Quill was inside already.
Sen reached the edge of the Drazi horde and dived head first, splashing down into oil, mud and memory.
LORD QUILL II
Hunger.
Hunger was on all sides of him, rushing in through every pore. It was all that the Drazi felt and it consumed them completely, but it wasn't all that they knew. In brief flashes Sen glimpsed random memories fired across the vat, stolen and stored somewhere within the Drazi mind.
The first were of farmers; men and women of the Sump in simple cotton smocks, standing at their hay bales with long forks in their hands, trying to fight for what was theirs. He saw children running, their calves streaked with mud. The bark of trees was peeled away to reveal the delicious worms inside, gnawing into the meat of the wood. There was life turning in the dirt, in the plants, in the trees, and all of it offered fuel.
He saw their origin in the hunger; the master mogrifer who birthed them to consumption. Sen glimpsed him in the Drazi collective memory, carried from body to body over the distances and transferred from vat to vat; a yellow-skinned Painman who cut every shred of humanity away from his creations' living minds, leaving only the hunger behind.
He whittled them down to that basic remainder then crossbred them with the very disease that was killing him. At his direction they learned to mogrify themselves and rebreed with dire efficiency, to learn with the hunger always at their core. They were his revenge against a world that had reviled his caste and laughed at his ailments; an Unforgiven before they even held that name.
He'd been a Wight, a wisp-bodied sucker-of-wounds, and his kind had always been shunned as parasites and unclean. Banned from most cities across the Corpse, the good citizens did not care for his protestations that he had never bled a child unto death, never eaten more than he needed, never stolen the whole of a life. They treated him as a monster, so he became a monster, at the last feeding his own body and mind into the Drazi mulch and setting his creations free.
Abruptly Sen lurched up through the oily surface at the edge of the vat and gasped in a breath. On every side of him now stood the Drazi like an endless wall, their mogrified faces staring back at him with Efraius' eyes.
He spat out oily fluid and kneaded it from his eyes. The colors in the vat rippled faster now, focusing toward a pure white fire around a figure in the center. Something deep was changing, and Sen knew what it was.
Lord Quill.
But perhaps not fast enough. Long Drazi tendrils slithered up his legs and drew him back in. He hacked at them with his blunt spikes to no avail.
"Wait," he shouted, as his lower body was quickly encased in white, growing up from the vat like roots. "I need Quill!"
The tendrils didn't listen and dragged him down.
* * *
Within the vat the Drazi swirled around him, shredding the outer reaches of his mind, even as they swirled faster and brighter around Lord Quill at the center. Sen felt a dizzying blending as he was conjoined into the horde, as pieces of himself were thinned out like clay rolled flat and folded. He tried to cry out and resist, but the Drazi held him at their mercy.
It was no the same for Lord Quill. Their hunger seemed to be enraged by his inexplicable calm, even as they bored harder, desperate to suck out the secrets of Quill's incredible knowledge of war, his fiery skin and his skills with a caulk.
Yet Quill did not fight back. Whole generations of farmers and fighters and beasts gnawed on him, and Sen felt that gnawing as if it was in his own skin, as the thing that was Lord Quill steadily spread into the Drazi mulch, and so into him.
He began to understand.
This was the moment the Drazi tide turned. As they consumed more of Lord Quill, they became more like Lord Quill, and through him they saw themselves for the first time. Once they had been people, and if there was anything Quill knew, it was people. He saw through the hunger to what they truly were; stolen minds and lives turned into a cancer, once filled with hopes, dreams, fears, and loves.
With his own eyes he held up a mirror so that they could see themselves. He spoke directly into the mass of them, not with words but a message spiked in burning white light.
"Fat Kal," came his voice, "Efraius. Glay, Mantico, all the fallen of the Decatate. I have come for you. None of my soldiers go this way alone. Listen to me."
The Drazi listened. Suffused throughout their collective brain were memories of Lord Quill from both sides of the siege. He was the god-like figure on the battlements above, who had both stymied and rallied them at every turn, who had at once burned off their brothers and sisters and saved their families, who had slaughtered them in their thousands and saved them in their thousands. They knew him as a great leader and a great lover, as a man who would never give in, who offered hope and defiance and delivered on his every promise.
So they listened, and slowed their assault.
"I can help you," Quill promised the hive mind, as new possibilities poured out of him. "I can offer you more than you can ever take. I can fill up your hunger and bring you peace."
The Drazi swarm stopped swirling and boring, as one by one their individual minds began to believe. Everything they were made of believed in him already, from fallen Decatate and damasks to farmers and children swept up from the Sump; all of them respected the last Man of Quartz. They listened as he spoke of something bigger than the hunger, coming from an older and deeper place.
Hope.
"I'll lead you to such glory," his voice boomed through the vat in shivers of white light. "I will make of you a burning army, and together we will rebuild this world."
The Drazi didn't fully understand his words, but his meaning was clear. He was better than anything they'd ever consumed, better than the one who had made them, and he could mogrify them into something better too, because he'd done it a thousand times before with men and women of all castes.
He was a leader, and he now he was offering to lead them.
They responded; slowly at first but gaining speed as his thoughts spread and reverberated. So they carried him deeper into the core of the horde than any mind they'd absorbed before, down the linking canals to the grand central vat, where they made him more than just limbs and faces, more than memories reduced to kindling for a shambling beast intent upon salving its own hunger. Rather, they made him their soul.
In their embrace Quill lost himself and found himself a thousand times over, and Sen too felt it all. His thoughts were stretched to encompass countless animal minds, his pulse became the pulse of the swarm, his body became all the bodies of the Drazi across the battlefield. The pressure was immense and at once it was simple, as within every one of them he found glints of better dreams beneath the ravening hunger.
He saw glimpses of love won and lost, friendships sealed and ended, fathers and sons broken and reunited, mothers and daughters wounded and forgiven, new unions and new life, children born, children lost, glory stolen and earned, all the many fragments of life jumbled and swirling. Throughout he found hidden dreams like embers in the Drazi heart and breathed them to life, starting his final, greatest fire beneath the skin. You will live well, he promised them. You will die well. You will leave something better than yourself behind.
In the Drazi horde he sowed a thousand dreams of something better, and cured the cancer at the horde's heart.
So the war ended. So the fighting stopped, and the Drazi stood silent and still across the siege plains, gathered about the vat where the change was made.
* * *
Sen shivered back to breath at the edge of the vat. The white mask of tendrils that had held him in position sank into the mulch, but his connection with the horde was still there. The hope Quill had promised was within him still. The army was ready to fight and destroy another hunger that couldn't be stopped; the Rot. A thousand Efraius faces looked at him, and he looked back at them.
We'll help you, they said. Together.
Sen rose to his feet in the vat, finally understanding how Lord Qu
ill had achieved his legendary ascent. It was happening right now. This was the moment Lord Quill carried the Drazi scourge away into the heavens, except it wasn't to the heavens, but to the veil.
Sen laughed, as the pieces clicked into place. How else would a chariot fly? It was because of him. He would raise Lord Quill and the horde up.
Except he was exhausted. All he had left for strength was Feyon and Avia, and every moment he could feel himself losing them too. The Darkness was coming already, and it just wasn't enough. It couldn't be enough and he was too tired to try.
Then a bright white figure rose from the center of the vat; Lord Quill transformed. His rough Quartz edges had been rounded into Drazi flesh, but still he shone with a terrible fire.
His eyes met Sen's.
"We can help," he said, and his voice shook the earth, because it came from every Drazi mouth at once.
"I can't do it," Sen answered. He held out his hands; there was no fire left in his scars anymore. "I'm not strong enough to take you all."
"You will be," the Drazi voices said, filling the air like a holy chorister.
More memories surged into him then, and all of them were gifts; a young Quill riding on a cart over the Sump, seeing the city for the first time and knowing it would be his future. Efraius earning his Decatate name as a draftee and feeling the weight of Lord Quill's sword on his shoulder as he was inducted, becoming somebody that mattered. More followed in a tumble, from thousands or people that Sen had never known.
He knelt down in the yak field and asked for her hand, she said yes. He dropped a dagger into the heart of the man who had killed his father, and felt the relief come. She leapt from the cliff edge and fell to the rocks below, alas. Their baby, born! The rains came, at last! She died in his arms, he wept. They were married in the town parish, everyone saw. He was betrayed, forgave. She longed for something greater, and the angels came down! Madness. Quiet. The trees grew over her grave. He died and saw the faces of his family. Love, heat, light. Moments of clarity came so brilliantly now that they felt like blows, punches of color spiking in Sen's mind with joy, vaulting rage, bliss, the deepest loneliness, the fullest peace, filling him up.
Sen threw back his head and blue light burst from him in a geyser. He was everywhere at once.
On the wall he woke Black with a start, healing the blow he'd struck through his chest. Beyond the cinderfields he healed dying citizens in their hundreds; their innards sewn back within their skins, their bones set, their terror and pain replaced with a blushing heat of wider memory, of wider existence, of wider flowing life.
Everything. He was them all; the Sump, the mountain, the Drazi, Quill, Efraius, everything that had been swallowed up, everything that had been taken, everything they had known, now returned.
Around him the lands of the Sump burst into flower. Shoots of trees burst up through the soil like fingers, blades of grass flamed from the earth, birds and animals cawed and called their way back to life.
The Drazi. The battle. The army. These were tangible things, blocks he could move about in his mind, realities to be twisted, folded and engaged. He thought it and it was so. The war was waiting and they would come, rising on a cloud of white fire into the sky, into the veil, into history.
* * *
Black heaved himself to his feet.
The word rang through his mind, and he whispered it aloud. "Assassin."
The siege plain ahead was empty. There'd been a single, brilliant flash of light then all the Drazi were gone. Now where the vats and the churned brown mud had been there was a new growth of crops, with grass and trees spreading out over the barren Sump where the war swarm had been.
How much time had passed?
He turned to the city. The fires there were out, the clouds of smoke were lifting, and the invading Drazi were gone. He heard the first voices raised in cries of happiness and celebration; sounds he hadn't heard for a long time, other than their twisted echoes in the dull, smacking, smoky confines of the Sunken Jib.
These were real.
Somehow Lord Quill and Sen had saved them all.
He descended to the city and walked the barren cinderfields. Soldiers he'd lost in the morning ran up to him, cheering, their wounds healed. They held his arm, shook his hand, embraced and wept on his shoulder.
He knew these men and women. They were as good as dead, and now they had returned. It wasn't possible but it had happened.
"It was Quill," he told them, all of them. "I saw him rise on a chariot of blue fire, sweeping the Drazi away."
He didn't mention Sen, and his soldiers didn't ask. This was Lord Quill's story, after all.
So the people hugged. They wept. Slowly they hobbled back into their broken city, to rebuild again.
KING SEEM I
Sen stood in the white of the veil, looking at his hands.
How long had he been there? He didn't know. How long had he been looking at these hands? It was hard to say. They looked like his own, but how would he know? There were no mirrors. There were only names.
Sen was a name. Quill was a name too. Which of those was he? It felt like his head was sloshing with a thick liquid. There'd been white bars in Freemantle's cell. He wondered what they tasted like. Was that the liquid tumbling in his thoughts?
He walked.
Sen.
In this direction lay Freemantle. He knew that. The lantern-jawed clocksman, so sincere, so concerned. The hope in his eyes made Sen feel ill. Then in this direction there was Craley. It would be good to know if she was alive. There were a thousand places and times he could go to see Feyon.
What would he say?
He didn't fell empty. He didn't feel full.
What about Efraius?
Now the Decatate were gone. That hurt to think. He'd just been with them, drinking, fighting, surviving; but they were all long dead now, five hundred years ago and faded in the mists of history. What did that mean? He could go back at any moment and see them, but what good would that do, now the war was over?
War was a crucible. War fired spirits and beat them together, making of them a singular blade. Was that a quote?
Tears leaked from his eyes. He touched his cheeks and looked to see if they were blue, but they were clear, like tears. He didn't know what came next.
King Seem, Craley would say. Awa Babo. More heroes, written into his fate by a mother he still remembered. But King Seem would drain him. He knew that already, could feel it. The army of Aradabar would pull him apart, darting across the Corpse and opening so many doorways to the veil, hiding them in pockets for some grand reveal.
What about him?
He'd even be happy to see Lonnigan. He was tired of always moving from face to face. To feel all the Drazi inside him, to feel the world turn with the Darkness always underneath, was like a constant ache that never went away.
Responsibility. Loneliness. He started walking toward Freemantle. The door opened, and through a slit in the white wall he peered into the clocksman's cell.
Freemantle was sitting at his white desk, as ever. At the side was Sen, slumped in the white chair, lost in the veil. Freemantle was writing something, of course. Words were his reality. Sen stood at the entrance for a long time, willing Freemantle to turn around. It would be a relief, and perhaps that relief would break him open. If he slowed down now, if he stopped, would he ever be able to start again?
He felt like one of Lonnigan Clay's bombes, hurtling through the veil and bouncing off walls until finally its gyroscopic energy burst in a static rain over Heaven's Eye. The oceans would part. The world would change forever.
He let the door to the cell close. It would be cowardice to return now. He had to take do his duty, no matter the cost. Lord Quill had said it.
He opened the veil on King Seem.
It was simple now, to watch his father sitting on the rooftop of his palace, waiting for a change to come. Everyone had their own pain, and Seem had been young once, uncertain, perhaps even lost. Three thousand y
ears ago he'd been at the peak of his powers, standing at the dawn of recorded history with bat wings spread, and still he had his own pain.
Three years ago was before the Book of Airs and Graces was written, before Seem had found Avia, before any of the legends Sen had grown up believing had been dreamed up. Perhaps they were magical times, filled with possibility, and Sen thought about stepping through.
He could talk to his father as a young man. He could explain all that was to come; the Rot and the Darkness, his three thousand years of solitude in the ruins of his own city, the circular war for the Corpse, but he didn't do it. This was King Seem's life to live; both the sorrow and the joy. How could he rob that from him, just to give himself some relief?
He'd lost too much to stop, and too much to go back. There was no other place; no home for him in the Decatate, no role for him on Lonnigan's crew, only a white cell with a lonely man who hadn't seen another soul for generations. He smiled, only for himself. Perhaps this was what Freemantle felt like all the time; observing but never taking part, never being remembered, never being able to stay, becoming a ghost in the eyes of the world. He felt like a ghost in history, flitting across the ages and offering a nudge here, some guidance there, but what did any of it mean?
He hoped there wasn't long left.
He closed the veil on his father. It wasn't time for him, yet. There were others to convince, other works to do, though all of it would come full circle in the end.
* * *
It was night, and King Seem sat on the tower roof of his palace, overlooking the library city of Aradabar; the glass towers of learning glinted in the moonlight, the spread of bookyards sparkled with spartan candlelight. Beneath him the burnished brass roof was still warm from the day's sun, and the heat soaked into his outspread wings.
Overhead the stars shone brightly, and as ever he wondered what they were; distant gods, as some of the Dust's tribes believed, or shellaby bugs stuck to the sky, or whole other worlds looking back. Occasionally their lights were shadowed by the blur of one of the city's bat-clouds, hunting the sky for Jalopy geese.
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