Emis Jesler stared, said nothing, his silence intended to be agreement.
The woman, eager and nervous, said, “It could be an off-worlder, but this is too great an opportunity to ignore.”
“The machine is ready, of course,” Thars said.
“Mills says it is. That it has been for a very long time now, but that some set-up will be required.”
Thars nodded. “Go up to the ship and have Mills prepare the machine for projection.”
“Yes, Thars,” Emis Jesler said, turning to leave.
“Shiia, get the others ready and summon the current matches for hosting. If it is Kapler and he’s coming here, I want us up at the ship to greet him when he arrives.”
“Yes, Thars,” she said. She looked at him with questioning eyes, hoping for more.
Thars sighed and fixed her with a stare. “There is a time and a place for everything, Shiia. When this is finished, perhaps—and only perhaps.”
“Yes, Thars. And thank you.”
Thars Kohanic straightened and sat cross-legged, folding his arms across his chest. He sank into thought—real and productive—for the first time in he couldn’t remember how long. Kapler. If Kapler had come and all worked out as they hoped, perhaps he could give up this farce of an existence. Kohanic was one of the first, had endured it the longest, along with the other Bright Ones—they were six in all—but his burden had been the greatest and he was tired. Eternity, or even a fraction of it, was proving to be too much for him. But justice must win out. Justice was all that mattered to him.
He stood, stretched his prodigious frame, and strode across the grass, passing dancers and couples, birds and butterflies, fruit trees and sprays of flowers, until all around him grew night dark, with stars sparkling above and about him. But these stars were as varied in color as the flowers he’d left behind and soon revealed themselves to be far more mundane. He stood now, a white shape as diaphanous as the clothes that so recently covered him, a ghost in the engine room of the ship that brought him to this planet so long ago, indicator lights winking up and down the walls and across the ceiling.
Kohanic sighed again, remembering, with the shock that always came, how familiar all the machinery was. How long had it been this time? He didn’t know and didn’t care. It was increasingly rare these days for him or any of the Bright Ones to rise to the world of the living.
• • •
Raus stood at the control yoke, easing the windram down the riverbed. The corpses kept a steady pace behind them, indifferent to the broken terrain, except for occasional trips and falls. The banks had risen up to sheer walls, carved out centuries or even millennia ago, casting them into shadow and submerging them in an unnatural hush. The ghosts still lingered in the bed, flitting through the mass of walking corpses, passing the windram to take up hiding places and watch the entourage’s progress. They escaped no one’s attention, but so far they’d proved harmless, and neither Raus not Jav new any good remedies for ghosts.
As they made their way, with the icy wind occasionally bringing small, swirling flurries to keep them company, they spoke to pass the time.
“Were you given a similar assignment when you were awarded your Artifact?” Raus asked, staring ahead, down their well-sheltered road.
“I suppose I was. The first time, anyway.”
Raus turned to look at Jav, narrowing his eyes. “First time?”
Jav nodded and regarded the Kaiser Bones covering his hands. “I had an Artifact before the Kaiser Bones. Everything about the Ritual Mask was like a curse, though. It might be different now, but back then it controlled me. It also would have killed me when it expired if I hadn’t won the Kaiser Bones. On Planet 1398, which is where my memory begins, I was dropped in the middle of the enemy and made to fight my way out. Those memories are still spotty, and the Ritual Mask was largely driving me with its hunger, but I’m told I did well. I didn’t always discriminate between friend and foe, though, which didn’t make me too popular among Barson’s troops. That was before I had a name, before learning the Eighteen Heavenly Claws, before being remade by the Kaiser Bones. I don’t think most people realize that I’m the monster they used to call Mikaidaa.”
He reflected for a moment, laughing softly to himself. “It’s a little like First Specialist Kalkin, in a way. When Dark, he is a horror to look at and his power is perhaps worse. Those who know no better call him Fuhaidaa, a name like a curse, coined for the monster, often used to scare children into obeying their parents, but few have ill to say of the man Lor Kalkin: fair and honest, handsome and charismatic, the top graduating student of his class at Locsard and now part-time professor, the sole survivor of the Plague Squad, the First Specialist of the Death Squad. But they’re one in the same.”
Jav was silenced by an unbidden train of thought. Like bile, guilt rose up in him for all the things he’d done while not in his right mind. Many had assured him that he was not to blame for what happened when the red madness of the Ritual Mask was on him, but if he wasn’t to blame, then who was? Kalkin merely looked the monster and had a monster’s power, but his role as a bogeyman was all show, while Mikaidaa had been different. Wasn’t Jav to blame? He had worn the Mask, he had killed all those people. Was there some part of him that had simply found release and expression through the Mask?
“Jav?”
Jav looked up. Raus’s voice had won out only slightly over a white-noise chorus of other voices droning in his head. A chill ran up and down Jav’s spine, and he frowned unseen inside his skull helm. Ever since his encounter with Ty Karr and being doused with powdered Gun Golem steel, there had been a noise in his head, sometimes in the forefront of his consciousness, sometimes way back, unnoticed, but he recognized it now for the first time. It was a chorus of voices. What they said—when he was conscious of them—he could not say. They were quiet now, or at least they had died down to a murmur, like the sound of rain, or the wind, or the hum of an engine. For the second time here on Sarsa, Jav wondered if he was losing his mind.
“Sorry,” Jav finally said. He gripped his skull with both hands and took a deep breath, an action that was purely reflexive and symbolic as he he had no need of oxygen to clear his mind.
“Are you all right?” Raus said.
“Probably,” Jav answered. He was amiable but wanted to change the subject. “What do you suppose the story with these ghosts is?”
Raus shrugged. “Couldn’t say.”
“If they’re watching us and keeping track of our progress, there may be some cause for caution,” Jav said.
“You think they’re reporting to some ghost general?”
“Maybe. But this seems all too easy. You said that the Witch Kings made their last incursion more than a hundred years ago, right? So, what? They disappeared off the face of the planet? Did they all die and evolve into ghosts? What we saw from the ridge didn’t look like any military camp. They had numbers, but they looked idle, like they were asleep on their feet. Granted, the distance may have obscured some of what we saw, but they had no military hardware to speak of, no sign of any Lightning Guns, no windrams. This one crashed at least a hundred years ago, maybe two.”
“So what are you saying?”
Jav shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe the Witch Kings are dead, and your assignment will turn out to be little more than a vacation in the snowy north. Or maybe there’s something else going on.”
“Something else? Like what?”
Jav shook his head again. “I don’t know. It’s just a feeling.”
Raus nodded. He couldn’t begin to fathom what else might be going on, but he wasn’t so naive as to discount Jav’s misgivings. “Okay. What’s your advice, then? Should we take it slow or expedite things?”
“I have no idea why, but I feel like taking things slow with ghosts is a terrible idea, that before long we won’t be able to trust our own senses, and that at some point we’ll just find that we’ve become ghosts ourselves, never knowing life fr
om death until it’s too late. The fact that we can see them isn’t a particularly good omen, and on top of that, I’m hearing things in my head that I can’t explain. I’d rather face what we’re going to face with as many of our wits about us as possible.”
Raus smiled. “Suits me fine. Let’s expedite things.” He torqued on one of the handlebar grips, accelerating the windram to its top speed, which was about two hundred kilometers per hour.
The corpses trudging behind soon fell out of range of Raus’s influence and collapsed in a wave, laying an even carpet of bodies upon the riverbed for a stretch. Raus turned to look as the last of them fell. “There will be more to make use of,” he shouted above the wind. “Or not. How can the corporeal combat the incorporeal, anyway? You and I will be sufficient, or I alone will, if that is to be the way of things.” He finished with a long, hearty laugh.
They surged through the riverbed bucking smoothly over boulders and fallen trees and things unseen that made up the otherwise smooth roadway. Along the way, they overtook a lone ghost, who stared at them white and wide-eyed as they passed. The banks, once towering above them, had given way to low mounds, still dotted with those dead, white trees. The sun had sunk and was barely visible on the horizon through the uniform gray of the sky. It would start snowing again soon. It mattered little, though. From where they were, they could see the black of the tower, which Raus insisted belonged to the Witch Kings.
The plain spread out beneath the tower was coming into view as well, causing Jav to frown behind the protection of the Kaiser Bones. He was frowning a lot lately. Radiating out from the black tower were rows and rows of stone structures, simple rectangular buildings with myriad openings from which ladders depended. The buildings all rose to a uniform four stories and formed a wide chevron pointing back to the tower. Tiny pale faces, probably those of women and children, could be seen dotting the otherwise black openings, but their presence was more surreal than anything, making the settlement appear to be populated by lifeless mannequins.
The crowds still surrounded the tower and seemed to be doing no more now than they had been when Raus and Jav first saw them from so far away. There was some activity. Some of the men milled about, tending fires, drawing water from snow, coming and going from little outbuildings that were scattered below the tower, some even coming and going from the tower by way of a vast stone stair, but the majority of them stood motionless, a sea of bodies standing erect, but idle, not too different from Raus’s corpse soldiers. It didn’t make sense. Besides that, the chorus of voices in Jav’s head had returned and grown louder as they neared their destination. With enough input, Artifacts were supposed to make all ordered forms of spoken communication intelligible to their hosts, but what he heard inside his head was a jumble of dream-slippery sounds, half-familiar but maddeningly elusive. He wondered again about what he’d said to Raus about trucking with ghosts and the state of his sanity.
It was snowing again. The sky had darkened to a shade of gray that seemed to spread to the air about them, stealing not just color but reality itself. Ahead of them, the tower loomed. From its top, a great jet of flame waved, casting down an eerie light that danced upon the plain and interacted with the gray to make the scene all the more surreal.
“That tower is huge,” Jav said, both impressed and a little daunted.
Raus nodded as he stared ahead, open-mouthed. “I had no idea it was that big.”
Jav swallowed hard. “I feel a little guilty about just walking in and slaughtering them, but I’ll be glad to have this little assignment behind us.”
Raus saw that he black pits of Jav’s eyes had begun to glow faintly in their centers. On either side of the river, the banks began to crumble as large, heavy-boned skeletons climbed slowly from the broken earth. A thin, unnerving whine accompanied the glow emanating from Jav’s eye sockets. That light shone fiercely now and yet still seemed far away, as from a world beyond what’s real and solid and known.
Raus faced ahead again and narrowed his eyes, bringing down a single stroke of lightning from the darkening slate sky to the ground some ways ahead of them. It would only be minutes now before they reached the outskirts of the settlement.
Corpses in the hundreds and even more skeletons clambered up from the ground. Most were whole, all were caked with sparkling frost or dirty, crusted snow. They stepped aside, uniform groups in perfect synch, to make way for the windram as it rolled up over the riverbed bank to make its final approach into the midst of thousands and thousands of northerners who stood idle, watching but showing little interest.
The northerners were dressed in furs and skins for the most part, but some wore armor of a sort that neither Raus nor Jav had expected to see. These, the biggest of them, were covered in enameled ivory plates that looked like they might be plastic or ceramic and which were obviously machine-sewn to bodysuits of thick, synthetic material. Jav and Raus shared a look, both a bit taken by the contradiction: the armored clothing seemed out of place, too new and far beyond the means of the people wearing it.
As the windram drew closer, the northerners continued to stare and simply stepped aside, as the dead soldiers had, to make a path for the boat that led directly to the steps at the base of the tower. Raus moved them cautiously along the way opened up by the silent men and women. Their silence and their stillness were disconcerting. For moments at time it was easy to forget that they were people who’d shown signs of life—albeit subdued signs of life—mere moments ago, and not simply part of the landscape, trees for instance, or statues at best.
From within the tower, a lone Sarsan emerged. He walked down the steps and with a purpose so clearly born of independent thought, that the otherwise simple act stood out starkly when compared to the strange hive-mind behavior of the masses. He was big, too. At least as big as Raus was before going Dark, which is to say that he stood a full head taller than the next biggest Sarsan among the thousands that surrounded the tower. He wore the armored clothing and a broad blade fixed to his left hip. He held the pommel with his left hand and brushed thin brown hair from his brow with the other as he descended the stairs. He had the clear air of authority about him, which Jav and Raus acknowledged with a look, both reassured by a return to normal logic and predictability.
“Let’s get this started, shall we?”
“By all means, let’s,” Jav said.
Raus flipped a thumb control on the right handlebar, prompting the prow of the windram to hum and vibrate softly. The hum built to a high-pitched tone that seemed to waver in and out of the audible range. Raus checked a gauge and raised his eyes to the Sarsan, now at he foot of the steps. He adjusted the thumb control and pulled a trigger on the underside of the handlebar with his index finger. The forward spar crackled with spark-light dancing down its length, giving birth to three trunks of lightning. The trunks jetted out to combine, separate, and combine again before hitting their target.
But the man at the stair raised a hand and drank in harmlessly with his palm what should have cooked him inside out in an instant. He continued forward, his pace and composure completely unaltered.
Jav jerked his head back unconsciously. “Okay,” he said.
Raus uttered a long sigh.
Skeletons and corpses were now walking among the idle Sarsans, responding to the will of their respective masters, saturating the throng with their own numbers. Raus set the windram down about a hundred meters from the man coming to greet them. He and Jav leapt over the gunwale to the well-trampled snow below.
The big Sarsan was hailing them with the hand he’d used to thwart he Lightning Gun. “Hello!” he called. “Hello! This is a surprise. And a good one, too, I must say.”
Raus cocked his head, thoroughly confused by the man’s almost jovial manner. “I think you misunderstand, sir,” he said. “We meant—and mean—to kill you. All of you. You’ll forgive us if our attempt came off as a gift of friendship from distant lands.”
“Oh, no, Mr. Kapler—it is Mr. Kapler, isn’t
it? Only a descendant of Jorston Kapler would have the means to come here, across the sea, over the mountains, through the ice and snow, and then set that old relic to rights. You are a Kapler, are you not?”
“I am. Jorston Kapler was my father.”
“Was he now? How many generations, I wonder. None? A hundred? We shall see soon enough.”
“Who are you?” Raus said, fairly spitting rancor.
“I am Thars Kohanic,” he answered, bowing theatrically.
Raus looked at the man before him with narrowed eyes. “Thars Kohanic? That name sounds familiar.”
“It should,” Kohanic said, wearing an enigmatic smile. “For I am he, first officer of the Bright Sarsastra.” He indicated the tower at his back. “Alas, this is not the skin I wore when we arrived, but it is of my own descent.
“You appear to know little of your own heritage, Mr. Kapler. It is unfortunate that you will be accountable for Jorston Kapler’s crimes, but we are a people who cannot forget.”
Raus shook his head noncommittally, not understanding Kohanic’s meaning.
Jav looked up at his big companion, then back at Kohanic. He was tired of all the strangeness and intrigue. He wanted to finish this as cleanly and efficiently as possible and the less he knew about Thars Kohanic, the less his conscience would bother him. It was, perhaps, childish, an emotional escape of sorts, but too many things niggled at him, and a nasty variety of fatalism growing in the back of his mind needed to be exorcised.
In a flash of motion, Jav occupied the place Kohanic had stood, his hands poised before him, one over the other in the distinctive pose that marked the Kaiser Claw. He dropped his hands and examined them. Something unseen had tried to prevent him from taking Kohanic’s head.
The northerner was stumbling back several paces, reaching for his head, now thrown back from his broken neck like the cast-off hood of a cloak. The skin at the base of his throat had ripped, revealing the white of vertebra nestled in a wet, red mass of muscle. Blood pumped copiously from buried vessels, spilling all down Kohanic’s front, staining his armored clothes and filling the area around him with rising steam.
The Blood Solution (Approaching Infinity Book 3) Page 12
