by Jon Skovron
23
Jilly thought she might be the worst student of biomancery ever. Theoretically, once a mental link with someone had been established by direct contact, it should be easy to reestablish at any time. That’s what Brigga Lin had told her when they’d first set things up with Hope before the attack on Dawn’s Light. And it was pretty clear that Brigga Lin expected her to be able to reestablish it now while she sat in the inn with Uter, far from the dangers currently plaguing the Shade District. But for some reason, it hadn’t worked. She couldn’t connect to Hope at all.
Of course, she could have contacted Brigga Lin again and asked for help. But she knew Brigga Lin was dealing with the kraken and didn’t need to be bothered with Jilly’s pathetic and probably unimportant failure. So she would have to fix this the only way she knew how. By direct physical contact with Hope. And that meant heading for the chaos of the Shade District. Possibly this was an excuse to get into the action. But she was pretty sure it was a convincing excuse.
She and Uter ran through the crowded streets. Being smaller, it was easy for them to slip through the knots of people that milled around.
“Hey, Jilly, you look grumpy. You should cheer up!”
Uter held out a dead mouse in his hand and made it do a little dance.
“That’s disgusting!” She smacked it out of his hands.
“Sorry.” He glanced over his shoulder as they ran on, leaving the dancing mouse behind.
Jilly knew she was more frustrated with her own pathetic failure and general uselessness than she was with his weird wighting power. Still, it wasn’t right to turn the dead into jokes. Not even animals.
“Why in all hells do you do stuff like that?” she demanded. “What is wrong with you?”
He stopped running and just stood in the middle of the busy street. His head bowed and his arms hung limp at his sides.
“Uter, what are you …” She stopped and stared at him. She couldn’t see his face beneath his mop of spooky white hair, but when she saw his shoulders start to shake, she realized he was crying.
“Piss’ell. Come on, Uter …”
“S-s-sorry,” he said. He looked up at her, his pale face wet and blotched with red. “I d-d-don’t know.”
She sighed. “Don’t know what, Uter?”
His lips puckered for a moment, and his forehead creased like he was in pain. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
Now she felt bad. “Ah, listen, Uter. I didn’t mean it like that. We’re all messed up in one way or another. I mean, look at me, I make little boys cry for no good reason.”
“You don’t like me.”
“That’s not true, Uter. I just …” What could she say? She resented being burdened with him? That probably wouldn’t make him feel any better. And she didn’t have time to explain it all to him anyway. She had to find Hope.
“Look, I like you fine. I just don’t like it when you bring dead things back to life. So don’t do it. Okay?”
He sniffled loudly and swallowed what was probably a huge glob of snot. “Promise? You like me?”
“Sure I do, old pot. Now come on, we have to find Hope, remember?”
He sniffled again and nodded.
“Sunny.” Jilly scanned the street ahead. The crowds in front of them were getting even thicker. She wasn’t sure they’d be able to weave their way through as easily as before.
“It’ll take forever getting through those people,” she told Uter. “Come on. We’ll go around.”
They made a wide sweep around the mass of people. It forced them close to the docks, but it was the southern piers, which were still pretty far from the kraken. Even so, in the distance, she could hear the kraken continue to lay waste to everything in reach.
“Those ships are huge!” said Uter as they ran along the pier. Trust him to be distracted from a giant monster attack by something silly like that.
“Those ships aren’t even that big,” she told him, glancing at the ships briefly as they hurried past. “When I was in the navy, I sailed on much bigger ships than that.”
“With cannons and everything?” asked Uter.
“Of course with cannons,” said Jilly. “What kind of navy vessel doesn’t have cannons?”
“I don’t know, what kind?” he asked earnestly.
She sighed. “You’re hopeless, you know that?”
“Well, that’s why we’re going to find her!” he said.
“What?” she asked.
He smiled like he’d just said something very clever. “Hope. We’re going to find her because we don’t have her right now. We’re hope-less, right?”
Jilly groaned. “I can’t believe I got stuck with you.”
His smile suddenly vanished. “I’m sorry, Jilly.”
She felt awful immediately. Right after she’d just cheered him up, too. “You just don’t know any better, and that’s not your fault. Honestly, babysitting you is probably what I deserve. I can’t even follow through with my master’s command.”
She glanced over at him as they ran, and saw that wasn’t really cheering him up.
“Listen,” she said. “When I was your age, I was the same way.”
“Really?” He looked doubtful.
“Sure. I was always bothering Red about something. I thought he was the most pat wag who ever lived and I wanted to be just like him. So I was always asking him for advice.” She thought about it for a moment. “He was always pretty nice about it, too. Nicer than I’m being, anyway. So, I’m sorry, too, I guess.”
Then she jerked to a stop.
“Do you still hear it?” she asked Uter.
“Hear what?”
“The kraken. Can you hear it anymore?”
He shook his head.
“Come on, we’ve got to get a better look!”
“Okay,” said Uter agreeably.
“Try to keep up,” she told him. Then she started climbing up the fire escape of a nearby building. The buildings on Vance Post weren’t as easy to climb as the ones on New Laven. There were fewer broken bricks or cracks to utilize. It took some pretty creative zigzagging to make her way up. As she neared the roof, she half expected to see Uter still down at the bottom. But when she turned, he was right beneath her.
“Are we almost there?” he asked.
“Almost. You’re doing great.”
His eyes lit up. “I am?”
“Yeah.” She had reached the roof by then. She leaned over and held out her hand. “Here.”
He grabbed her hand and she hauled him up to stand next to her. Then she scanned the eastern skyline.
“I don’t see it,” she said. “The kraken is gone …”
“Did they kill it?” Uter looked eager.
“I don’t know,” said Jilly. “Maybe they just drove it away or something. Sure did do a lot of damage before they got it, though.” She shook her head as she surveyed the shattered buildings and rubble-strewn streets. From this vantage, it looked even worse than she’d thought. The city looked … broken. She wondered, could a city ever sustain so much damage that it just … died?
“Why’s that man over there waving to you?” asked Uter.
“Huh? What man?”
Uter pointed to a two-masted brig that was tied up at a nearby pier. The cut of it looked awfully familiar. And standing on the quarterdeck was someone she recognized immediately.
“Where’d it go?” asked Vaderton.
Brigga Lin shook her head. The kraken had been moving slowly but steadily closer. They were preparing to abandon Vaderton’s small craft. But then it seemed to abruptly lose interest in its rampage. It had loomed over them, motionless for a few moments. And then it withdrew, sliding back out to sea and into deeper waters. That had been roughly a half hour ago, and the kraken hadn’t returned. People were even starting to ease back toward the wreckage of the docks from wherever they had been hiding.
“Perhaps my cousin found Fitmol Bet and persuaded him to stop the attack,” said Alash.
> “I’m not sure ‘persuaded’ is the right word,” said Brigga Lin. “Look.”
She pointed down the dock. Red was walking slowly toward them. In his arms, he held the limp body of someone in the white robes of a biomancer.
“Did he kill him after all?” asked Vaderton.
“No, this one is still very much alive,” said Brigga Lin. “I have a feeling Red has only earned us a brief respite.”
Red continued unhurriedly toward them, a cheerful smile on his face.
“Well?” Brigga Lin had to make an effort not to sound impatient when he finally climbed aboard with the biomancer slung over his shoulder.
“He’s actually pretty light,” said Red. “I don’t think he’s been eating enough. Can’t be healthy.”
“She means, did you resolve the issue with the kraken,” said Alash.
“I know what she meant,” Red told his cousin, then turned back to Brigga Lin. “And sadly, no. But that’s your job, isn’t it? I was just supposed to bring him here alive.”
“Yes,” said Brigga Lin.
“Look at this.” He laid Fitmol Bet on the deck with unexpected gentleness. “I feel kind of bad for the gaf, really.”
He opened the biomancer’s robes, and Brigga Lin saw what he meant. She stared at the vestigial tentacles fused onto her old master’s sides, then sighed. “That’s one way to do it, I suppose. Unfortunately, it’s not something I could replicate without the proper materials. And even then, I doubt we’d find a willing volunteer to replace him.”
“That’s just it. I don’t think we need to,” said Red. “Bet’s been compelled to attack Vance Post. If you could remove that compulsion, I think it’s likely he’d stop.”
“As I said before, and as I’m sure you’re aware, compulsions can be extremely tricky. If this one was done by Progul Bon before he died—”
“He said it was done by Ammon Set.”
“Really? How strange.” Brigga Lin hadn’t known Set to be particularly skilled in that area. “I’ll take a look.”
She placed her hand on Fitmol Bet’s head and closed her eyes.
“Dear God,” she whispered. Because what she found inside her old master’s head was not so much a compulsion as it was endlessly repeating mental assault.
“Is it bad?” asked Red.
“It’s …,” she began. Fitmol Bet had not been a kind or warm master, but he had always been conscientious in his responsibilities, even in training such a frankly mediocre student as she had been. She was surprised to find herself hurting for him more deeply than she’d expected. But she was unwilling to show such weakness to Red.
“I can see how this is the work of Ammon Set,” she said finally.
Fitmol Bet’s eyes fluttered for a moment, then opened.
“Be still,” she advised him.
“I cannot,” he told her calmly. His arms, legs, and vestigial tentacles began to undulate gently.
“You’re bringing the Guardian back,” she said.
“I must.”
“Ammon Set has torn out so much of … you to make room for his compulsion, that I fear there isn’t really enough left to stand on its own. The only reason you’re able to function right now is because you are bonded to the Guardian. In essence, you are using its cognitive abilities to supplement your own.”
“I understand.”
“If I remove the compulsion, what’s left of your independent consciousness will be subsumed by the Guardian’s. You will, in essence, switch roles, with it controlling you.”
“Could you join us completely, then?”
Brigga Lin’s eyebrow shot up. “That’s what you want?”
“It seems the best possible outcome, given the options,” he said. “And in a sense, I am already lost anyway.”
“True,” admitted Brigga Lin. “If I do this, what assurance do I have that the Guardian will cease its attack on us?”
“I can’t say for certain, but it seems likely that another target will replace you.”
“Ammon Set,” she said.
“Hurry, I’m nearly here,” he said.
“Ms. Lin, I see it out there,” said Alash. “Coming in quite fast.”
“I suppose we’ll have to chance it, then,” said Brigga Lin. She laid her hand on Fitmol Bet’s forehead. “You deserved better than this.”
“Did I?” he asked dreamily. Perhaps he no longer remembered. Or cared.
“Yes,” she told him. “I was a student of yours once, and I admired you greatly.”
He smiled. “Were you? That’s nice to hear. You’ve turned out so well.”
All through her training, Brigga Lin had longed for validation from this man, and he had never given it. She had thought she’d outgrown that longing ages ago. But perhaps some things lingered, no matter how old she got, because hearing those words shattered her usually impenetrable defenses and left her with an aching sadness.
She closed her eyes, and brought her attention inward to the electrical flickers that ran through her mind. That ran through his mind. She connected them, feeling just for a moment the great surge of power as she also touched the animal mind of the Guardian. The word animal was terribly inadequate. There was something ancient and ageless about its mind. Not subhuman, but merely prehuman. Primal and simple, but not brutish.
Brigga Lin tore out the garbage that Ammon Set had rammed into the elderly biomancer’s mind. It was brutal work, but actually quite simple to remove. She let what little remained of Fitmol Bet’s mind sink into the Guardian’s power.
“Brigga Lin …,” she heard Red say. Abstractly she was aware there was panic in his voice, but she was too far into what she was doing to react to it. She had to see this through.
She heard the great kraken breach the surface, the water streaming away as it rose up so close, she could smell the thick, heavy stench of it, like the bottom of an untouched sea dredged up and brought to the air for the first time.
She opened her eyes and saw the kraken looming over her. “Get back. All of you.”
The three men obediently scrambled back to the far end of the boat.
Brigga Lin stripped Fitmol Bet’s robes off, then carefully picked up the naked body.
“Ms. Lin!” shouted Alash. “Watch out!”
Brigga Lin ignored him and stood her ground as the kraken reached slowly toward her with one long tentacle. It stopped only a few feet from her. The mottled flesh on the thick trunk of it gleamed wetly, and the tip quivered, as if eager. Perhaps it was.
She closed the remaining distance and laid Fitmol Bet’s body on the soft flesh of the tentacle.
“Union, at last,” she said.
Then she pressed down until Fitmol Bet’s body was absorbed into the tentacle.
She stood there for a moment, her hands laid directly on the kraken’s flesh, feeling the strength of it up through her palms. She understood why he had wanted this.
“You are free,” she told the Guardian. “Live as you see fit.”
The tentacle pulled slowly away as the great kraken turned and headed back out to sea.
“Where do you think it’s going?” asked Alash quietly as the three men cautiously came back over to her.
“I reckon if there’s anything left of Bet in there, it’s heading for Stonepeak to settle a score with Ammon Set,” said Red.
“I suspect the Guardian may have already had its own score to settle with that man,” said Brigga Lin quietly. She sat down and pulled her arms in close.
Alash sat down next to her. “Are you okay?”
Her eyes gazed out to sea at the wake left by the Guardian. “Do you remember some months back, we were sailing to Dawn’s Light for the first time, and you were so excited to see those metal ships along the Breaks?”
He nodded.
“You said there were still mysteries in this life worth exploring …” She smiled sadly. “I think I understand now what you meant.”
They sat there for a moment in silence.
“Pre
posterous!” Vaderton shouted at Red. Apparently, they’d been having a quiet discussion of their own while she and Alash had been talking.
“Well, yeah, but that doesn’t mean it ain’t true,” said Red.
“What is it?” asked Brigga Lin, climbing wearily to her feet.
“He claims that Ammon Set is staging a coup to wrest power from the royal family.”
“That’s what Fitmol Bet told me,” said Red.
Vaderton shook his head. “The man was hardly in his right mind.”
“Even if he’d decided to degrade his own power by lying, there wasn’t enough of his mind left for him to make something up,” Brigga Lin told him.
“Which is why we have to get over there and help!” said Red.
“We did just send an angry kraken after Ammon Set,” Alash pointed out.
“It won’t be enough,” said Red. “We need to go, too. We need to go now.”
“We’ll see what Hope says,” Brigga Lin told him.
It was strange that in the midst of this crisis, Hope felt such peace. Although the situation was dire, she was grateful for the simplicity of it. There was no real question of what to do. A kraken had attacked innocents; those innocents needed help. And even though the kraken appeared to have fled, most likely thanks to Brigga Lin, the people still needed help. That was something she could do without any conflicting emotions.
“Half the district is in ruins,” Stephan told her quietly. “But I think we’ve managed to find all the survivors.”
Hope looked around at their makeshift shelter in the old temple, which had been built to straddle the river that marked the boundary between the Commercial and Shade Districts in the center of the island. Like nearly every temple she had seen in the urban areas of the empire, it lay empty and unused. She’d never really thought before on why people never came to temples anymore. But now it occurred to her that it was because there was no one to lead them there anymore. There were many stories of the old days where the emperor made tours of his empire, coming to each temple to speak directly to the people. But after the time of the Dark Mage, when the Vinchen and biomancery orders split, the emperor stopped coming to the temples. Perhaps the common people had still used them as community meeting places for a while. But slowly the temple had fallen into disuse.
