Chapter 7: Perchance to Dream
Uzuki family home, Second Miltia

"JIN!"

He didn't think, he moved.

The old katana flew from its sheath in a single liquid motion. Half-step, turn--he intercepted the charging shadow with the first third of the blade, feeling it cut deep and clean through muscle and organ to connect with bone. Drew back, twisting his wrist to disengage, an expert flick of the hand to send blood pattering to the floor at his side. His opponent hadn't even tried to dodge.

Was this all that had been waiting for him? chaos spoke from behind him, as Jin turned aside a moment to wipe the blood from his blade: "Jin--look."

There was an unexpected hitch in the youth's voice that drew the swordsman up short. He raised his head, brushing back his hair with a free hand. He didn't need chaos's shaking hand pointed past his shoulder to tell him where his victim lay; the spreading crimson puddle did that well enough. He didn't need a glimpse of a yellow-clad shoulder and mussed brown hair to identify who it was, or why it had been so easy to kill him--

"Allen!"

Shion came skidding around the corner at a run, grasping at the far wall to catch her balance. "Al--"

Jin didn't need Shion's expression to tell him what she saw: her brother and chaos behind him, both spattered in blood; Allen on the floor, neatly butterflied and already quite dead. It was a surprise to Jin that she didn't faint on the spot, or start screaming at him.

He took his hand from the hilt of his sword.

"What did you do to him," Shion said in a voice like ice.

"I--"

"WHAT DID YOU DO TO HIM?!" Her calm dissipated into a shriek. Faster than Jin could respond she vaulted the space between them, hands going for his eyes and his throat. This was not sibling rivalry; it was attempted fratricide and Jin very nearly drew his sword once more. Sense got the better of him, though; he grabbed her wrists instead, immobilizing her as if they were eight and twenty-one again and fighting over a trifle.

She was much stronger than he remembered her being and shoved against his hands with a shriek of indignation. "Shion, listen to me--!" It was only by good fortune he twisted away just as she got a knee up, taking a blow to the hip instead of the crotch. Undaunted she went for his eyes again, thrashing like an animal in a trap and shrieking all the while. chaos was saying something but Jin would be damned if he could pick it out from all of Shion's screaming.

"Listen to you! LISTEN TO YOU! You killed Allen, you heartless, selfish--" She bent her own wrist nearly double to get at him. Unwilling to hurt her, Jin let go and immediately regretted it as her nails found purchase in his throat. He took back the decision not to injure her and aimed an elbow for her midsection.

The blow would have put her out of the fight had not chaos's hands come to rest on his shoulder and Shion's wrist. "I said stop it," the youth barked.

It was more emotion than Jin had ever heard him use. He drew back in an instant, resigned instead to prying Shion's hand off his neck. chaos squeezed her wrist once--Jin swore he could hear bones creaking--and she let go, pulling her hand back.

A moment passed.

chaos let go of Shion's arm and Jin's shoulder; the younger Uzuki immediately fell to her knees next to Allen's body. She pulled his head into her lap, heedless of the smears of crimson it left on her pants--and then began to cry, in harsh wracking sobs that shook her entire body. Jin didn't bother to get any closer to her, torn between fraternal pity and self-preservation. Who knew what turn her mood would take next.

He fisted his hand, still feeling the slick slide of sharpened steel through meat and bone. Like cubing a steak for stew, the old man had once told him. Skinning an animal, cutting a joint of meat, killing a man, Uzuki, it all feels the same except that the man will keep coming for you until he realizes he's dead. Allen hadn't gotten very far. Jin supposed the engineer had always had a good sense of reality, even dying.

I really did kill him. It wasn't as if he hadn't killed men before. It wasn't as if he hadn't presided over this kind of butchery. Never without meaning to, though--and damn it, even if he hadn't been a friend and Jin didn't much like the way he'd looked at Shion, Allen was a familiar presence. He passed a hand over his face, batting his bangs aside and smearing angry crimson stripes across his cheek.

He needed a shower. Needed to get the blood off. Suspected that no matter how hard he scrubbed he couldn't erase the feeling of the hitch and snap of the sword cleaving a human body. God! His sister out of commission, her subordinate dead, and he was obsessing over a ghost of a feeling.

Assured that chaos had control of the situation, Jin turned to put his back to the grisly scene and scrubbed the sleeve of his robe across his face. It did little for the mask of gore coating him from ear to ear. The hallway was empty, and dark, back the way they'd come from. Quiet enough, too, that Shion's sobbing and chaos's murmured reassurance seemed too loud.

And where was the other member of their absurd search party? Jin's mind caught on Ziggy's absence, dragging his thoughts to a screeching halt. He thought immediately to ask chaos about it, then threw that away; Shion was headed toward total collapse and he didn't like the idea of having to drag her out into the snow if she melted down and they needed to run for it. No, no interrupting chaos. He'd find out himself.

Tucking bangs going stiff with dried blood behind an ear, Jin started back down the hall as quickly as he dared. No sign of the cyborg in the sitting room, but he'd expected that--the racket would have brought Ziggy in at a run, if he were in the house. That put him outside, far outside or distracted with something else if he hadn't heard what had just happened. Jin frowned, rested a hand on the door to the garden.

Inspecting the generator? Or the power conduits? No, he was smarter than that; anything that had taken both of them down was outside a bodyguard's power to fix. The swordsman pushed open the door and stepped out. It fell closed behind him, shutting out the sounds of his sister's incessant weeping.

The snow was coming down again, thick and hard. Jin's frozen garden was little more than a mass of sad lumps and ice sculptures among the growing drifts. He picked his way toward the front of the house, nearly dropping himself on his ass when he found the pond the hard way. He staggered once and righted himself with the help of the nearest tree. It proved frozen through, cracking to the heartwood but saving him from a fall.

His hand stung like he'd burned it. Wrapping cold-clumsy fingers around the hilt of his sword, he slid it from its sheath and used it as an inelegant crutch until he was off the damned pond. From then on he was more careful about his steps, sheltering in the lee of the house and making the laborious trek around to the front of it. It was cold, colder than he'd ever imagined, cold that was the worse for the empty silence all around him. The night swallowed up the rasping sounds of Jin's breath and the creak of the snow underfoot. Snowflakes dotted his hair and shoulders in a fine unmelted layer. He made the corner of the house with lungs burning from the cold and stopped there to catch his breath.

Something groaned--creaked--snapped. Silence. Then again--a long, low groan that became a shrill creak, then a brittle snap.

Jin bolted alert, breath coming faster. A moment and a handy drainspout saw him up onto the roof, which proved no less slippery than the ground. He had to crouch to keep his balance as he stared wide-eyed into the dark. Everything more than a yard from the roof's edge was lost to the snow and the night. Whatever was out there felt just a little beyond his seeing, close enough to be real but too far for him to make any shapes out.

Groan. Creak. SNAP.

This time as the swordsman strained to hear he could pick out the sound of breath soughing in and out of monstrous lungs. Then, even further out than the breathing beast, there was another groan-creak-snap and the squeak of compressed snow. Jin flattened himself to the roof, thumbing the old katana from its sheath until an inch of steel showed. No discernible sounds came from the house beneath him, which was the worse sign.

Another groan, this time followed by a great chaotic rustling of brush. Bending trees added a tortured note to the noise. One bent too far, cracked all the way up its length, and fell--close enough that Jin could feel the breeze against his face. A frost-rimed leaf drifted to the snow near his hand.

Silence reigned.

Then a sound like a bellows being pumped, followed by a wheezing sigh. A hot and fetid breeze swirled around him, melting the snow to rain and making him gag. There was a sticky pop close by as a little red dot swam out of the dark. Jin stared at it uncomprehending. Another pop, another dot. Another, and another. It was only when one of the dots rolled to focus on the swordsman that he realized what he was staring at--

Or more precisely, what was staring at him.

Up on a snowy knoll outside the house, Weathertop had the perfect vantage to listen in on the screaming. He nearly pissed himself laughing as he watched Ridgeley's bodylight wink out; if sai Uzuki was that quick on the draw, maybe he didn't even need to bother doing for his friends before taking the Rose. Nice as the thought was, though, he imagined the mistake was a one-off and that sobered him up. Not that Weathertop was afraid; far from it, he told himself. He just wasn't stupid, either.

No, Weathertop had no intention of barging down there to deal with the occupants of the house. Besides, if he stalled long enough the cousins Roger and his friends had let loose, the wormy-furred can-toi tak with their hundred eyes, would take care of the problem for him. But that wouldn't be any fun, would it, and the cousins seldom left an intact corpse behind once they were done with it. Better to suss out his chances to getting himself to the Rose and getting away with her before the house and everything in it got flattened. With that thought he stood up, squinting at the far-distant house and taking a good careful inventory of its inhabitants. Five bodies, one rapidly cooling, which left four. The Realian cocked his head, straining more than just his sight to glean the identities of those remaining four. Uzuki, it looked like--he was heading away from the scene of the kill--and the Rose (small and so bright and pure Weathertop could taste her), Uzuki's sister and the can calah.

All he'd gotten from his worthless subordinates pointed at there being six people up in the house. Which meant the big cyborg they had guarding the Rose wasn't with them, and nowhere close enough to the house Weathertop where would notice him. Too focused on the Rose, he'd been, and let one of them get out of his sight. It didn't mean a damn thing either if Ziggurat had found something else to occupy his attentions, but Weathertop didn't think a big fellow like him would be out clumping around trying to fix the sabotaged generators. "Well shit," he said, amiably enough. "Looks like we got ourselves a real problem here, sai Top."

He rucked the coat up about his shoulders, mobile lips turned downward in a frown. "Now what to do?" Turning, he swept the forest behind him with a cold, gold gaze, looking intently for signs of life. Nothing definite there either, beyond a distant squeak stressed snow and a maddening bob of movement just out of the corner of one eye. It disappeared when he turned to follow it, and IR was no help either--it was cold enough that everything just looked black, with trees a little less black than the rest and the snow a little more. He swore beneath his breath again, lips wrinkled back from his teeth in a silent snarl.

"Old bastard's more stealthy than he's got any right to be."

Still, there was only one of him, and like any good old dog, he could be distracted long enough to be put down. Weathertop's hand drifted to the piece he was carrying (a little tin-scrap piece of shit that would have made a serious gunslinger laugh himself sick--but it would get the job done, that's what mattered, say thank ya), fingers closing around the grip before jerking themselves away. "No, no, let's not go there quite yet. You come out carrying and he'll shoot first and ask questions of your bits," he remanded himself; stuffed the hand in a pocket.

Another squeak of snow close by made him start alert, staring in that direction and still seeing nothing. "Los damn it, I'm going batty." If it weren't for the perfect picture he had of the distant house, still lingering in memory for easy perusal, he'd have thought it was his sensors. He glanced sidelong, refreshing that picture in his mind. Uzuki had gone to the roof, and--there, god, there, they'd left the Rose alone in her own room in their hurry to moan and wail over Ridgeley's corpse. Teeth top-and-bottom nearly met in the flesh of his lip as he bit down, hard, resisting the urge to whimper at just how perfect it was. Well, that made his mind up for him, now didn't it. If they weren't going to bother keeping an eye on her, and her pet cyborg was out here playing hide-and-go-seek in the snow with him--how could he resist? How could he?

He eased a foot down the slope, giving the forest another look--then the other, shifting his weight and inching sidelong for a foot or two. Nothing moved in the minute that took him. "Hehh. Guess I must be getting daft in my old age. Poor old Top, his mind's going, going--" Almost as an afterthought, he hooked a thumb beneath the collar of the coat, peeling it off and tossing it away. "--gone! And I'm out of here!"

Making the bottom of the hill in two long strides, he took off in a sprint toward the house.

Bitter experience had taught Ziggurat 8 that not trusting in his own instincts led to trouble. The half-heard conversation or hint of footsteps behind you, the human shadow glimpsed fleetingly through smoke or twilight, a partial footprint captured in blood or grime--the good officer ignored these at his peril. He'd learned as much in the past, overlooking signs that might have averted disaster if only he could have seen... Experience filled in where memory often couldn't with a slow crawl beneath the skin, an urge to move in a man not usually restless. So out he went into the snow again on a hunch, not trusting (with the brittle cynicism of the often-disappointed) that things would be all right in the house, but trusting less that whatever had disabled the generators would leave it at that.

On this experience was ill help, though--following these urges to their logical conclusion just as often left the old cyborg in a different sort of trouble altogether than had he ignored them; just another restatement of the damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't theme that had plagued him since birth. But it was anathema to freeze when the situation demanded action--you had to do something. Find a clue. Demand a name from the shadow. As if solving this next mystery would set to right everything that had gone wrong in

(jan sauer's)

his life.

He stopped in place, lifting a foot (strange, even after all these years, to think of the metal as his, a part of him; better not to think about it at all) to shake the accumulation of snow from it; a pretext for pausing long enough to scan the barren landscape around him. Snow, everywhere snow, a thick white blanket such as Ziggy had never seen, in all his century and a half; and more coming down with every second now that night had come on. Given the option of cheap, effective climate control, few were the planetary governments in the local cluster who hadn't chosen to abolish deep winter entirely. Long experience on a handful of tropical worlds (and Lost Jerusalem before them) said that humans didn't need more than a shortening of daylight hours to function as if they had winter; snow was outmoded and unnecessary. No reason not to do away from it.

So much for that.

The cyborg snorted at the thought; the landscape was dead whatever way he looked at it, no indication of what he'd thought he'd seen or heard following them back to the house. One more sweep on a wider circuit all the way around the house, one that should take in the generators, and then he'd return. He set his foot down and started toward the next line of trees, reaching out a hand to brush a frozen branch out of his path--

Something shrieked behind him.

The house! It had been back the way he'd come from; Ziggy whipped around with a speed his size belied, taking three great strides that way. He was too far away, his enhanced hearing not nearly sharp enough to pick out who it had been, but the direction and the species of the owner (human) had been clear. So was the mortality. Men didn't scream that way except when they were dying; he had heard enough death-cries in his time to know.

(a nightmare of recollection: sharon and joaquin kneeling before their murderer, accepting death with smiles, but the other victims had not always been so complacent; and the screaming, screaming, resounding off the inside walls of a dead man's mind--)

Something flashed past him out of the corner of his vision, a ghost in the wasteland of snow and wintering trees. He snapped his head toward the blur, sensors alive, circuits etching data on the backs of his retinas. Telemetry, distance to, IR signature (much warmer than their surroundings), probable mass (a child, a Realian, here?), estimated velocity--even as the data poured past he'd already lurched into a run, powering back through snowdrifts when his own back-trail wasn't a straight enough line to the distant house. The wind rushing past his ears distorted but didn't deaden the sound as the distant figure yelled something; "--gone!" was the only word he heard clearly, but it was enough to confirm the identity of the speaker as sentient.

An ambush. They'd been set up, and someone had already paid for his inattention.