The Void Ascendant, page 31
At last she stirred, gazing around as if she had just realized that we were all yelling. The floor began to vibrate up through the soles of my boots, so hard that my teeth clacked together. I locked my jaw and looked back at Ksajakra and the Advisor through my crackling tunnel: they were braced and ready, standing behind me a few paces away. Our makeshift barricade was giving way, the railings and panels beginning to slide across the slimy floor.
I lifted my sword again, wearily, my arms on fire, muscle, bone, something else, whatever the god was doing, whatever he was eating or ripping away from me to build the spell; my helmet filled with the rotting-fruit-and-solvent smell of magic. And above the cage, an orange spot began to glow on the ceiling, burning away the rags of mould and web that hung from it so that ash rained onto us, embers fluttering across the room and sputtering in the slime.
Yenu absently wiped the ash from her helmet, leaving a long gray smear. “Get out of there!” Ksajakra shouted again.
We cannot leave her!
“I’m well fucking aware of that! Yenu! Get—” My voice left me in a wave of agony, rippling across me from inside to out, seeming to earth itself in my fingertips and head, so that I was only dimly aware that I was staggering, then falling. Someone caught me, and darkness covered my helmet. A wing, the black feathers smeared with filth.
From the ground I writhed and watched the orange circle grow, to redden in the centre like a sunset, and then suddenly open. A column of water slammed down, caving in the top of the metal cage like a fist, washing Yenu across it with a startled cry. My arm reached out for her without a single conscious thought, causing a fresh wave of pain that crisscrossed my body as if I had torn it off and set it on fire. I screamed, unheard in the din of the falling water.
The room was rapidly flooding, the thin trickle of water through the door its only release; everything we had not seized to barricade the door was beginning to float, and icy water lapped at my legs, rising with shocking speed.
Ksajakra was shouting something to the Advisor, who nodded, and they began to climb the half-crushed cage, the Advisor managing easily with three limbs, holding me with the fourth as I twisted and shrieked; Yenu, below me in moments, was no more than a scarlet mote in what vision I had left, paddling and kicking, trying to get to the walls of the cage.
What are you doing? I screamed internally. We’ll drown before you get that open! And she’s still trapped!
The god did not reply; the water torrented down as if forced through a firehose, under who knew what pressure, the ceiling bowing under it, metal beginning to tear like paper. The glowing strips in the ceiling went out. I waited for the cold to ease the pain, but it did not. The cost, he had said. The cost—
At last, the hole in the ceiling began to glow a blue-white, and I shut my eyes as we were yanked upwards through it, walloping briefly through a thin wall of water seemingly as hard as concrete, and dragged at skin-flaying speed through a glittering whiteness that left us washed up, gasping and shivering, somewhere else, but on solid ground, dry and flat.
I got up sluggishly; my body felt loose, boneless almost, as if I had been a rubber band stretched too far. (Maybe I had? Best not to think about it.) My helmet was cracked—it looked all the way through this time, though the filters were still working, and I could breathe if I did it slowly. A spangled green arc interrupted my field of vision, which had returned more or less to normal, if a little pink where I must have busted some blood vessels.
“Where are we?” I croaked; the metal plain was featureless, no sign of the lake, and the few ruins far in the distance were plainly not the ship. “Ogruthon. Hey. Where did you put us?”
The ship is not far, the voice finally came back, faint and tinny, as weak as when I had first heard him. I had to strain to hear him over the noise of the wind. An hour’s walk. Head towards the three-spired tower to our left and you will see it.
“Stop saying our,” I said. “That’s my left and don’t you forget it. If you don’t have a body, you don’t have a left.”
Silence; then a faint chuckle.
I told the others, pointed at the tower, and went over to where Yenu was curled on the ground like a shrimp, poking her back with the toe of my boot. Her helmet was shattered like a car windshield held together with safety film. I had thought Ogruthon would break the cage open somehow, but he must have just given one tremendous yank to get her out. “What happened in there?”
“I don’t know,” she said, not getting up.
“Can you walk for an hour?”
“I don’t know.”
“And may I just say, it is very refreshing to hear you finally admit that you don’t have all the answers,” I said. “Come on. Your lieutenant will carry you if he has to.”
“Okay.”
She still didn’t move, and I sighed and squatted next to her. “All right, so the god is dead,” I said quietly. “It’s a speedbump, not a dead end. You’ll do what you always do. Pivot based on new information, pick a new direction, and go. It’s not the end. What, did it fuck you up somehow?”
“I think so.”
“Oh.” That was interesting; but without even consulting the god inside of me, I knew it wasn’t something we could fix. I leaned closer, closer, till our helmets touched, and pitched my voice just loud enough to go through them both. “Get up or get dragged.”
She got up.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Around the ship, in the star-filled void, we began to see things like small tornadoes, tiny angry vortices of star-dust and pale flame. Yenu and Sudworth seemed to think they were ill omens; I leaned on the railing and watched them as the two discussed things from their personal treasure hoard of strange knowledge, their voices occasionally drifting back to me like dry leaves, a word here and there only. The dust devils were pretty, and they seemed harmless enough.
I did not know where Yenu was taking us now, only that we had to get away from the prison in the lake. We were forming patterns by what we were doing, and if there was any way to break up the pattern, we had to try.
And still I felt, without any evidence, that we were being pursued, and laughingly so; as if we were being tracked by something that saw our course like footprints on fresh snow, every part of the track visible.
The Advisor padded up next to me and sat back on his haunches. He smelled of the strong herbal soap we had brought onboard, and woodsmoke. “The others are eating at the fire,” he said.
“Mm.”
“I brought you food,” he added. “I will eat with you, Prophet, if you will tolerate the company. It seems you wish to be alone.”
“No. I thought I did. Maybe I just don’t want to eat alone.” I laughed bitterly, and unwrapped the packet of food: dried fruit, a rectangular slab of cheese crusted around the edges with crystals of salt and shards of pepper, a brick of compact, chewy black bread. At the bottom of the packet were several long shreds of jerky, dark red and fatty.
“Did... she tell you what happened in the ship of the god?” the Advisor said, unwrapping his own packet.
“No. But something did. You know, I truly think she doesn’t know. That frightens her more than whatever happened. It wouldn’t be correct to say that she knew everything, even back on... back when I first knew her. But it would be correct, I think, to say that she’s rarely even had to consider that she doesn’t know more than all the people around her.”
“So she was wise? Or she surrounded herself with fools?”
“Both, I suppose.” And again I had a flash of the past, unwanted, burning, brief: the bright little insects ambling along the hallways of her keep, that huge joke house like a fortress dug so deep into the ground I used to think it was warmed by the mantle, the insects looking for things to roll, unsure of what they were supposed to do with them afterwards.
“But not all who are wise can be trusted.”
“No.”
“Whatever happens…” the Advisor began, then paused.
“I know what you’re going to say,” I said. “So let me say it, because you’ll dance around it and dance around it and dance around it and you’ll say something next to it but it won’t be what you meant to say. I’ll say it for you. Listen, Advisor. She lied to me. She lied to save her image, then she lied to save her powers, and the world ended and I thought, At least she cannot lie to me any more. So now, no, I don’t trust her. I trust nothing she says, nothing. And if the time comes that I think she is lying again and I must make a choice, it’s you I’ll save, not her.”
“I—”
“She thinks she’s a chosen one,” I said, irritated. “And she’s got the rest of them thinking that too... She isn’t. She’s a tool made by a malevolent blacksmith. If she says otherwise, that’s a lie too. We have to save her only so he can’t use her. She’s not a chosen one. She’s a made thing. Broken down and remade into something worse, not better. And chosen only because she survived the breaking. That’s all. She doesn’t deserve to live through this. Neither do I. You do.”
He shook his head.
“Stop,” I said. “You don’t know her like I do. She’ll betray us all, Advisor. It’s what she was made to do. She fights it all the time. When she gets tired of fighting, it’ll be the end of us.”
“Then what should we do about it?”
“I don’t know. Nothing, I suppose. Not without hard evidence. As we’ve been doing. The others will still defend her to the death. They really think she’s some kind of saviour... They bought her whole act. I admit it’s the one she’s best at. She steps onto the stage and she plays it no matter what else she’s supposed to be doing.” I folded the empty paper carefully, put it in my pocket, and took out my canteen. Empty. They would probably have wine at the firepit, but I still felt unwelcome there.
“The problem is, we won’t know she’s about to betray us until the moment she does it,” I said, leaning on the railing again, looking down into the eddies of the River. “Before that, what can we do? You can’t arrest someone before they’ve committed a crime.”
“You can if they say they will commit the crime.”
“Only on Aradec,” I said. “That won’t fly here. And she hasn’t said anything, anyway. And she won’t.”
He stretched his wings, resettled them flat against his back, a gesture he used as, more or less, punctuation. “Then we must wait.”
“I don’t see what else we can do.” I put my canteen back, and added, “I suppose we could go get some wine. If we both go.”
“Yes, we could do that.” He smiled. “I’ll go if you will.”
When we sat, Itzlek hefted the jug from its niche in the rim of the pit, poured, and handed me a wooden cup of wine, tea-hot, and supplemented both with herbs and, I thought, a healthy glug of something far more high-octane than wine. I sat, juggling my cup, and Liandan got up from next to me without comment and wandered off towards the heads.
Sudworth had gotten well into whatever the drink was; she was so pink her white eyebrows stood out like chalk. “Don’t you start,” she said, before I said anything.
“No’m.”
Yenu was playing with something small, and staring moodily into the fire.
“What’s that?” I said, and was surprised when she held it out to me; I took it automatically, somewhat out of surprise as well, and examined it closely: a wooden box, stained dark brown and with a simple brass clasp and corners. It looked like the kind of thing you’d put an engagement ring into, though less fancy. It felt empty. “That wasn’t really an answer,” I said.
“You can open it if you want,” she said, still looking at the fire.
“Absolutely not,” I said. “There was a whole movie warning people not to open strange boxes.”
“I promise you the Cenobites will not show up.”
“If they do, you talk to them,” I warned her. “I am not even giving them the time of day.”
“I will.”
I flipped up the catch; everyone craned their heads to look. It wasn’t empty, but its contents weren’t what I had expected, either. Well, and how big was a god when it was alive, and how small did it become when it was dead, and what did size mean to gods anyway?
I held it up to my eye in case Ogruthon wanted to look, unsure as always whether he could look with or without me. Inside was only a droplet of something that looked like mercury, skittering around the lightly-incised sigils on the inner surface as I tilted it around. Unable to stop myself, I tipped the box over my hand and waited for the droplet to hit my palm, but it stayed stuck inside. I shut the box again and gave it back to Yenu.
“Did Ogruthon say anything?” she said.
“No.”
She bowed her head over the box again, moved it between her remaining fingers slowly, easy with the lightness of it. As clearly as if she had spoken I thought: She wants to toss it into the firepit.
She wouldn’t, I knew. Not in front of everyone. If she were going to do it, she would do it later, by herself. Rekindling the fire if she had to. Her life was still composed of this: succeed and only succeed in public; fail only in private. Certainly do not draw attention to the failure. There was still that about her. There was still that, and it still made her dangerous. And even with the small, hopeful flame of our plan burning inside me, this fear would not go away.
I had felt hope before, and she had killed it before.
“Yenu,” Rhakun said softly, “please, where are we going now?”
“We are actively evading pursuit,” she said. “We are putting distance between ourselves and the scene of this latest liberation. It is a tactical retreat.”
“And then what will we do?”
“Then we will renew the fight.”
“But how?”
“I’ll figure that out,” she said.
No you won’t, I thought. Because we’ve finally been told that the task we have to accomplish is too big for you. For any single person. For any mortal. For all the mortals that still live. We need to do the impossible and there’s no way you can get around it. When will they turn on you? Soon, I think. And what will I do when they do?
No one spoke for a long time. At last, Sudworth got up and stretched, unsteadily, and announced that she was going below; one by one, everyone got up and followed. Ksajakra was the last, and he and I both paused and looked at Yenu, alone by the fire, before we too walked down the steps.
I woke to fire, to smothering smoke, falling through the clouds of a dream of a glassy black mountain with a single inhabitant, watching me, fire, fire, “Fire!” I tried to scream but no words came, nor breath.
Reality slammed back into place like a door: not fire but pain, a stabbing blade and a hand around my throat, and someone’s hot, desperate, sour breath. I reached out blindly, felt the blade slash across my palm in the dark, snarled, used my other hand to pry away the hand squeezing my neck, and finally seized a handful of hair and ear and slammed a head against the wooden edge of the bunk.
In a moment I had slithered fully out of the bunk and, despite not being able to use my left arm properly, brought my full weight down on top of something that squirmed and flailed, and held it down on the floor, still silent. Blade. Where was it? Did they drop it? I groped for a throat, felt beard, stubble, scraping my hand, the sudden snap of teeth, saliva falling across my fingers.
The curtains were yanked aside, and lanterns appeared out of nowhere, dazzling me so that I couldn’t see, and then it was a blur of golden light, red blood, voices, hands. Pain roared and shrieked where my neck and shoulder met, and something bobbed out of the corner of my eye, something bright, wet. There was a scuffle, the clang of metal against metal, and then, very near my ear, a man’s voice saying in Low Dath, “Someone fetch a cloth, quickly!”
“Who was it,” I said, or the god said, or somebody. “Who was it? Who.”
No one answered; a white face passed close to mine, startling me so that I gasped and tried to recoil as if from a ghost. I felt drunk, despite only having a few sips of wine several hours ago. Had it been several hours? There was no time here on the river of darkness.
“Oh my God,” said the face in English. Another flurry: my shirt being removed, then my undershirt, and then I was on the floor and someone was pressing on my shoulder with both hands. Underneath, it felt as if they had brought a live coal to hold against my skin. “Quit moving around! God. I need someone heavier—no, not you.”
A darkness, a familiar face. The lanterns kept swaying. Were we being buffeted in the current? What current? I breathed, smelled blood. The Advisor reached out carefully with his right forepaw and pressed it down on the coal.
“Hear me out!” someone was shouting in Low Dath, a man. “Then let me finish what I began!”
“Who,” I said again, aware that my voice was ragged and faint.
“Liandan,” said someone next to me. Yenu, breathing fast. “He must have been trying to cut your throat. While you were. While...”
“Fucking incompetent,” I croaked. “Did you put him up to this. Did you ask to have me killed. You son of a bitch. Did you think the god would go to you? Is that what you wanted all along? How long were you planning this, when did you tell him to do it?”
“Stop talking shit.”
“You. You. You almost had me. You’d do anything, anything for power, not even money, power, we saw it for years, and then it was all taken from you, you were a vermin-infested skeleton in a dungeon, but you saw it swing by you again, close enough for you to touch—”
“Shut up,” she said. “Stop it. You’re not even making sense, and you’ll say something you’ll regret.”
“Will I.” It was becoming difficult to speak.
“Trust me or not, I don’t care,” she said, putting her face closer to mine. “The god had his chance. Anyway, if I wanted to kill you, I’d do it myself. And I don’t want the spy to hear any of this. Shut up.”
