Swarm and Steel, page 28
SEVENTEEN
Eat the snake for lunch before the snake eats you for dinner.
—Basamortuan Proverb
GRIND, CLICK, POP! THUNK. Late in the afternoon a new sound joined the percussive symphony of Tod’s rear hips. Zerfall, riding in front of Jateko, held in his strong arms, considered the young man. Where once he had ridden awkwardly, unable to move with the motion of the horse, he rode easily now. It was hard to believe this was even the same boy. His jaw, once weak and near non-existent was now strong and square. His chest, previously concave, was powerful and muscular. The once sloped shoulders were broad.
“Sun’s going down,” she said. “We should stop so you can rest.”
If he heard, Jateko showed no sign. He was, she realized, mesmerized by the landscape.
“Tod,” she said. “Stop.” The horse stopped and Zerfall glanced about. Grey, everywhere. The clear sky above, unbroken grey. The clouds spotting the horizon, the colour of dry bone left long in the sun. The sunset looked like slashes of grey surrounding the pure white of the sun. From black to white, I have it all.
“Jateko?”
He didn’t react. He didn’t even seem to notice they were no longer moving.
“Jateko!”
“Huh?”
He glanced at her, eyes wide.
“Let’s stop for the night,” she said. “You need to rest.”
“Right.” Releasing her he slid from Tod’s back, his eyes already drawn back to the world around them.
“Can you describe it? Zerfall asked.
“What?”
She nodded at the hills. “Everything. The colours. The smell. How it feels. I …” She shrugged, torn between explaining her need and not wanting to admit it existed. Why does this scare me? More even, than being dead. Need is a weakness. Was this a taste of who she had been, back when alive? She didn’t like it. Fear, that was a weakness. “I am separated from life,” she said, trying to explain. “I see grey. My tongue is dead. I smell nothing. I miss it.”
“It’s incredible,” he said, awed. “Green. So much green. It’s everywhere. This is being farmed. It’s food, right?”
“I believe so.”
“No wonder you don’t leave your cities; you don’t have to. Food, it just grows. Everywhere. We—the tribes—we have to fight for everything. We move because we have to. We follow the rains and the animals. This …” He waved a hand, encompassing the rolling hills. “You could feed armies. Thousands of men and women who do nothing but train in weapons and wage war.”
“They do. We do,” she corrected.
He laughed, a grunted exhalation through his nose. “We talk about raiding the soft hiria ero. We talk about how weak you are and how strong we are. We talk about your steel like it’s something we can wander in and grab whenever we want.” He tore his gaze from the fields and stared at the ground, his shoulders rounding as if he were caving in on himself. “It’s all fear. We never raid. All our steel is hundreds of years old, falling apart. The best knife in our tribe came from Gogoko’s grandfather’s grandfather. The only reason you don’t crush us is because there’s no point. We aren’t dangerous. You aren’t afraid of us.”
“Jateko.” He returned his attention to her. “Where we come from isn’t who we are. Geldangelegenheiten doesn’t define me any more than the Basamortuan defines you. We aren’t our past.”
“If I’m not my past, what am I?”
“We are our choices. We are our friends, the people we chose to surround ourselves with. We are our actions.”
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“You think you’re first and foremost a man of the Basamortuan tribes and that the fact the people of the city-states neither respect nor fear you in some way changes what you are.”
“It doesn’t?”
“Why give them that power?”
“Power?” he asked, confused.
Zerfall nodded. “If you care what others think to the point it defines your choices—defines your happiness and self-worth—you’re giving them power. Over you.”
“So I shouldn’t care what anyone thinks?”
A better question than the boy she first met would have asked. “I’m saying you can choose whose opinion matters. I care what you think,” she said, startled to realize how true it was. Some part of her, buried deep, screamed rebellion, railed at her weakness, and she drove it deeper. That was the old me, I want nothing of that person.
“This isn’t going to be easy for me,” said Jateko.
“What won’t?”
He gazed out across the rolling hills. “There are colours here I’ve never seen. Smells unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.”
She understood his desire to change the subject. “Try.”
“I know every shade of sand and what each means. There are as many shades of green here, if not more. Some so pale as to be almost white, while others dance somewhere between black and blue.” He plucked a round bulb, fronds curled up and in, from a nearby stalk. “This is deep purple near the base,” said Jateko, lifting the bulb to examine it, “and fades to the softest pink near the top.”
“Clover,” she said. “Pluck one of those petals and suck on the inner end.”
Jateko did as instructed and his eyes widened in disbelief. “I’ve never tasted anything so sweet.”
“Bees use these flowers to make honey.”
“Bees? Honey?”
Rather than try to explain, she gestured toward a sprawling field. “There?”
“Gold,” he said, “like a sandstorm backlit by the setting sun.”
“Grain. Probably wheat.”
“This, then, is what feeds your armies.”
Zerfall nodded.
“Everything smells so wet. There’s so much life here.” He bent and scooped up a handful of soil, crushing it in a fist and lifting that fist to his nose. He closed his eyes, breathing deep, nostrils flaring. “It’s like the guts of a freshly cracked cactus with hints of blood.” His eyebrows furrowed as he searched for words. “I feel things wriggling in there. There’s more life in this handful of dirt than one thousand strides of desert. It smells like I could eat it, shovel it in.”
“Not a good idea.”
“I know. I’m cavernous now. No. Carnivorous. I think that’s right. The Swordsman, he knew a lot of words.” Jateko’s eyes widened. “I know what honey is. He remembered the flavour.” He licked his lips, eyes wistful.
Movement on the horizon caught Zerfall’s attention. “People are coming,” she said, gesturing in the direction she and Jateko travelled.
Jateko turned to watch as four wagons, each drawn by a team of two horses, crested a hill to the west. “They’re flying flags,” he said, squinting. “It looks like the golden outline of a triangle on a white background.”
“It’s a pyramid. They’re Geborene priests.”
Jateko glanced at her. “Are they like the Täuschung?”
“Yes and no.”
“Are they dangerous?” Jateko asked.
“All religions are dangerous.”
“I meant to us.”
She ignored him and slid carefully from Tod’s back. They stood shoulder to shoulder watching as the Geborene priests—a thousand paces distant and all dressed in flawless white—reined in their horses, pulling the wagons to the side of the road, and set about erecting tents and making camp.
“I don’t think they’ve seen us,” said Jateko.
“Good.”
“Zerfall?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m hungry.”
“Oh.” She watched as several priests piled dry grass into a heap and then retrieved several logs from one of the wagons. “There’s a lot of them. Maybe a dozen.”
Jateko said nothing, his attention never leaving the camp. She knew that look. Hunger, raw and bloody. What had he said, cavernous? That was it, that’s what she saw in his eyes; bottomless craving, cavernous need he would never sate. Jateko wanted to march into that camp and kill and devour each and every one of those priests.
“Too many,” she said, and he nodded.
But his eyes said otherwise. They betrayed his thoughts, said he was thinking, planning. Plotting.
“We wait for one to stray from the camp,” he said. “To pee.”
“If they hear—”
“They won’t. We’ll be quiet.”
We. And in some strange way, we it was. He wouldn’t leave her, and she wouldn’t leave him. “Let’s be smarter about it this time,” she said. “Let’s pick a … a victim.”
“Right. No point in eating a weak moron.”
They watched as a gaunt young woman, no older than Jateko, staggered to the piled wood and grass. The youth stood, swaying, clawing at scabbed arms, face twitching and lips writhing. The rest of the priests backed away.
Smoke rose from the grass in coils, wrapping around the young woman’s legs like snakes intent on climbing her thin frame. Smoky tentacles reached up past the crisp white of priestly robes leaving ashen streaks and twined around her throat. Thin fingers, tendrils of wispy fumes, caressed her face, reaching toward her watering eyes. Tears streamed down the youth’s face, cutting tracks in soot smeared cheeks.
The piled grass and wood burst into flames and the young woman staggered back, retreating from the fire with a howl of soul-wrenching misery. Collapsing to her knees she buried her face in her hands and shook.
“Her,” said Jateko. “I want her.”
“Bad idea.”
“I want to be able to do that. I ate that Swordsman and now I can use a sword. What if I eat that …”
“Hassebrand,” supplied Zerfall.
“I’ll be able to light fires with a thought.”
Jateko grinned at her, eyes bright and intelligent, and again she marvelled at how he changed. The gap between his front teeth had shrunk to nothing.
If I weren’t dead … But she was.
“You have to ask why she can do that,” she said.
“Why?”
“It’s not magic. All Geisteskranken pay a price for their power. She might be able to light fires, but look at her.”
Jateko returned his attention to the woman, kneeling at the fire, ignored and avoided by the other priests, shoulders shaking from the force of her sobs. “She’s pitiful.”
“And that’s what gives her power.” Jateko stared at Zerfall, uncomprehending. “She hates herself. She’s broken.” She tapped her temple with a skeletal finger. “In here. She’s insane and that insanity defines her reality. Do you really want that?”
“Wendigast. That woman thought I was a Wendigast. That’s a type of Geisteskranken, right?”
“Yes.”
“I might be a Wendigast. Probably am. That means I’m insane. But I don’t hate myself. I like me. I’m important—”
“That too is delusion.”
“I’m not important?”
“If you died right now, would it matter a thousand years from now?”
He stared at her, not answering.
“How about one hundred years?”
He blinked.
“Ten years?”
“Well …”
“One year? Thirty days? A week?”
His eyes changed, lids narrowing to slits. “You’re wrong.”
“Really?”
“I am the All Consuming.”
ZERFALL STARED UP AT him, head shaking so slowly she probably didn’t even know she was doing it. He started again, trying to make her understand. “I believe eating people will make me stronger and smarter. And it does. So I’m what you hiria ero call Geisteskranken, Wendigast, or delusional or whatever. I’m crazy,” he tapped his own temple. “Reality bends to my beliefs. I understand that now. Most people—like the others in my tribe—they’re too sane to even try to eat people. And if they did, they wouldn’t get anything more than if they ate a goat or a snake. Cannibalism. It’s a terrible thing to do. It’s evil. I am evil. I kill and eat people, and I can’t stop. I don’t even want to.”
“It’s not that simple,” she said.
He waved her to silence. “Let me finish. It’s difficult to articulate this.” When did I learn that word? It didn’t matter; even that was part of what he struggled to explain. “Abiega thinks I’m the All Consuming and so do I. And it matters what I believe. For a thousand years the Etsaiaren dragged the undying—Cotardists, hilen deabru, whatever—to Santu Itsasoa, the Sea of Souls, and bound them to cacti. All for me. Their sorgin knew I was coming. The entire point was for them to take you there so I’d come for you.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“It does. The Sea of Souls is beyond the Etsaiaren lands, west of the Basamortuan tribes. They were leading me away from their people, making sure I followed you into the city-states.”
She frowned up at him, the remnants of her eyebrows crinkling in at the centre. “You’re saying they predicted you and me. Us?”
“Yes. But that’s not all. They’d only predict us if we were important. Why else go through all that trouble. What I’m saying is that I’m important. And so are you.”
She looked doubtful, and fair enough; he wasn’t even sure if he believed.
“But why?” she asked.
Jateko offered another crooked grin. “We’re going to end the Täuschung. We’re going to kill their god. We’re going to free the souls trapped in Swarm.”
“What if the Täuschung and Swarm don’t matter? What if it’s just you?” asked Zerfall.
“I guess—”
“What if it takes a god to kill a god?”
“I don’t understand.”
“How smart and skilled and powerful do you have to be before you Ascend?”
“I’m not trying to—”
“How many people will you consume? All of them?”
The All Consuming. He hadn’t taken it literally, more like a fancy title. But if he didn’t find some way to sate this hunger … “I don’t want to be a god.”
Goat-sticking liar, muttered Abiega.
“But?” asked Zerfall.
How did she know there was a but? “But I don’t want to be weak either. I need to be strong to help you.”
“So you’re doing it for me? If I give up and wander out into the desert to let the winds scour me to nothing, you’ll stop eating?”
Jateko eyed her. “You know the answer to that just as I know you aren’t going to give up.”
“So we’re going up there,” she nodded toward the tents, “and you’re going to kill and eat that insane Hassebrand in the hopes you gain something of her insanity. You understand how this might not be the best plan?”
“Yes.”
Zerfall looked skyward and he wondered if she thought she was rolling her eyes. “Let’s do this.”
“Actually,” he said, “I was thinking you should stay here.” She stared at him with guttered sockets. “You aren’t very quiet when you move. Everything crackles and rattles. Sorry.”
“Fine.”
He stared at the Geborene camp, thinking. “I’ll go up there, club her on the head when she leaves camp, and then drag her back here for butchering.” Zerfall looked like she was about to argue and he held up his hand to stall her. “I can hunt and kill one skinny Geisteskranken.”
“Fine,” she said again, scowling up at him. “But first sign of trouble, and I’m coming to get you.”
Jateko watched as she clambered onto Tod’s back. Gone was her lethal grace. “Comfortable?” he asked, and once again she gave him that cavernous look. “Right.” He winked and sauntered off into the dark, aware of her dead gaze following him.
Approaching the Geborene camp was easy; they hadn’t set a guard. It was like they didn’t think it was even possible someone might wander in with ill intent. Did this tell him something about the city-states’ civilization, or were the Basamortuan not as wrong as he thought? Of course it might also be that these priests were ill-prepared for travel, unaware of the dangers around them.
Or are they so dangerous, asked Abiega, that they have nothing to fear?
Jateko slowed as he neared the camp, placing each foot with care. It stung to think about how clumsy he used to be.
How many before you’re smart enough, strong enough? asked Abiega.
When I can protect Zerfall.
Abiega was silent for several heart beats. Then, Which part of The All Consuming do you not understand?
“All of it,” Jateko muttered under his breath. If I’m such a danger, why didn’t your sorgin tell you to kill everyone travelling in the company of the dead?
Abiega didn’t answer.
See? Your sorgin don’t want me dead, they want me to do something. If you know what, tell me now. Otherwise, shut the hells up.
Hells? asked Abiega. You sound more and more like one of these hiria ero.
Somewhere in the background the Swordsman bubbled and gibbered and both Basamortuan ignored him.
I think, said Gogoko, if you keep eating people, it’s going to get awfully crowded in here.
You’ve been quiet lately, said Jateko, moving closer to the Geborene camp. Figures moved about, silhouetted by fire. Some were cooking what looked like spitted rabbits, while others puttered about, laying a large crisp white sheet out on the ground and arranging plates and cutlery upon it. It was a strangely fastidious scene. The priests wore spotless white and stopped often to check their hands, dashing to a barrel of water where they scrubbed as if they’d found something offensive.
I’ve been thinking, answered Gogoko. Our sorgin are like their Geisteskranken, but they mask it in ritual and ceremony. Jakintsua mostly makes poultices and tells the tribe when it’s time to move on, but I remember my father talking about Urutiko, the sorgin before Jakintsua. He said she would sometimes warn the tribe of storms long before anyone else knew they were coming. Once she warned of a raid before it happened and the tribe was ready and butchered the raiders.
So? asked Jateko, watching a priest collect a shovel, a stack of white sheets of paper, and a shallow bowl of water from a wagon and leave the camp. Curious, he followed. The man walked a few dozen strides, placed the bowl and paper on the ground, and dug a shallow pit. Jateko watched with interest as the man hiked up his pristine white robes, and squatted over the hole to defecate. That is weird. Why would they crap in holes?
