She felt equal parts frustration with herself and with this whole damned mess. Wasn’t this what she had wanted? A clear exchange between herself and a god? So why, when one finally appeared, did it have to be so profoundly suspicious? “I don’t know about this. Some god happens to be hunting something here, happens to come talk to me, happens to ask me to perform some simple task…” Her eyes drifted between Hail and Sam and Tanos, who took a moment to parse the news. “We can’t trust this. Right? It’s too convenient.” Erran’s eyes lit up at the same time as Zoa suddenly broke her silence.
“A murder-god. That’s not convenient, that’s about as bad as it gets.” She glowered at Isavel. “Then again, you’re the murder-herald, so no surprises there.”
The words stung - Azure himself had said much the same thing, and she did not like to hear the idea coming from such different directions. She backed off, staring down into the village, where the last of the freed captives were disappearing between what buildings still stood, crying out in possibly vain attempts to find the survivors they cared about most.
“What did he want, exactly? Since when do gods ever ask for something easy?”
She turned to answer Erran’s question. “Some gods-damned ancient artifact. A red sword. Apparently somebody stole it. It might have passed through here.” Looking back down into the village, she started walking. “We’re on a whole other world where we can’t speak to anybody, and we can’t get back to Earth. What else are we supposed to do?”
“Isavel!” Hail ran to catch up with her, gently grabbing her upper arm. “Isavel - these aren’t our gods. We don’t belong here - why would they help us? I don’t trust them.”
Isavel nodded. “Our gods are good for nothing. How could their gods be worse?”
“They could kill us.” She tilted her head towards Zoa, who was starting to be obscured by the lingering haze closer to the village. “His followers have killed us.”
“Anyone can kill us.” She focused her sights on this village. She knew how to make a sword, and she knew how to make it red - that image should cross the language barrier well enough for her to figure out if there was any information to be had here. “Not anyone can send you home.”
She didn’t look to see Hail’s face, but the tone of the hunter’s voice told her enough. “You’re right, of course.”
She didn’t answer, because her foot struck something in the receding smoke that still lingered around their waists. Something cold and soft and a little wet.
She flared her nostrils, and though this was another world and the people were of another blood, she knew exactly what it was. She couldn’t see them now, but as the cloud of chaos from the attack fell back, she knew she would.
She quickened her pace, but even as she reached the village pale martian faces, white skin and hair from white to silver to grey, stared awkwardly towards her or the sky or the ground, marred by sickly and bloody blues.
And as she saw them, and as she remembered, pieces started falling into place. Rising from their resting places, bodies following the basic rules of how bodies - human bodies - worked, she saw them gunned down as they ran. She saw them running. She saw the panic and heard the screaming all around her, echoing out from beyond death. She saw the moment in their still-living faces they realized, from some sound outside, that something terrible was starting.
At her foot was a child. Young enough to die of the whelm, but… gunned down like the rest. You, Dragoneater, are of my stock . But she clearly wasn’t. Not… not like this. Humans always had those angry enough to kill, yes - they may be little better than their gods. But little was more than nothing.
Isavel shook her head, trying not to see the faces of the dying behind the faces of the dead. Maybe if she found the damned sword, she could fix this along the way.
It was time to manage the villages again.
No she couldn’t. That would fix nothing.
She could destroy and kill, just like them. She could hunt down these blue bandits, damn whatever god they served, and kill them all, and this would never happen to anyone again. She could snuff out any fire that threatened to burn any village that would leave any orphans behind.
The blood oozed out of her neck once more. It was hot now, electric and fiery, and from it the dragoness whispered into her ear. Yes; this is the way of the world. We hatch and we hunt and we kill and we eat, until one day we are killed by those younger and stronger, or by time itself. And then we too are eaten. This is the way of the world. Go forth, young and strong, and eat the things that once ate you.
Wings and dragon’s gift alight, she kicked off, this world’s weak pull completely failing to restrain her. She soared through the air and let the dragon’s embrace hold her in a gentle arc, looking across the village to see what had happened. One open square, not far, drew her eye - she saw quick movements, glints of metal. Was there still fighting? She landed back in the streets and made for it, her pathfinder’s good peripheral vision preventing her from stepping on the dead or having to really look at them at all. Something to do - something to fight - anything -
She stepped into the village square to the sound of silence, facing down a crowd of one.
The woman was tall and pale, a wiry tangle of ash-grey hair jutting up from her head. She was armored, but unlike Azure’s acolytes there was no blue to be seen there, only bronze and tan. And in her left hand hung a sword larger than Isavel had ever seen, a wide blade sharp on one edge and blunt on the other, tapering off to a savagely sharp point, glimmering vaguely golden-red in the light of the fire.
Well, so much for finding the damned ancient sword.
Around the woman and the sword was the carnage. Dead martians, most armored in bronze underscored with blue. They must have been the ones to leave their blood on her sword. Or - hadn’t? Even in the dim evening light, the weapon looked too clean, too unmarred by martian blue, as though neither it nor its wielder had committed any of the violence they both clearly had. Her heartbeat started to slow, and she let her wings and claws flicker out.
The woman looked at Isavel with a strange expression on her face. She was not shocked or horrified, the way the other martians had been. She raised an eyebrow, oddly accenting a look of exhaustion and disappointment and yet, somehow, also mild curiosity.
Only mildly curious about the sudden appearance of an earthling with glowing wings and dragon claws. Between that and the apparent theft of an artifact from a god, it struck Isavel she was not crossing eyes with a typical martian.
“Isavel!” Hail scampered from cover towards her, palms ready as the rest of their party emerged. “What - is that -”
As Isavel surveyed the scene, two other martians also rushed over to the swordswoman, two men with swords and guns at their hips. One of them, older if his steadier and less energetic demeanor was anything to go by, laid his hand on the swordswoman’s shoulder, and they exchanged words Isavel could hear but not understand. The younger martian man stared at Isavel wide-eyed, his hands hovering near his weapons, and after a moment he pulled his gun on her, wide-eyed but silent. The older man lunged towards him to get him to lower his weapon, and at the same moment Zoa started shouting.
“Isavel, get out of the way!”
She spun around to see the coder advancing with her gun raised, wild-eyed and looking to get a firing angle. She stood in the coder’s way and, quickly seeing that Zoa might just shoot her instead, flicked her wrist and shot the gun from Zoa’s hands. The coder froze for a moment before running towards the martians and yelling incoherently.
“Zoa - !”
It was Tanos who tackled her down, and the two scuffled as Sam jumped in to intervene. Erran was standing there, wavering on his feet, as Hail stared between the humans and the martians in a tense panic. The captives they had freed earlier were slinking cautiously into the square, too, and one of them shouted to the armored martians. Most of it she didn’t catch, but one word came up often as they pointed at Isavel’s party. “ Irditi! Ir
diti! ”
A wail from the village struck everyone silent and still. Isavel knew it to be the wraith, but these martians had either not seen the creature yet, or they had seen all too well what it was capable of. It did not show itself, but the sound was enough.
The swordswoman, for her part, was staring at the two earthlings scuffling on the ground, and Isavel thought she saw the corner of her mouth twitch up a little. Her arms tensed. Were these the only people standing between her and the power to send her friends home? The power to be flung across the stars?
After struggling for a moment, Zoa finally gave up on attacking and stormed off. Tanos and Sam hurried after her, Erran still staring wide-eyed at the carnage. The older martian man gave the her a nod and cautiously stepped forward. She watched him, curious but ready for it to be an attack. It wasn’t like they had any kind of shared language in common.
“Hello. Earthlings.”
She froze. He chewed the words out like gristle, and they were old words, like the words that came from machines and lesser shrines. But they were close enough.
“Far.” He tilted his head, pointing up into the sky. “Strange.”
His grasp of the language was not what she would have liked, but it was enough to tell her he had met earthlings before. Earthlings from her own homeland - from the very same coast, or at least who shared the language of the same ancients. “Do you understand me? What’s going on here?” She looked between the three of them, and noticed the unarmed martian villagers were gazing on the conversation in shock. Her blood started to cool. “We need help. We need to get away from here.”
The man glanced at the swordswoman and muttered something, and the woman’s grip on the hilt of her great sword tightened and loosened a bit. She shook her head, though, and nodded to their third member. Without a word, she grabbed the younger man and marched off with him, leaving the last fighter with a weary look on his face. “Lost words.”
“I can tell.” She glanced at Hail, then patted her own chest. “Isavel. You?”
He paused and nodded. “Tharson.” He gestured at his companions, who seemed to be quietly gathering debris from a ruined hut. “Kelena. Yarger.”
Unhelpfully, she couldn’t tell who of the two was who. This Tharson then gestured to Isavel, and to one of the bodies on the ground. She couldn’t tell what was of interest about this particular dead woman, until she noticed she wore no blue - only the plain armor he did. A fallen comrade, then.
He said a martian word, then followed it up with one that sounded more familiar. “Help.”
She stared at him. What did he want her to do? She was no medic, and she hadn’t had time to track down the one they had left behind. Given the death of his friend, Tellac may well not have trusted her enough to come. She could not bring back the dead, for all that that would go a much longer way to fixing things.
“Help what?”
He frowned and gestured around, saying a martian word for which he seemed to have forgotten the equivalent. But he made a fwooshing sound and motion with his hands, and after a second she understood. “Fire?” She let a wisp of dragonfire flicker from her palms, and tried to repeat the martian word he had used, which sounded to her like zahal . “Fire?”
He stared at the fire in her hands for a second before almost grinning and nodded. He looked amused - like this was some trick, and Isavel were a travelling performer. It occurred to her that he might not have seen the wings, and certainly hadn’t seen her fight.
But she could do this. And it was a slow thing - and they needed time to breathe. She glanced at Hail. “I think he wants a funeral pyre for this one. Look at the armor.”
Hail nodded after a moment. “Of course.”
“You burn your dead in the south, don’t you?”
“When we care to.” Hail stepped forward with the ease of someone who had indeed cared to from time to time, and together they helped Tharson drag his dead comrade out of the mess. The villagers had dispersed, and she heard the sounds of weeping in the distance, but a few stared at her from a distance in apparently horrified fascination.
When the other two martians returned, it was with tinder and half-charred wood they had clearly torn from ruined homes. Together Tharson and the swordswoman stripped their comrade of her metal armor, and laid her in her plain clothes onto the pyre.
The younger martian, though, stared directly at Isavel, almost without blinking, eyes wide with determination. She stared right back. “What do you want?”
He said nothing, looking instead to Tharson, who glanced between then and grunted, before naming them individually. Yarger was this tense young fighter; Kelena was the swordswoman. What Yarger’s problem with her was - or what all martians’ problem with earthlings was, except these other two - was no clearer. Perhaps she was simply uncannily alien-looking, as they were to her.
Or perhaps Yarger had noticed her glance at Kelena’s unusual sword. The weapons worn by the two men were much plainer, much less absurdly overblown in design. They did not look like ancient artifacts worth the murderous attention of a god.
Tharson and Kelena stepped back, and Kelena gestured at her, using the martian word. “Fire.”
She nodded and stepped forward, leaning in towards the wood. Yarger twitched, but Tharson held him back; she forced a puff of dragonfire from her hands, and the wood crackled and burst into flame. Stepping back, she watched the fires spread. Watching somebody’s friend, somebody’s family, stare into nothing through closed eyelids.
She stepped closer to the martians, looking at them before returning her eyes to the ground, to her feet. “I’ve been here before. Still don’t like it.”
If her accent or pace were too much for them, they didn’t show it. Tharson merely grunted something affirmative, and then, for a long while, they simply watched.
Isavel looked to Hail, who was watching as well, with a face that almost looked rehearsed. But while Isavel had scorched enemies in battle before, she had never watched a human body burn all the way from freshly dead to charred horror, slowly and deliberately. The smell was all the more appalling for how similar it sometimes was, when the winds stirred it wrong, to food. Her stomach churned violently at the thought, and she closed her eyes.
“Do we have to watch?”
After a moment, Hail answered. “We don’t have to do anything. We can just leave.”
Isavel sighed. Of course they could. Just leave was an easy thing to want, especially in a world like this. And, too, in the world she had brought with her. She had fought for her due and lost, and people had died for no good as a result. And they might keep dying, if she dragged them along with her.
But there was leaving, and then there was leaving . She took a deep breath and shook her head. “Azure - the blue god - said they made dark bargains. Bargains enough to thwart one god, apparently.” She glanced at the martians, trying not to look at the other bodies now being burned around the square, trying not to hear the weeping. “Gods. Do you follow any gods? Can they send us back to Earth?”
Tharson and Kelena exchanged glances. She shifted her stance, fixing Isavel with a long and intent stare. Isavel tried not to break eye contact, but rapidly began to feel uneasy under that stony gaze. Then Kelena spoke, tilting her jaw towards Tharson without taking her greyish eyes off Isavel. The words were incomprehensibly martian, but they were quick and curt and in their accent matched how Tharson had spoken the ancient tongue. They traded sentences, and Isavel thought their body language a bit complex - as though Kelena were deferring despite being in charge, asking despite already having plans. Yarger remained silent, clearly struggling with how cavalier his fellows were acting.
The sentences grew less quick, and suddenly Tharson and Kelena were arguing - politely, but unmistakably. There was a great deal of pointing at each other and at distant places far away, and their gestures occasionally shifted to encompass the earthlings as well, but Isavel caught none of it.
Then, with a strangely hooded expression, Th
arson turned to Isavel. “Gods. Yes.” He made a gesture with his finger, encompassing the earthlings and circling around them before arcing off towards an unremarkable part of the horizon. He said the next words in martian, first, then in his broken earth tongue. “We go. Come.”
Well. She nodded quietly, closing her eyes.
She could follow a murderous god’s clear and simple instructions, for a clear and simple reward, and hope the god wasn’t lying. Or she could follow martians who had defied a god, bargained with something that could fight the god, and carried a weapon the god apparently coveted.
At least she could decide not to decide yet. “To a god?”
She pointed, hoping that got across. She wasn’t convinced it did, despite Tharson’s answer. “Yes. All gods.”
She nodded and turned to find her fellows. Sam and Tanos had already reappeared, but Zoa was nowhere to be seen. Erran had slumped down against a hut, grasping the sides of his head, looking in shock. The wraith was curling around in the distance, bobbing between houses, occasionally cooing or wailing like some exotic bird in pain.
All of them should be on Earth. They shouldn’t be following her down the paths she cut. One way or another, she needed to get them home.
With Hail at her side, she drew their attention and explained as best she could. “They can bring us to other gods, I think. Not the one who did this.” She took a deep breath. “They’re gods - they can get us home. Whether they will is another story, but right now this is the best we have.”
Hail nodded. “They’ll have to at least listen to a Herald. I hope.”
Tanos was pointedly looking away from the dead. “I hate to be the one to suggest it, but could we just go back to the gate and… take it? Maybe fix it, somehow, if…” He looked around. “If we can get Zoa to look at it?”
Isavel sighed. She didn’t doubt that, if she and Hail returned prepared, they might have a chance at it. The martians were neither strong nor gifted, and for all that they had outnumbered and surrounded them the first time, flipping the element of surprise might prove to their benefit. But she was not at all convinced Zoa would be able to do whatever Ada might have with the gate, and there were further complications. “They were flying blue flags. So were the people who torched this village. This is some kind of army, I think. If we take an ancient relic from them - one we can’t move - I think more will come take it back. There’s too much we don’t know.”
Fourth Under Sol (Digitesque Book 5) Page 6