Eternity's Blade, page 21
At the base of the hold’s stair, two more Cultists lay in ambush. Soh’shoro killed both before they even sighted their rifles. Just ahead, the freight compartment door stood barred. But with two solid kicks Soh’shoro splintered its lock-beam. He stalked into the cargo cabin beyond.
Everything swelled with lantern light. Packing crates and half-chained shipments littered the floor, their contents spilling with the rolling waves. Amid the freight An-go’yi’ki stood, indigo robes swirling like an exotic flower. In one hand, he held a narrow pistol, small and cruel looking, its center bored into a rotating cylinder unlike any of the Black Cloaks’ rifles. Beneath his other hand shivered the broken misery of the Ang’soon princess.
Soh’shoro lowered his blade, gazing at his beloved. She hung ravaged by rot, her once-thin form swelling with the weight of coming wings. Congealed blood dribbled from her mouth, staining her throat like charcoal cast into water. Even now An-go’yi’ki forced his fingers down her throat to stop her biting her tongue, spattering his pale skin with gore and saliva. He held the princess like a paralyzed doll, all the more perfected for the terror in her eyes.
“Soh’shoro,” An-go’yi’ki menaced. “I warned you not to come for her.”
The princess screamed through her brother’s twisted fingers, her cry reverberating through the cavernous hull, catching against its bridging pillars and leaking through its sealant walls.
“Let me take her,” Soh’shoro begged. “I don’t need to hurt you.”
An-go’yi’ki shook his head. Tears spilled from his eyes. “You don’t know anything!” he yelled. “I was so close. So close to the Valley.”
“Let her go, An-go’yi’ki.”
“You’ve ended Eternity. The Cult was our only chance. He was our only chance.” His eyes shone wildly. “I won’t die! I will never die!” But the life in his words sputtered, like a spent candle. “This is your fault, Soh’shoro. You murdered me! You condemned my sister to rot in this horrid world! You brought fire and Black Cloaks to our Haven!” And An-go’yi’ki raised his pistol menacingly. “He can still feast. I can still take her to him. We can rejoin the Valley and . . .”
Soh’shoro had heard enough. He advanced across the hold as overhead flames scorched the ceiling timbers.
“You won’t shoot me,” he gambled, measuring each pace. “I am your brother. You can’t.”
“I will,” An-go’yi’ki swore. “You were never my blood. You were always his!”
They were terribly close now. When Soh’shoro reached for his princess, An-go’yi’ki aimed his gun. But in that instant, Soh’shoro snaked between brother and sister, driving his elbow into An-go’yi’ki’s stomach. The Ang’soon prince jerked like a tightened prayer strip, slamming into the ship’s bearing wall.
“You never stood a chance.”
The princess fell against Soh’shoro, blood dribbling from her mouth. He smelled lilies on her skin like poison. And Soh’shoro gazed again into her guileless eyes. But there was no monster there, merely a hideous void of black.
“I came for you,” he whispered. Then he took her hand, leading her limping from the burning hull of the ship.
“Demon!” An-go’yi’ki called. The Ang’soon prince stood once more, pistol shaking. “I can’t let you take her.” His weapon cocked into the flames. “She’ll suffer, do you understand? She’ll change into one of them!”
And in horror Soh’shoro realized the pistol wasn’t aimed at him.
He didn’t think. Instead, he leaped in front of the princess, knocking her to safety even as she snatched for bright lacquer. And then An-go’yi’ki’s shell struck Soh’shoro full force in the face.
The world cracked in a warm burst of blood and wood. His head snapped with the impact, the vexing spiral of the gun flash vanishing into the princess’s cry. The hum of the world went dead. Soh’shoro slammed against the ship’s flooring, gasping into concussive silence.
But he was still alive.
He blinked senselessly, trying to understand. When he raised his hand, it came away with bloodied slabs of lacquer. Fragments of her cracked mask. Soh’shoro had carried it here but never fitted it atop his own face. There was only one other who could have.
Turning his head, he saw it was the princess who had saved him. Even now she clasped a thin shard in her trembling hand, splinters scarring her palm bright and bloody. Her wooden visage had shielded him, breaking beneath the bullet instead of his own skull.
And Soh’shoro rose, unbelieving.
“How could you?”
“I won’t let her suffer. If she’s going to change . . .”
He flew toward An-go’yi’ki like a demon. When his brother fired, he dashed askance, falling low as the next bullet hummed overhead. Again and again, he weaved past the shots, anticipating each jerking motion of the pistol’s barrel. For one instant the brothers seemed to mirror each other, a perfect dance of reflexive violence. Then Soh’shoro’s blade sang free, splitting a bullet in two even as it gashed his brother wide. The pair spun past each other in arcs of crimson, back-to-back for one instant as An-go’yi’ki thrust his gun behind for his final shot. The needle-sharp sound of blade catching metal rang as Soh’shoro locked the muzzle away, driving his sword, reversed, through An-go’yi’ki’s stomach. And the Ang’soon prince slumped against him, head leaning into Soh’shoro’s shoulder as his muscles fell slack.
“I’m sorry,” An-go’yi’ki slurred. He fell forward, pulling free of the sword and collapsing to his knees in gushing wetness, painting the floor with his majesty. “I just wanted . . .” He choked on his own blood. “I just wanted not to end.” He coughed one last time.
“But we must,” Soh’shoro promised.
Then An-go’yi’ki, prince of the Ang’soon House, died for the second time by his brother’s hand.
Part Four
The End of Eternity
Chapter 19
Demon
He blinked as if awaking from a trance. His muscles ached. His body protested burns and cuts. She helped him stumble, step by step, from the dark of the hull.
Soon.
The burning sloop drifted ashore, listing awkwardly. Somehow Soh’shoro climbed down to the beach, even as fire disintegrated the ship. But the brilliant metal of the Qu’en Shard remained, lancing heavenward like a grasping hand as it settled into the shallows. The Haven burned beyond. Dawn brightened the horizon’s black sails with a chimeric, ruby riot.
“Thank you. For saving me.”
“I saved myself,” the princess replied forcefully. “I couldn’t let him take me.”
“Why? What did your brother mean? When he said the Onan’ji would feast?”
The princess stayed silent.
“Is that why you tried to bite your tongue?”
Still nothing.
“You’ve known all along, haven’t you? Ever since we first met?”
“Some.” She looked away. “Some I learned Outside. Or remembered, as I changed.” Her eyes ran the depths of the sea.
Soh’shoro leaned against her. She held him, gently raising her hand to where the exploding lacquer of her mask had scarred his bloodstained cheek. She traced those gashes down his chest and into the veinless staining of the Qu’su, as if connecting them.
“We all suffer. But some of us were made to. That’s my purpose.”
“What purpose? I need to hear it from you.”
When she next spoke, her words came carefully measured, each syllable metered and calculated. “To hook into the machine.”
He trembled.
“I’ve told you so many times, Soh’shoro. But you never listened. I am a backup. A copy. Hiding in plain sight.”
“No, you are the Ang’soon princess.”
“Why can’t you see?” She laughed bitterly. “I don’t even have a name. Just like you only stole your mother’s.”
He froze.
“The rot is not a disease, Soh’shoro. It is a sequence telling the body how to change.” She enunciated each word harshly and gutturally. “My kind are contingencies. Bred to incubate the essence of the Qu’en. So its Eternity can be ever enfleshed.”
“That’s what he meant by feasting, isn’t it? The Onan’ji will consume your rot to change.”
“To shape Eternity to his will.” The words shivered in her flesh, as if waking something alien within. “His original schemes were for the Corpse, I think. But through your father, he will have learned the rot must be fresh, from my kind before we change.” She swallowed. “There are so many of us, underneath the Mausoleum. I doubt he knows how to wake those copies without ruining them. While I’m alive, perhaps he can’t.” She smiled faintly. “But I don’t think that will matter. To him, we are just components. Waiting to be consumed.”
The feast.
“Who knows how far along the Onan’ji’s transformation is? Who knows what else he might dare, once he discovers his Cult has failed?” Her blackened eyes met his. “We must stop him now. No matter what.”
Shouts came from farther up the beach, as Black Cloaks rowed out of the storm. They had been found.
“How long do you have?”
She hesitated. “What do you mean?”
“Before you change too.”
In answer she lowered her robes. The rot spread, deeper and deeper, down her breasts and back, into the small of her stomach. Spiraling and lacing, in gorgeous arcs like whirlpools in a pond. Beneath her paling flesh, bones poked through, thin and hollow, fragile as a bird’s. The bulging swept worst across her neck and shoulders, with the rising pressure of a pinion mass straining beneath.
“My brother tried to delay it. With the Shard. But it’s already too late.”
“Not for surgery,” Soh’shoro insisted. “I saw with my own eyes what the chirurgeons can do.”
“I don’t want that.” She pulled her robes tight, hiding the darkness.
“And I don’t want to lose you.”
“But you must.” She turned forcefully. “It’s what I want, Soh’shoro. The end of all their kind. For the Qu’en to die with me.” The princess smiled brightly. “Promise me. Like you did before.”
But Soh’shoro did not reply.
Instead, exhaustion and pain took their toll, and he lay down on the damp sands, breathing heavily. And the princess merely waited patiently beside him, statuesque and sorrowful as a broken doll.
The Black Cloaks dragged the Shard back across the shore, crossing the Haven’s bridge just as the Mists reached the Ocean’s edge. Refugees, once barred by the barbican’s gates, streamed inside beside it. All just in time. Soon the last suggestions of the amaranthine plains vanished, alongside the waterlogged tresses connecting city to sand.
Until only the Mist and the sea remained.
The Black Cloaks carted the Shard to the amphitheater, as if mimicking the procession of the Gi’en shrines. There Outsiders gathered in speechless rows and huddled clusters, spreading blankets and tents across the fire-blackened stones. The Mists swarmed tighter, roiling now over the charred platforms of the Haven. All held their breath, fearing the magic of the Qu’en’s relic spent.
But suddenly the Shard sparked with alien colors: electric greens and putrescent blues. The Mists cleaved apart, as surely as waves breaking against stones. The amphitheater, and its nearby districts, endured inviolate. All else was blotted away, except a narrow sliver of sky. Then this, too, vanished.
During that longest night, the Outsiders watched in horror as something monstrous circled their sanctuary. As the Mists drifted past, an alien specter stalked within them. It was more wraith than wing; more force than flesh. A horrid, mouthless face kept pressing the edges of its prison. Yet somehow it cried with the Voice, again and again, repeating the same word with absolute, cosmic indifference:
Soon.
Then it was gone.
With dawn, the Mists drifted into the outer seas, the once-blue horizon vanishing beneath their argent bands. And any lingering pall from the horror’s presence faded as moonlight behind clouds. The Outside, or what little remained of it, had survived.
Soh’shoro watched all this barely conscious, through the haze of the lead chirurgeon’s leaden tinctures, as An’na treated his burns and cuts. He had been hurt terribly: in his battle with the Qu’su, in the Vault’s explosion, and then in his final duel against An-go’yi’ki. He could do little else but endure. And day after day passed like that, into that dim awareness of recovery.
The Ang’soon princess never visited. But Yei’an was with him always. Ever smiling warmly, gently squeezing his hand, just below the stains of the Qu’su.
“We can see clearly to the mountains,” she told him the morning she left. “To the Valley itself. The Black Cloaks make ready to march on the City. To finish the Onan’ji and his Qu’su once and for all.”
Soh’shoro leaned against her, testing his legs. And Yei’an helped him pace the narrow infirmary, as had become their routine, patiently encouraging his muscles to heal.
“I need to go with them,” Soh’shoro declared at last.
“You’re still hurt.” Yei’an shook her head. “You need to rest.”
“I need to see him,” Soh’shoro insisted. “I need to be there when the Onan’ji loses everything. When his broken dream burns.” He trembled in terrible anticipation of that moment. “Besides, I am still the prince of the Valley. I should lead the army’s march upon my home.”
“But you don’t have to,” Yei’an protested. “This War will be won with or without your blade. The Black Cloaks bring powder and cannon. In numbers far beyond the Qu’su. Even the Onan’ji cannot defeat such a force.”
“Nonetheless,” Soh’shoro replied, “he will still fight. I must go.”
Yei’an nodded slowly. “We can start with the walk to the War camp at least.” She forced a smile. “The fresh air might do you good.”
Together they shuffled outside the infirmary, into the Haven’s streets. But the stench of Death lay heavier on the breeze than even sea salt. Cultist corpses, strung up like butchered animals, baked in the afternoon sun. Gulls picked at their soft flesh, cawing cruelly.
“How many died?”
“So many,” Yei’an replied. “The chirurgeons saved what they could. But the Cult killed more. And the Mists took almost everything else.”
On and on they paced the desolate streets, leaning against each other. Soh’shoro savored Yei’an’s rich scent, her easy touch, her winking eyes. Being beside her, even among such Death, made his heart quicken.
But he never rethought his choice.
The Black Cloak encampment marshaled at the Haven’s bridgehead. Here riflemen stocked powder into tented carts, as others drilled formation to heavy drums. Chirurgeons clustered among grand bowers of blackened iron and knotted heartwood. Soh’shoro noticed An’na among them. She gestured warmly, inviting him to join her.
But instead of approaching, he stopped stock-still, then turned to Yei’an. Her luminous eyes gazed back at him with nothing except care.
“I need to tell you something.”
“Anything,” she replied, her breath like sweet melon.
“Most of the Houses are dead. Soon too the Onan’ji and his monks. All that will be left to govern the Valley is myself”—he hesitated—“and the Ang’soon princess.”
Yei’an nodded slowly. Her good eye welled, ever so slightly, in a way Soh’shoro had not seen since the very first night they met, amid the sorrowful shadows of the Qu’su temple.
“After we reclaim our home, it will need a new dynasty. Tradition will matter more because of what is lost.”
“I know you married her,” Yei’an replied coolly, lips trembling. “We never spoke of it, but I know.”
“Then you know what I must do.”
“No, I don’t.” She seemed suddenly small, like a cornered animal. “Everything has changed, Soh’shoro. Why not this?”
He tried to hold her gaze. But her single eye kept slipping away like a carp through broken netting.
“I care for you. Maybe more than her. But . . .”
“You’re lying.” She smiled sorrowfully. “You see yourself in her, I know. The same suffering. The same pain.”
“Yei’an . . .”
“But there is another part of you, Soh’shoro. A better part. You can be more than your darkness. You do not have to choose Death.” She swallowed. “Please. Choose me.”
He wanted to. So badly. For a moment he imagined again the other life that might be: of biting kisses and confident smiles. Of caring and being cared for, not out of need but out of gentle trust. Of wanting nothing else, because only she remained.
And still Soh’shoro shook his head.
“She’s a demon! Look at her. She needs to die! She asks for it herself!”
“She is not thinking clearly. The rot reaches her brain,” he insisted wildly, as if trying to convince himself. “The chirurgeons can cure her.”
“Listen to yourself!” she shouted. “Is this what you want to become? When you might be anything at all?”
He darkened. “Yes.”
“I will not watch you force surgery—” She swallowed the words, looking away in disgust. “You do it. You order them to torture your bride! You risk your life alone for a War that no longer needs you! I want no part in your madness and your misery anymore. If this is what you choose, you choose it without me.”
He glimpsed the cracked mask, its broken shards somehow still worming their way into his skull.
“Don’t leave,” he begged. But his words were hollow, the appeal halfhearted.
“I’m not the one leaving.” Yei’an stood terribly straight, every muscle in her body tensing with anger and sorrow. Tears streamed down her face, even more beautiful for her betrayal. She forced a final smile, swollen like a house grafted onto thin frames. “I still love you.” And she vanished toward the sea.
Now Soh’shoro stood alone, struggling without her aid, still smelling her winter bur and honey. He willed himself not to care, as he clenched and unclenched his hands, grasping for her ghost.
