The Nine Read online

  Whimsby smiled, as though to say, you’re not going to like this, but… “I am not permitted to speak about why I am not permitted to speak about the things I’m not permitted to speak about.”

  “Alright.” Perry stood up. “Stuber, blow his kneecap off.”

  “I assure you, that won’t make a difference. I mean, it’ll make a difference to me. But it won’t change what I’m permitted to speak about.”

  Perry stepped back, shaking his head, and pointing to Whimsby’s right knee.

  Stuber stepped over and lowered the muzzle of his rifle so that it hovered over the kneecap. His eyes were on Whimsby. “You sure you want me to do this?”

  “I actually have no desire at all for you to do it. But if the options are for me to speak about things I’m not permitted to speak about, or get my kneecap blown off, it would seem that it’s inevitable that I lose my kneecap. Is there anything I can say that would keep you from feeling the need to do this?”

  “Yeah,” Perry snapped. “You can tell us about the East Ruins. Where they are. How far away. What’s there.” He paused, considering how much of his cards to show. “And something called the Source. You can tell us about that.”

  Whimsby let out a great, long, exasperated sigh. “Very well.”

  “Very well, you’ll tell us?” Perry brightened.

  “No. Very well, do what you feel you must do.”

  Perry flashed his teeth. “Fuck it. Do it.”

  Stuber fired a single round. The gunshot rocked the serene mountainside. A flock of birds took flight, squawking their indignation.

  Whimsby gazed down at his knee with consternation. “That was very rude. And it will be expensive to fix.”

  Perry was so shocked by the absolute, impossible stoicism, the complete lack of pain on Whimsby’s face, that he just stared at the man for a long moment, his mouth open.

  “Oh,” Stuber murmured. “Uh. Perry?”

  Perry tore his eyes off of the man who he increasingly believed must be insane, and he looked at Stuber, but Stuber frowned down at the knee with a mixed look of surprise and discomfort.

  Perry dragged his eyes down to the knee, expecting a mess of blood and exposed tendons.

  Instead, he saw wires, steel, and a thin stream of acrid gray smoke rising from the hole in Whimsby’s leg.

  Perry jolted upright and pointed the longstaff at him. “You’re a fucking mech!”

  Whimsby looked up at Perry as though such a thing was obvious. “I’m sorry. I assumed you had figured that out yourself. Perhaps you’re not as astute as I first believed. I suppose you did get captured by a polymorph. That shows a certain lack of circumspection…”

  “Shut up!” Perry’s grip worked on the longstaff, his brain reeling about for something solid to grab onto. It didn’t take long. “Shit. Mechs mean paladins. Do you work for the paladins?”

  “I work for Warden Abbas.”

  “Is he a fucking paladin?”

  “Well, I suppose technically he is, though he lacks Confluence, which is why he finds himself in Praesidium. It’s complicated.”

  Perry only understood half of what Whimsby had said, but he didn’t want to get sidetracked. “Well, fucking un-complicate it for me, Whimsby!”

  “I am just a servant to the warden of Praesidium. But extrapolating from years of rumors, it seems that not all paladins possess Confluence, and the Warden of Praesidium is one of the places where they send those that are lacking. They are, shall we say…looked down upon.”

  “But he’s still a paladin! You still work for paladins!” Perry’s eyes widened. “Have you told them about us? Are there paladins on the way right now?”

  “No, I have not made any direct communications with anyone. And no, I don’t believe that there are paladins on the way right now. However, you should be aware that at any point in time, Warden Abbas can choose to observe through my eyes. Whether he has done that or not, I do not know, and what he would choose to do if he saw that you’d taken me captive I do not know either.”

  “Choose to observe through your…” Perry stopped himself midsentence. Horror suddenly gripped him. “Oh, Gods in the skies. Stuber. The mech at Fiendevelt.”

  Stuber nodded as Perry said it. “They could have seen you.”

  Perry remembered the red glow that sat beneath the trappings of a human eye. How it had stared at Perry in its last moments, after he’d scoured away the front half of the thing’s body with his shield. What if the paladins had been watching? What if it was all recorded?

  “Teran! Sagum!” Perry shouted.

  “We’re right here,” he heard Teran say over his shoulder.

  He spun about, surprised to find them there. “Oh. I thought you were searching the car.”

  Sagum looked piqued. “You shot a man’s knee off. We got a little distracted.”

  “Never mind that,” Perry snapped. “He’s not a man, he’s a mech, and—”

  “We’ve been standing here the whole time,” Teran cut him off. “And yes. They might know we’re here.”

  “Okay great. Glad we’re up to speed.” He whirled back to Whimsby. “Why did you come for us? Who told you we would be out here, and what did they tell you to do with us?”

  “Well. I observed the approach of your party to The Cliffs through our long-range scanners at Praesidium—”

  “Bullshit,” Perry barked. “That’s what you said last night!”

  Whimsby took a moment to consider this, as though wondering—calculating?—what that had to do with anything. “Yes, I do recall telling you that last night. So it appears that I’ve already answered that portion of your question.”

  “You lied.”

  “No. That was the truth.”

  “I don’t believe a godsdamned word you say at this point.”

  Whimsby cocked an eyebrow. “Then why are you still asking me questions?”

  Oh, screw your computer brain.

  But he had a point.

  “Fine. What about the rest of my question? Who sent you, and what did they tell you to do with us?”

  “Ah, yes. Warden Abbas sent me. And he instructed me to escort you to Praesidium, and to make sure that you all four arrived unharmed. He was very adamant on that last point.”

  Stuber grunted. “Because they want live prisoners.”

  Whimsby shrugged. “That’s an excellent guess. I did not question my orders, so I can’t tell you what Warden Abbas’s personal motivations were. However, if it helps you to reason out your next move in a logical way, I can tell you that there is no love lost between Warden Abbas and the paladins. You may find him to be surprisingly helpful. Also, I am not permitted to speak about certain things—”

  “Yes, you’ve made that abundantly clear,” Perry griped.

  “—however, being a biological entity, Warden Abbas is not subject to the programming restrictions that I am. He may be willing to tell you what you want to know.”

  “See, that would require us going to meet him,” Perry pointed out. “Which, and I’m just gonna hazard a guess, will probably result in him sending a longstaff bolt through our heads.”

  Whimsby frowned. “There is much wrong with what you’ve just said. First and foremost, as I’ve already explained, Warden Abbas is not Confluent. Secondly—”

  “Alright, stop,” Perry demanded, holding up a hand. “You keep using that word. What does it mean?”

  Whimsby looked bewildered, like Perry had just asked him if the moon was truly made of cheese, and if so, could he get a slice. “Right. It appears that something is being lost in translation. You are aware that you yourself are Confluent, are you not?”

  Perry blinked rapidly. “What…No. I am not Confluid, or whatever you’re talking about.”

  “Confluent,” Whimsy corrected. “And your use of an energy shield and a longstaff would appear to suggest that you are indeed Confluent.”

  “The god tech you mean?”

  “No, the ability to use the god tech. That ability
is known as The Gift, or more commonly, Confluence.”

  “And Warden Abbas doesn’t have it?”

  “No. He does not.”

  “How is that possible? You said he was a paladin.”

  “I said he was technically a paladin, based upon your usage of the term. Not on theirs. To them, he’s just…let me see if I can find a delicate way to put this…a genetic mistake?”

  Perry took an involuntary step back, as Paladin Selos’s last words shot through his head again like a thunderbolt, so strong that he could almost hear them.

  You’re an unfortunate genetic mistake.

  And so, too, was Warden Abbas. If Whimsby was to be believed.

  Despite himself, that little connection turned Perry’s image of Warden Abbas from a tall, sneering demigod, to something far more human. Something like Perry himself.

  Don’t fall for their bullshit. They are still the enemy. Warden Abbas is still one of them, whether they want him or not. He is my enemy.

  “So Warden Abbas would not be able to use a longstaff or shield against me. According to you.”

  “That is correct. And to your other point, I highly doubt that Warden Abbas intends to harm you. If he wanted you harmed, I don’t think he would have sent me to save you. He would have just let the polymorphs do the job for him. Or, if you prefer to look at it another way, he would have sent me to kill you, should you make it up The Cliffs alive. So, unless Warden Abbas is in a fit of faulty reasoning, which I don’t believe he is, then I must conclude that he doesn’t want you harmed.”

  Stuber looked at Perry. “Still might just want live prisoners.”

  Perry wrestled with an onslaught of possibilities and decisions. There were a lot of different ways to play this. This was like those damn strategy games they forced him to play at Hell’s Hollow. They required you to think three moves ahead, and to have three options to fall back on, and counter moves to your opponent’s moves, and Perry could never keep all that shit in his head at the same time.

  He hadn’t been the worst, but he’d been far from the best.

  He needed to talk this out. He needed to combine his brains with the others.

  But there was something he needed to do first, and quickly.

  He turned to Sagum. “Let me have your neckerchief.”

  Sagum touched it, looking profoundly offended, like Perry had just asked him to hand over his testicles. It was, after all, his namesake. He’d somehow managed to get the best of a legionnaire, and now wore a piece of that legionairre’s sagum cape as a memento.

  “This is the piece of cape that I…” he seemed prepared to launch into the story once more, but Teran stopped him by seizing the scrap of faded red cloth between two fingers.

  “This is the piece of cape that you cut off a legionnaire that was already half dead,” she growled at him. “Or did you forget that you told me about that?”

  Sagum’s face reddened. “That was supposed to be a secret.”

  Perry snapped his fingers. “I don’t give a shit where you got it, Sagum! We need it!”

  “Alright!” Sagum almost yelled. Then, quieter: “Alright. Just…let me take it off.”

  It seemed an emotional moment. Like he meant to draw it out into a long goodbye. But the second that he had untied the knot at the back of his neck, Teran swiped it away from him with a whispered curse and handed it to Perry.

  Perry took it, rolled it twice, and then used it to blindfold Whimsby. “At least this way if Abbas tries to watch through Whimsby’s head, he won’t see shit. And Whimsby, I swear to the gods, if you start talking before I tell you it’s okay, I will shoot you dead.”

  “Yes, I believe you will.”

  “Also, don’t move, because I’ll—”

  “Shoot me?”

  “Yes.” Perry turned and pointed to the buggy. “Sagum, did you see anything in there that might’ve been a listening device?”

  Smoothing his ruffled feathers, Sagum shook his head. “Not that I could tell. That’s not a guarantee, though.”

  “It’ll have to be good enough,” Perry said. “Let’s get in the buggy.”

  It was a gamble. But Perry had a feeling that the mech’s hearing was probably much better than theirs, and possibly could be dialed up to listen in on them, even if they walked a good distance away. And he didn’t want to go too far from Whimsby. He still wanted to be able to make good on his threat.

  They piled into the buggy, closing the doors behind them.

  “He might still be able to hear us,” Stuber pointed out.

  “I know that. What do you want me to do?”

  “I could just kill him.”

  Perry thought about it for a second, forming another idea. “Okay. Stuber, go put a round in his head.” He reached out and seized Stuber’s thick arm, shaking his head. He mouthed the word “Don’t.”

  His companions understood, and all eyes went to Whimsby.

  Who simply sat there. Serene.

  Perry went so far as to open his door and then close it again, to give the effect of Stuber getting out.

  Whimsby inclined his head towards the buggy, as though curious, but made no move to attempt to escape. His expression didn’t change.

  “Okay,” Perry breathed. “Either he can’t hear us or he just doesn’t care.”

  A glance around the cab of the buggy showed three doubtful faces.

  They were just going to have to deal with it. They had no idea how much time they had, or if someone was coming for them. Speaking in here wasn’t a perfect solution, but it was the best and fastest one they had.

  “Stuber,” Perry said, maintaining the low whisper. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

  Stuber kept his eyes on Whimsby. His jaw muscles bunched, causing the beard on his chin to roil like a tiny forest caught in an earthquake.

  “Okay. We know a little, and we don’t know a whole lot. I’d like to question Whimsby further. But I don’t think we should stay here. If anyone is coming, we need to be a moving target. Which begs the question, where do we go? We don’t know anything about this terrain, or what’s out here. We know that there is a place called Praesidium somewhere east of us. We know that there is a paladin there. Or a half a paladin, or whatever.”

  Stuber paused, chewing a flaking bit of skin from his chapped lips. “I want to put eyes on this place. That’s what I would do. I would get the location from Whimsby, along with any other information I can get, and then I’d recon that shit, nice and quiet.”

  Sagum shifted in his seat, looking at Stuber. “How do you know that Whimsby will tell you where Praesidium is?”

  Stuber shrugged. “His whole reason for being out here is to get us back to Praesidium. Even if he has to do it bound in the back of the cargo bed, he’ll tell us how to get there.”

  “Here’s something else,” Teran put in. “How do we know he’s not transmitting or something? We have no idea what his capabilities are. He could be able to communicate with this Warden Abbas without even opening his mouth. Maybe he’s sending him messages right now.” She grabbed Perry’s arm, realizing something else. “And if Abbas looks through Whimsby’s eyes, he’ll see red cloth. How long do you think it’ll take for him to figure that out?”

  “Which is why we need to be moving,” Stuber asserted.

  “Whimsby could have a tracking device planted inside of him!” Teran hissed.

  Stuber gave an irritable growl. “He could have fucking laser cannons that sprout out of his asshole, Teran. Gods. We gotta work with what we know, not get paralyzed by all the what-ifs.”

  Perry looked to Sagum, and figured this would be a nice time for Sagum to show off his expertise. Maybe it would soothe his chafed ego. “Sagum. What do you know about mechanical men?”

  Predictably, Sagum looked pleased. “Well. I don’t know everything about them. But I did take apart that one that you bisected in Fiendevelt. And I know a good bit from reading.”

  Perry rolled his hand in a get on with it gesture. />
  Sagum leaned forward. “Okay. So the one in Fiendevelt seemed like a pretty basic machine to me. Doesn’t mean that this Whimsby is created to the same specs. But I didn’t see any hidden weapon compartments or shit like that, and if Whimsby had them, I figure he’d have already used them.”

  “I wasn’t actually worried about laser beams in his ass,” Stuber commented. “I was just arguing with Teran.”

  Sagum ignored this. “Technical specs I can’t speak to—they could all be manufactured differently. But there are a few commonalities. Mechs can’t really think for themselves. Whimsby does a great job of appearing to have a consciousness, but it’s not actually there. He’s just a machine. But a very complicated one. It enables him to walk, talk, and act like a normal human being. But he still exists inside parameters that are not only set by how he was built, but also by whoever owns him—in this case Warden Abbas. Take for instance the things he says he’s not permitted to speak about. He’s not lying about that. He can’t violate his protocol. If Abbas told him not to talk about certain things, he literally can’t. And along that same train of thought, I’m not entirely sure that a mech can lie.”

  “He lied last night,” Perry said. “He told us he’d never heard of the East Ruins. Which is obviously bullshit, and obviously the East Ruins is a thing, because Abbas ordered him not to talk about it.”

  “Actually,” Sagum held up a finger, grinning. “What he said last night when you asked about it was ‘I can’t say that I have.’ Which is actually the truth. He can’t say that he has, because he’s not permitted to speak about it.”

  Perry frowned. “Are you sure about that? How do you remember exactly what he said?”

  Sagum shuffled his shoulders like a preening bird. “I have an excellent memory. And I’m a good listener.”

  “So are you saying you believe he’s telling the truth about Praesidium and Warden Abbas?”

  Sagum bit his lip, but then nodded. “Yes. I think he’s telling the truth. I don’t think he has a choice, though his programming is sophisticated enough that sometimes he can find a way to phrase things to draw you off.” A frown. “Wow. That’s really impressive. I’d love to take him apart.”