So You Want to be a Robot and Other Stories

by A Merc Rustad

  Moonlight lies in congealed puddles like old blood. Broken pieces of starlight glitter sharper from where they hang caught on dark leaves and dead branches. The air itself is heavy, blue-black as it holds the night close.

  Between the trees, I catch sight of a face made of darkness, smiling at me. I jerk my head uselessly, but the shadow melts into a formless void once again and is gone. Why is it so familiar?

  A glimpse of light at my feet attracts the wolf-eye, welcome distraction.

  It’s a lone sunbeam, shivering under a tree and cornered by shadows. Dawn is far off, not even a whisper in my bones. The pinch of regret startles me as we watch the forsaken sunlight. It will die here.

  The most I can do is offer it a warmer burial than the cold ground and damp leaves where the dark curls. A mercy, undeserved, that I desperately need to give it. I kick the shadows aside and cup the sunlight in both hands. It’s weak, lukewarm and dimming into ember-red.

  “Rest,” I whisper to it, and its radiance flickers in a sigh. I tuck it into my vest pocket, a droplet of warmth over the scars along my skin.

  “Do you ever question why?” the wolf asks.

  I’m tired of riddles. “Speak plainly.”

  The wolf’s shoulders are level with my chest, and the ghost tilts its head to make me stumble, my vision at my own feet. “Why you came to these Woods,” the wolf says, “why you have wandered the petrified land of stumps and bones where it is never dawn.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” The lie comes with the practiced ease of sliding a knife between sleeping ribs.

  “Our pasts matter,” the wolf replies. “Would you be here if it did not?”

  I won’t concede truth to the ghost.

  The Woods are tranquil as a newly dug grave. There, against one of the birch, a gash where an ax split the bark. Here, a skeletal bush where a net stripped it of foliage. And there, at my feet, a footprint: my own, bloodied, old. This is the path.

  My breath quickens, anticipation braided around dread. I won’t turn back now, though some buried instinct begs me to flee, to let the ghosts keep my eyes so long as I escape these Woods.

  I scatter the coward’s impulse and push forward. Ahead, the trees fall back and we reach the half-moon clearing.

  Six man-shapes stand with axes hanging limp in their hands. They aren’t ghosts, but they aren’t the living, either. Flesh sags from graying bones. Rotted leather garments hang in tatters about protruding shoulder-bones and jutting hips. Their mouths roil with maggots.

  “You came back,” they say in unison.

  Lichen ropes snap from the trees and snare my arms, pulling them above my head. A second forms a noose and snakes around my neck. The ropes heave me backwards, pinning me against a hawthorn. More lichen circles my ankles.

  Bound. Helpless.

  The ghouls lumber forward with axes raised. My heart beats in a panicked frenzy. I strain to lever one arm free as the noose tightens, dragging my chin up.

  The ghosts sit back on either side of me and watch.

  Pocked, dead skin stretches across the ghouls’ faces. Why do I not remember these details, the rotting teeth and ant-chewed eyes—

  “We are stronger now.” The ghouls raise their axes. “We will not fail you again.”

  Muscles strain in my shoulders as I pull one arm towards my chest. I feel the warm spot over my heart and hook my fingers inside the vest pocket—last hope. “Burn for me,” I whisper, a final plea.

  The sunbeam has grown strong on my body heat. The sunlight expands and blossoms, brilliant, terrible, pulling light from high above until it’s a miniature sun incarnate. It bursts in a passionate supernova and the echo of a triumphant scream.

  Both ghosts shut my eyes so I will not go blind.

  The ghouls cry out, their axes dropping to the forest floor. The lichen shrieks and unwinds. Free, I draw my knives and fling myself into the afterimage of the sunlight. Blades meet unresisting flesh.

  Pieces of my stolen memory unwind with the crunch of rib and rip of skin, weaving threads back into place.

  One.

  He remembers the Sun, his God; his purpose is only to obey. He is the Avatar of the Sun, glorious in battle, fierce in peace, merciless in all.

  Two.

  He was once a man, but when he gave himself to the Sun, it burned away all trace of who he was. He is remade only to serve.

  Three.

  He takes the map from the body of his predecessor, who looked too long into the abyss stretched dark across vellum. He envies that suicide.

  Four.

  He stands in a cave, surrounded by wolves—eyes gray, teeth bared, bodies unmoved. Too late he realizes he stares not at living flesh but skeletons, with the ghost-images of life overlaid on bones.

  Five.

  And he remembers the shadow; the beautiful, cold darkness that soothes the burning in his veins and the unbearable light behind his eyes.

  When the sixth ghoul falls, I wait for my name, surely caught like a fishbone within the woodsman’s throat.

  Only the feel of old blood on my knuckles comes as reward.

  I spin in a circle, though the ghosts now watched the clearing and see all. Six bodies. Nothing more. “Where is my name?”

  “They destroyed it,” the wolf says calmly. “You asked them to, after all.”

  My spine snaps rigid and I turn my head (sightless) until the wolf-eye looks me in the face.

  The wolf’s ghost smiles cruelly. “Don’t you remember, man?” It prowls across the woodsmen’s bodies. “Did the dead give you back what you begged them to steal?”

  Why would I ask for this? “Where are your bones? I will see you buried outside these Woods and at peace and you will leave me be.”

  “Look down,” the wolf says. “You will see.”

  The raven inclines its head, hooks the eye from its socket with its talons, and pops it back into my skull. The wolf does the same.

  Again my vision reels, settles, and I blink against crusted blood on my eyelids.

  The ghosts’ vengeance falls like an ax blade. Their memories and my own wrap together in my eyes and play out unflinching, unavoidable.

  He feeds blood to the map so it will show him where the old huntsmen are buried, cursed into undeath for their failure to save the First Forest from the war between Sun and Moon. Crouched among the petrified tree stumps, agate-colored in the campfire, he uses his knives to dig through ancient soil until he finds the six huntsmen.

  (High above, the raven watches him.)

  “Why do you disturb us?” the huntsmen wail.

  He pulls them from their graves and offers a simple bargain: Follow him to the Woods, which have grown on the blood and bones of the dead left from war. There their axes lie; they will pick up their tools again and kill him. Chop his name into nothing and make his body the same. His bones, full of sunlight, will burn them into ash and they will be free.

  (His death is what he promised the raven.)

  The woodsmen agree. They take up their axes in the Woods.

  (Far away, a wolf races across the land, a rippled blur of silver-black. The wolf raises his head and howls. “Wait, my love! Wait for me!”

  But the raven does not hear. The wolf cannot reach the raven in time to save him.)

  The huntsmen toss a net over the man, and he waits for the end, waits as they dig his name from his ribs with cold hands, waits as they cut it to pieces, waits—

  But the woodsmen’s blades are rusted and they have lost the strength in their arms.

  It hurts. Of course it hurts.

  They fail to kill him, leaving wounds ragged to bone not broken, and they chop away memory. For the undead, memory and flesh are the same—privileges of the living. They cannot tell the difference.

  He forgets why he came and who they are, but he never forgets his knives. He cuts himself loose and flees.

  A raven flares its wings, blocking the man’s path. “Let them finish,” the raven says. “You swore to me you would be n
o more! You swore you would pay for what you did!”

  (Far away, a wolf howls.)

  He kills the raven.

  The memory snaps my head back and the living trees of the Woods rear ancient and hateful above. I drop to my knees.

  “You remember,” the wolf whispers. “How you, heartblood of the Sun, crawled far beneath our mountains and incited the earth to rupture in fire and ash. You turned our mountains into weapons. You burned our homes, our ships, our people into nothing.”

  The ache in my gut threads like thorns through every vein. “Yes, lord wolf…”

  I sought darkness afterwards so I could forget what I did. But when was I ever honest? I didn’t want to forget. I wanted the darkness to devour me, blot out my existence so even the Sun would forget. But the darkness failed.

  No…no, I shied away, unable to ask. I fell in love with the darkness, with that face in the shadows, and could not beg for my end that way. The map would only send me back to the Sun. So I found the huntsmen instead.

  With the holes in my memory now sewn shut with ash-gray thread woven by ghosts, I look up at the wolf and the raven.

  “Your bones aren’t here, are they.”

  The wolf’s muzzle crinkles in a sad smile. “You’re kneeling on them. The huntsmen buried us together when I was dead. The Woods cannot hurt us.”

  “You needed no living flesh to come here,” I say, numb, the words coming in dull monotone. “And my blood was never in your eyes.”

  The raven’s neck feathers shine blue-black and red. “No, it wasn’t.”

  You cannot trust the dead, says the map.

  “You did kill my love,” says the wolf.

  “And my love died trying to bring me home,” says the raven. “Our bones are already together, in these Woods that will never forget.”

  I kept my word to the huntsmen, then, who will linger no longer, burned by the sunlight and destroyed with knives forged in the Sun. I lift my chin, throat bared, raw hope no different from desperation. Kill me, I want to beg. Let me go.

  “What do you want from me now, lord ghosts?”

  Raven and wolf turn their faces together. There is silence between them.

  At last, the wolf says, “Once, there was vengeance. But what does it matter to the dead? We only wished you to be held accountable. You do not deserve to live without remembering what you have done.”

  The raven nods. “And now you will always know. It is why we took your eyes; so you will see forevermore. Even your map cannot take that away.”

  I stare up at the tree canopy, at the unseen dawn. The sunbeam I freed will bring the Sun news of me. The Sun will wait, as it always does, its wrath unsated.

  You can still have your name, the map says. For a price.

  The map is honest, at least.

  “You fled the Sun once,” the wolf says. “If you step within its sight again, it will destroy you, and it will not be quick.”

  “I know,” I reply.

  “We can find peace now,” the raven says. “It is your choice if you do the same.”

  Wolf and raven turn, side by side, and disappear into the Woods.

  I stay on my knees, shivering in the cold.

  As I look into the Woods, where the ghosts faded, the shadows curl thickly. For a moment, I catch a glimmer of that face, the one I turned my back on the Sun to find. The darkness is here. It has a name for me all its own.

  Will it take me back, even with what I have done?

  (I was as bright as the Sun, once. The dark has every right to destroy me as I did the wolves.)

  I ignore the map. I will find my own way now; the dawn will always be waiting.

  I walk into the Woods in search of darkness.

  THE MOUNTAIN DREAMS pain. Cold iron vibrates purple-blue deep in the stone while tongues made from rot and rust bite and gnaw and hunger ever deeper.

  The dam, buried like a tooth in the mountain’s narrow gums, holds back the great burgundy ocean. Otherwise it would pour into the Agate Pass valley and swallow up the mining town at the mountain’s toes.

  From an owl’s eye, the dam is almost as big as the mountain, built five hundred human-years ago. The infesting tongues burrow in from the sea, sent by angry water-memories. The sea cannot see its children in the lakes far beyond the dam. So it sends corrosion into the mountain, into the infinitesimal pores of the dam.

  The mountain is being devoured from the inside and it screams.

  KYRU SQUINTS UP at the mountain in the moonlight.

  It slopes massive and muscled against the ice-black sky. The mountain’s dream-noise woke him from his own nightmares—the loudness of steel blood breath, of his mother’s last words—and he shivers in the late autumn night. Snow will come soon, blown in salt-scented gusts from across the ocean on the other side of the dam.

  He sits on his windowsill, the shutters thrown open. It is only one floor’s drop to the burlap-covered garden below and then twenty steps to the forge, where his heavy boots and thick gloves hang on pegs, where his rucksack, stained from coal dust, waits with his leather apron.

  He has never trod up the mountain, so he doesn’t know how many steps it would take.

  The miners’ cart trails are well-worn and wide, easy to walk. He could be gone before dawn and not missed until—

  That is where his plan falls to pieces like shattered crockery. His aunt would know he had disappeared within the hour. He apprentices to her in her smithy; and the only routes away from town are up the mountain or down the valley.

  He hates the valley. Its floor is littered with unknown graves, mournful bones, his last memories of his mother and sister. He craves escape and does not know how to unearth it.

  Dawn chips away the clouds and it is once again too late again to run.

  “Kyra?” his aunt calls from the kitchen. “Get dressed. It’s a long forge day.”

  He flinches at the wrong-name, slipped like a needle under his skin. He climbs from the chill window and grabs the heavy leather belts he uses to flatten down his chest before he pulls on his shirt and trousers.

  IN THE KITCHEN, his aunt straps on her leather apron as her husband scoops warmed day-old oatmeal into trenchers for the three of them.

  Kyru shuffles to the table, his sketchbook under his arm. Mint and honey spice the breakfast. He gulps his warmed cider to keep from having to speak.

  His aunt shovels her oatmeal in huge bites, saying around mouthfuls, “We got a big order from Brynu down at the farrier’s. He’s armoring some new plough horses for hauling ore through the Crags. He doesn’t want to take chances on the wolves being hungry this winter.”

  Kyru nods.

  “Kyra,” his uncle says with a sigh, “what are you wearing in your pants? Another bunch of sackcloth?”

  Kyru scoots his chair closer to the table so his uncle can’t see his lap.

  His aunt shakes her head and shoves her empty trencher aside. “She’ll get over it eventually, Dyru. Be glad she’s as skilled in metallurgy as her mother, ages rest her memory.”

  His uncle shrugs and clears the table. “Well, at fifteen I’d hoped she’d be eyeing herself a suitable husband by now. Folk talk more and more, you know.”

  “Eh, let folk talk. Long as Kyra pulls her weight in the forge, she can put off the men for years for all I care.”

  He has no interest in marriage, to another man or not. He’s never been attracted to other people the way everyone else places such value in.

  When he dreams of escape, he pictures himself in his own forge, content with metal-song and the warmth of burning coal, visited only by people who call him by his true name.

  His aunt claps her hands, brisk and loud. “C’mon, the farrier’s armor won’t forge itself.”

  Kyru’s stomach cramps. He leaves his meal unfinished.

  The bitter air warbles at his ears. Pleasant gray chill washes the kitchen heat off his skin.

  He looks up at the mountain. Over the dam lies the sea. He has never heard of water
caring the make of a person’s bones and flesh. It all sinks in the end.

  “Kyra,” his aunt snaps from the smithy door. “Daydream at lunch.”

  Kyru ducks his head and shoves his hands in his pockets. Even the promise of singing to the metal—when his aunt can’t hear—is dulled by her impatience.

  He hears the soldiers’ swords before the town’s alert bells sing.

  A REGIMENT OF one hundred soldiers in emerald uniforms and sun-bright armor marches into Agate Pass, the Lord High’s brilliant banners snapping in the cold air.

  The town of Agate Pass is the last frontier-hold on the mountain. Other towns in the region have withered and crumbled, but Agate Pass holds fast. The dam was supposed to bridge commerce, power great wheels and generate trade and wealth through the valley.

  But dour luck has clung here for generations, the dam now only a bridge through the mountain passes to the flatter lands in the empire outside the valley.

  Kyru watches, his legs rigid, from behind the cedar fence that corrals the geese into the yard beside the forge. A half-dozen imperial knights, their plumed helmets shaped like roaring lions, stride towards the smithy.

  Miners readying for work edge along the road, watching.

  “Smith,” the knight at the front calls, deep voice rich and thick like the hair that coils down over his breastplate in a thick braid spun with ribbons. The gold leafing along his shoulder pauldrons marks him as a general.

  Kyru’s aunt shuffles past him, out onto the front stoop of the smithy, and bows low. “Welcome, Hands of the Lord High.”

  As the knights draw nearer, their armor hums with wariness. Agate Pass has not received a military envoy in two years, since the Summer Census. It’s not the town that unsettles the armor’s folds and joints, but the dam.

  All the knights’ armor can feel the wrongness welling from the sea.

  A trumpeter, his throat replaced with a gilded cage and thrumming gears, announces that the Emerald Lion General and the Imperial Hands are closing Agate Pass’s mines. By the Lord High’s order, the mines will be closed until reports of instability in the dam can be confirmed.