Eternity's Blade, page 24
The Onan’ji smiled so widely his jaw seemed to disjoint. “Then I can give her to you. There are so many copies, Soh’shoro. Some in whom the rot refused to take . . .” He licked his lips thirstily. “Why not Rebirth your princess in a more perfect shell? Why not share more than a single, sickened life? When you could join together for all Eternity? With your mother. With me.”
The prince stared into the eyes of the dolls. Each empty duplicate waited, unwoken, in layer upon layer of his lover’s endless flesh. More than anything in his entire life, he wanted to accept them. To believe that, somewhere in their voids, a spark of her still smoldered.
But no matter how he imagined, these silent simulacra could never be the same. Not after what they’d shared. Not with what they still might, however fleeting.
“When I finish you,” Soh’shoro replied, rejecting the monk’s temptation, “I will do more than destroy the Valley and its machine. I will free the world from the Qu’en’s curse once and for all.” He still carried the powder bag, its black bands nestled safely beneath his robes. Now he lowered it among the dolls, settling it among their broken husks like earth upon a grave.
“Fool!” the Onan’ji spat. “How long will this world of yours endure? When its every grandeur must fade, even the greatest loves, even the vastest passions? If you measure Man by his wants, then you need only wait long enough to judge his life meaningless.” The Onan’ji stalked closer, his rotting eye flowering hungrily through the salt haze. “I have given you every chance. Because I love you. But if I am forced to choose”—he shuddered ferociously—“I love her more.”
The Qu’su stretched before Soh’shoro now, blood trickling down his spine and pooling thickly over the dolls’ empty faces and into their mouths agape, even as wing nubs strained farther through the Onan’ji’s flesh.
“I know your secret.” Soh’shoro smiled wickedly. “I don’t need her Voice anymore. I will kill you by my hand alone.”
“Then you condemn her, and everyone else you love, to the slow Death of time.” The Onan’ji’s mouth contorted wider still, a tiger’s smirk of malice. “Tell me, my child: Can you end Eternity itself?”
Soh’shoro’s smile twisted too, mimicking his mentor’s. “Of course.”
“Then show me.”
With the hunger of parched earth in high summer, Soh’shoro struck. In one smooth motion he cut, splitting the darkness of the chamber in scattering shadows of coruscating azurite, the Onan’ji shivering out of focus beneath the blade. Then the Qu’su was gone—a ghost into the salt haze. Instantly Soh’shoro rolled aside, a shurishi burying itself in the lacquer floor a hair’s breadth from his throat. As he rose, their swords met with a quaking note that reverberated through the brine-specter dark like the timorous echo of chimes.
Soh’shoro rounded low, knocking the Onan’ji off balance and shouldering him against the hard stone of the Emperor’s catafalque. The Qu’su rebounded with astounding speed, sliding beneath a slash as he locked his feet through Soh’shoro’s, tripping him to the ground. The monk’s ri’shou’an streaked the blue of a harvest moon.
But Soh’shoro caught a copy’s reflection in that eclipsing arc. And this time its eyes smoldered with the princess’s true brightness. Her tears, her scars; eyes pitch-black tombs he could never bear to close, perfect and familiar in their misery. Walled away from the world, she was a puppet, brought into it a creature of fading twilight. The taste of her blood mingled with brine tea; the falls of her hair tangled into an ageless darkness, consuming even the sweetness of her lilied skin. She smiled, then. He felt the sting of her lips parting, searing like deep winter’s cold, goading him into motion. Still gore splattered against his face, unfeeling where it caught the ghostly memories of her mask.
And Soh’shoro spilled down the far steps of the Emperor’s dais, his side split wide. Crashing through silken screens, he broke back-flat against a terrace doorway, tumbling atop another heap of her. As Soh’shoro struggled to stand, he felt the copies’ hands lifting him up, his blood washing their pale palms clean.
The Onan’ji was already upon him, bursting from the alkali haze like a falcon from a cloud, blade spearing before him. Instinct alone let Soh’shoro catch the weapon, ri’shou’an sparking down the length of the monk’s sword and snapping its guard aside. The Qu’su leaped then, vaulting his knee into Soh’shoro’s chest, butterflying his other leg and cracking Soh’shoro’s head against the terrace frame. They split through its sliding door in a shower of veils and tinted paper, streaming as wings unfurled onto the Mausoleum balcony. Soh’shoro crashed hard on his torn side, blood lacing the boards where he slid.
“I am doing this for her,” the Onan’ji confessed, flicking gore from his blade as a cat might paw at string. He stood framed by the shattered screen, the flames of a spilled salt brazier rising into the night behind him like cinder fireflies.
Gasping through blood-flecked lips, Soh’shoro spat out his answer: “I am too.”
And the Onan’ji felt it now: the gash where Soh’shoro’s blade had split cleanly through his ri’shou’an’s narrow guard. Already blood trickled down his veinless forearm, pooling crimson.
“So close.” The Qu’su’s fetid eye flashed. “I trained you well.”
Soh’shoro watched his mentor advance toward him, calmly and inevitably as shadows drawing long at eventide. There was a majesty about him unseen before, an ease of consequence both simple and terrible, like water filling the lungs of the drowned. He was not the man Soh’shoro had faced once before, in that other life bound by the limits of the Mists. By the taste of his princess, he had become far more: a force of nature, purposeful and cruel, like rot finding pleasure in savaging the dead.
Soh’shoro forced himself up to face him, ancestral ri’shou’an held low and askance, the roughness of its hilt binding pressing faintly like a lover’s silk.
A keening wind scoured the balcony, whipping up the voluminous dust of spilled salt. They vanished into the cloud as they charged. Cuts woke like heat lightning in a summer storm, Soh’shoro skidding past the Onan’ji’s furious counter. Effortlessly the Qu’su stepped with him, locking Soh’shoro’s wrist and wrenching against his momentum. The prince hurtled against the balcony’s railing, only reflex keeping him in motion as he struck. And as he hand-vaulted atop the balustrade, its pillars splintered beneath him with the Onan’ji’s cut.
Two steps along the rail and Soh’shoro leaped free as the banister collapsed under his weight. Blades met midair, sparking starlight. Soh’shoro skidded back onto the balcony, rounding in a wide slash that caught the Onan’ji’s sword against its grain. He felt metal chip beneath his fury, teething deeper as he stepped into the cut. Soh’shoro threw himself forward then, smashing them both through the railing and out into the night.
The upper ponds of the waterfall gardens waited below, thick with lily flowers that poured through their sunken glass into subterranean cascades. Soh’shoro had first glimpsed her in those leaded waters. He beheld her again now, drowning within the crystalline coldness of her submerged cells, begging to be saved. And his blade sang in answer.
Swords met mid-descent. He caught the Onan’ji’s next lunge through the ringed hilt of his blade, torquing it free, then twisting for the killing blow. But the strike sang seconds too late. And the pond fountained petal-laced waves as both master and student meteored into its shallows.
Soh’shoro’s ankle wrenched against muck-slick glass. He felt its crystal crack with the force of their fall, and he stumbled sideways from the fracture. A shurishi sailed past amid weightless arcs of foam. Off balance, he turned awkwardly into the next blow, the Onan’ji cross-stepping his guard and sweeping his legs from him. Soh’shoro’s world bled silent as he splashed beneath the suffocating cold of the waves.
Instantly the Qu’su clambered over the prince, holding him below the churning flow. As they struggled, the Onan’ji’s phage-stained eye flared, distorted through the waters like a gibbous moon. In its fury Soh’shoro found his measure, relaxing suddenly into the depths as the Onan’ji overstrained. Scissoring his legs, Soh’shoro twisted the Qu’su down alongside him into the shallows.
Now they grappled, starlight filtering their motions through the pond’s glass basin and scattering shadows over the leaden fonts beneath. Overhead the balcony’s railing tilted loose, swinging down as the entire structure sheared apart. The Onan’ji flipped Soh’shoro, striking him twice and trying to push him beneath a falling beam. But the prince evaded the blow, rolling away from the timber as it speared through glass in whirlpools of foaming shards. The entire basin gave way. And like shooting stars they fell, plummeting with sprays of lilies into the cleansing ivory of the waterfall gardens below.
His princess shivered through that cascade, her perfection burning away its avalanching waters. Somehow this was the house they had shared collapsing now, amid the weights of flames and snow and silence. He reached to her in tears, his touch cracking her mask into streaming ribbons of liquid starlight and fevered softness, their world bursting wide like a nova amid the rotting heavens.
And the prince and the Onan’ji crashed against the banks of the sunken gardens. Breath vomited from Soh’shoro’s lungs; his weapon clattered to the ground. Dazed, he moved only because of her love, shifting from the dented marble just in time. In the fractious light a blade glimmered, as the Onan’ji hurled his own sword. It split cleanly through Soh’shoro’s arm, pinning it to stone. Unhesitating, the Onan’ji dashed for the kill, snatching up Soh’shoro’s ancestral ri’shou’an, dead eye flaring through the waterfalls’ foaming haze. But the prince tore the Qu’su’s sword from his own flesh, spilling a cloud of sparks and blood into the cascading heavens.
Blades screamed as they scraped past each other. But Soh’shoro felt the weakness in his mother’s weapon: the golden inlay that repaired its ancient cracks had chipped free. So he threw all his weight behind the next strike, swords catching in a razor bolt of scything brilliance. A clean note fell, buttery and soft. And the ancestral ri’shou’an split like corded timber, the Qu’su’s remaining eye fountaining wide beneath Soh’shoro’s unyielding cut. The Onan’ji stumbled back. The prince turned his sword one final time.
Soh’shoro sliced downward for the killing blow—but he understood too late. The Qu’su fell to his knees beneath the cut, palms clapping the blade overhead, fingers lacing the weapon and wrenching it free. Soh’shoro’s wrist snapped, overbalancing him into the waters beside the broken tip of the crane-bright ri’shou’an. The Qu’su flowed with him, snatching up the golden blade’s other half, lancing its jagged hilt for Soh’shoro’s throat. They froze in their final struggle: the Onan’ji clasping Soh’shoro from behind, choking the lower shard of his family sword into the prince’s neck. Only Soh’shoro’s weakening hold on its ringed pommel held the killing gold away.
“It ends here,” the Qu’su whispered, dead eyes unmoving as the ancestral ri’shou’an burrowed deeper. “Goodbye, my son.”
Amid the cascading heavens, Soh’shoro watched a form coalesce, a ruined idol made from ash and Death. But this was not his princess but his mother. A ghostly recollection of her, awoken now as in those memories of Mists. In lilied torrents she laved herself to divinity, ensorcelled by crystal and petrified in foam, a perfect image of time ensepulchered. The world above opened in a yawning maelstrom, and he caught the full chaos of it: rotund stars like fire consuming the world, echoes of that passionless dark drinking heat and color and life and leaving nothing untainted before the expansive misery beyond Death’s dreaming.
He remembered her sacrifice. So now he made his own.
Soh’shoro reached for the upper half of his mother’s broken blade, glinting beneath the waters. His palm seared as he grasped its naked edge. Then he knew no more pain, even as he drove the golden tip through his chest; even as the cool scarlet of his innards spilled into the shallows. The Onan’ji screamed too, his cries not real but a last escape of the Voice, draining all intention away. And Soh’shoro held his mother close, as if both understood what the other had chosen.
Sacrifice.
“Of course,” the Onan’ji gasped into his ear, as wings burst free from his flesh at last. Blossoming into spans of otherworldly white, their rotting skin stretched farther and farther. They held for one moment, framing the unfurled Qu’en with empyrean perfection. But then the Onan’ji coughed, gore flecking his phage-black lips. “You can choose to die.” And the wings wrapped themselves about Soh’shoro slowly, folding into a pearlescent veil.
Because the blade Soh’shoro had driven neatly through his ribs had caught the Onan’ji completely off guard as it burst through them. Pierced through the prince’s upper back, the vicious tip had continued into the monk’s chest. There it had lanced deeply into his heart, spearing silent forevermore those flowering beats of the Qu’en.
And the Onan’ji fell away now, pulling free of the sword’s length and collapsing into the frothing waters.
“I wanted to give this to you,” the Onan’ji gasped, sightless eyes rolling vigorously, ice clear and beyond any pain. His hand, pure and smooth as worn stone, rose as if pulling back a curtain. “Life Outside the Mists is only regret and sorrow and endings.”
In answer, Soh’shoro wrenched the broken ri’shou’an from his own ribs, hemorrhaging warmth into his ragged lungs. “Then that is the price of potential,” he forced out. “Death.”
“No.” The Onan’ji blinked his sightless eyes one last time. “It is its only reward.”
The waterfall gardens continued their slow collapse, glass and metal shearing free, fountaining over the unleashed angel of the Onan’ji. Fragments cracked the dolls’ ovoid cells, bleeding lily scum inside, filling the lungs of any remaining silent sleepers. And the newly risen Qu’en bled out into their cold, staining the floating lilies crimson with his dying divinity.
Everything after tasted of ash.
Soh’shoro relaxed his grip on the broken blade, revealing a palm sliced to the bone. Then he kneeled painfully, fishing the sword’s twin from the bloodied waters. When he returned both shards to their ossuary, the final click of steel to sheath resounded like a funeral charm.
Now he waded to the watery banks, gasping for breath and trailing gore. His wounds were deep and vicious, and he doubted he could survive them. But he was no stranger to pain. And one final task remained.
Before the helix stair, priests chittered amid the shadows in horrified supplication. Soh’shoro caught the eldest among them, even to the end praying through stitched lips for his cemetery of angels. He broke the man’s throat with a single punch, spewing blood like steam from a kettle. None moved to protect their master. Because none dared confront the murderer of the Onan’ji: Eternity’s Blade made flesh.
Unchallenged, the prince ascended the Mausoleum, his vision swimming, his footsteps heavy. In that hideous peak still hummed the machine, and its aberrant tangle of wires and glass and bright metal. Beneath it lay scattered the broken graveyard of silent dolls. But Soh’shoro knew nothing here mattered. Certainly not the mute faces, and their row upon row of beauteous potential. Because they were never his princess.
Eerily, the Voice stirred one last time, with animal anticipation.
Soon.
He lit the powder bag. Then he ran as fast as his ravaged body would let him, leaping from an outer balcony and snatching its lantern strings. And the great heart of the Valley detonated behind him, in miraculous fireworks of cerulean and sapphire and scarlet.
He did not remember limping to the terraces of his House. But it was here, at last, he chose to rest. Leaning his head against their wooden railings, somehow still smelling the sweet grass of his childhood pillow, sight swimming beneath the sparkle of Obajen-mahoe’s iridized robes as he imagined his father’s arms once more sweeping wide the wondrous world. From here he watched it end: the waterfall gardens crumble; the Palace blaze; the Mists unravel until their last ethereal tendrils vanished beyond the mountain peaks. All fell to ruin, until even the alien Mausoleum melted into glimmering gold, its molten wreckage mirroring the silver starlight.
And still the conflagration spread. Across ponds and streams, over tributaries and river basins. For the fire fed upon the lily petals blanketing the Valley’s floor. Like the trails of shooting stars, the perfect seas of white vanished into celestine smoke. So the Valley’s heart beat free its veins of flame, vanishing alongside its perfect choke of lilies.
Ending Eternity at last.
Epilogue
QU’EN
He awoke to clouds.
Blinking in disbelief, he raised his hand to dim their fustic light. Then he struggled upright, grasping the terrace railing as he simply stared heavenward. For the Mists no longer blotted the Valley’s sky. Instead a vivid dawn spanned empyreal and aureate, shimmering the grasses and streams of his homeland into iridescent golds.
And beneath those piercing rays, Soh’shoro imagined the coming world they warmed:
Qu’su temples rotting in the hills, their subtle knives now mere fireside secrets. His own rise from obliterated royalty, returning to rightful rulership over a Valley reforged. A new court for council, welcoming both chirurgeon and commoner. And the City rebuilt with stone, bathed beneath fireworks bursting on foreign powdered wings. The day yawned with such furious and fantastic potential.
He took one small step toward that future, as if mere motion might hasten its approach. But instead, Soh’shoro’s injuries screamed. Collapsing atop the terrace’s knotted wood, he could only watch his own blood clot against the boards, reflecting the dawn’s miraculous rays a rotted ruby. And now that cerise sunrise seemed only to belie its countless coming darknesses: pain and futile perseverance; famine and disaster and disease; skirmishes against splinters of the Cult; War against seditious Salt-born; Black Ships beyond the foreboding seas of the chirurgeon’s blotted cartographies; and something worse. A sibylline design secreted within the encephalic horror of the Voice’s vanished whispers.
