The Vastness

by Hausladen, Blake;

  “Leger, please. I did this with hope that you would be able to continue as you were. I feared nothing would be left of you but rage and murder, but here you stand, your spirit whole. You are no puppet, dear friend. Please, come with us. Barok needs you.”

  “Madness,” I said.

  Lady Jayme spoke over Fana. “I am what Barok made me, and you are the same—a weapon of the Spirit of the Earth. No man can kill you. No Hessier can unmake you. We are returning to Enhedu, where your spirit will be strong. Come with us and you will be the Earth’s vengeance.”

  Fana said, “Leger, Dia and her child were taken. We are losing. We need you. Will you come with us?”

  “Taken?” I asked, and wanted desperately to hear Fana’s tale of all that had happened. The mist closed in and the tingle of pain returned. “I am fading. It hurts. What should I do?”

  “Follow me,” Fana said, and they led me through the back of the shop and out into an ally and a wagon. A long casket filled its bed.

  “Get inside,” she said.

  The pine box was lined with old blood-stained rags. The blood was Barok’s. I stumbled up and climbed inside as the mist closed in around me. A lid was fit upon the box and the wagon began to move.

  28

  Dia Vesteal

  Peboy Vamindavida

  It was well before the dawn when Burhn opened the iron doors and began his long walk back down to Verd in search of more acid for his Ashmari master. He’d not slept and neither did I. There seemed little chance I would see him again.

  The others had worked hard through the night to get him ready, and as they settled in, the hiss of the hot springs and the guttering of my small lantern became the only sound.

  I studied my blood-speckled hands in the soft glow. Memories of the cracking of a midwife’s skull stabbed at my calm, and an odd feeling crept along my hands and arms. I felt it on my face. It was like something from a play—the moment of the hero’s reckoning, blood upon his sword. Regret. Remorse. Guilt. None of those was what bothered me. Was it pride, perhaps?

  The tingle got slowly worse and I swore. “Idiot. You’re frost bit.”

  My voice disturbed Clea and she began to protest. I lit a second small lantern and knelt down to get a look at her.

  The stump where her left pinky had been was red and uneven, and instead of reaching up toward, her little arms were clutched close.

  “Good girl,” I said. “I didn’t learn that lesson until I was much older. Don’t you worry, my darling. When the men who hurt you die, you will hear them scream.”

  She hushed, but her eyes were alive with desperation.

  “You didn’t drink a drop of their sour Bermish milk, did you?”

  I wrapped her close and let her have her fill. Her eyes fluttered closed.

  The men were still fast asleep when I stepped out of the yurt—save one. I tried not to look at the misshapen form that stood beside the iron door while I washed my hands in the rising steam from the hot springs. The stink of his dead flesh hung in the air.

  I looked back at the door to the rectory instead. Aden has survived me and had healed enough to attempt to make new Hemari but he was not himself yet. He would send for me soon, to scare me or to gloat, if nothing else.

  I considered how I could see more of them dead and the details of the previous day recommended an immediate course of action. I decided to move on it before the men began to stir.

  I hid all my heavy clothes in the corner of the yurt beneath a tarp, shrouded my lantern, and gathered up my girl. She did not protest, and I took hold of a fresh hunk of fat before I started toward the rectory. The poorly-made guard they’d left at the front of the cave did not pay me any attention.

  I pressed the wad of fat against the hinges and worked the door until it opened for me without a squeak. The rectory hallways were dark. In the sanctum at the center, a single lantern added a note of red light to the ancient space. I had no intention of getting any closer to that chamber or the poisonous that would linger there.

  I crept left instead and found my way to the heaviest door along it. It proved unlocked, and I worked the fat into its rusty hinges, too. Once inside, I closed the door, uncovered my lantern, and laid a cloth along the base of the door to keep the light from leaking out. The space contained a couple of chairs, a wide desk in the center of the room, and a glass-faced curio that contained a collection of ledgers. I found one that was most likely to tell me what I needed to know, did my best to make Clea comfortable inside my wrap, and sat down to read.

  The dusty tomb was a record by season of the Priests’ Home’s trade and tithing dating from the years 741-995. It included an eleven-page index and an ancient map that made no sense. I was not sure of my sanity or my plan. I needed the history of the place, not a counting of its sheep and caribou hides. The vellum it had been written on was the ledger’s most interesting feature, the sheets still pliable after almost 500 years. Certain it would tell me nothing, I began to read the long accounting, and soon found myself daydreaming about what would be required to make the numbers I was reading possible.

  There has been a town here. The plateau and valley had been a green place with goats and pigs roaming in countless river valleys beside mills that ground wheat into flour. This was the place the caribou were taken after the hunt. A mighty harbor had filled the bay.

  But then the numbers dwindled decade by decade. The pigs vanished and then the goats, until only a single ship visited each year. Thirty empty pages followed the last entry. The town, its livestock killed off by the growing cold, its harbor abandoned. They had retreated into the keep and only a miserable handful of acolytes remained.

  I flipped back to the earlier days in the ledger and the tremendous tally of goods. The ledge was not the history essay I’d hoped for but told me a story all the same.

  The effort would not have gone unnoticed by Sikhek and his Hessier in Bessradi. The goods they brought would have come from all across Zoviya. The pair had negotiated a truce after the fall of Edonia. Sikhek became the ruler of Zoviya while the Ashmari shepherded the Earth slowly to her death. Vile creatures. The White Mother had been getting colder every day since.

  A low sound beyond the rectory was followed by a rising tumble of noise. Voices rose and men rushed through the rectory calling Aden’s name.

  “Burhn took Dia and the child with him!” someone shouted. “Get a group ready to go after them.”

  The men that rushed into the sanctum began to cough, one after another. The coughs became screams as the lingering poisons did its quick work. I prayed that the Ashmari did not have the right words to heal them. The men continued to rush about, some coming to the aid of the afflicted.

  “No, leave them,” someone smarter finally shouted, “It’s the brown smoke. They are poisoned. Flee.”

  The screams and pandemonium continued longer than I thought it would, and quiet did not come until Aden was at last roused. His icy touch reached out and struck the cavern silent. My arms fell to my sides as it seized me, but I did not feel the same dread. Aden was not what he’d once been.

  Someone approached, the door opened, and Aden stepped inside. His threadbare rags had been replaced by a crisp cream-colored linen dalmatic and a fur-lined azure mantel. His hair was cut trim and his boots were polished. His face was whole once again but still misshapen. When he opened his mouth to speak his face moved as though a great deal was still wrong inside. His speech was slurred.

  I laughed over his first words. “You’re drooling on your vestments.”

  I expected the lash of his magic. He checked his mantel instead to find that I’d lied to him.

  “Is your name even Aden?” I asked while he closed the door. “Such a stupid name they gave you all those years ago.”

  His expression was tired. “The name I was born with is Paboy Vamindavida, my family—”

  I laugh over him until his milky eyes fixed upon me. “Oh my, no wonder they decided to steal your humanity. I stand corrected.
Aden is a much better name than Pee Boy.”

  “Is it death you seek with all these games of yours?”

  “You’ve not killed me yet, nor will you. Another Vesteal grows inside me, but it is all soft and squishy. No bones yet. The men in the cave don’t seem to know this, but you must have lived long enough to have read the same books I have. Cartilage is not bone.”

  “There is bone and blood enough in your daughter to make every man here Ashmari.”

  “And yet here I sit. Is it cowardice then? Do you not have the spine to kill me?”

  “There is more to us than the savagery required for us to survive.”

  “Well, fools though you are, you certainly have been here long enough. What false notions keep you resolute? Is it faith or the black rails the Shadow that hold you to it?”

  He considered me for a long moment before finding a chair and sitting down across from me. His expression and demeanor changed like a priest hoping to talk me out of my clothes. I eyed the book between us and wondered if it was heavy enough to crack his skill.

  He began with a little speech. “It is evidence that holds me to this terrible course, not faith. The Spirit of the Earth means to burn the world. The Shadow desires only to keep her from exploding—to find a way to soothe Her before she ends us all.”

  “Delusions. The Hessier and the spent souls of the people they murder freeze the world. Your fiction is as poor as the performance of a Bessradi alley actor trying to say his line with one a cock in his mouth and another up his ass. You are absurd.”

  “Which of us is guilty of the blindness of faith? The Shadow has controlled Zoviya for a thousand years of peace and prosperity. He could have called upon His Hessier to sing a song that would end the world whenever He wished. The evidence I hold most dear is this; the Shadow has not moved to destroy us. His actions, terrible thought they are, preserve the world. He has only ever sought to take hold of His violent wife and be at peace. She will not relent, so must be chained.”

  “Said like a weak little man. Done like a weak little man.”

  “Done out of love,” he said.

  “You are blind. The terror of your cause and its affects are plain. You carve upon children and wet the earth with the blood of the innocent. You cannot convince me your cause justifies it. You’d do better to put on a red hat, hold your tiny cock in your hands, and beg for me to soothe you.”

  “Do you know where I am from?”

  “Like Sikhek, from the Eastern Kingdoms that spawned this nightmare.”

  “We did cause it,” he said and tried to feign sadness.

  “Yes, unburden your soul, poor man. Tell me next how you left Zoviya in Sikhek’s hands. I have read the records here. You and the Eastern Kingdoms have allowed him to torture the world while you guide it to an icy end.”

  Anger upset his calm face. He’d not though to hide away the ledger. He tapped on its cover.

  “Take your time. I am sure you need to amend your story now that I’ve read the truth of this place. Come, tell me that you have not been slowly unmaking the world so your master can be free of his troublesome wife.”

  “But it has not ended. Can you not see that? You have lived your life in Zoviya. You know the stories of winters more terrible that any in recent memory.”

  “So tell me, Pee Boy, how was all of this possible?” I asked and tapped on the book. The Priests’ Home was a vibrant town of fat sheep and tithes.”

  “And the Eastern Kingdoms were once the glory of mankind. My family name is two thousand years old. My home was the birthplace of astronomers and scholarship. We plumbed the mysteries of the world, opened the sky with righteous sacrifice, and took the gift of magic from the heavens. We brought the endless wars to the fifteen kingdoms to an end and ushered in a golden era that lasted until the whispers of the Earth corrupted the Vesteal against us. They betrayed us and fled to Zoviya upon ships held up with terrible magic. It was Her whispering that began the terror you speak of.”

  “This is the fiction you hold to?”

  “It is the truth of the world. The betrayers fled across the great ocean and founded Edonian. We searched but found nothing but the endless tundra of the south and the vastness of the unforgiving sea. Edonia grew strong and began to sing. They crafted a verse of all things that drove the Spirit of the Earth mad. The world began to burn. The glaciers melted, the seas rose. Volcanoes tore the land apart, ash hid the sun, and the world was slowly drowned. When we at last found a way to Edonia, it was across a vast desert that had been the frozen tundra of the Bunda-Hith. The evidence you site—the once green hills of the Priest’s Home—only existed for that brief time after the fall of Edonia as the tortured world cooled. As you see it now is how it was before the Song of the Earth was first sung.”

  “So the Kingdoms of the East have sent you to finish the job?”

  “No, Dia. The East is no more. The earthquakes and tidal waves destroyed everything. When Sikhek marched what remained of the kingdoms across the Bunda-Hith to Edonia, they were refugees. The men of the Priests’ Home are all that remains of the East. Like Edonia’s Chaukai, we are the last of our ancestors. We did not allow Sikhek to remain. He allowed us to linger. His Conservancy suppressed the magic that would wake Her, so for those long centuries we stayed out of sight and kept vigil. It was the tapping of Geart’s nouns in Enhedu that forced us to act.”

  He stopped talking then, and his quiet and his calm taught me his intention. He wanted to convert me to his religion. He wanted me to volunteer my children for his cause.

  “Do you remember the day we met before the gates of Urnedi?” I asked. He nodded and I said, “That was the day you should have tried this version of the truth on me. You chose instead to murder those I loved and steal me away to this vile place. Kill me or keep me, I will hear nothing you say, and even if the world was in flames around us I would not offer my children up for your magic. No one will ever use my children.”

  His face bent as he smiled. “Oh? Have you not already agreed to let the Vesteal burn them alive to power their song? Did your Chaukai not strike at Dagoda and Bessradi? You call me wicked and them righteous, yet all they do is murder.”

  “What a world you must have come from for you to talk to me this way. The women you have known and kept must have lived like cattle. I have heard and felt the songs. I am not blind. Our way lifts and warms. It fills hearts with kindness and light. Yours is ugly and presses down, strips away the will, and makes men slaves. Yes, we do murder. Yes, we will set my children aflame. Our righteousness is not measure by these acts. It is measured by the world we will build to replace your churches and your terrors. I call you false and you cannot sway me. I say it again—kill me you coward and slaughter my children if your religion is so wholesome.”

  His head fell forward, and I laughed at him while he struggled to stand. He moved to the door.

  “Madam Vesteal, consider please that there might be a male child in your belly. One girl can make several children, yes? A boy, though, Lord Vall taught us, can make hundreds. Plot your revenge. Kill which of us you are able. Walk the slopes down to the shore. Dream of escape. Stay strong and give us a boy.”

  He closed the door behind him, and I sat for a long time while Clea fussed. I flipped her around and gave her my other breast. She bit me several times but eventually calmed. I could not.

  All his words and all his cruel mercy were born of one desire. It would happen sometime mid spring. I would give birth, my days on this earth would end, and my children would become his ingredients and his breeding stock. It was his insane calculation that I was more likely to stay strong and healthy if he let me roam and have hope.

  He was right.

  I flipped through the pages of the old ledger to the map I’d glanced at. Its labels had faded, but I could see the outlines of the lands of the west and the east, and the date it had been made.

  I tore out the page before returning the ledge to the curio, tucked the sheet inside my wrap next to
Clea, and made my way back to the yurt.

  29

  Emi

  Children

  “Do you want to go see for yourself?”

  “No, I can see everything fine from here,” I told Franni while searching the tapestry of threads. “Besides, Avin is coming for a visit.”

  “Not until this evening. You should go outside.”

  “I go out every morning to help heal the men, and I was outside a whole bunch just a few days ago.”

  “Walking out onto the lawn long enough for the priests to sing does not count, and it’s been almost fifty days since your adventure in the Merchants’ Quarter. You haven’t gotten any exercise since. You are putting on a little weight.”

  I had not known the count of the days but was not about to admit that. I kept my eyes closed and watched the Warrens instead. The swirls of threads were forming tighter and tighter bonds as. Industries and communities were the work Benjam used. Yarik had not tried to cross the river in all that time, so I’d gotten to enjoy watching all the many people in the Warrens and Rahan’s fortress. Rahan had endless questions about it all; the number of people working on something or a group that was not getting along. Poor Benjam and his company got to run all over the Warrens fixing things. His scouts didn’t mind at all being envoys, though. It was much safer work, and their threads brightened with each good result. The Warrens loved them.

  I watched Rahan and Avin sometimes, too, and the way their network of threads kept growing. They were both fantastic at getting people to like them, and I only had to send word a time or two about someone who threads withdrew from them. Of all the people in the fortress and the Warrens, though, my favorite person to watch was Evand. He was a bit of a mystery. He has very strong connection with several of the men who had arrived on the ship from Enhedu but had yet to be in the same place with them. It was as if Rahan was keeping him away from his friends on purpose. Evand also loved and hated with such passion that watching him was teaching me how to see it in others. Tricky business, judging love and hate by a swirl of strands. The jungle of threads between Evand and Liv constantly tore at each other, caressed, and danced. They made me laugh the way they warred and loved each day.