Children of the Bloodlands

by S. M. Beiko

  “We’re so glad to see you’re all right,” Zhou was saying.

  The elderly man with the cane grimaced. “That’s a descriptor I’d use lightly, Commander.”

  “I was sorry to hear about your compound,” he replied, turning to the woman with the head wrap. “Madame Fante.” Zhou inclined his head. “You were able to get the trainees and acolytes to safety?”

  The woman nodded gravely. “Yes. It does not seem the intention of the attack was loss of life this time. Though we suffered it regardless.” She lowered her voice as her eyes flicked to the crowd on the dock. “Mala is dead. The attack was a distraction to remove Roan Harken. When Mala tried to bring her back, Seela . . . it took her. We do not know where, or to what end.”

  Barton felt a knife in his chest. He couldn’t breathe. He and Kita exchanged a glance, and she touched his arm.

  Commander Zhou barely nodded. “I see.” What could it possibly mean now, if this Seela had both the Emerald and the Opal? And what would happen to Roan . . . ?

  A sharp-faced woman in hijab stepped forward — one of the Owl Council members. “Please, Commander,” she said, “you told us over your message that you have been watching the crash site of our Paramount. Have you . . . ?”

  Zhou’s momentary stricken look flashed back to the composure of a seasoned soldier. “Yes, ma’am, we have been monitoring it. And just as we got word of your arrival, we believe that the landscape there has changed. We picked up seismic activity over the site. We are about to dispatch a team now —”

  “We will accompany you.” The woman nodded, then checked behind her for the approval of the others.

  Zhou balked. “But surely you must be exhausted after your journey?” Barton calculated it in his head: from Busan to Magadan had been at least twenty hours in the air, not to mention the overland travel to get to this camp. The Foxes had travelled even farther.

  “He is our Paramount,” said a rake of a man at the woman’s side. “And he bears our stone. We must aide both.”

  Zhou nodded again. “Understood.”

  “Me as well,” the icy-eyed man put forward. “I want to help. I was there with Mala’s party when . . .” but he didn’t finish. “I need to help.”

  “As you say, Master Reinhardt.”

  “Jacob.” The woman with the head wrap, Akilah Fante, came towards Reinhardt with a grim look. “Be careful.”

  He just dipped his head, and she took the elderly man to the side, most likely to find rest for the both of them.

  Commander Zhou turned crisply to a group of Rabbits, speaking into a device at his ear. Kita seemed to be buzzing beside Barton, leg jiggling. “Here we go,” she said. Barton could see the sun rising higher just outside the loading dock as they started putting the trucks together with whatever supplies and tech they’d need.

  Here we go indeed . . . But Barton didn’t know if he was ready, let alone what would be waiting for them out there. And if they stood a chance against it.

  ~

  Eli slept but dreamt of nothing.

  Darkness. Peaceful and devoid of thought. Of the hundred-fold voices. Of the intruding thoughts of those around him that he fought to keep out each difficult day he’d lived.

  Of memory, precious or poisonous.

  It was as dark inside the tree as in his mind, but something tugged at the edge of that dark, at the barest corner, trying to peel it back.

  He heard a rustle.

  Opening his eyes, Eli peered out for what he assumed was the last time, watching the grove of the dead. The rustling he’d heard was the wings of moths, gathering and fluttering from one tree to the next.

  He couldn’t hear Solomon’s mind any longer when he cast for it. There would be no turning his head inside this cage, but the tree that had once been the man he’d not yet called father was within eyesight.

  And so was the great winged creature beside it.

  The Moth Queen turned to Eli with the slight grace her great triangular wings afforded. She came towards him on legs he couldn’t quite see, many hands folded before her arching thorax in patient supplication.

  Eli’s mouth was blocked, still full of the tree’s dark matter, seeding his body and separating him from it breath by breath. He knew this confrontation would not have the need for words, anyway. He opened his mind as if it were a closed fist, fingers stiff as claws.

  So you’ve come for me at last. He cast the thought out, a weak tendril, and he saw Mother Death bow her head.

  “There are many here who need my tending.” Her fathomless black eyes flashed. “But you are not one of them.” Her voice was harsh in his mind — nails across slate, yet even that was more comforting than the silence.

  He glanced at the tree that bore Solomon. For him?

  The Moth Queen did not turn. “Soon.”

  It’s only a matter of time. For the both of us.

  The Moth Queen came closer to Eli, leaning her head back to take in the full height of his tree. Her thorax stretched and Eli swore he heard a humming between every chinking vertebrae, her entire carapace calloused with age like armour. “You are different now than when last I saw you,” she said, “for I have been checking in on you for you a very long time.”

  Eli didn’t directly respond. He thought of the beach, of the little cottage. Of the caer of stone, when he had last seen the Moth Queen come for his mother — and as quickly go.

  Different, well. Eli might have been dying, but he couldn’t help himself. I wasn’t a tree back then.

  Death does not laugh, but the corner of her puckered mouth lifted. “The tree is cunning. It is trying to remove the stone from you because its master was too weak to. And it is succeeding, because you are letting it.” Eli felt her pointed hand, the pressure of it, touching the Moonstone at his breast. “The stones are fickle things. Mortals seek them for power. The stones perceive this and seek mortals to do their bidding. Ancient trusted the stones to this world, and it seems I have been made custodian of the consequences that trust wrought. Always carrying away the innocent who perish in the wake of the conflict the stones continue to wreck.”

  In his rare moments of waking, all Eli had were his regrets. To remember, vividly, the things he’d done in the service of the Moonstone. In the service of the Narrative, and the things he once thought he wanted. Believed in.

  Can you take it from me before the tree does? he asked. Pleaded.

  Her great wings shivered. “I can only take you from the stone. And it is not yet your time.”

  But he was so tired. He had forced himself to live, to carry on. Maybe that was just the stone itself trying to keep connected to a life. Eli’s life. He had wanted to survive. But now . . .

  I wish to be free.

  The Queen bent her head again, considering him. “That will be up to you. And her.”

  Her?

  The Moth Queen’s needle-pointed digits ran over the bark that held Eli in its stifling embrace. Eli felt it trying to shy away from her, could feel its coils gripping harder to him, possessive. It was getting tougher to breathe without focusing.

  The Moth Queen shut her many eyes. “Help is coming. It is up to you to take it. And to give it back in kind. There is a light in you now, when before there was only darkness. It is faint, but it deserves to be in this world a little while longer. The same light struggles in the heart of another, so much like you. Her light will diminish. The Fox child will need you before the last. Only you can free each other.”

  Roan. He’d never considered Roan Harken anything like him. She was brash and sarcastic and could never survive on her own. Maybe her stone, the Dragon Opal, really had reached out to him in the dark. So it hadn’t been a dream, after all.

  The vision we shared. The crack and the sea —

  This time the Moth Queen said nothing, gave nothing, just stood still as if she was carved from the
earth. Her flickering moth cabal flocked to her and settled like a cloak. “When the time is right, I will come for you. I am the only certainty.”

  With the last whispered word in Eli’s mind, suddenly she was not there at all, may never have been, and the moths faded into the grey.

  Then Eli heard a sound he never thought he would again: engines in the distance. Human voices calling to one another through the mist.

  But Eli never made out what they were saying, because the tree could hear them, too, and it had worked too hard to fail now. So it squeezed with everything it had, and Eli let go.

  ~

  The group had spread out, each team leader carrying a handheld seismometer.

  “There!” Kita cried, and Barton and the others clamoured close. “A slight one this time. I could feel it before the monitor. But it is coming from here.”

  Barton looked up to the way in front of them. The mists were still shifting at their feet, the only sound the creaking of the skeletal trees as the barest wind moved through them.

  No one seemed very inspired to move forward, even as Commander Zhou’s team drew back from their own reconnaissance.

  “Do you recognize any of them?” he asked Barton.

  Barton pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. He took a step gingerly, then another, the ground hard beneath him and giving nothing away. He forced himself to look, although it was painful, eyes trying to make sense of the gnarled knots and thick bark, trying to find Eli in them. Hadn’t this been a game he played when he was a kid, that all kids played? Find the face — in trees, in buildings. When played at night it was even more thrilling, letting your imagination conjure demons in your own backyard. But this was in full daylight, and it was no less chilling, because the longer he looked, the clearer the faces pressed to the surface. Help me, they seemed to say. Please, gods, just let me die.

  “Over here!” someone shouted. Barton jumped, staggered away from a trunk he’d leaned into to get a closer look. He spun, inelegant on his blades, and went to find the voice.

  One of the Owl Council members was flanked by the other three, and Barton’s team closed in on her. She was standing before an enormous tree, its branches spread in twin forks over it. Like bone wings.

  “This is him,” she said quietly. “This is Eli Rathgar.”

  Barton didn’t need to get any closer to know it. Shining in a black knot that looked like a tumour was a white stone, flecks of gold shimmering along its surface, though faded in the gloam.

  “It may be him,” said the lanky Owl beside her, “but I cannot hear his thoughts. They’re . . . they’re silent.”

  Barton searched the group of Rabbits, looking for the commander. “But what does that mean?”

  The Owl woman in hijab who had called them all here served him with a withering look.

  “Can’t we free them somehow?” This time it was Kita.

  Nearby, the commander took a chance, laying his gloved hand over the bark of the demonic tree nearest him. He shut his eyes. “We are connected to all things of the Earth. But these are beyond us. They’re not natural. I can feel something in them, but . . .” He looked up to the Owl woman.

  She nodded. “The trees themselves are giving off thoughts. A single thought, as a parasite might. Total takeover.” She swept the grove with another pitying expression. “These people were encased in these things like tombs. The thoughts of most of these victims are either silent or about to be.” She looked back to the tree that held Eli. “I’m afraid we are too late.”

  But Barton wasn’t about to accept that or stay silent on the matter. “No,” he said, “that can’t be it. There has to be a way!”

  This time, the Fox Conclave member, Reinhardt, came forward. “I’m sorry, lad.” He bowed his head to the stricken Owl Council members. “At least you can perhaps recover the stone.”

  That made Barton stiffen with shock. What about Eli? Didn’t his life matter in all of this?

  “That stone is not for you,” said a voice behind them, and the crowd turned as one.

  A boy with a mat of greasy dark hair stood in the grove. His skin was flocked with the black marks of the plague that the Denizens Barton had talked to seemed all too certain was as unnatural as the trees around them.

  “Stand back,” Commander Zhou ordered the group. “Don’t let him touch you.”

  Kita frowned, speaking through her teeth. “I thought the Cinder Plague didn’t affect Denizens.”

  “Look around you,” Reinhardt said dryly. “Every tree in this grove was a Denizen once.”

  The boy surveyed them from hollow black eyes ringed with pulsing red. “That stone belongs to my father, Seela.” He straightened his spine, like he was completely resolved. “Soon it will be ready, and he will take it, as he took the first one. And when he smashes it, smashes them all, we will all be his children. Children of the Bloodlands.”

  Kita seemed to be humming with fury. So did the other Rabbits around Barton; he could feel it in the ground beneath them. They had gathered in this remote place to be of help in this time of crisis, but Barton hadn’t realized until now how deeply the Family mourned their lost Paramount. They wanted revenge.

  “There’s just one of you, little wretch!” Kita lunged, too fast for Barton to stop her.

  She stomped and the ground surged, all the rocks in the radius of her boot separating from the earth and raining down on the boy. He was impossibly fast, weaving between them as if he knew exactly where they’d fall, but other Rabbits went into play, lifting their hands and trying to bury the boy as he dashed out of sight, deeper into the dark trees and the rising mist.

  The team rushed after him, Barton bringing up the rear.

  “Wait!” he called into the din, his blades devouring the distance as he raced after them, but he pulled himself up short. There were shouts, screams. The mist was a curtain; he couldn’t see a foot in front of him. The trees loomed large, and the grove seemed to thicken. The ground quaked as the Rabbits pulled power from the earth. Kita was right; it’d only been the one boy. How was he getting away?

  “Got you,” a disembodied voice sang. Barton whirled, but he was too late — the boy leapt out of the trees and caught him around the middle, holding tight to each wrist as he locked on. Barton staggered, tried to shake him off, but the boy was crackling hot, his skin going completely black and popping with bright cinders as he shivered and blackened and burned.

  “No!” Barton screamed, but the boy exploded, and Barton became just another gnarled addition to the brutal landscape.

  ~

  “Barton.”

  Everything seemed to squeeze tight. Every breath wasn’t enough. His glasses had been lost in the chase, but even with them, he knew he wouldn’t see anything in the deep darkness that awaited him when he opened his eyes.

  “Barton . . .” Someone was calling his name. He couldn’t hear it but felt it inside him, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t stretch his mouth open to answer.

  Help me, he pushed the thought out with everything he had.

  “I can’t help you now,” the voice replied. “Only you can. Remember the power you were given. Remember Heen’s gift. Remember, karagosh.”

  Phae? But how —

  “I can heal a lot of things,” she said — it was something she’d said back in the beginning, when they’d first met, “but there are some things you need to take care of yourself.”

  Something flickered in the dark, there and gone. Heen’s gift . . . Though he couldn’t see it before him, he did remember — the Warren. The sacred resting place of the Rabbits and the First Matriarch. The huge hare with ears made of branches, eyes keen and all-seeing. Merciful.

  He felt that snout on his outstretched hand again, felt a prickle climbing up his fingers, over his arms . . .

  His arms.

  The darkness in front of
him splintered, just a hair. The tree seemed to be gripping him tighter, but Barton shoved back. Felt his fists tightening, the veins becoming vines, becoming roots. His fingers twitched and they became branches themselves, splitting the bark from the inside.

  No! someone cried out. It hadn’t been Barton, or Phae, or Heen. It was the tree.

  The black split further, cracks like lightning. He pushed harder.

  “Yes,” Phae said, and he felt her smile against his mouth, just as he let out a guttural scream, and the tree shattered around him like broken shale.

  Barton woke to someone turning him, to a face swimming above him. A dark face, with long black hair, crackling into antlers. He cupped it. “Phae . . .”

  But Phae was gone as the passing wind took the mist, and it was Kita helping him to sit up. He snatched his hand back, jerking into full awareness. “What —”

  “It’s not possible.” There was a crowd of awestruck faces and mingling voices, and Commander Zhou broke through to help Barton back to his feet. “You’re . . .” He padded him down, incredulous. “You’re alive.”

  “Seems that way.” Barton coughed.

  “But how?” Reinhardt came closer, flanked by the Owl Council, but they froze in their tracks as they stared at Barton, who in turn was staring at his own hands.

  The roots that comprised his arms were writhing gently over one another, reknitting into his fingers, his hands.

  “Heen’s gift,” Barton said, wringing his hands to get the tingling out of them. Then he looked over the group, turned back the way he’d come when he’d chased the boy in here in the first place. “Take me back to Eli’s tree.”

  It wasn’t far. There was a tense excitement as the Rabbit teams gathered, Barton stepping forward alone. But the Owl Council members were still dubious.

  “We can no longer hear his thoughts,” the councilwoman repeated. “He is lost.”

  Barton hesitated, not sure if he should defer to her rank and experience, but he dismissed both as he let the vibrating sensation back into his tendons. “Then it won’t hurt to try, either way.”