All my segments hesitated. The order made no sense. Whatever they had done, these were citizens, and I had them under control. But Lieutenant Awn said, loud and harsh, “Fire!” and I did. Within three seconds all the Tanmind were dead.
No one in the temple at that moment was young enough to be surprised at what had happened, though perhaps the several years since I’d executed anyone had lent the memories some distance, maybe even engendered some confidence that citizenship meant an end to such things. The junior priests stood where they had since this had begun, not moving, saying nothing. The head priest wept openly, soundlessly.
“I think,” said Anaander Mianaai into the vast silence that surrounded us, once the echoes of gunfire had died down, “there won’t be any more trouble from the Tanmind here.”
Lieutenant Awn’s mouth and throat twitched slightly, as though she were about to speak, but she didn’t. Instead she walked forward, around the bodies, tapping four of my segments on the shoulder as she passed and gesturing to them to follow. I realized she simply could not bring herself to speak. Or perhaps she feared what would come out of her mouth if she attempted it. Having only visual data from her was frustrating.
“Where are you going, Lieutenant?” asked the Lord of the Radch.
Her back to Mianaai, Lieutenant Awn opened her mouth, and then closed it again. Closed her eyes, took a breath. “With my lord’s permission, I intend to discover whatever it is that’s blocking communications.” Anaander Mianaai didn’t answer, and Lieutenant Awn turned to my nearest segment.
“Jen Shinnan’s house,” that segment said, since it was clear Lieutenant Awn was still in emotional distress. “I’ll look for the young person as well.”
Just before sunrise I found the device there. The instant I disabled it I was myself again—minus one missing segment. I saw the silent, barely twilit streets of the upper and lower city, the temple empty of anyone but myself and eighty-three silent, staring corpses. Lieutenant Awn’s grief and distress and shame were suddenly clear and visible, to my combined relief and discomfort. And with a moment’s willing it, the tracker signals of all the people in Ors flared into life in my vision, including the people who had died and still lay in the temple of Ikkt; my missing segment in an upper city street, neck broken; and Jen Shinnan’s niece—in the mud at the bottom of the northern edge of the Fore-Temple water.
9
Strigan came out of the infirmary, undercoat bloody, and the girl and her mother, who had been talking quietly in a language I didn’t understand, fell silent and looked expectantly to her.
“I’ve done what I can,” Strigan said, with no preamble. “He’s out of danger. You’ll need to take him to Therrod to have the limbs regrown, but I’ve done some of the prep work, and they should grow back fairly easily.”
“Two weeks,” said the Nilter woman, impassive. As though it wasn’t the first time something like this had happened.
“Can’t be helped,” said Strigan, answering something I hadn’t heard or understood. “Maybe someone’s got a few extra hands they can spare.”
“I’ll call some cousins.”
“You do that,” said Strigan. “You can see him now if you like, but he’s asleep.”
“When can we move him?” the woman asked.
“Now, if you like,” answered Strigan. “The sooner the better, I suppose.”
The woman made an affirmative gesture, and she and the girl rose and went into the infirmary without another word.
Not long after, we brought the injured person out to the girl’s flier and saw them off, and trudged back into the house and shed our outer coats. Seivarden had by now returned to her pallet on the floor and sat, knees drawn up, arms tight around her legs as if she were holding them back and it took work.
Strigan looked at me, an odd expression on her face, one I couldn’t read. “She’s a good kid.”
“Yes.”
“She’ll get a good name out of this. A good story to go with it.”
I had learned the lingua franca that I thought would be most useful here, and done the sort of cursory research one needs to navigate unfamiliar places, but I knew almost nothing about the people who herded bov on this part of the planet. “Is it an adulthood thing?” I guessed.
“Sort of. Yes.” She went to a cabinet, pulled out a cup and a bowl. Her movements were quick and steady, but I got somehow an impression of exhaustion. From the set of her shoulders perhaps. “I didn’t think you’d be much interested in children. Aside from killing them, I mean.”
I refused the bait. “She let me know she wasn’t a child. Even if she did have a Tiktik set.”
Strigan sat at her small table. “You played two hours straight.”
“There wasn’t much else to do.”
Strigan laughed, short and bitter. Then she gestured toward Seivarden, who seemed to be ignoring us. She couldn’t understand us anyway, we weren’t speaking Radchaai. “I don’t feel sorry for him. It’s just that I’m a doctor.”
“You said that.”
“I don’t think you feel sorry for him either.”