Echo from the Void (Lunar Lives Book 2), page 5
Tomf shouted, “Leave her alone! She don’t talk!”
The Reproacher clapped their hands one time again. “Interesting! A Topswinite who can’t talk—we can only imagine the mistreatment you have endured. Join us! We are your voice!”
Lina shook her head and pressed against Tomf.
The Reproacher frowned. “Please friend, you are the last person we want to void. But you must synchronize yourself with the harmonious chorus.” Two Compeers raised their quills.
Lina waved her hands and shook her head. Tomf tried to stand in front of her, but she slid past him.
“Do you choose elucidation then?” the Reproacher asked.
She hesitated a moment, then nodded her head sadly.
“No! No, Lina! Don’t do it!”
She signed with her shaking hands, What choice do I have? Let’s do it and see if we can escape together after it is done.
No escape! Tomf signed emphatically. Look at Wana!
She shook her head and walked over to the Reproacher. She felt like she was in some kind of Ev’ramite trance—time felt slowed, surreal. She heard Tomf shouting in the background, but it seemed courtyards away.
Up close, the Reproacher possessed an odd beauty. The female side faced her, smiling with a strangely maternal look. Like with Wana, she gently asked her to turn around.
Lina wondered what it was going to feel like. Would it hurt? Would she still be herself under that mask? Would she still be able to think? She watched Tomf pacing back and forth, tugging at his hair. The Compeers kept their quills drawn, clearly ready if he decided to charge at the Reproacher. Next to her ears, she sensed the presence of the Reproacher’s hands, but felt no warmth from them at all. She saw that the asp heads had circular mouths with tiny teeth around the edge and a forked tongue flicking behind the teeth.
She felt them press against her head, their sharp teeth digging for purchase. Her heart raced as the pain rang like a siren from her ears. Then suddenly, it stopped. The mouths dropped from her skin. She looked back at the Reproacher, whose face looked perplexed—the first time she’d seen anything other than calm confidence. “Turn your head back.”
Lina turned her head back toward the crowd. Tomf had stopped pacing and was staring at her in confusion.
She felt the mouths pressed against her head again, but this time, the mouths didn’t even try to attach to her. They just hung limply, refusing to dig into her flesh.
For the first time, the Compeers looked at the Reproacher or at each other, showing some degree of individual will and awareness.
The Reproacher looked openly confused and angry now. They cleared their throats in unison. “Perhaps it is because of your . . . condition, that the asp can not affix. Um . . .” The Reproached stopped for almost a whole wave, neither moving nor blinking. They appeared to be in deep contemplation or frozen during intense calculations.
The Reproacher snapped back to life. “Void her,” they said suddenly.
At the word, Tomf sprang into action. He barreled toward Lina, taking advantage of the distracted Compeers. He grabbed her and threw her over his shoulder. The Reproacher shouted in surprise as they stumbled back a few steps. Two Compeers trained their quills on Tomf and Lina as he sprinted toward a hatch door near the edge of the Assembly building. One male Compeer ran to cut Tomf off before the hatch. Lina saw gray slashes in reality around her as she bounced on Tomf’s shoulder. One slash caught a wisp of her hair, and it tore out as they ran away. She yelped in wordless pain. The other Compeer tried to tackle Tomf but was knocked back several wheel-lengths by the sheer mastodon-like size and strength of Tomf. As Tomf turned to open the hatch, she faced where the Compeer had been. Lina watched in horror as the Compeer stumbled backward, his feet tangling as he dropped his quill. The Compeer hit the raised edge of the roof with the back of his legs and flipped backward over the ledge. There was no scream—just a whistling through the air and a crunch as he landed at the bottom.
Lina reflexively shut her eyes tight, wondering if Tomf had just killed someone. They’d seen a lot in Abandoned City, including scuffles and fights, but the idea of killing someone felt scarier.
“Go down the shoot! If we get separated, run for our place,” he said, knowing she would understand even if she couldn’t respond. She felt herself sliding down the stone chute Tomf had constructed for the easy disposal of stage material they no longer needed. She ventured one more look upward at the hatch as she slid down and saw him moving around several of the reality tears and flopping onto the shoot, almost too large for the slide he’d designed.
She turned back toward the darkness of the sloping tunnel, which went from the third-floor roof all the way to the first-floor staging area. The burs and seams between the slabs of stone bruised and scratched her—he had designed it for stage equipment they no longer cared about, not people. She landed on a broken wooden platform, one of the jagged edges gouging her leg. Tomf landed behind her, his giant feet accidentally kicking her and knocking her another few wheels away. She groaned.
“Lina! Are you okay?” Tomf said, his voice trembling.
Lina couldn’t see anything more than a large silhouette, so she couldn’t sign to him. She felt such shame at trying to form words vocally, even in an emergency. Years of strange looks and recoiled postures had taught her that her voice was unwelcome. She concentrated hard and tried to create the sounds “O . . . K . . .”
“Whew!” Tomf said with relief. “I thought I smashed you.” He chuckled, breaking the tension.
They heard the sound of footfalls on the main steps.
“We gotta run! Let’s get to our dugout by the rim!”
Lina grabbed his hand and they ran through the abandoned stage equipment, trying to avoid twisted ankles as they made their way toward the door leading outside.
#
“Even if you are the All Seer, you ain’t go no right to be here,” Hailsound growled.
She flashed her typical enigmatic smile.
Marjaa peeked between the wooden rails that joined the porch to the banister.
“How did you find us?” Ladrin asked, her scythe at her side but still in her hand.
The All Seer shrugged. “We are the Prescient Guard.”
Hailsound growled.
Ladrin stepped down two steps to the grass where the All Seer stood. “Listen, we respect you as a person and we respect your position, but I thought we made it pretty clear when we left the Unmoored Cities we wanted nothing to do with your politics, or intrigue, or whatever you are working on right now.”
The timmuck next to the All Seer hissed, and she patted its turtle-like head. “It’s true, you’ve dodged our problems the last several cycles, but some problems are simply too large to dodge—even courtyards away on the mainland.”
“Ain’t our concern,” Hailsound grumbled.
She stopped stroking the timmuck’s head and looked into Hailsound’s eyes. Marjaa saw a look of relaxed confidence on the woman’s face, but one that narrowed, just slightly, around the eyes into a sharp, confident, determined leader. “Hailsound, we went through the Battle of the Camion together. I have respected your wishes for fourteen cycles. Do you trust my judgement, that if I am here today the situation is dire?”
Hailsound glowered at her, but put his knife back in the sheath on his boot. He gestured for her to come onto the porch. Her guards started to flank her, but she shook her head and they stayed at attention on the grass. One of the guards, a large man with a scarred, bald head, noticed Marjaa, and she felt her heart pound like a hammer all the way into her neck. He quickly looked away, saying nothing to the All Seer, who gathered her robes at her knees as she sat down on the top step. Ladrin sat next to her on the stairs, and Hailsound leaned against the edge of the porch with his arms crossed over his narrow chest, the stub of his elbow resting in the crook of his good arm. Marjaa could see her mother and dad’s faces from her place around the porch, but the All Seer was turned away. She could hear all of them clearly though, and what she heard scared her.
The All Seer smoothed her robe, then started speaking. “I won’t bore you with niceties. The Unmoored Cities are in crisis. We are riven by a group calling themselves the Compeers of the Sacrosanct. They came to our attention two cycles ago, and we’ve been tasked with using our trance skills to observe futures related to their dealings. A disturbing percentage of future outcomes end with the Compeers in total control of the Unmoored Cities and the cities slowly depopulated by a method we don’t yet understand. Worse still, as we invest resources in trying to prune the worst of those futures, several more pop up with similar outcomes.”
Ladrin picked at tilk root under one of her fingernails. She didn’t look nervous, exactly. Marjaa would call it troubled. Troubled and sad. “Who are they? What tribe do they come from?” Ladrin asked.
The All Seer put her palms up. “That’s the problem. They come from all the tribes. They are drawing recruits from everywhere, but particularly among Impotents, the more impoverished sectors of our cities, people who don’t have prominent roles in their tribes, and adolescents.”
“Well, what are they doing? Is it really that much of a threat?” Ladrin asked.
“We didn’t think so at first,” the All Seer continued. “But we were very wrong. Perhaps that’s why we find ourselves in this predicament: we waited too long to intervene. They have a weapon called ‘voiding.’ This is a process where they use a quill to tear the fabric of reality all around a person until they are trapped in a stasis and are incapable of moving or speaking.”
Ladrin frowned. “There’s no miracle like that. It has to be some kind of prestidigitation or sleight of hand.”
The All Seer shook her head. “Sadly, no. I have seen a voided person for myself. There is nothing we Ev’ramites or the great Niliite healers can do for the person. They are just . . . stuck. We suspect many of their ‘recruits’ may be press-ganged into service with the threat of voiding. But don’t be fooled. There are some true believers that willingly join, too.”
“Well, if they have this power of voiding, why haven’t they just taken over the whole of the Unmoored Cities yet? If no one can stop them, why are they playing it slow?” Ladrin asked. Marjaa observed something she’d not seen in her mother for a very long time: a curiosity for world events, and a little bit of fire in her eyes.
The All Seer shrugged. “We don’t know exactly. It appears voiding costs them some kind of . . . resource. Additionally, they are intermittently going to somewhere on the mainland, where some of the Compeers disappear. We don’t know where, why, or what happens to them. But this keeps their numbers from swelling as much as they could be.”
“You said some are joining them willingly. Why would someone join this group that forces others to join with the threat of this . . . voiding? This doesn’t sound like anything most people would want to be a part of. What’s their message that is so persuasive?”
“They are positioning themselves as the advocates of the forsaken people of the Unmoored Cities. They posit that the gods must be rejected, the power of governance must be taken by force, and the Assembly system destroyed. Think about it: after the Battle of the Camion an entire city was evacuated and spread across the other six cities. That’s thousands and thousands of new people in floating cities that can’t easily be expanded. Resources are low. Space is cramped. There are fights, skirmishes. It’s not that squabbles are new—but these are much larger, more well-coordinated actions. We are still not sure how best to integrate the Mukjalites—some try the Rite of Assimilation, but it is difficult for them, and the tribes they join often have such bitterness and distrust toward the Mukjalites. They associate them with the loved ones they lost, even if that Mukjalite may have been a child at the Battle of the Camion.” She sighed, her posture sagging momentarily. “Our cities are a mess, frankly. Chaotic, crime-ridden, overcrowded. Most of the Mukjalites just become informal Impotents scratching out a living. And we don’t banish them to the mainland Impotent ports because they are refugees, not true Impotents who have chosen the Rite of Impotence, nor are they extreme criminals forced to go through the rite. Few of the remaining Mukjalites were involved with the Battle of the Camion at all. We want to help them, but no one knows how.”
Ladrin sat back on her hands, thoughtfully. “Well, can they be negotiated with? It sounds like the cities are in need of reform; that much they are right about.”
The All Seer shook her head. “We’ve tried. They don’t want reform. They want revolution. Their demands are so extreme we presume they offer them simply as a pretense for their insurrection.” The All Seer rubbed her hands together slowly, seeming to chew something in her mind. “We can’t find exactly what it is in our observations of the Compeers, but there is some kind of secondary gain here. They’ve seemed to have moments where they could have ‘gone for our throats,’ so to speak, and won this conflict outright, but they’ve held back at times. They come in, recruit, get a slum or a city on its heels, and then retreat.”
Hailsound shifted his weight and asked, “They got a leader?”
The All Seer sighed. “Yes, a very powerful one. They call themselves ‘the Reproacher’ and they are both male and female—”
“They are a complete?” Ladrin asked. “Then they are obviously from the Bexlan-Ansibe tribe—”
“No, they are not a complete in the traditional sense,” the All Seer interrupted. “They are literally two people, sewn or sutured together. They appear to be a male and female twin somehow conjoined, but we do not think they are a Bexlan-Ansibite complete.”
Ladrin laughed in shock and puzzlement. “People ‘sewn together’? What is this nonsense? There’s no miracle like that! Not for any tribe!”
The All Seer drew in a breath, choosing her words carefully. “I suspect this ‘Reproacher’ is not from a tribe, nor is their . . . condition a miracle in our sense of that word. I think they come from some other source.”
“Who?” Hailsound grumbled.
“We don’t know. What we do know is the Reproacher talks about serving something called ‘the Sacrosanct.’ We can’t even get close to this Sacrosanct in our time trances. It is worse than trying to observe one of the moons or the gods themselves—it is as if a piece of time is just missing. Like the Sacrosanct, whatever it is, either exists in or is the embodiment of an absence in time. We have no answer to that.”
Frogs croaked in the distant pond and the cool wind made Marjaa shiver. She absorbed the information, and it glued her to the ground. She had learned more from this conversation than she had in the rest of her almost-fourteen cycles of life.
“Sounds bad,” Hailsound croaked, “but I still don’t see whassit to do with us.”
The All Seer straightened herself slightly. “Our tribes are riven with division. Some people see the Compeers as heroic. Most recognize they are dangerous but won’t push back against them out of fear. The Universal Assembly has considered a massive military maneuver, but in most of the futures we are tracking this ends in disaster—it alienates enough citizens that the Compeers get the recruits necessary to overthrow the Assembly and institute the despotic rule of the Reproacher. The only futures we see consistently being able to repel this threat is one where the people of the Unmoored Cities coalesce around a beloved figure.”
Ladrin went rigid. “If this conversation is going where I think it is going, you can save your time and just go.”
The All Seer sighed. “It may be difficult to hear, but it must be said: Marjaa is the only person that can unite the Unmoored Cities. It may be uncomfortable for you, but she—and to a lesser extent, both of you—are figures of adoration and religious reverence—”
Ladrin stood and walked to Hailsound, who put his arm around her. He scowled at the All Seer as Ladrin started speaking. “That is exactly why we want nothing to do with this! Or anything with the Unmoored Cities. We are people! A family! We aren’t political or religious figureheads!”
The All Seer also stood, though her posture remained relaxed. “But you are figureheads already—you are just absent figureheads. You can’t escape the image the people project on you. Your choice is either to use that for good or neglect that duty.”
“Duty?” Ladrin said, the word sounding bilious as it came from her mouth. “We ask nothing from the Unmoored Cities, other than to simply be left alone! Why do we owe them anything?”
The All Seer sighed. “This is not a question of what is owed, but a question of what simply is. Few people want the responsibilities they inherit. Rin’za certainly didn’t want to become the Lucid Host, but he became it nonetheless beca—”
Ladrin stepped forward, her erect finger in the air. Hailsound tried to gently hold her back, but she shrugged off his arm. “Don’t you dare! Don’t speak for Rin’za! You convinced him to martyr himself for the Unmoored Cities—”
“Which he did, heroically. We are only here today to speak about it because he accepted what he had to do—”
The two women’s words ran over the top of one another, Ladrin’s sharp and fierce, the All Seer’s calm and firm.
“You took him from me! You took my daughter’s father—”
“Had he not defeated the camion, your daughter would never have been born!”
Ladrin’s mouth snapped shut. She smoldered with rage.
The All Seer continued, “I know this is hard. I’m not asking your family to sacrifice a single thing except your residence for a while. We need you to come to the Unmoored Cities. We need you to become a rallying point for the people, and we need you to implore the people to resist the Compeers. We have scoured the futures and this is the only way. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t.”
“Please leave,” Ladrin said quietly.
“I know you may need some time to consider, but there is a point where even Marjaa’s influence can’t save the people. We need you in the Unmoored Cities in the next five days—”
“I said go! I don’t need time to consider! The answer is no!”
