Beyond Oblivion

by Daryl Banner

Maybe it still doesn’t.

  The main table around which the three of them now sit (minus Ranklin) is the stump of a giant tree. It has room to seat at least six folk about its perimeter, eight to ten if they didn’t mind sharing one another’s breath. Even the whole building itself is tree-like, its rooms constantly branching off into other rooms and corridors and smaller rooms yet, some of them as tiny as closets. It only has one floor aboveground (if you don’t count all its height in the trees that grow through the roof and reach for whatever sun they can find), but its basements dig three stories deep where chambers of weapons, armors, and food are kept—as well as the many, many tangled roots of the trees that sprout above.

  “One day, maybe I’ll have a castle in the sky,” Chole tells him, “and you can breathe all the air you wish. Though, I think it a bit of irony that the very air you’d be so thankful for, alas, comes from the very trees that are suffocating you right now.”

  “It ain’t the trees, I think, but the stupid flowers.” Jonan coughs and wipes his nose, his eyes reddened and teary. “Pretty, sure, but I’ll leave that for the Greensmen and Greenswomen. Fuck me.” He lets out another hearty sneeze, causing Mira to recoil and turn her face.

  “It won’t be much longer. We—Ah, he returns,” Chole says as Ranklin emerges from the bathroom and plops back down in his wooden chair, which creaks so loudly that for one worrisome second Tide thinks the thing might split in half under his big ass. “We have but three more things to discuss before I let you all to your duties.”

  “Another Marshal reassignment?” asks Mira with a curl of her lips. “After what happened in the fourth last week …”

  “Fuck the fourth,” growls Ranklin, incensed at once by the mere mention of it. “Those Sister-lovers can suck my dick. I was perfectly clear in what I asked of them, and those self-inflating, defiant—”

  “They’re just holding to their faith,” Jonan interjects. “After the Madness, you can’t fault a company of strong-willed women who worship the Sisters and answer only to them in the absence of a true King. Better than the strong-willed men of the second we dealt with long before them who—”

  “We have a true King.” Ranklin points one fat finger at Chole. “And if those Sister extremists can’t bow to him, they’ve no place in our Coalition and might as well face the wrath of my hammer.”

  “To a fool like you, it’s no wonder everything looks like a nail. You’re always set to fix things that aren’t broken.” Jonan is clearly unaware (or perfectly aware) of Ranklin’s reddening face. “Swinging about that hammer of yours like you’ve something to prove to a boy version of yourself from eight years ago who had his head dipped in the muds by schoolyard bullies.”

  “Watch your mouth, Jonan, or I’ll suspect your face is a nail that needs as much a hammering.”

  “Boys, boys,” cuts in Chole with a wave of his hand. “Come. We serve nothing when all we serve are our own words. Remember. All of this is bigger than any one of us alone.” He eyes either of them with importance. “Bigger than you, or you, or even me. The only one whose interests I serve is Atlas, and she is wounded, my friends.”

  “I’m sorry.” Jonan is quick—and first—to relent, bowing his head and folding his arms on the table.

  After just a moment of hesitation, Ranklin follows the big boy’s lead. “Sorry likewise.” He shrugs his back against his creaky chair.

  Tide looks between the two of them. They are so quick to bow to Chole, it’s as unsettling as it is annoying. Does anyone here have a backbone? wonders Tide. Does anyone oppose Chole, or do they truly think he’s some sort of god of peace they must obey at first word?

  “Besides, with a new woman on the throne and no sign of Impis in sight,” Chole goes on tirelessly, “we’ve a new set of strategies we must discuss. None of us expected the Madness to be handed off to a slumborn girl who has wishes in her eyes and, well, nothing else.”

  Mira crosses her legs the other way. “She could be the answer, soulless as she may seem.”

  “Yes. She very well could be. But that’s a matter we’ll discuss more in detail later.” Chole eyes Mira. “And to answer your question from before: no, there’s no Marshal reassignment planned for today’s meeting. I’m content with the three lovely lot of you.”

  “And Tide,” she throws back, lifting her hazel eyes his way.

  All faces turn his way. Tide Wellport sits there like a lump of meat with two black rocks for eyes. I’m no Marshal, he knows. Head of Crews, they call him. Whatever the fuck that is. Regardless of the empty title, he’s been given so many different tasks that haven’t a damned thing to do with one another that he can’t even say with confidence what it is he actually does.

  No matter his duties, he no longer works for the Queen of the Abandon, and for that he’s thankful.

  Provided the Slum King stays untouched by that vile woman.

  “Yes,” states Chole with an astute nod. “Tide, indeed. If I wasn’t afraid of naming everyone who sits at my table a Marshal, I’d name you some new role no one’s heard of. Marshal of the Very Wind Itself, I might say.” A handsome smile spreads his freckles apart. “Tell me. Do you think you can create a monumental whirlwind the size of Atlas that could rearrange the very face of it? Maybe this new Queen of ours needs a friendly little tossing of her hair up in that sky. We can call it our ‘hello’.”

  Tide eyes him with dark resolve. “I’ll do you better by spinning a whirlwind that will suffocate our enemies and pull the Lifted City down over their heads.”

  The room is silent as the others stare at him. Mira’s little smirk is gone. Even Ranklin shows a sparkle of fear in his eyes. Jonan’s face has frozen, an uncertain pinch to his eyebrows.

  It is evident everyone in the room remembers the day Tide summoned a wind across the first ward stage so strong it ripped away the woman who almost claimed Chole’s life—a woman called Gin who has been sitting in a cell right beneath them ever since.

  Tide feeds off the fear that lives in each of their eyes. Backbones, he’d say, meeting each of their eyes. Where the fuck are any of your backbones? Your strength? You are all pathetic.

  Chole tilts his head. “We build a city by uniting it. Not by—”

  “You can tell that to the Queen of the Abandon when she takes out your eyes,” Tide spits back. “Tell me how united you feel, then.”

  “Every effort has a sacrifice.” Chole lifts his hands in surrender. “Perhaps it is not my way to spill blood. Perhaps others have won their wars by doing so. But my war is a means—a very important means—through which I intend to show the city a different way.” He smiles at the others. “Much like I intend to handle the fifth.”

  “Oh, our scouts returned word?” asks Mira curiously.

  “Apparently the multitude of soldiers and—Hightower rogues? Is that what we’re calling them now?—are sinking teeth into the fifth and scaring them into submission.”

  And like that, the subject of Tide and his bloodlust is dismissed as fast as a fart. “Wall Breakers,” Jonan grunts, then clears his throat and adds, “I can’t say what wall they plan to break, exactly. The Wall is part mountain at the back of the sixth.”

  “And it keeps them safe from the Oblivion, yes,” admits Chole, “though, with the Madness as their inspiration, I wouldn’t doubt them having a nihilist or anarchist system of beliefs. I do wonder sometimes if that’s their purpose in the end, to annihilate everything we know. It was certainly Impis’s purpose. No one can say for sure, unless our scouts can push past the fifth without risking their lives.”

  “Everything is a risk of life,” Jonan says with a shake of his head.

  Chole nods somberly, then faces Ranklin. “My sir, you may need to form a Shield to safeguard a few of our diplomats in the fifth. We really cannot afford to lose any of them.”

  The brooding muscle nods. “A Shield of how many? Six?”

  “Try four. Four strong. Save our numbers for home. We’ve still a silent, foreboding south side to ke
ep a hold on. The Abandon has yet been silent, but so’s a knife at your back moments before it strikes.” Chole lifts his eyes to Jonan. “I’ve heard too many whispers at that edge of the first. A new rumor every day, it seems, on spies from the Abandon. Can we collect and temper these rumors to keep the peace of the people?”

  “It’s what I’m doing already,” Jonan replies almost defensively.

  Mira straightens up in her seat and crosses her legs. “I … have to put in an observation of mine, if I may.”

  Chole spreads his hands invitingly. “Please.”

  “Legacies shouldn’t be underestimated. It’s the first thing I was taught by my mother before she struck my traitor father in the back with a meat cleaver. May her soul be safe in the Keep. That said of Legacies, I don’t suspect the sixth is what it seems. There must be a strong Legacy at work. An Outlier. A number of them, perhaps.”

  “Yes, of course, surely it’s a team that runs the Wall Breakers,” agrees Chole, “but you suspect it’s a team of Outliers?”

  “Or one. And quite a powerful one, at that.” Mira leans forward. “Their numbers are multiplying, haven’t you noticed? But … how? Who joins them? We’ve had people come to us through the sixth—wanderers from the seventh and beyond—and some said they saw precisely no one in the sixth. Not a single person on the streets. Does that not sound strange? I’m not convinced of their numbers or their strength. It’s all shouts and show, but no real blood spilled.”

  “None yet,” grunts Jonan as he sniffles twice, then flicks a fly off his arm with irritation.

  Chole nods at her. “Interesting … So you think it’s a trick?”

  Ranklin shifts in his seat. “However many it is in the sixth, they have all the metal resource they can pick from the Mechanoid Mines at their backs. They’re not lacking for resource. And they—”

  “But perhaps rather they lack a means to make use of all that metal,” Jonan interjects. “The forges and metalshops—”

  “Are in the ninth and tenth,” finishes Ranklin, who clearly hates to be interrupted, particularly by him. “They would have to deal with the Greensfolk in the ninth somehow.”

  Jonan sighs. “The Greensfolk and the ninth are separate folk.”

  Ranklin wrinkles his face up. “They’re still working together.”

  “Yes, but—” A sneeze cuts off whatever else Jonan meant to say.

  Chole ignores their back-and-forth and focuses the group. “So it is obvious they could have the means to make use of their metal, if it is to be believed that they are as … heavily armed as they seem.”

  “I still doubt they are,” mutters Mira.

  Tide glowers and looks off, mumbling, “A whirlwind the size of Atlas will take care of them, too.”

  When a silence settles upon the others, he realizes he might’ve let out his snide remark a touch too loud.

  Then suddenly he doesn’t care. “We’ve the numbers,” Tide goes on, “and the willing men and women. We should just storm the fifth and the sixth and take the fuckers down.”

  Chole softly places a palm on the table. “But our advantage isn’t in our numbers. It’s in our patience, see? The Madness has sat upon all of our backs long enough. People tire of war. Now, we’ve—”

  “Now we’ve sat on our asses long enough,” Tide cuts in.

  It wasn’t what Chole was going to say, as is shown by the less than sweet look in his eyes.

  Mira interjects with a soothing, “Tide …” and nothing more, her head shaking left to right slowly. Tide glances her way. Unless she’s willing to stand up to Chole and his soft-ruling hand, I don’t need her soothing uttering of my name. He knows most other hot-blooded young men would have fallen at her feet months ago. Not him; his blood is hot for other reasons—and it isn’t for the warm, wet place between her legs that I might stick something.

  “I find I must agree with you,” says Chole unexpectedly.

  Tide glances his way.

  “Too long on our asses.” Chole gestures cheerily to the others. “Let us take a break off our merry asses! We must wait for our envoy from the Core to return, after all, so let’s rejoin at sunrise and take the rest of the evening and night to rest our minds. I think I could use a dinner, after all.”

  It isn’t exactly what Tide meant—which he suspects is precisely the point—but with a short clapping of his hands, the Slum King dismisses them, and the meeting is over.

  But just before Tide leaves the room, Chole’s voice stops him. “Hey, buddy, my man, can you stay for a second?”

  Tide stops at the doorway. The others have left, and only the two of them stand beneath the webbed canopy of vines and leaves and wooden slats. “What?” Tide grunts.

  Chole leans against the wooden column nearest him and crosses his arms. “Are you alright, buddy?”

  Tide frowns. “Of course.”

  “You sure? Anything you want to share with me?” He picks at something on his finger. “Damn nails of mine. Always a grain of dirt where it doesn’t belong.” He lifts his soft eyes again to Tide and lets on a caring smile. “You can tell me anything. Are you having trouble with your memories?”

  He so resents the boy King’s prying. If he might take back a day, it would be the one where he turned to tears and blubbered in front of Chole about his lost memories and the unknown person who took them. If I just had a glimpse, Tide laments. If I just had one little hint that explained my whereabouts those lost months, that explained that Wick-fucker’s actions, that explained my strange neon glows …

  “Listen to me, Tide. I was going to save this for tomorrow, but I feel it important—call it my instinct, call it my gut—to divulge my private thoughts to you now. Can I do that?” he asks suddenly, his bright eyes on Tide’s. “Can I share my private thoughts with you?”

  Tide shifts his weight uncomfortably from one leg to the other, frowning down on Chole warily. Is he about to beg to give me a suck-job? This Slum King boy?

  After a moment, Tide gives him a curt nod.

  Chole smiles. “I knew I could. You’re like a vault. Strong and big and unbreakable, and I can trust that all I put in you stays safe as a Lifted lot of gold. Listen.” He uncrosses his arms and puts a hand on Tide’s shoulder, who stiffens under his touch. “We are going to make our first move—a real move—and it will be toward this new Queen, this new slumborn Erana Queen.”

  Tide’s heart jumps. “A move? What move?”

  “I am assembling a team to go with me to the Lifted City.”

  Tide can’t believe his ears. The Lifted City …?

  “We’re going to meet with the Queen,” Chole goes on, “and I intend to negotiate a unity of slum and sky. Joint rulership of Atlas. King and Queen. I want you on that team.”

  Tide did not expect that. He only stares at Chole, unable to say anything in response.

  The boy King goes on. “It … will not include the other Marshals. I want a team of an elite few who will be able to handle any situation we encounter. I don’t wish to use force, but we need to be prepared for anything. This is an opportunity for all of us to get what we want—especially if this Queen means all she says.”

  Tide envisions himself standing between the Queen and Chole, creating a wall of wind to threaten all of the fools in the sky, bringing them to their knees in submission.

  “I’d appreciate your discretion in this,” murmurs Chole.

  Tide is pulled from his fantasy. “My what?”

  “Don’t tell anyone of this plan of mine. I wish only to tell the Marshals what they need to know. I don’t want anyone to think we are going to war, see? We’re not. It’s just a private meeting.”

  “But you need muscle with you.” Tide straightens up his posture and rolls his shoulders. “That’s why you’re putting me on your team. You might need my power.”

  “Don’t misunderstand. I don’t want to use power. I’d appreciate you on my side in this. Tide, the others … they aren’t like you.” His grip on Tide’s shoulder tighte
ns. “You’re special. I sense it in you. It’s a kind of strength that the others lack.”

  “Yeah, strength.” It’s the only thing Tide hears.

  Young King Chole looks him in the eye, and his words are slow and patient. “Strength is what we need, certainly. But Tide, you must learn to temper yours. Much like the wind, if you let it run wild, you can knock down everything we’re trying to build here. If you control it, however …” Chole smiles with half his lips. “A funnel of wind, like a finger of its own Madness, can own the world.”

  Tide imagines it for a moment—standing atop the world casting bolts of wind and tornadoes to the slums below.

  “So will you be on my team, yet keep the ordeal a secret until I am ready to reveal it to the others?” Chole tilts his head and smiles. “I’ll need you by my side.”

  To that, Tide gives him two hard eyes and one hard nod.

  The whole way home, Tide passes face after face of women and men who nod his way. Uncomfortable as it makes him, he’s learned to nod in return, though his nods are stiff and more annoyed than grateful. The people of the Coalition give him respect because Chole gives him respect, and that fact isn’t lost on him.

  And that very thought converts his pride into resentment.

  Chole doesn’t know loss, Tide had long ago decided. Otherwise, he would carry the red in his eyes like the rest of us, like the rest of us who have had our lives stolen out from between our fingers, and he wouldn’t be so soft on a secret mission to the Lifted City. He would use my wind. He would use it and take over all of Atlas by the end of the week.

  And someday soon, Tide will remember everything. Of that, he is certain. His memories that were taken from him since the day he fled the Weapon Show will resurface, and he will know who to trust.

  And who to put in the path of his fist.

  When Tide pushes through the door to his house, it’s like Dog heard him coming from halfway across the ward. “Hey, there. Hi. I made you a stew.” Dog has already set a table with two bowls, a plate with knobs of bread on it, a tiny saucer of butter, and a gently burning candle despite the sun still having an hour of light to give. “I figure you must be hungry after a day with the King. How are you?”