by Del Law
“I haven’t told anyone yet,” Fehris continues. “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know how much you knew, how much of you was… is taken.” He is speaking fast and quietly. “Most of the literature is forbidden. It’s deep in the libraries of the Tel Kharan, where no one goes. Only a few are trained.
“I’ve been there. I’ve read the books. They get them early, as children. They shape them they way they want them and put them to work. They keep them…contained. Focused. To keep them from getting consumed by others.”
Kjat remembers: the children in the ship.
She’s coming home now. She is home.
“Without that focus? It will control you and then it will destroy you, you know. Whatever it is that you’ve found, it will drive you mad. And then it will kill you bit by bit until there is nothing left of you. It will climb through you into our world. It will own your body and do what it wants with you. And then, unchecked, it’ll try and do the same with all of us.”
Kjat shakes her head. “No one owns me. No one controls me!”
She steps back and puts her hand on her knife. “This is my own power, that I have worked for all of my life!”
She realizes she is shouting at Fehris, and she isn’t entirely sure why. She looks down at her hands, where the black fog is beginning to rise. It sweeps around her like a cloak, and there is black fire flickering at the edges of her vision that makes it hard to see clearly.
She is Kjatyrhna, Kjat, Kjati.
She is so much more.
“Where do you think this power you have comes from,” Fehris whispers. “Don’t you think it has a price? Let me help you,” Fehris says urgently. “You can set this power aside. You can try and reclaim your life. It might not be too late.”
“This is my life!” Kjat shouts again. Her knife is in her hand. Her voice takes on the howl of the blackjackals and the window glass all around the room cracks at the sound of it.
Fehris shakes his head sadly. “Can’t you see it? Look at yourself. It has you now.”
“NO!” Kjat shouts. A dark blast leaps from her knife and explodes at Fehris’s feet, and the detonation knocks him backwards across the room and through the large bank of windows to the terrace. Chairs, desks, and chaises fly up against the walls. Windows shatter and the skylights blow out.
Kjat stands in the center of it all, quivering with rage and joy.
She blinks and looks around as the dark cloak of fog about her began to clear. Carpets and draperies are burning. Smoldering books are scattered everywhere, and the furniture was smoking. Even the curved ceiling high above her is blackened and scorched, and Fehris lies on the ground out in the garden.
He’s not moving.
What has she done? This is horrible.
It was beautiful. It’s a beginning.
What will Blackwell think?
The joy drains away from her, and its absence is filled with a cold kind of despair. What just happened? It doesn’t make sense to her. Why did she react that way?
This is where everything starts. This is the real beginning.
Had she killed him? First the Hulgliev, then the Tel Kharan, and now Fehris?
She runs to the terrace to check on Fehris’ body. He is unconscious, lying at an awkward angle and bleeding from thick gashes across his side that stretched from his back around to his chest from the window glass.
But he is breathing. She pulls him away from the burning debris onto a softer patch of plants and grasses.
She should finish him.
She should run, before Blackwell sees this, sees what she did to that Hulgliev.
She sprints back through the garden and leaps the low wall, and runs out into the street there. The long, curved faces of the Flowermech houses all stare back at her like judgmental old men.
She hears Blackwell calling her name from behind her, and wants to go back. Wants to talk to him, to explain, to stand beside him. She wants to fight alongside him and protect him now, with everything she’s gained, to atone for her terrible crimes, for that murder in the grasslands.
And yet she takes a street at random, running fast down the long curving length of it. At the far intersection she takes another turn at random and heads down the ridge, into the city. She passes an old walking bus, steam hissing from its legs, passes the station for the pneumatic train. Her heart comes into her throat and her breath is fast and furious.
The featherwolves are running with her. The blackjackals are watching. Her knife is in her hand.
The houses give way to larger buildings, the remnants of an older commercial district built from stone and brick, and the deserted streets widen. Murky, overgrown canals filled with swamp water cut through the streets at regular intervals. All power networks are down, though she is swimming in the feel of the lei. Disheveled humans—men and women, mostly pale skinned and wearing rough clothes, are out on rooftops for what light remained from the setting sun.
She takes to the alleyways. Is she being followed? Is it Blackwell?
She should go back, explain. Maybe they can help her.
She is running and will always run. She is the teeth of the wind.
She jumps a narrow stretch of canal, startling a school of red fish that glitter like gemstones down in the murk, and then dodges down random turns behind restaurants and shops. Some Talovians squat in a group over a set of dice and animal bones, and they croak and mutter curses at her as she passes. One stands and throws a rock after her.
A single Kruk in an ancient bateau calls out to her in his own language, thrumming his undertongue at her as he poles slowly along the canal.
She is utterly lost now, more ways than one and she knows it.
Still she keeps going and she sinks into the rhythm of it; the slap of her boots against the cobblestones, the beating of her heart, the ebb and flow of her breath.
She can run forever like this, past the edge of the Tamaranth suburban ghettos, out into the swamps and jungle, and through them all out across the plains and the Akarii mountain reserves and the Fjilosh forests until she comes to another ocean, one so very different from the one she just left, filled up with salt water so thick she can sink into it and let the tide just take her away to the other side of the world.
Blackwell, she thinks. Blackwell.
There’s a painful longing where her stomach was, but a featherwolf eats it and it hurts no more.
Then, it strikes her. She’s no longer alone.
The footfalls that echo now off buildings are not just hers.
It wasn’t Blackwell, who moved almost silently, or the Kerul politician, who would never have been able to keep up with her. It’s another presence or set of presences that moves easily through the maze of streets and alleys and across thin canal bridges after her. There is one behind her, just out of her view, turning corners just after she’d turned the next. Another presence off to her left—she catches a shadowy glimpse across a canal as it ducks into the darkness of an open entryway. Man-sized, ragged. Around another corner is the tall shape of a Talovian at the far end of the alley, silhouetted against the darkening sky.
She turned away from him, to her right, and goes down past the back sides of a series of collapsed row houses. A large, colorful bird watches her as she passes from a nest on an overhanging eave, and fluffs its feathers in indignation.
At the end of the row houses she comes out into a section of the street that’s filled with rioters, large groups of mostly Talovians and Humans looting and fighting in the streets with knives and rocks and broken bottles. She turns quickly up a tight alley that runs between the last house and a taller factory. It is long and narrow and once she is half the way down it she knows she has made a mistake, and sure enough there is another man at the mouth that opens to the canal, a wretched old Stona with a cracked and twisted beak, dressed in rags. He beckons to her with his three-fingered claw.
She turns back the way she’s come, but there at the far end of the alley is the Talovian. “Come, de
ar,” he croaks, and flicks spit over her head with his long tongue. “We just want to talk to you.” He holds a rough boat hook at his side. She can smell the khar leaf and rum on his breath from where she stands. Three more faces peer over the roofline of the row house, two dirty Talovians and another Stona. Next to one of them is a monkey that screams and chitters at her. There are men in the factory, too—she can hear running feet there, coming closer.
From somewhere in her fog, then a dark joy blooms and spreads through her.
“Talk,” she says, smiling. “Yes, I think I’d like that.”
Then the dark fog rises around her and takes hold of her and the fire is in her eyes. Her knife becomes a black beacon and the waves of black fire peal away from it and trace exotic pathways through the air. It seems amazingly slow to her, so slow it’s as though the fire is the path of someone’s pen, writing in the air, and yet she sees by the slower reactions of the men that it is not the same for them.
A Talovian dies first, wrapped in a black fog that bursts his smooth, frog stomach from within and ties him in his own intestines and organs before enveloping him in flame. One of the Stona may have been next. She is too fascinated with the pathways in the air to know for sure; they are secret messages for her in that beautiful script, messages telling her of her own future, of her incredible destiny that is nearly upon her now, and then the men on the roof are screaming and the monkey is on fire and in the warehouse there are men putting together a rough matrix but it does them no good. The blackness wraps around her and lifts her into the air on a pillar of fire, and she sees them, all of them, spread out below her like child’s toys arrayed in so many doll houses. She reaches down into the factory, through brick and stone and metal, and lifts a man into the air with her, and there she uses her long black beak to pluck out his tiny eyes while he is still screaming. Him, she will let live, she decides, and she tosses him into the dank water of the canal. Another she tears simply in half with one slash of her great talons, and as his blood and abdominal fluids leaked out onto the dirt and trash of the alley she incinerates others indiscriminately.
Somewhere, someone is crying, sobbing, and yet it means nothing to her as she pushes herself aloft.
Below, the entire city block is on fire now, and men are running in the streets and dogs are howling and other birds, tiny things, have taken wing to the west where the thick of the jungle lies. A large creature moves under the surface of the canal.
Is someone calling her name? And what is her name, exactly?
The writing doesn’t tell her.
She climbs higher, and she feels the joy of flight come to her, the joys of movement and freedom after confinement for so long almost as wonderful as the joy of the kill, and she knows now that the world she has come to will now be her own, and that she will love it and collect it and destroy it by fire just as she would any other thing of brilliance and beauty.
30: Blackwell
“She’s what?” Smoke rises through the shattered skylights of the garden room. The grasses and plants of the garden are singed and littered with broken glass, and out in the street a crowd is starting to gather. Millionaires in Festivaal costumes and masks. Others in dinner jackets and elaborate wigs, still holding glasses of wine—it’s amazing for me to think these people go on with their lives up here as though nothing is happening down in the Old City. In the distance, the setting sun glints copper off of an aerial mech caravan as it moves through the clouds.
Fehris coughs and spits blood as the Kruk helps him into a sitting position in the garden grasses. When he catches his breath he says the word again almost as a whisper. “Olhasqhek. It’s an old Kro word.”
“I’ve heard it. I thought they were children?” I ask.
“They are. They usually are. Or they’re insane. I should have said something, but I wasn’t sure if…”
“If I already knew? I didn’t.”
Sartosh talked about them, the children who joined worlds. We were in his San Francisco house that day. When he’d said the word, the fog descended and everything had gone dark.
They were supposed to be completely insane.
“She’s very strong, terribly gifted,” Fehris says. “But she’s been corrupted somehow. Something else is using her, using her to…” Fehris stops to catch his breath, spits more blood. There’s an awful lot of blood. “There’s no way to know what it is, or how many of them there are on the other side of her.”
Ercan kneels down. “Don’t talk, Fehris,” he says. “You need to breathe.”
Fehris grimaces. “You’re always trying to shut me up, Ercan. You need to understand this. The Council needs to know about this too. If she goes unchecked, if whatever it is gets through her, what Nadrune is doing will feel like a game of tag-the-barber. Remember the Grohmn-Elite? How do you think they got here in the first place?”
Ercan frowns. The Kruk kneels down on it’s forelegs and begins to treat Fehris’ wounds with its long, antiseptic undertongue. Fehris looks and then looks away with a grimace. The smell is rather intense, but if Fehris is well enough to be disgusted, I think he’ll recover.
The knife at Ercan’s chest chimes. Ercan stands and quiets it, and then takes me over to one side of the garden. “He’ll be all right?”
“I think so. It looks like your Kruk knows what to do.” Out in the street, other Kruks are dispersing the crowd. “Look, I should go after her.”
He nods. “I assumed. Be careful. I’ll figure out how to tell this to the Council, if I can. Frankly, the last thing they will want to hear from me is something like this. I’ll do what I can—maybe I can get to Chair Shoi alone. You’ll make contact with your Earth patron, too?”
I nod. “The opening to the corpse road is down in the Old City. I’ll get there. It’ll take a few hours.” Yet another Kruk hands me a small bag of gold bars to pass along to Capone. I look over, and see that Fehris’ wounds are covered over with a glistening gel that’s beginning to dry. “Don’t give the ship back to Nadrune, all right?”
Ercan smiles, and I can see how tired he is in the lines around his eyes. “It’ll be hard, but I’ll try and resist the urge.”
• • •
I search through the night, by the light of all the moons. I get out of the residential area and down into the Old City. I reach out through Semper’s knife looking for power signatures, resonances, anything that would give me a sense of where she passed but I can’t find her trail. There are creatures moving under the ground that read strangely, large and strong and not quite sentient, maybe looking through the old sewer systems for replacements to the old power conduits they’d grown used to sucking on. I try and avoid the fights and the looting. I duck into alleys and take my fur black to dodge street patrols, both Akarii and random gangs of humans or Stona or Talovians looking for trouble. I get a rooftop view of the Talovian riots in the Stellar Downs, the place where Tamaranth’s famous World Market used to be held in Dekheret’s time, and I hear explosions in the distance that turn out to be the seawall being blown—by who I don’t know. Parts of the city start to fill with water from the tidal lagoons.
I come across the site of one fight that might have been Akarii and might not have—dead men are scattered over the long length of an alley, and a factory has collapsed and burned, setting fire to an entire block. A ragtag mix of people are drawing buckets of water out of the canal to stop the smoldering, and the cobblestones are cracked and throbbing with aetherial resonance. A blinded man speaks crazily about some terrible bird, which makes me think Akarii, and in fact there are these strange, black feathers being scattered across the road by the night breezes. Their edges are sharp, like the blades of knives. But I can’t know that is has anything to do with Kjat. Tamaranth is large and ancient, old walking cities have been settled down into the mud since far back in prehistory, long before Dekheret’s time, and there are many things here that we don’t understand.
As the sun begins to rise I duck into the opening of a corpse road I kno
w, inside a trash can that’s back in an alley behind a noodle stand I frequent.
If you’re planning on using it, by the way, it helps if you dump the garbage out first.
I’ve brought a human with me, a man vaguely Capone’s size. I find him outside the gates of the Stellar Downs, unconscious and bleeding pretty significantly from the head and gut.
The fact that he’s dying makes me feel a little less guilty for what I’m planning to do to him. But not much.
The corpse road is dark tonight, dark and damp and it smells of rotting fish. Maybe that’s from the can, but it stays with me and gets worse as I go. There are more branches than ever, even from the last time I visited—I’m wondering if all of the connections with present-day Earth are pulling the two worlds even closer together. I have to sense my way carefully, carrying the bleeding human over my shoulder.
My secondfather told me that we navigate through the roads the way birds will navigate across continents and wind currents, and maybe that's true. Some branches of the roads just feel differently to me than others. Some feel welcoming, some make you feel like you’re being watched, and others raise up the hair on my back.
Something passes me in the dark, maybe a Buhr, maybe not. I hear whispers. Somewhere someone is crying.
There are a lot of choices at the edge of Capone’s cell. The road fractures into different slices of years—some of them have him in it, some of them don’t. Some of them open into times closer to present day, when this place becomes a tourist attraction. Some of them already have me in it, and I don’t need a conversation with myself—those are just frustrating.
I know all of my jokes. I can’t stand how stubborn I am.
I leave the human in the road and push through into Capone's cell. It’s night on the island prison. Everything is lit yellow with the dim glow of the old lights.
Capone is sitting up on his bunk. His hair sticks out from the sides of his head as though he’s been sleeping. “Beast,” he breathes. “You smell like the ocean. The real goddamn ocean. That’s not a compliment.”
