Page 33

Blue-on-blue transgressions are statistically the result of poor comms more often than poor targeting. Fratricide accounted for 11% of losses in the Desert Stork campaign.

Friendly Fire , by Major Tom Thomas

Evar

Evar had been surprised by the suddenness with which the need to urinate came over him. He’d been somewhat alarmed when realising that for the first time in his life there was no library corner to visit, not even a private spot in the loneliness of the Dust. The city people must obviously have a solution to the problem, but it wasn’t one he remembered reading about in any of the vast number of books he’d consumed. If the fog was still thick enough outside, then maybe…

His alarm grew dramatically when he pushed his chair back and stood from the table. “I’ve been poisoned!” The world spun around him.

“Relax.” Starval’s hand clamped around Evar’s wrist as he staggered back. “You’re just drunk.”

“Oh.” Evar steadied himself against the wall.

“I mean, technically it is a form of poisoning.”

“But it won’t make me sick?”

“I wouldn’t go that far, brother…”

Evar gazed out across the crowded tavern. “Where do I…”

“There’ll be somewhere out the back. Little huts, or just a trench. You’ll know,” Starval said.

Evar nodded, gathered himself, and started to forge a path.

“Don’t fall in!” Starval called after him.

Evar didn’t dignify that with an answer. He resolved instead to drink no more ale. It was foul stuff. Or at least the first tankard had tasted pretty awful. The second had been all right. By the time he found the back door he decided that perhaps a third tankard would decide the matter.

Outside, the mists had thinned a little, but the sun was setting, dying a crimson death in a valley to the west, and overall the visibility had hardly improved. Someone stumbled out of the gloom, headed for the door Evar had just come out of.

“Excuse me…”

But the human male just grunted into his beard and bundled past.

“…where do I…”

Evar followed the building’s wall rather than forge out into the mist blind. Starval had mentioned the possibility of a trench, and with his balance knocked askew by the local poison of choice, Evar could see himself ending up in said trench, unless he exercised caution.

He came to a corner and continued his slow advance. The wall now had a top, low enough for Evar to stretch and grab, but studded with broken glass. He reached a door, paint peeling from greying wood as if diseased, pushed, and found it locked. “Privy.” He finally remembered one of the names for the places where nature’s call was answered. Was this the privy?

Evar knocked on the door. He could hear something on the other side, a kind of clattering, clomping noise, some heavy snorting. Not the sort of sounds he would have imagined issuing from a privy if he’d ever given the matter any thought. He looked up at the wall. Its poorly set blocks made it something Starval could scale in the blink of an eye, but Evar had never had the luxury of the Mechanism to teach him climbing skills. He spotted a missing block and dug his toes into the gap. Even with the stones wet and two ales in his belly he should be able to get far enough up the wall to check what was on the other side.

“Did you find it?” Starval raised a refilled tankard at Evar as he wove his way back through the crowded room to the table.

“I did.” Evar wrinkled his nose and slid in beside his brother. “You go straight out across the yard, and there are four huts. Don’t follow the wall. There’s a door but it’s locked. Don’t climb up—”

“Climb?” Starval took the ale back. “I think you’ve had enough, Evar.”

Evar lowered his voice to a whisper. “There’s something strange going on here…”

“I know,” Starval said.

“You know?”

“Secrets are my business. And that Oldo has at least one big one. You didn’t notice how he looked at us? He thinks we’re here for him. Spies. I’d put money on it. That, brother, is a guilty man. But it’s hardly our concern.”

“Does beer sneeze?” Evar hissed, scanning the tavern to see if anyone was trying to listen in.

“Only when you’ve had way way too much of it.”

“Well, there’s an unloading area round the back, separate, behind a wall. And I saw them unloading barrels…”

“That is pretty suspicious,” Starval mocked.

“And one of them sneezed.”

“Don’t care,” Starval said. “He can be making his own special brew out of humans, I don’t give two hoots. We’re here for the book. It’s a maybe place anyway. Mayland said so. This whole world is a what-if.”

“You think this place is a maybe and we’re not? We’re the one true world and those alternatives we climbed through are ‘pretend’? I’m not even sure anymore if all the people you killed in the Mechanism were pretend. But I am pretty damn sure that we’re just another maybe. So, don’t go killing people here because they don’t matter. Everyone matters. Everywhere.”

“Or nobody does.”

“Right.” Evar faltered, unsure how his brother meant that last part. “King Oldo?”

“What?”

“King Oldo. That’s what he said to call him, unless we’re friends. Then Oldo’s fine. I wonder what that’s about.”

“I’ll find out using my assassin skills.” Starval drained his tankard and wiped his whiskers. “Hey you, Gothon.”

The old canith turned with the exaggerated caution of the very drunk.

“Why do people call him King Oldo?”

“Says he’s a Hosten. Cousin of a cousin of a cousin probably.” Gothon had started to slur his words. “Secret police would’ve strung him up long ago if it was any sort of decent claim.”

Starval turned to Evar. “There you have it.” He pushed Evar’s beer at him. “Drink up, time to go.”

“Go?” Evar eyed the suds slopping in the wooden tankard. “Where?”

“We’ll find that out on the way. I’m sure this city has more to offer than the Stained Page’s taproom. I’ll grant you the ale’s decent, the landlord mysterious, the food good, and it has a better class of drunk than most places. Still, I don’t plan to wait here until our siblings find us, or until they do the job we came to do and head off, leaving our sorry arses here.”

Evar frowned at his drink and set it down. “Let’s go then. I’ve got a book and a girl to find.”

Starval missed a quarter-beat then set off for the door.

The sun had set and been replaced with streetlights. The fog had thinned considerably but Evar’s view of the city remained limited. Starval led off as if he knew where he was heading.

“Where are we going?”

Evar had kept his mouth closed while Starval had taken one turn after another, each narrower and darker than the next, as if he were trying to worm into the city’s underbelly by force of instinct. He emerged now into a muddy square, narrower across than the height of the shabby buildings that hemmed it in to create a shaft showing a black sky and Attamast’s disk, the moon a curious shade of purple in a sky laced with ribbons of cloud.

Evar shivered. It felt as if the surrounding tenements had turned their backs on the square, ashamed of it. The occasional shuttered windows released only whispers of light, and the place reeked worse than the privy huts behind Oldo’s tavern.

Three lines of ragged washing hung out of reach, crisscrossing the space above them, the garments grey and listless. There didn’t seem to be any exits.

“Where are we going?” Evar repeated his question.

By way of answer Starval posed a question. “Where did we come from?”

Evar spread his hands, not prepared to enter into one of Starval’s games.

“A prison,” Starval said. “A place we all expected to grow old and die in, within a mile of the spot we were born.”

“I guess…”

“A place we’d all found our own escape from long before Mayland disappeared. And then you discovered that the pool led somewhere…and changed everything.” Starval began to pace as he always did when agitated. “Clovis had lost herself in revenge fantasies years before that. And you’d fled into your own obsession: finding an exit. Forms of madness, that’s what Kerrol called them behind your backs.”

“To our faces too,” Evar grunted. “Or at least to mine.” Clovis might have punched him.

“Mayland hid himself in the past. And me…I signed up to a code, not a code of honour per se , but one that was rigid enough to hold me up, keep me standing when nothing else would. Kerrol said I’d detached myself from emotion and fabricated disposable replacements. Also a form of madness according to him. But he’s the most lost of all of us, so what does he know?”

“It’s an odd conversation to be having here, and now.” Evar looked around. “But I suppose this is a dead end, so maybe it’s appropriate after all.” He paused and looked at his brother, small and dark and deadly, as if seeing him for the first time in a long while. “Why aren’t you drunk too?”

“I was tipping mine on the floor when you weren’t looking.”

“But you let me drink…”

“Why didn’t you have the last one?” Starval asked. “Didn’t even so much as taste it.”

“I don’t know.” But Evar did. At some level, down where the thoughts that never surfaced swam, he had seen a truth and acted on it, all without properly acknowledging even the action, let alone its source. “Because something was wrong.”

“It’s good to see that my training wasn’t completely wasted on you. Who’s easier to kill than a child who hates you?”

“A warrior that trusts you.” Evar had given this answer many times before.

“And you thought that lesson was for the outside world that we would never reach, rather than for the four square miles that were our universe?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you drink your third ale then? Why do I never turn my back on any of you?”

“I don’t understand.” Evar’s hand understood, though, and it went hunting the hilt of his knife. The weapon had been taken.

“I escaped into a code, Evar.” Starval magicked a large gold coin into his hand. “Mayland was the only one who understood that. Well, maybe Kerrol too. But Mayland was the one who used it.”

“I don’t understand.” Evar repeated the words like a shield against the truth.

“I’ve been paid to kill you.”

“But you don’t have to.”

“I’ve built myself around a transactional world view. It made my existence bearable. And now it’s part of me.” The hand without the coin held a knife.

Evar strangled a laugh. Starval was very far from joking. “You poisoned the last ale.”

“I did.”

“You could have stabbed me in the back before we even got to the tavern.”

“I wanted you to have a nice time first. You’d never had a proper meal. You missed out on a lot of things.”

“You could have stabbed me in the back when we entered this square.” Evar found himself in a strangely bifurcated state of mind. He could both believe what was happening, and at the same time be shocked, horrified, and saddened by it. Starval had always worn a mask. He’d not even lied about it. But Evar’s brain had always chosen to forget that fact as swiftly as it could. Starval was a nihilist to his bones, the sunny smile painted on.

Starval dropped the coin to the muddy cobbles. “The money means nothing. It’s a challenge token. And this…this is like a true believer being martyred for the faith or offering up their firstborn to a demanding god. That piece of gold is a question. It’s saying ‘Do you really believe that nothing matters? Or are you going to give the world a stick to beat you with? Are you going to open your door to every deed you’ve done, every life you’ve taken, and let them march into your heart with their pale faces and their accusations?’ Mayland wants you gone, brother. And he’s paid me to do it.”

“You could have stabbed me in the back,” Evar repeated, and with a deep breath he turned away from the knife. “But you couldn’t because we’re brothers.”

The knife hurt going in, but as the blood began to flood around the steel, betrayal was the deeper pain.