Cage of Souls, page 56
The gun did not go off. Kiera’s expression was one of rank disgust with both the weapon and her own luck. Before she could get back out of reach, Hermione had her, holding her up by her throat, her kicks and blows finding only that dense, impervious flesh.
I went to intervene, though what I could have done I don’t know. I stopped well short of them, though, because Gaki was somehow ahead of me, standing companionably near Hermione, yet with the slightest air of impatience, a man with an appointment.
“Well?” he said. “Finish her.”
Hermione regarded him, still holding the struggling Kiera up one-handed. She sighed massively. “Why, though?” she rumbled.
Gaki seemed taken aback, insofar as he ever was. “Have you ever needed a reason? Because she’s there; because she’s pretty and fragile. Or the overriding reason behind all we ever do: because you can. Because then there will be one less person in the world and the work will be that much closer to completion.”
Hermione grunted. “Were you going to leave me ’til last,” she asked dully, “or did you want to talk Stefan’s ear off about your mind powers?” There has never been a more dismissive assessment of all Helman and I slaved for than Hermione’s just then.
Gaki’s stance shifted ever so slightly, and I swear I drew breath to call a warning. Hermione knew it was coming, though. She had taken the role of henchman to an omnicide, after all, and there is only one way that can ever go. Even as Gaki flicked the little blade up at the great width of her neck she was flailing down at him with whatever she had to hand – in this case, Kiera. What Hermione did not quite appreciate was how effortlessly swift Gaki always was, even from his genteel standing start. Kiera flew past him, limbs windmilling, but the murderer’s body slid like a serpent aside and then he had cut, not quite the smooth and fatal throat-slitting he had doubtless intended, but enough to release a rush of Hermione’s blood.
Hermione sat down suddenly, broad hands clasped about the wound. Her face bowed to her knees and I could not see it.
Gaki stepped back, an artist admiring his canvas, and then turned to me as though inviting a critique. Peter had got to his feet, though, and laid his hands on the Ropa sword’s hilt. With an brutal motion he drew it from the earth and levelled it. His eyes turned once to Shon’s still form, once to me as I clutched my head, once to Kiera: sprawled and dazed.
“All right,” he said quietly to himself, and I remembered how he had set out against Jonas Destavian, another invincible opponent.
“When you’re ready,” Gaki told him. “It is not for a prisoner to rush a Warden, after all.”
Before he had finished speaking the Ropa blade was arrowing in for him, towing Peter in its wake. Gaki dodged it, of course, but Peter had known that he would. He dug his heels in, so that the thwarted momentum of the blade dragged it round, forcing Gaki to hurl himself aside. He regained his poise immediately, but there had been the smallest imaginable moment when he was not in full control of the situation. I realised that he had never fought against a Ropa blade before, nor seen Peter’s duel.
Peter was still moving, steering the eager blade in great arcs and curves that forever impinged on Gaki’s space. Gaki continued to pace backwards and sideways to keep out of their way. I saw his face: a man glad to have a challenge at last. He made no counter-move but kept a single step outside the reach of that deadly blade. Peter’s face was blank: he was concentrating.
Without warning Peter dropped to one knee with a great scything sweep of the blade, then was dragging it up fiercely even as Gaki skipped over it. The killer put a foot on Peter’s shoulder and vaulted over his head with the blade in pursuit. I knew it was only a question of mass and velocity, but Peter was making it look as though the blade wanted to kill Gaki, and he was doing a poor job of holding it back.
Gaki spun, letting the blade pass to one side of him, and I thought he would get Peter then, except that Peter dragged the hilt down and the blade cut where Gaki’s arm would have been. They continued their circling.
I knew Peter must tire, but I saw no sign of it. I knew I could not interfere because I could not predict the blade’s movement, and it would bite into me as willingly as it would Gaki.
It was like watching a raptor take prey in the air, watching that sword. It swooped and dived, always curving back towards Gaki, always homing in. Like a good puppet show where one forgets the puppeteer, I discounted Peter from the fight, it was Gaki against the sword. I think, in the end, even Gaki saw it that way.
The blade drove down for him again, high to low, pulling up just in time to avoid the ground, bearing in for his stomach. This time, Gaki acted. He spun aside like a dancer and, as the blade was pulling round to follow him, his hand pursued it. There was a moment when it passed over or through the hilt of the sword, with that tiny glint cupped in the palm. Then Peter made a shocked sound and the sword dove into the ground and stayed there. I could not see what had happened for a moment, but Peter was staggering backwards and, after a beat, the blood started. Gaki had cut three fingers from his right hand.
Gaki bore a thin white line across one bicep, a souvenir of the Ropa sword’s death-field where he had not moved quite fast enough. It was the only time that anyone had ever marked him. Peter should have been proud.
Peter was holding hard to the wrist of his mauled hand, trying to slow the bleeding. Gaki advanced on him carelessly and the glint in his hand winked at the sun.
I struck out at Gaki with all of my inner energies. The same claw that had crushed Harro’s mind now seized on his, just for a vital second, and Peter whipped his knife out left-handed and ran him through.
Or that was the plan. Peter knew it and I knew it, but nobody had told Gaki. Instead, I felt Gaki’s razor-toothed saw of a mind rip through me, a white-hot pain that exploded every nerve ending I ever had. In that moment I was blind and senseless, knowing only the agony and the hoarseness of my throat as I screamed and screamed. At the same time, without faltering, Gaki slapped the knife out of Peter’s left hand and broke the remaining finger of his right.
When I recovered my wits, Peter was lying virtually beside me, curled up about his own pain. Gaki had not killed us because he had been distracted. Hermione had been calling for him.
There was more blood soaking her prison greys than I had in my whole body and she was staring at Gaki. He must have felt that he owed her something, for he went to her. I fancy I saw a real tenderness on his face, for all that she had only one service left to render him.
“I must be the last, after all,” he told her frankly, then glanced at Kiera, who was clambering to her feet again, looking around for the gun. She made a sudden lunge for the fallen weapon, heedless of whether it would fire or not. Gaki was already there, Hermione abandoned again, effortlessly between Kiera and the weapon. She came up unexpectedly with my duelling dagger instead, and then Peter spat out some bitter words and lurched to his feet again, mangled hand held tight to his stomach. He staggered towards Gaki and I was right behind him. The killer turned on us with a delighted smile on his face, a man welcoming guests at a party.
“Just when I was losing faith in human nature!” Gaki’s left hand slapped Peter across the face, open palm, breaking his nose and giving Gaki the opening to lock his right hand over Peter’s finger-stumps. Kiera went for him with the knife and he rammed her below the ribs with his left elbow, driving the breath from her and knocking her down.
Peter fainted. Even he had his limits. Gaki cast him aside a little disappointedly and blocked the angry, amateur punch I threw at him. Hermione watched us dully, too weak from her wounds to stand or even move.
“What is this obsession with action, Stefan?” Gaki asked me gently. “You’ve had your chance to ape the deeds of others. Stick to what you know. I’d save you ’til last. What are you worried about? Now I’m going to have to do this.”
This was a simple jab to the neck with a single finger, but all the strength went out of my body and I fell loosely to the floor. There were shivers of weakness passing through my every muscle. It was all I could do to lever myself up on my elbows.
With a ‘now where was I?’ look, Gaki turned back to Kiera, who was still getting her breath back, the knife lost. With no other option I cast my mind at him, expecting the same fierce flaying as before, but this time he was not bothering with me and I just slid from the greased iron of his brain, clutching helplessly for handholds.
“Since you care about her, Stefan,” he called to me companionably, “I can draw this out, if you prefer…”
He choked off the word. The expression on his face, for the first and only time, was one of surprise.
Something had come ghosting into the square like a floating seed borne by the wind. I could not help but look at it, and the sight of it made me weaker and more sick than Gaki’s touch had, for it was Greygori Sanguival.
That part of him that had approximated a man was thrown backwards carelessly, like a shawl in hot weather. The long arms trailed in the dust behind him. Behind it; there was no him any more. The articulated legs made their patient way over the rubble and, despite their limp burden, they had a smooth grace to them. The eyes that had sprung from Greygori’s loins were now lustrous with life, and the feelers and sense organs twitched and groped. What Greygori had started, Gaki had finished. He had finally cut away the human part that even the Transforming Man had not been able to transform. Now Greygori was no more, and was perfected.
I think Gaki was horrified by it more even than I, but only because it was a thing that he had killed, and it had not stayed dead. It was a disastrous precedent.
Kiera took that opportunity to scrabble back from him, dagger shaking in her hand. She ended up crouching behind Hermione’s seated form as though intending to use the larger woman as a barricade. Her hand was on that broad, sloping shoulder, though, and I read some desperate camaraderie in that, though I reckoned it would shatter the moment Gaki recovered.
I had that moment, while he was distracted, and I put everything I had into it. I made my brain into a spearhead and launched it at him while he was not expecting me. He flicked me off almost irritably. The instinctive backlash of his brain laid my mind open like an autopsy, so that I had no guards or shields to protect me from the vast Silence of Shadrapar that was all around. For a moment, I was aware of everything.
Gaki was turning back to Kiera. I could feel his mind like a dark, thorn-spiked metal ball. Kiera was a winged thing struggling to fly and Hermione like a rock. Beside me, Peter’s subdued mind boiled with chained rage. Shon was an empty shell, the cage open, the soul flown. Inside the half-dead half-animate thing that had been Greygori, something was unfolding like a puzzle-box.
I touched another mind, a mind vaster than mine as Shadrapar is vaster than the Island, as the sky is vaster than Shadrapar. It was a mind like huge stone blocks slamming into place, earthquakes and thunder and the lightning that destroys.
To me, it was the mind of God. I could not imagine anything else having such a breadth of incomprehensible, inhuman intellect.
Thinking it was God, I prayed; I asked for help. In my direst need I became a believer.
Gaki strode towards Kiera, on message again, the little blade in his hand casting rainbows where the sun hit it. She threw stones and pieces of metal at him, loose clothes, bags of coins. Hermione actually levered herself to her feet, shuddering, her face the colour of ash. I expected a look of betrayal on her face, recounting of shared times on her lips, but she just stared at Gaki as sullenly as she ever had at the Wardens. He was just one more tribulation her life had thrown at her.
He showed them the glint in his hand like a magician exhibiting his sleeves.
But God was coming.
God came as a sense of great calm and peace. Kiera stopped moving and stared at God and, whilst she had been willing to fight Gaki, she knew she had no chance against Him. I likewise saw the error of my ways and saw that my divinity was something else, less divine and more deadly. I touched the contours of its thoughts and marvelled. Who would have guessed that within that ridgy shell was a mind like molten lead and the shift of rock and the dance of the sands?
The Macathar must have been just around the corner all the time, but nobody had known. Now I had called it down upon us and it stretched above us all like… what was it like? I have no similies. It was like a Macathar.
Our reflections were captured in an eye eight feet across. Our signatures were written in heat, in light, in sound, in mediums unknown to man, and recorded within its mind. I was still touching it. I could not bring myself to sever my contact with that consciousness. I had some fleeting idea of what it was like to be a Macathar: more colours than mankind ever saw, more sounds than we hear, to smell the radiation and to feel the crisp vibrations of the Earth’s crust and the songs of each and every star.
Gaki was expressionless. He had no response prepared for the entry of a twenty-foot, crab-legged monster into his plans.
Then he did move, and it was to conclude those plans as quickly as possible, for he was suddenly at Hermione again with the knife spearing down. Kiera darted to one side and tried to kick him, but he caught her ankle.
At last I got through. Help, I said.
I saw the eyes focus and narrow, triangulating, and then Gaki was on fire. The invisible beam had gripped him, and his skin blackened in patches all over his body, and he began to shrivel and crisp and char. I was no more than ten feet away and I felt no heat. Kiera would bear the white, clear impression of Gaki’s fingers on her ankle until she died, but no more than that. The intense, bone-consuming blaze of Gaki’s death was felt by none but Gaki alone. He was curling in on himself, cracking like charcoal. The angry coal of his face was turned from me, and I was glad. Then a breeze picked up from nowhere, and Gaki was ashes, nothing more than ashes drifting through the streets of Shadrapar.
I felt the Macathar turn its attention towards me.
It made a sound in my head: groaning and grinding, vibrating rocks, abused metal, shearing tin and the deepest thunder of the sea, so that my skull rang and my teeth ached and every bone in my body sang. It may have been asking me a question, but no man has ever encountered such a language barrier, not of words but of concepts. My world and the way I perceived it meant nothing to a Macathar, and its world was to me as mine would be to an insect. There was the tiniest overlap, though, some minute common root. It had heard my cry for help and it had come. Now I felt what in a human would be astonishment: a Macathar encountering the unexpected. It spoke to all of its fellows, scattered across the city and the desert (for they have a community, Macathars, that does not rely on physical proximity), and its meaning, clear to me in that moment of contact, was that these Vermin, these scavenging things, had some small intelligence after all, and who would have thought it?
There was no more room for communication, no common ground. I was filed in the anecdotes of the Macathars, and the creature stepped over me and away. Hesitantly at first, but then with more conviction, the thing that had been Greygori Sanguival followed it into the silence that was not Silence any more, but the unthinkable sound of vast inhuman minds at work.
Peter, when he awoke, refused to believe a word of it, but Kiera and Hermione saw it all.
47
Thelwel Through the Looking Glass
Peter and Hermione were both so weak from loss of blood that I thought they would die. It took all our fragments of medical knowledge, and my discovery of a surgery nearby, to save their lives. Neither was able to move for the next week, which infuriated Peter, and which was treated by Hermione as just one more damned slap from the world. Kiera herself could, at first, place no weight on the ankle that Gaki had grasped, but after a few days she began to get its use back. I think it was a result of Gaki’s grip rather than the Macathar’s power. The upshot of all this was that I had to do the running around for a while.
I got us ensconced in the nearest house and I searched for such food as the Vermin had not taken. I buried Shon, too. I found a hand cart and I dragged him to the Academy, where there was a green open space for him. It would be a good place for him to lie, a single corpse in the city’s heart turning the place from a cenotaph to a huge and majestic tomb for a criminal lawyer. Perhaps in future ages, if there are future ages, some archaeologist will disinter his bones and judge him a king of times past, to have been buried so.
I buried him before the Grand Memorial, which became his headstone. Digging a hole of the requisite proportions and then filling it in was surprisingly hard and lengthy work. At the end of it I wanted to say a few words, just for my own peace of mind. I wanted to say that he was a friend, that he had died in a good cause, he had lived a full life, all of those platitudes. In the end I said nothing. I knew what he was, and he knew what he was, and God, if He yet lives and cares, knows what he was.
That got me thinking about posterity, or lack of same.
Hermione, not really trusted by or trusting us, hauled herself off to a room of her own as soon as she was able, leaving Peter and Kiera alone together to further their acquaintance. I was aware of the fact as one might be of a constant, mild toothache.
I saw several Macathars, and could still not comprehend what they were doing. I wondered if they even linked the structures with my almost-vanished kind. They paid me no heed and I was never sure enough of them not to stay still or take cover when they strode into view.
When we had enough food stockpiled to last two weeks, I declared, “I am going to the Authority chambers.”
Peter raised his eyebrows. He and Kiera were playing chess with a beautifully moulded set I had found. Kiera kept winning; she cheated better than he did.
“The Governor of the Island has a mirror that he can use to talk to the President,” I said. “I have seen it myself. I’m going to talk to him.”
“If you think that you owe him anything,” Kiera said.
