by J. M. Frey
“That’s no reason to stab him!” Pip shouts up at her.
“Isn’t it? Violence is the only language idiots like him speak! This is me, punching up!”
“Violence is never the only recourse!” Pip growls. And then suddenly, she sits up straight, looking Ahbni dead in the eye. “Where are you from?” Pip asks, her voice shaking, a non sequitur as my wife leaps in her usual fashion to a conclusion that is just beginning to become clear to me. “Where do you live?”
Her face filled with triumph, Ahbni hisses: “Detroit.”
All at once, the niggling at the back of my head settles. The truth comes clear.
Too late. Oh, too late, Forsyth, you utter useless fool!
“The troll was you. All this time, it was you. Your new ga-gaming p-p-partner . . . n-n-no. You—” I choke, having trouble speaking around my own self-recrimination.
“You . . . you brought him here. How could you?” Pip challenges, staring at Ahbni with horror and regret, both. Blood drips from the tips of her fingers, splashes against the floor. “Your eyes aren’t even green. How could you choose this?”
Ahbni grins, triumphant. “I’ve done what no one else could! I’ve silenced a monster!”
“He’s getting better!” Pip screams, cradling Elgar’s body. “He’s growing! He’s trying! You can’t just—just—execute people who don’t think like you! You can’t—”
“And I’ll be rewarded for it!” Ahbni shouts.
“By him?” Kintyre snarls, tightening his hold. His biceps strain against his shirt as Ahbni writhes, feet flailing in the air to no avail. “Are you stupid?”
“I’m not stupid!” Ahbni protests, her pride pricked.
“You’ve gotta be!” Pip seethes. “You don’t think there are any corpses in the rubble upstairs? You don’t think that he intends to kill every single person in this building? Really? You don’t think we’re all next? That the Viceroy isn’t out to kill all of us? It’s what he does. He won’t stop until he’s laid waste to this entire building and everyone in it. He’s a sick, sadistic fuck.”
“But that’s not . . . that’s not what he . . .” She blinks, and swallows hard, eyes darting around the room. Her shock is real, I think, and not an act.
“You didn’t put two and two together?” Pip asks. “It’s in the books!”
“Well, I’ve never read them closely!” Ahbni protests.
“But you know you hate them all the same,” Pip hisses. “How can you claim to critique if you’re only reading for what will support your—?”
“He said that—”
“Not the point right now!” Kintyre snarls. “Help the Writer.”
“It pierced his lung, I think,” Bevel says, his voice shaky in a way that I’ve never heard from my brother-in-law before.
“For fuck’s sake, Forsyth, stop standing there!” Pip snaps at me.
Am I just standing here?
I am.
My feet don’t seem to be moving, even though I command them to do so. My hands twitch at my sides, as if I am already pressing them to the wound to aid Bevel, but they are not on Elgar’s body. They are not dipped in the blood of the man who invented me. My breath comes shallow and sharp. Swollen with grief, a hot fist of anger and surprise, my heart is struggling to pump blood through the constriction of seized terror that afflicts my veins. I try to speak, try to lick my lips, try to anything, and the most I can do is blink mechanically and let my mouth flop open, let out a harsh, low “haaaaa” sound that wavers and stumbles as I run out of breath.
The look on my creator’s face might have been comical if it weren’t so horrifying. Slack jaw, wide eyes, surprise and pain pinching the sides of his mouth white and thin. He is propped on his side, Pip and I before him, Pip pressing her knees into his belly to give Bevel leverage, and Bevel behind, jamming his increasingly red-soaked robe against Elgar’s back.
“Forsyth, please,” Pip sobs, face upturned and pale with her own grief, cheeks wet with her own terror. “Do something.”
The “please” is what knocks me back into my own body, into the moment, and I drop to my knees beside Elgar. I fear—I expect him to be dead already, but Elgar blinks up at me, smiling dopily through what must be his unbelievable agony.
“Hi,” he chokes, a bubble of red spittle popping with the vowel.
“Hush,” I say to him, and then, one hand laced tightly with Pip’s free one so I can draw upon her magic, I recite all the Words of Healing to which I am privy.
“It’s too deep,” Bevel grits out in a whisper, his voice tight. When I look up at him, I see sweat beading across his forehead. The tendons of his neck stand out, he is clenching his jaw so hard. His shoulders bulge with the effort of stopping the bleeding. “Forssy, it’s too much.”
“No!” Pip cries. “No, just . . . try harder!”
“Bao bei,” I say softly. “Th-the ma-mah-magic isn’t-t st-stron-ng enou-gh h-here. And th-the Wo-Wo-Words can-n only do-do-do s-so mu-ah-ch.”
“No! Don’t stop Speaking them! Keep going!” my wife orders, snot on her upper lip and her cheeks now splotchy, her eyes swollen with her tears. “If we can . . . Elgar, just hold on.” She turns her head back toward the ballroom door. “Isn’t one of you guys a fucking healer? Come on!”
Someone inside the room yelps, and the sound of feet pounding toward us rings out, but they are going to be too late. Too late. Kintyre drops down beside Pip, grips the ball of our tangled fingers, and recites the Words of Healing in tandem with me.
“The bleeding is slowing, but not enough,” Bevel grinds out. “Kin.”
“Where’s Ahbni?” Pip asks, and we both start when we see that Kintyre has bound her to a piece of protruding rebar with her own pink scarf. She is straining, working to get away, but the knot is too efficient, the material too thick.
The Words seem to bring Elgar back to himself enough that he is able to focus on our faces. He squints at me thoughtfully, then slides his gaze to Pip. He doesn’t linger long on her, turning his head slightly to take in Bevel instead. He squints at him, too, and then finally, his eyes settle on Kintyre.
I shouldn’t feel overlooked, or offended. I know I shouldn’t. But it feels, suddenly, very much like being the ignored and forgotten younger son once again, skipped over in favor of Kintyre. Bright, shining Kintyre, who does everything the wrong way and yet still holds the greater affection of the world.
Elgar has had a year with me, I tell myself, squashing down my jealousy for his attention, and regretting all the times I had pushed him away, and the time in each other’s company we had subsequently lost. He has had mere hours with Kintyre and Bevel. Do not begrudge him this.
Elgar lifts a hand, half-curled, toward Kintyre’s face. Without ceasing his drone of Words, my brother takes it and presses the old man’s palm to his cheek. He doesn’t wince at the usual jump of electricity between creator and creation, and I wonder if it’s because Kintyre is hiding his reaction or because the strength of the unnatural feeling is fading as Elgar drowns slowly in his own blood.
“Weren’t . . . s’posed to . . . love ’im,” Elgar grunts, and each word brings red foam to his lips.
The pronouncement is startling, shocking, and though I can’t speak for Bevel or Kintyre, I feel as if Elgar has just slapped me in the face. How could he choose to use his last breaths on this? To decry the happiness that my brother and his trothed have fought so hard and so long to make their own? How controlling, how spiteful must Elgar be?
“Stop talking,” Pip insists. “Just breathe. Just keep breathing.”
Kintyre’s eyes narrow, becoming even icier, his lips curling inward as he bites them to keep from wasting these last few moments in shouting.
Elgar’s mouth melts into a beatific smile, and he blinks so slowly that I fear for a moment that his eyes may not open again. When they do, he focuses hard on Kintyre.
“Glad you . . . do, though,” he says.
The reversal hits Kintyre so hard he grunts like
he’s been punched in the gut, the breath whooshing out of him. His expression breaks into a sunrise, and half a moment later, crumples into sorrow.
“Don’t go,” he implores. He lets go of Pip’s hand to grasp Bevel’s wrist, desperate for a connection with his trothed at this moment.
“Glad you’re . . . all loved,” Elgar hisses. “L’cy . . . do me . . . f’vor?”
“Anything,” Pip vows.
“Love the books ag’in. Write ’em if they ask.”
“What? No!” Pip gasps in horror. “I can’t! I’m an academic! I don’t write fiction! You do it! Stay, and write more!”
Elgar makes a slight motion with his head that might be a shake. “You care. P’tect Hain with tha . . . tha TV . . . bring F’syth.”
“I . . . I will. I vow,” Pip says, and then gasps as something invisible seems to clutch hard at her chest. She coughs, eyes screwing shut, and when she opens them again, they glow violet. For just a moment, just one very brief second, violet.
What does it mean? I do not have time to wonder, to ask, even. I have no time; there is no time.
“F’syth,” Elgar moans.
“I’m so-sorry,” I say, and I can’t seem to make my voice get any louder. It’s a harsh, low whisper, choked by sorrow and the onset of grief, and all things that I never said to my creator, and now, never will. “Elga-gar, ple-please, for-for-forgive me.”
He smiles dopily, eyelids drooping, and the corner of his mouth peels back in a grimace that, even now, he is clearly attempting to disguise as a smile. His teeth are red with frothing blood, and a tiny ruby stream of the stuff escapes from the quirked corner of his lips.
“For?” Elgar whispers.
“I’m a f-fu-fuck up, aren’t I? A c-c-co-omplete and utt-er t-t-tit. I m-made eve-ry single wr-wr-wr-wrong choice there wa-was to make. I was over-overconfident and b-buh-blind.” I sob, grasping Elgar’s other hand tight, where it is pinned against the floor. “Oh, f-f-for-forgive me. Elgar, p-p-p-pluh-please!”
A man dressed in white healer’s robes shoves, suddenly, in between Bevel and I, uncapping a phial and dumping its glowing blue contents over Bevel’s fingers, against the wound. Most of it runs down his arms, ineffectual.
“Try again!” Pip implores him.
“No, m’boy,” Elgar mutters. “No, no, no . . .”
“Stop it!” Pip sobs. “Just . . . stop it. Come on, Elgar. It’s your magic. You made it up. It should be working on you!”
“Last sec’rt,” Elgar says, grinning now, mischievousness warring in his eyes with the pain. He takes a deep, bubbling breath, gathers his strength to speak clearly. “Viceroy has no love in him. His mother, she lov’d ’im, but . . . m’be ’cause I nev’r unnersood what’s mys’lf.”
“No . . .” Pip says. “Elgar, no, don’t say that.”
The healer dumps out another phial, but it is diluted in the blood. It’s not working. Nothing’s happening. It’s like the liquid is still just a prop. It’s infuriatingly ineffectual and each uncorked phial smashes what little hope we are clinging to just that much more.
“Fans . . . people I pa-pay—a-agents, PAs, but . . . but not real love. Not . . . not fam . . . family.”
“You’re our family,” Pip says fiercely, grabbing his hand alongside mine. “We love you.”
“Do . . . you?” Elgar asks, a dribble of blood appearing at the lower corner of his mouth. “All ’f you?” He tries to roll his head to the side to see Kintyre.
“Absolutely,” Bevel says, and there are tears on his cheeks now, too, fat and rolling, and I can’t recall ever having seen my brother-in-law cry before. Not even when I stepped into the Overrealm for the first time, when I thought I’d never see them again. “Always.”
“Oh,” Elgar says, and it is a great gusting woosh. Blood splatters his lips. “Tha’s nice. No . . . na nice . . . copacetic.”
He exhales then, long and slow. It goes on forever, for an age, for an eon. Silence rings through the hall. Even Ahbni’s struggles have stilled. We watch, each of us, eyes wide and breaths caught in our whole, unharmed lungs. We wait.
But his chest doesn’t rise again.
Bevel is uttering Words of Healing, Words of Comfort, Words of Reversal, over, and over, and over, the first prayer I have ever seen anyone offer up to our creator. Pip’s eyes flare violet with each Word, whites showing all around.
“I hear them,” she whispers, licking her lips. “Forsyth, I hear—”
And then, like a tap being shut, the flow of Bevel’s Words cuts off. He sits back on his heels, lowers his head, heaves a wrenching groan, and howls.
“Oh god, no,” Pip blurts, tears and snot mingling and bubbling on her lips. Her voice is like a crack of thunder; it shatters the moment, the stillness. She turns into my arms, thumps her forehead painfully against my sternum, presses her mouth to my jerkin, and screams. Her hands fist in my sleeves, and she cries: “Stay! Stay! Oh god, don’t go, don’t go!”
“I’m here,” I assure her, my own hands coming up to cradle the back of her head with no concern for the blood I’m smearing on her skin, her clothes, into her hair, into the dips and valleys of her scars. “I’m not going anywhere.”
I’m not sure if it’s the truth, though. My extremities have begun to tingle. My breath feels shallower, less real. Like I’m not getting enough oxygen from the air. My ears have begun to ring with a high, tinny whine. And under that, I think I hear . . . I hear a voice, calling out.
“Wyndam,” Kintyre breathes, and his eyes are glassy, his posture loose. Bevel looks the same. Dazed and staring at his fingers, he licks his lips over and over again, chasing sensation.
“Don’t fade,” she moans. “I couldn’t stand it if—”
“Bao bei,” I choke, panic rising hard and fast, burning in my throat. “Alis!” I scrabble at Pip’s shoulders, trying to force my fingers to curl, to grasp, to hold on, but they are dead weights at the end of my wrists. My skin washes cold, and hot, prickling and sweating, and no, Writer, no, I don’t—I don’t want to—I don’t—
“I don’t want to go!”
“I forbid it!” Pip shouts, and she grabs my face in her bloody hands, holding hard and tight. It should hurt, but I can barely feel it. She looks up, eyes flaring violet again, lashes spiked with tears. “You stay! You all stay!”
The command hits me behind the heart hard enough that I sway on the spot. I hear Kintyre and Bevel grunt. Feeling returns to my body like a stone dropping through my stomach. I gag and gasp, light-headed and nauseous. Kintyre flops back onto his arse with an ungodly belch, and Bevel covers his mouth with his hand, pressing the other against his stomach and swallowing hard.
“What did you—?” Kintyre tries to say, and has to stop halfway through to gulp and gasp. “Pip, how did—?”
In the periphery of my vision, the healer jerks back into motion. His face is still covered by his hood, but he is focused on the blood on his hands. He too retches, but it must be from the gore.
“Did we almost . . . ?” Bevel asks, and his voice quavers. “Are we going to vanish?”
“No,” I whisper over the top of my wife’s head. “Not anymore.”
Relieved, Bevel drops the blood-soaked short-robe and wraps his arms around his trothed. Kintyre is white-faced and shaking, eyes wide and shocky. Bevel pulls Kintyre down, arms around his head, hiding his trothed’s face against his own neck. Kintyre heaves a massive sob and clings to Bevel like a drowning man. I stand. Or try to. My knees wobble; my spine cannot seem to unbow. There is nothing nearby for me to clutch to stay upright. I sway.
Splayed on the floor, hateful and obscene, Elgar is still and breathless.
His eyes, blue and frightened, still stare up at the ceiling. His hands are lax at his sides, his legs flopped akimbo. His stomach and chest are bare and splashed with red. The hole in his back seeps blood like a spring in a glade, still, and it is too much. It is disrespectful.
I lean down, shaking, wobbling, and gently, respectfully, lo
wer his eyelids for him. My fingers don’t seem to want to work, and it takes me much longer than I am proud of to unpick the knot keeping my sash tied tight around my hips. When I have it free, I shake out the length of Turn-russet silk. The golden thread shimmers in the overhead lights, and, beside me, Kintyre sucks back a sobbing gasp.
Lightly, gently, I kneel and lay the length of cloth over Elgar’s form. Clothing his nakedness. Blocking the harsh overhead glow from his face.
And then a noise from behind us grabs my attention.
At first, I think it is the Viceroy, come to finish us all while we’re distracted by death, but then I realize it is the sound of whimpering, and fabric tearing. Ahbni scrambles to her feet in my periphery. She is shaking, shocky as well, her makeup running down her face with her own tears. As if she has any right to weep when she was the one who murdered him.
“You!” I hear myself roar, and I am on my feet before I really register that I intend to stand. Then two sets of strong arms wrap around my shoulders, pressing, gripping hard, holding me back. “No!”
But they are not strong enough. They are not stronger than my rage, than my agony, than my grief. I will kill that bitch for this. I will . . . I will—
I know my brother’s fighting techniques better than he thinks I do. I’ve watched him spar. I’ve read Bevel’s scrolls.
I drop to my knees, startling both men and working against their hold. My arms slip through their hands, and I dash forward from my crouch like a sprinter.
“Forsyth!” Pip shrieks when I break free. “Stop!”
Ahbni doesn’t expect me to go for her. Perhaps she expects me to stay at Elgar’s side, perform the first aid exercises that are meant to pound life back into a body. No. I do not feel like fighting for a life already extinguished, not today. Today, I am going to revenge it.
She dives for the dagger, which Kintyre had foolishly left on the floor when he’d forced her to drop it. Overconfident arse. No matter. I am faster than a child with a weapon she does not know how to use.
Her long curtain of hair makes it hard for me to get purchase on her neck, and she slips away at first, screaming in terror when she realizes what I mean to do. That I mean to harm her. To end her. She slashes wildly, amateurishly, at me with the dagger—defiled, bloody, desecrated—and I slam my forearm against her wrist. The blade clatters away. Ahbni backs up a step, then another, hands up and shoving, slapping at me, and I don’t care. I don’t care. Let her slap and scratch all she likes.
