Woken Furies

Sanctified solo assassins.

I’d been up against them a couple of times on Sharya. Psychotically stoked religious maniacs in Right Hand of God martyr sleeves, peeled from the main body of fighters, given a virtual glimpse of the paradise that awaited them beyond death and then sent to infiltrate the Protectorate power bases. Like the Sharyan resistance in general, they weren’t overly imaginative—which in the end proved their downfall when faced with the Envoys—but they weren’t any kind of pushover either. We’d all developed a healthy respect for their courage and combat endurance by the time we slaughtered the last of them.

The Knights of the New Revelation, by contrast, were an easy mark.

They had the enthusiasm but not the lineage. The faith rested on the standard religious pillars of mob incitement and misogyny to get its enforcement done, but so far it seemed there’d been either no time or no need for a warrior class to emerge. They were amateurs.

So far.

I started with the cheaper hotels on the Expanse-side waterfront. It seemed a safe bet that the priest had tracked me to a sighting at Dzurinda Tudjman Sklep before we left for Millsport. Then, when the trail went cold, he’d have just sat it out. Patience is a sterling virtue in assassins, you’ve got to know when to move but you’ve also got to be prepared to wait. Those who are paying you will understand this, or can be made to.

You wait and you cast about for clues. A daily trip down to Sunshine Fun Jetties would feature, a careful check of traffic, especially traffic out of the ordinary. Like matt, low-profile pirate skimmers amidst the bright and bloated tourist boats that habitually used the moorage. The only thing that didn’t fit the pro-killer profile was the open approach to the pilot and that I put down to faith-based arrogance.

Faint, pervasive reek of rotting belaweed, poorly-kept façades and grumpy staff. Narrow streets, sliced with angles of hot sunlight. Damp, debris strewn corners that only ever dried out in the hours around noon.

A desultory coming and going of tourists who already looked miserable and exhausted with their cut-rate attempts at fun in the sun. I wandered through it all, trying to let the Envoy sense do the work, trying to suppress my headache and the pounding hatred that surged for release underneath.

I found him well before evening.

It wasn’t a hard trace to make. Kossuth was still relatively unplagued by the New Revelation, and people noticed them the way you’d notice a Millsport accent in Watanabe’s. I asked the same simple questions in every place. Fake surfer speak, lifted in easily replayed chunks from the conversations around me over the last few weeks, got me inside the defences of enough low-paid workers to trace the priest’s appearances. A judicial seasoning of low-value credit chips and a certain amount of cold-eyed bullying did the rest. By the time the heat started to leach out of the afternoon, I was standing in the cramped lobby of a combined hostel and boat-and-board hire place called The Palace of Waves. Rather inappropriately, it was built out over the sluggish waters of the Expanse on ancient mirrorwood pilings, and the smell of the belaweed rotting beneath came up through the floor.

“Sure, he checked in about a week back,” the girl on reception volunteered as she worked stacking a pile of well-worn surfboards against a rack along one wall. “I was expecting all sorts of trouble, me being a female and dressed like this, y’know. But he didn’t seem to fix on it at all.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, got a real balance about him too, you know what I’m saying? I thought he might even be a rider.” She laughed, a carefree, teenage sound.

“Crazy, huh? But I guess even up there they’ve got to have surfers, right?”

“Surfers everywhere,” I agreed.

“So you want to talk to this guy? Leave a message?”

“Well.” I eyed the pigeonhole system behind the reception desk. “It’s actually some thing I’ve got to leave for him, if that’s okay. A surprise.”

That appealed to her. She gri

She left the boards and came round to the other side of the counter. I dug around in my pocket, found a spare chargepack for the Rapsodia and fished it out.

“There you go.”

She took the little black device curiously. “That’s it? You don’t want to scribble him a note to go with it or something?”

“No, it’s fine. He’ll understand. Just tell him I’ll be back tonight.”

“Okay, if that’s what you want to do.” A cheerful shrug, and she turned to the pigeonholes. I watched her slide the chargepack in amidst the dust on ledge 74.

“Actually,” I said with feigned abruptness. “Can I get a room?”

She turned back, surprised. “Well, uh, sure …”

“Just for tonight. Just makes more sense than getting a place somewhere else and then coming back, you know.”

“Sure, no problem.” She prodded a display screen to life on the counter, scrutinised it for a moment and then gave me the grin again. “If you like, you know, I could put you on the same landing as he is. Not next door, it’s taken, but a couple of doors down, that’s free.”

“That’s very kind,” I said. “Tell you what then, you just tell him I’m here, give him my room number, he can come and buzz me. In fact, you can give me the hardware back.”

Her brow creased with the flurry of changes. She picked up the Rapsodia chargepack doubtfully.

“So you don’t want me to give him this?”

“Not any more thanks.” I smiled at her. “I think I’d prefer to give it to him myself, directly. It’s more personal that way.”

Upstairs, the doors were old-style hinged. I broke into 74 using no more skill than I’d had as a sixteen-year-old street thug cracking cut-rate dive supplier warehouses.

The room beyond was cramped and basic. A capsule bathroom, a disposable mesh hammock to save on space and laundry, storage drawers moulded into the walls and a small plastic table and chair. A variable transparency window wired clumsily to the room’s climate control system the priest had left it dimmed. I cast about for somewhere to hide myself in the gloom and was driven into the capsule for lack of alternatives. Sting of recent antibac spray in my nose as I stepped in—the clean cycle must have run not long ago. I shrugged, breathed through my mouth and searched the cabinets for painkillers to flatten the rolling wave of my hangover. In one, I found a foil of basic heatstroke pills for tourists. I dry swallowed a couple and seated myself on the closed toilet unit to wait.

There’s something wrong here, the Envoy sense admonished me. Something doesn’t fit.

Maybe he’s not what you think.

Yeah, right—he’s a negotiator, come to talk you down. God’s changed his mind.

Religion’s just politics with higher stakes, Tak. You know that, you saw it in action on Sharya. No reason these people can’t do the same when it comes to the crunch.

These people are sheep. They’ll do whatever their holy men tell them.

Sarah seared across my mind. Momentarily, the world tilted around me with the depth of my fury. For the thousandth time I imagined the scene again, and there was a roaring in my ears like a distant crowd.

I drew the Tebbit knife and looked down at the dull, dark blade.

Slowly, with the sight, Envoy calm soaked back through me. I settled again in the small space of the capsule, letting it drench me to a chilled purpose. Fragments of Virginia Vidaura’s voice came with it.

Weapons are an extension. You are the killer and destroyer.

Kill quickly and be gone.

It won’t bring Sarah back. When you’ve done this, she’ll still be gone.

I frowned a little at that one. It’s not good when your formative icons start getting inconsistent on you. When you find out they’re just as human as you.