Jav recalled the Kaiser Bones, returning to normal. “I’m not without means,” he said. “You have a rare combination here, Mr. Kapler. Your planet is roughly five of our standard gravities, which is high, and your people are as tall as they are broad. Usually with high gravity planets, it’s just the latter. The combination, though, gives you exceptional, naturally achieved versatility. You have proven your strength in your show against my troops. And, as you mentioned, your father has provided you with additional enhancements. Through various observations, I would say that, by our reckoning, you would be ranked at about 10 gravities. I have no doubts regarding your fighting prowess.”
“You’ve yet to see it fully displayed.”
Jav pursed his lips, nodded. “I know that I must appear weak to you, perhaps even frail, but if you would like a contest, I would be happy to comply.”
“Come at me then, Specialist Holson.” Raus was grinning, but it was almost a sneer.
“Right. Apologies in advance if I should hurt you.”
“Likewise.”
Jav was upon Raus before Raus could react. He struck with the heel of his palm all of the openings Raus left him, resulting for Raus in a cracked floating rib, a breath-stealing blow just above the heart, and a blow to his bowed forehead that threatened to see his head removed from his shoulders. With each strike, Raus was driven back a step, but Jav stopped, ignoring the cries and shouts to continue from Raus’s enemies.
Raus collected himself and stared for a moment, his eyes filled with anger, awe, and burgeoning respect. How could this little half-man before him, an off-worlder no less, be so strong and so fast? He straightened and wiped a thin stream of blood from the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand.
“We’re not finished yet,” Raus said.
Jav nodded, this time waiting for the other to come to him.
Raus did not disappoint. He moved forward, his big hands probing, seeking purchase, finding none. Each attempt was defeated by the thrust of a palm heel or a back-handed claw. With each failure, Raus winced from the sharp pain preventing his attempts at capture, but he was undeterred, and he began to smile an enigmatic smile.
He moved more quickly now, hop-stepping in a harrying circle with what Jav thought was impossible agility for someone of such size. Abandoning all caution and fixated only on snatching his prey, Raus finally succeeded in wrapping his fingers around Jav’s right wrist. Jav sought unsuccessfully to free his arm and instead found himself drawn into a crushing embrace.
Former king or not, Jav was done being polite. He thought he’d adequately demonstrated that he could beat Raus in a friendly fight, but Raus had been galvanized, probably because he wasn’t used to being challenged or to losing. Jav wasn’t sure if Raus was still interested in a fair contest or in killing him, but the embrace was tightening, and he’d had enough. Jav used AI to supplement a head butt that staggered Raus, brought an eruption of blood from his nose, and unlatched the locks of his arms. Jav pushed away from Raus, lighting for less than an instant before springing forward and landing a series of strikes that once more drove the other back with each impact.
Raus was helpless to stop him, but once again managed to grab Jav by the wrist after several missed attempts. This time, though, he took up Jav’s arm and folded it into a lock that was a more artful example of his Sarsan wrestling. Once again, Jav found himself at the mercy of Raus’s superior strength, unable to free his arm, and he felt the pressure rising to pop his wrist and elbow joints. He could still move, though. He took hold of Raus’s thick, confining arms, found anchor, curled his body up, brought his knees crashing into Raus’s head, and gained his freedom.
Raus stumbled backwards, and Jav sought to add to his momentum by delivering a front kick to his midsection, but Raus reached out a final time and latched onto Jav’s ankle. Raus looked up from under blood-painted brows and smiled toothily as the air thrummed with visible flecks of electric current. The smell of ozone was suddenly overwhelming. Jav reacted to pain and the threat of death, disappearing from before Raus and out of his grip, using the Ghost Kaiser, the displacement technique he’d practiced to reflex.
The hum of the current subsided with the onset of Raus’s surprise. Raus looked around and saw that Jav was behind him, Dark with the Kaiser Bones. With his hands resting on his knees, turned-half around to look behind him and panting from exertion, Raus watched Jav approach slowly, each step deliberate and measured. When Jav was close enough, Raus turned around to face him fully, cried out, and reached with both arms to wrap around the Shade. Now Jav caught Raus’s wrists and had no trouble exceeding the giant’s strength, holding his arms harmlessly away. He front-kicked Raus again, almost knocking his legs out from under him, but Raus remained in place, held firm by Jav’s outstretched arms.
“You may try your electrokinesis again, Mr. Kapler, but I would recommend against it. While I’m Dark, I could yank your arms out of their sockets or I could yank your head from your shoulders before your power would be of any real concern to me. You’ve proven your point—to me, anyway. You are mighty. It’s not important that you prove it to yourself. I’m sorry if that galls you. I’m sorry that you’re not king anymore. But you will be a Shade—so long as you. . . behave yourself.”
“Prince,” Raus said tiredly, unable to meet Jav’s black, hollow eyes.
“What?”
“Prince. I was never king. My father was the last to claim that title.”
“I don’t understand,” Jav said.
“It’s not important now. I will explain it to you sometime.
“You have beaten me, Specialist Holson, on my own land, humbled me in front of those who would see me dead.”
Jav released Raus’s arms and the other dropped to his knees.
“I kneel to you,” Raus said.
Jav returned to normal. “You needn’t. Stand up. We would be equals. You can kneel before the Emperor, but never to me. I’ll ask you again, Mr. Kapler: will you accept my hand in friendship?” Jav said, presenting his hand.
“Yes, and I would have you call me Raus.”
• • •
They had resumed their walk of the perimeter, taking a counter-clockwise course, with Raus to Jav’s right. Raus absently daubed the caked blood beneath his nose as they talked.
“You don’t appear to be bothered by your broken rib,” Jav said.
“It’s not broken anymore,” Raus replied.
Jav cocked his head. “Oh?”
“The current. It’s deadly to all except me. It’s exhausting, but it mends me.”
Jav nodded. He knew that the fight could have gone on for some time in that case, but ultimately the result would have been the same, especially with aid of an Artifact. It was a good test. Raus was an excellent candidate for an Artifact. If he’d dealt genuinely with the Emperor, his newness to the Empire could be easily overlooked.
“Your skills are very impressive, Specialist Holson. I will admit that I have never met a man I could not beat.” Raus paused a moment before continuing, caught off guard by his own words as they came to him. “Not even my father.”
Jav noted the weight Raus placed on this last, how uncomfortable he had made himself in saying it, and thought that there must be more to say on the subject, but let it go.
“I’ve had the benefit of excellent teachers,” Jav said.
Raus snorted. “Teachers, yes. Ultimately, it is the man who distinguishes himself, perhaps his teachers, too, in the doing, but in the end all men stand alone.”
“Is that what you believe?” Jav said.
“It is,” Raus replied.
Jav smiled. “Then let the end never come.”
Raus laughed and was slow to realize that Jav had stopped, that what little color he usually had was now absent from his face, and that he was staring dumbly beyond the line of skeletons at the crowd of revolutionaries.
“What is it, Specialist Holson?” Raus said. He stopped, surveyed the crowd for whatever might have
stolen Jav’s attention, found nothing. “Specialist Holson?”
Jav was trying to pick a woman out of the ranks of revolutionaries. He’d caught only the briefest of glimpses, but it was enough to. . . to shoot the sky full of holes. He could swear that he’d just seen Mai Pardine. Of course that was impossible. Mai was dead. He’d held her lifeless in his arms after their teacher, Laedra Hol, had killed her—punishment for her relationship with Jav, an unacceptable and unforgivable indiscretion, an affront to Hol. The woman he’d seen was now lost among her fellows, and he started to question his senses. At first, he’d thought that she’d looked exactly like Mai, but now he wasn’t sure. Of course, someone of Mai’s petite size would have stood out far more than Jav himself did. The more he thought about it, the more he realized how impossible it was. But the impression that it had been Mai was so strong that it was just as impossible to ignore.
It occurred to him then, like an epiphany, with drums, horns, and strings all sounding in his head, a tragic realization of loss, cyclical and inescapable that hadn’t started with Mai, but with some other unknown woman he was certain he had loved.
He calmed himself. There was time here yet, even before the Vine’s arrival. He would see an end to the cycle if possible, or embrace it if necessary.
“I’m sorry, Raus. I thought I saw someone I—” he caught himself and smiled. “Are you familiar with the idea of a soul echo?”
Raus eyed Jav appraisingly for a moment. “How old do I look to you, Specialist Holson,” he said.
“Please, call me Jav.”
“All right, Jav. How old?”
Jav studied him. He thought Raus looked a few years older than he had been when he received his first Artifact, the Ritual Mask. He was guessing, but for some reason felt confident that he’d been twenty-eight. “Thirty? Thirty-five?”
Raus snorted. “My father’s engineering has left my brother and I long-lived, though you’d not know by my brother’s condition. I’m 156 years old. I have tended the Lightning Gun alone for at least at tenth of its life.”
Jav’s surprise was clear on his face.
Raus nodded. “When I was twenty-three, I loved a girl. The wrong girl, a common girl, a serving girl. Wrong not in my estimation, but my father’s.
“Even in those days, our sway over the people had waned. The incursions from the north had ceased with the widening of the sea. Even with their witchery, they couldn’t sustain an extended campaign so far from home, and they’d grown tired of testing the Lightning Gun. So, with no external threats to protect them from, the people were less receptive to our totalitarian rule. I can’t say that I blame them. In the lawless times when the Witch Kings raided regularly, it was necessary and effective. But not any longer. My father would not change, though—could not change. He would never consider allowing the sheep a voice of their own. After all, our family had brought law, civilization even, to the people, and kept them safe from the Witch Kings of the north for fourteen centuries. No others could claim this or anything comparable. We were entitled to our pride and our rule.” Raus smiled a grim, sarcastic smile, waved a sweeping hand out before him. “See the splendor our pride and our rule have wrought.
“My father was displeased with my choice of Milla Marz and incensed with what he considered to be her presumption. She’d made none of course. She knew what would happen, but she made no demands on me. I couldn’t bear the thought of keeping our love secret, it didn’t seem fair to her, but it would be her death. Though I loved her, I was still in thrall to my father. He convinced me to make a public example of her for the good of the Kapler name.”
Jav narrowed his eyes, swallowed hard. “What did you do?”
Raus sighed. “In those days, the sun was still bright, springtime was still associated with life, with green, and with growth. The Black Fields were not so ominously named. They were paved with stones and home to markets and colorful pavilions. Music and the laughter of children filled the air. I can still remember it if I try hard enough, or it could simply be a testament to the power of my imagination. I think Sarsa died its first death that day, the first of many I would bring about.
“At my father’s command, I throttled her. Upon a dais in front of thousands, with forbidden tears stinging my cheeks, I closed my fingers around her neck and crushed her throat. For propriety. For place. For nothing. I make light of what I can and can’t remember, but the look in her eyes I will never forget. For though she died that day under my clenching hands, she has since graced me with that same look four times more. Each time she comes, sometimes separated by months, usually separated by years, I am made to kill her. I have tried to avoid it, have tried to reconcile with her ghost, if that’s what it is, but in the end it’s always the same. I set something in motion all those years ago for which I will be forever punished.
“If you say you thought you recognized someone in the crowd, you an off-worlder, your first time here, who am I to dispute you? If it is Milla Marz come again, you are welcome to her, for I have nothing but death to offer her.”
Jav took a deep breath. “Tomorrow, I’d like to go among them and search.”
“Of course. And if you find her?”
Jav shrugged. “I suppose we’ll see.”
10,689.142
“Did you have any luck?” Raus said, beckoning Jav to follow him.
“No,” Jav replied. “I’ll try again tomorrow. It would seem that you’ve made a fair number of enemies over the years.”
“Yes. All of them,” Raus said, chuckling.
“How did it happen? Politics aside, what made you choose the Empire over your own people?”
Raus shrugged. “Circumstance. Fate. Wisdom. A lack of it.
“Do you have any family?” Raus asked.
Jav pursed his lips. “I don’t know. My memories, my life as I know it, began seven years ago. I don’t remember anything before that.”
Raus looked at Jav hard with a combination of disbelief and something close to outrage. “You?”
Jav shrugged.
Raus’s face softened. After a pause he said, “I’m sorry.”
“You needn’t be.”
They came into a five by five meter room that was designed for pragmatic efficiency, but had the look and feel of a shrine. Against the back wall, lit internally by ghostly green light, a tank filled with a gel solution held Ban Kapler suspended, where he slept the sleep of decades or of death. Jav couldn’t be sure which it was, and neither could Raus, not any more.
“Everything is for my brother,” Raus said. “I did as my father commanded. I killed Milla Marz, but I hated him for making me do it. The people hated me for doing it. They hated our family for what the murder represented. The Kaplers had kept the peace and protected the land from the savagery of the northern Witch Kings for ages, but then, for something as big as love or small as pleasure, we showed them very clearly with little room for doubt that we were just as much an oppressor as any: closer, more familiar, perhaps even entitled to some degree. But they would not have that indefinitely. All men yearn to be free, whether from tyranny, from unwanted responsibility, or from the shadow of an overbearing father. The people wanted one kind of freedom; I wanted another.
“My mother was always my father’s thing. She had no hand in raising me, showed no interest in me. That was a kindness compared to the contempt she showed my brother.”
Raus sighed as he gazed at the man in the tank before him.
“Ban. He was born small, something that by custom is not easily excused or forgiven, especially not by the birthing mother. It’s an insult, an affront, though there’s no question that by then my father’s seed was to blame—so much exposure to exotic energies and radiations.
“Ban was 15 when I killed Milla, and afterwards only he understood. Milla had been our personal attendant for five years. Besides Ban, several years my junior, she was and is the only person I’ve ever really been close to. To me, the resulting relationship was natural. And I was young, p
assionate for her flesh, her companionship, and for her affection. She was like a real mother to Ban. She showed him love and kindness and by all rights he should have hated me for what I’d done—at least as much as I hated myself. But he knew why I’d done it. Not because I agreed with father, but because one didn’t say no to the old man. Ban didn’t blame me for killing Milla, or for killing father when I did. Mother tried to stop me and shared my father’s fate.”
“How did it happen?” Jav said.
“Oh, I didn’t start out intending to kill either one of them. Father and I had taken to arguing more and more. Even with the passage of weeks and months, I grew ever bolder, fed by hate and youth’s disdain for the established rules and norms. I would challenge those rules and norms. I would challenge my father.
“I set about gathering support, both inside the Tower and out. I don’t know how much they actually trusted me, but they had had enough of my father.
“I remember the day I told my father that he would be stepping down as king. He laughed at me. Long and hard, he laughed. And when he was finished, he asked me how the people could ever follow someone who killed a girl he professed to love, even if she was a low class whore. He started laughing anew when he saw my face. I couldn’t believe it. He’d made me do it, for the family name he’d said, and now he was using it against me.
“As he laughed, I approached him. He simply pointed and continued with his laughter. Until I wrapped my arms around his neck. My father had taught me every hold and every technique I knew, but I had grown much bigger than he had ever been and he had grown old and somewhat frail with his years. He laughed a few moments more before he realized the prison his head was in. He shouted for me to stop. He insulted me. He told me how much of a disappointment I was. Until I started to squeeze. He said no more then, simply fought to free himself, spilling no more filth from his mouth than his own spit. My mother came in then. What a sight it must have been: my father gagging, struggling against my closing arms. Very calmly, I told her to leave. She went crazy then.”
The Blood Solution (Approaching Infinity Book 3) Page 4
