Eternity's Blade, page 12
“You think I enjoy killing?”
“I think it is your nature.” Her voice gentled. “And all things are true to their nature with time.”
“You sound like the Onan’ji.” Soh’shoro recoiled.
“No. I sound like her.”
The real Soh’shoro. Rather than repel him, that sinister familiarity sparked strange comfort. The princess’s rotting eyes, the soft contortions of her body beneath the tightened blankets, suddenly sped Soh’shoro’s breathing. She fell into a shallow slumber. Her perfumed hair smelled of saffron and maple and grass.
Until her death, she would make her own perfume.
Many days passed in idle silence, until the next time her illness struck. Now Soh’shoro found the princess lying on her back, drooling blood. Her chest arched and her hands shivered as if plucking invisible strings. Without thinking Soh’shoro dropped the firewood he carried and ran to hold her.
He forced her head back, pressing his own fingers into her mouth, shielding her tongue from each spasm. And he stroked her hair, again and again, through the horrors of the fit. But he never took off her mask, even when he thought it would help steady her breathing.
Afterward, she lay with her head in his lap, eyes swimming to consciousness.
“The rot grows worse outside the court,” she whispered. “Inside my brain.”
“There are lilies for the pain . . .”
“They make it worse. The phage feeds on them.” Each half-whispered syllable slurred.
“Cold tea then,” he whispered. “Wash away the blood.”
“Not yet.” She hesitated. “I need salt, Soh’shoro. The salt settles it.”
But they had long ago run through the meager, gifted cubes of their Rebirthing bower.
So the next morning Soh’shoro risked traveling to the nearest hamlet. There, he traded what he could of his funeral finery for some of the villagers’ bland, unrefined stocks. The grains were too rough to take alone, but bitterly soothing in brine tea. And with the dregs of each kettle, he made tinctures for his princess, which she massaged into the spreading roots of her affliction. The imitated comforts of the court eased her. For a time, she smiled.
Seasons changed. Soh’shoro returned frequently to the hamlet to barter more grains. Soon he found himself helping its peasants drain the rice terraces that snaked like a Trader’s tattoos across the hills. Together they carved sluices from the rock walls, feeding waterfalls of raging white when the Valley fell to storm. Returning to his princess those nights, they would watch the cascades blur into the evening stars. Neither mentioned the sunken gardens they recalled beneath the Mausoleum.
“I should like to see them up close,” she whispered.
So together they visited winter’s first festival, and its floating lanterns and painted ice. The Ang’soon princess marveled at the sculptures, worked whole from the great faces of the loftiest cairns and carved with the skill of Eternity. She held his hand.
But that night proved too much. The rot crept deeper. Soh’shoro carried her all evening through the hills, until the morning grew heavy, and at last they reached their meager hut.
“You used to make me so unhappy,” she whispered.
Soh’shoro could only smile. He helped her to bed, bound her in heavy blankets and old silks. Here the pair took brine tea together to ease her suffering, looking over the sweeping tranquility of dawn. Mists roiled. Thrushes sang. Snowflakes drifted. The whole world nested into the cold.
“It’s getting worse,” she said. “My phage.”
“Tell me how to help.”
“Just wait.” She shivered. “Until there’s nothing else. Until I know it is too late.”
“Too late for what?”
But she held her silence.
“Do you want to die?” he asked directly. “Like you asked when I was a child? That’s why you agreed to come, isn’t it? So I might take your life, and you could find freedom from your pain?”
“Yes.” She leaned forward, lips gleaming through the thin mouth slit of her mask with the last of her smuggled court dyes. “But that’s why you took me, isn’t it? To change my mind.” Her lacquered visage slipped.
“It’s not so terrible, being here with me, is it?”
“No.”
And without hesitating, Soh’shoro pulled aside her mask.
In that moment, he gazed on the full ruin of her face. Pitted and rotten, the purpling strains streaking her eyes and gums, brilliant as fireworks. His thumb stroked them, fixated on their variegation. He wanted to lick his fingers.
“Careful,” she whispered. “It’s dangerous. If it gets in the blood . . .”
But still she leaned forward, kissing him. And Soh’shoro ran his hands across the strains of phage peeking from her sloping neck. He pulled away her upper robe, revealing veins deep and rich and blue as they scoured bare breasts, seeping into the hollows of her spine.
He held her so tightly then, it felt as if she might break. She grasped him back, kissing deeply. He pushed her down, carefully keeping the blankets beneath her. And they shuddered against each other. Through it all, Soh’shoro marveled at the black taint that scarred her body, like a vicious festival paint.
“I never let anyone see it.”
He kissed her stomach, her breasts, her neck, following the corruption until he reached her shoulder blades, thick and refulgent. The stains called to him, a splinter of Death’s true potential.
When it was done, they lay beside each other gently, breathing soft and shallow. He squeezed her hand.
“Ask,” she teased softly.
“You already know my question,” he replied gently. “You always do.”
“And I will answer.” Her pitted eyes darkened. “If you promise. When it hurts too much. When the change is ready. You will end it.”
“We won’t let that happen.”
“But if it does . . .”
Soh’shoro nodded slowly. At that simple gesture, a terrible burden seemed to lift from the princess. Her body slackened. She nestled closer to his chest.
“I’ll tell you exactly what your mother told me of the Valley,” the princess began, blackened eyes refulgent in the dawn. “Or the nearest I can remember.”
Soh’shoro remained quiet, torn between the comfort of her body and the anticipation of her words.
“There was a War,” the princess continued. “One the Qu’en could not win because it was a War they must never fight. Because its time must never come . . .”
“I don’t understand.”
“Just listen. Much doesn’t make sense to me either. But it’s what she told me. And I don’t remember more myself. Because my Rebirths are not like the rest.”
Soh’shoro nodded, falling silent.
“The Qu’en’s arts could shape the very forces of this world. They mastered mechanisms and manufactured relics, like the Emperor’s Throne and the Valley’s Shards. They rendered nature’s abstractions concrete, and manacled them to their flesh. But their greatest art was of time itself. Contorting distances and abstracting relations.” She swallowed. “It was not just Death they fought, Soh’shoro. But Death’s grandsire. The creeping no-place at time’s end, worshipped by the worst of their kind. So to escape it, they abandoned everything. Even themselves.” Her voice darkened terribly. “Even us. We were students left behind. So we had no choice.”
“No choice but what?”
She shuddered. “To live on the crumbs of their grandeur. To use what little was left: their secrets; their science; their bodies. Your mother claimed many sought to purge them. Because the Qu’en were so alien no goodness could ever come from their arts. But here in the Valley, we ignored those warnings. We decided to endure.” She coughed airily. “The priests pray for an Emperor that took pity on us. That sacrificed himself for our Eternity. But nothing could be further from the truth. We chained our Qu’en. To steal our sorcery from its flesh.”
“You’re talking about the Mists. The blood and the salt.”
She nodded. “As long as some dim semblance of life flickers in the Emperor’s Corpse, the Mausoleum’s relic still functions. Not as it did in the grandeur of the Qu’en’s kingdom. But as a fading shadow, powerful enough to shield some small pocket of our world. Our Valley.”
“Why the Houses’ blood?”
“This even I know. Because it matches. We make certain of that with breeding.”
“And why salt? Why seal Outside if those grains are so valuable?”
“Because we were hunted, Soh’shoro. Outsiders sought to smother our dream. To wash away the Qu’en’s legacy like rain against a pond.” Her face darkened. “So we chained the Valley quickly and out of desperation. We did not fully understand the limits of our new world.”
“And the rest of the Qu’en?” Soh’shoro asked. “The Emperor’s Corpse is one. But you spoke of more?”
She laughed, high and haughty.
“Even your mother wouldn’t tell me all she knew here.” She clasped his hand, squeezing gently. “What little she divulged was this: Their kind was truly Eternal. Completely and apocalyptically enduring. And because of this they sought escape. Some beyond the seas. Some to the stars. Some even turning against time itself. And all, in their own way, failed.” A quizzical look played across her pitch-scarred face. “The Valley’s Qu’en is the last. We don’t know what it wanted—or wants. Only that it found its answer—and its prison—in the Mists.”
“There must be records of all this. Ways to understand.”
“You sound so much like her.” Her gaze swept the snowy morning. “But it’s like we wanted to forget. It is all gone, Soh’shoro. Any record. Any writing. We burned it from not only memory but our very world. Because the things we did to the Qu’en were wrong,” the princess finished forcefully. “Because we knew the burden of the Valley’s birth must not follow us into Eternity.”
Dawn’s light streamed amber and gold. The thrushes’ song deepened. Soh’shoro squeezed his princess tightly. Her breathing slowed. And though he wanted to ask more, her beauteous rot and waning warmth lulled him.
Together they slept.
But after that morning, her coughing grew worse and worse. Now even when Soh’shoro held her, as stars bled into midnight, the fits would not end. In those dark moments, he stared at her bloodstained mask with twisted fascination, hoping. They tried stronger tea, and brine baths, and even a makeshift brazier to mimic the salt smoke of the courts. But still her shoulder muscles fattened full and taut, her spine bending fishlike.
“This is the change,” she whispered one night, looking at him from beneath her mask. “It’s almost time.”
“I love you,” Soh’shoro whispered.
They had had so few seasons together, so few memories. All of Eternity had once yawned before them, but now they had only this long, and terribly too soon.
“I wish there was more.” She forced a smile. “I am happy here, Soh’shoro. In a way.” Tears brightened her phage-sick eyes. “You did change my mind.”
The next morning brought fever, high enough that Soh’shoro grew hot from her touch. He held his beauty beneath her blankets of grass, then stoked the fire as high as he dared. He started making desperate plans to return to the courts, and to seek the guidance of its epoxy priests. He packed what little belongings they had, dreaming of being anywhere but here. Where he knew what would happen.
There is no Death in the Valley.
But now her breathing softened to short rasps, like the sound of blossoms falling against water.
“Take the mask.” Her words slurred so badly they could barely be understood. And she gripped its lacquer until it cracked, splitting from jaw to eye slit, like a vicious, severing scar. “Remember your promise. It’s time.”
He clasped her hand, stroking her blackened cheeks and neck. The phage worked like an animal building its den, burrowing deeper, bruising bone to its very marrow. Swelling her spine.
You are a stain, he thought guiltily. A stain on everything that makes this Valley pure.
“I can’t,” he whispered. “I love you.”
“Fool,” she teased, her voice recapturing some of its haughty, courtly nature. “I told you it would be harder if you cared for me.”
Her eyes wandered to the ri’shou’an, its ossuary bright with leaping cranes.
“Do it.”
Soh’shoro shook his head.
“Do it!” she commanded, her voice firm as when they first met. “Please, Soh’shoro. It’s what I want. I’m ready now.”
Elsewhere came the low creaking sound of wood beams; the sharp, rhythmic pattering of hail against thin walls; the sputtering of their sunken hearth. But Soh’shoro could only hear her gasp as the blade slid sharply across her throat. She cried out softly one final time, almost in surprise—
“It won’t hurt anymore.”
Blood painted her neck like firelight flickering over freshly fallen snow.
Then it was over. Once again, Soh’shoro held only a corpse in his arms.
Afterward, he lay beside her in the bed they had shared and cried, until even the spreading cold of her form seemed the greatest warmth he could clutch to his chest. She had asked for this. She had found her relief.
And still Soh’shoro could not forgive himself for what he had done.
The ghost of the princess haunted him. She would never again sip brine tea. Never again hold him close. Never again spit at him or loathe him, as she had done at first. Misery wormed its way through Soh’shoro’s veins as surely as a Qu’su poison.
In that moment, he realized his power of Death meant more than murder. His very existence let oblivion seep in, spreading misery to all that he loved. The Houses could not possibly be the darkness, as the Onan’ji had warned.
He was.
“You were right,” Soh’shoro confessed to her corpse. “I cannot deny my nature. I will always bring ruin to our world.” His tears splashed across phage-scarred skin, running in rivulets of darkness. “But that is why I can also save it.”
Calmly now, Soh’shoro’s mind wandered to the City and its courts, to the Emperor and his Throne of Mists, and last of all to the Onan’ji. It was too late for his princess. And in a way, it was too late for Soh’shoro. The prince of the Quo’dai-ma was now lost, blurred away like ink left to storm. His innocence had been stolen with his childhood; his nobility had died beneath his blade. And his happiness had vanished into these hills.
He piled cedar wood against the hut walls, splitting logs until his body ached with exertion. He set about cleaning, putting away one last time the daily things he’d shared with his bride—the teacups and the salt stocks, the homespun clothing and perfumed brushes. He smiled as he worked, eyes stinging from the tears that kept the world from focus.
Soh’shoro wrapped her in old silks, coarse and worn. He did not paint her face or bind her hands with lilies. Instead, he blanketed her with a simple veil of grass. Even in death, she seemed ethereally beautiful, merely another glimmering manifestation of her morbid perfection. He gently kissed her one last time.
“I will be Eternity’s Blade,” he promised.
He sent word down to the nearby hamlet. By evening a mendicant returned, asking of Rebirth. Soh’shoro lied until the man agreed to bear the princess’s body to the Traders. He wanted to follow her corpse, but part of him could not bear to see those blue tattoos touch her.
So Soh’shoro merely watched his bride’s pall vanish into the softness of the sleeting night. Still, she remained forever in the walls of their house, a lingering phantom of the life they had made.
“I’m going now,” he whispered.
The flame caught the thin walls effortlessly, and soon the hut blazed into the snowy night. It burned like a shooting star, as though the heavens themselves sparked alight by kissing earth. Clutching the cracked mask of his rotted princess to his chest, Soh’shoro walked away without looking back.
And so Death descended upon the Valley at last.
Chapter 10
Husk
He made for the temple where the Qu’su had trained him. The trip was hard in winter. A terrible blizzard raged, as if the Valley itself mourned the death of his princess, leaving heavy snows and blocked trails. Lightning broke constantly, its winking fury dancing over Mists that roiled deep into the Valley. Their veils stretched so far now they sometimes kissed the basin itself, white on white, snowy lilies vanishing beneath. He had only too much time to think, trudging through lonely roads, as he crept ever higher toward the moldering demons of the hills.
The night he reached the Qu’su temple broke calm, the air crisp with the first hints of spring. Soh’shoro stood before the winding stairs that led to the prison of his childhood, remembering a life unmade. Now the stone steps were slick with ice, and the untended arches had been splintered by storm, littering the ascent with fragments of wood and shattered bells half buried in snow. Soh’shoro could not help but smile.
The main compound was all but abandoned. Most of the structures lay in complete disarray, and some had even collapsed under the weight of the seasons, snowflakes spilling in through torn walls and cracked eaves. Soh’shoro had known he would find as much before his journey began. Fearful of reprisal, the Qu’su had vanished after his escape, leaving only skeletons to hunt.
“Soon, Onan’ji,” he whispered.
The main shrine appeared maintained, and thin firelight spilled through its papered walls. Nonetheless Soh’shoro approached without caution. Kicking open the door, he startled two junior Qu’su from prayer, their eyes wide and uncomprehending. These acolytes were all that remained of the mad monks who had trained him.
“Don’t.” Soh’shoro raised his hand in warning, but one had already moved for a ri’shou’an. “I am not here for violence.”
