Fourth Under Sol (Digitesque Book 5)

by Guerric Haché

  “Shut up!” She hissed at it. “She didn’t need me, so I damn well don’t need her. And I don’t need you either. Get lost!”

  To her surprise the wraith not only seemed to hear her, but fell quiet, turning away. She didn’t stay around to watch, slipping back down to the ground and marching her way back to others.

  They had reached the spot where she had made a move for the sword, and most nodded and looked curiously at her as she arrived. She felt a swelling of tension in her chest, though, and tilted her head slightly at Hail, just enough for the hunter to feel summoned.

  As soon as they were outside she grabbed the hunter’s hand and hauled her over to another ancient structure, ducking inside and planting her lips on Hail’s. But it was not the relief, or the revelation, she had wanted - it was a crack, instead, and even as Hail was starting to respond she felt a great well of utter unhappiness drown her lungs, and she started sobbing against Hail’s face, clinging to her, wishing it would somehow help, wishing she could stay quiet because she was the fucking Herald and the others shouldn’t hear her cry like some -

  But she had always been some hapless village child.

  Her gifts hadn’t changed that. Had they gone to someone like Ada, someone with drive and purpose, they would not have crippled her the way they did Isavel. She wasn’t cut out for this. Not any of this. Never had been. The gods had made a mistake - many mistakes - and she was just yet another.

  She wept from frustration; from the pain of throwing herself against things she didn’t understand and gaining nothing, never anything; from the weight of everyone who had suffered and died because some stupid village castoff had stumbled into a divinity she had no right to touch; from the hollow in her heart that might never be filled. That might have always been there, waiting to swallow her whole.

  Hail cradled her until her tears stopped, and held her still after that, and for all that Hail could be cold she felt perfectly warm just now. Not long after the crying had loosened its grip on her, Isavel fell asleep in the hunter’s arm, those deadly hands carefully stroking her hair, exhausted and done.

  Morning woke her. They were still together. She didn’t know what to say. She hadn’t said anything - she hadn’t even thought anything coherent. But she was stilled, now, enough to keep moving, to keep searching for this path back to Earth.

  For all of them, she realized slowly.

  “Isavel?” Hail’s blue eyes were soft. “How are you feeling?”

  She sat up slowly, stretching and rolling her shoulders, not sure. She felt… there wasn’t much going on in her. She wasn’t sure if that was peace or numbness or contentedness. She didn’t want to call it the wrong thing, or test it too closely. “Better.” She nodded towards the outside. “But things won’t be good until we get back to Earth.”

  Hail seemed to notice the specific form of we , and smiled lightly, helping her up.

  When they found the others and prepared to leave, she squeezed Isavel’s hand before moving away to help the other earthlings. Isavel stood awkwardly for a moment, alone. She didn’t like that feeling - not now, not even after sleeping through the evening. So she looked around and found Tharson, and made for him even as she fumbled through her mind for a question, an excuse.

  She ended up asking for their itinerary, and his response was not encouraging. “One day and one night to leave Deep Tharsis.”

  The mundane tedium of the answer, and the accompanying gestures to help her understand, tripped her up for a moment. That was a remarkably long time to cross a city. “What? How big is it?”

  He glanced at her and smiled sadly, as though he too had just learned how long it might take. “The greatest old city of Mars. The streets are neither straight nor clear. Still - Azure’s minions will not follow us here.”

  They may be on the edge even now, but she had difficulty imagining how huge and twisted it must be to take a day to cross. She sighed, pressing on. “And after Deep Tharsis?”

  He handed her a pack, and she held it in place as he strapped it to his galhak. “Highlands. The ancient forest. The First Tree. All the watan go there.”

  “The what?”

  He looked at her awkwardly, tousling the short, straight grey hair on his head. “People looking for gods.”

  She nodded, guessing he must mean pilgrims. Well, Kelena had thought they might gain by going there, and Kelena had the strange mystic sword. If that was the place to go for a fuller audience, so be it. She was not hopeful the third martian god would be of any use, though, and if not…

  She remembered just how quickly and strangely the Red Sword had moved, woman and weapon both. She did not want to find out their only way home lay on the other side of that blade.

  “How’s a tree going to get us back to Earth?”

  They both turned to find Erran staring at them - she hadn’t realized the ghost was listening in. “Kelena told me there were older things there than gods.”

  “So what? Rocks are old as shit and that doesn’t make them special.” The walker who couldn’t walk stepped closer, peering carefully at Tharson and trying his less-steady martian. “We need to go home.”

  Tharson nodded, and sighed. “It is difficult. But it has been done.”

  Isavel blinked. “Has been?”

  “People have gone to Earth.” He shrugged. “We think. They never returned. But if you are already here, I don’t see why you couldn’t also go back.”

  “At this - this tree?”

  “I do not know. Neither does Kelena.” Isavel frowned, finding it odd that he specified the two of them but not Yarger or anyone else. “Only that it has been done. Gods and other old things may reveal the way.”

  Isavel nodded slowly. “I don’t think Azure has all the fargates.”

  Erran sighed, turning to Isavel. “If there’s some way to get a fargate on Earth active without a walker walking there, it’s possible. The gods can open the walk anywhere - maybe that’s what happened. But I don’t know -”

  She grabbed Erran’s arm, leading him away from Tharson. “Listen - I tried to grab the sword from her.”

  Erran’s eyes lit up in a strange mixture of excitement and alarm. Clearly she hadn’t succeeded. “But what?”

  “But she could have killed me with it.” Could have opened her throat with it. Gods, yesterday had been a disaster. “There’s magic about it, Erran. I couldn’t react to it. I don’t want to try that again if I don’t have to.”

  “I mean, a god isn’t going to ask you to hunt down any random piece of shrapnel with cloth wrapped around the bottom.” He sighed, though, nodding. “So it’s complicated. I’ll think about it.”

  “Erran - don’t do anything stupid.”

  He grinned. “I already did the dumbest thing I could. It’s all open fields from here.”

  She might have smiled, on a better day. But as she watched him go she couldn’t help but think that he was making excuses for his future self.

  She saddled up with Tharson, who led them all deeper into the city basin. He continued to try to teach her, pointing at structures and plants and naming them, explaining things about them with gestures and sounds and words she already knew. After a time, though, he turned to her with a quizzical expression.

  “Your wraith.” She looked around to try and find it as he shook his head. “Where is it?”

  She hadn’t seen it since last night, not even in the peripheries. Maybe that would make the questions stop. “I don’t know. It’s not mine , Tharson.”

  He glanced at her eyes and made a hand gesture around his chest to clarify what he was asking. “Where is your pendant?”

  Her arm twitched towards the locator stone around her neck even as she remembered she had thrown it away. “I didn’t want it.”

  “The wraith is following it?”

  She groaned. It was possible - they were both things of code - but what made him think that? She almost wished she’d thrown it away sooner. “I don’t know!”

  He looked a
t her. “It helps you.”

  “No it doesn’t. Tharson -”

  He grunted, finally sensing some deeper and less pleasant answer, and let her be. Silence as they rode the galhak through Deep Tharsis wasn’t so comforting, though, navigating the ruined streets and the hardy weeds in a way that felt suspiciously haphazard. The martians might not actually know their way around the ruins in any detail. Maybe that, more than size, was the reason for their slow progress.

  So as the day wore on, long and uneventful, she listened to the continuous babble of martians all around her, silently mouthing along where she could. She glanced at Hail a few times, and received cautious smiles in return, ones she was sure she was reciprocating in kind. Tharson soon started up with her again, avoiding the wraith and the stone this time, and that was a relief; his readiness to carefully throw words at her spoke to a man more used to linguistic barriers than those where Isavel had grown up.

  Had he traveled, then? He did not look pleased to be asked that, but he nodded, offering little more. Clearly they both had things they did not want to discuss. In a sense, that symmetry comforted her.

  By dusk, she was no longer surprised their slow, winding path and its seemingly unanticipated dead ends had not led them to the edge of the city. She could feel Tharson tense up as the sun started blueing the sky; more than night, he seemed to fear twilight. When another screeching call sounded over the ruins - nothing the wraith had ever made - Tharson looked back at her unhappily. “The rokh are hunting close.” He shouted to the others. “Shelter!”

  This cry might have been different, but it was difficult to tell, and suddenly the martians were scrambling off their galhak and dragging the creatures inside whatever ruins they could. The fallen streets here were not home to any ruins large enough for the whole party of people and animals, so by necessity they split up. She couldn’t see most of her fellow earthlings except Erran, who had been riding with Kelena. The two of them darted into what might once have been a small house, just across the street.

  She leaned against the inside of the building, peeking out, but Tharson laid a pallid hand on her shoulder and pulled her back in. “Careful. You can’t see the rokh as it flies.”

  “Why would it make noise, then?”

  He shrugged. “To tell the other rokh this prey is claimed.”

  She twisted her mouth and said nothing. “You weren’t worried about the outers - the aliy - when we came here.”

  “They are less predictable.” He shrugged. “Sometimes they are friendly. Perhaps it has been a bad season. Either way, Azure’s minions do not like to deal with them.”

  She still hadn’t mentioned to any of the martians that she had met something claiming to be another god in here. She crossed her arms. “What else lives here?”

  He glanced outside, towards Kelena. “Many things. Some memories are more trustworthy than others.”

  She wasn’t sure what he meant, or whether she had misheard something, but she followed his gaze. The swordswoman was looking outside with mild interest, her hand always on her sword hilt, but she did not look worried the way Tharson or the other martians were.

  Erran, though. Tharson might not have noticed it, but Isavel saw right away that something was different - he had a gun. He wasn’t doing anything with it - he wasn’t really even holding it - but he had one, where he had previously had none. It looked martian. What for? She had a nasty suspicion, and she tried to make eye contact with him, to make clear he was being watched.

  He saw, but he mostly seemed more puzzled she was looking at him, tilting his head to the side as though to say, What? She didn’t know how to convey that he shouldn’t try to shoot the swordswoman and take up Azure’s bargain. She never should have told any of them, and her frustration at herself for doing so was making her agitated. Her hands were bloody enough without this, too. She tried to keep her expression flat, shaking her head.

  He continued to look quizzical, though, and she wanted to shout at him. Was he playing stupid? She needed to talk him out of this. She stepped in front of Tharson and quickly made a gesture while Kelena was looking the other way, so she wouldn’t follow. Erran scowled and quickly darted out of the building and across the street to meet her.

  Halfway across, the iron tang of human blood filled her nose.

  Something huge displaced all the air, and in the moment it took for everything to register she suddenly smelled it, felt the heat of it, all her senses now aware of a creature that had been downwind of her this whole time. She even saw the muddied, blurred shape of something easily the size of a large dragon, melded to the sky like a pathfinder, its meld suddenly betrayed as it dove so close to the ruins.

  Isavel burst out with a shield and started shooting, but the creature was moving incredibly fast and its meld muddled her firing intuitions. Erran was dangling from something she could barely see, screaming for help. People had started shouting and firing.

  Then her hunter’s instincts finally processed the scene. The rokh was moving in a nice, clear curve. A single warrior’s shield, sharp and bright, cut through the air and raked what must be its wing. It crumpled, landing with a crash on top of Erran, its body melding to conform to the dessicated buildings and hardy weeds and rust even as it collapsed.

  Tharson tried to grab her and drag her back inside, but she broke free and darted forward. The rokh was by no means dead, its wings flaring awkwardly as it turned to screech at her, a melded beak like a ripple of the world snapping towards her. She was about to shoot it when a green hexagon thunked into its side, then another and a third, several more following as the creature pivoted and staggered and collapsed all at once. Isavel turned to see Zoa emerging from one of the ruins, gun held high, looking utterly cold.

  She didn't wait to ask, and the coder’s dead stare left no room for conversation. She helped Isavel shove the feathered bulk aside, until they pulled Erran out from underneath.

  One of his legs was twisted awkwardly, snapped open to the bone near the shin, and the rokh’s claws had pierced both his shoulders deeply enough that they were oozing a great deal of blood, its red joining the blue pooling from the beast itself. He was a horrible mess, not one anyone could recover from without a medic immediately at hand. And there might well be only one medic on all of Mars - far from here, and not likely to forget Isavel had caused his companion to be killed.

  And none of that even mattered, because in the fall Erran’s neck had also clearly been snapped. He was utterly still. Another pointless fucking death.

  She looked at Zoa, and the coder stared back at her, blank-faced. For a long, quiet moment, Isavel hoped that, if they both refused to look down, this would somehow not be real.

  It was Zoa who broke the spell, looking down again with a ragged breath. “I don’t know what’s worse - being pissed Mars got another one, or being glad that at least this time it was a fucking ghost.”

  Isavel looked away. “This was my fault. I made him -”

  “So what? Everyone who dies around you is your fault. Nothing new there.”

  The words hit her like a rock, and she rounded on the coder. “I don’t want any of this to happen!”

  “Well too bad!” Zoa shoved her back, her hand still bloodied. “This is what happens! This is what rules are for! You get it in your head that you’re special and all this shit -”

  “What? I’m not special! What, you think everything was fine until I came along?”

  “It’s always someone like you, or Ada - someone thinks they’re different, someone doesn’t play by the rules. You push and -”

  “This -” She grabbed a fistful of the still-melding feathers and yanked them towards her. “This is a gods-damned animal, Zoa! It didn’t decide to, what, to punish us?”

  The coder stood up and fired a gratuitous shot into the corpse. “None of us would be here if not -”

  “You think it doesn’t eat martians?” She was about to remind Zoa that they had been warned - but that was the thing. They had been
warned. And that made this all the worse.

  Zoa bared her teeth. “At least it was a fucking ghost. We don’t need any more of them.”

  Isavel remembered what he had said about Tevoria; the odd, quiet tenderness he had avoided voicing directly, but that still came through when he mentioned the strange spirit. Zoa knew none of that, of course. “Even he had people he wanted to get back to.”

  “Sure. Plenty more ghosts needing a walker to cross over.” Still, as Zoa kicked the rokh’s carcass again, Isavel couldn’t help but be reminded that it was Zoa, of all people, who had charged out here with a gun.

  “You cared enough to help.”

  Zoa clenched her fists around the gun, and for a moment Isavel thought she might try to shoot. She eventually backed off in frustration instead. “Just wanted to kill something martian. Somehow you’re all killing but no payback.”

  And with that she stormed off, leaving Isavel amidst more death. She looked down at Erran - ghost, walker, still just a fragile body turned a corpse, just a bundle of thoughts and feelings turned to gore. For no reason at all.

  Frailty, constant chaos, stupid mistakes, utter meaninglessness. All the damned gods of Earth and Mars did was - what? They barely even meddled. It was the promise of their help, more than anything, that was poisonous. What could she do about that?

  She felt her fists clench, knowing that for all her unusual power, she and this rokh might well have more in common than she did with other people. Bringers of death, for everyone around them, friend and foe. Nothing more, really. And Zoa was not wrong - it was her very difference, her very strength and powers, that seemed to invite death all around her.

  She looked at the dead bird’s settling feathers, slowly seeping from their meld to a ruddy red-brown on the back and an olive-yellowish on the chest. She tried to avoid looking at the dead ghost. Tried to avoid imagining Tevoria, in her splinter of the thousand worlds, standing here, just out of reach, watching him cut down and unable to do or say anything. She hoped, for her sake, that the gods’ dreams themselves were as confined to Earth as the walker’s gift.