Churls offered her hand. Vedas took it, and climbed free. Though the aroma of freshly turned earth filled the air, he could still smell the sour stench of Fesuy’s excrement, the iron of the dead woman’s juices. The smell would linger, of course. It would follow him for a while until he managed to forget it.
Just as he had forgotten Julit Umeda and all the others?
He caught the priest’s eye and felt the first stirrings of resentment. How dare the man tell him to carry the body? How dare the man watch him work, only so that he could spout lies over the woman? She was dead, and the god had no interest in her soul.
People were nothing to Adrash. Adrash would make the whole world a tomb.
Have I forgotten who I am? Vedas asked himself.
Before the holy man could start talking, Vedas signaled to Berun to start filling the grave.
“It is custom to leave it open,” the priest began.
“Never mind your custom,” Vedas said. “Speak if you must, but speak plainly. Don’t insult this woman with your falsehoods. She wasn’t a member of your church.”
The priest regarded him for a long moment, and then put his right fist to his forehead and extended it to Vedas.
A blessing. A supplication for peace. Adrash be with you.
It was the wrong thing to do.
Vedas took a step forward, his fingers curling as resentment bloomed into anger—pure, righteous anger, hammering in his chest, behind his eyes, causing the world to tremble before him. Churls’s hand closed around his wrist, but he pulled it away. Another step and another, until he stood before the priest. Every nervous fiber of his being ached to send his fist forward, but he could not make himself do it.
The moment held for a second. Five seconds. Ten. His muscles screamed under the tension.
Will you accept this small gesture in your honor? the man had asked.
Sure, Vedas had told him.
“Vedas,” Churls said. “Vedas. What would be the point? The damage is done. She’s dead, and she won’t give a shit what this priest says.” Her voice became gentle. “Let it go.”
The tendons in Vedas’s neck stood taught. A frown deformed his features.
He spat at the priest’s foot and turned away.
Churls and Berun followed him to the road. They retrieved their packs and continued on. No one talked as the sun moved in a shallow arc on the horizon. The travelers they passed neither greeted nor questioned them.
Vedas’s hands shook. He washed them in every stream and river. For the first time in his memory, he felt truly unclean, as if his suit were a normal garment that needed to be removed and washed. He fought the urge to scratch, to pull the constricting fabric away from his skin.
‡
Though he was hundreds of miles away, high upon a mesa, he saw it happen. A massive woman rose from Lake Ten and stepped over Locborder Wall. Her tattooed thighs were as wide as the city of Ynon, which she crushed under her naked feet as if it were a folded paper toy. Mountains of muscle and fat jumped with each lumbering movement, shaking the water from her body. Droplets as large as lakes fell from her skirt to the earth, crushing hills and mountains, turning fields into mud flats.
Vedas ran from her across the flat top of the mesa, but not fast enough. It would never be fast enough, for she covered leagues with a single step, and his legs were heavy and slow. She would be upon him in no time at all. She roared his name, a bestial sound that threw him to the ground and threatened to rupture his eardrums. He rose and fell again. He started crawling. Over his shoulder he saw her head rise above the edge of the mesa.
So soon! She moved faster than he could ever have imagined. Her hand reached for him, and it eclipsed the sky.
“Vedas.”
The world faded. Flickered.
“Vedas.”
He woke. Two glowing blue coals stared down at him from a face composed of brass spheres. A hard hand shook him gently, companionably. A low, brassy chuckle.
“Berun,” Vedas said, relieved to be out of the dream. He rose on an elbow to peer past the constructed man’s crouched form, and located Churls. She lay close to the smoldering campfire, which was surprisingly far away. “What am I doing over here?”
The constructed man rocked back on his heels with a whisper of metal sliding against metal. “You crawled here. One minute you were sound asleep, the next you tensed. I readied myself, thinking of another cat attack or worse, but when you started crawling I knew that something else was happening. Then you flipped over, and it looked like you were going to start throwing punches. Were you dreaming?”
Vedas lay back. The road was solid beneath him. “Yes. About the dead woman.” A rumbling sound came from Berun’s chest: the sound of many spheres shifting position, rearranging themselves. “That Adrashi priest was wrong,” the constructed man said. “He made a connection between you and the woman when there was no connection at all. You had nothing to do with her death.” The rumbling stopped. “You’re a good man, but you’re not a whole man. You don’t know yourself.”
Too tired to protest, Vedas simply nodded.
“The Baleshuuk thief. Why did you save her?”
Vedas thought back, came up empty. “I don’t know. I just didn’t want her to die.”
“And the woman today? Why did her death affect you so?”
The muscles of Vedas’s jaw jumped as he bit down on his first response.
It was my fault. If I hadn’t agreed to Fesuy’s offer, she wouldn’t have died. He wondered for a moment if this was what he truly believed. Could a man be blamed for being in a certain place at a certain time? Adrash has simply put you here now to do this thing, the priest had told him.
“I don’t know,” Vedas said. “It was wrong. Evil.”
Berun nodded. “True. A man who does things like that deserves no sympathy. He has become worse than an animal.” The constructed man opened and closed his gigantic fists, and his eyes flared brighter. “True, I love fighting. I sometimes enjoy killing. Churls is a fighter, through and through. No doubt, we’ve both got our share of bloodlust. We’ve committed sins. But you see the difference, don’t you—between us and murderers?”
“Yes,” Vedas answered honestly.
“You think we should forgive ourselves our crimes, our mistakes?”
“Yes.”
Berun stood, a thousand joints sighing all at once. He stared down at Vedas.
“You should take your own advice.”
BERUN
THE 21st OF THE MONTH OF ROYALTY, 12499 MD
THE CITY OF SENT TO GRASS TRAIL, THE REPUBLIC OF KNOS MIN
Huge, sluggish fish swam in the stygian depths, their sinuous bodies only partially visible in the weak radiance cast by Berun’s eyes. An arm-sized fin waving. A black eyed, blunt-nosed head, needle-toothed maw slowly opening and closing. Dwarfing the constructed man, they swam in close but never touched him. He did not smell right, did not sound right. No beating of a heart, only the steady emanation of heat. Smaller fish darted before his face, attracted by the light and warmth, but these too were merely curious.
He had been here before. During the storm that drowned the Atavest, the heaving deck of the ship had catapulted him into the lake, where he immediately sank—for how long, he did not know. In his despair, he forgot to count. All sensation stopped during the fall, which seemed to last forever. And then the silt floor embraced him so gently that for a moment he did not realize the bottom had finally been reached.
Immediately, he had struggled upright in the soft mud and checked his map. Nothing. Knoori did not appear before his eyes. The weight of water prevented him from summoning the map. Lake Ten sunk to a far greater depth than the sea, he had heard, so far that the sun never reached its bottom. If this were true, the likelihood of reaching land any time soon was unlikely, and the island of Tan-Ten nearly impossible. Even if he knew the general direction, how could he walk in a straight line without points of reference?
Of course, such conjecture had b
een pointless. Long before he reached land, his body would shut down. Like all constructs, Berun’s cellular composition was largely elder, and required frequent exposure to sunlight. Unlike the physically weaker but more versatile hybrid animals, a construct possessed no digestive system, and thus could not subsist in the darkness for more than a few days. The full weight of this realization struck him, filled his being with dread so powerful that he no longer felt whole.
Unconnected to his component pieces, a mere collection of marbles, inert. Unsurprisingly, Berun was not happy to find himself back in this place. How had he arrived here? Where had he last been? He did not know the answer to either question. He watched the sluggish behemoth fish turn around him, recalling the dread, the absolute certainty of death. To be shut off forever: this was the thing Berun most feared. Some men believed in heaven, or at least a type of continuity, and Berun could see why. The body remained warm for a time after it died. It rotted, split apart and offered its contents to the soil, spurning new growth. But a construct was not a man. It went cold, and then became exactly as it was before life touched it.
If souls existed, they resided in flesh.
Berun threw his head back and roared the tone of a great brass cymbal. Dark water muffled the wordless cry, extinguished it only inches from the ringing cavern of his mouth as if it were nothing, had never existed—yet the fish jerked and dropped to the lake bottom around him, stunned or killed by the pressure of his voice. Small and large, they littered the ground at his feet. He took no joy in this. It had not been his desire. He had not acted with intention, only feeling.
The fish lay still, and it was only a short while before others came, curious, and began feeding, turning the water cloudy with blood and scales. Blind, Berun rocked back and forth as the immense, slick-skinned bodies pushed against him. Twice, a mouth closed around his arm, scraping its needle teeth over his spheres before spitting the limb out convulsively.
The feeling of dread increased.
Spheres knocked together in his stomach. A lonely drum roll, echoing into the endless night.
He did not bother to feel hope, for he had no reason to expect salvation a second time. He tried not to conjure the memory of being saved, but it shouldered its way forward: Light blooming in the distance, shifting closer and closer, growing in definition until it became the blazing form of a small girl. White from head to toe, but for eyes the color of light passing through shallow seawater. Her soft voice speaking indiscernible words, her hands urging him forward.
What had he felt? He did not entirely recall. He remembered the slow progress, slogging through knee-deep muck, staring so long at the girl’s light that it became his entire world. If he moved too quickly, a cloud of silt rose from his feet, obscuring her from him. Yes, at these moments he panicked, stumbled, fell into the muck. He learned to wait until the cloud cleared, allowing him to find her light again. Only then did he continue on. Eventually, his foot struck rock and the going became even more difficult. He fell into narrow crevices and mired his feet in loose sand, but still he followed the girl. He crawled until his head rose above the water.
It had been madness, yet it could not be rationalized away.
He had reached the island, after all.
Or had he? Doubt took root in his mind. Perhaps he had only dreamed of Tan-Ten, reunion with Churls and Vedas, Ynon and the Grass Trail. Maybe he had not stood on the shore of Uris Bay and looked through the shimmering glass dome at the island of Osa. Those traveling on the trail, even those few who possessed spyglasses and amplification spells, were not able to see that far. They asked him to describe the life that anchored itself to the clear wall. Filled with pride, he had done so. “I see huge vinetrees, crawling toward the sky. I see gigantic multicolored wyrms, perching on the tops of honeycombed nests.”
Devastating, to think he had only imagined these wondrous things. Even worse, to know he had never dreamed alone, that he had always been manipulated into sleep, coerced to take part in another’s vision.
Have I ever admired something for myself? he wondered. Am I just a dim reflection of my creator?
Berun roared again, and this time it was the word Father.
‡
The lake bottom shook. Dead fish slipped against one another, shuddering slowly into the muck like earthworms into soil. Berun made his feet large and flat to stay upright. Gradually the tremors subsided, and the bottom of the lake was smooth again, its dead buried.
A light bloomed in the distance before him, like it had when the girl appeared. It jumped closer and closer, moving from one position to another instantaneously. Berun felt the first faint stirring of hope, only for it to be extinguished as the source of light became obvious.
A pair of silver hands.
“Father,” Berun said, words now audible. “This is your dream?” Ortur Omali lifted a hand to his hood and removed it. Instinctively, Berun stepped back, nearly tripping on his oversized feet. The great mage no longer possessed a mouth, just a smooth patch of skin from nose to chin. His skull looked as though it had been crushed and reformed, or pulled like melted wax into the caricature of an elder. His eyes were large, liquid pools of amber in which two doubled irises swam.
This is no dream , Omali’s voice resounded in the spheres of Berun’s mind. There never was a dream. This is my place. An extension of my mind. A universe unto itself, folded inside you, enveloping the world. It is both here and not here, alive and not alive.
“That makes no sense, Father.”
Omali’s irises spun slowly. Indeed. But sense is hardly a requisite of existence. Strength and strength alone dictates success. Pure will sets the stars and the planets spinning.
Berun dismissed this claim as useless. He had no interest in cosmology or philosophy.
“Why have you brought me here?” he asked.
Omali rubbed his fingers together, producing a sound like singing bowls. You are here because you sought release. When you pleasure yourself, you become susceptible. He clapped his hands together and they tolled like bells. You have been bad, Berun. Very bad. You have kept your mind from me.
“You took control of my body.”
Omali’s eyes widened. This was a surprise, that I should treat you this way, my own creation? At what point did you begin to consider yourself an autonomous creature? You are not—nor have you ever been—your own man.
Indignation pressed Berun’s hands into fists. “And yet I’ve managed to keep you out for some time.”
Now the eyes narrowed. Truly. You have discovered that your physical form and my influence over your mind are related. This is a small inconvenience and a greater disappointment to me. In time I will overcome your resistance, but your character is not so easily mended. When I am animate again, you will submit to some adjustment.
Berun parsed this language. The possibility that his father existed without a body had never occurred to him, perhaps because he did not want to consider the implications. He had grown in his father’s absence, had he not? He had always half-believed himself capable of overcoming his father’s dream-specter, but what chance did he stand against the great mage in the flesh? Berun would be defeated, made into little more than a tool. A weapon.
It did not require a vivid imagination to picture the target. Vedas would die, and Churls would very likely die defending him.
The thought of being used to these ends caused a tightening of the spheres in Berun’s shoulders and chest—a slight but distinct darkening of his vision, a wavering of the figure before him. Berun raised his right arm, opened his fist, unsure of his intent.
Stop! Omali commanded, and the world snapped back into focus, crystallized on him like ice. You are not a man. You are my creature.
Berun resisted the compulsion to lower his arm. It felt as if a great weight had been attached to his wrist. “You have threatened my friends,” he said, though opening his mouth and forming words took a massive effort.
I have. Your black-suited friend endangers the ba
lance. Adrash’s eyes will soon be upon him. If allowed to live, he may very well throw the world into chaos. You do not see it yet, but you will. He must not fight at Danoor. He must not live.
Omali raised his silvered left hand and touched his index finger to Berun’s fist. As the mage lowered his arm, Berun was forced to lower his own. Omali pointed to the lake floor, which began bubbling. A lake of black tar, boiling, from which Vedas’s body surfaced.
The puppet—for it could not really be the Black Suit himself—opened its eyes and yellow light poured forth, washing out the scene around Berun.
‡
They stood on the mesa of blooming azure flowers where Berun had first recognized his father. At his feet, once again, a sleeping figure—and this time there could be no doubt as to its identity. Remembering the injury from his previous visit, Berun glanced at his right arm and found it whole.
A prediction that will not come to bear , Omali said. He stood beside Berun, face angled to the sky. You have disobeyed and disrespected your creator, but you will redeem yourself. You cannot be my sword of justice with a chipped blade.
“The cost of my freedom is a limb?”
Omali’s laughter rang in Berun’s mind. Freedom? Why, the word means nothing to you.
Berun regarded the body at his feet, its familiar lines. He had tried to see it as Churls did, as a thing of beauty, and failed. Vedas was no more beautiful than Churls, the captain of the Atavest, or the Baleshuuk they had encountered on the Steps. Still, his features had become oddly reassuring to Berun.
“I’ll resist you,” the constructed man said. “I’ll win this fight.”
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