Immortal Progeny (Fragile Gods Book 1)

by Philippa Ballantine

  As she dashed by Isobah, there was no time for words, but he caught her eye and saw there the determination and strength that had always been hers. A priest swung at her, and without missing a beat, with the child still cradled against her, she sent him crashing back with a kick to the midriff. It was all mad, impossible, and utterly Kiya.

  Isobah struggled harder against the homunculus, cursing and straining to get free. Perhaps Gentian had better things to worry herself about because the creation released him with a slight grunt, and ambled towards a knot of people around his mistress. Scrambling up from the ground, the guardsman ran, shoving priests out of his way, swearing and calling Kiya's name until his voice broke. His fist connected with jaws, his elbow with soft bellies, and his knee with vulnerable body parts.

  He couldn't see Nyennoh anywhere, but the child was small, swift, and Isobah taught him how to hide. The guardsman shoved a priestess out of his way, just in time to catch a glimpse of his wife ahead of him.

  She reached the gates, and calling on the might of Mariki, Kiya burst through them, sending them ringing to the ground. That was his last glimpse of her sky-blue cloak fluttering in the sharp wind between surging figures. She was not alone; Gentian, her homunculus and a dozen others were hot on her trail.

  He screamed her name as the cloaks of the other obscured his view, and then the crowd swallowed him up again. Everything was heaving madness around him. He fell, rolled, cut, and bruised left and right, knowing if he did not get up soon he would be crushed. Somehow, he got his feet under him and staggered towards where he thought the gates were.

  The cries of the pursuers ahead made no sense though.

  "She fell!"

  "The river!"

  "She fell!"

  "The pagan is dead!"

  Pushing his way through the crowd, punching and striking whoever got in his way, feeling blood trickle from his knuckles, Isobah found the river. Only one flowed from Penance; they called it the Bitter Tear. It was a fearsomely fast one that bubbled up from the center of the table-top mountain and dropped away off the end of the land into the sky. It was a force of nature as mysterious and deadly as the God Void itself.

  The priests and priestesses, angry and panting, stood on the edge of the channel that it carved in the stone of Penance. They had the look of hounds with the scent of blood in their nostrils when prey miraculously eluded them. This time though, there was no miracle. Senseless with disbelief, Isobah dropped at the rim of the river, hands clenching and unclenching on the stone.

  His eyes ran over the seething water, and as much as he scanned the river, Kiya and the child were not there. It was as if they were swallowed by a god and snatched up to another place. If only that were true. It was not. They were gone.

  The savage fact was, the river dumped its contents over the ragged edge of the table-top, down hundreds of feet to the hard earth below.

  Staggering to his feet, Isobah ran along the river edge and followed it to that point of no return. He didn't want to believe facts, but there was the place where the water screamed as it tumbled over into nothingness, hissing and burbling despair that matched his own.

  For a moment Isobah considered diving in, following them into the oblivion of the fall. It was a tempting thought, until he heard other words that stopped him. "Father! Father!"

  Nyennoh called him back. The child ran through the scattering of curious priests and priestesses to find the guardsmen. His warmth and need collided with Isobah's despair.

  Whatever those girls were, they cost Isobah greatly, but he could not forget his son. Kiya was gone, and that meant so many terrible things he never wanted to contemplate but still had to deal with.

  Wrapping his arms around Nyennoh, Isobah could still not pull his gaze away from the fall his wife and that nameless child had taken.

  Why had the children come to Penance, when it was only to end like this? Craning back his head, Isobah sent those questions winging to the Mother-Sky, and hoped one day to find the answer.

  Chapter One

  Constructs of Escape

  In the pits there were no gods. No goddesses either. Amaranth knew if any deities bothered to look down into the slave pits of Damnation, they would have only seen flesh ready to be twisted to their needs. They were the raw materials the homunculi and the progeny were made from; they served no other purpose. They were assets to be bred and sold for the so-called greater good.

  Amaranth was merely one of those assets. As she sat in the summer warmth of the carved rock slave pit, watching through matted hair the slow march of the pit drivers up on the earthworks, she determined once again to change her place in the scheme of things.

  She might have been born and grown up in the pits, but she was different—at least, in her mind. Her remaining hand clenched at her side, and her phantom limb on the other did the same—just as it always did. They took her arm, and other things on her insides she could not be sure enough to name. The drivers came in the night to claim part of their investment. They held her down and poured poppy juice into her mouth. All she glimpsed were the long sharp knives and the needles for stitching her up.

  They were very skilled at what they did. Later, once she healed, Amaranth imagined a story that provided some comfort. A young woman terribly maimed would now have a chance at wholeness. Being a chimera was an abomination to the priests, she’d heard, but a rich family could hide such a thing. Amaranth liked to pretend her arm was having a good life somewhere. After a while the story did not comfort her, instead it began to enrage her. Why could she not have what she'd been born with?

  Yet, the drivers did her a favor when they had taken the parts of her body, for something strange happened with their removal. Amaranth began to feel an odd, hot emotion. The pit of her stomach was tight all the time, and her throat felt as though she could barely swallow. Amaranth wanted to punch things, hurt those mindless refugees of reality around her. Finally, she worked out what it was; she was angry, deeply, uncontrollably angry. In that hot hole of anger, her plan took its first breath.

  Amaranth looked up at the ramparts, hacked out of the rock twenty feet above them, with every possible handhold removed and a tough netting thrown over the top just in case any of the spare parts were particularly agile. Opposite each other in the roughly circular pit, there were two funnels from which food poured twice a day, and in the middle was a small watering trough, supplied through an underground system. The sand on the rock floor was thick and deep, to soak up blood and other human fluids, but also to protect the skin of the driver's valuable stock.

  Four of them patrolled the borders between the pits that she could see, so she set about trying to winnow facts from the drivers' minds. Her skill was new, and she could only skim thoughts from her captors, but she did eventually work out there was a town nearby. She heard the sounds of laughter, the impression of home, which was as foreign to her as the concept of a city.

  Across the sand, Amaranth's eyes locked with Fleabane. In the pit, the only names given were ones you took yourself, and the two of them claimed their own. The younger woman was the only one of the twenty women sharing that particular pit who had the same spark of outrage in her eyes as Amaranth. She was smaller, with paler skin that burned under the sun, but her hair was just as matted. She appeared in the pit one day, and Amaranth had not asked her history. No one in the pits had history.

  Fleabane was a strange creature though, her mind felt like hard, impenetrable stone compared to the drivers. Amaranth judged her by her actions. With one arm taken she needed someone to help her, and Fleabane slotted neatly into the role of assistant. If she muttered to herself sometimes, or stared into space, it didn’t really matter.

  Amaranth tightened her remaining hand around the gift that started it all. It was Fleabane who gave her the small needle; a tiny sliver of bone, which she must have worked against stone for hours to create, and an eye bored through with something far smaller. Fleabane had not explained how she made it, nor how she knew
Amaranth could even use it. The ragged little redhead simply handed it to her in silence. If the drivers thought you were having long conversations, they might swing a lash just out of boredom. Talking among the slaves was kept for the hours of darkness.

  If there was one truth in the pits of Damnation, it was that meat was meat. Some flesh was harder to come by, and thus worth more, but that was the sum of it. Not one of the valuable human parts learned how to write, and only a very few learned how to speak. No spark lit their eyes, and they spent most of their time staring at their toes or at the sky. Some went blind from it, which only annoyed the pit drivers since eyes were of such high value. The minds of the prisoners were soft and baffling to Amaranth. She detected no distinguishable will in them, all human light extinguished by grinding hopelessness.

  Only in Fleabane's eyes, Amaranth saw the same burning desire that consumed her. Neither of them knew for certain what lay beyond the pits, but there was surely little to lose. She held onto those few certainties she stole from the drivers; there was the constant pressing sound, which she discovered was the ocean, a vast, turbulent body of water. At night she dreamed of the horror of that, of being sucked down until water claimed her life. She had never met anyone who drowned, but it was described to her in terrible details as a child by a mother she couldn't remember as well as the stories she told.

  So no, they would not go that way; even if they could somehow sneak on one of the ships that came to visit, Amaranth would not trust the ocean. The drivers, however, all went home once their shift was done. Damnation, one of their brains held the name. The pits and the town that housed the drivers were the entire scope of her world. What could lie beyond both of those places was terrifying.

  In her remaining hand, Amaranth rolled the needle between her thumb and forefinger for a moment as she imagined what other creatures there might be for her to work with. For now, she tucked it into a matted section of her hair behind her right ear. Fine thread made of a few stands of that hair was carefully plaited, and a small coil of it hidden behind her left ear. She had all the tools she would need to get them out.

  The pit was cooling, which meant evening drew near, and that was when they would have their best chance. The drivers of the day gave way to the drivers of the night as the sun dropped below the line of the pit walls. It was not that there were any less of them, but they would not see her creatures coming as easily in the darkness.

  Fleabane was not the only friend Amaranth had in the pit—it was just that she made all the rest herself. Till was the first of the friends she constructed.

  From under her hair Amaranth flicked her gaze to the right, where an infinitesimal movement under the sand made itself known. For a second the sun gleamed off a tiny exposed portion of his black carapace, and then Till went deeper.

  Most of the occupants of the pit would have snatched up and devoured the black beetle Fleabane found a month earlier, but the young girl brought the shiny creature to Amaranth. It seemed wrong at first to kill the insect, since he was so large and handsome, but there was no way for her spirit to enter a whole animal; years of careful listening to drivers' gossip taught the woman that. Even dead, a complete creature's soul clung to its body meaning it could not be controlled; it had to be altered to work.

  When Fleabane located and captured one of the scorpions hiding under the stones near the water trough, Amaranth used the needle to kill both the beetle and the new acquisition. Then with Fleabane's nimble assistance she carefully stitched the curved tail onto the beetle using a tiny braid of her own hair. She told herself she was making them both better.

  Working with one hand to make the stitches took practice, but Fleabane always seemed to know the best way to hold the subject so she could work the needle.

  When Amaranth finally pressed her hand down on the dead thing, it was as if she were inside it somehow. The little creation was like an empty room, and was so very easy for her to fill it with herself. How she had the skills to do this, Amaranth didn't know, but she was so focused on her plan, it really didn't matter...at least for now.

  Till was only the first of many, but the only one she named. The little army of crawling constructions built up quickly, with Fleabane possessing a real talent for finding the small animals needed. During the day, Amaranth kept them in the latrine ditch that was on one side of the pit, and when evening fell she sent them scampering up the walls to scout ahead.

  Tonight, she put her essence out, and spread it among the little constructs. Scattering herself meant she couldn't read the human thoughts, but she had to take her chance, and the beetle-scorpions she sent up the dirt onto the ramparts had important work to do.

  It was a curious sensation Amaranth enjoyed, and somehow she was stronger when she spread her consciousness across the constructs. Through strange, alien eyes she experienced the world, and left the pain and weakness of her own body behind. She was much greater than her own flesh now.

  She saw the booted feet of the drivers, and as the beetle-scorpions fanned out further, she and they glimpsed the edge of the ramparts that led down into the trench.

  Amaranth only saw the passage between pits with her own eyes on the rare occasion the portcullis was raised. It was there the drivers traversed to their work, dragged unwilling parts, brought in buyers to survey the stock, or hauled food.

  If they failed, she and Fleabane would immediately be killed and their parts distributed for maximum profit. Despite the terrible things done to her, Amaranth did not want to die, so her heart beat, and her hands trembled as she raised one finger in Fleabane's direction.

  At the signal, across the pit the girl scampered towards the portcullis. It was made of solid iron, and far too heavy for a grown man, let alone a child to lift, but there would be no feats of strength tonight.

  Controlling so many constructs was making Amaranth's head spin, and her own consciousness seemed to barely hold onto itself as she sent the other half of her beetle-scorpions clustering around Fleabane. They were not just poisonous—they were also great diggers. Any disturbance in the sand and dirt would be noticed during the day, so there was only one night to get enough moved for their purposes.

  She observed the scrawny girl with her hundreds of compound eyes, before the task at hand took hold, weighing and assessing once last time before they were both thoroughly committed. Amaranth thought she could do this. She now envisioned doing it. All that remained was to make her imagined freedom a reality. When she pushed her essence out, the sand was suddenly crawling with her constructs, pushing, pulling and burrowing. It looked as though the earth was boiling with them, there were so many.

  Amaranth might have wished for larger animals to get the job done quicker, but large interlopers were always killed if they were found in the pit, and anyway, they would have also been far too loud. Her insects were silent as they worked right next to Fleabane's toes.

  Above, Amaranth observed the two drivers as they talked in the cool night. It was impossible to understand what they discussed, since an insect's brain could not truly process human speech in any decipherable way, but the young woman was more interested in their position and if they noticed anything in the pit below.

  Her own body felt like a dead limb in comparison to the rapid darting of the constructs, but she knew she would have to take it with her, so she carefully began to drag it closer to the portcullis. She made it within ten feet of Fleabane before leaning against the side of the pit in exhaustion. The combination of her decrepitude, her hunger, and the will needed to control the constructs sapped her of all energy.

  Fleabane had her narrow frame down on her stomach, sliding her hand hopefully against the dirt, testing to see if there was enough room yet for her to get under. Amaranth had chosen her friend well, it seemed, because the constructs were very close to getting there.

  Maybe this is actually going to work, Amaranth thought, even as her chest tightened, and her breath became labored.

  Above, the guards moved, separating an
d walking in opposite directions. It meant splitting the group of constructs up there into two groups; another strain on her already stressed essence. Insects were easy to move as a group, but more than one bunch at a time was difficult. The reality from her own body began to fade as she concentrated on the three clusters.

  One of the drivers was moving towards the portcullis, while Fleabane was half underneath the massive piece of iron, and wriggling mightily to get the rest of the way. The diggers around her increased their efforts as Amaranth pressed them harder. Several broke stitches in their valiant work and fell apart in the earth, lifeless and useless to her. Every one gone decreased the likelihood of success.

  He was too close. Amaranth immediately felt the driver's presence overhead with her own body's limited senses. In a split second he would catch the movement below and raise the alarm. She couldn't allow that.

  The group of beetle-scorpions at his feet had to do their own work. They scurried quickly up his body as only creatures with six legs could. He jerked his foot, trying to shake them off. Anyone who worked in the heat of Damnation was used to insects, but he wouldn't be able to see what they were or their numbers in the half-light.

  In an instant they were up, inside his clothes and stinging as much as they could; two dozen constructs with all the poison of scorpions at their disposal. The driver fell writhing to the ground, clutching at his swollen throat. The toxins of the stings meant no sound but a soft, wheezing gasp could escape his body, so Amaranth was able to concentrate on the other driver who was about to stumble on his stricken companion.

  She couldn't leave him alive; he would see his dying colleague and then yell to the next pit over. The alarm would be raised within heartbeats. Amaranth sent her constructs scuttling up his leg too, and they mercilessly delivered hundreds of stings and poison into him as well. The woman felt more sympathy for the insects she was forced to kill than for the drivers. They had done the breeding and the cutting after all, and the concept of revenge was one that kept Amaranth alive so long. It was good to finally have a taste of it, rather than simply nursing it.