by Pierce Brown
“Sunborn,” one of them calls in their sluggish dialect as she rushes to the side of their silent leader. The speaker strips her helmet to reveal a brutish face thick with scars and piercings before falling to her knee and touching her forehead with a gloved palm in a sign of respect. A blue handprint covers her face. “We saw the flame in the sky….” Her voice falters when she sees my slingBlade.
The other riders strip their helms, dismounting in a rush as they see our hair and eyes. Not a rider among them is a man. The women’s faces are painted with huge sky-blue handprints, a little eye drawn in the center of each. White hair flows in long braids down their backs. Black eyes peer from hooded lids. Iron and bone piercings bridge noses and hook lips and notch ears. Only the lead rider has yet to remove her helmet or kneel. She steps toward us, in a trance.
“Sister,” Ragnar manages. “My sister.”
“Sefi?” Mustang repeats, eying the black human tongues on the prize-hook on the Obsidian’s left hip. She wears no gloves. The backs of her hands are tattooed with glyphs.
“Do you know me?” Ragnar rasps. A tentative smile on quivering lips as the rider approaches. “You must.” The rider catalogues his scars from behind her mask. Eyes dark and wide. “I know you,” Ragnar continues. “I would know you if the world were dark and we were withered and old.” He shudders in pain. “If the ice was melted and the wind quiet.” She drifts forward, step by step. “I taught you the forty-nine names of the ice…the thirty-four breaths of the wind.” He smiles. “Though you could only ever remember thirty-two.”
She gives him nothing, but the other riders are already whispering his name, and looking at us as if by accompanying him and possessing a curved blade they’ve pieced together who I am. Ragnar continues, voice carrying the last of his strength.
“I carried you on my shoulders to watch five Breakings. And let you braid my hair with your ribbons. And played with the dolls you made from seal leather and threw balls of ice at old Proudfoot. I am your brother. And when the men of the Weeping Sun took me and a harvest of our kin to the Chained Lands, do you remember what I told you?”
Despite his wound, the man reeks of power. This is his land. This is his home. And he is as vast here as I was upon my clawDrill. The gravity of him draws Sefi closer. She collapses to her knees and strips away her bone helmet.
Sefi the Quiet, famed daughter of Alia Snowsparrow, is raw and majestic. Face severe. Angled like a crow’s. Her eyes too small, too close together. Her lips thin, purple in the cold, and permanently pursed in thought. White hair shaved down the left side, braided and falling to the waist on the right. A wing tattoo encircled by astral runes is livid blue on the left side of her pale skull. But what makes her unique among the Obsidians, and the object of their admiration, is that her skin is without pocks or scars. The only ornament she wears is a single iron bar through her nose. And when she blinks down at Ragnar’s wound, the blue eyes tattooed on the back of her eyelids pierce through me.
She extends a hand to her brother, not to touch him, but to feel the breath steam before his mouth and nose. It is not enough for Ragnar. He seizes her hand and presses it fiercely to his chest so she can feel his fading heartbeat. Tears of joy gather in his eyes. And when they spill from Sefi’s down her cheeks to carve paths through her blue warpaint, his voice cracks. “I told you I would return.”
Her eyes leave him to follow Aja’s tracks into the crevasse. She clicks her tongue and four Valkyrie stake ropes into the snow and rappel down into the darkness to seek out Aja. The rest guard their warleader and watch the hills, elegant recurve bows at the ready. “We have to fly him to the Spires,” I say in their language. “To your shaman.”
Sefi does not look at me. “It is too late.” Snow gathers on Ragnar’s white beard. “Let me die here. On the ice. Under the wild sky.”
“No,” I mumble. “We can save you.”
The world feels very distant and unimportant. His blood continues to leave him, but there is no more sadness in my friend. Sefi has chased it away.
“It is no great thing to die,” he says to me, though I know he doesn’t mean it as deeply as he wants to. “Not when one has lived.” He smiles, trying to comfort me even now. But he wears the unjustness of his life and death upon his face. “I owe that to you. But…there is much undone. Sefi.” He swallows, his tongue heavy and dry. “Did my men find you?” Sefi nods, staying hunched over her brother, her white hair flying about her in the wind. He looks to me. “Darrow, I know you think words will suffice,” Ragnar says in Aureate lingo so Sefi cannot understand. “They will not. Not with my mother.” This was what he did not tell me. Why he was so quiet on the shuttle, why he carried dread upon his shoulders. He was coming home to kill his mother. And now he’s giving me permission to do just that. I glance over to Mustang. She heard too, and wears her heartbreak on her face. As much for my shattered, fool’s dream of a better world as for my dying friend. He shudders in pain and Sefi pulls a knife from her boot, unwilling to watch him suffer any longer. Ragnar shakes his head at her and nods to me. He wants me to do it. I shake my head as if I can wake up from this nightmare. Sefi stares at me fiercely, daring me to contradict her brother’s last wishes.
“I will die with my friends,” Ragnar says.
I numbly let my razor slither into my hand and hold it over his chest. There’s peace at last in Ragnar’s wet eyes. It’s all I can do to be strong for him.
“I will give Eo your love. I will make a house for you in the Vale of your fathers. It will be beside my own. Join me there when you die.” He grins. “But I am no builder. So take your time. We will wait.”
I nod like I still believe in the Vale. Like I still think it waits for me and for him. “Your people will be free,” I say. “On my life, I promise this. And I will see you soon.” He smiles as he stares up at the sky. Sefi frantically puts her axe in Ragnar’s palm so that he can die as a warrior, a weapon in hand, and secure his place in the halls of Valhalla.
“No, Sefi,” he says, dropping the axe and taking snow in his left hand, her hand with his right. “Live for more.” He nods to me.
The wind whips.
The snow falls.
Ragnar watches the sky, where the cold lights of Phobos glitter on as I silently slide the metal into his heart. Death comes like nightfall, and I cannot tell the moment when the light leaves him, when his heart no longer beats and his eyes no longer see. But I know he’s gone. I feel it in the chill that settles over me. In the sound of the lonely, hungry wind, and the dread silence in the black eyes of Sefi the Quiet.
My friend, my protector, Ragnar Volarus has left this world.
I’m numb with grief. Unable to think of anything but how Sevro will react when he hears Ragnar has died. How my nieces and nephews will never braid another bow into the Friendly Giant’s hair. Part of my soul has departed and will never return. He was my protector. He gave so many strength. Now, without him, I cling to the back of a Valkyrie as her griffin rises away from the bloody snow. Even as we soar through the clouds on great beating wings, even as I see the Valkyrie Spires for the first time, I feel no awe. Just numbness.
The spires are a twisting, vertiginous spine of mountain peaks so ludicrous in their abrupt rise from the arctic plains that only a maniacal Gold at the controls of a Lovelock engine with fifty years of tectonic manipulation and a solar system of resources could conspire to create them. Probably just to see if they could. Dozens of stone spires weave together like spiteful lovers. Mist shrouding them. Griffins making nests on their peaks, crows and eagles in the lower reaches. Upon a high rock wall, seven skeletons hang from chains. The ice is stained with blood and the droppings of animals. This is the home of the only race to ever threaten Gold. And we come stained in the blood of its banished prince.
Sefi and her riders searched the crevasse in which Aja fell; they found nothing but boot prints. No body. No blood. Nothing to abate the rage that burns inside Sefi. I think she would have remained over her brother
’s body for hours more, had they not heard drums beating in the distance. Eaters who had mustered greater strength and intended to challenge the Valkyrie for possession of the fallen gods.
Wrath stained her face as she stood over Cassius, her axe in hand. He is one of the first Golds she’ll ever have seen without armor. Maybe the first aside from Mustang. And I think, stained with the blood of her brother, she would have killed him there on the snow. I know I would have let her, and so too would have Mustang. But she relented at the urging of her Valkyrie. Clicking her tongue to her riders, sheathing her axe and signaling them to mount. Now Cassius is tied to the saddle of a Valkyrie to my right. The arrow missed his jugular, but death might come for him even without a kiss from Sefi’s axe.
We land in a high alcove cut into the highest reach of a corkscrew spire. Slaves from enemy Obsidian clans, eyes branded into blindness, receive our griffins. Their faces painted yellow for cowardice. Iron doors groan shut behind, sealing us off from the wind. The riders jump from their saddles before we land to help carry Ragnar away from us deeper into the rock city.
There’s a commotion as several dozen armed warriors push their way into the griffin stable and confront Sefi. They gesture wildly at us. Their accents thicker than the Nagal I learned with Mickey’s uploads and my studies at the Academy, but I understand enough to glean that the newer group of warriors is shouting that we should be in chains, and something about heretics. Sefi’s women are shouting back, saying we are friends of Ragnar, and they point feverishly to the Gold of our hair. They don’t know how to treat us, or Cassius, who several of the warriors pull away from us like dogs fighting for scrap meat. The arrow’s still in his neck. Whites of his eyes huge. He reaches for me in terror as the Obsidians drag him across the floor. His hand grasps mine, holds for a moment, and then he’s gone down a torch-lit hall, borne away by half a dozen giants. The rest cluster around us, huge iron weapons in hand, the stink of their furs thick and nauseating. Quieting only when an old stout woman with a hand-shaped tattoo on her forehead pushes through their ranks to speak with Sefi. One of her mother’s warchiefs. She gestures upward toward the ceiling with large hand motions.
“What is she saying?” Holiday asks.
“They’re talking about Phobos. They see the lights from the battle. They think the Gods are fighting. These ones think we should be prisoners, not guests,” Mustang says. “Let them take your weapons.”
“Like hell.” Holiday steps back with her rifle. I grab the barrel and push it down, handing them my razor. “This is bloody spectacular,” she mutters. They shackle our arms and legs with great iron manacles, taking care not to touch our skin or hair, and jerk us toward a tunnel by the Spires guards, away from Sefi’s Valkyrie. But as we go, I catch sight of Sefi watching after us, a strange, conflicted look on her white face.
—
After being dragged down several dozen dimly lit stairwells, we’re shoved into a windowless cell of carved stone and stifling, smoky air. Seal oil smolders in iron braziers stinging our eyes. I trip on a raised flagstone and fall to the floor. There, I slam my chains against the stone. Feeling the anger. The helplessness. All the things happening so fast, whipping me around, so I can’t tell which way’s up. But I can think long enough to grasp the futility of my actions, my plans. Mustang and Holiday watch me in heavy silence. One day into my grand plan and Ragnar is already dead.
Mustang speaks more softly. “Are you all right?”
“What do you think?” I ask bitterly. She says nothing in reply, not the fragile sort of person to take offense and whimper out how she’s just trying to help. She knows the pain of loss well enough. “We need to have a plan,” I say mechanically, trying to force Ragnar out my mind.
“Ragnar was our plan,” Holiday says. “He was the entire sodding plan.”
“We can salvage it.”
“And how the hell you expect to do that?” Holiday asks. “We don’t have weapons anymore. And they don’t exactly look tickled Pink to see us. They’re probably going to eat us.”
“These ones aren’t cannibals,” Mustang says.
“You’re willing to bet your leg on that, missy?”
“Alia is the key,” I say. “We can still convince her. It will be difficult without Ragnar, but that’s the only way. Convince her that he died trying to bring their people the truth.”
“Didn’t you hear him? He said words wouldn’t work.”
“They still can.”
“Darrow, give yourself a moment,” Mustang says.
“A moment? My people are dying in orbit. Sevro is at war, and he’s depending on us to bring him an army. We don’t have the luxury of taking a bloodydamn moment.”
“Darrow…” Mustang tries to interrupt. I keep going, methodically sorting through the options, how we must hunt down Aja, rejoin with the Sons. She puts a hand on my arm. “Darrow. Stop.” I falter. Losing track of where I was, slipping away from the comfort of logic and falling straight into the emotion of it all. Ragnar’s blood is under my nails. All he wanted was to come home to his people and lead them out of darkness like he saw me doing with mine. I robbed him of that choice by leading the attack on Aja. I don’t cry. There isn’t time for it, but I sit there with my head in my hands. Mustang touches my shoulder.
“He smiled in the end,” she says softly. “Do you know why? Because he knew what he was doing was right. He was fighting for love. You’ve made a family of your friends. You always have. It made Ragnar a better man to know you. So you didn’t get him killed. You helped him live. But you have to live now.” She sits next to me. “I know you want to believe the best in people. But think how long it took for you to get through to Ragnar. To win over Tactus or me. What can you do in a day? A week? This place…it’s not our world. They don’t care about our rules or our morality. We will die here if we do not escape.”
“You don’t think Alia will listen.”
“Why would she? Obsidians only value strength. And where is ours? Ragnar even thought he would have to kill his mother. She won’t listen. Do you know the word for surrender in Nagal? Rjoga. The word for subjugation? Rjoga. What’s the word for slavery? Rjoga. Without Ragnar to lead them, what do you think is going to happen if you release them on the Society? Alia Snowsparrow is a blackblooded tyrant. And the rest of the warchiefs are no better. She might even be expecting us. Even if we’ve hacked the Golds’ monitoring systems, the Golds know she’s his mother, then they could have told her to expect him. She could be reporting to them right now.”
When I looked up at my father as a boy, I thought being a man was having control. Being the master and commander of your own destiny. How could any boy know that freedom is lost the moment you become a man. Things start to count. To press in. Constricting slowly, inevitably, creating a cage of inconveniences and duties and deadlines and failed plans and lost friends. I’m tired of people doubting. Of people choosing to believe they know what is possible because of what has happened before.
Holiday grunts. “Escaping won’t be that easy.”
“Step one,” Mustang says as she slips free of her manacles. She used a little shard of bone to pick the lock.
“Where’d you learn that?” Holiday asks.
“You think the Institute was my first school?” she asks. “Your turn.” She reaches for my manacles. “As I see it, we can rush them when they open the…what’s wrong?”
I’ve pulled my hands back from her. “I’m not leaving.”
“Darrow…”
“Ragnar was my friend. I told him I would help his people. I will not run to save myself. I will not let him die in vain. The only way out is through.”
“The Obsidians…”
“Are needed,” I say. “Without them, I can’t fight Gold Legions. Not even with your help.”
“All right,” Mustang says, not belaboring the point. “Then how do you intend to change Alia’s mind?”
“I think I’ll need your help with that.”
—
Hours later, we are guided to the center a cavernous throne room built for giants. It’s lit by seal oil lamps that belch out black smoke along the walls. The iron doors slam shut behind us, and we’re left alone before a throne, upon which sits the largest human being I’ve ever seen. She watches us from the far side of the room, more statue than woman. We approach awkwardly in our chains. Boots over the slick black floor till we come before Alia Snowsparrow, Queen of the Valkyrie.
Across her lap lies the body of her dead son.
Alia glares down at us. She is as colossal as Ragnar, but ancient and wicked, like the oldest tree of some primeval forest. The kind that drinks the soil and blocks the sun for lesser trees and watches them wither and yellow and die and does nothing but reach her branches higher and dig her roots deeper. The wind has armored her face in dead skin and calluses. Her hair is stringy and long, the color of dirty snow. She sits on a cushion of furs stacked inside the rib cage of the skeleton of what must have been the largest griffin ever Carved. The griffin’s head screams silently down at us from above her. The wings spread against the stone wall, ten meters across. On her head is a crown of black glass. At her feet is her fabled warchest which is locked in times of peace by a great iron device. Her knotty hands are covered in blood.
This is the primal realm, and though I would know what to say to a queen who sits upon a throne, I have no bloodydamn clue what to say to a mother who sits with her own son dead in her lap and looks at me as though I am some worm that’s just slithered up from the taiga.
It seems she doesn’t much care that I’ve lost my tongue. Hers is sharp enough.
“There is a great heresy in our lands against the gods who rule the thousand stars of the Abyss.” Her voice rumbles like that of an old crocodile. But it is not her language, it is ours. HighLingo Aureate. A sacred tongue, known by few in these lands, mostly the shaman who commune with the gods. Spies, in other words. Alia’s fluency startles Mustang. But not me. I know how the low rise under the power of the mighty, and this merely confirms what I’ve long suspected. Slaggin’ Gamma are not the only favored slaves of the worlds.