3rd of Arrestre, Continued

Such an odd group phenomenon, celebrating the death of one's enemies. There is a tendency to lower one's guard by about half, and to believe the whole world must be on your side. After all, there was only the one enemy, and that enemy was outside, where enemies naturally are to be found.

The general dismissed me after the parade was over, giving me a kindly smile and insisting I go get some rest.

I bowed and mumbled the required "Yes, Your Grace. Thank you, Your Grace." Then I promptly disobeyed those orders the minute he left the headquarters narthex.

No one stopped me when I walked into the communication room.

No one was paying the slightest attention. They were too busy drinking toasts to their 'glorious rise,' alcohol turning their relief into silliness and loud laughter.

I slipped in like a shadow, made my way straight to the rack of dispatch bags by the door, and lifted one off its hook.

The only bags left at that time of day were for the Green Sector, so that was what I grabbed. Then I kept on walking down the aisle and into the listening room. I just needed a believable prop. I didn't dare try to remove the map from under my blouse. The protective waxed cover had gone warm and was stuck to my skin, making it next to impossible to wiggle it out from under my belt, and it would take too long to undo the togs on my blouse.

Besides all that, they checked the bag at the guardhouse. The map couldn't go in the bag.

I still needed something to go in the bag, though, so I sat down at my station and whipped out several report sheets, then got to work.

Five minutes later I surveyed my work with a critical eye. I had seen examples of records requests in the Stadhepheravalden's office often enough to know how to word them. Hopefully it would be good enough that the checkpoint guards wouldn't notice it was written on the wrong paper.

I put the documents in one of the dispatch tubes that were handily left in the bag for inter-sector communications. Then I pulled the pass cards from my stocking, scrawled the general's initials across the stamp, and filled out the destination and vehicle request sections in neat Paradazh script.

My hands were shaking as I gathered the dispatch bag, made sure my hat was on straight, and left the listening room for the last time.

~~~

Ayago was alone on duty in the vehicle requisition hut in the underground parking yard and was slouching against the counter on the hut's half-door. He had apparently pulled the short straw and was missing the festivities.

The sight of his familiar face sent a ripple of relief through me. I might have been able to convince another driver to take me up the mountain, but Ayago was the only one of them ever to talk to me like there was a human heart lurking beneath that grey uniform jacket.

He saw me coming and straightened, his eyes widening, his brows rising. "It is very late, Miss Anderfield. You should be in your quarters," he began in Low Altyran, only to frown when I patted the dispatch bag and held out the pass card.

"I'm on an important errand," I said. Calm. Confident... "I wasn't able to get to it with all the celebrating." It wasn't a lie, really, and the truth of it helped the words roll smoothly off my tongue.

I made myself remain still while he studied the pass card, his frown deepening. But it was clearly stamped and dated and filled out correctly, and if he had any doubts about the hour of the assignment, he didn't dare go against an order from the high general himself.

After a moment, he nodded and handed the pass card back, then stepped out of the hut, striding off toward his two-man horseless. "Need to go quick, Miss, or you will be out past curfew."

I released a pent-up breath and trotted after him, ducking into the passenger seat and hugging the dispatch bag to my middle, careful to keep the Green Sector emblem from showing while Ayago closed the door and went around to the other side.

He got in and released the flywheel, then guided the two-man forward out of the parking yard. When he reached the access lane that would take us around the parade ground colonnade and onto the main road, he cast a sideways glance my direction.

An odd tension was growing in the tiny cockpit. I bit my lip, then turned to him with a smile. "Your Low Speak has improved. Have you been practicing?"

He cleared his throat, then nodded. "A little." He paused and shifted in his seat. "I... ah... was wanting to know, what is a 'kenty goon?'"

I raised an eyebrow. "Kant'tu guin?" I guessed, grinning when he hummed an affirmative. "It means to be as small around as your little finger."

He frowned, then let out a heavy sigh, muttering "I thought as much" in High Altyran and shaking his head as he turned onto the road that would take us up the mountain to the Agricultural Sector.

The tension hadn't really broken, just changed slightly. Ayago wasn't looking at me suspiciously anymore, at least, and I couldn't think of anything else to say, so I sat back in my seat and tried to go through what little plan I had.

Get the map to the Illyrians.

And since my dispatch satchel only got me as far as the Agricultural Sector headquarters, I would have to start there, somehow.

That was as far as my plan went. Go to the Ag headquarters, get the map to the Illyrians.

In a dull, distant sort of way, I wondered if I should be worried that I wasn't trying to find a way out, but my brain had hit a wall. All that mattered was getting the map to the Illyrians. What happened after was a great, flat, featureless thing looming in my near future.

We began climbing up the switchback, passing through the pines that studded the mountain, their thick branches layering strips of false dusk over the road. It was strangely peaceful, out there beyond the metal fences and searchlights of the main headquarters compound. I peered out the luxglass window, tipping my head back to get a view of the sky above the treetops. The sun was tipping toward the horizon, turning the clouds a lovely shade of creamy peach.

It was a beautiful last sunset. That thought could have been maudlin and tragic, or morbid at least, but it lacked the force of loss and didn't leave behind anything but weary appreciation.

Ayago brought the horseless around the final curve, and then the checkpoint was ahead of us, two low, squat concrete guard houses facing each other across a double-gate. A pair of heavily armed guards were waiting for us to come to a full stop. The first gate rose and Ayago pulled forward far enough for it to swing down behind him, then stopped again, cranking his window panels open while glancing at me expectantly.

I had done this often enough to know what he needed, and handed him the pass card again, looking away as he handed it on to the guard glowering in at us through his window.

Just like every other time, the guard grunted and took the pass card back into his shack, where he would verify it against his book of pass stamps.

I looked back up at the sky and leaned my head on the luxglass, waiting quietly. In a few moments, I would find out if I was going to die before or after reaching the headquarters.

Footsteps approached the vehicle.

"You're good, but no funny business, now," the guard said. "You're running tight on curfew. You go straight up there and come straight back down."

Ayago shifted in his seat. "I'm aware sir, yes sir," he said, then released the brake, rolling forward under the second gate as it lifted.

My shoulders relaxed a fraction. I still had to figure out how to get into the headquarters building, and what, exactly I would do when I got in. And I had less than a minute before we reached the turn-off for the headquarters.

The Stadhepheravalden would have gone back to his personal quarters by now, his staff gone back to their barracks. The building would be mostly empty, save for the security detail that patrolled the ground between the buildings at night.

"You can let me out here and go on into the parking yard," I said, keeping my tone casual when Ayago began slowing in front of the front entrance. "That way you can turn around while I'm inside," I added, giving him a little smile.

He nodded a little, apparently agreeing, and brought the horseless to a halt, toggling my door open for me.

"Thank you," I said, hopping out into the drive and giving him a little parting bow, watching him motor on around the corner as I went on up the front steps to the door, my fingers already sliding the comb from the cuff of my sleeve. As soon as he was out of sight, I glanced around to make sure the guards weren't coming, bent, and began picking the door lock.

It gave way easily enough, and then I was inside.

I stopped on the orange carpet runner, the next step of my "plan" taking shape.

I couldn't actually drop the map into the pipe myself. That would take too long and be too obvious. I would have to be the distraction from the place I left the map. And I would have to leave the map where only Rushidi or her crew would find it.

An idea snapped into place, and I didn't have time to come up with something else. I ran to Sanjar's desk, grabbed his pen from its little pot of ink, flipped to the third page down on the tablet of papers above his blotter — the ones he used to take down his neatly detailed notes from the Stadhepheravalden — and jotted a single line of instructions. It was dangerous leaving it there like that, but if anyone didn't want his connection to Rushidi made public, it was Sanjar, and hopefully he would find it sometime tomorrow.

Then, instead of going back out the front, I raced down the hall to the kitchenette, and then on through the little mudroom where I used to get changed into my staff uniform. I paused for an instant at the back door, unlocking it carefully from the inside and cracking it open just far enough to check the narrow alley behind the headquarters building. No guard.

Then, with a quick breath, I opened the door, closed it gently behind me, and darted across the alley to the supply shed, aiming for the rickety old swinging door. The privy house stood beyond the supply shed. All I had to do was get through the shed to the other side, duck through the crack in the wall slats, and I would be in the privy. I had used that exact route three other times, delivering information to the Illyrian contact before washing up and meeting Karrali in her medical transport gopher.

This time things would go backwards, with no guarantee any of the rest of it would actually happen. It was a huge gamble, with Rushidi's life, with Sanjar's... there were any number of things that could go wrong, but I couldn't think about them. I could only do this one last thing.

I wound my way between stacks of dusty tent tarpaulins, towers of chairs, crates of orange and black streamers, pallets of paint drums. The windows were shuttered, which lowered the risk of being spotted by a guard but raised the risk of running into something in the heavy gloom. I had to move more slowly than I wanted, and still nearly tripped over a pile of plant pots.

But I made it to the other end of the shed without raising any alarms, and then I was in the privy, rushing for the first stall on the right, frantically undoing the front of my blouse as I went. The map was so stuck it took a layer of skin with it in places when I began yanking it off, but there was no time to be gentle, so yank I did, hissing in a breath through my teeth when it came off like a gigantic tacky plaster.

The privy hole reeked of fresh and rotting human waste, but that would do more to protect the map than anything else. I flipped open the satchel and fumbled out the document tube I had stashed in it. Pulled the cap off. Shoved the map inside, recapped it. Then I reached down into the privy hole, careful not to get any muck on my sleeve as I bent my arm, searching for the metal box hanging from the underside of the floor. There. I pushed the document tube up over the lip of the box, tested it to make sure it wasn't going to fall out, then brought my arm back out and clambered to my feet again.

Quick to the water pump. I scrubbed the grimy, stinky evidence of the privy hut off my fingers, tucked my blouse back in, the whole time straining to hear the tramp of boots approaching the privy hut.

Any moment now. It would happen any moment. But not yet. Not quite yet...

I ducked back through the ruined slats in the wall, and began shuffling through the supply shed again, my heart beginning to pound in my ears like a freighter engine. Now that I had actually managed to hide the map, now I was starting to shake. Now the fear was setting in. Not fear of my own fate, but fear that if I didn't get far enough away fast enough, whatever happened to me would be for nothing. Desperation clawed at me, making me clumsy as I scrambled through Coventry celebration paraphernalia. I hardly stopped to check the alley before I pushed through the half door and bolted across to the back of the headquarters building.

Up the steps, through the door. Somehow, I remembered to lock the thing before wheeling around and pelting down the hallway. I didn't even pause before I barreled through the front door.

Ayago and the horseless were coming around the corner, but I didn't stop. I turned, running flat out, aiming for the hay field beyond the drive.

"Miss?" Ayago called after me, his voice quavering and uncertain. "Miss, what are you —"

And then the klaxon started up, swooping from a low drone to a long, high, piercing note that hung in the air like a death knell.

Ayago sounded shaken, now, his shout ragged, "Stop! Wait, Miss Anderfield, don't —"

I kept my gaze fixed on the tree line in the distance. Cool evening shadows stretched beneath the towering vaults of their branches.

My blood rushed like hot lead through my veins, my arms and legs burning, growing heavy, then going numb when I drove my body on anyway. My serviceable boots weren't made for running through knee-high grass, and my right ankle rolled, sending me stumbling, slowing me down.

A chorus of excited canine barking broke out behind me. The clanking, creaking thunder of a bitrack coming up the drive.

Tears crept unbidden down my cheeks. Just a little farther kid... Get up. Try again.

Maybe he would be there, beneath those distant pines. It was a weird, disjointed, whimsically romantic thought, Arramy standing there in a mote of golden light, waiting...

I whimpered and pushed myself forward again, ignoring the ache in my shin. 

A wet, guttural snarl sounded off to my right, broken into rhythmic beats by the impact of the animal's paws on the ground as it surged toward me.

A broad swath of field suddenly lit up bright white, centering on me, everything beyond disappearing as if a black veil had dropped at the edges of the searchlight beaming down from an airship hovering overhead. Soldiers were there, in that darkness, moving in, their hounds slavering and snapping, pulling hard on their leads, eager to tear into me.

I made out Kreighvalden Ygraine's round eyes gleaming in the dusk, her lips parted in a feral smile as she approached in the wake of the patrolmen. Ayago was there, too, his horror plain even from several dozen meters away.

I stopped moving when I saw him, my eyes finding his. This. This is what your people do, I wanted to tell him, but there wasn't enough air to speak and breathe at the same time. This was as far as I was going to get. Dazed, lungs heaving, I collapsed to my knees.

Any moment now. Any moment now...

A series of metallic clicking: several rifles chambering a round...

I tipped my head back and closed my eyes, letting the fierce light bathe my face.

Then, "Hold your dogs, Kreigvalden. Draw down and bring her in. The High General wants her alive," Stadhepheravalden Offkelder said, his voice amplified over a sonulator coil.

My eyes snapped open, fresh terror slamming into me with all the force of a hurricane.