Gods of Rust and Ruin

by Azalea Ellis

  Even Blaine and Gregor were better at it than me, and neither of them had Seeds at all, which was pretty depressing.

  Torliam said there would be time to learn, since the village didn’t have a communication device—they had purposefully isolated themselves from the rest of Estreyan society—but they did have a supply convoy that would be heading to another village that did have a comms system. It would be a while before the convoy left, but we had been invited to travel with them. In the meantime, Torliam planned to teach me and the team how to fight, and how to speak and read the language, for those who were interested. Once we had a basic understanding, he said we had been authorized to search through the village’s store of knowledge for information about the God of Knowledge and the Oracle, so there was added incentive.

  I was sitting at the edge of the training fields outside the main wall. It was mainly open fields for sparring or practicing with the more destructive Skills, but some of them had trees or stumps to attack, or different types of terrain.

  Adam had created a bigger version of Birch out of ink, and Kris was riding atop it, shrieking with laughter as she raced the original Birch across the field. Adam called out a warning, and she dismounted before the construct disintegrated, immediately begging him to, “make another one!”

  Zed plopped down beside me. “Guess what I just learned?” He kept talking before I had a chance to speak. “They have a healer!” He nodded at my look of surprise. “Yeah. They were being sloppy with the new arrowheads, and Egon dropped some molten metal on his foot. They shooed him right off to the healer. I don’t know how this person’s Skill works, or if they’d be strong enough to fix what’s wrong with you and Chanelle, but what if they can?”

  I scrambled to my feet. “That’s wonderful, Zed! Do you know where they are?”

  He shrugged. “I can ask one of the villagers.”

  We went back to our hall of the elder’s house, and found Blaine and Sam both sitting with Chanelle.

  Blaine was tinkering with a small ball of metal, using tiny little tools that looked more like metal toothpicks than anything, and he didn’t even look up when we entered.

  “She’s making mental associations!” Sam said without preamble. “She can tell the difference between red and blue, and point out the correct one when I show her an example to match up with. Not every time . . . she gets distracted, but this is progress!”

  Zed told him about the healer, and Sam grew quiet, then stood up. “I’m coming with you. Maybe . . . maybe this healer can help figure out what’s wrong with me, too.”

  The healer turned out to be an old man with one of the nicer houses. He was a bit suspicious, but after Zed introduced us, and the man got a close look at my gifts from the Oracle, including a valiant attempt to make the ring come off my finger, he let us into his house.

  He tried to work on Chanelle first, making her sit in a bare spot on his stone floor that had diagrams drawn all over it. Then he stared at her really hard. He questioned Zed, eyes widening at the response. He shook his head sadly in the universal symbol for “kids these days,” and returned to staring at her. Eventually, he shook his head again and waved her away with an irritated “harrumph!”

  “What does that mean?” Sam asked.

  Zed talked back and forth with the man, and said, “I don’t know all the vocabulary he’s using, but I think he’s saying that any wounds caused by the direct touch of a . . . higher power?” he shrugged, “aren’t something he can heal.” He talked with the man a bit more, waving his hands about and miming things to convey concepts he didn’t have the words for. Then he said, “So, if a god punches you in the side and breaks your ribs with its fist, you can probably be healed. If the god uses a ‘power’ attack—maybe like a Skill? —then a wound that breaks the skin is way harder to heal. I don’t know if I’m really understanding the concept, but in any case, he can’t fix Chanelle’s brain.”

  “Maybe that’s why I can’t help her,” Sam said, relief tinting his voice for a moment. “But it doesn’t explain the backlash, and the way I can’t control if I heal or hurt someone anymore.”

  I sat in the middle of the circle next, while Zed explained what was wrong with me.

  The old man’s eyes grew bright, and he peered at me even harder than he had Chanelle. He asked questions about how I’d gotten the Seed of Chaos in the first place, how I’d been using it, and what effects had come from the Oracle’s gifts. By the way he suppressed an eager little smile, I had a sneaking suspicion that he wanted to know these things so he could gossip about them later, rather than because they would help him diagnose or heal me.

  Finally, he sat back and shook his head, stating something final, from which I caught the word, “die.”

  Zed looked pained, and asked him a question before he translated the answer fully into English. “He says you’re going to die, if Chaos does not stop attacking you. And as it is the direct power of a god causing your condition, there is nothing he can do about it. He said he knows of no healer in the world that could heal you, though there may be a couple who could keep you alive a little while longer. There is a healer in the capitol who may be able to help. Ifkana of the Panacean. He recommends we go to Ifkana when we get to the capitol.”

  Sam heaved out a sigh. “It’s not my fault, thank goodness,” he whispered. When we both turned to stare at him, he straightened. “Not that it makes what’s happening any better! It’s just—I felt like a failure. I mean, I’m supposed to be able to fix things like this, and I couldn’t, and I’ve been so useless lately—”

  I interrupted. “It’s fine, Sam. This was never your fault.” I had decided to take the Seed of Chaos on my own. Even with the warning from Behelaino. I stood up, and walked out of the center of the painted diagrams. “Your turn, now.”

  Zed once again explained what was wrong to the healer, who sprinkled white powder on Sam’s head.

  When the healer’s back was turned, Sam sent me a disbelieving look.

  —He just dumped chalk on me. Is this old guy pranking us?—

  -Sam-

  I smothered a laugh, and shrugged.

  Finally, the old man threw up his hands, said, “Agh!” and shook his head before turning to yammer at Zed, who translated as he talked.

  “He says, we come to him with unsolvable problems, do we try and mock him? The fair haired—blonde—one is not a healer. He’s not going to be fooled by us. Or maybe we’re stupid—”

  “Wait,” Sam said. “What does he mean, I’m not a healer?” He pressed his hands to his thighs, and met my eyes for a second. I knew we were both thinking of the same thing. His Harbinger Skill was of the Ruination Class.

  “He says it is a balanced power. You must take what you give and give what you take.” Zed shook his head. “What does that even mean?”

  Sam didn’t wait for him to ask the old man. “I can’t heal . . . unless I offload that damage somewhere else?”

  “Yes, basically. He says you are unbalanced, and your power will turn against you if you try to change its nature, or to leash it.”

  Sam didn’t speak again until Zed had thanked the healer profusely, we had left his house, and were walking down the street. Then he stopped, and turned to me. “I don’t want to kill people, Eve.” His voice broke on my name.

  “We’ll find some other way,” I said. I wasn’t sure I believed it. But we’d definitely try. Even if I hadn’t cared about Sam at all, the team couldn’t afford to lose its healer.

  It grew colder over the next couple weeks, and the green things started to wither away. I trained with Torliam and the others every day. He thought I was sloppy and relied on my Grace too much, rather than actual skill. He also thought I was weak, slow, tactically incompetent, and remarked repeatedly how generally amazed he was that I was even alive to learn from him. And I was learning. It had made me respect him in a new way, because even if your blood was pure Seeds and your bones were made out of steel, it would still take thousands of hours of pra
ctice to be at his level as a fighter. He knew what he was doing, and he knew what I was doing wrong. The only downside was that he liked to show me what I was doing wrong by showing me a couple times, then beating it into me.

  He didn’t say it, but I thought I had a talent for battle, because I learned quickly, almost instinctually. Even Torliam couldn’t fault me in that.

  Sam had tried attacking Adam’s Animations with the destructive side of his Skill, but the relief of “pressure” from doing that was apparently close to negligible. He didn’t want to hurt animals unless he had to, so he attacked plants, taking two other people from the team with him as he ventured into the forest, making things wither, explode, crystallize, and quite a few other destructive affects he’d absorbed over his time as a Player. That worked better, though still very slowly. Still, it was a solution that didn’t involve hurting anyone.

  I learned enough Estreyan to inch my way through their texts. The library held everything from old books to these cool little chips that could project information right into the eye of the “reader.” They were one of the surprisingly few examples of advanced Estreyan technology I’d seen in the village.

  Blaine loved the library, and seemed to be trying to gorge himself on the information equivalent of eating an entire blue whale. He may have been succeeding. Unlike me, he picked up the language with astonishing ease. I mean, I had already known he was a genius, but the way he worked with science seemed more like magic to me. This was something new, and I felt a healthy dose of respect and morose jealousy for his brain.

  All of us who could read spent hour upon hour in the library, searching for relevant information about the God of Knowledge, and my problem. I had never been more grateful for my boost to Intelligence, because I don’t think my progress would have been possible otherwise. In fact, I’d had quite a few spontaneous level-ups to my mental Attributes, and even to my Endurance.

  All of the electronically archived things were searchable by keyword, so finding reference to the God of Knowledge or the Oracle wasn’t the problem. Finding relevant, new information about either of them was. They didn’t make public appearances very often any more, it seemed.

  I found a picture of a mural with the God of Knowledge’s name on it, and showed it to Torliam.

  Rather than being mildly interested or explaining the background behind it like I’d expected, he stared at it, frowned, and stared at it some more. “There are old paintings,” he said. “From before the God of Knowledge removed himself from the presence of mortals. I’ve seen them, in my research into our past. He had a temple once. There is a painting of him in it, quite like this, the roof open to the sky, people supplicating before him, and golden rods shooting into the sky. Golden light stretching into the sky . . . everything within it . . .”

  “What?”

  “Within the range of his divination. I think those were the words. All that lies under the light is within range of his power.”

  “Why didn’t you mention this before?”

  “I—” He closed his mouth, and opened it again, with a small frown. “I had forgotten. It seemed insignificant.” The words were fairly innocuous, but he shot me a look of silent alarm, wide eyed and tight lipped. His skin had paled, and his jaw was clenched so the skin stretched over it a bit too tightly.

  It made me realize how weak he still must be, after what NIX had done to him. He was easily stronger than me, but I could only imagine what he must have once been. What he would be again. A creature with enough Intelligence that forgetting something was an anomaly.

  “I have studied this before . . .” He pressed his lips together. “I have spent my life studying these things, trying to find a cure for the Sickness. They say that he secluded himself to do the same. I have studied this before, and I have forgotten.” His expression spoke as much as his words.

  I kept my expression as neutral as possible, trying not to show my alarm. He had forgotten something important enough that it was dangerous, which meant something had made him forget. “How far does the light stretch?” I asked. Were we even now within the god’s range?

  “I do not know. But we should be wary.”

  That was worrying, but it didn’t change the vision I’d received from the Oracle.

  Torliam’s head jerked to the side, staring at the blank wall with such a horrified expression that I sank into a crouch with my claws out, hair raising in alarm.

  I snapped my awareness out to search for the danger, but found nothing unusual. “What’s wrong?”

  He didn’t have to answer me, because the black cube that formed in front of my face asking if I wished to enter the Trial explained everything.

  Chapter 19

  Be like snow. Silent and cold.

  — Citron Aodh

  I got a barrage of Windows from my teammates who had seen the cube. I told them not to worry. Enough time had passed on Earth for them to fix the Shortcut, and they had sent their Players out on a Trial. No big deal.

  Even so, the others gathered in the library with Torliam and I. Perhaps it was a subconscious thing—safety in numbers.

  “How could you tell?” I asked Torliam. “You knew a Trial had started, even before the cube.”

  “I feel all those that I have been forced to form a bastardized blood-covenant with,” he said simply. “The disconnect between your world and mine had given me some blessed relief for a while, but now they are here, spread all over the weaker lands in groups.” He turned back to me, relaxing somewhat. “I hope they are all annihilated before the gods of those Trials.”

  Over the course of the next few hours, Torliam announced when individual Trials across the world ended, removing their still-living Players from his consciousness. It grew late, and most of the group’s tension leached away in favor of fatigue, but Torliam didn’t relax.

  “Is something wrong?” I asked.

  “One group remains. Too much time has passed. It is not likely they are still in a Trial.”

  “Maybe they’re trying something like what my group did, escaping NIX’s clutches by camping out over here. Or maybe this is a special expedition, not Players sent to petition the Trial gods. I heard they’ve been trying to do research about your world, pick up old technology, etcetera,” I said.

  Torliam was slightly pacified, but as morning came, and then evening again and they had not left, he grew distracted and ever more on edge. That tension spread back to the rest of the team. When he revealed that the Players had begun traveling in our direction, we lost any sense of ease we’d gained since coming to the hidden village.

  The other Players moved closer over the next few days, till we were all on the brittle edge of fear and anticipation, and constantly asking Torliam for updates. We speculated that they were tracing us somehow, and NIX had sent a retrieval team for the valuable assets we represented. Or an assassination team.

  Then, I had an idea. I sent Windows to the team and Birch to retrieve Torliam, and all of us except Kris and Gregor met in the library. I spread out a large map on the floor. “Point out where we are,” I said to Torliam.

  He did something to a little metal tab on its corner, and the drawings on it wavered, the contents changing, flashing through different settings like it was diving downwards through them, and then settled. “It shows the main layer now, which we are on. Somewhere around here is the village.” He pointed to a blank spot, with no dot or label to indicate that people actually lived there.

  I eyed the map, picking out landmarks and labels. “We started . . . here?” There was no marking for the Estreyan Stonehenge, so I was pointing to a blank spot.

  “Yes.”

  I drew my finger haltingly along the map. “And the God of Knowledge is somewhere around here?” I waved a big, vague circle to the northwest of the village.

  “Yes.”

  “So . . . what if they’re not coming for us? I think they have no idea we’re even here.”

  Everyone was focused on me, and Adam crouched down be
side me to look at the map himself, already catching onto my meaning. “They want the God of Knowledge? How would they even know where to look?”

  “NIX has been piecing together information about Estreyer since the beginning,” Blaine said.

  “Or . . .” a horrible thought filled my head. “Somehow, they got the information from me, or one of us.”

  “I did not say anything,” he said.

  “I didn’t mean by betrayal. What if they . . . have mind readers, or something? I mean, would that be such a crazy Skill?”

  Torliam shook his head. “Skills such as that would not be gained from the lesser gods. At most, their Thinkers have extrapolated information based on data.”

  “However, this might have indeed been incited by you, Eve,” Blaine said. “You were able to gain power by going directly after a god, and then used that against them. They would obviously wish to level the playing field, or at least make up in some small way for the great loss they have incurred from our escape.”

  Never mind that, I couldn’t allow them to ruin my chances of getting aid from the God of Knowledge. “We need to follow them,” I said aloud, my eyes focused on the vague area of the map where the god resided.

  “Are you crazy?” Adam looked at me like I was.

  I frowned at Adam. “There’s no way I can just let this happen without having any idea what’s going.”

  “It could be dangerous, Eve! Why can’t you just stay safely away? I know you have this burning need to be in the middle of things, but—”

  “I’m dying. As far as I know, the God of Knowledge is probably the only one who can help me. I can’t just let another team of Players go after something so vital, completely unsupervised! And don’t worry, I’m not going to drag the whole team into it. Just me, and . . .” I looked around at them, judging their suitability for this mission. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t put them in needless danger by rushing into an unknown, potentially dangerous situation like I had when China was killed. “And Torliam.”