She should have been relieved, for him and for herself, but when her worry left, it only made room for her misery.
It was time to tell him goodbye forever. “We will meet again later,” he said, calm at first. “We’ll meet when they get bored looking for us. If they were Tacchies, we’d be able to meet in about three hours.”
“I’m sorry, Shanter. They have what are called standing searches. Each little clue, year over year, will be added to the file. They will never get bored. They will never stop.”
“I’ll fight them and chase them away.”
“And what about your family? That swarm of boys—they’ll be on the eternal front soon. When I think of Maggey’s serious face, and what they might do to her . . . Remember why we left your family. They are all targets. None of that has changed.”
“No, of course I understand that.” Shanter turned to the fire and she was grateful to escape his eyes. “Do you wish this, Caulie? I’d have to agree if you ordered me to.”
“It is my devout wish. And an order, for what it’s worth.”
“Ha. You can’t issue orders,” he said quietly. “You’re not really in the army.”
“Let me ask as a friend, then.”
He watched the fire. “If you’re all alone, how will I know if you’re in danger?”
Watching him made the conversation more difficult. The Pollution was fighting Shanter tooth and nail beneath the surface, and he veered between humor, irritation, and despair. Not that he was arguing with her—nothing so coordinated. He couldn’t achieve the momentum. As soon as he started one line of thought, it developed into something else before he could make a compelling point.
“That’s the point, Shanter.” She adjusted the strap of her satchel on her shoulder. “I’ll always be in danger. From the Gray House, from the army, from random Tacchies who are afraid of me. And who knows what the South might try if they figure out what happened. And I agree with everybody—all the problems go away if I disappear. But what if something else happens? What if a new wizard appears? I need to stay alive.”
“When you leave, Caulie, I shall hate the Haphans. I shall call them enemies and tear the empire down.”
She goggled at him. “That’s adorable, Shanter.”
“Is there really no chance we will ever meet again?”
She couldn’t answer like she knew she should, in a way that would stamp out all hope. She sighed. “I don’t know what will happen in the future.”
“Then farewell, princess. But who will carry you? Don’t tell me it’s that scrag, Prodon. Do you know he looks at you?”
She hugged him gently. With the slow, incomplete motions of a marionette, he patted her on the back with his new hand.
“No one will carry me,” she said. “I’m happy to walk.”
When she straightened to look at Shanter one last time, she was loath to move.
He drew twitchy under her steady gaze. “What now, Cauliflower Alexandrian?”
Caulie opened her mouth to croon her song. Her fingers tapped his chest above his heart. Shanter’s breath turned shallow.
She took away his Pollution.
When Shanter returned to himself moments later, full of compelling reasons to stay together and solid plans to make it work, she was gone.
Chapter 41
Shanter felt like a corpse, looked like a corpse, and moved like something dug up after a year in the ground. The music that animated him was unheard by all but him, and it never seemed to stop. Caulie’s last gift. He believed this would get easier with practice, but he doubted it would ever be effortless. Most of the time it seemed easier not to move at all, and to merely sit like one of those carvings of the trench pantheon somewhere the cold could reach him. He had always loved the cold, and now his broken body had stopped fighting it.
In terms of being a functional, useful soldier in service, he was now an utter loss. Between the hangings and the eviscerations, his value as a Tachba had dropped to toe level. Obviously Caulie would leave him behind; he’d only be another burden. But in any of that haze of death and undeath, had he ever told her that he loved her? He hoped not, because that would mean she had left while knowing full well. Better that he hadn’t told her, he decided, and yet he wished he had.
Love was something the Pollution could not say. The words would have been something that came just from him, free of all doubt—possibly the only thing free of doubt he could offer.
She was a silly, clumsy, unhappy woman. A brilliant woman.
It had taken all his wits to keep her distracted. Him lying on the bench with a wooden tongue, her always on the verge of remembering . . .
* * *
Shanter left the bunker several hours after Caulie, when darkness fell. He took the blood-fed’s spear from the corner so no one would try to talk to him. He’d travel as a mute, overlooked idiot for now. He packed as many supplies from the Haphan medic’s chest as he could carry. In a special square of soft leather, he rolled up all the utensils Caulie had used while operating on him. She would have cleaned them first, but he was nowhere near as fussy.
In slow silence, he walked to the panther’s corpse. It was an inert metal hulk too heavy to move, just like the disabled artillery piece next to Caulie’s bunker. The Haphans had filled the cockpit with cement, and the rest had been picked through by curious Tachba. As he hoped, the shoulder compartment containing the wizard’s head had been overlooked. Caulie had muttered about it while she’d operated on Shanter, and he’d steered her away from remembering ever since.
With some fumbling, he popped the compartment open using the manual overrides. As with sharpening spears and the panther’s cockpit controls, he didn’t know how he knew; he simply knew. It seemed reasonable that overrides would exist, and they were located right where they reasonably should have been.
The compartment billowed with frozen mist. The wizard’s head and the brains were still cold even days after losing power. After the briefest examination of the dangling brains, Shanter stuffed them into his sack.
He had every element. He had a body that would quickly heal. He had Haphan medicine and tools so he could safely operate upon himself. He had the wizard’s brains to study, and proof that it could all work if he was brave enough. It was all there if he wanted it, every element.
He could enlarge himself into something that could tear down the eternal front. It didn’t matter if he was constructed out of cadaver parts. It made no difference that he felt as brittle as a sheet of ice, weak as a brain bird, or clumsy as a Haphan. He could make himself powerful enough to change Grigory IV forever. He could free his people. He could kill the Pollution.
There was also that thing about taking revenge on the Haphan Empire for forcing Caulie into hiding. He felt he’d overpromised somewhat, but he’d spoken the words aloud so add it to the list. . .
Wait. What’s this?
Shanter stopped and glanced around. He hadn’t even left the mountain terrace. The guns were still in view.
She’d had a head start of hours.
“This is how far you got on your own?” Shanter said.
Caulie looked up from the bottom of a shell hole, where she had somehow mired herself to her thighs in the mud. Her face went through its carousel of expressions, as it did when she wasn’t sure how she felt. It was a relief just to see it again, all those possible futures for her next words. She was always so damn nettled and cute.
She landed on a contrite smile. “Really, what did you expect?”
When she raised her arms to him, his pulse hammered in his ears. He pulled her out of the muck. He tried to stay outwardly placid, lest he say something too revealing, or simply break his face smiling. Lest she think he was brain damaged and try to fix him again. Yet he couldn’t resist drawing her into an embrace, and her heart thundered against his frame.
She turned her face up. Her eyes shined with satisfaction—and triumph. Nothing shy about her now. She tilted her head, and there were her lips and there w
as the reckless kiss.
The End
Epilogue
From: Monograph on a New Trench Deity, by Lady Jephesandra Liu Tawarna
Not often do we witness the birth of a new icon in the pantheon of trench gods, and never have we been honored by a Haphan addition. Yet this is precisely what occurred during the spate of discipline problems on Front East last year, about which no clear narrative has yet emerged.
The “trench telegram” (gossip) of the indigenous soldiery quickly spread this god, entirely if inconsistently, across the eternal front. In Sheflis she is called Madam Medic; in Sessera she is Nurse Angry Revenge; and in the East she goes by either Doctor or simply Shambles. On Front West, she brings stomach wounds; on Front East, she is the harbinger of inexplicable deaths.
The trench stories agree on only two details: she wears a pristine Haphan medical uniform, and she crawls through artillery barrages like a giant insect, with extra arms where her legs should be. The following soldier’s narrative was captured in Ed-homse, the epicenter of these stories and the likely origin of this new deity:
It was a day of blood and fire up there. The gigantic metal predator, the one that prowled the mountain peaks, was gone. It had been stalking this cursed sector of the front and feasting as entire units fell mysteriously dead. Now the animal had been slain at the hand of a bizarre young woman who cast spells upon the thunder and ordered the overlords around.
To answer the next question, yes, she was a pretty girl. All girls are pretty; why do we still need to say it? She was also breathtakingly clumsy, and had to be carried for her own safety—but you should not find that endearing. She was a dangerous, spooky thing with perceptive eyes and an unwholesome joy in organizing the world to her taste. Tachba and Haphan alike found themselves doing what she wished, mere tools called to her hand.
So what happened on that morning of blood? What caused the gunfire and detonations at the artillery emplacements on the mountain? Simply this: the eternal front had tried to end this young woman’s domination. The gigantic metal monster stalking the front had been there for her all along. It attacked, but only managed to kill her helpie. Her anger made the metal monster explode.
The next part doesn’t stand up to the same rigorous scrutiny. It’s a work in progress, la.
The next part is this: rather than take revenge upon us all, the sorceress went insane.
She’s probably still up there now, up the mountain. Don’t go up there, or she’ll lure you to her bunker in the rock, the bunker with teeth carved around the door. It’s guarded by Tacchies who don’t behave properly. They throw severed arms and legs into the mouth and listen to the laughter from within. Don’t go up there, or you’ll become the next meal of the madness they are feeding.
About the Author
Walter Blaire writes science fiction stories about the Tachba, the Haphan Empire, and the interstellar CivGov in the Lines of Thunder universe. He is presently working on the third book in the series, which returns to Sessera and its precarious existence on planet Grigory IV. Find Walter online for updates and new releases.
In the past, Walter worked with computers and taught college courses in intelligence analysis. Now he writes as much as possible, and to keep in shape he thinks about exercising.
If you enjoyed reading What the Thunder Said, please leave a review. Reviews are the lifeblood of today’s working authors!
Acknowledgements
Lots of people helped get this novel into shape. Many thanks to Daniell Mattern for his willing eyes and precision insight, and to George Lewis for our conversations about brainpower in computing terms. Thanks to author Felix R. Savage for teaching me to like cauliflower, and sharing many ideas that improved this story (even though I couldn’t figure out how to use the best idea of all). Thanks to Fred Johnson for his piercing editorial review and a line edit to end all line edits. Thanks to Kate Lechler for her ongoing support, perspective, and a remarkable developmental edit that revealed the actual story in this story. Finally, thanks to my father Hermann Flaschka for kicking off the entire string of lies by describing the Cotard Delusion. If anything in this book sparkles, it’s because it’s surrounded by so much brilliance.
Oxford / 2017
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