Chased By War
Page 56
“Well there you have it, Avicenn. Elongations do seem to decrease intelligence. I’ll expect full details in your report.”
“Yes sir. Of course, sir.” Another pause. “Doctor Sina? What are we to do with them?”
“Them?”
“The students, sir.”
There was the exasperation of an elder repeating a well-known lesson. “Stylization and gassing. Standard operating procedure.”
“Of course, sir. Thank you.”
“You look haggard, Avicenn. How long have you been down here?”
“Ninety days, sir.”
“Ninety days? You ought to take some rest. A few days out in the open is exactly what you need. I’ll organize the papers myself.”
“Yes sir. Thank you, sir.”
“Think nothing of it, son. The brain is not meant to endure continually. It needs rest from time to time.” They parted at a crossroads, which was good for Sina. Orson was a figure of total rage, reason and thought abandoned. Primal instincts let him shadow poor little Avicenn, all the way to a window set into the far wall, locked by a series of chirps and lights. No mercy.
Smashing Avicenn’s head against the wall was more electrifying than sex. Unfortunately, the door denied him, as alien and impassible as the strange padlock that bound it. For a moment, he almost regretted killing the rogue scholar. Then he looked at the window to the next room and the fury rumbled through him.
Thirty children looked at him with dull, flat eyes. Each one had not a hair on their heads. And each one’s skull was tapered to a tall, conical point. The brown imprints ringing their heads was the only evidence of the vices used to crush the skulls into the elongated crowns. They were mannequins, falling just as surely as string-cut puppets. Gas, the elder scholar had said. There was nothing different in the chamber but the children fell anyway. The only consolation was there was no pain; they were as peaceful as babes in their cribs.
Orson’s rage grew as each new corridor revealed greater and greater abominations. Corpses strung out in flaring white light, the chest cracked open so the physicians could encase the organs in neat little jars on a shelf. Corpses diced to pieces and sewed back together in a patchwork fashion. All of them, from the rope burns at their throats, from the sliced-off ears and slit noses, from the branded insignia of the king’s justice, all of them had faced the gallows and the executioner’s axe. Still, treating a man as a puzzle to be tinkered with made Orson shudder. They don’t deserve this. None of them deserved this.
A door finally allowed egress back into the real world, and a bridge that tethered the island to a path curving through small white hills. Footprints in the snow numbered in the dozens, snaking between trees and hedges. The children. Treating the young like pawns wasn’t enough for the bastards. They had to expose them to the winter, too? The thought did not slow him in following the trail. They murdered children in the name of progress. They were going to die.
To the common eye, it was a standard rape-and-pillage. Lines of crackling fire meant the destruction had a lifespan of mere days. Born from the greater fires were the dark bulbous clouds of smoke. With the wind as it were, the smoke made sloping towers, growing and dissipating in an endless cycle. The scene should have been impossible, yet the fire danced amidst the winter and survived.
Far more interesting was that everything seemed intact. There were no broken shingles, no splintered doors, nothing ripped and torn. The church was a tower of purity, it treasures unmolested by heathen hands. What kind of thief leaves behind the grandest of treasures? The answer came almost immediately. Someone who’s in it for the fun.
A sudden creak whipped Orson’s attention to a misshapen hunk of charred wood. It took a moment to realize there was a man under all the grime and soot. Graying hair and saggy flesh named him grandfather, and the crimson stains on woolen clothes told he was not long for this world. “What happened here?”
“Children,” the old man wheezed. “They smiled when they did this...they were just children...east...they went to the east...” Then his eyes rolled up his head, and the old man was no more.
Towers of smoke were a constant presence upon the horizon, teasing Orson forward. Each new village was a portrait of destruction. By the fifth town the ranger could piece the attack together from the defiled corpses marking his path. The precise sections of brain-smattered scalps were clear evidence of a master swordsman. Black skeletons still hot to the touch were a silent testament to men put to the flame. Orson unlimbered his swords. They’re here. Whoever did this is still here.
Orson knew the beast was there long before its snarling sliced the air. From the sheer depths of the growl, Orson expected a mastiff, or at worst a wolf-dog separated from the pack. What he got instead took him completely by surprise.
Three heads. The beast before him had three heads. As if that wasn’t bizarre enough, each head was split right down the middle in color: red and blue, gold and green, and finally white and gray. Orson didn’t need a magician’s touch to know manna had a hand in this beast’s creation. There was only one choice, only one way to get out of this alive.
Orson matched the beast’s golden eyes. He felt the throb of its bloodlust, the tension tightening its corded muscles. If the beast launched an attack, Orson had no doubt he would die. No fear. The Northborn ranger put everything he had into the stare, never blinking, never breaking away, until...
The beast broke the stalemate by bowing its heads. Orson released a breath he did not remember holding. Its happy growl at ruffling his fur was a surprise; dogs bred for war were not starved for attention...What the hell?
The beast became a mass of white energy. Manna. At first holding to the dog’s dimensions, the manna fluxed and rippled outward, extending and shortening. The energy split into three smaller blobs, shrinking, shrinking, shrinking...
“Where are you now, you dumb shits? You’ve better have killed this one!”
The words were a thousand miles away, along with everything else in the world. Where one three-headed dog had been, now three young boys trembled. They varied from tall to short, plump to slender, tow-headed to wild manes of crimson, but in each of their eyes Orson saw the smoldering energy of manna.
“I swear, if you failed, I’m going to whip your asses so hard –” Finally the man came into view and froze in mid-word. He was incredibly average, balding and graying at the sideburns. The white overcoat failed to hide his potbelly, just as the small, piggish eyes failed to protrude from his bulbous, fat face. He took one look at the children, one look at Orson and ran away screaming,
Orson’s knives found home in the fool’s ankles. The momentum of the hedge-doctor’s flight tipped him forward, stretching the wounded muscles so far the tendons snapped under the pressure. The man was now short two feet, and by the frenzy the blood was pumping, death would arrive in seconds. Too good for you, filthy maggot. Orson squatted next to the physician’s side and gave a couple of slaps to the cheek. “Hey! Wake up! Don’t pass out on me. It’s not over yet. Understand?”
The scholar gave a nod that sent the head lolling from the neck. “Stay with me here.” Orson added a few more slaps to make sure. “You know, I think I met a friend of yours. Doctor Fragrock...Frayjack...Oh it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that I gave him over to the nurses. I will say you did a hell of a job using them. Deaf and mute. It was only a matter of time until the truth came out. I mean, if it wasn’t me who came to the isle, it would have been someone or something else. Anyway, I figure it would be rude to end your pathetic life. No, that honor is...more personal. Someone who deserves it more than me.” Orson barely suppressed a smile at the hot breath rumbling past his shoulder. “Take all the time you want,” he said to the children, already reforming into the three-headed beast.
“You don’t have to do this anymore.” Orson ruffled all three heads. “You’re free now. You can go back to children.”
WE DON’T WANT TO GO BACK.
Orson jerked back his hand as if seared by flame. “What the hell?”
WE WANT TO GO WITH YOU. IT’S MUCH MORE FUN WITH YOU.
“But...I’m going to harry the Coicro into submission. It’s very dangerous work. I’m not even sure if I’ll live through it.”
WILL THERE BE DEATH?
“Yes.”
WE WANT TO KILL THEM ALL.
Well, that was unexpected. An ally was an ally, though. The more help, the better. As the flames roared from the small isle, Orson and his new ally started their journey across the black river. “You know, I never got your name.”
CERBERUS. CALL US CERBERUS.
“Well, Cerberus, let’s go kill some Coicro.” Orson couldn’t help but smile. This is going to be fun.
LV
“Well, it’s exactly as you said, dearie. You’re six weeks pregnant.”
The words struck Sylver like a sledgehammer. Oh, she’d been denying it for weeks now. Natural tests were fallible, she told herself. There wasn’t a good herb out here in the field, not in this weather. If that was true, why was she going out of her way to bury the morning’s vomit in the snow? Why was she guzzling three bottles of water mid-afternoon, and six at night? There was no deception now. She’d run out of excuses save to get a midwife’s analysis. And even then, her hopes were dashed. John’s baby was growing inside her.
“It’s a girl,” the midwife was saying. As though she wasn’t dropping an anvil with the news. “Shouldn’t the father be with you?”
The father is killing the people bent on destroying all that you are. They will kill your children, pike their heads on the town walls, and fuck all the holes your daughters have. Sylver didn’t have the energy for a round of who’s holier-than-thou, so she left the woman with her morals.
The city of Mint spread out before her. The heart of the nation’s wealth. The heart of the Coicro stronghold. Silver towers stabbed the sky at every other step, like something out of a fairy tale. I bet Mykel knows their names. There were few people who could claim to that, scholar or no.
Then thoughts of the baby ultimately, inevitably, brought her mind to memories she’d rather forget.
She was two and ten when Papa died.
She walked from school alone that day, as she did every day. A score of years passed since the terrible fantasy of her mother was proven wrong. It had taken a long time to grow accustomed to the truth and the embarrassment it wrought. But while time provided maturity and acceptance for her, the same could not be said for her classmates. “Stay away from Melissa, she’s wrong in the head, or she’ll drag you down with the dead.” The phrase had grown from light teasing to occasional bullying to the fulcrum of which her life revolved. It was bad enough to think on the childhood of stupidity; worst still was the daily reminder. But then, man was cruelest when he was a child.
She came to her house and felt her heart stop. Voices came from the windows made gold by the lantern light, hushed whispers as though the words were too fragile to be spoken aloud. Just like the time when the truth of her mother was revealed, when her entire life was exposed as a child’s sham. Fingers numbed by terror clenched the door-knocker, pulled it open. Then she walked in like the wooden dolls lining the wall’s high shelves, fake and insubstantial.
“Melissa.” Miss Teacher had more wrinkles and webs creasing her face, with a touch of gray to her curly golden hair. Age hadn’t dimmed the ardor of her compassion, though. But Melissa flinched from her embrace, flinched further at the cadre of teachers gathered about in queasy knots across the breadth of the room. They were all there, faces lined and gullied in helplessness. “Melissa.”
“Where is my Father?” No tears. The ability had been burned out of her long ago.
Miss Teacher nodded. “I’ll take you to him.”
Papa’s room was a familiar sight. Everything was white: the curtains, the windows, the rugs, even the blankets and pillows and the bed itself. He’d started buying white when the times were lean and money short. White is the cheapest, he’d often said – what he always said when dodging questions of their poverty. Melissa hated the dodging, but her father’s love soothed all discomfort.
Would that she could keep the blandness now. Papa lay sheathed in his white blankets almost up to the neck. The head that protruded was an ugly mirror: shriveled, bumpy, hollowed and ravaged; skin was too sallow to hold his eyes in place. And even that was changed. The usual glaciers of his eyes were clouded somehow, shrouded by an inner fog that refused to burn off.
“Melly.”
Melissa was rooted to the spot. The voice was barely a croak, lacking the boom his great chest thumped while speaking. At his side, the white-haired physician rebuked him for that small effort. Father Thompson, patron saint of the town himself. Saint, blacksmith...he was everything the tiny town could afford, and the breadth of his responsibilities was such that his apprentices were an extension of his goodwill. To have him here personally meant that things were terribly dire.
Melissa nodded as the priest described the intensity she was seeing, but his voice was a dull buzz. She was too deep into the past to hear it, too deep in her own stupidity. She knew the progression of Papa’s disease, but she never let herself believe the finality of it. If it was belief in the first place. Eight years ago, she believed a gravestone to be a silent mother. Perhaps the denial stretched from her childhood, blinded her in this regard, too.
The pop of strained joints was a cacophony of despair as the shriveled head swiveled to include Teacher and the Father. “Please leave the room. I want to talk to her alone.” His voice was barely a croak, but they did as he asked. They could not begrudge him on his deathbed. When the door was shut, Papa bade her forward.
“Melly.”
She felt like a doll, ungainly and fragile, as she came to his side. “What’s wrong, Papa?”
“I’m going to join your mother, sweetling.” A claw-like hand, skin slipping off the fingers, wobbled towards Melissa; instinctively she grabbed it. The bones were so light they seemed in danger of breaking apart, but Melissa held it as though it was the only connection between them.
“I don’t want you to die, Papa.”
“Neither do I.”
“I don’t want to be alone. Please don’t make me go on alone.”
“You’ll never be alone, Melly. You’ll have the memory of me in your heart. You only need to think of me, and I’ll be there with you.”
“I’ll tell my children all about you. That way you’ll always be –” The words trailed off as Papa’s face twisted in pain. She’d seen that face before. The same face Papa wore when he explained Mama was never coming back, that she’d been a fool, delusional and pathetic.
“Melly. I’m sorry about this. I’m really sorry.”
“Papa?”
“Bend closer, Melly. There’s...something I need to tell you. Something I hoped I wouldn’t tell you for a long time.”
“Papa, you’re scaring me.”
“I don’t want to terrify you, Melly. But there’s something...something about your Mama you need to know.”
And there, on his bed, more wraith than man, shrunken and insubstantial, he told her.
***
The women of your blood always die in childbirth. Always.
She ran away the moment Papa died. She ran away from her pain, from her past, even her name. Melissa was no more. There was only Sylver.
She never told John. How could she? A carefully orchestrated of the past, bits and pieces instead of the whole, had guarded her secret. She told him she was bullied, as she was. She told him that she kept the world at arm’s reach because of those trying years, which was true. Bits and pieces instead of the whole. No, John did not know.
It hurt that she lied to the one man she truly loved, but in all honesty, she never thought she’d lived this long. The career of a soldier seemed fit to a woman whose motherhood was tied with death, and as it turned out the role fit her more easily than she thought. The inner toughness that hid the weakness beneath saved her life more than once. It was even the reason why she met John in the first place.
It was a dark time. Yet another man left her. Or rather she left him. Knowing the route of your own death was a painful thing, leaving those who left behind was even worst. But there could be no pain if you kept the world out of arm’s reach. Her womb could not betray her if there was no seed to sprout. But it was a lonely road, a road made harder when surrounded by people enjoying the one treasure she could never risk: companionship. Family. And now she was too good at soldiering to fall in battle. The weight of that burden, the cold length of the impeding future, the lack of things that could never be hers...it proved too much. The only escape was suicide. She had the place, she had the dagger and the will to use it. But her arms betrayed her. They wouldn’t plunge into her heart. Something was stopping it.
John was stopping it.
“No!” Scrambling across the ground she did not see the man towering over her. In his hand was the dagger she so craved. “Give that to me.”