by Molles, DJ
“Well fought, half-breed,” Mala said, giving him a curt nod. “There are paladins who’ve lasted less time against me.”
“Congratulations,” Perry growled through his teeth. “Go fuck yourself.”
Mala smirked down at him. The blade remained where it was. “The first time I laid eyes on you was an image from the mech you destroyed at Fiendevelt. You had the very same look on your face as you do now: pure rage. Pure hatred.”
Perry spat at the blade beneath his chin, the little globule of froth sizzling when it touched. “Do what you’re gonna do,” he rasped, nothing left in him except defiance. All he could do was try to rob her of any sense of satisfaction she might feel in killing him. “You’ve beaten a fucking runty peon. Now put that blade into my head and get it over with.”
I’m sorry, Father. I wasn’t enough. I was never going to be enough.
He kept those thoughts deep inside, behind the wall of anger he’d erected between him and Mala. He would not let her see regret in his eyes. Let her walk away wondering how many more peons like him hated her and all her family just as much. Let her wonder when the next one would rise up against them.
Mala laughed then. Not derisively. A bright, genuine sound that locked Perry’s breath in his chest, making him feel suddenly off-kilter. “If I wanted you dead, Perry, you’d have been dead eight years ago when Selos found out where you and your father’s manservant were hiding.”
The farming freehold outside of Touring. The place where Selos had first appeared to Perry, though, at the time, Perry’d only known him as The Tall Man.
Mala leaned over further, her voice lowering. “And if I wanted you dead right now, I’d have already split your head in two. One doesn’t have a conversation with someone they want to kill—one simply kills them. Speaking is folly when death is in order.”
“What do you mean?” Perry husked, his eyes glancing down at the blade, though it hadn’t moved. “About the freehold where Selos found us?”
“Hmm,” she toned, thoughtfully, not taking her eyes off him. “It’s a long and sordid tale of politics and intrigue, which I doubt you care about. Suffice it to say, for the duration of my time with Selos he was somewhat…how to put it? Under my power.”
“So you sent him after us?”
“No. I was the one who told him not to kill you.”
“Why would you—?”
“Be still,” Mala commanded him, twitching the blade so that Perry felt a searing heat nick at his chin. He gasped. A single curl of acrid smoke rose up, stinking of burned flesh. “Do not speak when I am speaking. Our time is short, and I won’t stand and answer to all your ignorant questions. If you wish to have the truth, then shut your mouth and open your ears.”
Perry’s mouth was already shut, but he certainly didn’t open it after that.
“I didn’t come here with the intention of stopping you. I came with the intention of redirecting you. You think you know the truth, but you know nothing. You might have seen shadows of it, but the entire picture is still unclear to you. So mark my words carefully, Perry McGown: You do not want to go to the East Ruins.”
Lies. She’s lying. Just like Warden Abbas. It’s what the demigods do.
He kept this to himself. Let her talk. Perhaps he would see more shadows with which he could piece together more truth. Because all lies contained an element of truth, even if it was only in what they chose to omit.
“The paladins are weakening,” she said. “More and more, the nine houses are populated by less of the Confluent, and more of the un-Gifted, like that fat, despicable Abbas that you had the displeasure of meeting. Our society has devolved into decadence and hedonism.” She quirked an eyebrow at him. “I doubt that you care, but I do. Because the lives of every living thing on this earth hang by a thread. And that thread is the strength of the demigods. A thread that is continuing to fray and weaken. The only way to strengthen it, is to force the demigods into a war that will require them to be strong again.”
Perry found himself glaring up at her, the rage no longer an affectation of defiance. It was true anger. His teeth clenched, lips parted, trying hard to remain silent.
“You may speak,” Mala said. “Quickly.”
“You have a war already,” Perry spat out. “It’s been going on for hundreds of years. Perhaps if your paladin friends would fight their own battles, rather than using humans, they’d learn to be strong.”
The look that passed over Mala’s face confused Perry. He had expected derision, or some statement of how ignorant that was and how the paladins could not fight amongst themselves, or some such nonsense.
Instead, what he saw in her eyes was shock. Genuine mystification.
When she spoke again, it was quiet: “You really don’t know?”
Perry felt like the ground around him had shrunk to a precipice over which he was barely hanging on. Everything suddenly felt unstable, on the verge of crumbling. More lies, perhaps? More misdirection?
Mala looked oddly disconcerted. “I had you pegged as a free-thinker, halfbreed. But I suppose the teachings run deep. Difficult to deny what you’ve been taught all your life. Difficult to see through the lies that are so oft repeated, and so dogmatically.” She sighed, and for the first time, Perry sensed the blade move a little farther away from him. “There is no war. There are no sides. No Truth, no Light. There is only us, and you. There are only paladins, who have agreed over the course of the last five centuries, to execute the greatest mass deception the world has ever known, in order to keep human beings under our collective thumb. A great, fictional war, in which the best and most capable warriors of mankind are sent off to die. A war that keeps human beings depopulated. So that they can never rise again.”
“That’s a lie,” Perry murmured, because to say otherwise was too big, too enormous to accept. Because if what she said was true…
Mala shrugged. “Believe in it if you please. The rest of humanity does. And it has no bearing on what I need you for—”
She was cut off by a roaring sound. The air around them shifted, the tree tops lashing at each other. She tensed and looked up, the blade drawn back away from Perry now.
He saw the only opening he might ever get, and he lashed out with a kick, sending her longstaff swinging wide, though she held onto it.
Perry rolled and scrambled through the leaves in the direction that he’d seen his longstaff fall. His hands scoured through dirt and loam and struck metal that responded to his touch.
The roaring diminished, and in its wake, Perry thought he recognized the whine of thrusters.
Skiffs.
He jolted to his feet, longstaff ready in both hands.
Mala stood exactly where she’d been, staring at him. She jerked her head behind her, in the direction that the sound had faded to. “It’s too late. Those are praetors. You need to listen to me.”
Perry looked behind her, through the trees to the moonlit sky. He couldn’t see the skiffs, but he heard them. Praetors. Heading for his friends.
“Perry!” Mala snapped. “Are you listening to me?”
Perry’s eyes shot back to her. “They’re going to attack my friends!”
“There’s nothing that you can do about that now.” She extended one gauntleted hand towards him, the fingers outstretched. “Come with me. I’ll hide you.”
Perry shook his head, angling to her left side now, trying to think of how he was going to get past her. She was so quick. And, somehow, she was able to fly. He’d seen Selos do it too. He just had no idea how they did it.
“You are Confluent,” she said, speaking rapidly now. “You are Gifted. You are half-human and half-demigod. You are the only one that can help humanity rise up against us.”
“So you can slaughter them?” Perry shouted at her. “So you can have yourself a real war and make the paladins strong? Why would I ever agree to that?”
“Because it’s the only way this planet survives.”
“Too many lies!” Perry gro
wled. “That’s all you people do. You quote the Ortus Deorum at me, but how much of that is lies, too? How much of that is manipulation?”
“I can teach you,” Mala deflected. “I can train you how to fight like one of us. If you truly care about the future of humanity, then this is the only way.”
Perry shook his head. “I’ll never trust you, Mala. I’ll never cooperate with a demigod. I refuse to be a part of whatever plans you had for me. I was given a mission, and I intend to see it through. If you want to stop me, then you’re going to have to kill me.”
He steadied himself for an attack. But it didn’t come.
A spurt of rifle fire crackled in the distance.
Perry started running. Angling around Mala, and taking to the shore of the river. When he cast a glance over his shoulder, she still stood there, watching him.
Ahead, the night devolved into a chaos of gunfire.
Perry’s whirling mind refocused on the only thing that mattered in that moment: Keeping his friends alive.
CHAPTER TWENTY
BLOOD LOSS
Stuber had to admit: It would have been nice to have Perry there.
He ducked behind an outcropping of rocks as a stream of bullets clattered after him, kicking up dust and chips of stone that peppered his face. He swore and ducked down, running low around the back of the rocks.
On the backside, he found Whimsby poking his head up, firing both revolvers empty in a rapid clatter. Two voices cried out, their modulators disguising their humanity, but they couldn’t disguise the sound of dying—Stuber knew it too well.
Whimsby slipped back into cover and reloaded his pistols. He glanced up at Stuber as he did. “I hate to say it, but I appear to be running low on ammunition for my pistols.”
“Not much I can do about that,” Stuber grunted as he slid up next to Whimsby. “Where’s Teran and Sagum?”
A blurt of gunfire sounded just ahead, the muzzle flashes twinkling in the darkness, the rounds skimming over Stuber’s head. He snapped his Roq-11 up, but stayed his finger from the trigger at the last moment—he spied Teran’s light hair, cast almost silver in the moonlight, as she fired her rifle right past his shoulder.
A praetor toppled to the ground over the top of Stuber’s head. Out of pure reaction, Stuber thrust a foot to the back of the body and planted four additional rounds into the helmet, punching straight through to the skull beneath. Just to make sure.
He glanced up to Teran. “Good shot! Where’s Sagum?”
“I don’t know!” Teran ducked back into cover as the ground she hid behind got chewed up with a string of fire coming from the top of the rocks.
Stuber spun, rifle up, and backed a few paces off the rock until he could spy the top of the praetor’s helm, just over the surface of the rocks. Stuber blasted the praetor in the face and neck. No modulated death-cry for that one—he was dead before he hit the ground.
Their damn armor was a problem—it was the very same as Stuber’s, which forced him to aim for smaller targets, like the thinner helm, or the unprotected neck and pelvis area.
Stuber knelt and snatched up the rifle of the dead praetor that had fallen at his feet. “Whimsby! How are you with a rifle?”
“Adept,” Whimsby declared.
Stuber tossed him the rifle. Whimsby spun his revolvers into their holsters and caught the rifle. He shouldered it just in time for a praetor to come crashing around the side of the rocks to his left. Whimsby fired from the hip, sending the praetor sprawling onto the ground, screaming. An additional three-round burst sent him to The After.
Stuber turned back to the lump of earth behind which Teran had ducked. “Teran! Cover!”
Her head peeked back up again, her rifle with it.
“Whimsby! Moving!” Stuber called, lowering into a sprinter’s stance.
“Proceed,” Whimsby answered.
Stuber hauled ass. The ground at his feet exploded with bullet impacts, spraying dirt in his face. He gritted his teeth against it and felt the crunch of soil between them. A round struck him hard in the back, a dull clank against his armor, and then another pinged off his spaulder.
He dove for the earth to the right of Teran. He hit the ground in a roll, crashing down a small ravine in an uncontrolled tumble. He splayed his body out in a rigid spread eagle, which stopped the rolling. He slid down another few yards and came to a stop.
Swearing, he righted himself and clawed his way back up the ravine.
He planted his shoulder in the dirt and checked his magazine. Brass glinted in the top, but it felt light. He swapped it with a fresh one and stowed the near-empty one in the back of his belt.
“How many are there?” Teran yelled, angling a few shots over the top of the berm and then ducking down as the praetor’s answer keened through the air where her head had been.
“I counted five skiffs,” Stuber shimmied closer to the top. “One squad per skiff. That’s forty praetors.”
“Fuck me!” Teran belted out, then blind-fired over the top.
“Maybe later,” Stuber said, then smacked her rifle down. “No blind-firing! Whimsby’s still back there!”
Whimsby then appeared, leaping over the top of the berm, but unlike Stuber’s graceless, headlong dive, Whimsby soared through the air, his duster flying out around him like wings. He completed a full turn while in mid-air, firing two, three round bursts as he did so, each one terminating in the very distinct thud of bullets on flesh, and then Whimsby alighted onto the ground beside Teran, his boots toed into the soft earth to steady him.
“I’m here,” Whimsby announced.
“Godsdammit,” Stuber breathed in true and earnest admiration. “That was the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Where the hell is Sagum?” Teran called out, snapping Stuber’s attention back to her.
“No clue,” Stuber answered, then stood up, eyes catching two moving figures, around the left side of the rock formation they’d just retreated from. He snapped off a burst at one, while the other targeted Stuber.
The first one spun to the ground, his hips and thighs chewed to shreds.
Stuber dropped, as bullets sang in his ears. He felt something smash into his left spaulder, the fragments of the shattered bullet slicing into Stuber’s face. He grunted against the pain, but before he could make it back under the berm, a second bullet landed, like a hammer blow straight to his upper arm. He felt his left arm jerk away from his rifle as he hit the dirt. Immediate wetness flooded his armpit and side.
He rolled onto his back, groaning.
“Stuber!” Teran cried, reaching for him.
“Get back on your rifle!” Stuber barked. “I’m fine!”
He didn’t know if he was fine. The upper arm and armpit had a lot of veins running through it. As Teran spat rounds over the top of the berm again, Stuber quickly evaluated if he should keep fighting, or tend to his wound. Sometimes it was hard to tell. Fighting until you bled out didn’t do anyone any favors.
Luckily, he had a mech there with him with some scannery shit in his eyeballs.
“Whimsby!” Stuber called out, getting the mech’s attention. “Scan me! How’s my bleeding?”
Whimsby’s eyes coursed over Stuber’s wounded arm. He nodded. “You’ll likely survive.”
“Wonderful.” Stuber grabbed a handful of dirt in his right hand and shoved it up under his armpit into the wound. He squared himself to the berm again, rifle back up.
Teran came down with a yelp, her hands flying to the side of her face.
“You alright?” Stuber grabbed her shoulder, keeping her momentum from carrying her too far backwards where she might fall down the ravine.
Teran’s trembling hands moved away from the right side of her face, revealing a deep gash in the skin, right across her jawline. No spurting. Just trickling. He slapped her on the shoulder. “You’re good! Rub some dirt in it!”
Stuber side stepped away from Teran a yard or two, so that he wouldn’t come up in the same spot as last t
ime. He raised his rifle so just the muzzle and his eyes cleared the dirt.
Enough to see a praetor, lobbing a ball into the air. It glimmered in the moonlight, then struck the earth and rolled a few feet to rest right against the berm, not a foot from Stuber.
Stuber didn’t say anything. There wasn’t time. He leapt, grabbed onto Teran, and sent them tumbling down the ravine.
The grenade detonated above them, the shockwave punching Stuber in the chest, spraying dirt down on them like rain. The flash was a momentary swirl in Stuber’s vision as he rolled to the bottom of the ravine and crashed into a rock.
Stuber disentagled himself from Teran. He rolled onto his back, his rifle up at the top of the ravine. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Whimsby sliding down on his ass.
A shape cleared the U-shaped divot left by the grenade.
Stuber fired a long stream of bullets, pitching the figure backwards into the darkness.
“We gotta move!” Stuber said, as Whimsby hit the the bottom of the ravine, spun, and fired up at the top. The bottom of the ravine was a death trap. No cover. Highground given to the praetors. They needed to get out of it.
The other side of the ravine was not as steep or as tall as the side they’d just come down. Thrashing to his feet, Stuber was able to see over the top. He saw trees. Nice, thick trees.
Where the hell is Sagum?
Stuber realized he was actually worried about the wirey bastard.
He vaulted over the lip onto the forest floor beyond, then turned on one knee and sighted for the top of the ravine, his rifle chattering every time he saw a head pop up. Teran and Whimsby cleared the ditch and sprinted for cover.
Two many heads were popping up. Stuber couldn’t keep them all down. One of them got his rifle up and sent a burst at Stuber that went wide, but only by inches.
The second he heard Teran and Whimsby start shooting again, Stuber scrambled to his feet and bolted for the nearest tree. Options were limited. He slid into cover behind the biggest one he could find, but he was acutely aware that his tidbits were still hanging out.