Shower of Stones

by Zachary Jernigan

  He spoke the words Shavrim had taught him and waited. After Shavrim had spoken them five days earlier, the reaction had been near instantaneous, but Berun did not worry, for both Shavrim and Sradir had anticipated a delay or even a failure. The spells keeping the island closed were ancient beyond human knowledge. Only Adrash had discerned their nature, and only his children could gain entry by uttering the phrase to unwind the arcane lock.

  Though inhabited by Sradir, Berun could not properly be called Adrash’s child.

  In truth, he did not mind the wait. He did not relish encountering Ortur Omali again.

  He pressed a hand to the clear wall. The thickness of the crystal—were it a liquid, he could have reached only a quarter of the way through—distorted the view of the rocky shoreline at the foot of the dome. A long, reptilian creature had crawled out of the sea to sun itself, its back bowed unnaturally by the warping effect.

  Your mind, Sradir said. It’s like this creature as you see it now. You’ve been distorted by the spectre of your fear. You’ve been warped, set up to be broken. We’re about to change that, Berun. Speak the words again.

  He let his hand drop. “Do you swear? This is your true intent, to help me?”

  I promise you. I won’t lie to you.

  “Then tell me this. Why are you the way you are now? I see Shavrim. I watch him. He clearly didn’t expect you to be as you are. How can I be assured this is not an act? How can I be sure you aren’t lying to me, leading me to my doom?”

  That’s an easy answer. You can’t. You can be sure of nothing. But time passes, and we’re all changed, even gods. I didn’t expect to be as I am now. For the span of my life, I expected to succeed Adrash, rule with a ironwood fist. I did not expect to one day ride a constructed man through forgotten forests and help him fight his dead father.

  He felt her shrug, though how such a thing could be communicated was beyond him.

  But here I am. And you have to trust your instincts about me.

  He nodded and said the words.

  Again, Sradir said. Together.

  “Uperut amends,” he said, Sradir harmony to him. “Ii wallej frect. Xio.”

  A dimple appeared in the crystal and pushed toward the outside world, creating a visible tunnel through the enchanted material. It widened quickly, creating a passage large enough for a domesticated cat, a dog, a child standing upright. Berun stooped slightly and entered it.

  You’ve never smelled the sea, Sradir said. I just now realized. Sad.

  He paused before leaving the shelter of the passageway and gazed out at the calm water. “What should I expect?”

  Sradir laughed. A battle, Berun. Expect a battle.

  ‡

  Immediately, he sensed something had changed. His own awareness of himself—of his body, the relation of each component sphere to its neighbor—intensified until the world itself seemed to fade around him. He expanded as everything else in existence contracted. His chest ballooned, creating a dark space within which his two innermost spheres knocked together. A lonely, hollow sound. He had heard it before, but not since he froze himself into the shape of a man.

  “Father …” he said.

  Berun, Sradir said. Stay with me. Focus on me.

  He fell to his knees on the cragged shoreline, his vision flickering in and out, replaced by stretches of blackness, blackness beyond which there could be no return.

  If souls existed, they resided in flesh. He did not want to die, and be nothing.

  You will not die, Sradir said. But he is coming. Prepare yourself.

  Concentrating upon Sradir’s voice, the world slowly swam back into clarity. The sea seemed to call to him, neither in the voice of Sradir nor the voice of his father, and so he stood, creaking from each of his thousand joints, and stumbled to the waterline. Seized and emboldened by an idea he would not, could not give words to, he walked.

  More surely with each step, into the water. Not so much confident as resigned to his fate.

  “Let him follow us,” he said just before his head fell below the sea. Glass-clear shallows rose above him, twenty and then thirty feet. Sand gradually covered the stones of the shore.

  He walked, and did not look back.

  Sradir remained silent. It had been in his mind long enough to know he had been crushed under deeper water than that of the sea.

  At first, he believed himself to be imagining the darkness brewing before him, but soon the reality of it proved impossible to deny. It became a heavy weight upon the surface of the water, appearing like the growth of distant clouds on a clear day. It spread, a droplet of ink, its fine tendrils reaching toward him.

  You may have gotten this backwards, Berun, Sradir said. He did not follow us. We’ve come to him.

  Berun, his father called, drawing the name out into the long creak of ship’s masts bending in the storm. It reverberated as the crack of thunder.

  Berun stumbled, righted himself sluggishly, and kept walking.

  “Father …” he said. Water muffled his voiced into incomprehensibility. Nonetheless, he knew he would be heard. “How—why—are you here? Why do you plague me?”

  No, Sradir said. Don’t think of him as father. He is a sorcerer, a back-alley mage. Think of him as a thing, a thing with no power over you.

  He laughed. Existence was not so simple as deciding upon ways to think.

  Much of existence is exactly that simple, Berun.

  Omali repeated his name, loudly enough that the world rumbled under Berun’s feet.

  Creatures fled from the encroaching darkness. Sleek, torsional fish snapped at each other in panic while evading the claws and teeth of equally frenzied reptiles. Their massive bodies whipped past Berun, flattening him to the sea bottom, lifting him from his feet and sending him spinning. But for a few reflexive bites, the animals ignored him.

  After they had passed, he dropped to the sand unscathed and rose. Overhead, the sun showed through thirty feet of inky saltwater, appearing more foreboding than the moon through storm clouds.

  When his innermost spheres tolled together in his deep chest, they created an achingly lonely sound. A familiar sound. He and Omali had once visited Corol, a northern Ulomi city caught in the thrall of plague. There they watched infected men and women walk the streets, dull chimes locked around their throats. It had been Berun’s first exposure to death.

  Bring out your dead, Omali called, echoing throughout Berun’s body. Bring out your dead…

  Berun’s vision darkened. His joints loosened, sagged.

  “Help me,” he said to Sradir. “I’ll fall apart.”

  I will. And no, you won’t.

  They concentrated together, and the spheres within his chest slowly ground to a halt. His ankles, knees, and hips solidified under him. The darkness, however, intensified around him, forming itself into a nearly solid thing against which he struggled to make headway.

  Yes, he still walked. Without a glance behind, he pushed himself forward, into the darkness his creator had made. The ink swirled around him, forming and reforming half-recognizable images. It eddied around his feet and tugged his shoulders from side to side. He swayed, nearly tipping again and again, but he persisted.

  Fear had not been removed from him: he felt it ever more keenly. Sradir kept itself in the forefront of his mind, but otherwise maintained silence.

  It, too, he imagined, could not predict the outcome of this encounter.

  ‡

  An orange light bloomed in the ebon distance, as of an alchemical torch being lit in the gloom of night. It did not grow brighter or larger, yet he knew it to be advancing toward him. He sensed it in the same way a ship captain sensed an oncoming storm or the wind about to die upon his sails—as a fact of living, undeniable in its potency.

  When the darkness surrounded him completely, the light split in two.

  He stopped. Before him stood Omali. Two brilliant amber lenses, liquid and glowing like glass fresh from the kiln, had replaced his eyes. Bubbles of ligh
t poured constantly from their surface, rising into the blackened water as two thin streams of light. His body had changed from their last encounter, as well: skeletally thin and pale, his hairless nudity revealed no trace of his sex. He possessed no mouth, no ears, and only two closed slits for nostrils. To Berun, his creator had come to resemble a creature born to inhabit caves, far from the light.

  An eater of worms, Sradir said. Say that. Now. Call him an eater of worms.

  Berun shook his head, transfixed by his creator’s stare.

  Your days of pretending are over, Omali said. He lifted his right hand and opened it, revealing the webbing between each finger. His open hand became a fist. You will now submit to me.

  Sradir’s voice grew louder. Do it, Berun. Say he’s an eater of worms.

  “Eater …” he said. “Eater of …”

  Omali tipped his head to one side and turned it slightly, revealing an earhole Berun had not seen. The bubbles streamed more quickly from the sorcerer’s eyes as he stepped back. A pair of long, thin swords grew in his hands.

  (No, Berun noted. They grew from his hands, drawing material from his own body. His arms, already thin, became twigs as the blades lengthened.)

  What is this? Omali asked. Your mind is corrupted. Tell me, who is this interloper? It is different from the girl.

  Well apprehended, magician, Sradir said. Attack him, Berun. Don’t answer or delay. My strength is yours. Do it, now.

  Berun’s eyes flared as Sradir unfolded itself and stood inside him, wearing him as though he were a suit of armor. For the space of several seconds, he basked in the sensation of wellness—a sensation he had not experienced since the days when he could bend and mold himself to any form. Each component of his body tickled against its neighbor in readiness, sliding into new configurations, moving from his interior to his surface. Dirt, gathered from months without washing in the desert, rose around him in a red cloud.

  He closed his massive hands into tight fists, savoring the piercing sound of brass rubbing against brass. The simulated muscle of his frame bunched and writhed. The corners of his mouth curved upward into a grin.

  He was an alchemical engine once more, primed and rumbling.

  Allowing himself no time to doubt his actions, he stepped forward unencumbered by the water and wrapped his arms around Omali’s shoulders, crushing the small man to his chest. His forearms and hands flowed into a fluid mass of spheres, cohering into two constricting snakes seeking to crush the life out of their prey.

  But Omali would not be crushed. His frame, while frail in appearance, was harder than stone. It possessed strength to match its opponent’s. Omali flexed against the bonds Berun had constructed, inexorably lifting his creation’s arms. As he did so, he tapped the edges of his swords along Berun’s flank. Where it touched, Berun became numb.

  Candles, one by one, snuffed out.

  For the first time in his existence, Berun lost contact with elements of his body.

  He had heard men describe pain before, of course. This seemed far worse, however, an absence where there should have been only connection. It was worse, in fact, than the rare occasion he had been struck hard enough to remove a sphere entirely.

  Worse, even, than being stuck as a man-shaped thing.

  No, it’s not, Sradir said. You’re being manipulated to fear, Berun. You must not—No! Hold your ground.

  Berun had dropped Omali and backed away.

  You are a mistake to be rectified, Omali said, arms spread wide, the points of his swords leveled at Berun. Clearly, I was too liberal in the freedoms I allowed you. This is immaterial now. Now, I will have you and the thing inhabiting you evicted. I have much to do, and it cannot be accomplished in this wisp of a body. It is strong, but I need something more … permanent.

  He strode forward.

  Berun backed up a step before Sradir halted him.

  I’m sorry, it said. I’d rather see you fight this battle, but we don’t have the option of losing. I need your body as badly as Omali does.

  The sorcerer’s swords came down. Through no order of his own, quicker than he would have thought possible, Berun’s hands came up and caught them. Immediate numbness in his palms resulted, but Sradir did not so much as flinch. The god caused Berun’s wrists to rotate until, with a muted crack of bone, the blades broke.

  Omali screeched as blood pumped from the wounds. Bubbles streamed from his eyes and burst incandescently. He tried to back away, but Berun’s fists were locked in position. His feet were rooted to the sea floor.

  Sradir opened Berun’s mouth and spoke with his voice, with a clarity that the constructed man could not have achieved underwater.

  “You want to know who I am, magician? I am Sradir Ung Kim, Wood Heart—heir to Adrash.”

  Omali shook his head. No, he said in a strained whisper. There is no one by this name. There is no heir to Adrash.

  Sradir laughed through Berun’s mouth and pushed Omali backward with his right hand, leaving his left clenched around Sradir’s broken sword arm.

  The spheres of Berun’s chest erupted outward, ejecting something quickly to the surface.

  His right hand—Sradir’s right hand—rose from his side and closed around a handle.

  Weither, Sradir had called it. Berun had not known himself to be hiding the whip.

  The god brought the thin weapon low, arcing it near the constructed man’s hip and flipping it fluidly into a backhanded, slanting cut across Omali’s torso, severing the sorcerer from rib to shoulder.

  No expression crossed Omali’s face. He uttered no sound as the seam split and the top half of his body toppled backward.

  Sradir stepped forward through thick clouds of blood, pushing Omali’s lower half to the side. It crouched near the wounded man as the trail of radiant bubbles stopped flowing from his eyes.

  “Now,” it said. “Now, you die. It will be …” It smiled. “Permanent”

  It reached forward, covered Omali’s face with Berun’s broad hand, and slowly crushed the sorcerer’s skull.

  No stranger to violence, Berun nonetheless quailed at the sight. Blood, bone, and a liquid radiance erupted from between his fingers, the last of which bent like smoke toward his face. It wavered before his eyes, a living, vital thing. His instinct was to pull away from it before contact, but Sradir kept him from doing so: it caused his mouth to open and drink the golden essence.

  He fell back as the inky darkness dissolved above him. He stared at the sun through thirty feet of suddenly clear water, the vision faltering in each eye, off-time, a stuttering rhythm.

  Holding himself together became impossible against the will of Sradir, and so he decohered. After each component sphere loosened its grip in the matrix he had created, his body spread out as a mat of brass upon the sea floor. Under his own control, this would not have bothered him. He had once done exactly this to gather sunlight.

  Under another’s control, it was agony.

  You’ll likely not believe me, Sradir said, but I’m sorry.

  Apologies meant nothing. He had been betrayed.

  True. But I’ll apologize, nonetheless. I’ll apologize also for what hasn’t yet occurred, what you can’t prepare for. Hold steady, Berun. You have eaten your maker. Digesting him will not be pleasant.

  ‡

  Sradir did not lie. It was as far from pleasant as Berun could have imagined.

  In life, his creator had not carried within him an ounce of compassion. No sentimentality or allegiance. No quarter given to anyone. Possessed of a vision of brutal clarity, he coerced others to his own ends without a trace of regret, trading in lives as though they were coins. Near the end of his first mortal existence, a madness had taken root in his mind, focusing the dark lens of his intellect on the deficits he identified in humanity itself.

  Berun flinched from the reality, the immensity, of Omali’s narcissism.

  The pact he had made guaranteed the end of an entire world, the creation of a wasteland that would exist for millenni
a—simply to usher in an age where his hands would not be tied, where his words would be as law. He had been bound too long by the will of kings, ground under the heel of lesser men only because they possessed the resources to do so.

  But the elders—the elders, hibernating away under permanent cloud cover, shielded in a state of suspension, guaranteed him a place at their table, a king among kings. A god. They seduced him with the only object of his desire, and so he planned. Alone among men, he discovered a pathway to life after death. A true life, among the resurrected heirs of Jeroun.

  He had designed Berun as his vehicle.

  First, to enact his will against those who would prevent the fall of the Needle.

  Second, as a body in which to weather the death of the world. A place to hibernate away the long afternoon that followed.

  ‡

  The sun set and the creatures of the sea returned to their hunting. They circled around Berun, clearly curious but unwilling to touch him. He kept his eyes to the sky as the moon rose, dragging the disjointed halo of the Needle with it. Through the rippling surface of the sea, each sphere appeared dangerously mobile, shuddering in its orbit as though eager to fall.

  He imagined them falling, and wondered why he would do so.

  Human curiosity? Sradir said.

  He considered pointing the obvious fact out to Sradir.

  It snorted dismissively. You’re more human than not. And no, before you ask: there’s no part of you that desires the same ends as your maker. You’re your own man. In your desires, you always have been. It paused before continuing. Perhaps it wanted an answer he would not give, a sign he had forgiven it for its deception.

  There had never been a question about the outcome. It had defeated Omali handily, and this fact angered Berun more than its assumption of his body.

  You thought we were in this together, Sradir said. Tell me, Berun—have I ruined everything?

  He grunted. “Answer it yourself. My mind is yours to read.”

  Not true. There are aspects hidden even from me. I’m a good guesser, and that’s all.

  “No,” he said. “You’re a good liar. And I’m bad at discerning truth.”