She scowled and pointed the sword at his face. She didn’t know what she was doing. “I happen to be on good terms with a god. She’ll tell me where I can find relics that can help my friend, even if it takes a long time.” She lied. “I’d rather you help me, though. My patience has been deteriorating, lately.”
“That’s pretty clear.”
He stared at her, defiant. She swung the sword at his neck.
He didn’t react at all. He didn’t even wince as the metal touched his flesh. He didn’t care. She frowned - she had expected some kind of… desperation.
He glanced at the blade. “All that for a fucking feint?”
Even Mother Jera might have known. There is a crisis unfolding, Tellac, and your powers will help set things right, help defeat the very villain who has imprisoned you and whose followers killed your lover. Dendre Han might have known. Tie him up and carry him back. By the time we hit Red Rise he’ll have lost the will to fight. Anybody else might have known; but she had only herselves.
And she had her own knowledge.
She wished she could say he was giving her no choice - but she knew that was a lie. She had all the choices here. She bared her teeth. “Last chance.”
He spat on the ground. He bled on the snow. She settled onto her knees in front of him, pulling the blade back. Looking at the cold metal. “I tried. I really did.”
He looked confused, tilting his head a little and frowning deeply. “You think I’m going to feel sorry you can’t even torture someone?”
The glow healed her cuts. Ada would understand.
“That’s new, I’ll give you that.”
She took a deep breath. He deserved… better, certainly. But instead he had her. The dragon’s heart, beating just moments ago, steaming in her hands. The blood running down her arm. “No. I was apologizing for this.”
She took the metal blade in her right hand. Snow chilling her knees and her shins. Started carving lines down her left forearm. The blood ran down her skin, seeped right in.
His contempt changed to confusion as the snow melted under blood. Confusion to horror. Skin to blood to scars to skin. “What - what are you -”
She thrust the bronze blade forward, the tip catching the palm of his free hand and impaling it against the wall. She thrust a hexagonal sword forward, the tip slicing through the dragon’s chest. They shrieked.
Her wounds were healing, as she ran her hands over the blood.
She jammed the blade so hard into the wall it stuck, and his frantic panicking didn’t dislodge it. Slicing her arm open, sealing it shut, she pressed her open, bleeding gashes up against his, and the blood ran down her arms. Her right hand pressed his face into the wall. She held the dragon’s heart in her hands, and the blood ran down her arms. She opened her mouth wide and bit down as hard as she could.
He wailed.
Again the hot burst of blood in her mouth. Again the iron tang, again the shreds of torn flesh. Again the electric feeling seeping into her veins. The feeling of her wounds healing shut. The veins in his arms opened as she shook her jaws, they closed as she sang her blood, they opened for her jagged teeth, they closed for her mind.
She kept chewing and drinking as he screamed.
Zigzagging slices up and up her arms, the dull bronze blade painted dark red. Smoothing out the cuts till no scars remained.
He flailed against her right hand pinning his head against the wall. He was so much weaker. I was apologizing for this ? She held the dragon’s skull in her hands, eyes dead and drained of blood, and the dragoness gripped her shoulders tight with her clawed hands, rasping into Isavel’s ears. I never apologized for this .
She laughed into the hot red gush of blood in her mouth, burning, disgusting, electrifying. She laughed as her wounds knit shut under the alien familiarity of new ancient magics. She opened her arm, cut by cut, and the blood fell down to snow.
Dizzy. The Dragoneater was feeling dizzy.
And yet the maneater’s blood still lay torpid. Burning, drinking, bleeding, healing.
Headache. Skull-splitting headache. Isavel would know what to do. She had, and she would, the intangible green glow of the medic a salve for her wounds.
Gift . What a fucking word.
She felt that new wyrm twisting and waking in her brain, her vision flickered and flashed, and the world peeled apart before her senses in ways it never had before. She felt under Tellac’s skin and within her own flesh the flows of blood, the coils of muscle, the tension of tendons. Tissues wrapped around tissues all the way down to bone and marrow within. The complicated, densely woven cloth of human bodies. Torn apart by teeth, sliced open by metal.
She pulled away, gripping her head, trying to feel it. Her hands smeared blood all over her face. She was covered, steaming red above the mountain snow. Shreds of a heart in her hands. In her teeth, sharp and gnashing like they never were.
“You -” He was panting, wincing, moaning. “You fucking monster -”
She stared at her right hand. He had bitten it open, raggedly, and it unfurled beneath her senses like delicately folded cloth. The weave of flesh and bone and veins and nerves sang separate and clear for her, and her left hand knew, as it approached, as the blood ran down her arms.
Each tattered thread cried urgently for help. A warm, comforting water churned under her hands, smoothing together the broken strands, rebuilding the intricate coils. She smiled, running her left hand over her right, watching the flesh knit itself back together, watching blood recede into the skin.
It was there. It worked. The medic was awake within her. And like every one of her selves, she knew well enough to teach right away. She laughed, sputtering blood onto her newly healed hand, her head still in pain, her face and arms and clothes still covered in blood.
She looked up at Tellac, and he was looking pale. Blood loss - she sensed it, now, rather than guessed. The sloshing fluids in his body rustled along the paths they would take and the paths they should, and she saw what was wrong. I am wrong. It was escaping from his right hand and forearm, of course, where she had opened him to take what he would not give. I was apologizing for this . She felt the mirrored wounds along her own forearm. The blade bit in, zigging and zagging up her skin, and the hand ran down, smoothing the wounds back shut. She started to smile. I was apologizing for this?
B lood lost to the sand and snow, of course, could not be recovered. There was only so much a medic could do.
She reached out with her left hand, feeling the medic’s gift slowly spreading there as a kind of field, a magnetic force that could push and pull and knit and tear. Her hand hovered against the wounds she had inflicted on him. The damage was more severe, and as her hands approached she could feel the tubes of blood that needed to be sealed, the muscle that needed to be stitched, and the greenish field under her hands twisted and spiraled and flexed as she tended to each problem in turn. Every wound under her hands felt in mind like a woven basket or blanket that had come undone, and she wove it all back together and massaged the broken halves back into wholes.
She finally pushed the blood back into his skin, watching it disappear with fascination, and then collapsed back onto her rear and stared at him with a smile even she could feel was wild and feral.
He continued breathing, shallow, terrified, wide-eyed.
Isavel was still glad she hadn’t had to eat his heart. “You’re alive.”
“You fucking cannibal.” He was quiet. “You - you ate my gift. How the fuck did you do that?”
Life had made her one thing. She had made herself something more. “It’s not the first time.”
“What… Did you deal with a demon?”
She smiled with all her teeth. “Death and dumb luck.”
He was pressing himself against the wall, she realized, trying to get away from her, his boots pushing the dark, sticky sand on the floor away. “ Cannibal . You drank my blood. You know cannibalism is the highest sin against the gods.”
He was still sta
ring, and for a long time she stared back, silently, before he gathered the strength to continue.
“Even on Mars, they’ll find you. You’ll answer -”
She hauled herself to a crouch. “Let them find me.” She leaned in and lowered her voice. “Maybe I’ll drink their blood too.”
She thought of Hail’s dying body, frozen in stasis in Crimson’s vault. She thought of Ada, who had raged against the gods long before she had. She thought of all the people who had died while she tried to do what the gods wanted of her. She thought of what she had made herself.
People she cared about were in trouble. She had had enough. Everything else was dust.
“You deluded -”
Isavel reached out with a hunter’s palm and blasted the rope holding his wrist to the wall. He cowered, as though expecting to be shot himself, but she turned and stepped out into the sun. She was done here. Tellac could scamper out to freedom and live to see another day, do whatever seemed best, heal or not heal, whatever he wanted. With food and rest, new blood would flow in his veins soon enough, and the Azurites had left plenty of supplies.
That did not unmake the monster. But she wasn’t sure the monster needed to be unmade.
She looked to the southwest, and smiled at the thought of racing against the sun. She would lose today, but she would win tomorrow.
She climbed the dome of the fargate, the tallest building in the ruin, and spread her wings and soared. She felt the medic settling into her core, into her mind, alongside all the others as she glided towards the mountains. More blood taken by force, another identity for her to fail to live up to. It was all the same. She was Isavel Valdéz; life had given her many faces, and she had taken many more.
She pushed herself harder, racing up steep, shrub-encrusted peaks to get a better boost into the air. What guilt and shame coiled around her spine shied from the burning sense of determination that had driven her all the way out here. She answered to no gods or mortals unwillingly. She felt the locator stone’s white cord rippling against her neck in the wind and set her jaw.
Three things. She had three things to do.
She started tiring in the afternoon, within sight of a modest, narrow river coursing through a lush little gulley. She brought herself down and staggered around it, looking for any hint of danger. Today, here, Mars did not seem to dare.
She stood on the edge of the water, perhaps not deep enough or muddy enough to take on the wine-coloured hue she had seen elsewhere. She could see dark rocks and pebbles and sand at the bottom, but the clay beneath her feet, extending as far as the river might flow at high tide and not much further, was a yellow ochre. As she walked along the edges, she noticed her footprints revealed coarser white sand underneath; the contrasting colours were strange, though no stranger than a great many other things.
Turbulent though the shallow waters were, she did catch a few glimpses of something else in the lulls. Herself. Her face and clothes were darkly blotched, matching the dark, caked blood on her hands and arms.
And behind her her father’s daughter, aghast; and her mother’s daughter, embarrassed but unwilling to be shamed; her hunter, ready to strike down any objection, and her warrior disappointed she was too afraid to endure, and her pathfinder, evasive and impossible to pin down. And her dragoness, teeth bared, wings spread, bronzed arms of muscle and scale wrapped almost lovingly around the shoulders of her weeping medic.
She shook her head, tried to center herself. Thickly caking blood wouldn’t do her clothes any favours, and she needed to do something about them; she was too short and stocky to fit any replacement martian clothes. She pulled them off and waded into the chilly river, rinsing and wringing them out to the best of her ability, twisting and wrenching them again and again. And the blood ran down her arms.
It was second nature to her to start a fire under the high branches of a sturdy old tree, and she hung her damp things above it, where they should dry without burning. They might smell like smoke, but that would be little different to how they smelled after Red Rise.
It might be a good time to rest, while she waited; afternoon sun be damned.
A brief glimpse at it suggested that maybe it was.
There was something there… a spot on the sun. She wasn’t sure what it was, but it was definitely there, a fraction of the whole disk but enough for her gifted eyes to notice in glances. Perhaps it had always been there; perhaps old Sol was dying. Perhaps the heavens were stranger and more broken than she thought. Perhaps everything was. She was still a bloody mess, after all.
She walked to the river, curling her fingers in the soft yellow riverside, grinding with the heel of her foot so she churned up some of the coarser white sediment beneath it. For a moment, she thought of nothing at all. Then she realized she hadn’t curled her toes in wet clay in a lifetime, and smiled.
She knelt down to grab a fistful of it, pleasingly soft and sticky. So sticky that when she smeared it between her hands, it coated her skin; tentatively, she flickered her pathfinder’s gift, and it was profoundly strange to see her skin change as ochre clay and red blood clung to it unmoving. She grinned, reaching down for more of the clay and sand, and started rubbing it onto her arms. She pressed her hand into a clear patch of clay and drew it out, looking at her handprint, the ridges of her palm and fingers muddied away by the riverside.
She covered all the blood - her hands and arms, her chest and neck, her face and shins - with the yellows and whites of the martian riverside, feeling an odd warmth to the cold cling of the soil. She ran it through her hair, lay her back in it, grabbed it and threw it and watched and heard the satisfying thunk of wet clay slapping into the ground and laughed. The moon was setting on the other side of the horizon; the sun was still looking down on her, that dark blotch still marring its face. Sol .
She raised a fistful of yellow clay at the speck, cheering its stand in the face of distant, unrelenting Sol, and squeezed her hand shut, clay oozing between her fingers. Then she walked into the water, unbothered by the chill, watching her feet churn up the dark mud beneath the stones and pebbles of the riverbed. She smiled at the textures, the sound of rushing currents, the way her body adapted to the cool water. In the center of the river, where the water reached her armpits, she raised both arms to the sky and grabbed and squeezed, as though she might tear down the sky if she pulled hard enough. She smiled a dragon’s roaring smile, teeth making way for a cry to everything and nothing, daring the heavens to try her. She might yet.
She dove into the water on a deep breath, digging her fingers into the dark below her feet, pulling up the mud and flinging it into water, death and decay gone on for so long it had become the foundation of life. She scrubbed at her arms and the clay and sand and blood peeled off, carried off by the buoyant lightness of martian water, swirling away from her downstream. She surfaced for breath and splashed, scrubbing and scraping at her skin and everything that clung to it. She dove back down, relishing how little a lack of oxygen could slow her.
Sol looked on, and that dark marr stood defiant.
When she turned away from the sun, she saw what she had done to the river. Curls of charcoal black rose from where she churned up the riverbed, mushrooming up among sulfuric plumes of yellow and pearly white wisps and the alien red blood of Earth, ribbons of colour carried along too loosely to truly mingle. This banner unfurled behind her, on its way to entropy downstream, and her selves rested hands of strength and stories on her shoulders, and she laughed and faced the empty sky above.
She had herself, all of her, and the world and the stars all around her. She was not a monster, alone under Sol. She was not broken, in this river. She was not lost. She was a thing only and fully for her. She let the water carry it all away, except for her.
She waded out of the river, towards the fire, and crashed. Sleep came easily, if only a nap. She awoke just as Sol finally retreated beneath the horizon, and set off across the plains with a leap from the tallest tree she could spot. She kept going t
hrough the night; with the first pale hints of twilight, she was already racing the dawn.
She reached the crumbling foot of Red Rise with the martian noon sun trying its best to beat her down, its heat sliding ineffectively off olive skin born to weather far worse. The only thing that exhausted her was her own exertion. She looked up the ruined artwork of the monument city, obliterated and scattered by Azure and the wraith, fields and rubble littered with decaying bodies and shredded barges and tattered scraps of banners blue and red. She just needed to climb to the top.
Metre by metre, she bounded up the landslide of rubble and death. By the time she set foot on the last tier of Red Rise she was beginning to tire from lack of food, but she could do this. She just needed to walk to the temple.
It was there, ahead of her, at the end of a winding red flagstone road.
She walked up the hill, but the ground moved underneath her - or - no, those were her legs. She reached Crimson’s temple and the doors started sliding open, and she staggered inside. She crouched down for a moment, her head swimming. The hallway towards the central chamber suddenly seemed very, very long.
Sam and Tanos were rushing towards her, and Sam looked at her with panic and concern. “Isavel? Where the hell were you go? What happened to you? You look like shit.”
She laughed and fell to her knees.
“Are you -”
“Food.” She started looking around the ground, and realized that she hadn’t eaten at all on the way back. Stupid. Did too much blood make a person stupid? “Get me some food.”
Soon Tanos was handing her dried martian fruit. She chewed on it, at great effort, and swallowed it in large, grating chunks. She stood up, braced between her companions, and hobbled her way into the central chamber. She had traveled far - really, really far. It was normal that she was tired. It wasn’t the many bloods, the many selves, no one person should have. She was fine.
She looked up, and Hail was still in stasis, still on the verge of death with nothing waiting for her on the other side. Everything would be fine.
Fourth Under Sol (Digitesque Book 5) Page 26