The wraith had approached in the air, its miasmic shape obscuring stars and starlit stonework, confronting two of the outers. And instead of attacking, it was… gods, it really was speaking. The words were alien, entirely unfamiliar to Isavel, but the outers on the rooftop were barking back at it even as they clung to cover. It had all the sounds of two sides talking past each other without listening, but still, they were talking . Their guns were pointed at the tangle of black scratches, but they weren’t firing.
What in the thousand worlds were they talking about? Did they even understand each other?
Then, without rhyme or reason, the outers started backing off. The wraith reverted to its warbles and coos as they disappeared, and shortly after they vanished, it slid onto the building, carefully picking its way back towards her, stopping one roof away. It had no eyes, but she could have sworn it looked at her for a moment before wordlessly slinking into the streets.
Chapter 7
“What is it? A demon?”
Tharson was asking about the wraith, of course. She shook her head. “No, something different. I don’t know! A wraith.”
He frowned deeply. “Is it yours?”
“It’s following me. I don’t know , Tharson.”
Tanos was still holding the gun close to his chest, glancing out into the ruins. “Outers, here? And it spoke their language? I didn’t even know it could speak.”
The earthlings all exchanged concerned glances. Nobody had been hurt by the outers’ attack, but everything about the event felt strange. Sam nodded slowly. “What did Zhilik say, Tanos? When she made the first one. A wraith was a shadow of a person?”
He nodded, looking uncomfortable. “Yeah, that - what, you think it has her memories?”
That thought concerned Isavel even further. The wraith was behaving more like an overly bold coyote than anything, so the idea it might be concealing human intelligence made its behaviour all the more puzzling. The idea that it might be Ada’s intelligence…
Kelena shook her head, interjecting in simple martian. “Speak ot tharsis if you can. Is it dangerous?”
Isavel shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“ Aliy are dangerous. They will return. We should move.” Kelena stood up. “I will search for a large enough shelter for the galhak.”
Isavel nodded. “What about the rokh?”
Tharson shook his head. “The rokh is dangerous. If aliy are hunting us, that may be worse.”
She nodded; she hadn’t even mentioned Amber. She watched Kelena stand and make for the door, sword hanging at her side, and thought about what Amber had said. Azure controlled the only ships, and most of the fargates, that could get them away from Mars.
She rose up to follow the swordswoman. “Kelena. I’ll come with you.” The martian nodded simply; Hail made to follow, but Isavel shook her head. “Stay with them - the night’s not even half over. Anything could happen in this damned place.”
The hunter frowned. “I don’t trust them.”
“I think they’re all ungifted.” She offered a tentative smile. “Even if she tries, I don’t think she’s fit to face down an earthling with one gift, let alone four. But that’s what I need to find out.”
Hail’s eyes widened for a moment, and she seemed to consider the ground at her feet very intently before nodding. “I understand. Be careful.”
“Of course.” She turned to Kelena, who was watching them with keen suspicion, and tried her martian. “Let’s go.”
Kelena nodded and was out the door, moving at a slight crouch and keeping to the walls. Isavel followed quickly; when the martian saw her skin shifting from tan olive to sandstone she let some curiosity seep through, but not as much as Isavel might have expected. More often she was glancing at the buildings or the sky, looking for something specific. The Red Sword dangled at her right, her hand never far from its hilt.
What kind of fighter was Kelena, exactly? What would it cost Isavel, if that sword was the only way for her to get away from this place?
They padded silently along several blocks. Isavel kept her eyes and ears alert; Kelena was not much of a speaker, her bluish-grey complexion looking even stonier in the night. Perhaps the silence was intentional - when it was broken, it almost startled her.
“The Red Sword.” Kelena glanced at Isavel. “You understand it?”
Isavel looked at the thing, cold metal somehow shimmering vaguely reddish-copper in the night’s pale light, even though Isavel knew it was faintly blue if she looked straight at it. She couldn’t say she understood it, but she understood there were stakes attached to it. “No.”
Kelena nodded, peering inside a ruin they were passing by; Isavel looked too, but the space was too small and constrained to hide all their galhak. The martian continued speaking quietly. “It kills people.”
What an absurd thing to say. Isavel tried to answer respectfully, wondering if she had misunderstood. “It’s a sword.”
“No. It eats people.”
“Eats?”
She followed Kelena across the street, towards another promising-looking ruin that turned out to be a weedy rockslide on the inside. “People who want power use the sword. They kill too many people, and then they die. Over and over.”
“And you?”
Kelena tapped her sternum, speaking slowly. “I am the Red Sword. I keep it away from people who want power. My elder did. His elder did. Her elder before her. One hundred years and more. Back to the first. Before then, it brought wars.”
Isavel found it surprising that a single sword could cause enough trouble to be worth the tale Kelena seemed to be telling, but she was no stranger to equally absurd tales from Earth. She also knew she had no way of knowing if such tales were true. “Why does Azure want it?”
Kelena’s eyes narrowed. “What do you know of that?”
Isavel didn’t like the threatening tone, but if this woman was sworn to safeguard the thing, she couldn’t well begrudge her for it. “He said you took it. If you’ve had it for a hundred years, what does he need it for?”
Kelena shook her head and kept walking. “It is not his to have.”
“Where you’re taking me - is there a path back to Earth?”
The swordswoman turned to face her and stood still. Her hand was on the hilt of her sword, but at this point that almost seemed more of an affectation than a threat. The real threat seemed to be the tension in her arms and her back. “Were you promised a way home?”
Isavel didn’t want to cross weapons - not yet, not so quickly. She still wasn’t sure what she was getting into. But what was she supposed to say? She was a terrible liar.
She was also stranded on an alien world, gods knew how far from Earth and even further from where she wanted to be, and this barren damned world was giving her precious few options. Amber had confirmed that poverty of futures. What else was left to her? Who else could she turn to.
She thought of the power to fling herself across the stars, and fired. The shot went for Kelena’s hand, aiming to snap the sword from her hand - but somehow went wide. Or, Kelena’s hand was no longer there. The blade was coming for her instead. She bloomed a shield on her other arm and moved to block it, but the sword jerked at an odd angle and slipped right past. She had just called up a sword of her own when the Red Sword was at her throat.
Her throat had been opened once before, by an old metal blade under a raining sky in the distant mountains of Earth. She suddenly felt the wound all over again.
She lashed out and the sword was gone, but like soft butter it had somehow slipped through the world and rested its tip on her stomach. She was breathing heavily, trying to understand what had happened, but the way the sword had moved was deeply counter to her intuitions about how it should move. She couldn’t make sense of it.
She was angry, her arms squeezing with tension, but all she could do was stare. And Kelena stared right back, shaking her head. “Do you understand the Red Sword?”
Isavel’s throat was stil
l smarting, feeling struck even though it had barely been grazed. Her face was heating up at the stupidity of even trying to take the weapon - she hadn’t even seen it used . What was she thinking? It was infuriating, but she had no other options. She opened her mouth and bellowed dragonfire into Kelena’s face.
To her amazement Kelena dropped and rolled out of the way untouched, her eyes surprised but the rest of her body moving as though nothing about Isavel was unexpected.
“You have strange powers, but you are not the Red Sword.”
Gods, the woman wanted to have an argument? Still? “Azure said he would send them home!” She gestured back through the ruins, towards her companions. “Azure -”
“Azure lies whenever he wants.”
“What other choice do I have?!”
Kelena tilted her head. “You are strange and dangerous. You could do many things, on Mars. Why leave?”
“I do need to leave.” She pressed her lips shut for a moment and huffed, then extended her hand. “Give me the sword. Please.”
Kelena boggled at her for a moment, then actually smiled. “No. Gods will not do anything for you, ever. They have no power.”
“Really?” She pointed at herself, taking a step forward. “I died, and they brought me back!”
Kelena frowned at this. “Who died?”
“Me! I did! I know that word in your language, you -” She clenched her fist and burst out solid shards of light behind her back, dragon and warrior wings that glowed bright white in the night, and Kelena’s eyes flicked to them with some apprehension. “They brought me back, and now I’m this.”
The martian finally seemed to be paying attention, and at least trying to understand what she was saying. Very slowly, she reattached the Red Sword to her hip. This time Isavel took a step back - she was beginning to suspect the sword gave her unnatural means to slip past Isavel’s senses and defences. “Why did your gods bring you back?”
She clenched her fists. “They wanted a human for their plans. I don’t know. All that power, and instead of protecting us from death in the first place they just picked me out of the pile and brought me back.”
Kelena shook her head silently for a moment again before speaking. “So why would you trust Azure?”
“I don’t trust the murder-god! But nobody else has any ideas for getting off this fucking -”
“You want to go back to Earth so badly?” The Red Sword’s tip suddenly knocked against the locator stone. “For this?”
She snatched at it, and the sword was gone. “That’s not on Earth either.”
Kelena’s eyes narrowed at this, and her mouth actually hung open for a moment, her head tilting oddly. “Not on Earth. Nor Mars.”
“No.”
“Where else is there?”
“I don’t know. Nothing I can imagine.”
Kelena lowered the sword and seemed to think, for a long, quiet moment. Isavel watched her. Why was that the thing that gave her pause? Then Kelena nodded, suddenly stony-faced again. “Don’t try to take the sword again. Come with us to the First Tree. I would like you to find a way to go to this other place.”
She blinked. What? “Why do you care?”
“I may want to go.”
She took a step back. “I’m not asking you to come along.”
“I don’t know if I will want to.” She carefully set the sword back at her hip. “But I want to know. To decide.” She gestured into the ruin they had stopped by, suddenly looking entirely peaceful again, as though they hadn’t just had a spat that could have turned deadly. “Come on. Let’s get the galhak.”
She stared as the swordswoman walked off, apparently utterly unconcerned. “You’re not going to fight me?”
“You would lose.”
She scowled, wanting to dispute the point. But she had acted rashly, hadn’t even taken the time to understand what she was up against. She was just as stuck as she had always been.
She kept silent as she followed Kelena back, and though Kelena didn’t appear to tell Tharson or Yarger or any other martians about what had happened, Isavel knew she was not hiding her own emotions from her fellow earthlings. They looked at her in concern, Hail especially; as they set out under cover of night, hurrying the animals along, Isavel kept to the rear far from Kelena, and Hail fell to the back with her, looking closely at her in the night.
“What happened?”
She had been stupid. Again. She sighed. “She’s more dangerous than I thought. Or the sword is. We had a bit of a tussle.”
Hail raised an eyebrow. “Tussle? Sounds safe.”
“And she knows Azure asked me to get it for him.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what to do. She asked me to follow her to this First Tree thing, and she said…” She glanced up. “She said if I find somewhere else to go, she wants to follow. I don’t know why.”
“Somewhere else? You mean on Earth.” Hail’s eyes lit on the locator stone. “Right?”
Isavel turned her head away and said nothing, focusing for a moment instead on the birdlike creature she was leading along. Hail laid a hand on her shoulder.
“Isavel - I know it hurts, but she’s gone.”
She pulled away. “We’ll figure it out when we get there.”
“I just think -”
“I’m fine. There’s nothing to worry about.” A loud, eerie cry sounded out across the ruins as though to spite her. “Aside from getting caught by any one of a hundred fairy tales living in these ruins, apparently.”
Hail reached out to take her hand. It was not an urgent motion, nor a demanding one, and in a sense that surprised her all the more. The look on the hunter’s face was oddly flushed, all of a sudden, and she stammered over her words. “You don’t need to chase after her.”
Isavel froze, briefly unsure of what Hail meant. Then the hunter leaned forward and kissed her, tentatively, quietly, and pulled back before Isavel’s brain could formulate any kind of response, physical or verbal or otherwise, behind completely blank shock.
Vertigo, panic, floodgates.
She remembered a moment of confusion and pain when she had kissed Hail in much the same way. Had she started this? Her mouth hung open, and for a second she wasn’t even sure whether that was in order to speak or in anticipation of continuing the kiss, but the look on Hail’s face demanded an answer, and as the moment stretched it also grew more fragile.
“I - I -”
What was she supposed to say? To do? She hadn’t even considered…
Should she have?
Hail was still staring at her, a look of fear now twitching across her face. Gods, she had to say something .
“I need time. I need to think.” She backed off.
Hail opened her mouth, closed it again, then nodded, and Isavel cursed her damned hunter eyes for seeing the look on her face so clearly. “I’ll always be here.”
Will you? Nobody else had been. Everybody else died, or turned on her, or left her. She tried to smile, but was almost certain that didn’t come across, and turned to stumble off into the dark, Mars’ weak gravity tripping her up now that her mind was elsewhere.
She escaped sight of the others, then escaped the sound of them. She found a building to climb up, one where she could feel isolated and alone, and cursed those damnable stars and all the secrets they held.
Breathe. Think .
She pulled the locator stone away from her neck, staring at it in her hand. It was dim. It had been for days now, its twin lost or destroyed or too far away for even the gods’ own magics. Either Ada was gone with it, or she had cast it aside. What more was there to do about that? Could the gods even track her down? They had answered that, hadn’t they?
Ada Liu is lost even to us.
And what did she have here? Hail was not wrong. She was closer to Isavel than anyone, for all that that closeness was not exactly warm. She was steadfast and absurdly committed. She had found, in Isavel… something to latch onto, something she needed, some kind of stable anchor or gu
iding hand. Maybe not something good for her, but something. Whatever Isavel was to her, it mattered enough that she was - was what? What could she become to Isavel, given time and trust and encouragement?
Out here, on this world where everything of Earth was so far, could they break down the earthly titles and myths that might otherwise have complicated things?
Up in the sky, in the void above that river of stars, she saw those dark wings taking flight again. I can’t not know . Ada would never be able to not know - to not go - to not chase after whatever she was hunting. Tanos had said it - she was a runner. She might even have wanted Isavel to keep up.
But gods damn it, at some point you had to stop running. You had to breathe . What was Isavel doing, chasing someone who demanded she keep up? That was never what she had wanted for herself.
The warble caught her so off-guard that she lanced out a fiery bolt in its direction, but the wraith simply flowed around it like water, continuing to approach her unperturbed. It sounded almost curious. She looked between it and the locator stone, wondering if the magic in one drew in the magic of the other.
“What do you want? Are you just following this stupid thing?” She scowled, waving the stone. “Why bother. You won’t even talk to me. Can’t be bothered to reach out to me, eh? Too fucking familiar.”
The wraith pulsed and hovered near her, but didn’t respond in any way that mattered. She shook her head, squeezing the locator stone in her hand. She had been thinking of it, hadn’t she? Trying to use the gods to get back to Ada?
What good would that have done, if the damn girl was going to keep running away?
She lifted her eyes to the stars in turn, wondering what alien enticements lay so far away. “I hope it was worth it, you idiot.”
She wound her arm back and flung the locator stone as far as she could into Deep Tharsis, away from the party’s path, well past where she could see it under ringless starlight. She didn’t even hear it land. The wraith, though, cooed quietly.
Fourth Under Sol (Digitesque Book 5) Page 11