Sweep in Peace

  It was a tranquil room, high-end yet masculine, peaceful and clean without being sterile. Stepping into it was like entering a refreshing lake after a hard sweaty run.

  “My deepest apologies,” I told him. “I’m sorry you were attacked in my inn. I’m sorry I didn’t keep you safe.”

  “Thank you,” he said quietly.

  The wall parted and a tray slid out, offering a plethora of food from the banquet: the starters, the drinks, the desserts in tiny cups, and in the center, the pan-seared chicken. Orro must’ve recovered enough to put a plate together.

  “The best chicken in the Galaxy,” Turan Adin said, a hint of something suspiciously resembling amusement in his voice.

  “Of course,” I told him. “We only serve the best to our honored guests.”

  I stepped outside and quietly closed the door behind me.

  ###

  The trick to finding an invisible thief is making him or her visible, which sounded like the most obvious conclusion in the world. Teaching the inn to recognize the faint blur of the thief’s presence and target it was a lot harder.

  I raised my head from the screen. I was sitting in my lab under the main floor of the inn. In front of me, the inn had formed a square niche in its walls five by five feet and roughly nine feet tall.

  “And go,” I murmured.

  A holographic projector in the wall of the niche conjured up the close approximation of the blur. The wall split and a jet of mist erupted over the blur. The niche’s walls looked exactly the same.

  “Lights,” I murmured.

  The light died. A black UV lamp came on, rotating slowly. Its beam swept the niche. Once sterile walls glowed with bright blue.

  “Perfect.”

  My screen blinked and changed into an image of my front room. George and Sophie were looking around, as if they had lost something.

  “What is it?”

  The two of them spun around, back to back, identical neutral expressions on their faces. My voice had emanated from the walls. Usually I didn’t do this because it was bad manners and guests tended to react badly to disembodied voices echoing through their living spaces, but I was still annoyed.

  “We came to check on you,” Sophie said.

  Wasn’t that sweet? I could tell them to piss off. Unfortunately, I was still an innkeeper and they were my guests to whom I would afford every courtesy even if it made my insides explode from the strain of containing my rage.

  I waved at the inn. A set of stairs formed in the wall and I walked up into the front room. The floor flowed closed behind me.

  George and Sophie looked at me.

  “I’ll get us some tea,” Sophie said and went into the kitchen.

  “She made you come down here to talk to me.” I took a seat on the sofa.

  “Yes.” He lowered himself onto a chair opposite me.

  “And you humored her. Her feelings are important to you, so you weighed the odds and decided that whatever plan you have wouldn’t be injured too much by you having this conversation with me, and here we are.”

  “Yes.” He leaned back, his handsome face somber. She must’ve told him he had to be honest.

  “Everything you have done since you arrived here, every word, every expression, and every action has been carefully calculated. You’ve destroyed the alliance between Robart and House Meer, isolating him from his peers. To Arland and Isur, he is damaged goods and to House Meer he is no longer an asset. He’s an embarrassment, a witness and facilitator of their dishonor. He will be desperate to make peace now. House Meer is huge and House Vorga is one fifth of its size. If the knights of Meer choose to set aside the shame of Beneger’s failure and pursue House Vorga, the Meer will swallow Robart’s House whole and barely notice. Robart has no choice but to throw his lot in with Arland and Isur now and pray for a strategic alliance. On the flip side, House Meer is dishonored. They sent three of their better fighters and they couldn’t take one man. They look weak and pathetic. Together with their excommunication, this will make them hard pressed to form any alliances at all.”

  “The region will be more stable for it,” George said, matter-of-fact.

  “Then you’ve murdered the pride of the Horde in front of the otrokari. I saw Sophie’s face. She lives for the challenge. You knew that the moment you showed her Ruah’s image, she would target him and kill him. You didn’t check the Horde’s hubris, you annihilated it.”

  “Yes,” George said.

  “Now the vampires are desperate, and the Horde is desperate. Both are humiliated. Both are indebted to me and the peace talks are in shambles. All part of the plan?”

  “Yes.”

  If he said yes one more time, I would brain him with something heavy.

  “And my inn is an unfortunate casualty of this process?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Are you done?”

  “Not quite.”

  “What else is there? You could also make the Merchants desperate. Is that next?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “George, stop with single word answers. You came into my inn and you used me and Gertrude Hunt in the worst way possible. I deserve to at least know the final objective of this terrible mess.”

  “It’s not a mess,” he said. “It’s a carefully steered ride. And the objective has always remained the same: to do the impossible and broker peace on Nexus.”

  I leaned forward. “Where is my place in this?”

  “You’re in the very center of it,” he said. “You and the inn. Everything that happened has been designed for its impact on you.”

  “To what end?”

  “I can’t tell you that. You have to trust me.”

  “That is the one thing I will never do again. You can’t just play with people’s lives.”

  “I never play.” A hint of frustration twisted George’s face. “I examine my objective very carefully and I weigh everything I do against the benefits attaining that objective will bring. I’m intimately familiar with death. It’s been a constant companion, almost since childhood. I take no one’s life for granted, not yours, not Ruah’s, not even Beneger’s. To avoid murder, I will go as far as to endanger myself and my objective, provided that the level of risk to my goal is acceptable and my threshold of acceptability is a lot higher than you might believe. I resort to killing only when it becomes absolutely necessary, and you can be sure that when I take a life, it is because I have examined all my options and had no choice. But some events are greater than the people who bring them about and so I will do what I must to set them in motion. It’s almost over, Dina. You will understand soon. I promise, I will not drag it out.”

  He rose and walked away.

  Who the hell had I let into my inn?

  Sophie glided over from the kitchen and set a cup of steaming tea in front of me. I tasted it. Chamomile.

  She sat in the same chair as George.

  “Do you know what he is planning?” I asked.

  “No. I know he is conflicted about it. He calls me his conscience even though, of the two of us, I am more violent, at least at first glance.”

  “No,” I told her. “You kill quickly and with mercy. George is merciless.”

  “If one can be compassionate and merciless at once, he is that. George was always a contradiction.” Sophie drank her tea. “What will you do?”

  “I’ll do what I was hired to do. I gave my word. I won’t back out now, but I will no longer let myself be used.”

  Sophie smiled. “I bet he is counting on that.”

  Chapter 13

  I woke up, because the nameless cat was staring at me. His big round eyes shone like two moons, catching the morning light slipping through the curtains.

  I raised my hand. He pondered it for a few seconds, then slowly moved forward and rubbed his soft head against my palm. For some inexplicable reason, it made me feel better. The cat rubbed against me again and settled on the bed to make muffins. I slid down to the floor.

  “Be
ast?”

  The little dog shot out from under the bed and jumped on me, licking my face. I hugged her. “Who is a good doggie? Beast is a good doggie!”

  At least Beast loved me. No matter what I did that day, Beast thought I was the greatest owner in the history of the Universe. Sadly, I couldn’t just stay up here and play with her all day.

  I got up, brushed my teeth, took a shower, and got dressed in my Innkeeper garb, complete with the blue robe, accomplishing the tasks on autopilot. Sleep had helped my body, but not the rest of me. I felt exhausted, emotionally and mentally wrung out.

  “Main ballroom, please.”

  A screen offered me the view of the main ballroom. The Battle Chaplain and the shaman sat on the floor, with about fifteen feet of space between them. They were talking. Their facial expressions didn’t seem hostile. The bodies of the three vampires had been placed into stasis chambers which looked a lot like coffins and gave rise to many Earth vampire legends. The body of Ruah had been wrapped in layers of cloth with ritualistic runes on it.

  I made my way downstairs. Both of the religious representatives had decided to ship the corpses off world. Ruga, the shaman, wanted Ruah to be buried with his family. Odalon had written a communique to House Meer. He read it to me as we walked through the orchard, the pallet with the dead trailing behind us.

  “It is with great regret that I must inform you that Lord Beneger and Knights Uriel and Korsarad have fallen victim to Turan Adin, having attacked him as he entered the dining hall during dinner.”

  “Like cowards,” Ruga added on my left.

  “Fallen victim?” Vampires saw themselves as predators, not prey. This was a scathing insult.

  “Indeed,” Odalon smiled, baring his fangs. “Their resistance lasted but a few breaths and despite our most valiant efforts, they couldn’t be saved.”

  The laughter burst out so fast, I clamped my hand over my mouth before I snorted.

  “Even the intervention of an otrokari swordsman failed to make a difference, as they were dead within moments of their ill-fated charge.”

  I glanced at Ruga. The shaman shrugged. “It’s not my communique.”

  Odalon grinned. “I have performed the rights of Absolution and Passing through the Veil and have stood vigil for the required hours. I can only hope that my years of serving the Most Holy through thought and action and the blood of my body and that of my enemies spilled onto the fertile battlefields in the name of the Holy Anocracy are sufficient to recommend the souls of your knights to Paradise. You will find the recording of the incident with Lord Beneger.”

  I chuckled. “So how hard did you have to beg the Most Holy to allow them to enter Paradise?”

  “Only as hard as my integrity required.” Odalon smiled. “What do you think?”

  “That is the nicest ‘Here are your dishonored dead, piss off and don’t come back’ letter I have ever heard,” I told him.

  “I helped him with it,” Ruga said.

  I felt someone’s gaze on me. To our left Turan Adin stood on the balcony. When I designed everyone else’s quarters, I had made sure that they all saw the orchard but jumping into it from their balconies would’ve landed them in different spots in it. Since Turan Adin made everyone lose their mind by his mere presence, his balcony actually opened here, near the landing field. He wore his armor and tabard. His hood was up, but he was looking at us.

  Ruga growled quietly. Odalon glanced at Turan Adin and for a moment the otrokar and the vampire wore identical expressions.

  “That creature disturbs me,” Ruga said.

  “You are not alone in that,” Odalon told him.

  “Because of how he kills?” I guessed.

  “No.” Ruga grimaced. “Because he is desperate.”

  “We are all desperate,” Odalon said. “Nobody wants to go back to Nexus.”

  “Yes, but we are desperate but we still have hope that the fight will end.”

  “True,” Odalon said. “There is darkness there.”

  I glanced at him.

  “A true spiritual advisor is more than a priest,” Odalon said. “We are the link between human and holy. We devote ourselves to service and that includes not just the spiritual but also the emotional needs of our congregation. We were chosen and drawn to our vocation because of our empathy.”

  “We are similar,” Ruga said. “We seek to peer into the soul of the person and heal the frayed edges.”

  That explained why the two of them had hit it off. Put two empaths into the same room for a few hours, and sooner or later they would naturally try to reach out to each other in an effort to understand how the other person feels.

  “When I look into his soul,” Ruga said, glancing back over his shoulder at Turan Adin, “I see conflict.”

  “Desperation is a catalyst that forces us to act,” Odalon said. “It summons the last reserves we possess in an effort to extricate us from danger. This is why we are here at this summit. We are so desperate, we are willing to negotiate with our sworn enemy. It pushes us to limits we normally cannot reach.”

  “Desperation is a fire,” Ruga added. “It burns bright but it must have a chimney, an outlet.”

  “A chimney?” Odalon’s eyebrows crept up.

  The shaman rolled his eyes. “Fine. Desperation, as exhibited by that creature, is basically a prolonged lower state of fight or flight response. Where the flight or fight shot of adrenaline is a reaction to the actual manifestation of danger, desperation is the result of a perceived future danger. It primes the organism, forcing it to actively seek an avenue of escape before the danger actually manifests, resulting in a complicated cascade of hormonal interactions. You get higher metabolic rate, an entire slew of glands functioning at a greater output, obsessive thoughts, and so on.”

  I stopped and pinched myself.

  “I know,” Odalon told me. “When I discovered he has an advanced degree in microbiology, it was quite a shock to me as well.”

  “It’s not a healthy state of being,” Ruga continued. “You are not designed to function in a state of desperation for a prolonged period of time.”

  “It’s a short-term metabolic burst,” Odalon added. “The body will seek to vent some of that built up potential. If you are under a great amount of stress, you might have a panic attack, for example.”

  “Turan Adin is desperate, but he is also trapped,” Ruga said. “It rolls off of him. To go back to my early metaphor, if desperation is a fire, his fire is raging inside a stone bunker. I don’t know what is keeping him where he is, if he is indebted, if he is disciplined, if he feels he is there for the right cause, but whatever it is, it has created a deep-seated conflict within his psyche.”

  “He won’t be able to sustain this kind of pressure,” Odalon said. “His body and his soul desperately want to escape, but his mind is keeping him put. He is tired. He’ll kill himself in six months.”

  “I would go as far as eight, but yes,” Ruga said.

  “It makes him incredibly dangerous,” Odalon said, “because he doesn’t care. He has no thought of self-preservation beyond the basic instincts of his body.”

  “He will never take his own life. He will try to die in battle,” the shaman added. “And I do not want to be on the battlefield when he decides that it is his last day.”

  “That’s horrible,” I said.

  “War is horrible,” Odalon said. “It ruins people.”

  “War on Nexus is especially horrible,” Ruga said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Modern war is, in an odd way, merciful,” Odalon said. “Our technology permits us to precison-bomb strategic targets. When casualties occur, they are typically swift.”

  “Death from high density beam bombardment takes .3 seconds,” Ruga said. “It is a loss of life, irreversible and irreplaceable, but it is a death without suffering. Advanced weaponry doesn’t function correctly on Nexus. Orbital bombardment is out of the question, because something prevents accurate targeting. Trying to
pound your enemy with artillery is pointless as well.”

  “We’ve had weapons explode,” Odalon said. “There is a record of a concentrated artillery assault in the first year of the war. The projectiles disappeared and thirty minutes later materialized above the House that fired them.”

  “I remembered reading about that.” Ruga smirked.

  “It is an up close and personal war, fought with savage weapons,” Odalon said. “At first when you’re young and dumb and you hear about it, you think it will be glorious. That you will be like the hero of old, ripping through the ranks of your enemy. Then you find out what six hours of fighting with your sword is really like. The first hour, if you survive, is exciting. The scent of blood is intoxicating. The second hour, you are injured, but you keep going. The third hour you realize you’ve had your fill of blood. You want to be done. You want off the battlefield. In the fourth, you notice the faces of people you kill. You hear their screams as you hack off their limbs. It is no longer an abstract enemy. It is a living being that you are ripping apart. It is dying by your hand, right there, in front of you. In the fifth, you bleed and vomit, and still you push forward, punishing your body and soul. In the sixth, you collapse finally, grateful that you survived or simply numb. Everything smells like blood and the smell of it makes you ill. You’re hurting and you try to keep your eyes open, because if you close them, you might see the faces of those you killed, so you look upon the battlefield, and you realize that nothing was gained and, as the medic is patching you up, you must do this again tomorrow.”