Future Artifacts, page 11
He was mostly right.
The thump in his chest knocked him back a step. Nev had a moment to wonder at the feathered shaft jutting from his chest before the pain hit him, a purl of fire that uncoiled across his whole left side.
How terrible. He had loved this body.
The second arrow took him in the left side, a little lower. He let himself fall because he knew they would keep shooting until he did. He loathed to let go of the alpaca’s lead, but did so, yelling for her to run. She kicked up her toes and took off into the darkness.
Nev lay on the still-warm ground. He slipped his fingers behind him, took hold of the small utility knife he kept in a discrete sheath tucked into the inside of his belt. The burning pain of his wounds threatened to cloud his mind, but he breathed through it, as he has been trained to do.
“He down?”
“He’s down. Where’s the fucking camel?”
“I can track it.”
“Let’s search him first.”
Nev closed his eyes and listened to their approach. Two voices. More importantly, two separate gaits, not three or six or eight. Two was difficult, but not impossible.
He had loved this body. Youth was wasted on the young.
Their hands on him. A rough kick at his wounded side.
Nev rolled and lunged, stabbing the nearest man in the throat. Blood gushed. The man gurgled. Behind him, a younger woman, little more than a girl, shrieked. She fumbled with her bow, dropped it, thinking better of the distance, and went for a knife.
But by then the man was bleeding out. Nev pulled him close, so close he smelled the terror of his breath and felt the tinkling of the man’s curly black beard. Nev pressed his palm to the back of the man’s neck, skin on skin as if they would share a kiss, while the man’s hot blood soaked them both. The man’s body sagged.
Nev huffed out a breath.
Felt the distant stabbing in his side. The girl with the knife.
Too late, though, too late.
He jumped.
* * *
The girl in his grasp. The yellow field. Easy to take her. Face to face. Breath to breath.
But as his fingers closed over her throat she murmured,
Come little Jini in your flying machine
Come across the waves with me
Those golden waves, Jini
Those golden waves.
Nev released her. Lay back. Huffing. “Bring help,” he said. He stuffed his fist in his wound. He wouldn’t make it. It would take too long. If they knew who—what—he was, maybe a line commander would send a body. But how …?
He grabbed the chain at his neck. Yanked at it, too weak to fumble with the clasp. On the end of the chain dangled a stone of green glass and silver etched with his name and rank within the guild. It contained something far more important than that, though.
“Get this stone to a soldier,” he said. “Command. Send … help.”
The little girl took the stone into her palm. Wiped at the blood. “I’m Matild Clovanis,” she said, “from Avarise. What is your name? I can’t help a stranger.”
“Nevarius. Now run! Go! Before I change my mind!” he snarled.
She leapt away, a startled deer.
He lay where she left him. Tears clouded his vision, or maybe the darkness was coming. He wasn’t sure which—or both. More the fool, him. A soft heart. Corpse soldiers with soft hearts wouldn’t last a decade, let alone a century. He would die on this field with all the others because he did not have the heart to kill a little girl.
Nev rolled on top of his fist, using the pressure of his body to further quell the blood from the worst wound. From this vantage, he could just see the outstretched hand of a corpse, one half-buried in mud churned up by some elemental wizard.
Nev clawed his way forward. An inch. Two. A hand’s breadth. Gagging, making bloody bubbles, sick with pain, he crept forward. Again. Again.
The darkness. Death. The long night. He felt it, comforting, like a warm bath after a long, agonizing day punishing his body to the brink of its endurance. How wonderful would it be to just … stop?
He stopped. How far to go?
Nev reached for the fingers of the corpse ahead of him as the darkness took him.
I should have been a better soldier, he thought.
It was the last thought he had in that body.
Nev was not the first to escape the Body Mercenary Guild; he certainly would not have been the last. There was no public record of rogue Body Mercenaries; it would inspire panic and pogroms if the public knew exactly how many people like him walked among them. His records, such as they were, would be closely guarded things. He liked to imagine that perhaps he had been officially declared dead. After all, there was no physical way to know he was still alive outside summoning his soul into another body.
And only one with the stone could do that. The stone he had given Matild that day. Matild from Avarise. He would never be free, truly free until he destroyed that stone.
The guild loved to make its members’ lives more difficult; to make all lives more difficult. The more difficult the lives, the better it felt it was doing its job. It believed itself the arbiter of whose lives counted and whose did not. In all his living years, decades, he had never thought who got to be human a political position. It was a moral and religious position. But in most of the countries and city-states he’d lived, there was no line between government morality and religious morality. Right and wrong were beliefs, as were religions. Intrinsically tied, for better or worse.
His continued existence had come down to his military usefulness. What greater fear could an army invoke than unleashing a wave of undead against the enemy, undead who could take on the face of those they killed? Shock. Horror. Awe. Fear. He had seen all of it.
Nev came sputtering back into consciousness. He lay on the ground next to a pock-marked young man with two arrows jutting out of his torso. From this vantage, the young body Nev had worn looked foolish, foppish, the mussed hair, the terrible complexion, the knobby knees and elbows.
He bent over in his new, shaggy body and vomited. Black bile. A little blood. He reached reflexively for the wound he had inflicted while in his other body. It had already closed. His tunic was heavy with his blood.
Nev gazed into his big, calloused hands. Coarse black hair studded the knuckles.
Across from him, the girl was on her knees, eyes glistening in the starlight. “Papa?” she said, choking on her tears. “Papa, are you all right?”
Nev’s guts churned. He stumbled off the path and yanked down his pants. A wet sea of shit left his body. He braced himself against a heavy tree trunk and vomited again.
Gasping, spitting, he yelled, “Stay away!” He did not even know her name. They tried to kill you, he thought, here you are, soft again. But he had made his own terrible choices often. He understood.
“Papa, I—”
Nev heard the crashing before she did. Whether it was his heightened senses after the body jump or her fear and grief that disguised it, he did not know.
A figure smashed into the girl, knocking her flat.
Nev cleaned himself up as best he could and slogged toward the ruckus.
Mez tussled on the ground with the girl. Popped her nose. Just as he got hold of Mez’s collar, she locked the girl into a neck hold.
Nev heard the snap.
He let Mez go. The girl’s body dropped like a marionette, the neck broken.
“Mez, I—”
She punched him in the face.
Nev reeled back, stunned, but he could feel the second wind coming, the massive surge in adrenaline that he got after every body hop. His senses became heightened. The pain vanished altogether.
Mez hit him again. He snagged her arm and twisted it behind her.
“It’s Nev! Mez!”
She snapped at him, nearly taking off his ear. He pushed her and held her down, relying on this new body’s brute strength and the adrenaline that still coursed through his healing body.
“Mez! I’m Nev. The alpaca named Alpaca. We played cards.”
She head-butted him. His nose burst. Tears welled. He spit. He was aware of the injury, of the pressure, but no pain. Not yet, not until the rush wore off. Already, the blood gushing from his nose stopped. He would have a few more impervious minutes for her to flail at him.
“Your nephew believed griffins were nocturnal. You have no children. You tried to serve me a beer and dance. You remember that part at least? I do.”
She tensed. Arms tight, still pushing him away. But her look was different. She eyed him like a terrified animal caught in a snare. Maybe that’s what he had done.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Can I let you up? Mez, if you kill me I’ll have to kill you and take your body. You understand? There’s no reason to attack me. Don’t make me do that.”
Her body softened almost imperceptibly.
“All right?” he said.
One nod; a spastic jerk.
He eased his grip but did not let up his guard. “You understand?” he said. He jerked his head at the young body filled with arrows. “That was me. Now I’m here.”
She mouthed something at him. A curse?
“What?” he said.
“Corpse soldier.” Soft and smoky. Not fearful. Factual.
His mouth twisted, even after all that time. “We prefer to be called body mercenaries.”
“Thought you were all dead. My grandmother—”
“I gave her the stone that can summon my soul.”
“Why?”
“I thought I was dying. If she got it back to the guild, they could summon my soul from the darkness. Bring me back. It’s where my soul goes if I can’t find a body to house me.”
“You’re already dead.”
“I’ve been dead many times, yes.” He saw her swallow; the starlight made her eyes seem luminous. “I’m going to let you go,” he said.
“You said that.”
“I said there was no reason to attack me.”
“All right.”
He released her. Took two long steps back. In this body, he was much larger than her; he stood a head and shoulders above her and outweighed her by eighty pounds. He tried to give her space.
Mez sat in the dirt. Gazed up at him. Then at the body. She got up and went to his old body. Knelt beside it. Pushed the hair from the face, noted the wounds. Then Mez began to methodically remove all of the bronze rings Nev had kept on those skinny little fingers.
“Your remorse is touching,” Nev said.
“About as polite as you running off in the middle of the night. You fucking idiot.”
“I know about women like you.”
“Women like me? Like me?”
“It didn’t seem wise to stay.”
“I was being polite. You have a massive stick up your fucking ass.”
“I have been around a long time.”
“No doubt.” She snorted. Pocketed the rings. Leaned back on her heels. “You just kill people when you’re attacked? Just like that? No wonder we hunted you all until you were dead. Really dead. After the war. How did you live?”
“Not every country believed the genocide of people like me was humane.”
“You mean not every country wanted to give up their tactical advantage.”
“I don’t fight on purpose. The bodies I take … most are as this was. Defense. Or those already dead.”
“Stealing the dead is better?”
“They are dead. What do they care? You certainly didn’t care about the dead when you took those rings just now.”
“I can’t believe I fell for this.”
“For what? I’ve told you nothing untrue. If someone has that stone, someone alive, they are in danger. Because yes, you are right. People like me are being hunted. If they find someone with that stone—”
“If they find someone with that stone, it leads them back to you. I wasn’t born on a slow boat. You’re worried about your own guts.”
Nev shifted from foot to foot. The adrenaline was draining from his body, leaving him feeling exhausted, hungry. “I need to find Alpaca. Keep the rings.” He bent and took the dead girl’s heavy knife. He felt a coin purse knotted against his shin. He would have money enough, provided it was coin in there and not something more nefarious. It was horrifying, some days, to realize what sorts of bodies one had jumped into. Who they had been.
He headed down the way he had seen the alpaca go, humming softly for her. It was not long before he heard Mez crashing around behind him. She was nimble as a bear, that one.
“What?” he said without turning. “You want to knife me in the back? You’ll need to creep better than that.”
“Why didn’t you kill my grandmother? You gave her that stone and hoped someone brought you back, but why not just kill her? Then you’d know you’re coming back for sure.”
Nev lifted his gaze to the crowns of the trees. Little blossoms fell from the canopy, collecting around his feet like dying stars. “It was not necessary,” he said.
She grunted.
He waited.
“I take you to the gravesite,” she said. “That’s it. That’s what I agreed to.”
He nodded, already turning his attention to the flash of creamy white in the distance.
The site of the massacre was mundane. All such sites were, in the end. He remembered a war from some time ago when they buried all the dead beneath birch trees. For two decades after, he had avoided birch trees, made uneasy and anxious by their breezy forms.
The place where the little child wizard’s family had been killed was a tall field of grass, a clearing overlooking the little settlement they had hoped to settle, Fortezia. How terrible, to get so far, to be within sight of salvation, and to be cut down.
“Who killed them?” Nev said. Beside him, the alpaca hummed. Her saddlebags were empty. She had either lost them or they’d been stolen along with all of Mez’s beer and musty cheese and jerky. Of all the things that had happened the night before, Mez seemed angriest at the loss of the beer.
“Temple people,” she said. “You know what they do to those kid wizards in the temple.”
“Matild said that too … but no, I don’t know what they do.”
“Oh.” She shrugged. “Bad things. They think you have to hurt kids to make them powerful. Make them mean. You know, toughen them up.”
Nev knew all about that.
He found the fresher, humped ground over the graves. “They buried them?” he said. “Didn’t burn them?”
“You don’t burn wizards. Does bad things to the air. Miasmas.”
“Let’s dig,” Nev said.
They spent two hours digging. Brought up the corpses. A man and a woman, only a few months in the ground. Mez did not gag or complain, but searched the corpses thoroughly with him.
“Where’s the boy? Did we miss him?” Nev said.
“Maybe they didn’t get the boy.”
“Where did you hear about these deaths anyway?”
“The tavern. Old soldier I know from some jobs last year. He was in the party sent out after them.”
“And he said they got all three?”
“Maybe they were supposed to, so that’s what he said. Word gets around. He’s old enough not to yak in a tavern that he didn’t kill someone he was supposed to.”
Nev came up empty; the pockets and pouches held some old snuff and a decomposing map. As he dropped the map he noted the cord around the female body’s neck. He tugged it. It came up with a little bronze pendant. Nothing.
“Her hand,” Mez said.
Another cord trailed from the woman’s hand, filthy like the rest of her. He uncoiled her rotting fingers and slid the cord free.
A blue stone shot through with green glass gleaming from the end of the cord. As it dangled there, shimmering in the light, Nev remembered what Matild had said about the woman buying it as a good luck charm for her son.
He imagined this scene as it had played out here, some desperate family trying to save their child from harm. The soldiers drawing the boy away, the father dying, or already dead, the mother wounded, clutching at her boy, her fingers tangling in the pendant hanging from his neck. The soldiers yanking the boy away, and the pendant, there, curled up in her palm, all she could save of her child.
“Nev?”
He let out his breath. He hadn’t realized he’d been holding it.
“That it?” Mez said.
“Yes. Thank you.” He knotted the broken cord and hung the stone around his neck. It felt warm against his skin. It had been so many decades since he’d parted from it; he expected to feel some jolt of power, a tingling of recognition. But there was nothing. It was just a stone. Until it was needed.
“Well, let’s cover them back up.” Mez rolled the woman back into the shallow grave and began heaping dirt over her again.
After a moment more, Nev helped her. In half an hour, the bodies were covered again, leaving Nev and Mez filthy and breathless, sweat pouring down their bodies.
“Guess that’s it,” Mez said.
“I guess so.”
“What’ll you do next? Go creep back to a hole somewhere?”
He pressed his fingers to the stone beneath his tunic. As long as the stone existed, they could come back for him. He could live, yes, it was true. But he would be theirs. Always theirs. What was he really, now that the war was over and he’d fled the guild that had once shielded him and his kind from the obliteration of their immortal souls? What was he, but a corpse soldier running away from the same fate that dogged them all, mothers and children? He closed his eyes and remembered Matild’s singing.
Nev took the stone from his neck and dug into the alpaca’s saddlebags. He had kept a few chunks of volcanic glass there sewn into the bottom, just in case. Now he took them out and lay a flat piece on the ground. Put his soul stone on top of it.
“What are you doing?” Mez said.
