Children of the Bloodlands

by S. M. Beiko

  “There’s no time for sleep,” he said, yanking me out of the chair by my shirt. “We need to come up with some kind of plan.”

  I kicked him in the shin with little force, but it was enough to make him buckle.

  “Says the guy who’s been sleeping for the past few hours.” But the truth was, I didn’t feel tired in the way that I should. I felt . . . separate. From my body, from its needs for rest or recuperation or healing. I was alert. I knew I wouldn’t sleep even if I tried, but I needed time to sort things out. I needed to at least pretend I was still human. “And anyway, I thought you were the one with the plan? You found me easily enough, got past Seela’s guard. You wouldn’t have gone to the trouble if you didn’t have an endgame.”

  Eli took a seat again on the edge of the sofa. “I can only improvise so far. It’s your turn now, because we’re running out of time.”

  He unbuttoned the front of his sweater.

  “Wh— Hey,” I warned, turning away and holding up a hand. “What are you —”

  Eli glanced at my face, then recoiled. “Did you . . . oh, get your mind out of the gutter, Harken, this isn’t a bodice-ripper!” He opened his sweater enough to show me the Moonstone, but his cheeks were definitely purpling, and he couldn’t look me in the eye. “I need you to tell me what’s going to happen to me next.”

  Saskia had been crumbling the biscuit into the carpet, sifting through the crumbs. “Just like the Emerald.”

  Eli threw another withering glance at Saskia. “Ignore her,” I told him as I sat down beside him, muttering, “bodice-ripper . . .”

  Where the stone met his skin was only slightly grey. Comparing it to the Opal, which I’d had for only a few months now, the Moonstone looked genuinely like it was a part of Eli. Like he’d been born with it. He didn’t carry it with the heavy submission I did, and its geode spread was much wider. It was a pale white thing with equal parts edge and curve, flecked with gold. In the middle of it was something like a black inky stain.

  I sighed. “I don’t know . . .” Our eyes met and I quickly looked away. “You hearing any voices? The Paramounts’ voices, I mean.”

  Eli inhaled as he mulled it over. “No. I’d managed to get them under some semblance of control and they were quieter. But . . . you’re right. They’re completely gone.” I didn’t want to revel in it, but his expression looked a bit relieved, despite what this meant.

  “Any other voices?” I pressed. “Like one villainous one, telling you . . .” There was a fist suddenly around my heart, squeezing, keeping me from going on.

  “No,” Eli confirmed. “Not yet, anyway. Nothing like the one you’ve got in you.”

  “How did —”

  “Just when I think you can’t possibly be that dense you confirm it,” Eli grunted, fastening his buttons again. “Have you really not felt it? Don’t you remember any of the visions over the last week?”

  Damn his patience was thin. I looked back to Saskia, who had now covered the carpet around her in crumbs, arranging them into symbols and shapes I didn’t want to interpret.

  I shrugged weakly. “They were dreams, I thought.”

  I felt the back of my neck prickle. I’d already forgotten there wasn’t much point in lying to a telepath. “Idiot,” he confirmed.

  “Twat,” I volleyed back. “All right, maybe not dreams. The Opal has been showing me so many things. Too many. Memories, flashes, projections into things that couldn’t have happened. Your memories. It’s all jumbled up. And yeah, just one too many crises. How did you expect me to sort out what’s real?”

  Eli moved farther away from me. He really didn’t do well with even the chance of human contact. “You’re untrained. I suppose I shouldn’t have expected an amateur to grasp the sheer magnitude of what these stones can do. Or undo.”

  “You’re the one who said we didn’t have time, so stop lecturing me on shit I already know.” I bristled. “So the stones are linked, somehow, and we were able to . . . I don’t know. Communicate. Which explains how you found me, unconscious or not.” I gripped the cushions, sorting through what I’d seen. “So I somehow . . . passed this infection on to you when we were linked, I guess? Or else Seela did. Or this ‘voice’ I keep hearing.”

  “A demon,” Eli said, and I looked up.

  “Maybe.” Whatever it was, it was overriding my ability to make my own calls. It was stronger than me. I lifted my arm — the skin was peeling back, burning beneath. Fire rose from the core of my palm, the flame as purple-dark as my flesh was becoming. “You’re right. I still don’t know what I’m doing. Or what’s going to happen. I’m sorry you’ve been dragged into it, too.”

  Eli grabbed my wrist so hard and so roughly that the fire guttered out. I looked down, saw that he’d rolled up his sleeve. His chain-shaped scar was clear as mine, which still somehow showed through my darkened skin. “Stop being so Canadian with the sorries and think.” He threw my hand aside. “Whatever is infecting us is secondary. Seela has to be stopped, and with us on the lam he’ll be coming sooner than later. We have what he wants.”

  That reminded me, and I suddenly thought of Corgan. “The Rabbit Paramount. I’ve seen him. Seen what Seela turned him into before taking the Emerald.” I glanced at Saskia. “So maybe that’s what’s at the end of this for both of us. Death, though, would probably be preferable.”

  “I wouldn’t have come all this way and carried your sorry hide here if I was looking for either of us to die.” Eli stood, rubbing his hands in thought. “We aren’t meant to die. Not yet.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “The Moth Queen paid me a visit,” he grumbled. “I tried to tell you — or your subconscious — that. Not a lot sticks with that unfortunate lemming brain of yours.” He bent down to turn the electric heater up, but I felt nothing. Temperature, or even my comfort, seemed to matter less and less. “At any rate. She said that . . . ugh . . .”

  He stretched, hands on the small of his back, face contorted in disgust.

  “Out with it,” I snapped.

  “She said that we have to free each other. Whatever that means. Saying it out loud sounds even more saccharine than the thought of it . . .” He sighed. “No specifics, though. But I learned long ago to trust Death when she gives you a get-out-of-jail-free card, and to figure the rest out later. I’m sure you know what I mean.”

  I opened my mouth to say something smart, but I thought better of it. “Why is the Denizen auto-reply always some goddamn riddle?”

  Eli snorted. I couldn’t help it; I felt proud that he was amused. “The gods like to see us squirm. More entertaining for them.”

  “You’re beginning to sound like my fa—”

  I choked on the word, but Eli perked, and despite trying to freeze him out of my thoughts, he snatched it from me and turned slowly to face me.

  “Seela,” he said slowly, “is your —”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I cut him off. “Anyway, it doesn’t —”

  His face was a gallery of fury. “That’s why you didn’t want me to intervene. You wanted to save the bastard.” Now his laugh was really something else. “Unbelievable.”

  “And what if it had been your father? Your mother?” I was on my feet, in his face despite him being a head taller. “No matter what either of them did, and you saw the chance to bring them back, would you have killed them?”

  “Then maybe there is hope,” Saskia said from the floor. We turned as one to look at her, and from this angle we could see she’d smeared biscuit into the carpet into the shape of three rings.

  Eli looked back at me, almost . . . softened. “I don’t know if there is any coming back from this, Harken.” He was tired again, the words losing all their bite.

  I felt the corner of my eyes prickle, but I moved away from him to the unlikely cinder kid we’d saved. “What are you talking about, Saskia?”r />
  She raised a bony finger, dark eyes wide. “Your stones. They’re what’s killing you. Why can’t you just take the stones off, like Killian did with the Emerald?”

  In all of this I’d forgotten Saskia wasn’t a Denizen. Lucky her. And it’d been a hell of a — week? Month? — for a crash course in a lot of history and lore and their consequences for me, but at least I had the answer. “We can’t remove them,” I said with a sigh. “We’re stuck with them. Unless we die.”

  “That’s not true.” Eli’s hand was up, finger in the air like he was testing the wind direction in the stuffy room.

  I frowned. “That’s not what the Conclave —”

  “You have a brain in there somewhere, Harken, otherwise I’d just be reading empty air.” Eli’s mouth twitched into something that may have been a grin. “There’s one person we both know who managed to separate herself from her stone. And go on living.”

  Another four bad names jockeyed for priority on my tongue, but I bit them back as it dawned on me. “Cecelia.” My eyes dropped to the floor as I tried to compose myself. “It’s her memories I’ve been seeing in the stone. I thought she was . . . guiding me. But she’s not the person I thought she was.”

  “Oh, who cares.” My head snapped up at Eli, appalled but not surprised by his complete lack of tact. “Whatever she was, she’s left the answer behind, at least. Because somewhere in there —” he’d come closer, pointing at the space above my chest where the Opal was, and realizing it was probably inappropriate in a vastly different context, his finger dropped. “Somewhere in there is the way that she did it.”

  “But it took her fourteen years, Eli. She went looking for the way, and by the time she got back up, I was nearly fed to Zabor and my mother, whom she was trying to save, was long dead.”

  Eli grabbed my sleeve and hauled me out of the living room. “Then we’ll have to do better.”

  The Cost of Freedom

  They’d left the Abyss behind. The bottom of the ocean was an Abyss unto itself, in that way. It was hard to tell where one ended and the other began in this dark and infinite place. Natti had spent days walking across it at Aunty’s side — but not fully Aunty, entirely. Ryk. Some aspect of her.

  “Why did you do it?” she’d asked at first, still trying to deal with Phae’s absence, hoping that she could handle her own mission. Natti wished she could be there to help her but also here at the same time.

  Aunty shrugged. The Sapphire gleamed so bright between her eyes, eyes that knew what she needed before Natti did. “You are young. There is enough fight to go around for everyone. You’ll need your humanity by the end of it.”

  Back at the glacial bay, Natti had parted with her mother with a tense hug, still full of questions.

  “I have to stay here as a guide for those who cannot fight,” she said. “My duty was to the Sapphire. And it is still to the Empress. I’ll see you again after this. I promise.”

  Natti frowned. “Better not make promises you can’t keep.” But she knew what her mother really meant. Whatever happened, in whatever plane or realm their souls went, they could find one another in the end. And things seemed keen on ending soon.

  Here at the bottom of the sea, there were cracks slowly spreading over the sea floor, splintering trenches in the rock. Dark places, dark mouths, where darker things could emerge at any time. Nowhere was safe.

  The world is in pain. The depths weren’t all beautiful dark blue expanses — there was garbage suspended around them the further they travelled through the world’s oceans. They hitched to a current to spell them away from a terrain as devastated as the tar sands miles behind them now.

  As they travelled, they encountered Seals from the world over. Natti lost her orientation somewhere past the Bering Sea. With Ryk’s influence they could move from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian with a whisper, gathering their forces. The islanders from Polynesia, the Maori from New Zealand. Natti had spent her life feeling landlocked and like she and Aivik were the only Seals. Now they were surrounded. And as their numbers grew, a slight hope swelled.

  “The Empress is with us,” Maujaq had said, but as they travelled, as the sea life seemed to be swimming ever faster to escape an incoming tide of shadow, Natti didn’t know if it could be enough.

  The current buoyed them closer to that horizon, and Natti thought of Phae.

  ~

  “Tell us what you know of the Quartz.”

  They had walked round the mountain so many times now that Phae could recognize its varied landmarks and details. And they’d done these circuits in contemplative silence, all the while Phae pinged to Barton that she was okay, while he pinged back that he wasn’t, that the world wasn’t. But she couldn’t rush this conversation, and when Fia spoke after such a long quiet, the words rang in her skull, and Phae didn’t know how to answer.

  “While you think,” said the antelope, “let us tell you something else. Denizens are divided into Families. But the Matriarchs are a part of a family of our own. We love our sisters, however different we may be. We had our own clashes and conflicts before the humans came, but we never dreamed that we would fade as we have, especially from each other. If we could speak to our sisters again we would, but it is not to be. We cannot be anywhere near them. It is too painful.”

  Phae just nodded. “It’s the same in most families, I think.”

  The woman’s face was twisted in a grin. “It is painful because we have failed even our sisters. We brought the darklings into being for balance between creation and destruction. Now the scale has tipped to that dark end, and we feel it is a just reward for humans’ damage to the world for which our sisters sacrificed so much.”

  Phae didn’t bother arguing with that circular logic since, after all, it was Fia who had put the darklings into the universe in the first place.

  “Each sister represents part of Ancient’s body,” said the man, and though his eyes seemed full of longing, he sounded calm reciting this knowledge. “Deon and Ryk are Ancient’s hands, the left and right, two forces using their great powers to fight and defend. Phyr is Ancient’s great fathomless mind that never sleeps. Heen is Ancient’s womb and legs, and we are Ancient’s heart. Spirit. Soul.” The comfort fled when he was finished. “We are all parts of a whole. A whole that will not stir, not matter how much we try to shake Ancient awake. The Quartz was entrusted to us when Ancient fell silent. It is the bell that will awaken Ancient. It is the key to the Brilliant Dark.”

  Phae stopped. Fia went on walking, but when they noticed she wasn’t following, they turned.

  “That name,” Phae said, clutching her forearms. “The Brilliant Dark. What does it mean?”

  They stood at the base of the mountain, staring up at it, then Fia beckoned. “The Brilliant Dark is the edge of all things. The last realm where Ancient sleeps. Only we can open the way there. Only Ancient can stop our dark children.”

  There seemed to be a double meaning in every word the god had spoken. Surely they were speaking about the darklings. Surely they were pointing to a way to stop all of this mad destruction before it started. Phae noticed a twitch at the corner of the antelope’s mouth. Or were they?

  “And only the Quartz can open this door?” she asked, ignoring her mounting doubt.

  “Come,” they said. “We will show you our pain. What is to come. Because it is not your fate that will determine this, but hers.”

  Fia climbed. Phae only hesitated a moment longer before following. Hers. She knew, without asking, that Fia had meant Roan.

  ~

  “Couldn’t we have waited till the rain let up?”

  I don’t know why I was complaining. The rain plastered my hair to my face, but I was numb to it — the damp I should’ve felt, the bone chill. Even the refreshment the rain promised, considering I couldn’t remember the last time I’d showered. But nothing seemed able to penetrate the dark shell I was g
rowing, inch by inch.

  It was tough to see for the mist and the whipping wind, and I didn’t like us being out in the open, despite Eli’s claims that we were hidden behind some invisible brain force field he and the other Owls on the island were putting up.

  “The rain lets up for three days in August, thereabouts. In Scotland that’s called ‘summer.’ Get used to it.” We’d elected to walk from the town, called Uig, up the highway that curved high along the seashore. I wasn’t about to let Eli take me back up under those wings — I needed a break, however minor, from the proximity. “Besides, aren’t you from a place that’s colder than Mars? It’s just up here.”

  “Owls,” I muttered, “can’t have a summoning chamber indoors like civilized people.”

  “Don’t get me started on you Foxes with your claustrophobic burrow holes.”

  Up the road rose hills like the cone spires of a Seussian sandcastle, dusted in grass in the fading daylight. But I had to admit, the wind up here was something fierce and perfect for Eli’s uses, probably.

  “It’s called the Fairy Glen,” Eli called over the din as we scaled the face of a hill, leading up to a giant crest of red sandy rock. “But don’t expect any of the wee folk to be interested in a sorry lot like us.”

  Saskia gripped my hand as I helped her up. “Do fairies really live here?” she asked.

  Eli rolled his eyes so hard he shut them. “No,” he snapped, “but I’m certain there are other things that could snatch you away and relieve us from babysitting duty.”

  “The only person who needs babysitting is you,” I spat back, watching as Saskia went running to the next hill, sending a group of errant sheep scattering. There certainly couldn’t be anything up here more fearsome than a cinder kid.

  “You should’ve left her behind,” Eli said. He didn’t mean at his croft.

  “Get over it already. She’s here. I couldn’t just leave her. If you were in my position you wouldn’t have, either, you feckless crankshaft.”