As he watched, it disappeared. Into his body.
A memory tugged at him upon seeing it.
Pol. During their battle, the elderman had hit him with a spell composed of a similar substance.
With a thought, the armor flowed from Adrash’s chest to cover the injury.
“Who are you?” he asked. He gestured to her with his unarmored hand as though he were choking her. To his puzzlement, no strength came to his aid. Though he had so recently moved the spheres within the void, he could not lift her from where she stood.
“Answer me,” he said through gritted teeth.
The woman only spread her arms.
Lights bloomed to either side of her, and rapidly coalesced into forms. Into figures, shades of white upon white. An old Knosi woman, unbowed by her age, a defiant cast to her jaw. A second Knosi woman, perhaps in her mid-twenties, alluring, as hard as a knot of oak. After a shamefully long pause, Adrash recognized her. She had died, just before Vedas and his companions arrival in Marept.
Both women stood weaponless, with arms crossed, no trace of nervousness about them.
The younger one spat. The fluid fluoresced into nothingness before hitting the ground.
“I told you to answer me,” Adrash said. “Who are you?”
“Me, plus a couple trespassers,” Churls said with the faint trace of a smile. “You’ll never know their names. But these two? Say hello to Jojore Um and Laures Kasoert.” She looked at one, then the other. “Go. Get them up.”
Quicker than their steps would suggest, the ghostly women moved to Shavrim and Vedas’s sides. They reached down to both, into both, their arms cut off at the wrists in each man’s chest, and then lay down, disappearing completely into the men’s bodies.
Shavrim and Vedas shuddered. Screams tore from their throats as they bridged up from the grass. Their eyes opened as spotlights. Adrash watched, fascinated despite the clear threat, as they regained their feet. Shavrim winced as his sternum snapped audibly back into shape. Vedas gasped as his arm straightened with a resounding pop.
Churls cracked her knuckles and grinned.
‡
One came after the other, closing him in, reigning blows upon him at speed, as quickly as he could deflect them. He returned the violence, landing hits through their lesser defenses while admitting the tide had taken an inconceivable yet undeniable turn.
How such a thing could be done—he did not bother asking. He did not allow himself the room to wonder who could have such power. There would be time to determine what had occurred once the threat had been neutralized.
With a thought, the divine armor covered him completely. He batted his opponents’ hands and feet away, and with three open-palmed strikes pushed them back. Turning in a circle as they stumbled, he allowed the blast furnace within him to crack its seals and overflow. From his eyes and mouth it came: a fountain of flame, engulfing his opponents.
No. Not engulfing. Flowing around. The shields they had formed flickered against his fiery onslaught, limning their bodies in shifting, actinic blue as their spells counteracted his attack. Regardless, their defense was not entirely effective. The heat demonstrably wore at Vedas and Shavrim, causing them to fall back under the blaze.
Churls, however, kept her smile in place and lunged forward, landing a viciously quick punch to Adrash’s gut. He grunted, and the fire from within faltered. She blocked his clumsily upthrust knee with her left forearm and jabbed stiffened fingers into his throat.
The fire died as he choked for breath.
She followed with a flurry of punches to his jaw and cheeks. Shavrim and Vedas returned, battering him from side to side. He slipped on the wet grass, falling beneath their fists and heels. The white light of their eyes bathed him.
Pain, so odd that it quickly became an abstraction, a wave, a feeling to lose oneself within, became his reality.
His children pummeled him into the ground. Into a grave.
‡
He did not make the decision—that is, he did not consciously resolve to move.
Yet move he did. He shifted from one place to another, a near-instantaneous maneuver he had never used anywhere but within the void, where no atmosphere impeded his progress. (Moving so quickly, even against something as insubstantial as air, had never seemed an advisable course of action.)
He stood for only a moment, in the position his unspoken desire had deposited him, before his legs collapsed and he crumpled upon the ground.
Further agony.
It felt as though a massive hand had slapped him from the sky, pulping every bone in the right side of his body. He groaned into the night, and then screamed when he rolled onto his back. Broken bone-ends ground together, clicking in his hip, his shoulder. Breathing in and out produced pain so sharp that his vision blurred.
A figure obscured a portion of stars above him, staring down with radiant eyes. Churls. A second figure came up beside her, placed his hand in hers.
They were a good pair, he noted, equally broken, beautiful in the same frail, human way, neither bending to what fate appeared to have in store.
They had retrieved their weapons. Churls put the edge of Rust to his throat.
Vedas caused the elder-cloth to unmask his features. He flipped back the hood of his suit.
“It all seems to be happening so quickly now, doesn’t it?” the man said.
Adrash did not answer. It did indeed seem that way. A life could be so long, yet it still failed to teach one about death. That moment, he had always known, would not be meditative. Time would not wait, but hasten the end. It would come too fast, rendering all the periods of one’s life into a fleeting memory, no more substantial than any other life.
He had lied to himself. He would have let a coward continue to live in his body, as long as it could. He would not have chosen death.
For the world, yes, but not for himself.
Vedas crouched at his side. “Not the wisest move. You’ve crippled yourself, and for what? A hundred yards? You’ve gotten nowhere, for no reason. Should have let us kill you. Now, you’re going to die here, in this undignified position, throat slit like a hog.” He frowned. “For all that you’ve done to shape the world, no one is here to remember you, to mourn for you.”
Adrash ignored these words. They were meant to offend, and he could be offended no more. He willed the divine armor to retreat from his head, and spoke through a broken jaw.
“How?”
“How, what?” Vedas asked. “How are you beaten?” Grim-faced, he tapped the flat of his sword against Adrash’s ribs, sending twinges through the god’s torso. “Through superior forces. With the help of others who wouldn’t see the world made a grave.”
“That’s not …” He paused, embarrassed by the slurring of his words, the trail of drool that ran from his mouth. “That’s not what I meant. These others … You’re not Evurt. You’ve pushed my child out completely.”
“Evicted, without remorse,” Churls said. She shrugged. “We couldn’t have done it on our own. As Vedas said, we had help. It almost seems like there’s a lesson in that.”
Vedas gazed up at her with an unreadable expression.
“Let him see the victors in this battle,” he said.
She nodded, and the light fled from her eyes as two radiant, phantom figures stepped from within her. One did not have to stoop as she emerged, stepping to the side. The other very much did, unfolding his broad form from within her and stretching to his full height.
The girl bore an unmistakable resemblance to her mother.
The constructed man—the constructed man resembled no one but himself.
‡
He admitted to himself: he was afraid to die. If there was a life beyond death …
“What are you?” he asked.
The girl smirked. “I’m a dead girl.” She pointed to Berun. “He’s a dead person.”
Adrash tried to shake his head, and gasped. The relief he had been counting on, the immediate easing of
pain his unique physiology had always provided, appeared never to come. The body he had known as his own, a constant over the long course of millennia, was now infected. His awareness of the divine armor dimmed, too, until the artifact no longer felt a part of him. It was as if he had been swaddled in wet sheets, encased in plaster.
“That’s no answer,” he said.
“I’m fairly sure it is,” the girl countered.
Shavrim appeared above him and crouched opposite Vedas. He gripped Sroma in his right hand, tapping its flat against his left palm. His expression held a measure of regret.
Adrash’s first child had never been as callous as his siblings. He had tried. He had rebelled. But he never was the leader he desired to be. He had been an odd choice to lead a revolt against his maker. Love, the desire to be a family in more than just words, clouded his vision.
“Some mysteries go unsolved,” Shavrim said. “Even you, observing from on high, privy to so many secrets, don’t get everything you want.”
Adrash moved his uninjured arm carefully, arousing as little new hurt as possible. He gestured to the sky, the scattered components of the Needle.
“What will you do with this? Left alone—”
“They’ll fall,” the girl said. “We know. We’re not fools.”
Adrash allowed himself a chuckle. It turned into a cough, which speckled the white of his armor with red. The cough turned into a scream as something shifted within his chest cavity, pressing down upon his heart. The organ pumped against the intrusion. With each rhythmic shudder, agony erupted, coursed throughout his body.
The girl looked to her mother. Churls nodded.
The torment stopped when the girl reached into his chest. Warmth suffused him, blissfully.
Leaning in close to his face, the girl whispered. “I know what you think is so funny. How will we, weak little things, get up there? Even if we did, what would we do?” She smiled. “You have no idea what I’m now capable of. I’ve stolen skills from your children, and from one hateful elderman. They knew things—things you never suspected they knew—some things they didn’t know they knew.”
Her smile widened even further. The light pulsed from within her.
“I’ve learned better than you what it means to be a god.”
She stood, removing her hands from his chest. He gritted his teeth against the pain that abruptly resumed, breathing shallowly against the scraping of bone in his right lung. The world dimmed perceptibly, vibrating to the rhythm of his spasming muscles.
“Do it,” Berun said, nodding to Shavrim.
Shavrim rose, Sroma in hand. He regarded the knife for several seconds, turned it over to grip its blade, and passed it to Vedas.
“I can’t,” Shavrim said. “Or I won’t. It makes no difference.”
Vedas stared at the weapon. “You lived for thousands upon thousands—”
“No,” Shavrim said. He shuddered. His eyes closed, and when he spoke it was with an altogether different inflection—an accent Adrash recalled intimately.
Speaking modern words, Shavrim nonetheless spoke in the manner of the ancients.
“It will be you,” he said. “It will be now.” He stretched his arm toward the Black Suit.
Though doing so caused new hurts to bloom, Adrash held his breath. No human had ever touched Sroma. He doubted anyone gathered suspected what it meant to wield it. Adrash himself did not know what end the elders had sought in crafting the knife.
Vedas did not move. He paused.
In that pause, another stole his fate.
‡
She dropped her own sword and stood, taking the knife from Shavrim. She weighed it in her hands.
“Balance,” she murmured. “It has a nice balance.”
Her knees bent. The blade flipped vertical in her calloused grip.
Falling upon Adrash, Churls plunged the blade into his chest.
EPILOGUE
THE 2ND OF NIGHTTIDG WATCH SENNEN, BOWL OF HEAVEN, NATION OF ZAROLIES
They labored on a vast concave plain, under the pale rose moon and her five smaller children. Side by side, the four of them: she, her mate, and the two men who had become like brothers to her. They pulled sweetroot, depositing their vegetables in the long furrows that ran poleward to poleward for nearly forty leagues. It was repetitive, backbreaking work, but they were content.
Particularly content, for they were tipsy. The sweetroot in the far up-poleward rows had fermented over the course of the immensely long night, and they sampled it liberally. As per usual, they did not talk in their work, yet still they managed to communicate, stepping jokingly upon one another’s toes, jostling one another with their hips as they moved down the line.
Seasoned by three days and nights on the plain, the two men did not look up from their work. The black-skinned man no longer stared fixedly at the moons. The lighter-skinned man did not steal glances at the black-skinned man.
They were focused on their task—yes, even drunk, or even when a gulling croaked and lifted from the ground only a few feet away from them, re-depositing its long, land-awkward reptilian body a bit further away. The first night, both had been fascinated by the creatures. She understood, of course: in their southern climes, people did not train animals to fertilize the sweetroot fields during the night. They woke to shit on their own soil.
She smiled, thinking of the joke she had told about southerners. It amused her to see how a world modified its inhabitants, to make light of the variations between people. Some would foment hate over such things, but having known a thousand types of person, not all of them human, guaranteed she could not summon an ounce of indignation over their divisions.
This did not mean she loved mortals easily, however. Time had made love for anyone but her mate and the two whose arrival she always anticipated difficult. She no longer sympathized with their limited awareness. She could be brutal, unfeeling, and so left the easy tenderness to her mate, who had retained through his lifetimes a sense of commitment to charitable work.
She alone bore the burden of remembering. Though her mate would quickly locate her in whatever place they found themselves, he needed to be reminded of who he had been. It came as a great relief to him when she told him. The story fit. He had been a hero, after all.
But the two men?
They came to her and her mate in peace, but also in need, knowing only two things—two things they had struggled to put to words their entire lives. They had lived before. She had been there when they died.
Beyond this, they held their suspicions.
They had not been good men, had they? For all their trying, they were missing something – had always missed something.
Could she help them find it?
‡
They became hungry at the same moment, and sat in the dirt and grass. From their packs came roasted corn, honey-cured boar, and cakes formed of the ever-present sweetroot. Somehow, the food became more delicious with each passing meal. Now that their gathering was complete.
(Of course, drunkenness might have had something to do with it, as well.)
They ate quickly, each of them grinning through their packed mouths, each eager to have the story at its end. Picking up where she had left off at the end of the previous meal, she nodded to the lighter skinned of the two men and finished the tale in two sentences, without fanfare.
“And so I killed you, because you asked me. You wanted to come with us.”
He nodded, rough features settling into contentment. He had spoken only a handful of words since arriving, and never asked a question. Of the two, he never required further clarification.
His companion, on the other hand …
“Is it still there?” he had asked the previous night, head tipped back to stare at the moons. “Is the Needle yet in place?”
“What of the elders?” he had asked. “Surely, they tried again.”
“Why would you save me?” he had asked. “I deserved no compassion.”
Now, he said, �
��But your mother—you loved her enough to do what none of the dead had done before you. What became of her? What of Vedas, and all the others?”
She answered these questions the same way she had answered the others.
“Not everything has an answer.”
He shook his head, smiling through his frustration. “You’re not curious? What if there’s a way to know, an arcane science or magic to determine …” He gestured broadly, to encompass the world. “There are only so many places for a soul to go. You might see her again!”
She cut a sliver of fermented sweetroot free and placed it in her mouth, relishing the tart fizz of its juice. A second, third, and fourth slices went to her companions. She sensed each person’s mood as her own. Her mate, satisfied after a long period of work. The lighter-skinned man, appeased to know what he now knew.
The black-skinned man, frustrated but unable to rouse the rage that defined every life he lived.
Her hand, sticky with fermented sweetroot, pressed against his warm cheek. She called him by his old name, and he shuddered slightly at the sound of it.
“I’m going to tell you what your friend—” she nodded to the second man “—told you, just before your first death. He said, Some mysteries go unsolved. This doesn’t mean there’s no truth to be found. Courageous acts aren’t erased simply because you don’t know what their ultimate effect was. Most importantly, perhaps, the existence of a mystery negates no love anyone has ever felt.”
“But don’t you want to know?” he asked. “Don’t you want to see her again?”
“I suppose,” she responded. “Eventually. But for now, I think I chose my fellow travelers wisely. We can be a family, even if just for this moment. A hundred, a thousand years hence, I bet we’ll be sharing the same moment, or one just like it. This is enough.”
“Is it?” the lighter-skinned man said. “Is it enough?” His hand moved toward the black-skinned man’s knee, as of its own accord, but stopped short of contact. He drew it back to his own lap.
She willed him to move it again, crossing the border between the two.
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