All at once, the coldness of the air registered. He shivered.
Pressure built, centering into a tight knot of resentment behind his eyes. He stopped his chattering teeth by clenching his jaw until it rang, and stretched his fists out before him.
Anger became determination. With a twitch of his wings, he dove forward.
The wall did not physically restrain him. There was no pain. Nonetheless, he cried out as he crossed the threshold, for the error—the wage of his impetuousness—was immediately clear. Ebn had been a master of dampening spells, but even she could not have accomplished so thorough an effect.
At once, the sigils were thrown into chaos on Pol’s body, spreading and contracting like tides, pooling and bursting without pattern. The vision in his phantom eye faltered, flickering to him an image of the valley below and then failing utterly. His wings began to diminish. They rippled, no longer rigid along their length.
Struggling for any measure of control, using his legs as crude rudders, Pol managed to turn toward the lake.
Despite his rapid descent, by the time the water stretched beneath him he still flew too high. Soon, he would be beyond it. Possessing neither the strength nor the alchemical faculties to turn around for another pass, without considering the injuries he might sustain, he curled his wings around himself and fell.
Below, the surface of the lake was a mirror, reflecting the noon sun as a perfect circle. He kept his right eye open and focused upon it, letting its light sear into his skull, seeing his shadow become a black hole at its center just before his body hit the water.
It came to him, fully, a complete memory in the breath before impact:
He had been laid out by an attacker before. Once, years previously, a fellow mage—Pol’s senior by a decade, resentful of the younger elderman’s quick advancement—had nearly killed him with a simple, outsized concussion spell that blasted him thirty feet into an iron cauldron. He recalled the feeling of its impact, being slapped by a giant hand, and then the near immediate rebound of his body against an immobile surface far harder than his own body.
Then darkness.
Then, all in an instant upon waking, the awareness of the fragility of one’s physical being. The sudden rush of memories … of bones breaking, of flesh collapsing.
He did not have the benefit of losing consciousness, this time. He remained aware as his body crumpled against the unyielding surface of the lake. His joints flexed and strained, threatening to snap. His bones, from the smallest to largest, creaked and rang. His neck bent at a sharp angle, driving his skull to the side and crushing it against his left shoulder, forcing his teeth down upon the tip of his tongue and severing it clean.
The surface yielded, as though he were a pebble dropped into molten sand. The lake drew him under. Lungs flattened, arms and legs immobilized by his wings, he could do nothing but sink through the glass-clear water, watching as the world grew dimmer. It seemed to him it took far longer to reach the sandy bottom than it should have, and when he came to rest it was as though a soft hand cupped him.
His mouth opened and closed, releasing a cloud of blood that turned his vision red. The sun, dim through the water, wavering in the turbulence of his passage, became a baleful eye.
Life flitted before his eyes, tiny and nearly translucent. His eye flicked from one creature to another as they moved back and forth through the bloodied water, and finally formed an image. Shrimp. Smaller than their cousins fishermen netted in Lake Ten.
Eldermen hated water. They wanted nothing to do with anything that came from water.
A smile formed on his lips.
He opened his mouth again, and took the lake into his lungs.
‡
Swim while you can, Adrash said, eyes flaring in darkness. You will not get the opportunity to do so again.
Pol stared at the stricken god, whose armor appeared slightly gray under the weight of water. Having exhausted himself, he weighed his options. There were none. The god would recover before him. And so he turned and swam, as fast as his weary body would swim, through an openness of sea that was not open at all, but which pressed upon him from all sides. Black and cold and swarming with life, he felt the weight of sinuous bodies, monstrously-jawed and behemoth, eager for any morsel of flesh.
He escaped through the most shameful of realities: only because of his own smallness, his own insignificance in comparison, did he survive. Nonetheless, smallness notwithstanding, he could not rest. There was nowhere to rest. He had to continue pushing himself, beyond the point of collapse, breathing in the sea itself, lest one of the beasts finally notice him.
All the while, at his back, Adrash fumed in the shattered remnants of his abyssal palace, injured but not yet dead.
Pol had failed in his task. Before long, the god would repay him for his presumption.
And so Pol swam. He reached land and flopped onto it, choking on air.
But even here, above ground, he had not truly escaped.
‡
How long his eye had been open, he did not know. Someone stood over him, swaying from side to side, undulating like a flag in the breeze, like kelp rooted to the sandy lake bottom. He wondered how it was a person could be where he currently lay and survive.
He yawned, jaw popping, and gasped: the air entered him as a knife.
Water bubbled in his chest and then burst forth, searing his throat: the knife left him.
He fell onto his side and curled inward, coughing and gagging upon water, mucus, and blood. He shook violently on the cold ground, breathing raggedly until he could breathe evenly. The pain remained—in truth, it inhabited him from head to toe, occasionally flaring into prominence in one area and subsiding to allow another agony to bloom—but it no longer obliterated thought.
Air.
Concentrating on the shifting ground before him, on the fingers of his clenched left hand—a hand which seemed also to shift, growing larger and then smaller—he suffered a moment of doubt. What if he had never landed on the mountainside? What if Adrash had killed him and he was now but one of the dead, waking in one of the many hells he had never quite been able to convinced himself did not exist? His mother had been fond of discussing the various hells a man might inhabit once he died.
Some among the Usterti sect believed in a place between life and death, where a person would be forced to relive an awful fate (drowning, typically: the Usterti were fond of tales of drowning)—that is, until the Goddess smiled upon that individual, lifting her free of torment.
The corners of his mouth turned down. He spit blood and mucus past the throbbing, shorn tip of his tongue. It steamed for only a moment before freezing.
I’ll not start believing such nonsense now, he thought.
He rolled over and regarded the person standing over him. He blinked, and slowly the figure took on definition.
A human male. Small, naked, grey skin a hairless mapwork of fine lines. Eyes bulging out from his skull, his lips pulled back in a perpetual grimace. Shrunken-cocked, testicles nearly nonexistent. He should have been shivering with cold, moving to keep hypothermia at bay. Instead, he seemed content to simply stand and stare. The longer Pol regarded him, the less the man’s body undulated from side to side, leading Pol to believe he had been drugged or concussed. Concussed, likely, oxygen deprived from his near drowning.
“You—” He cleared his throat. “Who are you?”
The man did not respond, did not appear to have heard. His eyes remained focused on Pol’s, but behind his gaze Pol sensed nothing.
Pol looked from side to side, finding his wings a crumpled mess spread around him. Two wet sheets, pathetic, lacking any structural integrity. With shaking hands he gathered them, shook the water and ice from them, and draped them across his body. He shook until he was no longer frozen, and then sat up, immediately burying his head between his knees.
“What are you looking at?” he asked, expecting no response from the man.
There was none. Pol chuckled
without humor and wondered if he had been wrong to dismiss the idea of hell. To spend eternity with the mindless, he surmised, would be a very effective hell indeed.
‡
Eventually, he raised his head.
He blinked.
Before him lay an elder corpse.
Beyond it, a trail of roughed earth stretched. It had been moved.
All thoughts of hell fled his mind. He peered up at the man standing over him. He could not recall if Adrash’s memory of the valley had included inhabitants. Surely, it had not.
“Did you drag this here?” Predictably, the man did not answer. Pol pointed to the corpse. “You, you brought this here.” He stood, looming over the man. He lowered his face until it was level with the other’s. “Is. This. For. Me?”
The man’s eyes shifted to the corpse. Pol nodded, though his companion failed to notice. The man took a step and bent, crouching toward the corpse. He extended a hand, and for the first time Pol noticed a flint, little more than a crude edge, clutched in his fingers. Grasping one of the corpse’s forearms—which ended as a ragged, bloodless stump just below the wrist—the man used his primitive knife to cut a small strip of skin free. He placed it in his mouth and began chewing contentedly, then repeated the process.
He pivoted and held the flesh up to Pol.
Pol nearly slapped it from the man’s hands. It was not that the thought of eating elder disgusted him. After all, he had used alchemical solutions made from the bodies of elders for much of his adult life, externally and internally. He had survived for days in the void of space on nothing but bonedust, as had all outbound mages.
No, it was the sacrilege of seeing an elder corpse so abused. The corpse trade had produced a variety of associated guilds, each of whom possessed their own secrets and unique paranoias, guaranteeing that few whole corpses made it out of Stol or Knos Min. The Academy of Applied Magics contained only one whole elder corpse on display in its central library—an entire city’s worth of riches, a storehouse of alchemical power beyond the ability of any single man in existence to possess. Pol had spent many hours studying it, lingering on and memorizing every physical detail of the three-yard-long body as though it were that of a lover. Or a parent.
To see it treated so casually, solely as a food source …
He watched the man chew. His stomach gurgled and growled, and a cramp bent him double. He took the strip of skin and placed it in his mouth, surprised to find the taste immediately sweet, its texture like soft leather. Chewing on it, his mouth became wet, as if he just taken a drink of water. A coppery taste, similar to sagoli berry, replaced that of his own blood. The severed tip of his tongue tingled, became warm and then quickly numb.
He shivered in pleasure as the warmth spread quickly from his mouth, suffusing him in the space of twelve indrawn breaths. A moan escaped his lips.
The man watched Pol with no trace of understanding. He returned his attention to the corpse, now using the flat side of his rock as a rasp, sanding away at the protruding end of bone at the elder’s wrist. After he had created a small pile of dust in the hollow of the corpse’s belly, he wetted his middle finger and dipped it in. He offered the whitened fingertip to Pol.
Pol ignored it, and instead took his own measure of bonedust—far more than he had ever consumed at once. The familiar sensation of wellness, of focus intensified, further bolstered the steel in his legs.
He concentrated on rousing the sigils from their slumber, but found them dampened still, gathered once more on his forearms and calves, immobile. Unless he found the source of the shield’s effect and put an end to it, he would not soon be taking advantage of the alchemical resources he had found. Given the singular nature of the effect, he figured it to be an artifact of elder magic. The possibility of him halting it after incalculable millennia seemed unlikely.
He turned a complete circle, examining the jagged peaks that ringed the rubble-strewn valley. On his own, it would be a challenge to climb beyond the dampening wall, but while dragging a corpse? Two corpses or three? Even with his strength returned to him, the task would be considerable.
He stretched, vertebrae popping. An itch under his skin—the feeling of walking from a cold building into the full heat of a summer’s day: the awareness of a fever building in the body: the sensation of being too large for one’s hide—made him shiver.
“You,” he said to the man who still crouched with his finger proffered. “Do you have anything to say of value? No, clearly not. Do you have a leader, someone I can speak with?”
The man simply stared.
Pol shrugged free of his ruined wings and slapped the man, who stumbled backward but did not fall, did not cry out or grunt. His eyes widened only fractionally.
Fingers curled into fists, claw tips biting into the flesh of his palms, Pol advanced and threw his weight into a right cross that broke the man’s cheekbone. Pol felt and heard it shattering, savoring the perceptions. He savored also the sound of the man’s shout of surprise, his choking sob thereafter, and followed his first attack with a sharp kick to the ribs.
Four. Four snapped ribs. Pol grinned.
He took the crude knife from the man’s shaking fingers and severed his wings, letting them fall uselessly to the ground. They were the stuff of intense alchemy, a product of the sigils. Once he resumed his power, he would grow a new pair more glorious, more substantial than the last.
He plunged the knife into the man’s thigh.
Behind him, someone cried out. He turned to see another man—no, it was a woman, though they appeared so similar the distinction hardly seemed pressing—running toward him.
Pol’s grin widened.
Pain had been a transformative factor for him. Perhaps it would inspire these fools to speak something worthwhile.
‡
In truth, he had no plan. He did not believe the inhabitants of the valley would prove able to communicate anything of value. They were clearly ancient, their meager lives extended by a steady diet of alchemicals that nourished the body extraordinarily while atrophying the mind. They had sat on the world’s most valuable treasure without using it.
No. He had no plan. He merely wanted to cause pain.
As he circled the lake, he found others like the first two, and left them crippled behind him. Not one fought back, though in a similar way to the second, a few expressed concern for their neighbors without understanding what was occurring. Or, indeed, how to help. These he enjoyed hurting the most: their confused impotence amused him as much as it fueled his anger.
“Fight back,” he said, repeatedly through his laughter. “Do something.”
And so he made them scream.
Eventually, night came and he stopped. The bare ground failed to chill his naked flesh appreciably. Nonetheless, he found himself longing for a fire, a thing more alive than the creatures he had broken over the course of the day. He avoided looking into the sky for a time, and then relented to the inevitable. He had seen it before, but always at dusk.
Now, with its twenty-seven broken components stretched across the bowl of heaven … closer than they ever were.
Massive. Somehow, more massive than they appeared when viewed from orbit.
I did this, he mouthed.
He slept, and in the morning she appeared to him.
‡
Just like the others, though more weathered around the eyes. Wrinkles of expression, perhaps, as opposed to exposure to the elements.
He met her gray-eyed stare and recognized a depth behind it, a measure of awareness he knew did not exist in the others. Even the manner in which she crouched before him, resting her elbows upon her knees and letting her hands fall casually—it spoke of a distinct personality, something he had not yet seen among them.
She nodded, as if she had followed his train of thought, and stood. It was only a dozen steps to the lake. She walked into it up to her knees and turned.
“Wwwwwwaa,” she said in a croak of a voice, a voice which never spoke
. She lifted her left hand and stared at it, examining both sides before meeting his gaze again. Slowly, like a child doing so for the first time, she crooked her index finger for him to follow.
“Are you the leader here?” he asked.
She cocked her head to the side, doglike.
Curious, clear of the aggression that had informed the previous day, he rose.
They stood in the lake, she staring up at him, he staring down at her. Distantly, he recalled his mother. She had been a small woman, far from beautiful. Oh, how he had wished for her to be as silent as the woman he now regarded. Knowing so little of anything, she nonetheless had had an opinion on everything.
“What are we doing?” he asked.
The corners of the woman’s mouth quivered, trying to arrive at an expression. She shook her head and bent at the waste, cupping her right hand to gather water. She mimed lifting it to her mouth and drinking.
“Why?”
She shook her head again, repeated the drinking gesture.
He shrugged. Obviously, the water would have some effect, either ritually for her or physically for him. Perhaps, his consumption of the water had been responsible for his confused, perceptually altered state upon waking the day before. Drinking it again might leave him vulnerable. At the same time, none of the valley’s inhabitants had expressed the slightest aggression toward him.
Gazing into the woman’s eyes, he found no animosity, only an intensity he could not contextualize.
He crouched and dipped his hand into the lake.
“You first,” he said, gesturing with his chin.
She looked down at her reflection in the water and smiled, slowly, apparently making sure of her expression before meeting his eyes again. He winced at the sight of her toothless gums, black with untold age.
She drank, filled her hand a second time, and drank again.
He followed suit without smiling.
Shower of Stones Page 18
