Tuesday, December 17, the year 1090 on Revan’s Calendar
Gray Watch, Capital of the Nor Sator League
Nymir and Phaeduin were dead, everyone’s cover had been blown. Amo had scraped their way out of the mess intact and strong somehow. Edner was alive and doing his best, but he was a terrified wreck who would give in to shivering fits if they didn’t keep him busy. Most of the others were missing, including poor Myrel. And Indirk, for as much as she’d been through in her life, felt hints of something dark in deep parts of her heart that she’d left untouched for a long time.
“If you want me to trust you again,” said a gray man to her, “You need to be honest with me. You need to tell me everything.”
Indirk looked down at her hands, noticing their wrinkles and veins, feeling old. She muttered, “My parents were both dead by the time they were my age.”
The man huffed a firm, “Indirk.”
And she looked up at him, at that impatient glare that hurt. Indirk hadn’t expected such a horrible, guilty feeling. She’d been a spy, yes, a liar with a false identity, but how false was it really? This man had known her as someone invented for years, but that didn’t make the person unreal. It didn’t make the relationship fake. These walls – his home, in the Angolhills near the Admiralty offices where Indirk had been undercover as a clerk before she was found out – were warmly-polished wood that had once welcomed her. She wanted that feeling back.
With a low voice, Indirk said, “I’m from the Laines. My parents were rangers on the border of the deepwood, killed by Cradsoun infantry. My foster mom ended up being an artillery captain in Pharaul, so I grew up there and learned to shoot. And as soon as I was old enough-“
“Stop.” The man groaned and leaned back in his chair, putting his hands to his face. “I really didn’t want it to be true.”
“You asked.” Indirk looked from him to the pistol on the table between them. She’d dropped it at the Admiralty office when she’d fled the Watch guards who’d come after her. She wondered why he’d picked it up. People in Gray Watch didn’t use guns. They stuck to magic and the iron-bolted crossbows that could penetrate spells.
“Fine.” The man sat up and looked Indirk in the eyes. “Go on. Go on, then. Talk.”
* * *
Three months earlier
Tuesday, September 17
Pharaul, Capital of the Rhyqir Valley Alliance
“Did you miss it?” Amo said to the endless rumble of the avalanche as it poured eternally just beyond the cliffside of Pharaul, a precipice that the snow and ice had carved for itself over eons.
“I’m going back,” Indirk said. “I’m going to leave again.”
“I know. But did you miss it?”
“Yeah.” Indirk pulled hard right on the driving column of the autocarriage and it swerved, spun, and stopped with its back end facing the avalanche. While Amo held fast to their seat, Indirk effortlessly rolled over the back of hers, vaulted over the pair of anthrals sitting in the rear seats, and bounced out of the vehicle. Some autocarriages had roofs and heaters, but not this one. As Amo fearfully pulled on the handbrake, Indirk was already standing tall on the iron dome of the carriage’s back engine, one hand to its mooring brace for balance as she leaned toward the avalanche and shouted, “And I’ll never see you again, you beautiful blizzard!”
The avalanche roared on, massive beyond reckoning, throwing up clouds of snow taller than Pharaul’s parapets and so unreasonably wide that there could be an entire city buried beneath it and no one would ever know. At its passive thunder, Indirk cackled. It was an animal sound. Her sharp, carnivate teeth showed, like she’d happened upon some injured prey. Indirk was dressed unseasonably, the incredible wind of the avalanche throwing her dress up around her, but she didn’t seem to care about the snow brushing over her thighs and arms, the ice blasting over her graying chestnut hair and frosting her brows.
Amo didn’t tell her to be careful. Amo was laughing, too, getting out of their straps and stepping over the carriage rail. “The hell are we doing out here? You didn’t just come to say goodbye to the cliff, right?”
On the long, narrow plateau where Pharaul was built, the city mostly came right up to the edge of the cliff. Many of the city walls were half inside the avalanche, reinforced now by a thick coating of ice, but in this place the wall had fallen away and the streets ran to nothing. Centuries ago, there had been a warehouse here, gone when a chunk of the plateau had calved into the avalanche and taken both warehouse and wall with it. Nothing had been built here since, leaving an empty, half-absent square. The electric lights and steaming vents of the city were well back from here, almost lost from sight in the blizzard.
“Get out,” Indirk demanded, stomping on the engine hood and gesturing to the two in the carriage’s rear seat. “Out, out!”
“Okay, okay. Come on.” Mirev pulled himself over the rail and reached back in to help Halin out. Halin picked up on Idirk’s playful energy, as she always did, and tossed herself onto Mirev’s shoulder. He almost fell trying to catch her, complaining as she laughed. Mirev, unlike the rest of them, was not very fun when he was drunk. He complained a lot.
Amo leaned into the carriage to dig around beneath their seat. “Guess this is a good place to hang out if we don’t want to get caught.”
“We are spies!” Indirk proclaimed as she walked across the seatbacks, leaving boot smudges on the leather cushions. “We don’t get caught!”
Halin, still on Mirev’s shoulder, gasped, “You’re spies?”
“We’ll get caught if you go yelling about it.” Amo pulled a bottle from beneath the seat. “You two forget you heard that, alright? We’re just scouts, is all.”
“Scouts don’t get autocarriages as a bonus for shipping out,” Indirk said. “I’m a spy. Anyway, let me show you something. Give me a minute. Just a minute.” She crouched between the two front seats and poked at a machine beside the steering column.
“They’re spies,” Halin said. “Mirev, careful or they’ll catch us.”
“I regret catching you,” Mirev countered.
“Catch this.” Amo threw the bottle at him. Mirev did not catch it. It fell in the snow beside him, cushioned enough that it didn’t break. Halin kicked off Mirev’s shoulder to go after it.
“Look, look.” Indirk squinted in drunken concentration as she turned a knob on the machine she was working on. After a few moments, electric lights flicked on and the machine projected music in a low, grumbling voice. It took a few moments for the high-pitched notes to join in and create the lively rhythm of its magic.
Halin sat in the snow, with her feet in front of her, coat so thick she looked like some kind of angular gray worm with a bottle in her little hands. Mirev stood cross-armed and red-faced over her, all fur and thick wool wrapping him but for his face. Amo leaned against the door, sleekly garbed in oiled black leather that Sgathaich had conjured for them in defiance of nature and poverty. And then there was Indirk, who had no coat, no parents, no lover alongside her, dancing in the snow on top of the autocarriage as the magic took hold.
The machine’s song conjured an aurora in the air around the carriage, light in blue and pink and magenta, curls of snowy white and shadowy black spinning around Indirk as she moved. The magic seemed to reach toward Indirk as she swung her arms around, spun and kicked to match the energy of the tune. She danced with her eyes closed for awhile, then winked one open to notice everyone watching her and yelled, “You’re supposed to dance with the magic, dummies. Don’t just stare at me! Move, move!”
Amo, who had forgotten for a moment that they existed as something other than eyes for watching Indirk, blinked hard and stammered, “I don’t know if I’m sober enough.”
Indirk paused to reach down and grab Amo like a cat by the collar, pulling them off their feet and onto the autocarriage with the carnivate strength she always forgot not everyone had. Amo struggled for footing, but Indirk had them by sleeve and collar, swinging them around one way and then another. The magic didn’t care about the difference, wrapping them both up in light and dark while Amo shouted, “Okay, stop! Give me a second!” and Halin cheered loudly.
The sunlight behind the blizzard darkened with time, the magic light became less intense as they grew tired and their movements slowed, and the bottle passed between hands a few times before it got back to Halin’s little hands and was empty. Mirev had tossed himself into a snow bank and lay with his limbs stretched, sobering. Amo leaned against the autocarriage and watched as Indirk still tried to dance around, so drunk and tired that she was just stumbling in a circle around the carriage. She was panting with effort, steam curling from the sweat on her shoulders and brow, but she was laughing.
Then she stopped, took a breath, and said, “Are we done?” When nobody answered, she said, “Yeah, we’re done. Get away from the carriage.”
Indirk pushed Amo onto the ground beside Halin. Then she released the brake on the carriage, tossed its engine in reverse, and watched as it slowly accelerated itself off the cliff. It wasn’t an impressive fall. They couldn’t watch it plumet. It just backed up, went a little crooked, slid with grinding groan off the stone and vanished into the gray. They all stared and waited, quiet, hoping to hear the sound of its impact, but the roar of the avalanche consumed it. The carriage was just gone, its music and its lights and its metal and all.
After a few minutes of staring at the cliff in silence, Amo said, “The fuck was the point of that? Indirk, that was your carriage.”
“Nah.” Indirk shrugged. “I stole it from a warehouse on the other side of town.”
“You fucking what?”
“Spy or not, they don’t give nice toys to orphans. You know that.” She turned back and smiled brightly, ignoring the discomfort on the faces of her friends. “Oh, come on, Amo. We’re leaving tomorrow anyway, and we’re spies! We don’t get caught.” Then she took an iron-wrought pistol from her bag and fired a few rounds into the avalanche for no reason. At the sound of gunshots, there were shouts from the direction of the city, so they split up and fled before anyone came to investigate.
