by Rabia Gale
Who am…?
What…?
Hold on.
Lalita vey lalita vey…
Old routine and deep faith arrest the flow, slow the dissolution, gather, hold.
Brings myself to myself. Holds myself to my myself.
Not that there is much to me now. I’m a bundle of energy, a collection of particles, hiding inside a body in pain, a body frozen in mid-transformation.
I hear the skitter-click of spider legs, see half-unraveled tissue, taste the change of living matter into crackling energy.
I flee, not because I have a plan, but because something terrible is happening and I’m trapped in here with it. Already, the spiders have grabbed particles from me—or else I left some behind in the room, when Kato Vorsok called to me and I fled into him.
I’m going to be rather short if I ever return to myself.
Dry humor. Understatement. I stop at the familiar lemon taste of that thought.
This. This is me.
I have a personality.
What happens to Kato’s as he transforms? Does he lose himself in metal and energy, just as I lost myself in dissolution and darkness when I became—was made into—a cloak?
I run into what looks like a frenzied group-coupling of spiders. Several attach together to form another creature, something dark and biped. I dodge into arteries and stay in his blood as long as I can, but it is more light than liquid and does little to hide me. I leap on to nerves stretched fine and silver, up the spinal cord, up to the neck…
And right into alien sentries, bristling with weapons of undoing. Jagged stars, spiky caltrops, nets with cutting strands. These don’t belong here. They hold Kato Vorsok a prisoner in his body as much as they do me.
Disperse. I scatter into nervous points, my components so much less than the sum of the whole. Remember! I tell my fleeing particles. Remember…eilendi…Taurin…
Taurin.
My God.
Remember.
Surely even the smallest part of me will.
I am cut so small, spread so thin, that the sentries don’t notice me as I flow past them.
For one moment, I think the hard part is over.
Smack. Like a wave breaking onto shore, I hit a wall.
His mind, so tight that even the smallest part of me will not slip through.
But it is still a wall. And walls usually have doors. He’s not had time to brick himself up completely.
I coalesce and flow around until I find the one doorway in his wall.
They are the same bronze gates that lead into Tau Marai. The same gates that resisted Kato and a dozen Champions before him. The most impenetrable things he knows.
Gates such as these can only be opened from the inside.
“Kato Vorsok. I wish to talk to you.”
Nothing.
“You cannot give up and die. If you do, you take me with you.”
He doesn’t care.
“If you surrender now, your life will have meant nothing.” Even as I say it, I know he doesn’t care about his legacy. Love, and the memory of love, kept him living. Now even that has been taken from him. Who has he truly cared for, besides Sera? Everyone knew of Kato Vorsok, but who actually just plain knew him?
Scritches in the dark. His jailers come, hunting me. I could scatter and run, but I cannot keep circling his body forever, shedding pieces of myself. No, my stand is here at these gates.
“Kato Vorsok! Your spider guards are coming for me and they will shred me to pieces. If you want to stop Sera from doing this to herself, you need my help.”
The doors don’t open, but shift a fraction. I turn to mist, dodging mandibles, and slide through.
I gather myself together on the other side, and stop in surprise. The landscape of his mind is not Highwind nor the desert where the eilendi live nor the broken valley outside Tau Marai. Instead I am on the steppes, a world of wind-scrubbed rock and short sparse grasses. Sky rolls blue on every side, and the wind chills my ears. I shiver and tuck my hands into my wide sleeves.
Wait. I look at my hands—they are as I remember them, brown and small and normal. Nothing drags at my shoulders and arms, nothing flutters out behind me. My feet are encased in sandals.
I set off for the one living thing in this entire expanse—a figure in unbleached sheep’s wool tunic and dark pants.
Distance and time work differently in this mindscape. I walk a long time, but never get any nearer. And then I climb out of a hollow, and there he is. Not looking at me, but turned away, gazing across the steppe.
I join him and we both gaze at the empty land together. No animals, no birds, just the sighing of the wind.
I wait for him to speak. It is his head after all.
“I looked after sheep and goats here,” he says, finally, absently. I take that as permission to look at him. His face is sad and weary, but young, not as lined with bitterness and failure as what he shows to the world. “I had a hawk, too. I thought I would marry Nettina from the family that camped next to ours at the winter grounds. I thought I’d go to market in Banarkand and admire the clothes and flags one day. I never thought I’d leave the plains.”
“Life never goes the way we expect it to.”
Now he looks at me. The sharpness of his gaze makes me wish for my cloak-wings to shield myself with.
“What is it?” I ask.
“You’re young.” There is pity in his voice.
“So are you, here,” I point out. “Here we appear as we still think of ourselves. It is not truth, but our own perception. Here you are the Shepherd and I am the Novice. But that’s not who we are, anymore, are we?”
“No. Too much water has passed by for that.” Pain tightens his features, casts pallor over his face. “I wonder how Sera sees herself now.”
I wait.
“I failed her,” he says, finally. “I failed them all. I was not Taurin’s Champion, after all. I didn’t have it in me to sacrifice myself, in the end.”
“Perhaps you were saved, just for today.”
“Why? Sera will win. She has her army and the transformation. The gates will not stand against her.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” I say, softly.
“So, it was you. Up on the cliff that day.”
No need to ask which day. “Yes. It was me.” I betrayed you.
And I still stand by the choice.
“We had the chance to crush Tau Marai. Defeat all the golems, take on the Garguants. Tear down the gates and enter the city.” He says it all without emotion, like going down items on an inventory list. “She—” He pauses, swallows. “She said that Toro told her the Seeing was stronger than it had ever been. What did it show you, Weaver?”
I make myself hold his gaze, though I would rather look at his shoes, the ground, anywhere else. “I saw how the gates and the Garguants and the golems were connected, as if they were one thing, built to keep separate those within the city and those outside it.” I shake my head. “I didn’t trust myself to crack the gates open and let whatever was inside come out.”
“That’s what Taurin showed you.”
“That’s what I think he showed me,” I correct. “Another eilendi—your friend Toro for one—might have seen differently.”
He looks thoughtful rather than angry, but I sense he is keeping emotion at a distance, locked down. He knows about prisons.
“The golems,” he says, slowly, thinking out loud. “They came from holes in the cliffs all around the valley. From structures built on to the wall itself. Same with the Garguants. I never saw anything go in or out of the city. Not in the three months I laid siege to it. We saw no Masters, just the horde of golems.” His mouth twists.
“And how many of those did you destroy?”
“Dozens. Hundreds. It doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t it?” I toy with the sleeves of my robe, and somehow I know that this is a habit of mine, to keep my impatience at bay and let him reach his own conclusions.
> He frowns. “You think the guardians of the city were at the end of their resources?”
“Yes. I think you breached their last lines of defense. I went to the libraries, afterwards. To see what our histories said about the origins of Tau Marai.”
“It was built by the Dark Masters who withdrew into it after the time of Shivering.”
“Nothing I read indicated that they built it or went there willingly.”
“You think Tau Marai is their prison, and the golems their jailers.”
If I’m wrong… I nod.
His mouth hardens. “And Sera’s about to let them out.”
She cleanses my blood, the way she did back in Highwind, half a world and an eon of time away. She clears away Sera’s poison, and slowly I come back to consciousness.
I am outside, lying upon something hard. A razor slice of sky, intense with heat, glares down at me. I turn my head toward a rock wall and screw my watering eyes shut. I must’ve slept the night and half the day away.
“He’s awake. Lift him up. Let him see.”
Stone and sky spin and suddenly, I am upright. Cloth-wrapped iron bands lock my body in place. The valley of Tau Marai slashes deep into rock in front of me. The gates are bigger than I remember. They dominate the scene, locking in who knows what?
Then Sera is beside me, sheathed in metal, something shiny and sleek, unlike my plates of iron. Her armor is silvery-blue and fluid. It begs to be touched to see if it would offer resistance or not. Sigils float across it in lazy circles, and I remember them glowing in Flutter’s cloak.
Sera had always been interested in arcana. I should’ve recognized those symbols from her books.
She notices me looking and the corner of her mouth quirks up. She almost looks like the old Sera. The movement is the same, but her eyes no longer have that ironic playfulness. Instead, her amusement is secretive, almost sinister.
Or perhaps that is just my perception.
“I created a new alloy, just for this purpose.” She runs silver fingers over her bluish arm. The metal ripples, but smoothes out behind her fingertips. “Light, strong, easily shaped. Much better than being cobbled out of scrap metal parts.”
My voice comes out thick and raspy. “You don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know what it’s really like.”
“What it’s like is wonderful. I am strong. I will never be weak again.” She stretches her arms to the sky in exultant—and misplaced—joy.
“I felt that way, too, at first, if you remember.” Those half-remembered memories sit like acid in my stomach. “But you’ve never let the transformation progress all the way, have you? It’s not enough to have pretty armor, you know. It wants to change—”
She snaps her fingers and blades spring out from all over her, their sharp points at my eyes, my throat, my chest. “Enough. I will not be poisoned by your self-defeating talk again. It should have been me that first time. I had the will, the drive, and I knew it at the time. Though”—again she caresses her armor—“it was probably better to have waited for the upgrade.”
“So it was all about power for you, after all. All about you and your ambition and your greatness.”
For a moment, I think she’s going to attack me. Her armor roils all over her and I wonder if it will be whips or hooks or a blast of heat. But she controls herself and her armor smoothes itself over her body.
“No,” she says. “It’s about my people. Our people, preyed on by the golems. Every time we grew and spread, they came out and wiped out most of our fields and half our population. We never achieved the science and progress of Highwind because they destroyed every third generation. We could’ve been a great people, if not for them.”
“We can still be a great people.” I’m straining against my bonds in my urgency. “Destroy the golems and the Garguants, if you wish. But the gates must stand! They lock the Dark Masters in, not protect them. If you open the gates, you’ll let the horrors of the Shivering back into the world.”
She casts me a look of mingled dislike and contempt that twists my soul. “Still listening to that eilendi bitch, are you? That’s what she cried out to me while we melted her bones and ripped out her organs. She can’t face her own betrayal, nor you your failure, Kato.”
So. Sera had done that to Flutter, and enjoyed it, too. Parts of her soul are black and dead.
But so are mine, but I can taste hope on my lips. It doesn’t have to be this way. “You are angry, but then so was I. But what if she is right. What if Tau Marai is a prison for dark creatures we no longer have names for…”
“Then I will crush them, and we will no longer have to worry if Tau Marai is prison or stronghold.
“I loved you once.” Sera’s mouth crooks, her eyes soften. “I loved you when I married you and I loved you when we fled to Highwind. But you lost the will to fight. You were content to sink into obscurity and let our people live in fear and oppression. Nothing mattered to you anymore.”
“You’re wrong,” I say past the ache in my chest. “You mattered to me.”
Sera shakes her head. “You didn’t care for the things I cared about. The fire still burned in me, but it had been quenched in you. Our minds no longer met, and, in the end, neither did our hearts.”
“I hunted cloaks for you. I fought with Toro over your burial rites. I wrote the hardest letters I ever have to your family. Your heart might have changed, but mine did not.” I draw a deep breath. “Is it really too late for us, Sera?” I wish I can reach out and touch her.
“Stop it.” The disgust on her face strikes me like a blow. “You want to stop me, don’t you? Because you are afraid of victory. You’re afraid of things changing.”
She’s close to drugging me again. I shut my mouth.
“Watch, Kato,” she invites. “See how it’s done.” And with that she turns and strides away. Her hand brushes against my leg. She doesn’t notice, or care.
But I do.
Sera’s army is ragged and motley from a distance, certainly not the neat, disciplined squares of men that we had trained in earlier days. Yet each member of it is capable of inflicting far greater damage than a single soldier. Eerie men growl and pace off their nervous energy. Night walkers root themselves into the dry soil and stand still as trees. Cobble crunchers lounge and cloaks are pale patches against the ground, half-there and half-not.
Sera strides to the front, drawing my gaze. She is strong, confident. It bubbles out of her every springing step, every swing of her arms. Well I know that feeling of limitless power.
And of the fall that waits at the other end.
Sera throws up her arm, and her army advances. Deliberately she steps upon a line cut in the earth and filled with dirty chalk, then kicks at a boulder. She wants the golems to know that she is here.
They come.
Up here, from the vantage point, they aren’t so terrible—clockwork toys that have seen better days, slow-moving compared to the lupine bounding of the eerie men, the spreading mist of the mourning cloaks, the flashing movement of modified, earthbound wind swifts.
I can see right away that there aren’t as many golems as there were that last time. So perhaps Flutter is right, that they had spent themselves repelling my army. Guilt gnaws at me anew. I should’ve stayed to finish them off. No matter what Flutter says about the gates, I should’ve hunted the golems down in their caves, destroyed whatever process they use to replicate themselves, so they could never march upon us again.
The golems fall to the hybrids of Sera’s force, cut by the night walkers’ blades, electrocuted by the eerie men’s whips.
Movement near the gates. No, from the gates and all along the walls. Protrusions that might have been taken as embellishments move, uncurl, and push away from the vertical surfaces. They fall, plummeting several feet before their wings snap open and catch the updraft. They glide, beasts of silver and obsidian, part-bird, part-lion, part-reptile.
The Garguants are back.
Pressure builds in my
ears, behind my eyes. I feel them suck in the air, taking in so much that I am dizzy from the lack.
And then they exhale.
Even from up here, I cringe away from the droplets of acid brought in by a hot and dry wind, churned up by the Garguants’ flight.
Down in the valley, Sera’s creatures bear the brunt. Their cries are tiny, but no less shrill and pained. Even the mourning cloaks cannot dissipate fast enough.
And then the Garguants breathe again, and this time it’s the fire, setting aflame the acid, followed by a dose of toxic smoke.
Sera’s armor hisses all over her, covering her hair and face, then snaps out into wings at shoulders, back and hips. She’s outlined in blue light and heat shimmer.
She can fly.
My armor—my old scrap-metal armor—can’t do that.
Sera shoots up into the air like a Highwind firework. She turns into a speck I can barely follow. I strain against the bands, feel for my spiders.
Come on, Flutter! Where are you?
And then Sera’s back, this time above the Garguants. One of them turns and rolls onto its back. Its claws rake empty air. Sera’s inside its reach and she hits it like a catapult-flung stone. The tangle of Garguant and armored woman wheels across the sky. When they finally come apart, Sera zooms away and it’s the Garguant that crashes to the ground, squashing several eerie men. Its death throes take out again as many of them as died by its breath.
Sera flies for another, but they’re warier now, grouped and working together to deny her an opening. She shoots a beam at them, but it skitters over their armor and scatters in a spray of light. Garguants are hard to kill, even with the transformation to aid her.
And Sera is slower now, up in the air with nothing for her spiders—my spiders—to replenish her energy with. Bereft of the advantage of surprise, she barely misses a spray of acid. Would her super-alloy protect her if she were caught between all those Garguants? I don’t know, and I don’t want to find out.
A Garguant claw clips Sera’s wing. She tumbles in the air, nearly crashes to the ground. Her flight away is slow, zig-zagged.
