Just then, a messenger came panting up to our impromptu council at the Deepseeker’s fire. Perwik acknowledged the young ranger with a wave. “What is it, ranger Zetteret?”
“Message,” he managed between gasps for air. “Urgent message. There’s some… something at the main entrance. It’s asking to speak to the Akkandaka.”
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Joanna
Parley
I strode towards the main entrance, flanked on my left by Nissikul and with Volistad on my right. They were in full regalia, Volistad in his crystalline combat armor, Nissikul coated in black witch-plate and bearing a great black hammer. I wondered if in a thousand years there might exist a legend concerning all of us. Volistad would be painted as my prophet, the holy warrior who was invincible so long as his faith remained unshaken. Nissikul would be his opposite, but not his nemesis. She would be some kind of angel of death, clad all in black and trailing thunder and lightning. And me? Who knew? Would I be remembered as a good god or a bad one? How long would I live before something finally killed me?
We climbed the twisting ice tunnels up out of the crater of the great entombed mountain, following the jutting peak as it grew up from jagged cliffs and jutted into the sheets of ice above. The passage seemed longer coming up than it had felt going down, but that made sense. Especially when I considered that I had been carrying Volistad's mostly dead body in my arms the whole way down- my only focus being to get him somewhere safe and warm. I looked over at him now. Though I couldn't see his face through his crystalline helm, I could imagine those awful bruises encircling his neck. I couldn't believe he was alive. When I asked him about it, he just shook his head and said, "We'll talk about this with the Deepseeker. He can explain it better than I can." I supposed that I just had to accept that. I had my secrets, and so did he.
We broke out of the winding tunnels into the surface cave that served as the main entrance and exit from the village of the Erin-Vulur. Not twenty paces from the mouth of the tunnel, four Erinye rangers stood, arrows on the strings of their bows, not quite aiming them at a single figure that stood stock still and antenna straight on the ice fifteen meters away. To one side of the little knot of archers, four more rangers stood ready, with great hammers on their shoulders in preparation for a devastating first strike.
It took me a moment to realize what they were all watching with such trepidation. It was a man, or at least a crude facsimile of a man, constructed entirely of tarnished, coppery metal. It bore no weapons, and only wore a tattered, colorless shroud around its shoulders for protection. It stood completely still, apparently unconcerned with the eight warriors all determined to destroy it if it so much as moved an inch. I approached, putting a hand on the shoulder of one of the archers as I passed. “It’s alright. I can handle this thing.” Reluctantly, the rangers backed off, lowering their weapons.
As soon as I came within five meters of it, the metal man animated, suddenly. Glowing green lights came on in its copper skull, and I shuddered. They were the exact same shade of green as… as.... Its stance changed, its movements becoming a little more fluid, a little more natural. Lights came up all across its body, and thin beams of illumination began to stitch themselves together into the shape of a man. It was Barbas, exactly as I remembered him from the night before he had… before he had been taken. He smiled, his single green eye bright and inviting beside its empty silver cousin; his handsome dark face enhanced rather than marred by the war scars he had adopted. He bowed, his movements elegant and graceful in the tailored white Armani suit he had chosen for the occasion. His lips, full and intriguing, parted. That voice. It was exactly right. "Hello, Gorgeous," he said and broke my heart.
Memories swam through my mind in a rush. I could taste Barbas' lips; I could feel him moving inside me. I remembered the "vacation" of my trip through the stars, asleep within my Bullet as it carried me here. It had carried me here, to my personal frozen hell, but that journey had been sweet, bright, and wonderful. I recounted to myself the nights spent dreaming of the cabin and that evening in the library in Barbas' mind. And then- then I remembered the boat. WE ARE BENEATH. Being torn from my armor to freeze to death, naked and alone. I heard myself cry out, desperate for some reason, some justification for this savagery. And then I saw Barbas’ face, cruel with indifference, smirk down at me as he turned away from me. Where seeing him had awoken a little flicker of flame inside me, the ice came in a great impenetrable sheet and smothered it. Whatever he had been, the thing before me was a monster. It had used my trust against me. It had tried to kill me. Barbas was dead, regardless of what that old tech shaman had said. At the very least, he was dead to me. My voice was as frigid as the passing of the Great North Wind as I growled, “What do you want.” It wasn’t a question.
Barbas’ smile grew brittle. “Whoa, let’s not be hasty, lover.” He took a few steps, putting a little more distance between himself and me while somehow managing to make the movement look casual and unmotivated by fear.
I raised an accusing finger, opening my mouth to pour forth my anger when I realized that ice crystals were actually forming on my skin. I clenched my teeth, sucked in a long, slow breath, and tried again. "To what do I owe the dubious pleasure, demon?"
Barbas laughed, a full-throated, infectious sound. “I just want to talk, Joanna. I came here to apologize for that little misunderstanding down beneath the ice.”
“Misunderstanding?” I hissed, feeling hot bile rise in the back of my throat. “You tore me out of my armor and left me bleeding and dying on top of a mass grave, and you think there was some kind of misunderstanding? Oh, I understood you alright. You were done with me, and you threw me away like trash the moment you got what you wanted.”
The cheerful mask that Barbas was maintaining slipped a little. “I wasn’t… I was not myself. Recovering the lost part of me and receiving my body was… It was overwhelming.”
I raised an eyebrow. "I expect so. Almost as overwhelming as trying to murder someone that loved and trusted you. And where is that new body, by the way? Are you too much a coward to come and see me yourself? Can't you ‘apologize' in person? You have to send this… thing in your place?"
Barbas rolled his eyes. “We both know you would have killed me if you had seen me again. Honestly, knowing your past, I’m somewhat surprised you’ve lasted this long without resorting to barbaric violence.” He indicated Volistad with a nod of his head. “Though I see you’ve already sought barbarism between your sleeping furs.”
I'm not sure how I managed to refrain from blasting the smug sneer of his face, but it was actually Volistad who snapped first. He took a step forward, an axe appearing in each hand and growled, "The last one of these metal men you sent to kill me was an embarrassment. Can’t you do better?" I put a restraining hand on his shoulder, and he stepped back behind me.
“God spare me from heroes,” Barbas lamented dramatically, then abruptly turned serious. “But I didn’t come here to trade banter with your pet, love, as entertaining as it might be. I came here to tell you that I’m finishing the work we started. Do you remember why you came to this frozen turd of a moon?” He gestured savagely at the sky. “One hundred thousand humans up there, counting on you to turn this place into paradise, and what do you do the moment things get a little rough? You go native!” He visibly restrained himself, regaining his calm. I didn’t say anything, so he continued, his voice pleading, almost reasonable. “Look, Joanna, I’m sorry for what happened down there. I don’t know what happened. I’ve never made a mistake before, and I’ve gone over that morning again and again and found nothing.” He paced, agitated. “But we can work it out, you and me. We can turn this place into the garden that we dreamed about, and build that cabin by the lake, and find ourselves a real home, here in reality! I don’t care what old ghosts down below the ice have said, to either of us.” Barbas pressed his palms together, his face riven with desperation. “But I love you, Joanna Angeles, and I want to make this right. I wan
t to help you make a better world for your people. Will you please, at least consider it? Could you come to forgive me?”
I would like to think that I wasn’t tempted. But that would be a lie. I thought about it for a long minute, remembering all of it, the good times and the bad. I wondered what it would be like to be the maker of paradise for a whole new nation of humans. It would probably be less pressure than being some kind of fake deity for a bunch of carnivore tribesmen. I remembered Barbas’ hands on me, the way he looked at me, the way he made me feel. What if… Another memory floated to the surface. A memory of terror, confusion, and pain. It’s here, with me. You have to run, Jo. It has what it wants now, and it doesn’t need you! And then I saw the lie.
I smiled, wide and cruel, not like a human woman but like an Erinye god. I felt the heat of my fury collapse in on itself and turn into an emptiness that screamed to devour all that stood in my way. Worlds dissolved in the face of cold like that. Atomic motion ceased when it met that kind of pure, merciless entropy. “Barbas is dead, demon. He tried to save my life before you consumed him and wore his face. You’re not here because you love me. You’re here because you need something from me. You need something that you think I have to accomplish whatever foul mission your masters Beneath have charged you with. But your lies mean nothing to me. I will find you, and I will kill you, and I will scatter your remains to the wind.” I lunged forward, lightning-quick, and seized the metal homunculus by its throat. My fingers passed through the image of Barbas and closed on cold metal, and I lifted the thing wearing my dead lover’s face up off of the ground with one arm. I brought the metal man closer, holding it so that I stared into those defiant, simulated eyes. “And when I’m finished, I will take your rotten, maggot-infested heart and I will seal it in stone beneath the ice. And you will have an eternity to know that you failed.”
Even suspended by his throat more than a foot off of the ground, Barbas somehow managed to look exasperated. "Fine, suit yourself." The simulation winked out, leaving me holding a limp metal mannequin up before me. I felt stupid just standing there, and tossed the damn thing away from me towards the mouth of the cave. It was pure luck that saved my life. The copper body shattered as something struck it with explosive force. The projectile that struck the body was deflected by the slightest margin and shot past me. I felt a hot wind dry my face as something gouged chunks of rock bigger than my balled fists from the exposed peak of the mountain. All of it happened in less than a tenth of a second, but it all seemed to stretch out before me, slowed so that I could watch the streak of the projectile pass me like a raindrop streaming across a windshield. Then the sound of the shot reached us in a piercing thunderclap, and time resumed its normal pace. A gauss cannon. Barbas was firing a gauss cannon at us. At me.
Even as part of my mind froze in shock, some other part of me leaped to action. “Volistad! Get everyone below! Nissikul! On me!”
Chapter Sixty
Joanna
Parley
We ran out across the ice at speeds that would have made old pre-war muscle cars jealous. All around me the winds gathered, filling me, infusing me with their speed, their power, their joy. I ran like I had never dreamed of running before. Where I had been wearing a simple sealskin shirt and trousers, black witch-armor formed around me, changing me from a sprinting cross-country star into a charging juggernaut. But I didn’t feel the weight of the armor. It didn’t feel like I was wearing much at all. I thought about drawing the sword at my waist to complete the image but thought better of it. It wouldn’t do to bring a sword to a heavy cannon fight. Instead, I sent my machine spirits out into the wind and called down the storms. The Great North Wind answered, but he wasn’t the only one. We ran at the heart of a vortex of howling wind and clashing thunder, lit only by strobing lightning. Though my own eyes could not pierce the walls of the storm, my wind spirits painted the landscape ahead of me in my mind.
Nissikul kept pace with me easily, unshaken by the rise of the storm. Of course, she wouldn't be bothered. She might have been the least of the Stormcallers before her unexpected promotion, but that just meant she had been running with the storms for only years rather than decades. Her black, featureless helm reflected the frenetic dance of the lightning back at me in menacing green as she asked, in a conversational tone that I could nonetheless understand perfectly, "Joanna, are you alright?"
I laughed at the absurdity of the question, and a little of the tension went out of my chest. The storm returned my cackle as a blast of thunder that rattled my teeth in my skull. “Am I alright? What kind of question is that?”
Nissikul didn’t share my amusement. “You’re leading my people now, Storm Queen, I need you at your best. That thing- the metal man wearing the face of your dead lover- it shook you up, cracked the mask. I need to be sure you aren’t going to break.”
I sighed, a sound that became a rushing howl of wind as a funnel cloud calved off from the storm and spun itself into nothingness. “Well, I’m going to break some of that thing’s fancy toys, that’s for sure.” Getting no answer from Nissikul, I continued, resigned. “I’m fine. I’ll be fine. I’m going to have no trouble killing that demon when the time comes.”
“What about if we have to capture it?” Nissikul asked. “You heard the Deepseeker’s plan. What if we decide to capture your spirit and bring it back to be a part of that old coot’s ritual?”
I shrugged. “Then I’ll catch it. I doubt Barbas can still be found in there, but if he can, I’ll do my best to save him.” I turned my face back forward into the raging storm, searching through my wind spirit’s perceptions for Barbas’ gun emplacement. Every so often a shot would pass through the storm, warped off its course by the force of the wind, but I saw no sign of the cannon. It came as no surprise to me. A properly installed gauss cannon could kill a target with a nearly direct shot at a distance of over twelve miles.
Nissikul didn't let up. "If you catch it- if you catch your spirit, what will you do about my brother?"
“What?”
Nissikul laughed, and the sound was echoed by the storm around us just as mine had been. “Don’t play dumb, Joanna. He is obviously smitten with you.”
“And…” I prompted, not wanting to give her anything.
Nissikul just stared at me for a full minute, her blank helm conveying nothing. A gauss cannon shot passed us in the storm, thrown a dozen meters wide of either of us.
I groaned. “Fine. I might have feelings for him too, but I don’t know if this-” I gestured all around me, “-is the best time to be thinking about those. We’re fighting a war. If Volistad is in love with me, then maybe after we save your people from certain destruction, he and I can think about what that means.”
“It’s too late for that,” Nissikul commented lightly. “You kissed him. You reciprocated his feelings. You both have to sit down and talk about this, or it will go sour. You might not want to do anything yet, one way or another, and that’s fine. But you have to at least talk to him about it.”
“I have to, huh?”
Nissikul snorted. "Don't play god with me, ‘Storm Queen.' My brother might be a little caught up in your living myth, but I'm not. I've seen you with a hole in your chest where a heart should be." Her voice changed from conversational to a dangerous, poisonous hiss. "And if you hurt my big brother, Joanna, I will tear that shiny new god heart out of you. And no one will be filling that hole back up again. Do you understand me?"
I swallowed hard. Damn. “Yes, Nissi, I understand you.”
“Good,” she said brightly. “Now I think I see something up ahead of us. What do you say we break some of that metal abomination’s toys?”
Chapter Sixty-One
Volistad
Deepseeker
I watched the great storm carry Joanna and Nissikul away to battle, and felt a brief pang of jealousy in my chest. I couldn't go with them, I couldn't help with this fight. This was a battle for a god and her head mage. I would probably get in the way. I
sighed. I wasn't used to being no good in a fight. I was a ranger. Fighting was what we did. But the sensation of feeling insignificant before the power of someone like my sister- I was well used to that. She had been a Stormcaller since the day we left childhood behind. On that day, she had ceased to be my little sister and become something more- she had become her own woman. Much as I wanted to be by Joanna's side for any danger she chose to confront; I knew there was no shame in being left behind. Besides, this gave me a chance to speak to the Deepseeker- to Palamun- alone.
I trudged up the stone path to the old shaman's hut, still wearing my armor, though I had tucked the helm under my arm. I was unsurprised to hear the sound of the Deepseeker's many strange tools at work. It wouldn't have shocked me to learn that the old man didn't ever rest. It was too early for anyone decent to be sleeping, anyway. I stepped past the smear of ash that was all that remained of the afternoon's fire. Perwik was gone, as I expected. As the only remaining Elder from the previous Council, he had a lot to do to keep the tribe running smoothly. There were over fifty-thousand of the Erin-Vulur remaining, though on an average day I saw less than a tenth of that number moving around in the village. Not every Erin-Vulur lived at the tribe's heart. We lived together out of necessity, but we preferred to have our space when we could, carving out little spaces far beneath the ice or deep with the great mountain for little packs and knots of Erinye families to live. Perwik was dealing with the duties usually carried out by Vassa and his priests- making sure that every single pocket of Erin-Vulur living in and around the village had what they needed. It struck me then that he had even more work than that- with Vassa proved to be corrupted, the Master of the Rangers had to make sure every single family of hidden Erinye was alive and unaffected by the dark influence that had infected the High Priest. I did not envy his job. It actually explained why I hadn't seen so many rangers out and about lately.
Volistad: Paranormal Sci-Fi Alien Romance (Alien Mates Book 3) Page 35
