Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch #1)(12)

Either Strigan had security in place, or she did not. I stepped over the line, into the circle. Nothing happened.

The doors were open, both inner and outer, and there were no lights. One of the buildings was just as cold inside as out. I presumed that when I found a light I would discover it was used for storage, filled with tools and sealed packages of food and fuel. The other was two degrees Celsius inside—I guessed that it had been heated until relatively recently. Living quarters, evidently. “Strigan!” I called into the darkness, but the way my voice echoed back told me the building was likely unoccupied.

Outside again, I found the marks where her flier had sat. She was gone, then, and the open doors and the darkness were a message for whoever would come. For me. I had no means to discover where she’d gone. I looked up at the empty sky, and down again at the imprint of the flier. I stood there a while, looking at that empty space.

When I returned to Seivarden, I found she’d lain down in the green-stained snow and gone to sleep.


In the back of the flier I found a lantern, a stove, a tent, and some bedding. I took the lantern into the building I presumed was living quarters and switched it on.

Wide, light-colored rugs covered the floor, and woven hangings the walls; these were blue and orange and an eye-hurting green. Low benches, backless, with cushions, lined the room. Beyond benches and the bright hangings, there was little else. A game board with counters, but the board had a pattern of holes I didn’t recognize, and I didn’t understand the distribution of the counters among the holes. I wondered whom Strigan played with. Perhaps the board was only decorative. It was finely carved, and the pieces brightly colored.

A wooden box sat on a table in a corner, a long oval with a carved, pierced lid and three strings stretched tight across. The wood was pale gold, with a waving, curling grain. The holes cut in the flat top were as uneven and intricate as the grain of the wood. It was a beautiful thing. I plucked a string and it rang softly.

Doors led to kitchen, bath, sleeping quarters, and what was obviously a small infirmary. I opened a cabinet door and found a neat stack of correctives. Each drawer I pulled out revealed instruments and medicines. She might have gone to a herding camp to tend to some emergency. But the lights and the heat being off, and those doors left open, argued otherwise.

Barring a miracle, it was the end of nineteen years of planning and effort.

The house controls were behind a panel in the kitchen. I found the power supply in place, hooked it back in, and switched on the heat and the lights. Then I went out and got Seivarden, and dragged her into the house.


I made a pallet of blankets I found in Strigan’s bedroom, then stripped Seivarden and laid her on it, and covered her with more blankets. She didn’t wake, and I used the time to search the house more thoroughly.

The cabinets held plenty of food. A cup sat on a counter, a thin layer of greenish liquid glazing the bottom. Next to it sat a plain white bowl holding the last bits of a hunk of hard bread disintegrating into ice-rimmed water. It looked as though Strigan had left without cleaning up after a meal, leaving nearly everything behind—food, medical supplies. I checked the bedroom, found warm clothes in good repair. She had left on short notice, not taking much.

She knew what she had. Of course she did—that was why she’d fled to begin with. If she was not stupid—and I was quite certain she was not—she had gone the moment she realized what I was, and would keep going until she was as far from me as she could get.

But where would that be? If I represented the power of the Radch, and had found her even here, so distant from both Radch space and her own home, where could she go that they would not ultimately find her? Surely she would realize that. But what other course would be open to her?

Surely she would not be foolish enough to return.

In the meantime, Seivarden would be sick soon, unless I found kef for her. I had no intention of doing that. And there was food here, and heat, and perhaps I could find something, some hint, some clue to what Strigan had been thinking, in the moment she had thought the Radch were coming for her, and fled. Something that would tell me where she’d gone.





4


At night, in Ors, I walked the streets, and looked out over the still, stinking water, dark beyond the few lights of Ors itself, and the blinking of the buoys surrounding the prohibited zones. I slept, also, and sat watch in the lower level of the house, in case anyone should need me, though that was rare in those days. I finished any of the day’s work still uncompleted, and watched over Lieutenant Awn, who lay sleeping.

Mornings I brought water for Lieutenant Awn to bathe in, and dressed her, though the local costume was a good deal less effort than her uniform, and she had stopped wearing any sort of cosmetics two years before, as they were difficult to maintain in the heat.

Then Lieutenant Awn would turn to her icons—four-armed Amaat, an Emanation in each hand, sat on a box downstairs, but the others (Toren, who received devotions from every officer on Justice of Toren, and a few gods particular to Lieutenant Awn’s family) sat near where Lieutenant Awn slept, in the upper part of the house, and it was to them that she made her morning devotions. “The flower of justice is peace,” the daily prayer began, that every Radchaai soldier said on waking, every day of her life in the military. “The flower of propriety is beauty in thought and action.” The rest of my officers, still on Justice of Toren, were on a different schedule. Their mornings rarely coincided with Lieutenant Awn’s, so it was almost always Lieutenant Awn’s voice alone in prayer, and the others, when they spoke so far away, in chorus, without her. “The flower of benefit is Amaat whole and entire. I am the sword of justice…” The prayer is antiphonal, but only four verses long. I can sometimes hear it still when I wake, like a distant voice somewhere behind me.