Fifth Quarter (5 page)

Vree stopped, crouched in the shadow of a thorn tree. Her teeth were clenched so tightly together that a muscle jumped in her jaw. "And just what's that supposed to mean?"

"You don't want to leave…"

"So I'll allow myself to be seen?" She spat the thought at him. "So I'll have to go back to camp or be shot as I cross the perimeter? Do you think for an instant that I want you in my head for the rest of my life?"

"Do you think I want to be here?" Bannon snapped back.

Panting slightly, Vree stared at a thorn, four inches long and silver-gray in the starlight. When they were children, armed with thorn daggers, they'd saved the Empire from a thousand rebels, winning honor and glory and the notice of the Emperor himself. Together. Always together. She forced her fingers to uncurl. Who was she going to hit? "We'll get your body back. I promise."

Bannon remained silent as she moved closer to the watchfire, but she could feel him holding back, in no way adding his skill to hers, allowing her to prove her commitment. Black shapes stood around the fire that had been lit in the middle of the road; kilts and sandals and tunics, round helms and shields and pikes imposing uniformity on the silhouettes. Vree could hear the quiet murmur of voices, then a loud laugh, then…

"Slaughtering bugs!"

"Not lice
again
."

"Bugger you. Something just bit me."

"Good," muttered someone else. "Now it'll die and not bite us."

She knew those voices. All of them. The Fourth Squad, Second Unit, First Company, First Division, Sixth Army had provided the soldiers who were watching the road. Knowing what to look for, she began to pick out individual shapes. Nub had a way of wearing his helm that made his head look as though it sloped straight from crown to nose. Wora slapped the shaft of her pike constantly from palm to palm. They said she'd be corporal when Emo finally took his wineskin into one battle too many. The slim figure pacing nervously around the perimeter of the light could only be Tic, his youth radiating off him.

"Just
no
, okay? Be quiet."

They'd be easier to pass than strangers because she knew their habits. Harder because she knew them and there was no way to even say good-bye. She had no idea why that should matter, but it did.

As she drew even with the fire, a burly shadow shambled off the road and straight toward her. Corporal Emo. She froze, trusting the night to keep her hidden, eyes narrowed to slits so that the whites would not betray her. He continued to come directly at her. They'd served together five, nearly six years. Did he know something?

Then, less than a body-length away, he stopped. And there was a dagger in Vree's hand.

"Kill him!"

"I know what I have to do." But as she hesitated, Emo hiked up his kilt, reached into his sling, and directed a stream of urine practically at her feet. "He doesn't see me, Bannon."

"He's probably too soaked to see anything." Vree could feel relief under the derision. "What if he'd aimed six inches higher?"

"Then I'd have killed him on principle." She felt almost giddy. "How can he piss for so long?"

"How can he drink so much?" Bannon asked in turn, a shrug implied.

Emo finally tucked himself away, belched, and turned to go. Then he stopped, frowned, and stared into the shadows. Vree felt his eyes meet hers, saw recognition dawn, and she slowly stood. His gaze dropped to the dagger in her hand, then went back to her face.

He knew her speed, he knew her skill, and he wasn't so drunk that he didn't know, at that moment, how close he stood to death.

No one in the squad would be surprised if Emo died in the bushes, too drunk to have seen the enemy. Vree could feel the weight of the dagger she held, feel the familiar grip under her fingers. This close, she
couldn't
miss; could close her eyes and with a flick of her wrist still bury it in Emo's throat.

You don
't
see me
, she mouthed.
I
wasn't here
.

"Vree! What are you doing?"

Emo stared at her, startled. She wondered what he saw. Who he saw. Finally, after several lifetimes, he nodded.
I
don't see you
.

"You've brought the hunt down on us," Bannon snarled when the watchfire had faded to a glow in the distance.

Vree remembered a younger man with large callused hands and a ready laugh; Emo before the wineskin became his constant companion. "He won't say anything."

That was not an argument she wanted to get into. Bannon hadn't been the one with the dagger in his hand and those kinds of choices were easier to criticize than to make. "There was no need to kill him."

Bannon gave a mental snort. "You think he'll keep his mouth shut just because you used to fuck him? Think again. They'll know you didn't die in the city. They'll come hunting for you, Vree, and when you die, I die, too."

All at once she was very, very tired. "So we'll try to get your body back before that happens."

They hadn't caught up to Aralt when dawn began to elongate the shadows and brush the cloaking night away. But neither had there been any indication that they themselves were being followed.

"Keep going! He can't have gone that much farther!"

As Bannon's thoughts bounced around her head, brittle and beginning to shatter, Vree realized how tightly his sanity had been tied to finding Aralt quickly. What if he lost it? Would he drag her down with him, or would madness dissolve their unnatural union and send him screaming off as a disembodied spirit?

"Vree!" Her name echoed in her skull as she moved farther away from the road. "What are you doing?"

Locking her fear away, she chose her words carefully because her calm appeared to be the only thing holding her brother together. "I'm taking advantage of this water hole," she murmured, as her approach sent a trio of wild goats bounding away. "I'm going to take a long drink, and then I'm going to make myself a little less obvious for day travel."

"But we have to catch Aralt!" His protest was shrill enough to be almost painful.

"We will." Her tone suggested she spoke to a small and frightened child, not a young man only a year her junior. "But it's going to be hot, and I don't know when we'll find more water."

"Slaughter it, Vree, don't patronize me! I hate it when you do that. I've always hated it!"

Always hated it?

Pursing her lips, she pressed her face against the water and carefully sucked from just below the surface. It was still night-cool but with a faint, flat taste of the heat it had held the day before. Fortunately, the goats hadn't had the chance to stir up much of the gritty silt. Vree drank past desire, until she sloshed when she moved, then took a dagger to her tunic and breeches.

First the long sleeves, then the high collar, then a double hands span ripped ragged from the bottom of each leg—the fine, closely woven cotton, dyed and redyed to match the darkness, tore easily. She knotted the narrow ends of the sleeves and filled them with the weapons she could no longer hide as well as the supple ankle boots that were a better indication of her profession than any number of concealed daggers. A fistful of damp sand scrubbed the charcoal from hands and face.

After a thorough roll in the pale dirt, Vree bent and forced herself to take one last drink. As she lifted her head, she frowned at a shadowy indentation, newly delineated by the rising sun. "Bannon, look there."

"I look where you look," he muttered. Then she felt his mood change as he saw what she saw. On the other side of the watering hole, an earlier visitor had braced his weight, leaned forward to drink and left a clear impression of the heel and thumb of his right hand. "Mine. That's my handprint. He came this way, Vree! I told you so! We're almost on him. Get up! Get going!"

She'd trusted her brother's judgment in a thousand situations where a mistake would mean both their deaths. She trusted it now although she could see nothing familiar in the curves pressed into the damp earth. Securing her narrow pack with the silken length of her garrote, she slung it across her body and hurried north.

It was mid-morning when Vree heard the sound of a horse approaching from behind. She turned, shaded her eyes against the glare from above and the stone dust glare from below, and squinted back down the South Road. "Courier." The word was flat, inflectionless, but her heart began to pound a little faster. They should have expected this; in this part of the Empire the South Road was the only road the army bothered to keep way stations on. In this part of the Empire, it was the only road that went anywhere. "The marshal's probably sending news of the governor's death to the garrison."

"The governor isn't dead."

"He is as far as the Sixth Army is concerned. There's a body and there's no one to lead the rebellion. What more do they need?"

"Us?"

"If Emo squealed, we'd have had to kill someone long before now."

"Yeah, but Emo's a drunk, Vree. We can't count on him not to spill his guts the next time he crawls into a wineskin. Or the next time. Or the time after that."

"You're right." She started back the way they'd come. "Let's go back and kill him."

"What are you doing? We have to find Aralt!"

"Then you shut up about Emo! Maybe I should've killed him, okay? But he's alive and he knows and there's not a slaughtering thing we can do about it!"

As the courier rode closer, she dropped her head and continued slogging north, shoulders hunched, bare feet splayed out against the heated stone, nothing in her bearing suggesting she'd ever marched behind the Empire's banner.

She needn't have bothered. The courier trotted past, the sunburst pennant on his lance tip snapping, eyes under the crested helm locked ahead on the distance still to be covered. One skinny, filthy traveler meant nothing to him. After all, the Empire had built the roads to be traveled on.

As horse and rider and road disappeared behind an outcrop of faded pink stone, Vree scrubbed at a dribble of sweat between her breasts and shook her head. "Bannon, this is impossible. We need more to go on than
Aralt went north
. Didn't you get anything else?"

This
emotion, she recognized. In the past, jobs had always been weighted toward her planning and his instincts. He always wanted the overview and hated dealing with the details.

"Look, he's in
my
body!"

"And this is
mine
, and it's not moving until you give it a direction." He believed weariness where he would have argued with anger. She listened to the high-pitched whine of a buzzbug protesting the heat, scratched the top of one foot with the heel of the other, and waited.

"Did we pass something that looks like this?"

An image of a jagged ridge, half the face sheared off and huddled at the base, was shoved in front of her mind's eye. Vree jerked her head back and slammed it against the rock behind her.

The ridge. Vree frowned, remembering, "it was off on the left side of the road about an hour ago, just past the last milestone."