Fourth Under Sol (Digitesque Book 5)

by Guerric Haché

  A hand rested on her shoulder. It was Tharson, looking both distraught and sympathetic. She knew they shouldn’t stay out here, so she followed him back into shelter. He patted her back awkwardly, though he could hardly say anything more than that he had warned her, and so she appreciated the silence. Hail, foolishly, bounded down the street to find her as well, wrapping her arm around Isavel’s shoulder.

  For this, though, she couldn’t cry. Perhaps that was proof of how broken she was - she could weep for her own stupid, petty heartaches, but not for the death she drew to others. But truth be told, she was used to death. She had an army of the dead that followed her everywhere, and if she knew one merciful truth, it was that the memories would dull, if not disappear.

  She looked up to the sky, to faint stars and distant worlds she would never know, and knew that was more than she deserved.

  Chapter 8

  “What do ghosts do with their dead?”

  Sam looked at her strangely. Isavel didn’t blame her - it was a strange question, but it had seemed worth asking nonetheless. The red-haired woman didn’t seem to agree. “What do you think? We wait for them to come back again.”

  There was no coming back from this, if what they said was true. She didn’t need to say that out loud.

  “He wasn’t my friend. I have no idea.” Sam looked at Tanos. “Honestly, I’m tempted to just leave him here. We’re moving as soon as we can. Bodies return to the earth either way. Or to Mars, I guess.”

  Here wasn’t the middle of the street - they had moved him away from the dead rokh, while the martians had begun stripping the creature’s corpse . Zoa was with the martians, though Isavel couldn’t imagine what the coder wanted from the body. The rest of the earthlings - the four of them - were in a small, stony hut whose metal skeleton peeked out here and there, where old impacts had broken stone loose. Isavel had no idea what the ghost would have wanted, or whether it really mattered. If it was true - if there was no Elysium here - then he wasn’t around to care anymore.

  Gods, she hoped there was some kind of afterlife, even on Mars.

  They settled for piling stones and gravel over him, the simplest solution that did not leave a body exposed to the elements. The ground in Deep Tharsis was dry and tough, and to burn him would have cast lights and smells they wanted neither for themselves nor for the attention they might draw.

  When they left, they found Kelena and Tharson in agitated conversation - and not about the rokh. Isavel had heard enough of the words that, though they were fast and quiet, she could tell they were talking about her, and about the danger she was putting them in. Both martians quickly fell silent as she approached their shelter and joined them, and Kelena gave her a brief, inscrutable glance before stepping out.

  She frowned and turned to Tharson. She couldn’t help but think that they were starting to put two and two together. People around Isavel died. It wasn’t a coincidence. “Tharson - tell me where the First Tree is. I’ll go myself. I won’t put you in more danger.”

  His eyes widened for a moment. “What? No. The Red Sword is more dangerous than you are.”

  “Because Azure is hunting it?”

  He shook his head. “Because it eats people. You… Maybe the First Tree can help you.”

  “Maybe?” She glanced back outside, though she couldn’t see Kelena anymore, only Zoa and Yarger sitting quietly in another ruin, the coder staring at a wall. “What were you two arguing about?”

  He bit his lip and seemed to wince. “Nothing important. The First Tree is a place where… things happen.”

  Was he being purposefully vague? He sounded like he was trying to pace his language, like there were words he thought she didn’t know. Or ideas behind the words. “What was Kelena saying?”

  He looked warily at her, and for a moment she thought Kelena had related Isavel’s attempt to grab the Red Sword. Instead, though, he sighed. “She wants us to visit an ancient temple to Crimson. It is useless. Crimson never speaks to us, and it is dangerous to bring the Red Sword to a city. She should know this. The First Tree is where you must begin your search.”

  He said it with a finality that did not invite further questions, but his tone was not hard; it was quiet and drained, like he was worried of having to rehash the entire argument. She let him be, then, hoping his idea was the right one - she certainly didn’t feel in a position to ask Kelena for her side of the argument.

  But Isavel could see the pattern emerging; she felt the trend. Two of her party dead already, in less than a week. The gods had cast them out with her, and they may well all die waiting for her to get them home. The faster they found a way back - or a final confirmation there was no such way - the faster… The faster what? “How far?”

  “Not much further. A day or two.” He gave her a sad look, gingerly patting her shoulder. “I am sorry for your friend.”

  She gritted her teeth and nodded. “Thank you.” She didn’t stay for more sympathy, though, stepping out to seek more earthly companions. Let the rokh come for her; a dragon would welcome the challenge. It didn’t though, and so she joined Hail and found Sam and Tanos with her. When Isavel joined them there was a moment of uncertainty in the hunter’s eyes, and so Isavel sat down beside her, strung out between wanting human companionship and wanting to stay away from everyone, for fear they might get snuffed out by the clouds that followed her.

  Hail gently laid a hand on her knee. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “Of course it was. Why is Zoa the only one who’ll say it?”

  Hail shook her head, trying to be pragmatic. “It was melded and downwind and -”

  “I panicked.” She faced Hail. “I thought he was - I was trying to get his attention, trying to get him to where I could talk to him. He was just across the street, and I -”

  “You have many gifts, Isavel, but you’re still human.” Hail smiled sadly. “I have hunter’s eyes, too. I didn’t see danger.”

  She leaned her head back against the wall. “What was I thinking, demanding things from the gods? Of course they flung me out here. Now two of us are dead. That’s what I do to people.” She looked at Hail. “You should get away while you can.”

  Hail stared openly at her, so Isavel crossed her arms, turning away again, feeling the guilt ooze through her veins, sour and vicious. Hope felt as far removed as Earth itself. Could they ever go home again? Could she deserve to?

  “There’s nothing left of me that’s allowed to be, except the Herald. Shooting and stabbing things. I need to learn to live with that.”

  “The gods are sometimes -”

  “It’s not them, it’s me. I’m not blind, Hail. Sorn left, Ada left, Jera turned against me, Zoa betrayed me to her elders, our gods ignore me. Ren died, Erran died, my whole family died, Hail.” She turned to the hunter, and could almost see the skull behind her skin. “You realize you’re going to die, too, don’t you?”

  Hail stared at her wide-eyed for a moment, then leaned sideways towards her. “Isavel, I’m still here. I’m not about to die on you.”

  Isavel didn’t respond. Her gut said she needed someone to lean on. She thought that someone was gone, but maybe she didn’t need Ada. Ada was harsh, irreverent, unpredictable. Maybe her gut was wrong, and she needed nobody at all. Maybe the Saint Herald could best protect people by keeping them away from herself.

  She noticed Sam and Tanos’ eyes both flick to the pair of them, and through them, somehow, she thought Ada was looking at her. She almost jumped.

  “I - sorry. I should sleep. Clear my head.”

  She heard Hail hesitate and almost shift towards her before leaving her be. She settled down by one of the walls, facing away from the others, to sleep alone. Or try.

  What was worse? Never leaving Mars, never finding her way back to a world she understood? Or going back, knowing nothing could really change? Amber and Azure had both implied, ultimately, that Azure was her best bet for returning to Earth, but his offer was repugnant and potentially fatal.


  On the other hand, there was a whole world here, with its own life and peoples and history. It would be around long enough yet for her to live a long life, if she wanted. She could vanish into the deserts and scrubland, and with nobody around and nobody looking for her, maybe she wouldn’t need the gods’ power to simple live in peace. She might finally stop killing people by mere presence, if there was nobody nearby. Perhaps that was the most she could aspire to.

  But she would always be an earthling, here. She had always had a touch of outsider to her, but this was more than a touch. Could she live with that, too?

  She made it halfway through the night, only intermittently fading into shallow sleep, before suddenly snapping wide awake, restless.

  No, not just restless. Rustles.

  Something drew her ear. She sat bolt upright, flexing her fingers, listening carefully. A tumble of stone, a rustle of shrubbery. Quiet and deliberate. She kept quiet, padded outside, and bounded up the lightness to the nearest of the low rooftops, looking for a vantage point. If something else was coming to kill people -

  She found herself face to face with an outer, and almost shot them.

  The colour of their fur was washed out in the night, and though she saw triangular ears and dark colour patterning, she would be hard pressed to make any judgements of age or gender. They were armed, but their weapon hung lazily by their hip, and their hands were free. That was the only reason she didn’t shoot right away. That, and the almost expectant stare she was getting.

  Isavel frowned, letting her ears and a few quick glances confirm that, as far as she could tell, they were alone. “Hello?”

  The outer made a strange head gesture, and spoke with a lilted voice that struck her as slightly, gruffly feminine. “Not martian.”

  Isavel curled up one side of her mouth. She might be equally bad at the martian tongue, which was odd to say of a being that may have lived here her entire life. “No. Earth.”

  “Yes. Hm.” With her free hand, the outer gestured towards the street. “Killed a rokh.”

  Isavel frowned. “Do you want it? The martians took some.”

  The outer lowered her arm and bobbed her head. “Hm. Don’t kill more, please. If you find eggs, give to us.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “You want the eggs?”

  “Keep them. Fly them.” The outer took a cautious step forward, standing a little taller than Isavel but certainly shorter than the martians. “Heard tell. You have wings?”

  Isavel glanced around again, wondering what this was about. She nodded, slowly, and flashed them white behind herself, flexing them up and down before letting them boil away into sparks and nothing again. The outer stepped back, startled, and then repeated her favourite word.

  “Hm.”

  Isavel tilted her head. “Were you… looking for me?”

  The outer stepped a little closer and peered at her, and for the first time Isavel saw her eyes, barely visible as distant suns glinted against them. “Yes. Stranger earthling than others. How did you get here? A ship?”

  She glanced north, and gestured. “A gate.”

  At this, the outer wheezed out a little hiss, her ears flicking around the top of her head. “Oh. Gates useless. We both die on Mars, then.”

  Gates useless. Well, that was not what she had wanted to hear. The outer made to leave, but she suddenly thought this outer could tell her something. “Wait - I - Azure has ships.”

  The outer flicked its ears. “Yes. And Azure lies and kills. Useless.”

  “Why do you aliy always want to leave?”

  The outer flashed pointed teeth, her ears perking forward. “On Mars, you too are aliy.”

  “On Earth.” She swallowed, remembering the chaos of the scene, the alien blood in the streets, the black storm and the white-hot rockets - “On Earth, the aliy left. In a ship.”

  She had never thought she could be startled by stillness, but the sudden, stony posture that overtook the outer felt like a rock slamming down just in front of her. “How? When?”

  “Days ago. A week maybe. They - someone called the ship. It came, and took them, and left.”

  The outer was in her face all of a sudden. “Lies. Earth’s gods -”

  “It’s true!” She pointed up. “I wish I was lying. The godfire fell on us , not on the ships.”

  The outer suddenly turned away from her, seemed to walk away for a step, then turned back. “How did they call?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Earth’s gods silenced us all. How did they call?”

  “I don’t know! I didn’t help them, I - I was -”

  The outer grabbed her by the shoulders, four furred fingers with thick nails digging into her skin. “ How did they call? ”

  She brought up a palm, pooling with the hunter’s killing light, and pointed it at the outer’s chest. There was no mistaking the threat, even if she had never seen an earthling’s gift before. She let go and growled, setting off and bounding lithe across a gap from this roof to the next. She disappeared into a corner before Isavel could begin to process what had happened.

  Alone again, in the dark, she scowled at all the strange damned things in this supposed ruin, and found her way back to shelter. Deep Tharsis was far too lively for her taste - but at the very least, she had something else to think about now, as she fell into a proper sleep this time. Where were all these outers trying to go?

  Perhaps the city had registered her annoyance. Perhaps Amber had decided to leave them be. Or perhaps she was simply trying to make sense of chaos; they found their way out of the city soon after morning. She was glad when the galhak carried them up the rusty red ridge, their little party spilling over the rim of Deep Tharsis into a sea of rolling red plains. The land rose gently from the northwest upwards, transforming into bumpy, knobbly hills and mountains further southeast. These foothills were more rugged and irregular, and the flora was growing lusher if no less alien. She wondered if she could get used to it.

  On one stop for water from a stream, Tharson drew her attention, pointing towards a bruise-like darkening across the hills. “You can see the old forest.” Were those trees, then? “One day. Maybe two.”

  She nodded. “Why do you call it old?”

  He smiled. “It’s old, and filled with old things.”

  She gave him a look, and he laughed.

  “What do you call your places on Earth?”

  She opened her mouth, but the truth was not especially flattering. Glass Peaks, Hive, Fogpoint - they called things what they looked like. Or they called things by names they had forgotten the meaning of - Campus, Institute. She wasn’t sure which of those was true for Sajuana - her mother had never explained that. “Okay, nevermind.”

  “No, I am curious. Tell me about Earth.”

  She frowned. “It’s… blue and green, in browns and grays. It’s old. Overgrown.”

  “What do you miss?”

  She shook her head, leaning a hand on the galhak. What did she miss, really? Everything she had lost, she had already lost before coming here. Maybe she should stay here. Maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world for her story to end here, peaceful and removed from the path of the Herald. That was what she had wanted, once, wasn’t it? To be somewhere her divine touch didn’t matter? Where better than here?

  After a moment, her silence must have said something. He nodded and left her in peace while they ate and drank and took care of the galhak; soon enough, they were on steppes again. The galhak chirped and warbled loudly to one another, feathered tails flicking and long legs bounding across the martian foothills. Isavel watched taller and softer red grasses whip by underfoot.

  She knew Hail was watching her. She had too many thoughts competing for her attention, though, too many possible futures. It had been simpler, for the brief moment when there had seemed to be only one worth thinking about. What now? Without gods at her shoulders or fire at her heels, what the hell was she supposed to do?

  She had one last chance at pur
pose - find a way home. For her companions at the very least. Everything else was just shades of mud and fog.

  The animals rode straight till dusk, by which time they were certainly in some kind of forest, though the trees were still sparser than in the forests of Isavel’s homeland. Further ahead, she could see foothills teeming with dense, towering thickets of dark purple needles and sand-coloured bark. They found an especially dense copse of pines that had sprung up where a stream left the highlands, and settled the galhak underneath them. The rokh, she guessed, wouldn’t dive through needles to get at their heads.

  The martians settled in for the night. Isavel sat down with Hail, hoping not to have to talk about anything further away than the night and the campfire. Hail seemed to oblige her in that, silently hooking her left arm into Isavel’s right under their ponchos. Some of the martians appeared to be smoking fungi over the fire, and the smell of that alongside the cooked mash of berries and cured meats they were sharing suddenly spoke to her. The fire was warm, the thick, rich soil of the region soft underneath them, and after the silence had settled she grew to feel strangely… comfortable.

  That comfort was not even broken when Zoa, for reasons Isavel could not fathom, took a sword and demanded that Yarger spar with her. They watched in quiet perplexion as the earthling, stocky and short by martian measure, fumbled her way through the basic patterns of swinging around a metal sword. Gift be damned, it seemed, the woman wanted to fight her way out of this. It made Isavel wonder if all coders were secretly ready for a scrap, only denied the opportunity by their gifts - but the look on Zoa’s face, cold and tired and stony, was far from the wild, manic grins and panicked chaos she had seen play across Ada’s. Maybe this was just to be human, then.

  She and Hail leaned into each other a bit more and watched as a few of the group slept; when morning returned, and everyone was ready, they rode down towards the wooded lowlands. The blackish-purple canopy closed over their heads with remarkable speed. Isavel thought she saw banners fluttering in winds just above a few of the tallest trees - red and black and red - but she couldn’t imagine why anyone would put banners atop the trees, and the galhak quickly carried them deeper.