by JDL Rosell
The voice wasn’t done with him. Kill him, it said. Commanded, Erik suddenly realized.
“Why?” He said it out loud, his throat rough from being twice torn apart and twice mended. “Why do you want me to?” He didn’t know who it was, but he had an uneasy suspicion. Someone who could talk to him in his head, who could show him how to use these abilities so few possessed, and so easily. Only two beings could have that sort of power, and Erik had already met one.
I am not your enemy, Erik, the voice said, calm as before. I do not wish to be your enemy, even if my brother’s hand has made and tainted you. So let us destroy this tool of his, and we shall remain... friends.
It was good he did not need to breathe; he wouldn’t have been able to had he tried. “A’Qed?” he whispered.
Silence him, Erik, A’Qed said in his head. Silence his song.
Erik gritted his teeth. Two gods wanted him to kill Oslef. Blighted Void, he wanted to kill Oslef. But it felt wrong. He felt himself a piece scraping across a stone game board. But with the players both watching, both their hands moving him forward, what choice did he have?
Even as he hesitated, he felt his grip on Oslef tighten. A’Qed, if that was who it was, pressured him in the same way he’d shown him what to do. But he’d already made his choice. Oslef had made it for him when he hurt his father.
“You brought this on yourself,” Erik whispered as he walked towards the bowed Talstalker. “You always were a blighted fuck up, Twice-Late Viscount.”
Oslef looked up as he approached, eyes moist with pain, seeming to sense what was coming. Erik felt that wail at the center of Oslef struggle in his muting grip, but it was weak and thin and had no momentum to push back. He was cornered, out of options, with nowhere to run. There was no resurrection from this.
Erik knelt next to him. He remembered how, in the dream of the Drift Ose, Oslef had begged for his help. “I’m sorry,” he said as he put his hands about Oslef’s throat. Inside him, his grip on the reed-thin song tightened. “I’m sorry, but you made me do this.” His hands tightened, and a bit more of the song choked off. Oslef gurgled, but he didn’t struggle. He leaned into Erik’s hands, still bent over, racking with sudden sobs. “I’m sorry, brother.” He pressed his thumbs into the windpipe, tightened his fingers around the back, and squeezed his hands closed.
Oslef choked out his last words. “Remember… her.”
“I can’t,” Erik whispered. “But I’ll remember you.”
Then slowly, gently, Erik led him the final silence.
Twenty-Seven
Silence. It pressed against his temples like the cold steel of a robber’s dagger, hissed in his ears like ocean wind on a black night. It was a silence that could cut, that could slit your skin, that could carve your heart out. A silence, long and unrelenting, impervious to any songs.
A silence that would never cease.
His sense of sounding heard the echoes of things all about him, so he heard the mooneyes sharp despair, heard them pad off from the waves, back and away, heard their songs disappear as they left the edges of the timeless world.
In his hands, Oslef’s body slumped over, still and limp, and Erik withdrew like it had become a poisonous snake. His old friend lay face down in the sand, but Erik didn’t need to see the still eyes to know he was dead. He couldn't hear even the faintest tremble from within, stiller than stone. He turned away, turned back towards the living who still needed him, and tried not to feel like the murderer he was.
His father’s chest rose and fell in shallow breaths, and his eyes rolled towards Erik as he knelt next to him. Tara, who had been trying to stem the wound, withdrew at his touch, exposing the gashes. Erik winced at how deep and ugly they looked, and how they immediately welled with blood.
“Erik…” His father tried to grasp his hand with his own trembling one, but it slipped on Erik’s, both of them covered with blood.
“Don’t speak.” Erik held his hand, but with his other, he gently put it over the injuries and closed his eyes. I healed my own flesh, I can heal his. I can remember him whole.
“Erik,” his father said more urgently. “There is no time. There are—” He broke off, wet coughs racking him violently, his torn flesh wriggling under Erik’s hand. Erik winced and ground his teeth.
“Stop talking, Fafa. I need to concentrate.” He closed his eyes again, settling back into the memory.
“You cannot trust them, son,” his father wheezed, disregarding him. He coughed again and squeezed shut his eyes with pain. “Cannot trust them,” he murmured again.
Erik tried keeping the memory in his mind, to somehow concentrate the thrumming energy still within him, but he didn’t know how. “Who?” he murmured, trying to humor him.
“The Sons…” his father managed.
Erik opened his eyes and stared. “I met Er’Lothe,” he said. “And A’Qed spoke to me.” He half-hoped one or the other of the gods would speak then, to intervene and save his father, but he knew they wouldn’t. His father had served their purpose, and like a dirty rag they would toss him away.
His father’s eyes snapped back open, a measure of his old shrewdness returning. “I know,” he said simply.
“You knew? Why didn’t you warn me?”
His father sighed and his eyelids drifted closed again. “No time. You must…learn. To be Recarnate.” He drew in another ragged breath and set to another round of coughing, his hand straying to his wounds, but Tara pulled it away. “A teacher…”
Erik exchanged a look with Tara, and she shook her head.
“Where is this teacher?” Erik’s voice sounded flat in his own ears, robbed of feeling. And why only now tell me? But it was just one among so many other unanswered questions.
“He is known,” he coughed again, and blood spattered his lips, “as the Collector. More, I do not…” The next bout of hacking was bad enough to make him curl up and moan.
“Easy, easy,” Erik said, but there was no comfort to his words. He sat up, staring across the still sea while Tara again pressed into the wounds. Futile. I’ve seen enough dead men to know when it’s coming.
His father pressed on. “He kills Fontfolk, those near to becoming sancts… and collects relics of their bodies. Then…” He broke off for another cough, worse than all the rest that had come before. “Then he sells them.”
It might have been horrifying in different circumstances, but Erik felt the barest disgust. “And I’m to learn from him?”
“The only Recarnate… I have known.”
His father sighed heavily, then met Erik’s eyes with great effort. “I…” he started, but cut off, and not from a cough. “I…”
“Don’t.” For no reason that he could tell, Erik suddenly felt the sharp knife of fear pressing his belly. “Don’t say anything, Fafa. I know.”
His father shook his head weakly. “I…”
His father breathed in again, but suddenly gagged and started wracking with spasms. His hands flailed out to grab at Erik and Tara, and Erik moved indecisively to react, but Tara turned him on his side and pounded on his back. His father was choking. He’d breathed and said all he could, leaving off that last sentence. Erik sat and stared as the life went out of his eyes.
No matter how much he’d feared them, Erik wished he could hear those last words.
He ground his teeth through the death throes. The mess trying to bring the blood up from his lungs, the jerking limbs as his body struggled desperately to keep alive, the slackening as the final moments passed. A gruesome, awful thing, not befitting such a man as he. Not his father, no matter what he'd done to Erik.
“I’m sorry, Erik,” Tara said softly. “I think he’s…”
He didn’t meet her eyes but stared off into the sunset. He vaguely noticed he’d stopped oscillating and sounding, and everything inside him was once again silent. Better get used to it sooner rather than later. Silence promised to be his companion from now on.
After a bit, he touched his father’s li
mp wrist tentatively, trying not to feel queasy at its looseness, then tightened his grip. The skin was still warm.
“What are you doing?” Tara asked, but he ignored her, coming to his feet and dragging at his father’s body. He moved it across the sand, mixing streaks of red in with the gray and tan granules, until it was next to the small pool of voidic smoke. Then did he settled the hand into it.
He left the rest to hope.
He, Tara, and Persey left the Drift Ose soon after, watching guardedly as they exited, but no mooneyes waited in ambush. Only the vast, featureless landscape, and that was no surprise.
“Not exactly a welcome scene,” Tara observed. She leaned to one side as if she’d like to lean right over to the ground, and her pack was slung loosely over one shoulder with resignation.
Erik reached out and took the straps, but Tara hung on with surprise for a moment. “I think I’ll be better off carrying it than you,” Erik said, a slight smile on his face. Not a large one. He couldn’t manage much of a smile at that moment, even if he’d attained what he’d been searching for.
“But you'll stain it with blood," she protested as she relented, looking guiltily relieved.
He blinked and looked down at the gore spattered all down him. There was no help for it, though—water was miles and miles away.
“You too,” Erik said as he turned to Persey. The girl barely lifted her bowed head, and didn’t resist when he slipped her pack from her stooped shoulders.
Erik slung them both on and worked his shoulders. They weighed on him, but he thought it would be long before they bowed him over. He felt a persistent resilience to his body now, and as good as it felt, its unnaturalness still made him uneasy.
Tara took a drink from her water flask and looked out over the sands. “Where to, then?”
“You know what I have to do,” Erik said softly. “Find this Collector and hope he will teach me.” Teach him what, he was still uncertain on. What could he possibly learn that would make a difference with the Sons Incarnate returning, even now?
Tara didn't hesitate. “We’ll go with you.”
He could hardly believe his ears. “Didn’t you see what just happened? If you stay near me, all you and Persey will have is more danger—”
“Which is what surrounds Persey anyway. And if this Collector can help you, he can help Persey as well.”
Erik looked at the girl, but she could have not been listening for all the signs she gave.
“Besides,” Tara continued with half a smile, “I’d be a terrible Amodist if I didn’t keep near one of Er’Lothe’s Recarnates. Perhaps I could be the next Sanct Eckard.”
Erik shook his head and smiled. “I can’t say I’ll be sorry to have you along.”
Tara faintly returned it.
He watched the sand swirl over the landscape a moment. “Then we’ll head for Theo’Buur. That’s the best place to get a boat and cross to the continent. Then we can search for the Collector, wherever he is.”
“There’s the barricade,” Tara pointed out. “Won’t be easy getting through.”
“There’s always smugglers. We’ll find something in the city.”
The relict just shook her head. “Seeing as I don’t have any better ideas, and you’re the Lastborn’s herald, we’ll have it your way.”
Erik tried smiling again, but his thoughts were still on his father, guiding him even after death. Guiding, the devilish voice said. Because that’s what he’s been doing. But Erik wouldn’t listen this time. He would do better. He would trust.
“Well then. Better get started.” He looked to Persey. “Ready to go?”
“Never,” the girl muttered back.
Erik smiled faintly. “Neither am I, but we don’t get much choice in it, do we? You don’t get to stay in one spot, not as long as you’re alive. You have to move on.”
You have to move on. He remembered his father’s face how he saw it last. He remembered Oslef’s body, bowed and silent. He remembered the echoes of the woman he couldn’t remember. And sometimes, you have to leave people behind when you go.
But that was part of it, this path he was on. Maybe he wasn't a good man, not with the things he'd had to do, that he might still have to do. Maybe he still had demons to wrestle, and ghosts of his past to do right by.
But he knew those devils now, and he knew they weren't in control. He walked his own path. He had his fate in his own hands, gods and their plans be damned.
It was time for the first step on that path. The first step towards something better.
Erik took the first step, and didn’t look back.
Epilogue
Within the cold ashes, a gentle zephyr stirred
The first breath of life returning
The first heartbeat of a new beginning
He woke, and sighed, and looked into a world beyond
Er’Lothe, my lord, what did you see?
Er’Lothe, my lord, what did you see?
What hope dawns on the broken horizon?
What horrors awake? What horrors awake?
- The Sons Incarnate, “From Ashes,” the final cantus
Witnessed by Sanct Eckard, the Living Testament
190 IY, First Cycle of Our Broken World
Jeth watched the arms of Theo'Buur's harbor slowly approach from the deck of the Kingfisher’s Crest. It was a misty day, and the ships were tiny and phantasmic, growing faintly more corporeal as they came near. Beyond, the buildings of the dock were nearly completely lost in the gray vapor, but Jeth knew they were there all the same. He knew his surroundings as intimately as if he could see them. After long years of sustained concentration, sounding had become just another one of the senses. If he bothered to parse through the bustle of the city's denizens, he might even find precisely where his new employer waited.
Time to perform. The thought didn't hold the same sweetness it once did. His palms no longer itched, his stomach no longer fluttered. He could have been thinking of his drab seafarer’s dinner for all the thrill it gave him.
But the performance was the only thing left that made him feel alive. Or half so, at least.
His thoughts flitted to another day, the day he had felt most alive, and he seized upon the opportunity like a gravedigger on gold. Fire... justice... a burning building. A severed noose. A slick, extinguished lamp.
A small smile crept across his face. A good day to remember so much. He thought harder, tried to pry out more images, hoping to see a face, the face of whoever had been inside—
“My Lord Mummer!”
Someone clapped him on the shoulder, and Jeth flinched, his hand darting to his knife before he recognized the voice. He hadn’t heard him approach, though he continually sounded the world about him. Remembrance was making him lax, and laxness was never a thing to be tolerated.
"Captain Sunbeard,” Jeth said as he turned, moving his hand to rest at his side. “Come to enjoy the view?”
“Pah, still calling me that name?” The man grinned through his flax-yellow bird’s nest of a beard. "Can't say it en't appropriate though."
Jeth stared pointedly at the beard for a moment, then met his eyes with a slight smile. How he'd love to make a fake beard out of that. "Quite appropriate, I do say."
“Can't say Theo'Buur's much of a sight, though. Seen better ports among the Ennish. But she’s serviceable, she is, for our purposes. And yours, en’t that so, my Lord Mummer?” He winked from beneath his bushy eyebrows, similarly bright, his smile broadening.
“The player ever follows the road,” Jeth obliged, ignoring the captain’s knowing grin. They both knew there was more to Jeth's game than he let on. A simple mummer paying his own voyage, and without a troupe—it didn’t take one of the king’s Huntsmen to work out that Jeth wasn’t what he dressed as. That was, of course, part of the performance.
Jeth pretended to take an interest in the activity about the deck as the captain looked with the anticipation of landfall across the foggy bay. A few sailors stalked abo
ut, some hauling ropes, some rolling barrels, but most heaved at their oars, bringing them slowly in. On the ships of the Seafolk, there was only one level, all for sleeping and eating and working. It didn’t make for the most convenient of voyages, but for Jeth, it was comfortable in its own way. It reminded him of days past, when he had sailed on a Volken drakkus for a time. At least, that’s what he’d written to himself in his book—he couldn’t remember any of it now. Jeth put a hand to his jacket where his heart was, feeling for the leather-bound journal he kept there, his most prized possession. As he did, he felt a small vial over it. What was in there? He'd have to check that later among the pages.
“Well, lad, perhaps we’ll stick around these rocks long enough to keep a place for you, hm hm. How long are you staying, anyhow?"
Jeth's gaze lazily returned to the captain's. "As long as the whim holds. And as long as the dogs are still hunting my trail on the continent."
Sunbeard laughed. "Always thought some trouble was left behind there. No worries, won't have no telling of it from here. Honest work only for us." The captain winked.
Which is why you're smuggling me across the strait. Jeth didn't wink back.
"Now that we're nigh landing, captain, I wanted to have one final talk with you," he said. "May we retire to your quarters?"
"Of course!" Sunbeard said, clapping him on the back. "Mind your step, now."
After crossing the sea-sprayed deck, the captain held the door open for Jeth, and he entered the dark cabin. It was not a big room, the drakkus not allowing for much luxury, but it was richly adorned for a seafarer. Bronze and silver were on frequent display along plaques denoting religious sentiments, inlays of chests, and even an opal-hilted short sword mounted on the wall, which Sunbeard claimed he'd won from an Ennish prince in a duel. A prideful fool's quarters, if Jeth had ever seen one. A man you could trust only to place himself above all others.
