Barbas laughed, a full-throated, infectious sound. “I just want to talk, Joanna. I came here to apologize for that little misunderstanding down beneath the ice.”
“Misunderstanding?” I hissed, feeling hot bile rise in the back of my throat. “You tore me out of my armor and left me bleeding and dying on top of a mass grave, and you think there was some kind of misunderstanding? Oh, I understood you alright. You were done with me, and you threw me away like trash the moment you got what you wanted.”
The cheerful mask that Barbas was maintaining slipped a little. “I wasn’t… I was not myself. Recovering the lost part of me and receiving my body was… It was overwhelming.”
I raised an eyebrow. "I expect so. Almost as overwhelming as trying to murder someone that loved and trusted you. And where is that new body, by the way? Are you too much a coward to come and see me yourself? Can't you ‘apologize' in person? You have to send this… thing in your place?"
Barbas rolled his eyes. “We both know you would have killed me if you had seen me again. Honestly, knowing your past, I’m somewhat surprised you’ve lasted this long without resorting to barbaric violence.” He indicated Volistad with a nod of his head. “Though I see you’ve already sought barbarism between your sleeping furs.”
I'm not sure how I managed to refrain from blasting the smug sneer of his face, but it was actually Volistad who snapped first. He took a step forward, an axe appearing in each hand and growled, "The last one of these metal men you sent to kill me was an embarrassment. Can’t you do better?" I put a restraining hand on his shoulder, and he stepped back behind me.
“God spare me from heroes,” Barbas lamented dramatically, then abruptly turned serious. “But I didn’t come here to trade banter with your pet, love, as entertaining as it might be. I came here to tell you that I’m finishing the work we started. Do you remember why you came to this frozen turd of a moon?” He gestured savagely at the sky. “One hundred thousand humans up there, counting on you to turn this place into paradise, and what do you do the moment things get a little rough? You go native!” He visibly restrained himself, regaining his calm. I didn’t say anything, so he continued, his voice pleading, almost reasonable. “Look, Joanna, I’m sorry for what happened down there. I don’t know what happened. I’ve never made a mistake before, and I’ve gone over that morning again and again and found nothing.” He paced, agitated. “But we can work it out, you and me. We can turn this place into the garden that we dreamed about, and build that cabin by the lake, and find ourselves a real home, here in reality! I don’t care what old ghosts down below the ice have said, to either of us.” Barbas pressed his palms together, his face riven with desperation. “But I love you, Joanna Angeles, and I want to make this right. I want to help you make a better world for your people. Will you please, at least consider it? Could you come to forgive me?”
I would like to think that I wasn’t tempted. But that would be a lie. I thought about it for a long minute, remembering all of it, the good times and the bad. I wondered what it would be like to be the maker of paradise for a whole new nation of humans. It would probably be less pressure than being some kind of fake deity for a bunch of carnivore tribesmen. I remembered Barbas’ hands on me, the way he looked at me, the way he made me feel. What if… Another memory floated to the surface. A memory of terror, confusion, and pain. It’s here, with me. You have to run, Jo. It has what it wants now, and it doesn’t need you! And then I saw the lie.
I smiled, wide and cruel, not like a human woman but like an Erinye god. I felt the heat of my fury collapse in on itself and turn into an emptiness that screamed to devour all that stood in my way. Worlds dissolved in the face of cold like that. Atomic motion ceased when it met that kind of pure, merciless entropy. “Barbas is dead, demon. He tried to save my life before you consumed him and wore his face. You’re not here because you love me. You’re here because you need something from me. You need something that you think I have to accomplish whatever foul mission your masters Beneath have charged you with. But your lies mean nothing to me. I will find you, and I will kill you, and I will scatter your remains to the wind.” I lunged forward, lightning-quick, and seized the metal homunculus by its throat. My fingers passed through the image of Barbas and closed on cold metal, and I lifted the thing wearing my dead lover’s face up off of the ground with one arm. I brought the metal man closer, holding it so that I stared into those defiant, simulated eyes. “And when I’m finished, I will take your rotten, maggot-infested heart and I will seal it in stone beneath the ice. And you will have an eternity to know that you failed.”
Even suspended by his throat more than a foot off of the ground, Barbas somehow managed to look exasperated. "Fine, suit yourself." The simulation winked out, leaving me holding a limp metal mannequin up before me. I felt stupid just standing there, and tossed the damn thing away from me towards the mouth of the cave. It was pure luck that saved my life. The copper body shattered as something struck it with explosive force. The projectile that struck the body was deflected by the slightest margin and shot past me. I felt a hot wind dry my face as something gouged chunks of rock bigger than my balled fists from the exposed peak of the mountain. All of it happened in less than a tenth of a second, but it all seemed to stretch out before me, slowed so that I could watch the streak of the projectile pass me like a raindrop streaming across a windshield. Then the sound of the shot reached us in a piercing thunderclap, and time resumed its normal pace. A gauss cannon. Barbas was firing a gauss cannon at us. At me.
Even as part of my mind froze in shock, some other part of me leaped to action. “Volistad! Get everyone below! Nissikul! On me!”
…
We ran out across the ice at speeds that would have made old pre-war muscle cars jealous. All around me the winds gathered, filling me, infusing me with their speed, their power, their joy. I ran like I had never dreamed of running before. Where I had been wearing a simple sealskin shirt and trousers, black witch-armor formed around me, changing me from a sprinting cross-country star into a charging juggernaut. But I didn’t feel the weight of the armor. It didn’t feel like I was wearing much at all. I thought about drawing the sword at my waist to complete the image but thought better of it. It wouldn’t do to bring a sword to a heavy cannon fight. Instead, I sent my machine spirits out into the wind and called down the storms. The Great North Wind answered, but he wasn’t the only one. We ran at the heart of a vortex of howling wind and clashing thunder, lit only by strobing lightning. Though my own eyes could not pierce the walls of the storm, my wind spirits painted the landscape ahead of me in my mind.
Nissikul kept pace with me easily, unshaken by the rise of the storm. Of course, she wouldn't be bothered. She might have been the least of the Stormcallers before her unexpected promotion, but that just meant she had been running with the storms for only years rather than decades. Her black, featureless helm reflected the frenetic dance of the lightning back at me in menacing green as she asked, in a conversational tone that I could nonetheless understand perfectly, "Joanna, are you alright?"
I laughed at the absurdity of the question, and a little of the tension went out of my chest. The storm returned my cackle as a blast of thunder that rattled my teeth in my skull. “Am I alright? What kind of question is that?”
Nissikul didn’t share my amusement. “You’re leading my people now, Storm Queen, I need you at your best. That thing- the metal man wearing the face of your dead lover- it shook you up, cracked the mask. I need to be sure you aren’t going to break.”
I sighed, a sound that became a rushing howl of wind as a funnel cloud calved off from the storm and spun itself into nothingness. “Well, I’m going to break some of that thing’s fancy toys, that’s for sure.” Getting no answer from Nissikul, I continued, resigned. “I’m fine. I’ll be fine. I’m going to have no trouble killing that demon when the time comes.”
“What about if we have to capture it?” Nissikul asked. “You heard the Deepseeker’s pl
an. What if we decide to capture your spirit and bring it back to be a part of that old coot’s ritual?”
I shrugged. “Then I’ll catch it. I doubt Barbas can still be found in there, but if he can, I’ll do my best to save him.” I turned my face back forward into the raging storm, searching through my wind spirit’s perceptions for Barbas’ gun emplacement. Every so often a shot would pass through the storm, warped off its course by the force of the wind, but I saw no sign of the cannon. It came as no surprise to me. A properly installed gauss cannon could kill a target with a nearly direct shot at a distance of over twelve miles.
Nissikul didn't let up. "If you catch it- if you catch your spirit, what will you do about my brother?"
“What?”
Nissikul laughed, and the sound was echoed by the storm around us just as mine had been. “Don’t play dumb, Joanna. He is obviously smitten with you.”
“And…” I prompted, not wanting to give her anything.
Nissikul just stared at me for a full minute, her blank helm conveying nothing. A gauss cannon shot passed us in the storm, thrown a dozen meters wide of either of us.
I groaned. “Fine. I might have feelings for him too, but I don’t know if this-” I gestured all around me, “-is the best time to be thinking about those. We’re fighting a war. If Volistad is in love with me, then maybe after we save your people from certain destruction, he and I can think about what that means.”
“It’s too late for that,” Nissikul commented lightly. “You kissed him. You reciprocated his feelings. You both have to sit down and talk about this, or it will go sour. You might not want to do anything yet, one way or another, and that’s fine. But you have to at least talk to him about it.”
“I have to, huh?”
Nissikul snorted. "Don't play god with me, ‘Storm Queen.' My brother might be a little caught up in your living myth, but I'm not. I've seen you with a hole in your chest where a heart should be." Her voice changed from conversational to a dangerous, poisonous hiss. "And if you hurt my big brother, Joanna, I will tear that shiny new god heart out of you. And no one will be filling that hole back up again. Do you understand me?"
I swallowed hard. Damn. “Yes, Nissi, I understand you.”
“Good,” she said brightly. “Now I think I see something up ahead of us. What do you say we break some of that metal abomination’s toys?”
...
Chapter Nineteen: Deepseeker
Volistad
I watched the great storm carry Joanna and Nissikul away to battle, and felt a brief pang of jealousy in my chest. I couldn't go with them, I couldn't help with this fight. This was a battle for a god and her head mage. I would probably get in the way. I sighed. I wasn't used to being no good in a fight. I was a ranger. Fighting was what we did. But the sensation of feeling insignificant before the power of someone like my sister- I was well used to that. She had been a Stormcaller since the day we left childhood behind. On that day, she had ceased to be my little sister and become something more- she had become her own woman. Much as I wanted to be by Joanna's side for any danger she chose to confront; I knew there was no shame in being left behind. Besides, this gave me a chance to speak to the Deepseeker- to Palamun- alone.
I trudged up the stone path to the old shaman's hut, still wearing my armor, though I had tucked the helm under my arm. I was unsurprised to hear the sound of the Deepseeker's many strange tools at work. It wouldn't have shocked me to learn that the old man didn't ever rest. It was too early for anyone decent to be sleeping, anyway. I stepped past the smear of ash that was all that remained of the afternoon's fire. Perwik was gone, as I expected. As the only remaining Elder from the previous Council, he had a lot to do to keep the tribe running smoothly. There were over fifty-thousand of the Erin-Vulur remaining, though on an average day I saw less than a tenth of that number moving around in the village. Not every Erin-Vulur lived at the tribe's heart. We lived together out of necessity, but we preferred to have our space when we could, carving out little spaces far beneath the ice or deep with the great mountain for little packs and knots of Erinye families to live. Perwik was dealing with the duties usually carried out by Vassa and his priests- making sure that every single pocket of Erin-Vulur living in and around the village had what they needed. It struck me then that he had even more work than that- with Vassa proved to be corrupted, the Master of the Rangers had to make sure every single family of hidden Erinye was alive and unaffected by the dark influence that had infected the High Priest. I did not envy his job. It actually explained why I hadn't seen so many rangers out and about lately.
I pushed through the hide flap to the Deepseeker’s hut and found him working at his stone table, making adjustments to the strange, pipe-like device he had been carrying when he had reappeared at the duel. My neck ached just thinking about that disastrous fight, but I supposed it could have been worse. Palamun looked up, a brief smile wrinkling the corners of his mad eyes before he turned back to his work. “Welcome, young ranger.”
I crossed the hut and stepped up beside the old man, peering down at the silvery, complicated weapon that lay before me. “What is this?”
Palamun grunted. “It’s a… well in our newest god’s language, it would probably be called a grenade launcher.”
I frowned at the unfamiliar words. Unlike Joanna, I hadn’t had an entire language dumped into my mind by an ancient dead god. “She hasn’t taught me those words yet. Grin-yate lawn-chair?”
“There’s no ‘ya’ sound in grenade.” He shrugged. “But it doesn’t matter. What it’s called isn’t important. You should just call it…” he trailed off for a second, musing. “Call it a dragon-pipe.” He laughed for a moment at his own joke, and then, realizing that I wasn’t laughing with him, stopped and cleared his throat.
“Eld- I mean, Great Father-” I began, but Palamun cut me off.
“No, don’t start with the honorifics. I don’t like those any more than my crazy old friend down below. Just call me Palamun. It happens to be my name.” He rocked his head from side to side as if weighing something in his skull. “One of them, anyway.”
“Palamun,” I said, feeling blasphemous. “You seem a lot less mad than you were before all this.”
The shaman looked up at me, a dangerous glitter in his eyes, and I swallowed hard. That might not have been the best thing to say. But the moment passed, and a smile narrowed the old man’s eyes. “Yes. Well, perhaps it is time I explained that, and explained what it could all mean to you.”
“Alright,” I said, warily.
Palamun seized a cloth from the side of his table and threw it over the strange weapon. “Follow me.”
We left the hut and circled the village, passing clusters of little houses and tents set up around clusters of fungal crops and pens of livestock. The old man moved with his usual erratic gait, and some of the twitches and tics that had been missing since his return came back into his face. I wondered how much of that was an act. We left the crater that cradled the village and climbed toward the craggy peak, following a trail of steps hewn roughly into the rock. Despite his bizarre affectations, the Deepseeker had no problem navigating these, and it became clear that he had walked this path many, many times. After just a few minutes of uneven steps, the path leveled out and ended in an iron hatch, much like those that capped the side entrances to the village. I frowned. There was a ranger mark on the hatch, but I didn’t recognize this tunnel, and I thought I knew about all of the ways in and out of the village. I remembered the old abandoned network that the Deepseeker had used when he had saved my life the first time and stopped. “We’re going down to that… workshop that you took me to the first time, right?”
Palamun gave me a look that could have killed a vulyak goat at fifty paces. “Obviously, boy. Now quit standing there and lift the damned hatch.”
I smiled to myself. That was the temper I knew. I crouched and slipped my fingers into the openings in the iron that had been left as handles. As easily as I would
have moved a chair aside in the ranger’s lodge, I lifted the heavy iron portal and set it aside. As I had expected, a narrow shaft opened up before me, descending into darkness. The only distinguishing feature of the tunnel was the ladder of simple iron spikes driven into the wall. I groaned. Someone had to come up with a better way of doing that. At the shaman’s prompting, I clambered down into the tunnel. I was beginning to hate these.
…
We reached the bottom of the shaft a long while later. My shoulders burned from the effort but in more of a pleasant, well-stretched way than any from kind of actual pain. We stood inside an open stone cavern, far beneath the village. I turned to Palamun. "Where are we?"
The Deepseeker didn't answer right away. He fiddled with some kind of little metallic device he had produced from inside his furs, and I heard a short chirping sound echo out of the darkness. Light came to life in the cavern, produced by glowing orbs that dangled from wires set in the stone ceiling, far above us. I took in a sharp breath, not sure of what I was seeing. Dominating the center of the huge cavern, there was some kind of huge metal-skinned… thing. I couldn't begin to guess what it was. It was enormous and vaguely arrow-shaped, though none of its edges seemed sharp. Instead, every spar or protrusion from the great metal body was rounded and smoothed. It had the look of a gigantic metal water-tank, except that there were no seams where a craftsman would have sealed pieces of beaten steel together. It was the large protrusion that extended towards me that reminded me of an arrowhead. The whole thing was like a fat, misshapen arrowhead large enough to kill a mountain. The Deepseeker turned around proudly, his back to the great metal-skinned bulk. "This, my boy, is why your people called me the King of the Sky. This is my… I guess the closest word in the Erinye language would be ‘sledge.' Joanna would call it a ship. This is the great metal urn spoken of in legend, with which I brought your people to this place.” He smiled with his eyes and gestured to the ‘ship’ with one hand with the same sort of pride I would expect from a father introducing his newborn daughter. “I call her Heaven’s Hawk.” He sighed. “But you’ve never seen a hawk, so I doubt you can grasp the significance of the name.”
Alien Romance Box Set: Romantic Suspense: Alien Destiny: Scifi Alien Romance Adventure Romantic Suspence Trilogy (Complete Series Box Set Books 1-3) Page 64
