Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) (35 page)

‘Khinda was right,’ Hari said. ‘The assassin was in the free zone all along.’

‘The representative, so-called, of your late little friend’s clients,’ Rav said. ‘She wants to snatch you, youngblood. She wants your head. Let’s try to make sure
that doesn’t happen.’

He pulled a knife from a loop on his harness, handed it to Hari, asked him if he knew how to use it.

Hari squeezed the grip. The thin blade blurred with a vibration he felt all the way up his arm.

‘Could you cut or kill someone if you had to?’ Rav said.

‘I suppose I’m going to find out,’ Hari said.

‘If she doesn’t come after us again, she’ll be waiting at the gate,’ Rav said, and pointed towards the living wall of a giant banyan patch beyond the far end of the
platform. ‘Think you can follow me?’

Hari slid the knife into the cinchband of his suit liner. ‘I grew up in microgravity. Let’s go.’

They both kicked away from the garden platform and plunged into the labyrinth of branches and leaves, zigzagging past platforms, past rooms like giant insect cocoons woven from living leaves or
fibrous ropes. Hari felt a primal exhilaration. It was like the games of tig he’d played as a child – but now everything was at stake. He was thinking with his muscles, following a
heartbeat behind Rav, flying through air, through screens of big green leaves, swinging around branches. Rav smashed through a bower of flowers and Hari followed, bursting through an expanding
storm of petals and shooting out across a spherical volume of open air. A man stared out at him from the window of a hut lodged amongst sprays of leaves. Hari laughed and saluted him, saw Rav grab
a branch at the far end and kick sideways, grabbed the same branch, pivoted, followed.

He caught up with the Ardenist when they reached a wide cordway on the far side of the banyan patch. They swam along it, using their fingertips to skim over the warp of the fat orange threads.
Workshops along one side, a wall of leaves and branches on the other. They overtook people, passed people travelling in the opposite direction. After a couple of minutes, Hari realised that half a
dozen young women in leather corselets and knee-length trousers were keeping pace with them, some twenty or thirty metres behind.

Rav said that they were locals, not Saints. ‘It’s probably just a territorial thing. Ape posturing. But if they come at us, we’ll have to deal with them. Strike first, and
strike hard.’

‘Right.’

‘Use the knife, but don’t try anything fancy. If you try to stab something vital, you’ll probably miss. Slash. Quick, tight strokes. It doesn’t matter where you hit your
opponent. Even shallow cuts hurt, and they bleed a lot, too.’

‘Right.’

Hari’s mouth was parched. The djinn had retreated, leaving behind a bright pulse in his left eye.

‘We’re almost there,’ Rav said. ‘No turning back now.’

Curtains of leaves fell away, revealing a huge shaft or corridor with bubbles and platforms and buildings cantilevered out into it and a swarm of people moving through the air, swimming along
cableways and cordways, riding all kinds of machines, shouting, blowing whistles. Fanjet tractors towed strings of cargo sleds up and down the periphery of the shaft, sounding mournful horns.
Strings of red and blue lights sketched traffic lanes that everyone seemed to ignore.

All this stretching away for more than two kilometres, terminating in a black wall or shield pierced by tunnel entrances set in a hexagon, each ringed with red or green lights. The end cap of
the cylinder. The gates to the exterior.

Rav gripped the cord he’d been following, stopping so quickly that he swung through one hundred and eighty degrees. Hari stopped too, both of them hanging there, looking down at the gates.
Their followers clustered some ten metres away, beside a pod with a dim red-lit interior and a banner sign printed with Pinglish ideograms rippling inside an underwater fantasia of bright fish and
waving waterweed:
Lete’s Eats
.

Rav flung his arms wide, so that his wings spread from shoulders to ankles. Calling out, saying, ‘Like what you see?’

‘I see fresh meat,’ one said.

‘And I see children who don’t know what they’re getting into,’ Rav said. ‘Run along. Play somewhere else.’

‘This is our playground, fresh meat. We go where we please.’

‘The only thing we have in common,’ Rav said, and kicked away from the branch.

Hari followed. They kept inside the banyans as they moved towards the gates, making their way through curtains and fans of leaves, skimming around clusters of pods. Near the end of the long
tangle, Rav snatched at a branch and waited for Hari to catch up with him.

‘If I was trying to snare us, I’d set an ambush at the only way in or out of this place,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to go under cover. We’ll have to sneak
out.’

‘How are we going to do that?’

Rav pointed to a short train of cargo sleds puttering past. ‘By hitching a ride. Ready?’

Before Hari could answer, Rav kicked off and flew straight at the train. Hari kicked off too, shooting out into open air, smacking into a transparent bladder swollen with water, snatching at the
straps that lashed it to a sled as he rebounded. Rav grinned at him, pointed. The gang of women arrowing out of the banyans, landing one after the other at the far end of the train’s string
of sleds, moving towards them.

Rav drew his pistol. Hari pulled out his knife, tingling with nervous anticipation.

The leader of the gang laughed and said, ‘Is that all you’ve got?’

She hung from the flank of the neighbouring sled by a hand and a foot. Her toes were as long as fingers, terminating in flat pads. Her hair was swept back in stiff wings on either side of her
lean and eager face. Her eyes were white stones with tiny black dots at their centres. She raised her free arm and flung it forward and something snaked towards Hari – a whip divided into a
hundred threads at its end, each tip armed with a vicious hook. Hari flattened himself against the taut bladder, felt the whip snap above his head, slashed at it with his knife, and lost his
balance and tumbled into empty air. As he turned, he saw two women coming towards him from different angles. Then Rav struck him and held him, and they flew away from the train, banyans and gates
and a ladder of buildings turning over and around.

Rav’s wings beat around Hari. Their tumbling trajectory stabilised. The women were diving towards them, using little squirt bottles to steer themselves. Rav told Hari to catch hold of his
harness, and pulled out his pistol and took aim. There was a blink of blue light and one of the women flared into a shrieking fireball that slewed sideways and struck a stack of platforms.

The others sheered away in every direction. Hari clung to Rav’s waist as the Ardenist beat towards the gates. All around, people and vehicles were swerving around burning debris that
sprayed across the shaft. Two trains crossed and collided, spilling wobbling blobs of water and expanding clouds of plastic pellets. Hari and Rav dropped through the debris. A hard rain of pellets
stung Hari’s face and hands. As they came out of the far side, a scooter sliced past, Ang Ap Zhang leaning out, slashing at Rav with a long knife, gone. Rav gasped and jerked, and his wings
folded as he and Hari arrowed towards a building jutting into the gulf of air and crashed through a wall, paper stretched across wooden framing, into a small room where a single sleeping cocoon was
strung on a tether.

Rav was bleeding badly, blood pumping from his thigh, tumbling away in scarlet droplets. ‘The knife,’ he said. His voice was tight with pain.

Hari handed it over at once. Rav squeezed the handle and the blade vibrated and began to whine and shone a dull red that brightened to yellow, white. The Ardenist set his teeth in a jagged grin
and plunged the knife into the wound.

Hari gagged on the stink of seared meat.

When Rav pulled the blade free the bleeding was much reduced. Hari took the knife from him and cut of a strip of material from the ankle of his suit liner, twisted it into a rope and wrapped it
around Rav’s thigh, and caught a floating splinter of wood and used it to tighten the improvised tourniquet until blood stopped flowing.

‘We can’t stay here,’ Rav said. ‘If the assassin doesn’t find us, that little gang of bad girls will.’

‘Can you move?’

‘I can still fly. The assassin is fast, but I’ll take her if it comes to it. You understand that the only way out is through the gates.’

‘We’ll do it together.’

Layers of smoke obscured the gulf of the shaft. People were fighting a small fire in the banyan wall on the far side, whacking at flames with blankets, spraying foam. The building that had been
struck by the body of the burning woman was a charred shell wrapped in a pearl of smoke. There was no sign of the rest of the gang, and the shaft was mostly clear of traffic.

Rav went first, pushing away with his good leg, spinning out and down towards the gates. Hari followed, a fast exhilarating swoop. They fell past windows and platforms, past some kind of
manufactory where elephantine machines shuddered and pulsed. They punched through a string of glowing signs, and that was when the gang of women ambushed them.

They shot out from a tier of platforms, impossible to avoid. A whip snapped around Hari’s leg as one of the women flew past; as they spun about a common axis Hari grabbed the whip and
hauled close and slashed at the woman and felt the knife catch on something. He kicked free, flying towards the wall of the shaft as the woman he’d wounded tumbled outwards. A knot of women
was writhing around Rav. Hari caught a branch and swung and got his feet under him, saw one of the women lock her arm around the Ardenist’s throat, saw two more hammering at his chest with
the spiked handles of their whips. Saw a scooter sidle in, saw the women push away from Rav as Ang Ap Zhang stood up in her saddle and delivered the killing stroke.

Rav’s body tumbled in a mist of blood. The women were swarming after his severed head. And Ang Ap Zhang was heading towards Hari, standing astride her scooter, flourishing a whip. Her
unbound black hair flew behind her like a banner; her long knife was sheathed at the waist of her white shirt.

Hari barely had time to draw his knife before she was on him. Leaping from the scooter as it went past, knocking him backwards through a tangle of branches. He struck out in panic, and the
assassin hit his wrist with two stiff fingers and he dropped the knife. She spun him, pushed him away, lashed out with her whip. It spiralled around him, binding his arms to his sides, gripping
with hundreds of tiny teeth.

Ang Ap Zhang pulled him close. There was nothing human behind her gaze. A spray of blood glistened on her pale face. Rav’s blood.

‘I should kill you now, for what you did to my sisters,’ she said. ‘But you are wanted alive, and I am merely the arm and the hand.’

She towed him to the edge of the maze of leaves and branches, where her scooter was waiting. The pressure was back inside Hari’s head. Light pulsed in his left eye, obscuring pop-up
warnings from his bios. He felt as huge and heavy as a water bladder.

Ang Ap Zhang paused at the edge of the banyans. Down the shaft, something inflated around the string of glowing signs. A giant figure jigsawed from shards of light, from compressed signage and
images, its misshapen head turning, jagged eyes fixing on the assassin, an arm stretching out towards her, stretching a hundred metres. She flinched as talons tipped with flame whipped past, and
the giant somehow grabbed hold of a fixed spot in the air and hauled itself towards her.

Hari drifted sideways as the burning giant yawned and breathed out a ball of flame that engulfed the assassin. She tumbled free, and a black ball thumped against her white shirt and writhed and
burst, spurting thousands of threads that tangled around her arms and legs, swiftly wove a cocoon that held her in a close embrace.

The giant began to shrink and fade. Two broomstick scooters dropped through its dimming image. Khinda Wole steered one, Riyya behind her, clinging to her waist; two men rode the second.

Khinda Wole halted neatly beside Ang Ap Zhang’s cocooned figure. She pulled the threads from the assassin’s face and met her fierce stare without flinching, then looked at Hari.
‘This is the woman who killed Rember?’

‘I think so. Yes. She killed Rav. Her and those women. They must have been working for her . . .’

‘I saw it,’ Khinda said. ‘I wish I could say that I was sorry.’

‘He knocked us out,’ Riyya said. ‘He came out of the jetty and knocked us all out.’

Hari was about to ask her exactly what Rav had done when Ang Ap Zhang started to shake and quiver inside the rigid weave of the cocoon.

‘Don’t struggle,’ Khinda told her. ‘The threads will keep tightening. All the way down to the bone if you keep it up.’

‘Something’s wrong,’ one of the men said.

There was white foam on Ang Ap Zhang’s lips. Her eyes had rolled up. The two men hauled her close to their broomstick and started to work on her, but she was already dead.

They left the free zone and returned to the docks without incident. Khinda Wole was in a grim mood. Ang Ap Zhang’s suicide had cheated her of her revenge, and she was
still angry about being tricked by Rav.

Riyya told Hari that Rav had emerged from the main lock of Mr Mussa’s ship. ‘He flew out of the jetty with a pistol in his hand. Shot us with tranquilliser darts. Me and Khinda and
her friends. I didn’t know what had happened until I woke up, he moved so quickly. Khinda’s friends in the free zone spotted both of you. When we caught up I tried to use the weather
against him, but the machinery was too different.’

‘You saved me, anyway,’ Hari said.

They were swimming down a broad corridor, heading towards Khinda Wole’s workshop. Hari, Riyya and Khinda Wole, Khinda’s friends. Skimming along cordways greasy with the touch of
thousands of hands, past walls livid with half-life signs and slogans deposited by rival crews and cults and engaged in a slow and patient Darwinian war for
lebensraum
that reminded Hari
of the vacuum-organism pavements on Themba. And he had the feeling he’d always had under the empty black sky of the asteroid: the tingling sense of being watched, of being stalked by some
invisible, implacable and all-knowing enemy. It had never entirely left him, but it was stronger than ever now. He was preternaturally alert, starting every time someone came into view. But they
all seemed harmless, the few passers-by, men and women dressed in work clothes and suit liners.