Ten Arrows of Iron, page 65
And a tiny black shape, small and insignificant and utterly inconsequential, fell to the earth.
And a house was gone.
A plume of fire erupted from the earth. From up here, it looked so small, like I could close my eyes and pretend it hadn’t been so bad. Then another fell. And another. And a garden of flame burst across the Blessing.
I remembered what it was like to look down from on high onto a sea of fire.
And who it would be that drowned in it.
“No.”
My voice. Breathless. Weak. Lost on the wind.
“No.”
Cutting my mouth as I spoke it.
“They did it,” I whispered. “Those fucking… those shitheads… those… those…”
What good would words do anymore? Words wouldn’t be able to take those bombs back. They couldn’t explain what sense it made for the Revolution to attack a village to punish an army. They couldn’t fix anything…
And yet.
“That’s not fair,” I said to myself. “I stopped him. I stopped it all. They can’t do this.” I clenched my teeth. “THEY CAN’T DO THIS.”
You would think so, would you not?
A voice. A thought? No…
It takes so little to convince them to hurt themselves.
A heartbeat.
Time passes, mountains crumble, rivers dry, and they still kill themselves for no reason.
In my head. In my body. In my blood.
Ah, well.
In the clouds ahead, a mountain peak loomed large in our path. Towering, twisted, with things that looked like limbs.
Perhaps that’s why they fascinate us so much.
It wasn’t until I saw the collection of massive animal skulls serving as its head that I realized it was no mountain.
And by then, it had me.
The airship groaned to a sudden halt, sending us skidding along the deck to slam against the railing. My body exploded in pain, just enough of me left to scramble away from the sides as a colossal hand made of briars, trees, and wicker reached up and seized the hull of the ship, each finger twice the size of me. It was followed by another, and another, three misshapen limbs holding on to the airship and keeping it from moving.
They pulled the railing down low. A morbid display of skulls and bone, lashed together by wire and rope, peered over the edge of the airship. I stared at it, clutching Liette, mouth agape.
The effigy stared back.
It was different than the one back in Terassus—bigger, angrier, more skulls and limbs—but I knew its stare. I knew the fires burning inside its body of bone and wood. I knew the sound of its heart beating in perfect time with mine.
“I can feel you,” its wooden body rumbled, a voice so soothing having no place coming out of a creature so foul. “I can feel your body crumbling. I can feel your thoughts swirling about inside you.” Its collection of skulls canted to the side, almost quizzical. “Is that fear? Love? Both? Or are you so pedestrian as to be consumed with wondering how I found you? Would that I could provide an answer that would not break you.”
Splinters and twigs popped from its colossal body as it moved. Its great mass swiveled toward Liette, its fires stoked inside the empty sockets of its many skulls.
“Would that any of us had time.”
Without thinking about it, without even breathing, I stepped in front of her. I held the Cacophony out, his grin leveled at the effigy’s heads. The great mass of wood and flame and bone did not seem impressed.
Not that I could tell, what with it being a bunch of fucking skulls strapped together.
“Ah, a moment. I recognize this sensation consuming you.” A wistful sigh escaped the effigy on plumes of smoke seething out its many holes. “That yawning sense of futility. That dawning realization that all that you possess, all that you can do, all that you are is not enough. And never will be. It lurks in every prayer and every desperate hope.”
It leaned over the railing. Liette took my free hand, the two of us backing away from the shower of cinders and splinters as the effigy’s shadow fell over us.
“My faithful, too, radiate it,” it hissed. “Would that you could feel them as I feel. The fervor of their devotion, the rush of their fear, the sheer ecstasy of feeling both of them break at the same time. As I offered them salvation, so, too, do I offer it to you.”
I saw it for the first time. A flash of pain and light across my eyes, like the flickering ache of an old wound. I saw within the effigy, past the wicker and bone, past the blood and flame, to the burning heart within. To the eyes that stared back out at me.
The Seeing God stared at me. And it extended one of its massive hands, beckoning.
“Render unto me what is mine and I will give it all to you,” it said. “Safety. Security. Whatever you need to convince yourselves such things are attainable. Everything your feeble person craves that you refuse to acknowledge yearning. It can be yours. Simply return my sibling to me.”
Its wooden fingers extended, popping and creaking, as it held out a colossal, splintering palm.
“Return Eldest.”
Eldest?
Sibling?
Shit. Shit, shit, shit.
You wouldn’t think there were many things that could make a ten-story-tall monster of bone and fire that could crush you with one finger more frightening. But a ten-story-tall monster of bone and fire that was also a fucking Scrath sure as shit would do it.
This thing—monster, effigy, Seeing God, whatever the fuck its twisted devotees called it—was no god, no savior. It was a parasite. A fetid tick riding a host, drinking the blood offered it. What had it offered Haven that they agreed to follow it? Did they even know?
I didn’t. But I knew what it was offering me.
The beating of my heart flickered in time with the quivering of its fires. I could feel its voice inside me, reading my thoughts, my feelings like they were graffiti on a wall. I could feel the promises it offered, the sincerity of its sensation. How easy would it be, I wondered, to just reach out my hand and simply take it?
But to do that… I’d have to let go of her first.
I looked back to Liette. And she looked at me. No pain in her eyes, no fear, no scorn. It spoke to her as it spoke to me, offering promises, rewards, things even she couldn’t put into words.
I wondered… did visions of me flood her mind as visions of her had flooded mine?
Our eyes met. She gave me the slightest smile, as soft and gentle as the first one she’d ever given me. She squeezed my hand tightly.
And I knew what our answer was.
I turned toward the effigy. I showed it my smile. I closed my eyes, reached out my hand…
And pulled the trigger.
Discordance smashed against its skulls, the eruption of sound tearing bone and wood from its body, sending a pair of colossal craniums flying into the wind. Its remaining hollow sockets stared at me and I wondered if that was disappointment I saw in its stare.
Maybe.
If it wasn’t, though, that sure as hell was disappointment I saw in the giant fist that it clenched, that it raised high into the sky…
And brought down upon us.
I had always thought I wanted to die in song. In great fires or bloody wars that would be sung about in taverns once everyone had exactly two drinks more than they should have. Or maybe in solemn ballads sung by bards on street corners about the day I put down my sword, walked away, and disappeared into legend.
Now I knew there wouldn’t be enough left of me for a song.
But if there was…
I hoped it would be something slow. Something soft and tender. Something young women sing to their lovers or mothers soothe their children to sleep with. Something about how Sal the Cacophony had stared down her end, with the smell of her love’s hair in her nose, with the feel of her love’s fingers around her own, gently rubbing a finger across a scar on her palm, and when it finally came…
It hadn’t hurt at all.
I held my eyes shut. I breathed in the cold wind. A warmth neither searing nor angry coursed through me. And with her beside me, I waited.
I felt the deck shift beneath me. I felt a great rush of wind. And then…
I felt a scream.
A great wail coursed through my blood, a pain that went deeper than a human body could handle. I opened my eyes, saw the effigy’s great fist hovering three feet over my head, halted and trembling.
Its wooden hand began to change. The deep crimson of its splintering lumber bled to a pale gray. The wood creaked and groaned as it began to change, the wood becoming brittle and calcified. Twigs and branches turned to pale stone, snapping off to splinter into dust.
Just like Eldest’s body.
“In all your great eons and all your great wisdom, am I to understand that you still have no idea how these things work?”
A voice, sneering and snide like the nicks in an uncared-for knife, cut through my ears. I whirled and beheld a man, frail and bent beneath his Revolutionary coat, approaching, his hand outstretched.
And his eyes pitch black.
“Truly,” Culven Loyal, commander of the Iron Fleet, muttered at the effigy. “Your standards have grown lax.”
Loyal tightened his hand into a fist. The effigy’s fist exploded into a rocky powder, cast out upon the wind. The effigy watched its hand, reduced to nothingness, dissipate and leave behind a splintering stump. It turned its collection of skulls toward Loyal, fires burning in their sockets.
“Sibling,” it acknowledged.
“Sibling,” Loyal replied, inclining his head.
“SIBLING?!” I screamed, glancing between them. “You’re fucking family?”
“We share common origin.” Loyal smiled bitterly. “We are not family.”
Undeterred by the looming horror staring down upon him, Loyal walked forward, hands folded behind his back. He glanced up at the effigy and sneered with the same distaste with which one regards a pile of trash on the street.
“Am I to understand, then, that you have decided against all experience and wisdom to challenge me?” he asked of the effigy. “Or did you merely wish to reconnect?”
“I have no desire to experience the unpleasantness of your presence, nor any of our wayward kin,” the effigy rumbled in reply. “Yet is that arrogance I see tinging your countenance? When did you learn such a thing?”
“It comes with power,” Loyal replied, his face coiled into a seething smile. “As does hatred. Contempt. Terror. All that we sacrificed for her, all that we were denied, this land bleeds. From every creature on this desolate husk of dirt.” His smile faded. “But surely you realized that. I’ve seen your pets.”
“Pets?” I asked, agog. “You mean… the Haveners?”
“My devoted give me only so much,” the effigy said. “Neither they nor I have any interest in you or your deranged minions.”
“Is that so?” Loyal hummed. “I had assumed otherwise by the fact that yours are currently trying to slaughter mine.”
“Shit,” I whispered to Liette, taking a step back. “Shit. Haven, the Revolution… they’re both answering to these… these…”
“I am here for Eldest,” the effigy said. “When our sibling is returned to me, you may take your toys and make them march around as much as you see fit.”
“I would have thought it obvious that I have no intention of doing that,” Loyal snapped. “Yet you have always failed to live up to expectations. Perhaps the error is mine. Why would I give our sibling to you when I have only just now broken them free of their cell, Wisest?”
“Do not mistake your haughtiness for intellect, Strongest,” the effigy seethed in response. “You stand here only by virtue of having been the first to be cast out. Eldest’s knowledge would be wasted on your decaying shell.”
“Cast out?” I blurted out. “Wisest? Strongest? Just what the fuck is—”
“Contrary to whatever belief you may hold…” Loyal turned his void-dark stare upon me, face seething with contempt. “Your befuddled interjections are neither charming, contributive, nor desirable. Have you nothing else to offer us?”
“As a matter of fact,” I replied, raising my gun, “I do.”
I pulled the trigger. Right into his shriveled face, Discordance flew.
Slowed.
Stopped.
Inches away from his nose, the shell came to a sudden halt, hanging in midair, unexploded and useless. Loyal’s left eyebrow twitched. And it all fell apart. With precise dismantling, the shell split in half, emptied its contents, and fell to the ground in a collection of useless metal and Dust.
“Shit,” I whispered.
“Rather,” Loyal replied.
He raised a hand, leveled a finger toward me, curled it.
And fire shot through me.
It flooded through my body, into every fiber of muscle and every droplet of my blood. My legs gave out from under me, my arms ceased to work, my brain ceased to think. All that was left in me were my lungs and just enough air to scream.
And I did.
“Two hundred and six bones, seven hundred–odd layers of muscle,” Loyal muttered, contempt dripping from his voice. “A tangle of fragile nerves, a collection of gases and fluids, all bound together by a singular lump of soft gray.”
He curled his finger a little more. I no longer had a voice.
“This is all that it takes to create you. Nothing more than a collection of glistening parts and luck.”
A little more. I didn’t have breath anymore.
“And to unmake you?”
He curled his finger again.
“Even less.”
My heart ceased to beat.
Breathless. Dying. Unraveling. I didn’t know. I couldn’t think. Not as the darkness swirled around me, not as I struggled to find the voice to call out for her, not as I tried to reach for her, for the gun, for anything with hands that no longer worked.
As I went rigid with pain, the effigy stiffened up. Its titanic body groaned, wracked with a pain its skulls couldn’t convey. The fires inside its chest began to dim, plumes of smoke and cinders escaping its body to dissipate on the wind.
If there was any blood left in my brain, I might have found that odd. If I could think or feel anything except animal panic hurling itself against the walls of my useless body, trying to break free, that would have been nice, too. But I couldn’t. Nothing worked. My body wouldn’t obey. My lungs wouldn’t fill. My heart wouldn’t pump blood. I was going to—
“STOP!”
A moment. A word. A blink of an eye.
And it all stopped. The pain. The fire. I could breathe again, could feel again. I could see Liette, standing in front of me, her hands held out wide.
Eldest clutched in her hand.
“Truly?” Loyal arched one brow. “That’s all it takes? Predictable. But acceptable.” He extended his hand. “Return Eldest and take your collection of flesh and be gone. Consider this our only mercy—”
“Second law.”
“I do not—”
“Second law,” she reiterated through clenched teeth. “A Freemaker, upon accepting assistance, must compensate fairly for said assistance, by whatever means necessary.” Her eyes narrowed, her fist tightened around Eldest. “Anyone who helps me—everyone who helps me—I will never abandon.”
She leaned down, pulled me close against her. Her warmth seeped through me. Her smell filled my nose.
“Ever,” she said, tears streaming down her cheeks. “No matter the cost.”
Loyal’s sneer twisted to a disappointed frown. “The purpose behind human affection for pointless dramatism continues to elude. Am I to assume you will not surrender Eldest?”
Liette’s face burned with a searing anger she only ever used for me. Her mouth opened, for a stirring rebuke, a defiant speech, or maybe just a few good cusses. But whatever she had been holding on to couldn’t find its way to her mouth. Her anger fell, her face with it. She closed her eyes, held Eldest closely to her chest, and whispered the two words I never wanted to hear her say.
“Forgive me.”
Loyal’s face turned to a twisted smile. “I am certain the sentiment would be appreciated, if Eldest were capable of it.”
“I wasn’t talking to Eldest. Or to you.”
She turned to me. She gave me a smile. Soft. Tender. Apologetic.
“NO!”
That was my scream.
That was my hand, reaching out as she raised Eldest above her head.
That was me trying to stop her.
And me failing.
Loyal’s eyes widened. He reached out with that terrible hand, stared through those terrible eyes, but it didn’t matter.
In another instant, I couldn’t see him. Or her. Or anything.
Sound died—the wind, the carnage, the airship. Color vanished—the gray of the skies, the red on my hands. The world disappeared, swallowed up by a great light, a spectrum of colors too beautiful to behold, too terrible to look away. The barest crack appeared on Eldest.
The light erupted.
A great pillar of twisting hues and radiance erupted, snaking serpentine through the sky and painting a halo above us. I stared at it through burning eyes I couldn’t blink, my mouth agape in a soundless scream at its majesty. It was beautiful. It was incredible. It was indescribable.
Eldest. A Scrath. In its purest, rawest form.
It hung in the air there—for a second, for twenty years and two days, I didn’t know. So radiant that it could abide no other light to besmirch its beauty. And though my ears were too primitive, too useless to understand all of it, I thought if I listened, I could hear a song condensed into a single, perfect note.
It sounded… sad.
Then, the great column of light twitched, shivered, and came sweeping down into a pillar. Out of the sky, out of the world.
And into Liette.
The light flooded into her, through her mouth, her eyes, her very pores. The radiance tore at her, threatened to break her apart with its splendor. Her mouth craned open, the song escaping into the sky. But all I could hear was her scream.
I forced my body to rise, I didn’t care how much it hurt. I forced it to run. To leap.
