Mimir craned his neck and placed a finger on Nicholai’s forehead. “Ah.” He tapped it several times, nodding his head as he did. “Madros only planted the seed, but Darjal watered the tree.”
Umbriel felt her heart stop, but she kept a steady outward appearance. “I see ...” She felt Darjal’s wrath from the moment he found Nicholai. Though she never saw him, his presence never ventured far. His lust for judgment was insatiable. How Nicholai managed to restrain himself from gutting her in the throat, she would never know, but an exhausted hand slid over to the Time Father’s leg. She gripped it and closed her eyes. The woman had nothing to give him. No energy left. But she wanted to feel him in her hands, to reassure herself that although Darjal consumed him, he was still here. Somewhere inside his manipulated brain, the empathetic Nicholai Addihein remained.
“Can’t we just kill Darjal too?” Brack asked, breaking the silence. “I mean, we got the katars. And we got practice. Already killed the fecker once.”
Mimir returned to his spot near the wall. He leaned against it, casual in his movements. “I doubt it. If Darjal bore witness to Madros’ slaying, he is now aware our dear captain possesses a weapon capable of destroying lesser gods. I should think it will be quite difficult to get him to manifest himself now.”
Penn made a face, sliding his hands into his pockets. “Hard to kill what you can’t see,” he muttered.
Mimir snapped his fingers and pointed at the Elmbroke man. “Precisely.”
“He’ll be fine,” Umbriel reassured them, though her words were more for her benefit than for theirs. Her fingers embraced his leg tighter. Though she did not often need such luxuries, it brought her comfort to touch him. To feel him present, though he remained unaccounted for. “I’ll make sure of it.”
In Umbriel’s room, Kazuaki’s eye bobbed open, unsteady. His surroundings lived in a blur. Instinct compelled his hands to reach for his side, to seize a weapon, any weapon, but his movements were languid and unmanageable, still hindered by the effects of the powerful sedative. When he felt a distinguishable absence of hard metal available, he tried to sit up.
“I’d take your own advice and belay that,” Bermuda said from his side, resting a hand on his arm to steady him. “I removed your weapons. Didn’t want you rolling over on a dagger while you slept.”
Her voice. It had a sedating effect. Edgy muscles eased as he collapsed back into his spot in Umbriel’s bed. His chest rose and fell shallowly as he turned his head to face her. Clear vision returned slowly, but Kazuaki was quick to locate the dried blood caked on the side of her face.
An unsteady arm raised from the bedside. Though his fingers shook, he took care to gently part her hair to the side, offering him a better view of her injury. But where he expected a wound to be, there wasn’t. “That belong to you?” he asked, his voice slurred as he nodded toward her crusted crimson stains.
Subconscious desire made her lean into his touch. It kindled something in her, a continuous craving for the feel of Kazuaki’s hands on her body. Despite the situation, she found a wry smirk slip over her face. The way his words melted together, weighted down by the poison still present in his veins, and still, his concern shined through. “I’ve lived through worse.”
His arm hovered for as long as he was able to convince his body to hold it there. Kazuaki brushed his thumb over her cheek before gravity pushed his limb back to the bed’s side. “Madros?”
“Dead.” Bermuda leaned forward, resting her elbows on the mattress to put herself closer.
Kazuaki’s voice sounded hoarse. His eye turned to the ceiling. “And Nico?”
Bermuda hesitated. Her face shifted to a downcast state. “Alive. Restrained. Not himself, I’m afraid.”
She watched Kazuaki’s eye close. The immortal was flawless at containing his sentiments deep within his brain; he trained himself to imprison anything that might serve as something someone could exploit. But here, now, with his actions dulled, she bore witness to his grave disappointment.
“We corrected Vadim,” she said, her tone delicate. “We can correct Nico too.”
Kazuaki opened his eye. He continued to stare at the ceiling. “He shouldn’t have fallen, Bermuda. He’s willful. Determined. But he did. He did because he believed what Madros said to him ... even for a moment ... how we treat him ... devalue him ...” His words rolled off his tongue, lumbering and incoherent, but sincere. “He fell because what Madros said was right.”
He was still lost in a mental fog. Bermuda winced. Though lacquered in tranquilizers, his words held a tinge of truthfulness. Still, she did not wish to cause him any additional burdens. “He’ll find his way through the dark. He’s persistent.”
Kazuaki tried to raise his head, but it only lifted several inches before he allowed it to collapse back into the pillow beneath him. “Yes,” he murmured, his words rough. “That he is.”
Bermuda slid forward and laid the side of her head on his chest. The sound of his beating heart provided its own sedative effect. As his chest bobbed with each breath, she peered up at him. “So, you’ve killed a god. What do you intend to do now?”
Measured movements shifted Kazuaki’s arm as he slid his hand up the side of the bed, slow to trace the line of her spine before it stopped in the softness of her hair. He held it there, gently burying his fingers into the auburn strands. She heard his heart beat faster. “I intend to kill some more.”
Bermuda grinned underneath his touch. She couldn’t help but find amusement in his anesthetized state when the ancient walls Kazuaki Hidataka built over the years crumbled away. But her smile was quick to fade. “Kazuaki. Do you trust Mimir?”
His hands stroked through her hair, slow and gratifying. “No.”
The quartermaster closed her eyes. “Neither do I.”
“He is a nuisance,” Kazuaki muttered. “But he is powerless to harm us ... so far as I know.”
Bermuda lived in the quiet of Kazuaki’s touch. A haven in which she abandoned the afflictions of the moment. It wasn’t until she felt the captain looking about the room that she crawled out of her temporary reverie.
“This must be Umbriel’s room,” Kazuaki murmured, a brow arching on his face.
Bermuda lifted her head from his chest, gazing about the small, four-cornered chamber. Potted plants lived in almost every nook, ranging in variety from wild grasses to exotic blooms. The quartermaster chuckled. “What gave it away?”
Kazuaki’s head turned to the right. He spied a small bush growing near the bedside opposite Bermuda’s chair. A familiar burst of red. It lived in the farthest reaches of his memory, in a time when a majority of Panagea’s plants had all but withered away. But this one ... this one he remembered, though four hundred and some odd years separated him from the last time he saw one.
His free hand slid across the sheets, extending to the shrub. Though thorns dug into his calloused fingertips, he made no signs of discomfort as he plucked the rose from its place. Umbriel would not find pleasure in his actions, but the Earth Mother was a forgiving sort. Idle hands spun the short stem between his fingers and thumb, taking in the sight of something he long thought to be extinct. “This reminds me of you,” he said, studying each scarlet petal.
The quartermaster’s eyes settled on the flower. She tilted her head as a soft laugh escaped her. “Gods, how much sedative is in those vials?”
“Mock me if you must,” Kazuaki said, his voice low as he venerated the rose with an admiring eye, “but it’s true. It’s a faultless creation. Bewitching. Sung of by poets and scholars alike. Its bloom is commanding ...” His look of contented introspection faded. “And fleeting ...”
He tightened his jaw, not satisfied to dwell on the pain of Bermuda’s mortality. The captain cleared his throat. “It looks fragile at first glance ...” Without hesitation, he pressed the pad of his thumb into one of the thorns, just enough to feel the needle-like sting. “But if you’re careless, it will still make you bleed. A baleful beauty.”
; Content to remain there and listen to the sounds of his pacified musings, Bermuda returned her head to his chest. She reached over, delicate as she took the flower into her metal hand. “What’s it called?”
“Rosa Othello.” The words slipped off his tongue, unhurried and unenergetic. “Most just called it a rose.”
She brought it to her nose and drew in the scent. It smelled of rain and wind that crawled through the leaves of Southeastern’s forests. Though the thorns were a threat to skin, Bermuda did not wish to part with the plant, and it did not bother her nerveless, metal fingers. “So, Captain,” she wondered out loud, peering up at Kazuaki past the burgundy petals, “what do you want to do now?”
He sank his fingers further into the enthralling sensation that was her hair. She felt a ravenous hunger in his touch, and for a moment, she knew where his mind went. But pleasures of the flesh played second fiddle to necessity. Though it wasn’t easy, Kazuaki calmed his impious thoughts. There was plenty of time for rendezvous later. With any luck, again, and again.
“Let’s restore Nico’s sanity,” he whispered, his eye on the ceiling once more. “Then, let’s slay some feckin’ gods.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Elowyn trudged through the waste of Eastern for miles. Mud tainted by chemicals cast off from the division’s countless factories marred her from head to toe. She kept close to the coast, not only to reduce her interactions with those who might be a threat but because that was where the homestead of Mairyn Catteral dwelled.
She was no stranger to the hardships of travel. Elowyn had powered through more horrid conditions than this. Her time spent as a medic to the Northern military ensured that. Now, though, she drove her legs through sheets of muck instead of banks of snow.
Flashbacks triggered with each parallel to her past. Screams of civilians trailed down from the mainland and into her ears. Poor, unprepared people, brought down by the hands of their manipulated family members and neighbors. There were too many for her to stop and intervene. It was a tough lesson she had learned from the battle of Northern and Northeastern.
The shrieks of her people echoed the cries of the fallen soldiers in her past. It was a sound that never left a person’s brain, no matter how many years it sat there, collecting dust.
Elowyn used to be a crusader. She risked her life on the battlefield more than once, dragging mangled bodies back to vehicles that carried them to the safety of her tent.
She couldn’t save them all then. She couldn’t save these people now. Not yet, anyway.
The shabby condition of Mairyn’s humble home came into Elowyn’s vision when she crawled over a final hill. It looked just as it did when she and the crew washed up on Eastern’s shores last year.
Muscles in her legs pulsed from their extensive journey. Her lungs ached from breathing in the still-tainted oxygen of the Eastern division. But her destination only rested several long strides away. That knowledge alone helped convince her throbbing limbs to approach the door and knock.
Elowyn waited. She didn’t deny the heart palpitations she experienced in the vicinity of Mairyn’s home. The Time Mother wondered if the gun-toting maiden would shoot first, impelled by the conditions as of late to take no risks. But after much thought, Mairyn Catteral remained the only person in Eastern she trusted.
Elowyn only hoped she hadn’t fallen to the gods.
Her knock earned no response. Before she lifted her fist to try again, Elowyn’s ears perked at the familiar sound that came from behind her: the undeniable noise of a lever-action cocking on a shotgun. She remembered it well.
Elowyn made slow, careful movements when she raised her hands above her head. She did not wish to encourage any rash decisions. “Hello, Mairyn.”
“You’ve got ten seconds to explain to me how you know my name and what you’re doing on my property.”
Elowyn turned, unhurried and gradual, to portray no sense of danger. When she finally spun all the way and found Mairyn’s eyes, she said nothing.
The woman scrutinized Elowyn for the longest seconds in the Time Mother’s life. She couldn’t tell what went through her mind. Elowyn’s heart battled the fear inside her, until Mairyn slowly lowered her rifle, and balanced it to rest on her shoulder. “Well, well, well,” she said, seeing through the filth into the eyes of Elowyn Saveign. “Look what the tide dragged in.”
“I hate to impose,” Elowyn uttered, lowering her voice. “But I find myself between a rock and a hard place. You’re the only one I can trust.”
Mairyn looked over her shoulder, scanning the horizon for any watchful eyes. When she was satisfied with the lack of onlookers, she reached passed Elowyn and opened the door to her home. “Get inside.”
The Time Mother nodded and slipped into the confines of Mairyn’s dwelling. She shivered once, her body’s way of banishing the adrenaline that boiled through her. Now, in the relative safety of Mariyn’s home, she felt as though she could ease her shoulders some.
“I knew you weren’t dead,” Mairyn muttered, resting her shotgun against a wall. She put a kettle on the stovetop and ignited the heat. “Word is spreading you abandoned Eastern. Have a seat.”
Elowyn glanced at one of the mismatched chairs that flanked Mairyn’s table. Her legs were grateful to relieve themselves of the burden of carrying her weight. She sank into the hard material, indebted despite its lack of padded comfort. “That’s ridiculous,” she replied, resting an elbow on the tabletop beside her. “If I did, time here would have stopped.”
Mairyn stood on the tips of her toes, reaching into the highest cupboards above her to find several cups. She examined them as she pulled them from their resting place, blowing dust out of the unutilized vessels. “People believe what they want to believe. And what they want to believe, as they have for generations, is that women are unfit to lead.”
A look of disgust frosted over Elowyn’s face. “Yes, I’m aware. Those voices have raised loud and clear. But there are just as many who thought I was doing well.”
“You were.” Mairyn set the cups down on the table and returned to digging through her cupboards. She pulled out a manufactured sugar substitute, along with a synthetic tea, and placed them near the cups. “I don’t know much about the demons invading this place,” she started, having only heard of the gods since Elowyn made her public announcement that they invaded Panagea weeks ago, “but I venture a guess that they’re happy to feed fear to people. If what you said in your declaration is true, and they can only control the thoughts of those who don’t have mental strength, I’m sure they’ll look for other ways to rattle those of sound mind. Your disappearance, for example.”
Elowyn’s eyes closed. It was a mixed feeling. The reprieve brought to her from the simple action, allowed her body to think she might rest. But Mairyn’s observations were swift to banish any extended release. “I think I have a solution,” Elowyn said, her words tired, but forceful. “I just need to amass some competent people who can get me into one of Eastern’s medical laboratories.” She knew just the one. The most advanced of them all. The first one she helped finance the moment she took up leadership of Eastern.
“You’d get in pretty easily if they knew you were the Time Mother. Just lord your title over them,” Mairyn suggested, glancing at the kettle as it started to produce a weak whistle.
“The lesser gods are after me. Half of Eastern still hates having me as their leader. As I stated before,” Elowyn said, her voice trailing off as she revisited the loss of her dear companion, Huric, “you’re the only person in all of Eastern who I would put my life in the hands of. I can’t let anyone know who I am, let alone where I am. They already tried to come for me once. The risk is too great.”
Mairyn removed the kettle from the stove. She walked over to the table and popped two of the artificial teas into the cups before she doused them in the heated water. Steam swirled upward, wafting around the kettle until she returned it to the stove. “Do you really think you can help Eastern?” she asked, fi
nding Elowyn’s eyes as she sat down.
The Time Mother met her penetrating stare. She did not waver. She wanted Mairyn to know the belief behind her statement. “I do.”
A small nod came from Mairyn’s head. She slid her cup closer toward her and exhaled a gentle breath over the top to cool it. She seemed to mull over something before she took a small, considerate sip and set it back down. “There is a rebellion gathering in the town of Brendale. Mostly footmen who haven’t been turned by the gods. Go to them.”
Elowyn’s brows scrunched together. She laced a finger into the handle of her teacup but did not take her attention away from Mairyn. “How do you know that?”
Another small sip from the hot tea kept Mairyn from answering immediately. Just as well, she did not seem eager to share, as the memories attached to her statement brought her discomfort. “Mr. Catteral patrolled Eastern for almost twenty years. When the riots broke out over the families who were sent to Southern for the construction of Darjal’s ironclad, he felt for them. All the complaints were diverted to the footmen. He saw everyone’s pain, their confusion, their pleas for their family members to return to them. He said they just wanted answers. But he didn’t have any to give them. So he went to find some.”
Elowyn’s head tilted to the side as she dragged her cup toward her. The warmth that filtered into her weary hands felt nice. “Where did he hope to find them?”
“Edgar was a no-nonsense man. He wanted to go straight to the source. Avital York, himself.”
A lingering sense of doom infected Elowyn as she watched Mairyn relive her tale. She wondered whether it was wise to allow the woman to continue, but she did. Mairyn did not seem to bend to weakness, no matter how painful.
“He was on his way to Avital to ask about the status of the families. On the way, he saw a riot form outside the Time Father’s stead. Scared people, acting out of pain. They were trying to break through Avital’s residence with force. He tried to stop them because he was always a soldier first. A man of Eastern.” Mairyn’s face steeled. Her grip on her cup intensified, to the point Elowyn detected a small quake in the liquid that was inside it. “They saw his uniform as a symbol of solidarity to Avital. Avital, who they despised. So they killed him.”
The Panagea Tales Box Set Page 81