Ikamja grinned, baring needle-sharp teeth. We had an understanding, we’d had one ever since our alliance forged in blood on the Urcos plateau, but that didn’t make her any less of a predator.
“You should be thanking me, really. I think it’s rather generous to give an old friend four months to resurrect before concluding her corpse can be re-used for the sustenance of others.”
“Four months?” I said. I shouldn’t have been shocked; time passed at the same rate in both worlds, my coma had already established that.
“Four months,” Ikamja said with a nod. “No breath, no motion, no heartbeat. And yet your body did not rot; still perfectly palatable.”
“Where did you find me?”
“A shallow grave, in a field, a few miles outside of Grantval. It was a Nahajet grave, strangely enough, marked ‘Alraune’ in Rochathan script. Would you like to explain that?”
I nodded. “Tersine. She’s…a Cassandran agent. It’s a bit of a long story, but she’s the one who killed me the first time.”
“But you came back.” Ikamja made it sound perfectly normal.
I shrugged. “I mean, I didn’t really die at all. More like… my mind was separated from my body. Sent somewhere else. Took me this long to come back, and even then only because… You know, I guess I should thank you. Now that I think about it, that butcher knife carving into my arm may have been the final push I needed to make it back.”
“Then I accept your thanks, Emma Marcus Farrier.” Ikamja sketched a loose half-bow. “Would you like to accompany me? Much has changed since last we met.”
I accepted her invitation, and she led me out of the tent into the wider camp. The sheer scale of the operation immediately caught me off-guard. The tent where I’d been in the process of being butchered was just one of a whole row of identically-sized tents all used for processing meat. Whether that meat was human or not was a question I wasn’t going to ask. Past them were more tents used for storage of other foodstuffs, centered around a huge kitchen tent that sweltered with the heat of cooking-fires.
The same pattern continued throughout: Ikamja’s entire operation had absolutely ballooned in size. The last time I’d met her, maybe nine or ten months before, she had only a few hundred stonewose under her command, a company of mercenaries in service to the Cassandran Empire. Such a short time had passed, and yet somehow the size of her army had increased an order of magnitude, somewhere north of four thousand combat-capable stonewose, not counting those too young or too old to fight. Their camp spread out like a small town made entirely out of tents, all of it meant to be picked up and moved somewhere else when the time came. I tried not to think about what that population had to be eating.
As the initial rush of return faded away—and as the smell of all the food hit me—I realized I was absolutely starving. This body hadn’t eaten in seven months after all. Fortunately, Ikamja wasn’t going to let me go hungry; we stopped at the dining tent, and after Ikamja finished receiving reports from every single subordinate officer in a hundred-foot radius, she sat down across from me. The food was nothing exceptional, sausage and dried fruit with a sort of vegetable sauce, but I was hungry enough that anything would have tasted good. In fact, it was so good, that I’d swallowed three-quarters of the meal before I thought to ask the burning question.
“You said you found me near Grantval. What were you doing around there?”
Ikamja looked around, as though she had been moved somewhere else without noticing. “The same as we always do. The same thing that we are cursed to do. I have not changed, Emma Marcus Farrier.”
A shiver of tension passed down the length of my spine. “You left Urcos?”
“Of course I did. We were starving up there, always on the very brink of being taken. The Cassandrans left us with enough guns that we could go wherever we wanted, take whatever we pleased. So I moved the war band south, and any other Accursed we met along the way either died or joined. Nearly all the land between Zander and the northern coast belongs to me.”
“Ikamja the Conqueror,” I said.
“Indeed.”
“I’m surprised nobody’s stopped you. I may have more sympathy for your people than most, but if I were anyone with any power at all in Bluerose and I saw the local ghouls trying to pull a Genghis Khan schtick, I’d start some shit.”
I’d let an Earth history reference slip through again, but instead of looking confusedly at me, Ikamja started laughing, and didn’t get herself under control for a solid handful of seconds, long enough for me to shove more food down my throat.
“Yes,” she said, “perhaps they would. But I’m afraid the humans have something more pressing to worry themselves about.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“You are ignorant? I suppose you must have been already dead when the war started.”
The memories slammed back into my awareness. Cassandra invading Fanggard Fortress, the tension in the streets. It had been more than long enough on this side for that initial strike to explode into a much larger conflict.
“Like I said, I wasn’t actually dead. I was… somewhere else, and trying really damn hard to get back. The war slipped my mind. How has it been going?”
“I’m glad you asked,” Ikamja said. “Some of my commanders have questioned the need for intelligence on the progress of a war between humans.”
“Weren’t you serving on one side of that war less than a year ago?”
“Yes, I was. And then you delivered an extremely convincing argument against that plan of action directly to my sternum.” Ikamja pulled down her collar, revealing the huge, dark scar I’d given her in our first encounter.
I couldn’t help but wince. “Fair enough. So, who’s winning?”
“Cassandra.” Ikamja shrugged. “How could it have been any other way?”
I nodded. Cassandra was the larger nation, a vast empire that had lasted for several hundred years, backed by a huge industrial might and extreme technological prowess, while Bluerose was the upstart. It made sense that Cassandra would take the upper hand in terms of the fighting. Just as they had in the last two Secession Wars, really.
“I’m surprised they haven’t invaded Grantval yet,” I said.
“Yet,” Ikamja replied. “Last I heard the battle is still mostly out at sea, with the occasional bout of shelling by the Cassandrans. Outmatched though they may be, the Bluerosers are fighting for their homeland, and that sort of morale can lend might beyond mere numbers.”
I fell silent, letting Ikamja give me whatever updates about the war she felt were necessary. Everywhere the situation was the same: Bluerose was on the back foot, but for at least a little while was holding off a complete collapse. It was interesting information, but not what I really wanted to hear about. What I yearned for was news of Laura, of Lady Halflance and Doctor Charcharias and the others, where they had gone to, if they had held up well with my apparent death. How I could find them and let them all know I was still alive.
But Ikamja had never even met any of them. The closest she’d ever come to knowing Lady Halflance was as one of several commanders on the Bluerose side of the battle of Zrimash, and even then only as a name and a presence. I wasn’t going to get any relevant information from her.
Which raised a real question: what next? For so long I’d been completely consumed by thoughts of doing this, of making it back to Selene, of making my life on Earth even vaguely tolerable. Now that I’d done it, I found myself strangely lost. Everything had turned upside-down in my absence, consumed by war and confusion, and somehow my only ally was a monster I’d used to dispose of another monster a while back.
The question only became more pressing once I’d finished stuffing myself, and it became clear that Ikamja wanted to get rid of me. She walked me over to the stores, handing me a pack, weaponry, ammo, bread and dried meat, even a fresh set of clothes (presumably meant for tween-aged stonewose, considering how big they are and how small I am). All the while, I kept bouncing the question around in my head: what next? Where was I going to go? I mean, we were in the middle of nowhere, over a hundred miles from even the nearest railway line. If I wanted to go anywhere at all, I’d be walking for weeks.
Which suddenly reminded me of the time pressure I was under. Not just the pressure of finding Laura, of rebuilding my life on this side of the void; Tersine was still out there, and I still needed to stop her. The fact that Ikamja hadn’t mentioned anything about a new super weapon gave me hope that, somehow, she hadn’t reached Primary Control just yet, leaving me with some amount of time to stop her still.
As Ikamja showed me to the main gate of the camp, my mind went into overdrive figuring out how to find Tersine and stop her before it was too late. Even once I’d walked back to human territory, how long would it take to find my way back to Amrinval, or wherever Laura and Lady Halflance were now? Would they even know where Tersine was, or would I make it back home only to start the whole search process over again, leading into the same situation that had gotten me taken out to begin with? No, there had to be another way.
And there was one place on all of Imbrium that I knew Tersine would be going, one place where I would either find her, or else be able to wait in ambush for her arrival. Primary Control. The red X marked on the map at the absolute center of the Great Desolation, hundreds of miles to the east. If I could somehow make it there, then I could take her down without even having to do any of the detective work.
Ikamja and I stood at the edge of the camp, looking out over the vast expenses of reclaimed prairie that filled the space between the cities and farmlands of northern Bluerose. It was a beautiful landscape, if sparse. Ikamja seemed to understand that too, pausing to rest on her sword-spear for a moment.
“Tell me, Ikamja, have you ever been into the Great Desolation?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Myself? No. But many of my followers have been there, as it is a frequent stop in the wanderings of the southern raiding bands. I hear there are many of my kin who dwell there, far from the marauding guns of the humans. Why do you ask?”
“Well, I was just thinking…” I paused, piecing together my argument as best as I could. “Have you ever heard of a place called Primary Control?”
“I have not.”
“Apparently it’s some kind of Forebearer ruin, or an artifact or something. I don’t know what it is precisely, I’m not sure anybody does, but from what I’ve heard it’s some kind of weapon.”
Her eyes narrowed as she turned on me, pivoting around the sword-spear to give a look that could see through flesh and skin to the bones underneath. “Why do you mention such a thing?”
“We’re allies, aren’t we? Not necessarily friends, what with the whole anthropophagy thing, but at bare minimum allies. Allies share information, and this is something I thought you might be rather interested in.”
“I do not care for miracle weapons,” Ikamja said with a sigh. “Were I the type to become obsessed with such easy solutions, I would still be a petty tyrant in the frozen mountains of Urcos.”
I nodded. Then, adjusting the leather straps on my bag, I took a few tentative steps into the wilderness.
“Of course, that makes perfect sense. I guess the Cassandrans must have been fooled by false promises as well.”
I walked slowly, casually. If the trap didn’t work, I’d have nothing but my own hands with which to resume the fight against Tersine. Fortunately, after a few seconds, my words had their desired effect.
“Halt.”
I turned around. “Hmm?”
“You imply the Cassandrans are hunting after this supposed weapon as well?”
I nodded. “Tersine, the one who killed me, has been hunting after this thing for, oh, a year? She seems convinced that it’ll win her country the entire war. You’d better hope that’s not true, considering what you did to that reikverratr.”
Ikamja’s expression continued to darken. “I see through your clumsy manipulations, Emma Farrier. You wish for me to delve into the Great Desolation, hunt down this Primary Control weapon for your sake.”
“Close. I don’t really give a shit about the weapon; it’s Tersine I want.” I smirked unconsciously. “But you can’t really afford to let her have it, can you?”
“No, I cannot.” Ikamja looked up at me, eyes narrowed. “Do you mean to say that you wish to come with us?”
“Of course. I wouldn’t be a very good ally if I sent you and your little circus off on your own, would I?”
Ikamja grinned, showing her needle teeth. “The courage to lead from the front? Perhaps this is not a misdirection after all. I will not change the functioning of my camp to accommodate for the presence of a human. You will have to learn to live with our less…savory activities.”
I grimaced, knowing exactly what she was referring to. Life would move on just as surely as it had before I’d ever arrived; my presence wasn’t going to add to the death toll. What was I going to do, kill them all?
“I think I can learn to live with it,” I said.
Ikamja gave me a half-bow of respect, then turned around and started walking back into the camp. “If this was your plan all along, then I congratulate you for outwitting me once again. Come.”
I followed, breaking out briefly into a jog to catch up with her. After a moment, Ikamja said softly, “If you are lying to me, none of your special talents will allow you to evade my wrath.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”