by James Maxey
To his relief, he saw rows and rows of bottles. To his sorrow he saw they weren’t wine, but mostly preserved foods. Unlike the omnivorous winged dragons, earth-dragons ate meat almost exclusively. The bottles were filled with foods Pet recognized: picked ham-hocks, brined eggs, and red sausages preserved in vinegar. He’d had this type of sausage before and liked them, but right now he had no appetite.
There were other things in bottles Pet didn’t recognize, or at least hoped he didn’t. Was this jar full of brains? Were these pickled eye-balls? He moved to the next row, still hoping there might be wine.
He paused before a bottle with contents that caught his eye. Hands. Human hands. Female, to judge from the size, though it was difficult to say. The fingers were bloated and wrinkled by the pickling brine. The flesh was a disturbing shade of pink, colored by the red chilies that floated in the jar. His stomach twisted into a knot. He was grateful he hadn’t eaten anything in several hours.
Then his eyes caught sight of another bottle full of small lizards. Pet drew closer, in sickened fascination. He wasn’t sure what kind of lizards these were. They had heads like turtles, but their hands were more like earth-dragon’s and… Pet suddenly knew. The earth-dragons pickled and ate their own young. Something inside him snapped.
Pet marched back up the cellar stairs, to go back out among the gleaner mounds to hunt for survivors be they dragon or human. Burke was right. Anyone who had aided the dragons was part of a vast engine of death. In his old life as the pet of a sun-dragon, he owed every luxury he’d ever enjoyed to this system. Every silk pillow he’d slept upon, every golden cup he’d drunk from, every ivory comb he’d ever pulled through his locks—all were the product of an economy of enslavement. All the fine things he’d ever enjoyed, he now knew, were the gifts of monsters.
Chapter Twenty-Six:
You Know What I Have Done
The damp, smoky, slaughter-scented air of the Nest gave way to warm floral breezes as Bitterwood stepped from the rainbow. The false sky overhead was still a nightscape dotted with stars and a moon. The light was bright enough to illuminate the footprints of the fallen angel that had preceded Bitterwood through the gate. He studied the shapes in the crushed grass; these weren’t the prints of a living thing. The prints had hard, crisp edges that told him that what he’d glimpsed as the angel had vanished into the gate was true. Gabriel was a clockwork man, as Hezekiah had been.
Bitterwood followed the trail of bent blades, though he instinctively knew where they led—the temple. Gabriel only had a few minutes lead. Bitterwood could tell from the trail that the machine man was limping, injured from battle. Bitterwood, on the other hand, felt energized after his murder of Blasphet. His fever dreams, his visions of Recanna, all the omens and portents suddenly seemed clear. For twenty years, the hatred of dragons had given him reason to rise in the mornings. He’d been full of righteous anger at the thoughts of how dragons held power over the lives of men, power they’d used unjustly. Yet, what of the power of gods? He didn’t know if his hatred could drive an arrow through the heart of the goddess. He was keen to find out.
He hoped his bruskness had been sufficient to dissuade Jandra from following him. If he died in pursuit of this task, it mattered little. He saw no reason for the girl to risk her life, however.
He caught up to Gabriel as the winged man climbed the steps of the temple. The angel was exposed for what he truly was, a mockery of a man made of steel bones and wet-clay muscles. Bitterwood dropped Blasphet’s severed tongue to the grass. From a hundred feet away, he took aim at Gabriel’s skull and let his arrow fly.
Sound, however, flies more swiftly than arrows. Gabriel spun in response to the twang of Bitterwood’s bow and swatted the arrow from its flight with skeletal fingers.
“Oh, it’s you,” Gabriel said. The angel drew his flaming sword from its scabbard. “I’ve known since you arrived you were an ungrateful guest. Put down your bow, human. You failed to kill me while my back was to you. You have no chance of victory now that I’m aware of your presence.”
Bitterwood placed a second arrow against his bowstring and stepped forward. “I’ve just come from killing a god,” he said. “An angel is no challenge.”
Gabriel spread his legs into a fighting stance, holding his sword with both hands.
“Bant Bitterwood, you owe me gratitude, not anger. I saved the life of your son. He’s grown into a valued servant of the goddess. It will cause him tremendous grief to know you died at my hands. For his sake, put down your bow.”
Bitterwood continued to close the gap. Twenty feet away was close enough for him to feel the heat of the flaming sword against his cheeks. He knew what this being was capable of. He’d witnessed Hezekiah survive far worse injuries than anything his bow could inflict. The machine man’s strength, even injured, was ten times his own. But he also knew one further thing that this angel didn’t know—he’d watched Vendevorex disable Hezekiah in the Free City. He knew this creature’s vulnerable spot.
He released the bow string. The arrow crossed the gap between man and angel in a time too fast to measure, yet the angel swung his sword swiftly enough to knock the arrow aside. He then raised the flaming weapon high overhead, and lunged. Bitterwood had anticipated this gambit. He charged forward with all his speed, coming in low under Gabriel’s racing weapon, tackling the angel’s torso with his full weight.
As with Hezekiah, it wasn’t enough. Throwing himself against Gabriel was like throwing himself against stone. He found his footing and rose up, in the embrace of the angel, until his face was staring into Gabriel’s steely skull. He could see his own eyes reflected in the angel’s gleaming teeth. Gabriel calmly folded his arms around Bitterwood in a bear hug. Bitterwood reached around the machine man’s back, feeling his way up the mechanical spine to the base of the neck. He smelled burnt hair from Gabriel’s sword being so near his face; his ribs were on the verge of breaking. There was no way for him to draw a breath in the angel’s death grip.
Bitterwood found the small, smooth orb that sat at the base of the angel’s skull. He wrapped his fist around it and yanked as spots danced before his eyes. Suddenly, Gabriel dropped his sword. His clasped arms around Bitterwood didn’t slacken, but they also didn’t grow any tighter.
Bitterwood exhaled fully, creating tiny amounts of slack. He slipped down the angel’s rib cage, twisting his shoulders to free himself. He staggered backwards with a shiny silver marble in his hands. Vendevorex had called this sphere a homunculus—the machine soul that animated the artificial man. Gabriel was still now, save for a trio of wires that snaked from his back and floated toward Bitterwood like tentacles of a jellyfish. Bitterwood dived beneath these probes, reaching for Gabriel’s flaming sword, which lay on the ground beside the angel’s skeletal feet. He rose with the weapon and sliced upward through the wires, severing them. Instantly, they began to grow back.
Bitterwood ran away, down the lengths of the temple steps. He didn’t know the range of the wires, but it couldn’t be infinite. Or perhaps it could. They might seek out the homunculus wherever it went. Bitterwood stopped, having put several yards between himself and the wires. He laid the silver orb upon the polished steps of the temple. Then, he placed the flaming sword upon it. He stepped back, hoping that the wires would melt away before they could reach the orb. Instead, the homunculus suddenly popped like a kernel of corn, violently enough to throw the sword into the air. Tiny fragments of shrapnel tinked against the stone. A steel splinter buried itself deeply in Bitterwood’s cheek, barely an inch below his left eye. He dug the sliver out with his ragged nails, then wiped the wound with the back of his hand. He allowed himself a deep, calming breath, though it sent needles of pain through his bruised ribcage.
He retrieved the flaming sword from where it had landed. It had burned a circle around it in the grass, though the ground and vegetation were too moist to allow the flames to spread far. He carried it at arm’s length, unable to even look directly at the white-hot weapon. He
hoped that placing it back in Gabriel’s scabbard would squelch the weapon. Yet, as he wished that the weapon wasn’t so hot, the weapon responded. The white searing flame faded to the intensity of a torch. Bitterwood no longer felt as if his shirt sleeve were on the verge of catching fire. He stared at the now manageable flame and wondered if it could grow dimmer still. It did, lowering its intensity until only the barest halo of faint orange flame danced around it, and Bitterwood could no longer feel its heat on his face. With a thought, he willed it to brighten again.
He allowed himself a rare grin as the sword obeyed his unspoken command. He went to Gabriel’s paralyzed form and placed the sword back into it scabbard, then fastened the scabbard to his own belt.
He cast a glance back to Blasphet’s severed tongue. At least he now knew how he was going to cook it.
Bitterwood left the flaming temple. For an hour, he’d shouted in the place, calling the goddess down. He’d burned her statue and set fire to the walls to no avail. She hadn’t come for him.
Very well. His true purpose in returning, he reminded himself, wasn’t to kill angels and goddesses, but to rescue Zeeky. He walked away from the conflagration of the once sacred place. With the angel slain and the temple on fire, Bitterwood saw no further need for subtlety. “Zeeky!” he shouted. “Zeeky, where are you?”
He listened to the night jungle, to the chirping of frogs and the buzzing of insects, to the agitated cries of birds and monkeys as they chattered about the scorched earth Bitterwood had left in his wake. For all he knew, Zeeky could be crying out for him and he couldn’t hear her beneath this cacophony.
Jandra let the prime number that locked her helmet run through her mind once more. She and Hex were in the Thread Room, looking at the rainbow gate. They had already sent Adam and Trisky through, and the other long-wyrm riders had returned through the gates they had entered.
The situation at the Nest wasn’t good, but there was little more she could do. The matriarch had recovered from the anesthetic smoke and taken command once more. She’d ordered Graxen and Nadala taken away in chains, and Jandra didn’t feel she had enough of an understanding of the situation to protest this decision.
Jandra had spent much of the night healing injured valkyries. She’d also been waiting for news of Blasphet—the valkyries who searched the tunnels hadn’t yet found his body. But, Jandra couldn’t believe he wasn’t dead. She’d seen his severed tongue, after all, and for all of Bitterwood’s flaws he wasn’t a liar. If he said he’d killed Blasphet, he had. Could he possibly have done something so awful to the body it could never be found? It was best not to think about it.
Besides, she had other things to focus on. She suspected that Jazz would know almost instantly that her helmet was locked once they were together. The genies communicated at radio frequencies—with Jazz a hundred miles away and a mile beneath the earth, and Jandra in a room beneath the surface of a lake, she was reasonably confident that Jazz couldn’t listen in to her conversation with Hex right now.
“You know, this isn’t your fight,” she said. “You’ve never even met Zeeky. I have a score to settle with Jazz, but you don’t need to get yourself killed on my account.”
“On the contrary,” said Hex. “I feel that confronting this Jazz is required if my beliefs mean anything to me at all. I’ve spent much of my life developing my philosophy. I believe that all law is ultimately a shackle, and that all kings are ultimately tyrants. If I don’t trust power to a king, how can I rest knowing that Jazz wields even greater power? I told you earlier that I don’t believe we must be the puppets of fate. This would-be goddess imagines herself as a puppet master. It’s my duty as a warrior-philosopher to cut her strings.”
“Warrior-philosopher? Is that what you are?”
“My last official title was assistant librarian,” Hex said. “Confronting a god as an assistant librarian is a risky undertaking; a warrior-philosopher, however, is suited for the task.”
Jandra smiled. She appreciated Hex’s dry humor. She handed Hex a silver ring that she’d created from the dust in her pouch. It was scaled to fit his talons; on her, it would have been a bracelet.
“Wear this,” she said. “It might come in handy.”
“What does it do?” Hex asked.
“You’ve seen me turn invisible. I do it with the aid of the silver dust. It fills the air and configures itself into a billion tiny mirrors that carefully guide the light around me. I’ve taken that dust and shaped it into this ring with a preprogrammed command to form an invisibility sphere around you. Unfortunately, I can’t make the sphere big enough to cover you if your wings are fully outstretched. The illusion falls apart once you get much past a twenty-foot diameter. Too many gaps in the integrated mirrors. So, it won’t work if you’re flying, or fighting all out. But it might help you hide, or ambush someone as long as you stay compact. Keep your wings and tail tucked in, don’t stretch your neck too far, and no one will be able to see you.”
“How do I activate it?”
“I’m keeping it simple,” she said. “All it needs is a good jolt of kinetic energy. Just hit it against something hard and part of the ring will flake off and form the field. There’s only enough dust in the ring to work a half dozen times, so use it wisely.”
“Thank you,” said Hex, sliding the ring on. “Though, I confess, stealth and invisibility aren’t my style.”
“Not your warrior style,” said Jandra. “But it may come in handy for a moment of philosophy. Jazz can probably see straight through the illusion, but maybe not. Here’s what I do know about her: despite all her seeming power, she’s only human. She’s no doubt enhanced herself physically; she can probably heal from grievous wounds almost instantly. Mentally, she seems to think she has the right to do anything she wants because the world owes her. She claims to have saved the world from environmental catastrophe.”
“Do you think she did?”
“No. I think like most people she wants to believe her presence makes the world a better place. She pushed a bunch of her memories into my head that I think are supposed to make me sympathize with her. For instance, I have this memory of her when she was only a teenager; she’s crouching on a beach covered with oil, cradling a dying seagull. I can feel her sorrow, her genuine longing to keep this from ever happening again. Two years later, she was the mastermind behind the bombing of an oil refinery. She killed nine people and triggered economic turmoil that ruined the lives of millions. She’s given me this as one of her good memories, one of the things she’s most proud of. She wants me to see that while her methods may be harsh and violent, she’s always striving for the greater good.”
“Just as my father justified war in the name of peace, and oppression in the name of order,” said Hex. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned about life, it’s that those with the most passionate convictions can justify the most savage cruelties.”
“I don’t know that I agree with you,” said Jandra. “You’re passionate about your beliefs, but it hasn’t left you bloodthirsty and ruthless like Jazz. Or like Bitterwood, now that I think about it. You’re a living contradiction to your own assertion.”
“If there’s a second thing I’ve learned about life, it’s that any truth I can sum up in a single sentence is almost certainly going to snap once I place the weight of reality upon it.”
“One thing I’ve learned from these new memories is not to be intimidated by Jazz any more. She may be powerful and smart, but she’s not omnipotent or omniscient. She’s just a woman with a human brain in a human skull. Not to be gruesome, but I’ve seen what you can do to a human skull. We stand a chance if we get close enough. I believe we can beat her.”
“Well then,” said Hex, moving toward the gate. “The time has come to once more test a belief against reality.” He leapt, vanishing into nothingness.
As he did so, the rainbow seemed to vibrate, and the air around it shimmered with countless tiny prisms that faded as quickly as they’d formed. Yet in that bri
ef flash, Jandra was certain that she’d once more heard her name spoken by Zeeky. Bracing herself, Jandra stepped into the rainbow…
… and now the void was endless. Rather than emerging from the other side, Jandra was adrift in darkness and silence. She couldn’t breathe; she couldn’t feel her heart beating within her. The disembodied sensation felt the way she imagined death must feel. And yet… she wasn’t dead. She was thinking. What was happening to her?
She tried to summon fire around her hands to break the darkness, but she couldn’t feel her hands. She wasn’t certain she even had hands any more. It was as if all that was physical about her had been stripped away and she was left as only a mind.
“Jandra,” a voice whispered.
“Zeeky?” she asked, despite lacking a throat or mouth to form the words.
“Follow my voice,” said Zeeky. As she spoke, the darkness split and a sliver of light formed. Jandra wanted to move toward the light, but didn’t know how. She had no limbs to push herself with. Panic seized her. The presence of a way out of this void and her inability to reach it left her feeling trapped.
Then, hands that were not hands pressed against her, or the idea of her, and pushed.
Jandra landed hard on a concrete floor in a gray, windowless, room. The presence of gravity felt both reassuring and confining. She was pinned to the cold, hard surface by the weight of her body. The light here was dim, but after her encounter with the void even this faint illumination felt like daggers stabbing her eyes. She threw her arm across her face to block the light. She took long, slow breaths, welcoming the air across her lips after her brief encounter with airless, lipless nothingness.
Something wet, cold, and circular pressed against her forehead. Jandra moved her hand to see what it was and found her fingers touching the snout of some kind of animal. She opened her eyes and looked up into the face of a pig, its hide mottled black and white. The pig looked down at her with an expression that resembled concern.
