by Gregory Ashe
Chapter 70
The darkness fluttered back like raven wings. Abass screamed again, the rough stone altar scraping his chin, as dew pounded through him, forcing him to live. Denying him the mercy of unconsciousness as his screams echoed through the smoke-filled sanctuary.
The pain was terrible, as vast as the earth itself—pain-made-flesh, and taken root in Abass. He screamed again, drumming the toes of his boots against the uneven, rust-stained stone. The dew pounded along his veins, pulsed in time with the raw, red pain of the arrow wound. Hot, steaming blood scorched Abass’s side and arm. It soaked into the stone, adding its own shade to the countless bloodstains that marked the altar.
In a matter of breaths, the dew took control, pushing back the pain. A triple load of dew augmented his healing so that the blood dwindled, the wound shrank and puckered into an angry sore. The dew that would most likely kill him when it ran out was healing him, giving him strength even as it drummed out his last day of life. Abass felt his mind clear, as much as the bloodlust of the dew would allow, and the darkness faded as dew-light returned. He shivered. For a moment, he wanted nothing more than to lie still on the stone altar, never to move again.
The frenzy of the dew made him crawl, then stand, and just in time. A heartbeat later, the first esis reached the top of the altar, his braided blond hair smeared with blood and ash. Abass met his gaze for a moment. The bloodlust within Abass surged, demanding the esis’s life. A part of Abass wanted to give in, to continue the slaughter of the eses. For what they had done to Isola, to him. To hundreds and thousands of people, for centuries, under the gods-made-flesh.
Abass crouched and launched himself away from the altar, toward the massive metal doors at the far end of the room—opposite where he had entered. The doors that led into the most holy portion of the temple: the tair’s residence. Killing one more esis would not make a difference; killing a hundred eses would not make a difference. They were just men—dupes, most of them—tools for what the tair itself had engineered. If he killed the eses, the tair would just find more to take their place. No, killing the eses would not change anything; killing the tair would.
Shaking his head, trying to clear the bloodlust, Abass landed at the base of the metal doors and started to push. The doors were massive, solid iron, and designed to be opened by a god-made-flesh. With three cubes of dew in him, with the inferno raging inside, Abass was more than a man, though. He was a being of fire and life, a bonfire of energy accumulated across lifetimes and consumed in heartbeats. Killing the tair would change everything, would make everything better. To feel that divine blood spill across his flesh, to taste it on his tongue. The door shifted, squealing across the worn and splintered wooden floor.
With another shake of his head, Abass tried to focus. He was not here to kill the tair; the thought filled the rational part of Abass, the part still free of the dew’s fever, with terror. I’m here to rescue Isola, Abass told himself, digging his heels into the floorboards and pressing against the doors with his shoulders. Another squeal, and they skidded another few inches, gouging the floor.
The eses were climbing down the altar and making their way across the room toward him. Abass had been lucky that the tair had not stationed any of the su-eses or the Renewed to defend the sanctuary; perhaps they were needed elsewhere. Or, perhaps, there was no need at all. The tair was a god-made-flesh; why would it fear one man?
And yet—somehow, the rest of the gods-made-flesh had been cast down. Killed by men just like Abass, if the rumors were true. The blood of gods had soaked the other Paths, bringing a new era of prosperity. Perhaps the same could be done for Khi’ilan. An end to the harvests, forever.
The door screamed across another few inches of wood. Such thoughts were foolishness. He needed to focus on Isola, and then on escaping with his sister. If he could just get her free from the temple, it would not matter what the dew did to him. As long as he could keep moving until she was safe, away from the temple and the High Harvest and the tair.
Arrows clanged against the metal doors; the eses were close now. Abass glanced at the door. Even with the excess dew, he had barely moved it a hand’s span. He was not a big man, but that was not wide enough even for him. Bunching his shoulders, Abass slammed his weight backward, and the doors lurched behind him. A few more inches. He hit them again and again, the pain in his side blazing in time with his efforts to open the door.
The eses had almost reached him. Bloodlust filled Abass’s, left him breathless with anticipation, but he forced it down. With three cubes of dew in him, it was the hardest thing he had ever done. Part of him, an animalistic part, screamed for death. Abass took that mad part and channeled it into his efforts against the door. It slid again. It might be enough.
Abass slipped between the doors, stepping sideways and letting out a breath to make himself as thin as possible. Even so, he thought for a moment that he might be stuck. Then he was free, on the other side, and he could hear the ring of swords striking the huge metal doors. Abass gave the door one good shove, closing it an inch or so—enough, he prayed, that the eses would not be able to squeeze through as he had.
Ignoring the shouts behind him, Abass turned to see where he was. The wooden floor ended a few paces beyond where he stood, giving way to packed dirt. The wooden walls ended as well, turning into a tunnel of earth. No stone showed; it reminded Abass of where he had been held prisoner. Metal and earth. Well, he thought, at least there’s no chance of turning into a stone-wight. It was little comfort.
The earth tunnel was massive, matching the metal doors. Built for a tair—easily three or four times a man’s height, and two or three times as wide as a man stood tall. The air was damp and musty, thick against Abass’s nose with the smell of something long shut up and hidden from sun and wind. He could taste the soil on the air, feel it against his skin, like cool death. He shivered, grateful for the dew blazing inside him. The shouts, the ring of metal on metal, echoed strangely in the still air, distorted, distant, but still present and threatening. It would only take a single su-esis, or a Renewed, to open the doors, and then Abass would find himself trapped between an angry mob and an angrier god.
He took off down the earthen hall, running easily. The dew dulled the pain in his side and gave him speed and light, so that the packed soil blurred around him into long streams of darkness against the twilight-noon of the dew. The tunnel widened, the ceiling rose, gradually opening into a vast chamber whose edges were visible only through the dew; torchlight would not have reached those distant curves and corners. The air grew thicker, cut with the tang of something like urine, and yet foreign too, mixed with something of a tannery. A memory, laced with smoke and heat, stirred at the back of Abass’s mind, but he could not seize it; the wound, along with the agitation of the dew, sent the memory spiraling away, out of reach. Underneath the panting lust of the dew, though, it left Abass disturbed; where had he smelled that before?
Ahead the ground dropped away suddenly, and Abass brought himself to a halt at the edge. The packed dirt fell beneath him to form a maze of terraces that descended toward a final level, an inverted pyramid, but one designed by a madman. The terraces on the four sides of the pit were uneven—none shared a common height, none lined up with the terraces of the other side. Some differed by dozens of paces; others came within inches of meeting, but had been left inexplicably short. Each terrace was covered by regular, evenly spaced mounds of dirt. It reminded him of a twisted graveyard, played out across space in a way that no rational mind could conceive. It seemed impossible that such a place could exist within the temple; it was like a world within a world.
Shouts broke his study of the terraces. With the dew-light, Abass saw two figures at the bottom of the pit scrambling away from the lowest terrace. Abass sprang into the air, sailing past the terraces easily, until he landed at the bottom of the pit, sinking into the packed soil. The smell was stronger here, sharper than the blood and bile that the dew made him so aware of. It overpo
wered the chilly must of the tunnel. Abass rose to his feet, wishing that the dew had not enhanced his sense of smell quite so much. With three cubes of dew in him, he could almost visualize the smell—a cold, shimmering gray, a blade crusted with sand in cloudy moonlight. He shook his head; the dew was driving him mad.
Two men stood nearby staring at him. One was tall, broad-shouldered, and with his dark red hair cut short, like a soldier. He had no feet; his legs ended at the ankle, and soiled bandages covered the stumps. He held himself upright with two crude crutches. The other man could have been his opposite; short, stout, but with the loose skin that bespoke a fat man losing weight too quickly, he had unkempt dark, foreign hair. It seemed ridiculous, but he cowered behind the cripple as though for protection. Abass shook his head; the two wore the knee-length tunics of the Garden. Whatever they were doing here, they were more pawns of the tair.
“Tair bless us,” the cripple said, “you’ve got to help us.”
Abass smelled it then; blood, so sharp that he thought his own nose must be bleeding. The strange tang in the air had covered it until then. He found the body in heartbeats; a man lay face-down behind the two from the Garden, a knife sticking out of his back, blood black against the pale skin of his neck. He wore a green robe, but without flipping the man over, Abass had no idea what rank he held in the temple. At his side lay a sheathed sword.
“What’s going on?” Abass asked. “Where’s the tair?”
The fat man’s eyes darted to one side, and Abass followed them. Another tunnel led deeper into the earth, cutting into the terraces, but invisible from the top of the pit. Cool, damp air blew from the tunnel, stirring the miasma of the terraces. Abass nodded and started toward the tunnel.
“Wait,” the cripple said. His voice was hard, accustomed to being obeyed.
Abass turned to look at him, but kept walking.
The cripple gestured to the dead body. “He was doing something down here, something to change the course of the war; he might have succeeded.”
“He might be a su-esis,” the fat man said. “Let him go.”
“He’s no su-esis,” the cripple said. “He looks like a thief, albeit one with a brachal.”
He knew about sarkomancy. That meant he knew more than it seemed. Abass stopped and gave them his full attention. “What’s going on? Who are you?”
Before the cripple could answer, the sound of breaking branches filled the cavernous chamber, a series of cracks and pops that echoed even in the heavy, still air. One of the mounds closest to the dead body, a mound on the lowest terrace, burst apart, shooting clumps of earth and a spray of loose dirt into the air to fall on Abass and the men of the Garden. A naked man, his skin mud-colored and wrinkled, as though forgotten in a wash-tub overnight, pulled himself from the mound. Whiteless eyes, an unbroken, deep brown, stared at each of them in turn. His—its—fingers had been replaced with long, metal talons.
It was a seir. Abass knew it without needing it to be named, with the terror bred into him across generations. In his sickness, when escaping from the tunnel, he had mistaken Fadhra and Eyl, with their incredible speed and strength, for seiri. Since then, he had fought stone-wights, su-eses, Renewed. To face a seir, though, was to face something hidden in the nightmares of childhood. It should have driven him to his knees. He had been raised on fear of the seiri, creatures that people understood even less than the stone-wights.
Abass realized his thoughts were wandering, that his mind was scrabbling to keep from accepting the presence of the seir. The creature continued to pull itself from the mound, its thin, shriveled limbs tensing as it put weight on them. Abass pulled the ocean of dew forward, let it slow the world around him, and cursed himself for a fool.
Then he ran toward the seir.
The creature stared at him, as though surprised, and it jumped and flipped backward, but it was slow. Perhaps because it was freshly born, perhaps because the stories were exaggerations, or perhaps because Abass had more dew in him than any man should, Abass found himself moving faster than the seir. Much faster. He drew the sword from the dead man’s sheathe. It was steel, three feet long, and well-balanced.
With the speed and strength of the dew, Abass launched himself into the air. He floated up toward the seir that was turning over, its flip too slow compared to Abass’s own speed. Abass slashed with the steel blade. It cut through mud-colored skin and bone, but it was like drawing a stick through drying clay. Chips of muddy flesh flaked around the blade, and Abass’s arm screamed protest at the sudden resistance to his swing. His dew-enhanced strength was enough, though, and the blade cut free of the seir’s neck. The dark brown eyes stared up at Abass as the seir’s head fell away from its body, still halfway through its flip. The head bounced twice across the lowest terrace and came to rest on the floor at the bottom. Its body continued through the flip and sprawled across the next terrace. A thick, brown sludge seeped from its neck.
Abass landed on the third terrace, his heart pounding so fast that it buzzed like a bee. The world swam around him, darkness and twilight-noon dancing in patches. He shook like a leaf in a whirlwind. As quickly as he could, Abass dropped the sword, ripped open the pouch, and crammed three cubes of dew into his mouth, clamping one hand over his lips to be sure that, in his spasms, he did not spew out the precious dew. The cubes dissolved at the warmth of his tongue, bursting into waves of that impossibly rich, flavorless oil that coated the inside of his mouth. In a matter of heartbeats, a span that stretched out into infinity as his heart threatened to tear itself in two, the dew reached his stomach and burst into a conflagration of energy and life.
He grabbed the sword from the ground and jumped back to the floor of the pit. The crippled man’s mouth was drawn into a hard line, his hazel eyes dark. With a weak grin, the fat man’s eyes flicked between Abass’s sword and the cripple. Abass tossed the sword at the cripple’s crutches.
“Get out of here,” Abass said.
“We stopped him from awakening those things,” the cripple said. His voice was as angry as his eyes. “We’re part of this war as well.”
“What are you talking about?” Abass said. “What war? Go, while you still can.”
The cripple stared at him, mouth slightly open. He said nothing in response.
After a moment, the fat man said, “What if another of them wakes? We tried to stop him, but what if more wake?”
“There’s the sword I used,” Abass said. These two fools made him tired; they were useless, helpless. The dew inside him demanded blood, and they were holding him back. They were keeping him from saving Isola. “It should work just as well for you.”
He turned and sprinted into the dew-light of the tunnel, moving with the speed of the dew, so that he would not have to hear their complaints. Nothing mattered now but saving Isola. And, perhaps, killing a god-made-flesh.