“We are all Humans, Sabira, we all get scared. I think that will never change. But we can choose how we react to fear. When you choose to let go of your fears, you will find that what you once thought was impossible is standing right there before you.”
“But that’s really what you want, to raise your rank?”
“In part yes, I admit it. With higher rank, as you say, I would have more resources, be able to accomplish more, help more.”
“I can understand that.” Sabira smirked. “Raising rank is what I thought I wanted most.”
“And now?”
“Now that I think about it,” said Sabira, “it’s the same thing I’ve always wanted. To be able to choose.” She ate the remainder of the bitter umu nut and decided. Tonight, she would drink eon for the third time.
37.
THEY HELD RITUAL on the second floor again. The heavy, translucent curtain was pulled to the sides, so they could look out and see the stars. The walls of the common room remained in their normal state, appearing as nothing more or less than any other room of the Embassy. Rain didn’t join them, but Torque, Playa, and Zonte returned to the circle again.
“Tonight is the third night of your initiation into the mysteries.” Maia sat in the middle of the circle, a bowl of stinking eon placed before her. “We call this third night the reunion. It is the night of the ascent, of completion, and also of new beginnings. The different aspects of your personality are revealed to you by the sacrament. Tonight, reunify those parts into the whole and take this new knowledge, this new understanding, back into the world.
“There is no music on reunion night. Only silence, darkness, and the presence and the intentions of those gathered. Sabira, starting tonight and every night you drink eon, I want you to do so with intention and purpose. Eon can offer many insights. Sometimes an overwhelming amount of information can carry our minds away in wonder. But if we approach the eon with intention and purpose, asking for wisdom and guidance on matters important to us, we can glean profound answers. Though they may not be at all the answers we are expecting.”
Since understanding and insight were exactly what Sabira was desperate for, it was easy to choose her intentions. What was the truth of the world she saw, with sapphire blue skies and clear rivers? What was humanity’s place in the universe? What was hers?
When Maia passed Sabira the cup of stinking, brown liquid, pangs of terror gripped her chest. She knew she was going to die. Again. That she would be crushed. Again. Terrified at the certainty she would experience her own death, she suddenly grasped a new way of understanding what was happening in vision. It wasn’t that she was dying when she drank eon. More like she was cracking apart an old shell of herself, shedding old skin like a tunnel snake. Sabira decided she needed what was emerging within her more than a shell grown brittle and obsolete, and drank the sacrament.
A voice disrupted her thoughts. Zonte’s. He and Playa lay close by on a mound of soft cushions. “Sabira. We just wanted to let you know we trust you.”
“We believed too, both of us,” Playa said. “I grew up with the Chosen. I believed everything the Akuhn-Lo told us about the Nahgak-Ri and the Nine Gods.”
“It was hard to let go,” said Zonte, “but you have to. You have to let go of the lies of the Overseers and Godseers and Warseers. All of them.”
“Everything we were told to believe was sacred was nothing but lies, a faith of horrors as I see it now,” said Playa. “But it doesn’t mean there isn’t anything worth believing in. That’s something the eon has shown us. Both of us. Maybe the Nine Gods aren’t real. But there is something . . . more to this life. Something that gives life and love. A connection deeper than our skin and bones. Deeper than any lie. Maybe the Gods of the Nahgak-Ri don’t see us. But something must have seen you and brought you to join us. Just like Maia and Gabriel were brought through the Shattered Gates to free us.”
“What we’re trying to say, Sabira,” said Zonte, “is that you need to let go. But don’t lose faith. Not now. We’ve come so far.”
“We’re a brood now,” said Torque, “and we need you to be our protector. That’s what I say about it.”
Was it possible? Could she protect them? Sabira had tempered her body and will through trial after trial to become a conqueror, to become a holy warrior of Divine Will. Could that same strength be called on to protect?
She had protected brood before. When they were little mine rats, she defended her brood-sister from the more brutish in the warrens. Whether it was by chance, or eon, or intervention of some greater powers, she felt like Torque was right. They were all brood now.
Tomorrow they would leave the Unity and the Monarchy and all the madness of war and slavery behind. But who knew what waited for them, really, on the other side of the galaxy? Gabriel and Maia and Orion, as much as she wanted to believe she could trust them, had kept secrets from her about who they were and where they were from. Maybe there was more they were keeping from all of them? But whatever awaited them on the other side of the Shattered Gates, her brood would need protecting. They would need her. She was a servant after all; maybe it was time to serve her own.
She would need help, though. Would need to get through to Daggeira. They were both servants. The two of them had protected each other, even to what they thought would be their dying breaths. Sabira hoped she could find that instinct in Daggs and call on it to stand by her side, protecting their new brothers and sisters together. Even if some of their new brood didn’t trust them yet.
Sabira stepped out of the swirl of thoughts for a moment, realized the eon was already taking effect. A tight nausea seized her belly, but soon let go. The bucket waited nearby, though she suspected she may not need it. Her palms turned clammy. The silent darkness of the room seemed to breathe, reality itself expanding and contracting around them.
“Be calm, lay back,” said Maia softly. Her fingertips traced a light caress along Sabira’s sweat-beaded scalp. “You are safe. Close your eyes. Let the sacrament do its work.”
For the third night in a row, she felt the change come over her, the queer, new awareness of her own body, even of her own thoughts. She stood beneath a great, living dome with her fellow eon drinkers. Passed through worlds of light and meaning. It wasn’t the same as before. Each experience and vision was unique. Though there was a similarity, an uncanny familiarness.
And for the third night in a row, the zaicha came to her. Small, timid, fragile—everything she had spent her life stripping away from herself—it stood before her in the darkness, waiting to show her the way. For the third night in a row, she followed.
The zaicha led her to herself.
In the pit again. Gouts of red pouring from her chest, globs of black dripping from her hands. Runny smears of black across her face. Teeth bared, muscles rippling, pale eyes wide like a frenzied beast. The rage and the strength unlocked by the yarist gem consuming her.
And then she was someone else. She lay on the fighting pit’s rocky floor. Lights glared and spun overhead. A stranger with a familiar face stood over her, victorious, bloody, a gem in one hand and a gore-drenched axe in the other.
Is this how I die? At the hands of a nameless mine rat, deep in the fighting pit? Far from the stars?
Was that Sabira looming over her? Was that who she was then, or who she was now? Were the wide, feral eyes her own? The power and the fury and the righteous faith, was it unleashed, burning inside her, now? Or a memory, an echo? Victor and victim. Living and dead. Hero and traitor.
Like a single rock tumbling within a cave-in, a thought about Torque bounced through the chaos of her mind. Did Torque see her like this? Did she feel this same confusion?
Was she Torque? Or was she Sabira? Or was she the nameless, unseen dead?
All around, the drums boomed. The walls of the pit trembled. The pounding war rhythms of the Servants grew louder, fiercer. They reverberated in her chest. Her heart thumped in sync to the deafening beat, awa
kening her instincts, her training. The drums surrounded her, encased her in sound. The drums . . .
The Servants are here.
Sabira’s eyes popped open. She needed to warn them all. But her jaw reacted like a machine she didn’t know how to operate. She reached for Maia. Heard Torque’s scream a moment before the explosion. The whole building lurched. A high-pitched ringing eliminated all other sounds. She didn’t hear the window exploding or the harsh tittering of a thousand glass shards. But she did see the stunner roll across the floor, streaming black, icky lines behind it in the air. She tried to dive for it, but her insides were thick, sloshy mud.
The stunner exploded in her face.
Then she was on her back, convulsing, unable to control her movements. Sharp bile stung the back of her throat. The walls rippled into glowing geometries. Armored bodies flew through the shattered window. Blood-coated afterimages trailed their every movement. Nine of them. A whole crew.
Her guts spasmed, and she vomited foul, brown liquid and stinging bile. Lems stepped out of the walls, a team of faceless men dripping sparkling shards in their wake. Long arms projected from their bodies, whipped out at the servants, coiled around armored limbs and snared their weapons.
Searing, bright plasma ripped through lems. The whole room glowed hellish scarlet. The lems recongealed, kept moving forward, whipping tentacular arms at the invaders. Burning bits of forma dropped to the floor around her.
Sabira gagged, convulsed. She couldn’t get all the vomit purged from her mouth. It pooled in her throat. A weak hand grasped her shoulder, pushed her on her side. Still gagging, desperate for air, she felt like a giant was wringing her insides like a wet rag. The vomit mostly cleared her throat, splattered onto the floor. Sabira still couldn’t breathe.
She felt a presence near, radiating terror. Maia’s arm encircled Sabira. Her gasps echoed hollow and pained in Sabira’s ears. Maia couldn’t breathe either. The regulated atmosphere within the Embassy blew out of the broken windows, leaving nothing for their desperate, burning lungs.
The eon makes everything abstract and deeply horrifying. Every moment plops into being with a shrill screaming dread.
Loud, cracking pops, sparks tear white-hot arcs through the air. The servants blast the lems until they burn through to the nodes animating their forma bodies. Plasma fire slags nodes into steam.
Motion erupts from the pole shaft. Spirals of purple and gold carve through the room, bisecting the invaders. Armored limbs drop to the floor. Red blood spatters on Sabira’s face. Blood drips down the walls, leaving graffiti glyphs in its wake.
A stream of sizzling plasma bolts slams into the torrent of color and butchery, gives it a form. Blur solidifies into body, crashes back against the wall. The body is covered in scorched armor. Bits of it burn and flake off. Matter pours from the wall and floor, replaces what was shed. A glint of gold and silver eyes. Gabriel.
Another explosion. A hollow thud from above slams the building.
Sabira gasps, and Gabriel transmutes into color and motion, leaves fading echoes of his passage. One last lem tangles a servant. A flash of gold, a volcano of blood from the decapitated neck. Plasma fire. The room strobes red.
Sabira sees the breathing masks where they lay across a terrain of broken glass, severed limbs, and writhing forma tentacles. She tries to crawl, but her muscles still spasm and clench uncontrollably from the stunner. All she can do is shake and gasp and watch the blur of killing.
Two servants, one lem, and Gabriel’s lethal blur are fractals of time, velocities of color. Plasma blasts sear through the room. A slagged node spurts from the smoking lem body. Round after round of plasma fire tumbles Gabriel out onto the balcony. A fleeting hint of his image through the empty window frame before the transformation back into pure motion. Something flies across the room and lands near where Sabira and the others huddle, quivering and breathless.
With violently shaking hands, Torque finds the object Gabriel had thrown to them. A bag. She manages to pull out a breathing mask and affix it over her mouth.
An armored servant blasts plasma fire again and again, misses, while the other quickly reconfigures their palukai into a short spear.
The torso of the servant who was just firing falls to the floor, his pelvis and legs falling back the opposite direction. A thick slosh of intestines slithers out of each half.
The remaining servant nails Gabriel with plasma fire to the chest, spins the palukai with expert precision, and drives the spearpoint through the Emissary’s thigh. Gabriel swings, but the servant is already dodging back. Gold-tinged rupture blades carve through empty air, leave shaky tracers in its wake. Gabriel lunges, still fast, but no longer a blur.
A hand touches Sabira’s face, shakily places the mask over her mouth. The sides of the mask cling to her sweaty cheeks. A quick, electric buzz and she breathes again.
Another blast, another stab into Gabriel’s leg. He slices again at the servant, but the elongated palukai keeps him out of Gabriel’s reach. The servant fires, and Gabriel slams to the floor hard on his back. The servant spins his weapon, reconfiguring during the motion. The palukai blade slices off Gabriel’s left arm at the elbow. Screaming. He grabs the stump of his arm to shield the wound, stop the gush of blood.
The servant’s heavy boot stomps down, traps Gabriel’s right arm, and the blade cleaves the right forearm in two. Sabira tries to gasp and scream at the same time. The servant drops down hard, grank-plate armor over his knee driving into Gabriel’s sternum, the butt of his palukai crushes his face. Gabriel’s forma helmet cracks, falls away. The servant pulls a small device from a utility compartment on his hip, sticks it on Gabriel’s forehead. The Emissary’s spine curves back on itself, as if he is being folded in half the wrong way. His eyes roll up, showing only white.
The servant stood, kicked Gabriel’s motionless body aside, and turned to face Sabira where she lay huddled in a terrified, shaking pile with the others. Sabira felt more arms wrap protectively around her. She wanted to embrace them back, but she had taken the majority of the stunner’s blast. Every muscle still spasmed and screamed in pain.
The servant stepped through pools of blood, vomit, and sizzling debris so that he towered over them. Using his palukai as a staff, he lowered himself to one knee directly before Sabira’s quivering eyes. The silver glyphs on his faceplate seemed familiar, but their lines wouldn’t hold still, each mark slithered into the next.
The amplified voice coming from his helm sounded hollow and dry. “Calm child. It’s all over. You’re safe now.” The helmet’s visor shifted transparent to reveal a face covered in scars and glyphs.
“Thank Star Father we found you,” he said. “It’s all over now. Grandfather is here to take you home.”
Part 4: Sacrificial Altars
38.
DRENCHED IN COLD sweat, Sabira wedged herself into the corner of the quarantine cell, curled up in a ball, and shivered uncontrollably. Earlier, she had been convinced she was burning alive. The cell’s walls and ceiling had sprayed her from every direction with boiling enzyme showers. In her mind’s eye, she had envisioned the shower like plasma fire, scalding away her flesh into vapor and ash. Now, the press of the ceramic walls felt cool against her naked, feverish skin.
The eon still spiraled within her mind, warping and transmuting everything around her. The walls and ceiling pulsed through a spectrum of colors, and thousands of orange and black eyes protruded from every surface, staring at her, lidless and fierce, penetrating into her being.
Overwhelmed by the thousands of staring eyes, she closed her own. Instead of black, silent relief, the eon cycled her through memories of her capture like a terrifying, waking dream. A dream far more vivid and lucid than any she’d had before. Over and over, she remembered.
Grandfather Spear slicing through Gabriel’s arm. His heavy knee smashing that beautiful face. Grandfather cradling her in his massive arms on the Embassy balcony. The hum of his armor’s h
over pods, rising into the night.
Trails of fire cobwebbing the black sky like a hellish dome over the city. The green orb atop the ancient fortress rupturing, an emerald shockwave skimming the tops of buildings. The sparkling rings of Dlamakuuz stretched across the horizon turning hard, lethal, a diamond-sharp scythe looming over the planet.
Into the bay of one of the wreckers lurking in the sky a hundred meters above the Embassy. Devoured by the ship, swallowed whole. The medics blurring into scanners and questions—something about quarantine, safety precautions. Daggeira already inside getting quick-scanned, ignoring everyone but Sabira. Staring straight at her, eyes like pale steel. Silent and unwavering. Sabira’s face burning beneath her glare.
And then again. Gabriel, bloody and mutilated on the floor right in front of her. Grandfather, sky, fire, Daggeira. And again.
Gabriel, Grandfather, sky, fire, Daggeira.
Again.
Sabira wanted to die.
“Don’t say that,” the boy said. “You’re a fighter.”
Sabira lifted her trembling head from her arms. Her neck protested. Everything felt stiff and weak. The motion made her dizzy. “Zonte?”
Two disarmingly pretty faces, Zonte and Playa, looked back at her from across the little room for a quick, cutting moment, before dissolving into abstraction, just a play of the light strips gleaming off the wall. Sabira felt as if a coarse, heavy stone had lodged itself into her lower belly.
For a second there she’d thought she wasn’t alone.
Thonk.
Sabira turned toward the hollow thumping sound. Thonk. Torque sat curled in a ball on the floor next to her, rocking, shaking. Thonk. Hitting her head against the ceramic walls.
Thonk.
Silence again. Alone again. Just her and the walls of orange and black eyes staring at her naked thoughts, probing her every secret.
Before the Shattered Gates of Heaven Page 25
