4.47: Assassination

“Speak gently and quietly,” Malas instructed, “and if she gets worn out, leave immediately. She has a severe concussion.”

“Is she going to be alright?” Hammond asked. (I’d run into him in the hallway. Apparently he couldn’t wait, either.)

“I don’t know. There are no problems as of right now. And most people – but not all people – recover quickly from a concussion. Things are promising but I can guarantee nothing.”

We tiptoed around the curtain. Saina, sitting up in bed with blue magic covering her left temple, offered us a drowsy smile.

“Hey,” I whispered.

“Hey,” she whispered back. “Did we win the treasure hunt?”

Hammond snorted a laugh. “No, the competition was called off. I think pit comps might be cancelled for a while.”

“Ah. Peter’s going to hate that.”

“He’ll get over it,” Hammond said. “How are you feeling?”

“Weak. Dizzy. Better now that my boys are here. Is anyone else hurt?”

“No,” I said. “They took down the illusion as soon as you were hurt. Talk about awful timing for a system to fail.”

“Would there have ever been a good time?” Hammond asked. “A good half of pit comps are based specifically on violence. People get in there and hit each other with weapons, go as hard as they can, try to ‘kill’ each other safely. This kind of competition was probably the safest time for it to fail.”

“Yeah, I guess.” It was kind of disturbing to think about, really. Most pit comps were about violence, about teaching kids to jump into an arena and beat the shit out of each other for fun, no consequences. Most schools did football and basketball or whatever, we usually duelled to the ‘death’. That couldn’t be great for the brain, right? Enough pit comp kids went on to work for Sekura Refujeyo that it was a stereotype; the brash, sporty sekkie kid. ‘makes a name for themselves beating people up for fun’ wasn’t exactly a great common history for most of our police force to share, right?

Yeah, yeah, I know. I know what that sounds like. ‘Woo, look at all these violent computer games making kids so violent, let’s ban shooting games’. But that’s not what the Pit was like. The Pit wasn’t like playing a computer game, it was like actually being somewhere and taking action. Me climbing a cliff in the Pit felt exactly the same as me doing it in the real world. I couldn’t bring myself fight in the Pit because I couldn’t bring myself to fight in the real world, and those two scenarios felt as real as each other. They were the same thing. It’s just that one was a place where someone could form habits like that without consequences.

Until now.

Or maybe I was being an ‘old man yells at cloud’, ‘boohoo kids entertainment is turning them evil’ fusspot. I dunno. It didn’t really matter at this point anyway.

We were shooed out after about two minutes, with Malas insisting that Saina needed rest. I wanted to protest, but Hammond put an arm around me and started walking, and there wasn’t much I could do against that.

“She’s going to have a lot of people dropping in on her soon,” he pointed out. “Her parents are probably on their way right now. If she needs rest, we shouldn’t get in the way.”

“Do you think she’ll – ”

“She’ll be alright,” Hammond said, in the tone of someone who couldn’t conceive of a world where what he was saying wasn’t the case. “We might get to see her again tomorrow.”

I nodded. Maybe, the next day, things would be normal.

The next day, things were not normal.

My first hint of things being very much not normal was when I went to the dining hall for breakfast and about twenty people from all over the room locked their eyes on me and got up. I turned around and left. Quickly.

I’d nearly made it back to my room when I was waylaid by Peter. “Did you know?!” he asked.

“Know what? What happened? Let me guess, they’ve cancelled pit comps after this, right?”

He waved a hand dismissively. “Forget that! Did you know about Parveen Surya?”

The expression on my face answered his question.

“Oh my god! You did! And you didn’t tell me?!”

“Isn’t this something to be angry at Saina about? What’s it got to do with me?!”

“Do you think Hammond knows? Oh, he’s going to be so upset. They’re such good friends, if she was lying to him about her identity – ”

“Wait,” I said, “hang on. How do you know who Saina is?”

He blinked at me like I was an idiot. “Everyone’s talking about it,” he pointed out. “After the assassination attempt.”

“The what?”

“The ass-ass-in-a-tion at-tempt. Yesterday. When someone shut off the safety systems on the Pit to get her killed. You were there, remember?”

I stared at him. “Someone was trying to assassinate Saina?”

“Um, yes! Presumably! I mean, can you think of any other reason to turn the safeties off and land the Surya heir in hospital? She’ll be safe now, I guess; there’s no way her family won’t pull her out of school after this.”

“They can’t pull her out of school, she’s under contract just like the rest – ”

“What part of ‘Surya heir’ is confusing you? You think the High Crone can be stopped by an initiation contract?”

I raced for the hospital ward, ignoring the couple of people along the way who wanted to talk to Parveen Surya’s boyfriend for inside goss on assassination plots, or whatever the hell people kept trying to stop me to talk about. The corridor to the hospital ward was absolutely choked with Sekuranti. Most of them were armed, with sheathed knives at least, and a couple carried fetishes that looked distinctly weaponiseable; wands and staffs and such. One carried what looked like a water gun covered in runes, and the few familiars crowding the corridor were big and muscular, with claws or teeth. Big dogs mostly. A bird of prey of some kind. And, it was hard to tell through the crowd, but it looked like an animal way down the other side of the corridor might be a tiger. (That couldn’t possibly be right, could it? There was no way anyone would take a tiger, even a familiar, into a crowded or confined place like this. That was just asking for an innocent to get mauled.)

A steely-eyed woman with a lot of tattoos and a big silver baton stopped me. “Do you need medical attention?” she asked in Ido.

“No, I need to see Sain – ”

“The Lady isn’t accepting visitors right now. Please move around.”

“But I’m her boyfr – ”

“The Lady isn’t accepting visitors right now. Please move around.”

“Okay, fine.” I pulled out my runecrafting pen and prepared to bring it down and slice open my arm, but the sekuranti caught my hand in her (unnecessarily tight, I thought) grip.

“You’re the fourteenth student to try that stunt today,” she said. (At least, I think that’s what she said. My Ido still wasn’t exactly fluent.) “If you come here with an injury, you will be allowed through to see the very tired, very annoyed, very time-stressed kuracar, or one of his equally tired and annoyed apprentices. You will be patched up. You will be sent on your way. You will still not, at any point, see the Lady. Understand?”

“Yes,” I snapped in Ido. She released my hand. I put the pen away.

Fine. Saina would probably insist on seeing me at some point, so I just had to… wait. I headed back to the safety of my room. Max was there, reading some big old-looking book with a title in a language I didn’t speak.

“Hey,” I said, “apparently the Pit thing was – ”

“Nobody’s trying to assassinate Saina,” Max said, not looking up. “People are just assuming that because nobody expects the Pit enchantments to break on their own, and she’s high profile.”

“Oh. Are you sure?”

“Yes. Well, no; somebody, somewhere, might be trying to kill her. I looked into the Surya Duniyasar political situation when we were dealing with the whole Heiress prophecy and apparently things have been getting more and more tense for awhile; there’s probably a few traditionalist extremist groups out there who think the Suryas have lost their way and should pay in blood or some other stupid nonsense. But nobody hacked the Pit enchantments to try and kill her.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because nobody smart enough to accomplish that would be stupid enough to try it. It’s the worst assassination plan ever. Look at your hands.”

I looked at my hands. They were… hands. Same as they’d always been. Could do with a wash, perhaps, and the nails and palms were a little torn up from being careless trying to climb the limestone cliff in the…

Oh.

“The satefy enchantment didn’t come down just for Saina’s injury,” I said. “It had been down for awhile.”

Max nodded. “The last injury that caused safe paralysis, at least that was big enough for us in the audience to see, was your friend Hammond getting munched up by the giant spider. Meaning that somewhere between you leaving that forest, and you climbing the cliff, the enchantment came down. There was plenty of time after that for anyone to get injured by any number of things. Eight people were in that arena; there was no guarantee at all that Saina would be the next one to get hurt. Terrible assassination plan.”

“I should have noticed,” I said, still staring at my hands. “How did I not notice? I knew how the safety charm worked!”

“Don’t beat yourself up about that. Half the players were picking through a junkheap, and everyone was struggling up a mountain; do you really think you’re the only one to get little scrapes and bruises? Everyone would have. Nobody noticed.”

“How could we not notice?!”

“Probably because you climb stuff in the real world in training all the time? You’re used to little scrapes, right? Probably don’t even really think of them as injuries. Nobody drew any blood, so nobody really thought about how they should be getting numb skin, not scrapes.”

“If I had’ve paid attention, Saina wouldn’t – ”

“Nobody noticed! Don’t beat yourself up over it. Anyway, an assassin wouldn’t use such a stupid plan with such high chances of failure. The chance of the next person getting properly hurt was one in eight. Even if an assassin could’ve been certain to get Saina, there’s no way to guarantee a fatal injury. And nobody in their right minds would believe it was an accident; there’s presumably an investigation going on right now on anyone who got anywhere near the Pit enchantments, which can only be accessed through a secure area, of course. It’s too high risk for something too unreliable; anyone who was willing to do something so obvious and attention-getting would have just shot her.”

“Well, maybe someone who didn’t have the opportunity to get close enough – ”

“If the Pit was their best option, they wouldn’t turn a safety feature off and hope for the best. If they’re already altering things, they could just rig the Pit to be really hot and incinerate all of you when the game begins. Or to crush you all to the size of a marble. Or fling you into an empty void with no oxygen, maybe fill it with mustard gas or something so a quick rescue wouldn’t save you, or – ”

“Okay, okay, you’ve made your point! Wow, now I never want to go into the Pit again.”

“Probably for the best. Has going in there ever not been awful for you?”

“… Point.”

He turned a page in his big book, and grimaced.

“What are you reading?” I asked.

“A record of various contracts and agreements made between various long-dead people who once resided in various areas of Pakistan. It’s extremely boring.”

“Okay, why?”

“Because while the history of the political and social aspects of Refujeyo are well-known and well-recorded, it is remarkably difficult to find information on the actual construction of the site, at least information with solid dates attached. And when one knows what one is looking for, one can tie some of these materials, services and territorial exchanges and disagreements to certain construction projects taking place in the general area of Duniyasar. And these exchanges are dated, so.”

“So… learning anything interesting?”

“I am learning a lot of very interesting things, and I am learning them in the most boring way possible. Have you ever noticed how little platinum is around the school?”

“Uh… what?”

“Platinum. it’s an extremely expensive metal. I haven’t seen any outside the labs, have you?”

“I… wouldn’t know?”

“No basalt, either. I’ve checked pretty thoroughly. Not a stone in common use here.” He slammed the book shut. “Kylie still owns Duniyasar, right?”

“Yeah, for now. You’re out of luck if you want to go there, though. Between us and the portal are about ten billion Sekura people keeping everyone away from Saina.”

Max cursed quietly.

“Why? What’s this about? What do basalt and platinum have to do with anything?”

“Oh, not much.” He grinned. “Just, well. You remember how we apparently found important secrets deep under the school, and then lost all memories of them?”

“Yes?”

“I think we can get them back from Duniyasar. Without having to go through the Labyrinth of Dreams.”