delay of fifteen seconds. Time enough to put a gnat-sized slug in every man in the clearing — watching each reach up idly to scratch his neck at what he imagined was an insect bite. By the time the eighth and last man noticed something wrong, it was much too late to do anything about it.
The squad dropped to the dirt in eerie unison. Later, we descended from the hill and requisitioned the supplies for our own unit, stepping over corpses grotesquely bloated from internal explosions.
That was my first dreamlike taste of death.
Sometimes I wondered what would have happened if the delay had been set to less than fifteen seconds, so that the first man dropped before I’d finished putting slugs in the others. Would I have had the true sniper’s nerve — the cold will to carry on regardless? Or would the shock of what I was doing have rammed home so brutally that I would have dropped the gun in revulsion? But I always told myself that there was no point dwelling on what might have happened. All I did know was that after that first series of unreal executions, it was never a problem again.
Almost never.
It was in the nature of a sniper’s work that one almost never saw the enemy as anything other than an impersonal stick-figure; too far away to be humanised by either facial details or an expression of pain when the slug found its mark. I almost never needed to send another slug. For a time, I thought I’d found a safe niche where I could psychologically barrier myself from the worst that the war had to offer. I was valued by my unit, protected like a talisman. Although I never once did anything heroic, I became a hero by virtue of my technical skill at aiming a gun. If such a thing were possible in any kind of combat, I was happy. In fact, I knew it was possible: I’d seen men and women for whom the war was a capricious and spiteful lover; one who would always hurt them, but to
