Sroma, a long silverblack knife for Shavrim: a malevolent item, possessed of its own ill personality. It did not speak in words, but made its desires known easily enough. Shavrim cherished and despised it by turns. He tasted blood when it bit into flesh.
Jhy, a razored throwing circle for Bash, which passed through steel and rock as easily as it passed through flesh. Bash kept it close to her at all times, but always sheathed. She used it rarely, and only against the strongest mages, as if only to prove a point.
Deserest, a glass spear for Orrus—a weapon he refused to use.
Weither, an oilwood and leather sambok for Sradir. In its owner’s hands, the diminutive whip became a blur, a devastating shadow that severed even the most armored men in half. Sradir never used its proper name, instead referring to it as Little Sister.
Ruin and Rust, a pair of short swords for Ustert and Evurt: blades that never grew dull and would not be tarnished. Oddly, Ustert, who seemed always on the verge of an outburst, who lived with abandon, wielded Ruin with a cold detachment, while Evurt, the quiet one, carved with Rust in wild arcs, almost as though he were trying to throw the weapon away.
Thus equipped, no army on the face of Jeroun could stand against them.
This fact ate at Shavrim. He had been warned of threats. Initially, when he spoke of his concerns to Adrash, he received smiles and hints of further developments (“Have faith in me, Shavrim. I don’t labor to provide you with tools for your defense simply to watch you wave them about.”), but as time passed the god’s enthusiasm took on a dark, solipsist edge. Adrash spoke rarely, his moods unpredictable. He spent time away, always just out of reach, leaving the increasingly complicated task of governance to his eldest creation, often for years at a time.
Each time, coming back crueler, more inscrutable.
The thin persona of a man sloughed away, revealing the madness of divinity.
‡
Simplifying the first millennia after the introduction of elder magic, turning such a vast length of time into one color, one feeling, proved appallingly easy for one who had never been human and could only approximate the concerns of one. Surely, the change in Adrash had occurred gradually: Shavrim had known it then and certainly knew it now, yet in retrospect it was shockingly abrupt, as rapid as a droplet of ink clouding into a pail of water.
One day, he had known his creator intimately, felt the god’s moods as if they were his own—or thought he did, though the distinction makes little difference. And the next, he struggled to understand the capricious demands of a stranger, an incomprehensibly powerful being who forced his creations to betray the very people they had been engineered to assist.
One day, Shavrim had been a child, trusting, and the next …
‡
“The world would be better without him,” he said, the obvious conclusion to a hundred years of long and evasive arguments. Finally, he said it.
And then, he said even more: “He must be destroyed.”
Ustert grinned, revealing her sharp teeth. She threw one shapely silver leg over her twin’s and laughed. “Grief, Shavrim, that’s a nice thought. But there’s no chance of it happening. I don’t like him any more than you do—haven’t liked him since I was small enough to be mistaken for a corpse miner—but we’re six against a god. Besides, he’s not really here any longer, is he? Off on his little ship, father is, doing who knows what.”
“Don’t call him that,” Evurt said. He sat as rigid as his twin was relaxed, a thin bronze statue of a man. “I don’t like it when you call him that. He’s not our father.”
Ustert rubbed his cheek with the back of her hand, causing Evurt to grimace.
“So, you’re not in love anymore,” Bash said. She flicked at an imaginary piece of lint on her coat. “So, you’ve been abandoned, forced into a role you never wanted and aren’t suited for.” Her seawater eyes met his, and her features softened. “You used to hate me, eldest brother. I know you did. But I’d hate to think you wanted me gone from the world. Give it time. Maybe you’ll feel differently. Maybe he’ll feel differently.”
“This isn’t about love,” Shavrim said.
Sradir nodded, expressionless as only it could be. “Of course it is not, Shavrim. Bash is speaking in her metaphors again.”
Ustert grinned.
Shavrim looked to Orrus, who shrugged with both shoulders and wings. “I’m in,” the winged demigod said in his rasp of a voice. He tapped his head and then gestured to encompass each of them. “All of us are in. We can pretend otherwise, but it’s the fact.”
Bash opened her mouth and then closed it.
“Yes,” Evurt said, just as his twin said, “Fuck.”
Sradir gazed woodenly at Shavrim. “Many will die. Even we may die. Are you that in love with mankind?” The corners of its mouth rose fractionally. “Love being a metaphor, mind.”
“We aren’t men, so love is not the word,” Shavrim answered. “Love is never the word for us. But I won’t see mankind pushed and pulled by his whims any longer, given the tools of war and domination and then crushed for their arrogance when they use them. I won’t be one of those tools any longer.” He stood and paced before them. “So, he’s gone for a decade, two, even three. He’ll be back, and who knows what he’ll do then? Even absent, he exerts his influence. You can’t tell me you don’t all feel it. It limns our every word, or every gesture.”
Silence—as close to assent as they would give. Shavrim pressed.
“We’re a reflection of Adrash, and we’re slowly going mad with him. We all know the result of madness on our scale, which is terrible enough, but on his? The world will be burned to a cinder, should he continue down this path. We’ll be carried with him. We’ll be responsible.”
Bash shook her head. “But what if we’re what’s causing him—”
“No.” Evurt stood abruptly, dislodging his twin. He made a cutting motion with his left hand. “No. We have heard this before, sister, heard it and dismissed it. The question is irrelevant because it has no answer. We may be the source of Adrash’s disease—or we may not be. It does not matter. We are the cure, either way. The only cure.”
The room grew quiet, ever the result of Evurt choosing to voice more than a brief complaint. Ustert reached forward and drew her twin back down onto the couch, wrapping her arms around him. Sradir closed its eyes, blank-faced. Bash raised her eyebrows at Orrus, and Orrus turned his intense gray gaze to Shavrim.
“We look to you,” Orrus said. “Perhaps we shouldn’t, but we do.”
Shavrim nodded. He knew this, had relied upon it. There were advantages to the way his mind functioned, how it forced thoughts to branch out along pathways throughout his body, causing him to arrive at conclusions only after long and repetitious thought. One day he would come to feel overwhelmed by the lifetimes he had accreted in his stretched neurons, but it had not happened yet. He still possessed wisdom unique to him.
He crouched and pressed a huge palm against the sun-warmed marble floor, a floor he had slapped his bare feet upon as a child. He remembered being scolded by a tutor for running. He had scolded his siblings for doing the same when they were young.
“I won’t pretend we’re a family,” he said. “I won’t pretend we even enjoy sitting here with each other, especially not in this place. We’re not saintly, by any metric, but we’re not part of the disease spreading in Adrash’s soul. Of this I’m sure. I think it more probable he engineered us too well to our task, and that our task was more complex than he let on. He couldn’t predict what would happen to himself in time, but he knew the risk. He knew, and created us to keep himself from the void.” His fingers stroked the leather sheath covering Sroma. “He even engineered us weapons for the task.”
He heard an intake of breath—Bash—and held up his hand, forestalling her words of denial.
“I’m not saying he made plans for his own defeat. He will not concede to us, like a man taking medicine. He has let himself forget our full purpose, and we let
him.”
Sradir opened its eyes and locked stares with Shavrim.
“We let him,” she said. The words were neither challenge nor agreement. “Well. No more of that.”
‡
In the Month of Soldiers, Adrash ended his self-imposed exile of two hundred and seven years by landing The Atavest on the southwestern coast of Doma. Announcements, which would in time become slow and expensive, dependant upon massive reserves of elder-corpse materials, traveled quickly from Adrash’s hand. Mankind—not one member of which had known their god in the flesh—rejoiced with a month-long celebration.
Despite the passage of two centuries, Shavrim’s siblings required no reminding or spurring to their purpose. Indeed, time had only increased their violent resolve. They allowed the celebrations to come to an end, and then met Adrash in the scrub desert of central Gnos Min, just beyond the eastern wall of Curathe.
The god read their intention immediately. Undoubtedly, no great act of premonition: all six had been conspicuously absent from the festivities.
The battle began without a word exchanged.
‡
Thirteen hours later, four of the six siblings remained. What had been the city of Curathe ticked as it cooled before them, a vast shallow bowl of fused ceramic.
Shaky on his feet, nearing a point of exhaustion where reality blurred around the edges, Shavrim experienced a vision of what the place would become in only a few months’ time. Rain, falling in the Month of Mages (not a monsoon—nothing so monumental as that—merely a few tantrums, brief reminders of a wetter time), creating a temporary lake, a waystation for migrating birds and orr-bison, a place fleetingly filled with the low-throated burp of desert toads.
One day, too soon, men would stop and wonder at it, ignorant of its origin.
“Well done,” Bash said, voice heavy with sarcasm. She wiped at the blood under her nose, and spit a tooth onto the ground. “We’ve got him on the run.”
“Shut up,” Orrus said, fist tight around Deserest, the weapon he had always declined to use.
Ustert remained silent. She held her right hand out to her side, as though expecting her twin to take it.
Shavrim closed his eyes, allowing himself to be buffeted by the wind.
Adrash had taken Sradir first. A wise move, Shavrim thought: he had always suspected it was the most powerful of his siblings. Then he had chosen Evurt. Another wise move. Without her twin, who knew what Ustert would be?
One battle, and already they had lost two of their number.
Had he anticipated anything else?
“I hadn’t expected it to hurt so much,” he said, so softly he thought no one would notice, but he heard the rustle of Orrus’s wings and knew his brother had been heard. Of course. He and Orrus had always been close. They understood one another, how deeply, Shavrim would only know in the millennia to come—alone, searching for meaning as the world spun slowly toward destruction. Searching, while he gradually succumbed to his own madness, the compounding of a thousand voices.
And yet it was Ustert who spoke in response.
“Yes, it hurts. Of course it hurts.” Her voice was flat, characterless. “You always lie to yourself, eldest. You practice the worst sort of deception, hiding from what is plainly true, what is obvious to everyone but you. We were a family, or as close to family that the phrasing becomes unimportant. Whether we liked one another had no bearing on this fact. If you’d stopped, for one moment, and looked up from your worship of Adrash, your sadness over losing him, you’d have realized this sooner. Now it comes, and you think you feel pain. You feel nothing compared to me.”
They waited one night to recover, sleeping on the open ground within an arm’s reach of each other. Closer than they had ever been.
‡
The four moved on to Danoor, which already lay smoldering in the shadow of the Aroonan mesas. They passed through the rubbled grave of Lantern Light, turning away from the bodies that littered the brick-paved streets. Death—this they understood. An individual man’s life held little importance, after all, but a city’s worth? That many innocent souls possessed a weight, demanding acknowledgement even from demigods.
Adrash taunted them by being just a step ahead.
They were fast, but still crawling in comparison.
In Grass, where tradition said the first men had awakened from their ancient slumber, the god waited, hanging in the sky above the city, his aura shuddering around him in radiant golden waves. He was a man-shaped shadow at the center of a new sun, motionless. Taunting, still.
Ustert spat onto the dry earth. “Listen to me. He won’t take one or two or three of us. He takes all four of us, or we kill him. This ends now.”
No one responded, but all were agreed.
Shavrim peered through waves of heat into the city. From as close as a mile away, it appeared as though it had been left untouched, but as they entered its gates Shavrim saw that everyone—those visible in the streets, but the effect surely extended to those indoors—stood or sat frozen in place, either held in temporary thrall or, more likely, halted forever in the state of death. Such a thing was not beyond Adrash’s power, though Shavrim imagined the act drained him considerably. A small, grisly boon to his attackers.
By unspoken agreement, a simple acknowledgement that events would unfold exactly as quickly as Adrash willed, they walked into the city. As they neared the central square, lesser buildings seemed to shuffle aside to reveal the full glory of Adrash’s temple: this, the most ancient of structures, famed as the site of mankind’s birth on Jeroun. Shavrim had always considered its warm sandstone edifices and encircling gardens beautiful. They remained so.
Upon their stepping into the square, Adrash commenced his descent from the sky. Slowly, maddeningly so.
Shavrim unsheathed Sroma, gooseflesh raising upon his arm at the touch of its hilt. He stretched his arms wide, muscles bunching massively in his back. He tipped his head to either side, cracking vertebrae. He touched the two small horns on his forehead.
Orrus stood, glass spear gripped in two hands before him, wings pulled in close to his back. He had never flown before the age of twenty, and then only under pressure from Shavrim. He would not fly now: it would do no good against Adrash.
Bash spun Jhy around the upraised index and middle fingers of her left hand. She also spun Weither, Sradir’s recovered whip, by its lanyard. She had always been the showoff, and Shavrim admired her athleticism. He had never told her this, but surely she knew.
Ustert likewise held two weapons—her own sword, Ruin, and her twin’s sword, Rust—and stood, rooted to the ground by two wide-set feet. Of the five siblings, only she had beaten Shavrim in armed combat. She had never let him forget it.
Adrash reduced the blaze of his aura as he descended. Nonetheless, by the time he landed on the steps of his temple the light from his eyes alone proved sufficient to throw acute shadows from every standing object. His four living creations squinted against the radiation, unfazed, while the people gathered in the square, struck immobile in the seconds after death, blistered from the heat.
The god stood, unmoving, encased head to toe in the flawlessly white embrace of his armor. Despite himself, as always, Shavrim admired the graceful lines of his creator’s physique, its contours accentuated rather than hidden by the divine material, and felt the accompanying rush of desire. He risked a glance at Bash and confirmed the flush in her pale cheeks. She, too, could not hide her attraction, a fact which had always angered her.
It had been tens of decades since she or Shavrim had shared Adrash’s bed, yet their bodies would not allow them to forget.
Orrus had not moved a muscle, revealing to Shavrim an altogether different type of strain. He had been, since birth, the least favored of Adrash—a hurt he would not allow shown on his features but still felt keenly. Ustert, conversely, had forever been a focus of the god’s praise. But now, having witnessed the almost casual dismemberment of her twin, she shook with rage so thinly contr
olled that Shavrim feared for her. She would be a danger, very likely to herself.
Thus arrayed, they waited for the inevitable.
Hello, children, Adrash said, directly into the interiors of their skulls.
‡
The moment held, and in Shavrim’s memory would forever hold—the moment separating being one of four whose souls rang in union, discordant though it was, and the next …
‡
It was two hours after dusk in the ransacked city of Danoor. He reclined naked on a flat clay roof, savoring the last of the day’s trapped heat before it seeped out from underneath him. There was a distinct sharpness to the desert air, and he felt it—less than a man would, true, but enough to make him slightly uncomfortable. In truth, he enjoyed this unique sensation of discomfort. No matter how long-lived, one never forgot the feeling of home.
Though the city’s fires had been doused, the smell of burnt timber and clay lingered.
Far off in the unlit night, beyond the border of Shavrim’s orderly territory, someone screamed.
And above Shavrim—far, far above him, leagues and leagues beyond the envelope of air that surrounded the world—the heavens were shattered. What had been Adrash’s greatest weapon, the ultimate symbol of his madness, a constant feature of the night sky generations of men had known as The Needle, now extended in broken orbit around the moon, each of its twenty-seven massive iron spheres spinning through the void on unplanned trajectories.
No longer in the god’s control. No longer kept from falling.
Shavrim smiled, unashamed of the conflicting emotions the sight evoked. He admitted to himself that he was not quite happy, no, that in fact the sight of the world’s approaching doom filled him with remorse—but also that he felt a sense of satisfaction, of appropriateness, of You’ve really done it now. He considered with what emotion his lost siblings would have greeted the sight, and his smile widened. He said each of their names, names left unspoken for longer than he chose to remember. He spoke to them in a language the world forgot twenty-five thousand years ago.
Shower of Stones Page 3
