Eternity's Blade, page 19
“I’m going now.”
Behind Soh’shoro, Remedy’s lights blurred into the stars, as though the heavens themselves kissed the earth. Clutching the cracked mask of his princess against his mother’s blade, Soh’shoro walked away without looking back.
And so Eternity’s Blade descended upon the Haven at last.
Chapter 17
Haven
Soh’shoro spent days crossing the beach. As he traveled, summer came in earnest to Outside. Blossoms took the acacia trees, growing willowy and overbright. The wind gentled, soothing tides along comber-lined coves. Clouds brightened with thawing, fustic sunlight.
And the Mists crept closer, swallowing the world. At night Soh’shoro slept facing into their lingering veils, almost as if he camped again beside the Onan’ji. With morning he woke to find the haze hungry, reaching for him in fetid tendrils like broken fingers, threatening to vanish all of Outside beneath their slithering roils.
With the Mists spread War. For trailing up the coastline, Soh’shoro caught the dark sails of Black Cloak ships. Whether An’na trusted him enough to command this conflict, or the Outsiders simply had no other choice, he could not guess. Either way, the Haven would soon be under siege.
Soh’shoro reached the floating city just in time.
A massive stone bridge, arcing over the waves, spanned shore to settlement. Once, Soh’shoro guessed, its painted tiles had bustled with commerce. Now the crossing swarmed with refugees, driven before the roiling Mists. Desperate tides of sunburned flesh pounded on the shuttered gates of the bridge’s barbican. Light spilled from its inner fortification, as Cultists patrolled rifle-slit windows. Occasionally gunshots sounded, driving back the frantic crowds.
Soh’shoro used the mob as a distraction, weaving through its throng to reach the gatehouse. With the next reckless surge of pleading faces, he pretended to be pushed, tumbling toward the sea. But he merely caught the bridge’s barnacled trestles, swinging underneath. Now he lurked invisible in the arches above the waves. And monkeying hand over hand, he climbed his way past frothing whitecaps and into the Haven beyond.
Passing the bridgehead, he clambered up a floating strut and onto the city’s streets. But he did not find the Haven gripped by fear, as he expected, but festival. Everywhere fluttered tangerine pennons and polished bone charms, brightening the pier-lined avenues like trinkets in a courtesan’s hair. Floating platforms and inner canals bristled with brine-soaked celebrants banging seashell drums. Buildings gleamed beneath fresh washes of nacre and matte clay. A faint haze of lily smoke lingered over everything, saturated into the city’s very stones.
And to Soh’shoro’s horror, he noticed Traders among the merrymakers. Worse, they bore atop their backs the very Gi’en shrines of his home. Outsiders jostled and cajoled alongside them, pantomiming with their own miniature temples. Imitating the Valley’s rituals. Already, Soh’shoro guessed at what might wait at the parade’s end. So he followed its celebrants, as they danced to water drums and insectoid flutes, flowing into a stone amphitheater, lofted above the waves.
“Prophet!” the crowds chanted. “Hear the prophet!”
Great braziers dominated the distant stage, fountaining sparks skyward. Cultist guards flanked the fires, eagerly fingering rifles. More and more merrymakers packed the amphitheater, so even standing, Soh’shoro struggled to breathe. Still he threaded the crowds, drawing close to the podium.
Soon a lone figure strode between the stage’s pyres, swathed in indigo robes, face hidden by a pale bone mask. Its eye slits squinted fiercely and its mouth hole narrowed wickedly. Silver charms tangled from the carved scalp, jangling beside brass bells. And the crowds screamed—
“Prophet! We listen!”
“Salvation!”
Through the bone mask, an eerily familiar voice whistled in reply: “Bring forth our final harvest!”
Now the Gi’en shrines gained the stage, streaming lilies from their gilded innards. Bulk crates and overpacked jars, bound by reams of twine twice as thick as a man’s arm, burst beneath Cultists’ hammers. Men shoveled the petals in great clumps like snow, fueling the braziers. The perfumed smoke rose faintly at first, the cloying oils slow to vaporize. But soon heavy plumes drifted across the crowds. The amphitheater fell into silence, as smog obscured swaying bodies and silent stone.
“Gi’en!” the onlookers muttered. “The last Gi’en!”
Soh’shoro breathed the fumes too. And for the first time Outside, he heard the Voice. It came in fractured whispers, like tiny shards of minds entombed, all glimpses and thoughts and broken impressions. He grasped his temples, shivering. This cacophony sounded nothing like the quickening instincts of the Valley. Instead this Voice cried with the madness of a caged animal, struggling to break free.
“Breathe deep the scent of paradise!” cried the prophet’s familiar voice. “Its visions of our coming Eternity!” His skeletal visage slipped slightly.
Now Soh’shoro was certain. He knew the masked man.
An-go’yi’ki! What happened to you?
“This will be our final festival! Our greatest Gi’en before battle!” his brother preached. “We need only defend our Haven against the coming Black Cloak ships! One last War! Using their own storehouse of rifles and powder against them!” He gestured toward a cavernous structure of steel, its rusted eaves towering beyond the amphitheater’s walls like the wings of a great bird.
The Vault, Soh’shoro intuited.
“War for Eternity! Death to end Death!” An-go’yi’ki continued, his melanized robes swirling through the fog. “Our time is at hand! The Mists draw close! Soon they will swarm our city. And then—when they part—the Valley will open before us! Our promised paradise will welcome us at last!”
The multitudes screamed lupine howls, as they descended deeper into the Voice’s haunting malaise. And Soh’shoro took a terrible risk.
Because he still trusted his brother.
Fighting the swaying bodies, he forced himself to the very front of the crowds. As he advanced, he raised his hand high, straight and purposeful as a tern’s dive. Despite the festival’s chaos, he knew he would be noticed. For in his palm, the cracked mask of the princess gleamed aloft.
Almost instantly, the prophet’s gaze swung to it. Then it settled on Soh’shoro’s face, studying. Beneath its bony visage burst a smile of pure joy.
“That faithful!” An-go’yi’ki commanded. “That one there! Bring him here! Now!”
Cultists descended from the stage, surrounding Soh’shoro. They raised him overhead, parading him like a Gi’en shrine through the stupefied merrymakers, before lowering him atop the podium. The Voice cried its disjointed, alien shrieks.
And the prophet hugged his brother terribly close.
“You came!” he whispered. “I thought they’d stolen you. Doomed you to the Mists.” He held the prince at arm’s length, still beaming. “You came!”
Again An-go’yi’ki turned to the crowds. “The last prophet! This is the last prophet! Arriving at our time of salvation! Just as the Onan’ji foretold!”
Screams shook the amphitheater so madly they shuddered even the waves. The Voice itself echoed the refrain, hissing and gurgling with bestial eagerness.
“Paradise at last! For the faithful! For the deserving! For us all!”
And An-go’yi’ki led Soh’shoro from the stage.
The brothers entered a complex of sloping wood, freshly painted purple and pearl. Beyond its bronze gates rose water-lofted row houses and seashell-pressed monuments, encircling a massive pagoda. The spire had clearly been erected recently, in mimicry of the Valley’s own.
Inside, An-go’yi’ki and his Cultists led Soh’shoro across a wide hall, hazy with lily smoke. The prophet opened a gated screen at its end, revealing a sumptuous suite fanned by salt breezes. Divans and silk pillows molded in the sea air, their odors congealing beside lilied brine and preserving wax.
“Now leave us!” An-go’yi’ki commanded the guards.
But his Cult escort hesitated. “If this is Prince Soh’shoro, the Black Cloaks stole him first. We don’t know what lies they plied him with. You need protection . . .”
“And what help would you be, drunk on lilies?” An-go’yi’ki snarled. “Besides, I have other defenders far more reliable than you.” He raised his hand. “I said leave us. You will do so.”
The Cultists relented, shutting the screen. Now the brothers stood alone, surrounded by only opulence and lily smoke.
“A blockade,” An-go’yi’ki snarled, pointing out a seaward window to the black sails circling the whitecapped horizon. “But why do the chirurgeons hesitate to strike? Despicable. Desperate . . .”
“Brother,” Soh’shoro interrupted. “It is you, isn’t it? Really you?” His voice faltered. “What is going on?”
At last An-go’yi’ki unclasped his bone mask, fully revealing the warm smile and pale skin Soh’shoro remembered. But now, deep lines of worry creased his cheeks, like lily roots worming through soft soil.
“Isn’t it obvious?” the Ang’soon prince replied. “I’m dying, Soh’shoro. We are all dying. Outside is cursed with mortality.” His eyes, dilated by lilies, grew wide with sudden fear.
“I’m so sorry,” Soh’shoro pleaded. “I never meant . . .”
“. . . to kill me?” An-go’yi’ki finished, trembling with the memory. “I know the Qu’su tricked you, Soh’shoro. That much is forgiven.” He shook his head mournfully. “Besides, your blade helped me understand. For after my death, there was nothing. No future nor past. Just a snap; the brevity of oblivion.” He grimaced. “I will not let that be my fate.”
“It can’t be true. Are you really helping the Cult?”
“Of course I detest it.” An-go’yi’ki shook his head disdainfully. “But what choice do I have? They are the only way back to the Valley.”
“You mean the Onan’ji is the only way back,” Soh’shoro corrected.
“I don’t deny it.”
“How can you serve him?” The prince’s voice trembled. “After everything he did to us, to our Houses? To you?”
“I am pathetic, I know.” An-go’yi’ki fanned his hands, as if considering choices. “The monk is cruel, Soh’shoro. Even mad. I wish his schemes had never fallen upon our world.” The prophet’s auburn eyes glittered with fearful passion. “But he is selfless, in his own way. He means to save us. To gift the Mists beyond the Valley, stretching Eternity over the entire world.”
So it is true. He plans to make all pure and perpetual. Soh’shoro’s thoughts darkened. But also sedated and static.
“We can’t let him,” the prince pressed. “The Valley isn’t paradise. It is enduring, yes. But it is also unchanging. A prison, with evil at its heart.”
“You think as I once did.” The Ang’soon drew close. “You see darkness in the rigid repetitions of Rebirth. But that is a small price to pay against Death. Who are you to cast a graveyard sentence across the entire world? If anything, the Valley did not dare enough, and that is the Onan’ji’s true dream.”
Feast. Soh’shoro did not know why he suddenly recalled the word, licked from the monk’s lips, as he took the prince’s life.
“Listen,” Soh’shoro begged. “There must be another way. The Black Cloaks already know the Haven is a sanctuary against the Mists. We could invite them in. After the veils break, we’d have an army to end the Onan’ji’s schemes.”
The lingering Voice of the lily smoke quickened with his words.
“You think the Cult would allow that? Even were I to command it so?” An-go’yi’ki arched an eyebrow. “They are faithful, not fools.” He shook his head. “Besides, this is the only way to save my sister.”
“What do you mean, save her?” Soh’shoro shivered with anticipation. “Where is she?”
“I’ll show you,” An-go’yi’ki said sadly. “Come.”
He led the prince deeper into the suite, onto a balcony overlooking the pagoda’s interior. Now Soh’shoro realized this spire was erected not as a palace but as an excavation site. The tower’s core rose hollow, open to the sky and encircling a great stretch of Ocean. Gargantuan augurs and dredging hooks groaned over the enclosed waters, their work recently complete. For a great metallic salvage hung overhead, suspended by thick cords and counterweights.
The Qu’en Shard.
Its angular geometries sparked brightly in the newly fallen dusk. Its fustic fragments hummed with Ocean breezes. But something black and bloated stirred behind its fogging glass.
“Is it her?” Soh’shoro stepped closer in disbelief.
“Of course.”
For ensepulchered within the Shard slept the Ang’soon princess: her rot refulgent and her elegiac eyes static as a doll’s. Soh’shoro gasped in both revulsion and recognition. Because he had seen such a sight before. In those silent simulacra sleeping within the cells of the waterfall gardens.
“Why do this to her?”
“To slow the rot. Just as I learned from the pods underneath the Mausoleum. To keep her in stasis. In slumber.” An-go’yi’ki flinched with revulsion. “It was the only choice. To buy time until we returned to the Valley. To her rituals and her salt baths and . . .”
“. . . her suffering?” Soh’shoro balked in disgust. “Would the Valley really save her? Or merely torture her?”
An-go’yi’ki softened. “You really do love her, don’t you?” He clapped Soh’shoro’s shoulder affectionately. “I see it plainly on your face, even now. Even at the end of the world. Still you don’t understand.”
“Then tell me.”
“This is her kind’s purpose.” An-go’yi’ki gripped the balcony railing, knuckles whitening. “When the Emperor wastes away, when even our blood no longer quickens his Corpse, he must be made anew, Reborn inside fresh rot.” His eyes glistened with coming tears. “It is for this we keep the princess, Soh’shoro. It is always her. Always her flesh ensepulchered on that horrid Throne. Imagine her pain. Pumping poisonously to stave back ruin. Absolute and interminable agony, moment by moment, on and on, into forever.” He placed both hands on Soh’shoro’s shoulders, partly in appeal, partly for comfort. “That is why I help the Onan’ji. He offers to take that burden from her, to bear the rot himself. To become the next Qu’en.”
Feast. Soh’shoro stepped away in disgust. “Madness.”
“Salvation, Soh’shoro.”
“Listen to yourself, brother. I don’t know what the Valley truly is. What the Qu’en are. Or why their world broke. But to give the Onan’ji such power?” Then came the terrible insight, as he remembered the monk’s mysterious words: The power of its hand is invisible. “The Qu’en craves freedom from the Valley’s prison. I think all this might merely be its escape. The monk nothing more than its puppet.”
“You offer riddles.” The Ang’soon’s face hardened. “Whereas I speak simple truth. We can return to Eternity and spare my sister her darkest fate.”
“Never. The Onan’ji must be stopped. Alongside whatever evil he seeks.”
“No.” The Ang’soon’s eyes darted dangerously beneath their lily fugue. “I think not.”
“You care only about yourself!” Soh’shoro snarled. “You’d sacrifice the world to live forever?!”
“Of course!” An-go’yi’ki shrieked. “I will not die again! Nor will my sister!”
The two stood barely a pace apart now, eyes locked, bodies menacing.
“I will not serve the Cult. And I will never serve him.”
“And what if I make you?” An-go’yi’ki sneered. “After all, you will have Eternity to forgive me.”
Neither moved.
“Call your Cultists.”
“Soh’shoro, please . . .”
“You can’t, can you?” Soh’shoro smiled viciously. “You still care that much.”
An-go’yi’ki’s lips tremored. But he remained silent.
“I will be back for her,” Soh’shoro continued, “for you both, when the Black Cloaks come.”
“If you so much as touch my sister . . .”
But Soh’shoro vaulted atop the balcony’s railing before An-go’yi’ki could finish. Then he leaped again, catching a hanging rope, swinging against its counterweighted pulley, arcing atop the pagoda’s open eaves. Below him, An-go’yi’ki shouted a desperate, final warning.
“Please! I don’t know what they’ll do if you leave! They’d relish your death, as payment for theirs.”
But the prince didn’t understand.
“Goodbye, brother.”
Soh’shoro ghosted over the excavation’s walls, vanishing into the coming night. He did not know how long he had before An-go’yi’ki’s sympathy faltered, or his brother guessed his plan.
He had to act now.
So Soh’shoro stole through the Haven like a phantom, vaulting its rooftops, dancing its ropeways, leaping canals and creaking columns. Atop the distant seas, the ships of the Black Cloaks circled, their dark masts blotting out the early stars. Along the shores, the Mists churned dangerously close, their tumescent veils choking away the world. Ahead the metallic wings of the Vault glimmered, argent and ethereal beneath the newly brightening moon.
But the structure was offset from the city streets by defensive bridges, each patrolled by Cultist riflemen. Soh’shoro dared not approach directly. So he clambered underneath the city itself, into its inner lattices of load-bearing pylons. Whitecaps churned handholds terribly slick, salt gummed senses, and the scent of gunpowder piqued the wind. Soh’shoro advanced mainly by forcing his fingertips into gaps in the trestle ribbing. He doubled back often, finding the way forward impassable where rusted iron gave way to furious sea. Moonlight filtered through cracks in the flooring above, tiger-striping the waves beneath.
Halfway across one of the Vault’s outer bridges, a Cultist patrolled too closely overhead. In desperation Soh’shoro let himself fall, bracing each leg against a different sea pillar, split like a birthing charm. The deeper shadows, closer to the waves, shielded him from the guards’ torchlight. The Lily-Eater passed overhead. Still Soh’shoro waited until his legs cramped with the pressure of the hold, making certain. Then he ghosted on, as if through forest boughs.
