Under the Rushes Read online

  They shared this too, without even a word.

  Dorjan vaulted to the back of the battered cricket and made sure his port was securely attached. It was difficult to get in—the port had been bent with the fall—but he wiggled in and offered Areau his hand.

  “I’ll vault the children out,” he called as Areau swung his leg up over the cricket. “You get the officers near the gate to help you with the others.”

  “Deal!” Areau’s arms tightened around Dorjan’s middle, and for a moment Dorjan was reminded of the helpless, useless torch he’d carried for his best friend since he’d first kissed a boy and decided they were more fun than girls. Areau had undergone no such revelation, and Dorjan closed his eyes and hoped it wasn’t the guilt, Areau’s ever-present fear that Dorjan’s disappointment would sever their two hearts that so often beat together.

  The cricket bounded up into the aether and landed solidly square in the middle of the courtyard.

  Oh God. They were terrified. Without knowing what he was searching for, Dorjan found three girls, their hair as black as pitch and night sky, and thought of the boy, the scrappy, arrogant kid on the side of the road. He lifted up his visor as Areau scrambled down off the cricket, and called out to them.

  “There’s a magnesium fire on its way! Give me the children—I’ll lift them out. Areau will try to get the adults out through the gate. We’re sorry—we thought this place was empty. Please… please let us help you.”

  The mother had the same black hair and midnight eyes in the pale face, and the father was whippet thin and brown haired, so his blue eyes were surprising. They came up together with their daughters and about half a score of other children under twelve gathered before them.

  “Please,” the mother whispered. “Please—can you?”

  Dorjan nodded. Areau had slid off and was herding the adults under the ramparts, where the first wave of infantry had been stationed. Dorjan could hear his voice, commanding, strong, thundering over the objections of the lokogos there, but that was not his job. He had to trust in Areau as Areau had trusted in him from the moment they’d first enrolled in the academy.

  “We have a son!” the father protested as the mother shoved her girls up behind Dorjan. Dorjan pulled at leather harnesses attached to the exoskeleton of the cricket. The harnesses were hidden under the top plate of armor but could be pulled out for passengers, and the mother and father used them to secure the girls.

  “Make the attachment logical!” he warned. “I need to let them off so I can come back for the rest of the children!”

  The father nodded, and he seemed an able man. “About our son—”

  “He’s the one who told us your keep was occupied,” Dorjan said. “When I left him, he was safe.” His mouth quirked up, because that could have been the only bright spot in what was surely career suicide even if he and Areau survived. “Angry, but safe.”

  The parents nodded, and Dorjan looked behind him. “Hold tight!” he ordered tersely, hoping the girls were secure. He wasn’t sure if it was the heat from the fire or his own fractured imagination, but he was sweating inside his armor, and the fire-illumined faces of the girls seemed flushed as well. “One, two, three!”—and with that, the cricket took its biggest leap yet.

  The girls didn’t scream. He checked twice in flight behind them, and they were wide-eyed and looking past the brutal wind at their surroundings. The steam armor had served his battalion well, and Dorjan saw his own men, led by the lokogos who had given him the cricket, racing down the road as if to help. He aimed for them and landed in front of his surprised lokogos before he turned to help the girls slide off the cricket in his hurry to get back.

  “What in the furry asscrack of Bieman….” Lokogos Dre stopped his swearing when he realized there were children on board, and Dorjan was so grimly determined to finish out his task he didn’t even smile.

  “The stratego tried to blow the place after I told him,” Dorjan snapped tersely. “I kept the mag-bomb from landing, but the whole bloody bogland is on fire. Where’s the boy?”

  Dre grimaced. “Wriggled out of my grasp as soon as you took off! Said he couldn’t trust you to do the job right.”

  Dorjan found he was growling, mostly because it was true. “These are his sisters. I’ll be back with more. This could end badly for us, you understand?”

  Lokogos Dre nodded. “I didn’t sign on to slaughter children,” he said. “You neither, even though you are one. You get them here; I’ll keep ’em safe. Their parents?”

  Dorjan looked toward the keep and shuddered. “Lokargo Areau—with munitions. He’s getting the parents out. Ready?”

  “Bimuit’s luck!” the lokogos wished, and Dorjan thumped his closed fist against his chest even as he bade the cricket to jump.

  His next visit to the keep, it wasn’t his imagination—the fire was moving quickly and it was moving mercilessly. He’d seen the tech battalions hosing down their own environs with flame retardant, but he wasn’t a fool. They were staying carefully beyond the keep. Alum Septra was going to let those people burn, and take credit for the kill.

  Not if Dorjan could help it.

  The second time at the keep, the parents must have been as frantic as Dorjan—they shoved even more children up on the cricket’s back—five this time, two of them hanging precariously over the sides. “You can hold on?” he asked, and he believed their frantic nods because he had to. Up, up, and away he bounded, giving thanks under his breath when the little ones proved good to their word. He stared at the keep and the closing flames, not even speaking to Lokogos Dre as the man unharnessed the frightened children. (They had held on, but this batch had screamed, and two of the girls, tiny and terrified, were screaming still when he lifted off again.)

  He landed in the courtyard, feeling his armor heat so badly his skin blistered beneath it, and saw that the children were drooping, semiconscious, in their parents’ arms.

  “Where’s Areau!” he called, wincing as one of the smallest screamed upon touching the heated metal of the stressed cricket. Without a word, the lady of the keep ripped off her nightdress and stood, fat and middle-aged and bare in the center of the courtyard, so she could swaddle the boy from the heat. Her husband was not far behind with his own sleep tunic.

  “Is that all?” Dorjan called, lifting his visor so they could talk.

  The adults nodded, and two people came from the shadows with lengths of wet muslin in buckets that were already beginning to steam. “Areau!” he called. “Areau! What’s your status!”

  He heard a hacking and Areau stumbled from the doorway. “We’re using a blow torch to get through the gate. They won’t help us open it, the fucking gits, but they’ve promised not to kill us if we get through!” Pained voices cheered beyond the ramparts, and Areau looked up and nodded. “Go—go, Dori! I’ll be there! I swear! We’ll face the Triari together, you and I, Bimuit’s luck!”

  Dorjan reached down, seized Areau’s hand, and pulled him close with their clasped hands between them. They touched foreheads and Dorjan muttered, “Bimuit’s luck!” before he straightened and bounded upward one more time.

  He barely avoided the magnesium missile that had been aimed and waiting for his exit from the keep. He pulled the steering stick to the right frantically, then pounded at the two stabilizer wheels on either side of the board to keep the thing from rolling in midair. The children screamed as the magnesium seared their skin and the heat choked their lungs. His armor protected him to an extent, but the five children bound to the back of the great metal beast—

  He cried out as one of them slipped off and went tumbling down, and then another. Bimuit, oh hells! Two of them, and then a third, but she didn’t even scream, and he wondered if she hadn’t been dead or unconscious before she fell.

  “No!” he cried. “No! Hells, Bimuit! Hold on! Oh hold on!” The cricket hurtled downward, preparing its legs for landing, and he saw that one of them was frozen, unable to support weight. He had just enough time to screa
m, “Jump!” as the cricket tumbled to the ground.

  The children landed painfully on the soft bogland, but he was attached to the cricket. It thudded hard, throwing him against the windscreen before rolling over him twice, the force so great he felt his bones give and his skin split. He screamed in pain, and the cries of the children answered him, so for a moment he felt relieved—at least some had survived. The cricket twitched, rolling off of him, and he screamed again. With the cricket gone, he had a clear view of the keep, and now he screamed in rage.

  He saw the final magnesium bomb arc gracefully into the air and fall and hit the keep, and he was still screaming as the inferno destroyed it all.

  WHEN he stood before the Triari, he stood alone.

  He’d been scooped off the battlefield in fractured pieces and had spent a month in recovery. Lokogos Dre was his first visitor.

  “Lokargo,” the lokogos said tentatively, “it’s good to see you’re recovering.” He looked both ways in the infirmary, but Dorjan was the only one there. He’d been removed to a special ward for military criminals, and the gauze sheets separated him from… nobody. Not even nurses and doctors, whom he saw when it was necessary, but not enough to know them as people.

  “The children?” Dorjan mouthed, because he was not sure how much anybody knew. Nobody would tell him.

  Dre looked left and right and removed his cap, revealing blond hair cut short but not shaved. “Smuggled to my father’s keep,” he murmured. “Before we could get to you, Septra’s personal battalion ran in, calling you a war criminal and saying you were responsible for the deaths of our men.” Dre glared about him again. “This is the only military hospital anywhere near the Biemansland-Karanos border, and Bimuit, boy, I swear the only other person besides you is a boy with diarrhea. It’s a ruse, sure enough, to explain why we were trying to take out that keep.”

  “Why were we trying to take out that keep?” Dorjan asked before the one thing he really wanted answered superseded the strategy of the people falsely accusing him. “And where the hell is Areau?”

  He saw the tentative look of sorrow on Dre’s face and knew his heart was about to fail.

  “He’s not—”

  “No!” Dre muttered, and again, that fearful look about the place. “He suffered wounds—he was trying to drag the last of the people out when the mag-bomb hit. I heard him screaming as they carried him away, but he was still alive. As far as I know, they’ve taken him into the asylum in Thenis.”

  Dorjan tried to scowl through the pounding in his head. “Thenis? Bimuit! Why there? That place is… it’s bedlam! Are they healing him, if he was hurt? Why would they shove him in that place?” His whole body ached and his soul most of all, but this… oh, God, Areau, who had followed him out of the same sense of duty Dorjan had been instilled with. “Why? Why would they shove him there?”

  Dre leaned closer. “Don’t you see? They don’t think he has people—they think you’re it. Now see, I’ve been to your father’s hold. I know how it works there. You all have the mines, and the niskets, and that alone is a bond there, and you share that with the miners and the farmers and everybody. Areau’s yours, like kin, and I’ve sent word to your father, so he’s probably working on it, but he’s working on it legal.”

  Dorjan remembered Lokogos Dre, back when the man was a young lokargo, seeking shelter at his parents’ keep on his way to his own keep, which was even farther out from Thenis, the principal city. “Why is that wrong?” he asked, and Dre’s look of pity would haunt him for the rest of his life.

  “Don’t you see? What they were doing? That wasn’t legal. Septra got found out—he’s not going to be happy, and he’s going to pin it on you and on your friend there, and on me—”

  “No.” Dorjan looked at him and shook his head, his heart pattering against his ribs. “We can’t allow them to pin it on you, Dre. We’ll lie first to keep you there. We need an honest man in the army. Did this… this hieterfuck do it for Septra? Was he promoted to Triari?”

  “No—which probably steamed him right through his armor plates, if you ask me. He had a reporter with a copper glyph and a wax mold for his phonograph, all ready to make a talking head for his announcement. He’s putting it about that two young cadets committed treason on his watch—which sends your credibility into the privy, but it’s not looking so great for him either. He’s not Triari, not yet. In fact, I think it put him down on the list. The other rumor is that he led us into an ambush, and there’s even another, that’s the truth, that has civilians in that keep.” Dre had pulled up a chair, his crisp brown uniform practically bending like pasteboard as he sat. He had gold braid at his shoulders, but he was, as far as Dorjan could tell, missing some of an officer’s treasured pins at his breast. No, Dre had not done well by this, but he hadn’t complained of it either.

  Dorjan nodded. “We need you,” he said quietly, his brain churning steadily ahead. When Areau had been working on the steam armor with the other military alchemists, Dorjan had told him once that he wished someone could connect a steam pipe to his brain so it could move in those lovely, fitful leaps and bounds, like the soldiers in their armor and the transpo crickets. Areau had laughed and cuffed him in the ear. Your brain works fine and solid as it is. No leaping about for Dori’s brain—need to keep it on the true way and have it steamroll any shite that lies in the path before it. “We need you,” he repeated, his thoughts finding their purchase in the uneven ground of maybe.

  “For what?” Dre asked, but he asked it eagerly.

  Dorjan wished his head would stop pounding, and the breaks in both arms and legs and his ribs and his chest, but he began to form a plan around the pain. “We need to stop him,” Dorjan said. “If he’s not losing his commission for this, sooner or later, he will be the Triari—that must be it! The power, the money—”

  “The way out of harm’s way,” Dre grumbled, and Dorjan remembered the man’s cowardly act of launching the mag-bomb.

  “That too,” he agreed. “So he wants on the Triari, and we need to stop him, and to do that, we need information.”

  Dre nodded. “So what’s your plan?”

  Dorjan sighed. “Well, I’ll tell them I rescued the children and gave them to a soldier—a deserter. If you can fabricate a name for me, that would help. But I’ll sell them that pile of slop and tell them I stole your cricket—”

  “Didn’t you already tell them I gave it to you?” Dre asked, upset, and Dorjan barely managed to tilt his bandaged head sideways.

  “Do you think they’ll gainsay me?” he asked crossly. “If they try it, they’ll have to admit I told them civilians were in the keep, and at the moment, I think they’re trying to ignore that part altogether. So I saved the children, gave them to someone untrustworthy, and I have no idea where they are. I knocked you cold after we found the boy—what happened to the boy?”

  Dre snorted. “I told you—he ran off. I’ve had soldiers looking for him too, but no luck. Not in Karanos, not in Biemansland—I don’t know if he’d manage to make it to any of the other provinces. He was only a wee boy.”

  Dorjan remembered the boy’s assurance, his pride, and would have shrugged if his wounds had let him. “I’ll have to believe he made it,” he said, not wanting to think about the three of the five children who hadn’t made that last trip on the cricket. “I have to.” And it was nothing less than the truth.

  “So we save your job, and then my father and I, we’ll have to find out where Areau is, and get him back and—”

  They both stopped. They heard footsteps coming, purposeful and impersonal. A doctor, shrouded in white, with a white cloth helmet and white cloth mask, peered around the corner. “Your time is up, Lokogos. The… lokargo is resting.” The man’s contempt was unmistakable.

  Dre stood up and leaned forward. “We’ll find your friend, boy. You save my job, I’ll make myself useful, worry not.” With that, he turned to the contemptuous doctor. “That boy has saved more people in one act than you have in your entire
life, you quack—you treat him right or I’ll have you transferred to the Thenis asylum, you hear me?”

  And with that, Dre was gone, and Dorjan was left to wonder how long until someone who could help him write a letter would visit.

  A MONTH later he stood in his basic lokargo’s uniform—pressed brown pants, burnt-umber jacket, silver braid at the shoulders, and a hexagonal cap with a stiff brim—and gave testimony to the three governing Triari of the Biemansland province.

  To say it was a travesty of justice was to say mag-bombs burned hot.

  The three Triari were elected from the rulers of the individual keeps, and occasionally from someone who had distinguished him or herself in the military. In this case there were two men and a woman, all landowners, in their late middle age, who all wore the traditional togas (the woman deferred to the late fall by wearing a white sweater beneath hers) and crowns of oak. All three surveyed Dorjan dispassionately as he stood, with aid of a cane, and answered their questions without pause, without a chair, and without even a glass of water offered as a courtesy.

  His father would say later that he’d never been prouder of Dorjan than on the day he destroyed his life.

  “So, Dorjan, son of Kyon, what do you have to say for yourself?”

  It felt like the sixth time (his father said it was the twelfth) that the question had been asked.

  “There were civilians in the keep—”

  “That’s never been verified.”

  “Nobody wanted to verify it,” Dorjan snapped bitterly. “And you’ve successfully buried the other lokargo who would have.” He was aching and exhausted and tired of courtesy and worried for Areau. They had located him—and Dorjan’s father had smuggled an honest-to-aether healer into the ward to make sure he didn’t die of infection (or a lead pipe to the head)—but so far they hadn’t been able to smuggle him out.