No warning or introduction. He was still trying to push her off-balance. What did he want to know so badly? There was nothing of interest or value to him in her mind, save the Immersion Chamber. But he’d asked little of that.
“There’s been smuggling, refugees trading mechanisms. You’re to shut down the trading posts I indicate.”
“Trading posts, sir?” This wasn’t a Seeker’s work. It barely qualified as work for the Street Keepers—Polis Sumad’s legal enforcement gangs.
“You have an objection, Head?”
“No, sir,” she blurted, entirely too quickly.
“Two Missionaries will do as backup. Your deputy, Jools Teeber, and that dreamer with the blond hair.”
“Toornan Lyrean? He was promoted just before we left home.”
“Yes, yes,” he said with a dismissive flick of his hand.
This was a trick. Lijjen wouldn’t let up on hounding her so easily, surely? He wouldn’t just let her go like this. It was likely, somehow, things had just gotten worse.
“There are rumours of dark mechanisms in that direction,” Lijjen continued. “The Refugee Cenephans are up to their usual tricks. Shut them all down, Saarg. It’s past time.”
Mechanisms running on chaos energy? She doubted it. But it was enough to justify sending her.
“I take it you wish me to track the traders and their movements, sir?”
He gave another ambivalent hand-wave. No, he didn’t care about that. Was he going to get her, Jools and Toornan kidnapped and tortured? Or simply make them disappear?
“Just shut them down. You’ll have to be prepared, so you’ll be fitted for skinleaf plate armor to wear beneath civilian clothing, and we’ll give you tracers. The locals are hostile.”
“Thank you, sir.”
The lines around Lijjen’s eyes relaxed. A thought struck Terese, a hint of Lijjen’s purpose in sending her into Polis Sumad’s wilds. It had nothing to do with chasing chaos mechanisms.
“Dismissed.”
She clicked her heels loudly and turned to exit the windowless office.
“And Saarg?”
“Sir?”
“Rewrite your chaos flux reports, enlist for basic shockpole tutorials and extra patrols under another Head’s supervision. I wasn’t aware you’d been lax in those areas. Thank you for advising me of your inadequacies.”
He’d taken a fresh paper and was writing on it when she closed the door behind her.
4
“Now’s our best chance, Terese,” said Toornan, sliding off the rocky outcrop. “No one’s coming.” He raised an eyebrow. “If, that is, we’re actually going through with this.” He waited.
Terese took her time to respond, considering each word carefully and hoping what she said sounded unforced.
“We have a job to do, Missionaries,” she said. “Let’s get it done.”
“Really?” said Toornan, folding his arms. “What part of this has anything to do with hunting chaos energy or cadvers? There’s no chaos out here at all.”
She resisted the urge to scream. Toornan didn’t blame her, she knew. He’d been at the failed taking and gained bruises as souvenirs. But her demoralizing treatment had caused a few of her complement to ask questions they would not have, back home.
Terese turned from Toornan, rubbing her waist, where the note she’d hidden crinkled under her fingers.
“Pull your head in, Toornan. We have orders. Liking them isn’t part of it.”
Toornan snorted. “None of us can scent chaos energy here, so I can’t get in trouble for refusing an order. The bastards back at the chapterhouse won’t know.” He stamped a foot. “Dammit! All we’re doing is screwing with the refugees. They aren’t trading chaos mechanisms. They’re legitimate traders. And how does any of this help us find the renegades?”
Terese made certain her voice didn’t waver. “If you want to sit this one out, Toornan, and leave the work to Jools and me, you can. And I’ll commend your clear, moral nature to Keeper Lijjen when we return. I’m sure he’ll find you work better suited to your delicate temperament.”
She’d said it with her back turned, watching Jools for her reaction. Terese’s deputy avoided looking at either Terese or Toornan, preferring to fidget with her pack straps. There was a sigh. When she turned back, Toornan had hefted his pack to his shoulders.
“Will that be all for now, Missionary?”
He returned her stare without blinking. “Yes, Head.”
“Good,” she said.
They stepped out of the rock’s shadow and into sunlight. Their destination was a simple brick trading hut up ahead, nestled in a shallow basin.
Terese’s upper lip beaded with moisture. The impossibly blue sky had actual clouds in it today, though not many. Her old, reliable padded boots were a godsend, for even if the Sumadan afternoons boiled her feet, at least they were blister-free.
For what it was worth, Terese agreed with Toornan.
Perhaps because the silence unnerved her, Jools began speaking. “There’s such variety in Polis Sumad,” she said. “Way more than back home. I mean, the Polis gets dustier the closer it gets to the RimWall. Back home it’s grass and hills everywhere outside the Center, but here there’re deserts at the Rim and rivers near the Center. There’s these drought-resistant crops out this way, but actual willow trees a few hours further in.”
Terese’s hands turned to fists.
Had they been ‘further in’, Terese silently lamented, they could have used the Polis’s tram system, and their mission would have taken three days at the most. Instead, they’d been allotted two weeks.
Jools let a pensive hum escape her lips. “And the Walls the Cenephan refugees live in, out this way. They’ve got so much variety in their cluster patterns. You can actually tell which clusters were raised first, as experiments, with help from Sumadan builders, and which were made by the Cenephans by themselves. The oldest-looking buildings always have those entryway arches with points at their apexes. Can you believe the Cenephans even put chimneys in some of those oldest Walls? There isn’t enough tinder out here to burn every night! These Walls do well enough though. They’d keep out the most determined cadvers pretty easy.”
Terese stifled a groan. Jools’s meandering trains of thought were the worst part of their mission. Why couldn’t the infernal woman have just become an architect or city planner instead of a Seeker?
But Terese wouldn’t snap at her subordinates.
