Children of the Bloodlands

by S. M. Beiko

  I swerved, launching from the porch and heading for the fray that had been on the cusp of crushing Killian, who was crumpled to the ground and wheezing for air. I landed over him, brought my arm up, and smashed into the oncoming blow of the icy-eyed man I recognized from the Conclave.

  “Stand aside, child,” Jacob Reinhardt snarled, straining with his full body weight on me. “This man is a traitor to our Family. To Ancient itself.”

  “Yeah, well. Not like Ancient really cares either way right now.” I pushed my other arm behind me, felt for the hilt in my back pocket. He’d seen, but I was faster, and just as his opposing strike came down, I countered again with the flashing garnet blade, and he staggered and fell with the blow.

  I felt Killian at my back just as two of Mala’s guards recovered, heading back for us. They came down hard, and they were fast, better trained. We all shared at least the same kinetic thread of mania, along with the exhaustion of trekking all night with little rest or hope for it. I didn’t want to hurt them, felt myself fighting both their advances and the stone’s need to devour everything with its power. Just let me in, I felt it urge. Let me end this for you. No. We’d beat them back, we’d tire them out and try to outlast them. But I couldn’t —

  “Stop this now!” Mala cried over the din, and her fighters pulled back, bloodied and breathing raggedly. Killian stood behind me, and I heard the air rattling out of him, knew he was clutching his ribs. I rubbed my mouth and spat blood, but I didn’t break Mala’s glare.

  She had Ruo in her arms, her forearm throttled around the old woman’s char-coloured throat. Ruo bucked, gasping and shying away from the flame pressed dangerously close to her face.

  I let the garnet blade clatter to the ground. “No,” I heard myself say. “Fine. I’ll go with you. Don’t hurt her. Please.” The stone was no longer hot in my breast. It was ice cold with dread. For a second I imagined Cecelia was standing near me, her face wide with the same panic. The stone was silent.

  Mala shook her head, but it was her low laugh that took me off guard. “Just like her. Heroic to a fault.”

  Rough arms seized me, shoving me to my knees. With the grunting and thrashing I heard behind me, I knew they’d grabbed hold of Killian, too.

  Mala’s knowing smile widened. “Perhaps it’s best we didn’t get to teaching you how to control the Opal after all. Now you’ll come quietly. But you need to see, Roan. To see what your need for justice and your altruistic pity nearly cost you. Cost this Family.”

  Mala threw Ruo to the ground, and she was still an old woman, fragile and vulnerable and a clattering body of bones. I struggled against the hands holding me back, but no matter what I did, I was Roan Harken Nobody from Winnipeg again. I couldn’t call the fire to me.

  “Stop it!” I screamed. “Leave her alone!”

  Mala stood over Ruo, and in the moonlight I saw Ruo’s skin turning blacker, the coal-glow guttering. She raised her heavy head and looked right at me.

  She smiled. Nodded. “Our granddaughter,” she said. “My last hope.” And just as Mala brought that flaming hand down on Ruo, the ground trembled.

  “Bloody hell?” said the man holding me, who seemed so sure of his victory only moments before.

  Then Ruo’s head cracked backward at a sickening angle, and from her mouth surged an impossibly huge spear of black, impaling Mala straight through the neck and up through her skull, killing her instantly.

  The rest happened too quickly to react: the ground crumbling, the Fox fighters slammed backward by rock and the very hill that seemed such sure footing before. Ruo blackened to ash and continued to grow outward, upward, arms now branches, feet now roots, spreading and creaking as the world fell down around us.

  I fell on my hands and rolled, saw Killian there, his hands moving in time with each concussive blast of rock sending his attackers back. Like he was conducting a symphony. Like he was churning the earth himself.

  He saw me. His mouth curled.

  No.

  Then I was in the air, too fast to stop myself as the rocks at the bottom of the hill rushed up to meet my head.

  ~

  The tree didn’t want him awake. It took so much more joy out of seeing him suffer, helpless, in these dreams. This time, Eli was walking barefoot along the frigid beach, pebbled with sea-smoothed stones as big as his hands. He looked down at them; they were his hands as he was now, not those of the young boy’s. He smoothed them over his face. It felt so real.

  When he dropped them back to his sides, his mother was there. The surf ebbed around their feet. She didn’t seem to either notice or mind. She had turned, pointing out to the wide and treacherous water, where the horizon line stretched to boundlessness, mist shrouding rocks that had killed and would kill ships full of unsuspecting men.

  But the sea and the sky were red. And at the edge of his mother’s quaking finger, Eli saw a maelstrom. A gap in the water, a crater. A fissure rocketed out from either end of it, and a thunderbolt like a sword came down from the bloody heavens, cleaving the earth.

  The sea ran into the crack, which grew wider with every pulse of his heart. Now Eli was standing on a cliff, overlooking the raging sea and the crack that split it in two. Not two feet away from Eli was Roan Harken.

  She was different than the last time he’d seen her. She seemed thinner, like she was wasting from the inside. Despite the apocalypse raging around them, her arms were folded comfortably as she stared down into the abyss.

  “Harken?”

  Her head whipped up, those mismatched eyes widening when she saw Eli. “Eli? What are you doing here? I thought you were missing?”

  He tilted his head. “What are you talking about? I’m not missing. I’m just trapped. In a godforsaken tree of all things, because Arthurian legend is making a comeback.”

  The devastation around them was mounting. And from the wound in the earth, massive shapes were climbing out, seeking purchase.

  “But this is my dream,” Roan insisted, hands now on her hips. “I must just be dreaming you here.”

  “No, this dream is mine. I’ve been having it —”

  “— for months now.”

  The divide in the earth was growing but, with the complete lack of concern of a dreamer, Eli ignored it, moved towards her. Reached out and grabbed her hand.

  It was warm. She stiffened and yanked it free.

  “This is real.” She clutched her hand to her chest, looking around with open terror. “What is this? Is this really happening now? Or is it just another vision from the past?”

  “Another?” He opened his mind to hers, to the awareness beyond the dream. She’d blocked him before, but now her mind contained too many images to sort. Invading memories. The stone had begun its work, showing her much more than she could possibly manage.

  “Wait . . .” Roan said, recognition dawning as the three massive shapes pulled themselves free of the gash they’d made in the world. “I have seen this before. Not like this. But on . . . a tapestry.” She held her arm up, moving it in a line just above and in front of her. The apocalypse transformed into a stone room, occupied with nothing but a massive embroidered version of the scene they’d just inhabited.

  “Where is this place?” Eli asked, noting the quiet room of weathered stone.

  “The Conclave of Fire. I was brought here by the Fox Family. Before . . . it was attacked. That thing, Seela. It came for me. It won’t stop.”

  A voice warm with warning filled the room: This is but one outcome ahead of us. The stones must not be brought together. They have the power to unmake the world.

  Eli looked down at Roan’s chest. She looked down at his. Both of them stood before one another, their stones exposed, flashing, painful.

  “Do you think our stones are talking to each other?” Roan asked. “Is that why we’re both here like this?”

  They were back on the be
ach. Roan stood behind Eli in the shallows, looking at his mother, who stood still on the rocky shore as if she were carved from it, as if she were waiting for the wind and the waves to take her back.

  “That’s my mother,” Eli said. But Roan hadn’t asked. “I’m trapped in a tree, and I’m trapped in the stone. It’s trying to tell me something. But just as I get close . . .”

  A quake to shake the dead.

  “Eli?”

  They were back on the edge of the dangerous cliff. Now the sea beneath them was gone, having poured itself out into the core of the world. Then the cliff itself cracked, separated, and between them shot a cosmic geyser, separating them, spearing through the stratosphere and out into space. The three black figures took hold of it and vanished into the fathomless sky, to hide amongst the stars as one.

  Roan teetered on the edge of the chasm, staring down deep into it.

  “Harken! Wait!”

  Eli threw himself through the geyser, wings beating through the blazing, boiled sea. He grabbed her outstretched arm just as she slipped over the edge and into the black, his arm with the chain-shaped scars matching hers reaching, and narrowly missing, and the world ruptured from the inside out.

  ~

  The sirens hooked into the seismograph system were still blaring even as the control room filled and Barton pushed his way through the chattering crowd that blocked every monitor.

  “What is it? What’s happening?” He found Kita at the head of the group, leaning over a tech’s shoulder to glimpse a screen of streaming code.

  “That.” She pointed to the readout above their heads, peaks and troughs leaping off the chart. She turned her megawatt grin onto Barton, arm coming around him and shaking him off balance. “Time to earn your stripes, soldier. We’re going into the field.”

  ~

  I woke to the sound of footsteps in the grass. To the feeling of the morning sun cutting through clouds. The sound of distant thunder. It made my brain burn.

  I couldn’t help groaning before I opened my eyes. I was moving, prone but jostled with each step. The footsteps weren’t mine. Someone was carrying me. We were in the woods, but there weren’t any birds. There wasn’t a sound.

  “Shh,” came a voice at my elbow, following close. A little girl, no more than nine, maybe Japanese. Her dark eyes were round with despair. She spoke English, a slight Scots accent there. “You’re with us now. You’re okay.”

  I was stiff with pain. My mouth was dry, throat clogged with nagging unease as I noticed the forest around me filling with those red eyes, with shadowy human shapes, following us at a distance. So many children, alert but not threatening. Not coming any nearer than the little girl had. She paced ahead.

  I looked up and saw Killian smiling down at me. “There now,” he said gently. “I’ve got ye.”

  I half shut my eyes against the pain. Something was wrong. Something key was missing. “Where . . .”

  “Ye know,” he said, in a quiet voice, “I always dreamed of carrying ye like this. When I found out ye were mine. ’Twas the only thing that got me through the long nights, trapped in a cell.” The smile faltered to a bleak expression of resolute faith. “Urka showed me a life we might have had. You, yer mother, and me.”

  No. Something . . . The thunder came nearer. The stone shivered at my breast, insistent, waking, trying to tell me. Something on Killian’s shoulder, underneath the torn cotton of his shirt, was glowing. I could barely keep my head up long enough before the Opal’s sensory invasion tore my attention away.

  I saw too much as it forced me into its cache of stored regrets: Ravenna, hair and cheeks flaming. A fight with words and broken promises. A man who had always been there for her, a friend, then a lover, now a traitor. A man she’d grown up with, who had learned everything he knew from her mother, the Paramount. They were taking him away for good, the scar on his face burning and fresh. Taking him away for an unspeakable act. But now he was just the reason for her to leave and start a new life, to drive another wedge between her and her mother. The new life across the sea, in a city with a river that held a demon. A river that would claim them all.

  But not me. No. The stone needed me.

  The whispers were a fury. Stonebreaker. Traitor.

  Father.

  Suddenly Killian stopped, and I toppled out of his arms into a heap on the ground.

  “It will all be clear soon,” he was saying, his voice odd, the easy humour gone, but the indulgent grin still there. “You defended me from them. You chose me. We chose each other. And now we can be the family we’ve both always needed.”

  The ground shook but not like the quakes that had torn a mountain apart. The vibrations of something huge coming closer, out of the dark of the trees. A mountain itself. A mountain with axes for hands, and six yellow eyes, and a furnace in its belly that burned with bruised flame.

  “Now we can both choose for ourselves,” Killian said, dragging me up by my collar and thrusting me towards Urka like I was nothing more than a weak lamb to be drowned.

  “Seela,” Urka said to Killian. “Child of my masters.”

  The demon bowed, and the dark flame lashed out to the Opal like a tongue, holding fast. The screaming hysterical whispers of the past Paramounts went out as I did, and I let the darkness win.

  Part III

  Fissure

  Black Water

  Phae had fallen into a miserable sleeping cycle of down for twenty minutes, up again for ten, trying desperately to cling to unconsciousness as the hours ticked by. The trailer was cold and uncomfortable, and there wasn’t any relief for her aching back or legs, even when Aivik had pulled into a truck stop three hours into the journey just to check on everyone. But that must have been at least six hours ago, surely? She didn’t bother checking the time on her phone screen. It would pass as quickly or not at all, no matter what it took. And Aivik planned to drive the entire way without stopping.

  But this was the longest stretch she’d slept now — a little over an hour, her wariness of the polar bears diminished as they, too, seemed just as exhausted as their human caretakers, curled up together in the corner of the trailer. And with this stretch of time came a window to practice, as Phae could generate light in her palm without going full antlers, the small ball of brightness illuminating Siku’s head as it came up with every bump in the road, every sound of a screeching car or truck careening by on the other side of the steel walls, as they clipped further down the impossibly long highway to Alberta. She gave up the light after a while, though; tried to rest. Tried to be grateful for the dark and the quiet. It meant they were still safe.

  Phae didn’t dream now. Not really. It was just dark behind her eyes, though they still moved beneath her eyelids, searching. It was a cold darkness — a harsh one that promised something was hiding the deeper she looked into it.

  “Phae . . .”

  Had that been Barton’s voice?

  Suddenly her eyes were open, and the only darkness she perceived was that of the trailer bouncing around them.

  Aunty didn’t seem to be having any problems sleeping, her snoring the only comforting noise above the rattling of crates and steel. But after checking a few times, it seemed Natti hadn’t even bothered shutting her eyes yet. Staying up for long stretches seemed to run in the family.

  “I can’t stand this,” Natti grumbled, and with a gentle ping Phae felt her hair climbing her neck, sparking up, and their corner of the trailer was bright.

  “What’s up?” Phae asked.

  “I’m not hurt. You can put the glowy ball away,” Natti said with a grin, but it fell just as quickly as it appeared. “It’s the waiting. The not knowing what’s going on. It’s killing me.” Natti looked over at the bears in Phae’s light. Maujaq was sleeping but fitfully, and Siku was scenting the air.

  “You must be patient, young Seal,” the bear rumbled. “The Empress will guide
us.”

  “Again with the damn Empress,” Natti barked back. “If she’s so mighty, why can’t she just come here herself?”

  The bear shook his head, unwilling to get into an argument. “Don’t allow your anger to cloud what you already know.”

  Phae frowned Natti. “What’s he mean?”

  Natti waved her hand at Siku, and the bear put his great head down again. “Ryk, the First Matriarch of the Seals. She can only dwell in the sea. So she can’t come on land, which is why she’s got the lackey twins here.” She folded her hands behind her head, staring at the trailer’s rattling ceiling. “All this stuff about the stones, the Matriarchs, this ‘coming doom.’ There has to be more to it. Apparently bringing all the Calamity Stones together is bad news. But for what? The end of the world?” Then she looked at Aunty. “And it doesn’t explain why Aunty is sick. Denizens can’t get the Cinder Plague. At least, that’s what we thought. So how can Aunty have it?”

  “The plague,” Siku said, face in his large paws, “did not come from Seela’s servants. It has always been here. They are simply able to call it up, to use it, and the more they do the worse it becomes. But this illness was not caused by them. It is deep in the earth. It is made manifest by the land’s own suffering, brought on by the people that call it home.”

  Phae felt her skin prickle. “You mean humans caused it? Or they made it?” Maybe it was a biological weapon, after all.

  The bear tilted his snout. “Humans carried it with them since they were created. The plague is the pain of the world, manifesting as destruction and death. For every hurt that humanity has heaped on this world, the plague has grown. This was the key role of Denizens. Once, all humanity used to carry the power of Ancient, to use as its steward in the world it so carefully made.” Siku seemed to turn inward, shutting his eyes. “But much has changed since then. Fewer Denizens now. Fewer who care to preserve this world over their own ambitions.”