Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch #1)(10)

I had two choices. I could wait here and hope to ambush anyone who came to murder and rob me, and take their transport. This would, of course, be futile in the event that they decided to wait for cold and hunger to do their job for them. Or I could pull Seivarden out of the flier, shoulder my pack, and walk. My intended destination was some sixty kilometers to the southeast. I could walk that in a day if I had to, ground and weather—and ice devils—permitting, but I would be lucky if Seivarden could do it in twice that time. And that course would be futile if the proprietor decided not to wait, but to retrieve her flier more or less immediately. Our trail through the moss-striated snow would be clear, they would need only to follow us and dispose of us. I would have lost any advantage of surprise I might have gained by hiding near the downed flier.

And I would be lucky if I found anything, once I reached my destination. I had spent the past nineteen years following the most tenuous of threads, weeks and months of searching or waiting, punctuated by moments like this, when success or even life hung on the toss of a coin. I had been lucky to come this far. I could not reasonably expect to go farther.

A Radchaai would have tossed that coin. Or more accurately a handful of them, a dozen disks, each with its meaning and import, the pattern of their fall a map of the universe as Amaat willed it to be. Things happen the way they happen because the world is the way it is. Or, as a Radchaai would say, the universe is the shape of the gods. Amaat conceived of light, and conceiving of light also necessarily conceived of not-light, and light and darkness sprang forth. This was the first Emanation, EtrepaBo; Light/Darkness. The other three, implied and necessitated by that first, are EskVar (Beginning/Ending), IssaInu (Movement/Stillness), and VahnItr (Existence/Nonexistence). These four Emanations variously split and recombined to create the universe. Everything that is, emanates from Amaat.

The smallest, most seemingly insignificant event is part of an intricate whole and to understand why one particular mote of dust falls in one particular path, and lands in one particular location, is to understand the will of Amaat. There is no such thing as “just a coincidence.” Nothing happens by chance, but only according to the mind of God.

Or so official Radchaai orthodoxy teaches. I myself have never understood religion very well. It was never required that I should. And though the Radchaai had made me, I was not Radchaai. I knew and cared nothing about the will of the gods. I only knew that I would land where I myself had been cast, wherever that would be.

I took my pack from the flier, opened it, and removed an extra magazine, which I stowed inside my coat near my gun. I shouldered the pack, went around to the other side of the flier, and opened the hatch there. “Seivarden,” I said.

She didn’t move, only breathed a quiet hmmm. I took her arm and pulled, and she half-slid, half-stepped out into the snow.

I had gotten this far by taking one step, and then another. I turned northeast, pulling Seivarden along, and walked.


Dr. Arilesperas Strigan, whose home I very much hoped I was walking toward, had been, at one time, a medic in private practice on Dras Annia Station, an aggregation of at least five different stations, one built onto another, at the intersection of two dozen different routes, well outside Radch territory. Nearly anything could end up there, given enough time, and in the course of her work she had met a wide variety of people, with a wide variety of antecedents. She had been paid in currency, in favors, in antiques, in nearly anything that might imaginably be said to have value.

I’d been there, seen the station and its convoluted, interpenetrating layers, seen where Strigan had worked and lived, seen the things she’d left behind when one day, for no reason anyone seemed to know, she’d bought passage on five different ships and then disappeared. A case full of stringed instruments, only three of which I could name. Five shelves of icons, a dizzying array of gods and saints worked in wood, in shell, in gold. A dozen guns, each one carefully labeled with its station permit number. These were collections that had begun as single items, received in payment, sparking her curiosity. Strigan’s lease had been paid in full for 150 years, and as a result station authorities had left her apartment untouched.

A bribe had gotten me in, to see the collection I had come for—a few five-sided tiles in colors still flower-bright after a thousand years. A shallow bowl inscribed around its gilt edge in a language Strigan couldn’t possibly have read. A flat plastic rectangle I knew was a voice recorder. At a touch it produced laughter, voices speaking that same dead language.

Small as it was, this had not been an easy collection to assemble. Garseddai artifacts were scarce, because once Anaander Mianaai had realized the Garseddai possessed the means to destroy Radchaai ships and penetrate Radchaai armor, she had ordered the utter destruction of Garsedd and its people. Those pentagonal plazas, the flowers, every living thing on every planet, moon, and station in the system, all gone. No one would ever live there again. No one would ever be permitted to forget what it meant to defy the Radch.

Had a patient given her, say, the bowl, and had that sent her looking for more information? And if one Garseddai object had fetched up there, what else might have? Something a patient might have given her as payment, maybe not knowing what it was—or knowing and wanting desperately to be rid of it. Something that had led Strigan to flee, to disappear, leaving nearly everything she owned behind, perhaps. Something dangerous, something she couldn’t bring herself to destroy, to be rid of in the most efficient way possible.