Malak's Arc

Chapter 4 of 4

The hawk came back at dawn with dust on its feathers and a tracker on its tail. Malak saw the second shape on the long-range screen, a single rider crossing the dunes in the bird's wake. The corporation had read the flight path and sent a man to walk it backward. If the rider held his line, he would reach the labyrinth before nightfall. Malak had hours, not days. He pulled on the shawl and took up the scepter. He did not run. He pulled a map from the table and marked three points: the labyrinth where the real archives lay, a tower of antennas two ridges south, and an open stretch of sand between them. He needed the rider to commit to the wrong line and stay committed long enough to lose the right one. First he went to the open stretch and dragged a long black case out into the sun. The case was the size of a coffin and drank the light off the sand. He set it half-buried, lid askew, as if someone had started a burial and run. He scattered a board of broken tiles and colored stones beside it, the kind of marker travelers leave to count their dead. Within the hour, carrion birds began to circle a pit he had opened the week before, the bodies inside long past use. From a ridge, the scene would read as a recent grave, a panicked stop, a man who had buried something and fled south. Then he climbed the antenna tower. Its yellow fronds bristled with deflectors in every direction. He keyed it to throw a false signal pattern outward — heat, movement, the shape of a man working inside. He set it to pulse for six hours and climbed down. The tower would shout his presence two ridges from where his presence actually was. He waited on a high rock with the scope. The rider came over the dune near dusk and stopped at the black case. He circled it. He photographed the stone marker. He looked at the vultures, then at the tower throwing its noise into the sky, and turned his mount toward the tower. Malak watched until the rider was committed to the wrong ridge, then climbed down and walked home the long way, sweeping his prints behind him with the shawl. The labyrinth held. The trail south would keep the rider busy until morning, and by morning he would find an empty tower and a hole in the sand. But the corporation now knew the hawk had flown from somewhere near here, and they would send a second tracker, and a third. Malak set the scepter against the wall and opened the screen. He had bought one night. He began to plan for what came after it.