Fourth Under Sol (Digitesque Book 5)

by Guerric Haché

  The gods had mislead her, again and again. From the very start, they could have told her the truth; they could have helped. She knew they could have - for all the limits of their power, they could have done much more. But they hadn’t, because they were broken, miserable creatures never meant to outlive the minds that bore them. They let people die.

  If she had the power, and let people die nonetheless, was she any better?

  “Isavel. What now?” Hail didn’t look like she was looking forward to the answer, and Isavel saw her eyes flick to the locator stone again. “What are we supposed to do? You say the gods can’t do anything, so we’re stuck here, aren’t we?”

  “They can’t help us.” She looked at Hail, standing there, one hand pressed against an abdomen still trying to recover from her injury, her skin pale and sweaty. “Hail -”

  “So why are you wearing it? ”

  Hail hadn’t liked what she had said so far. She would like this even less. She wasn’t sure she needed to say anything, though, and the hammering of her heart was pounding only the worst responses in her head.

  Ada wouldn’t judge me for this. Ada wouldn’t bow and call me Herald. Ada wouldn’t stand and gape like I had been possessed by a ghost, like the dragon in my blood had finally started growing its scales through my flesh. She would stand with me in the face of all the gods -

  Except she hadn’t. She had turned tail and run. It was more complicated than that, and a part of her did want to take the thing off again. But she watched Hail, both of them waiting for an explanation her brain would not put into words, and she left it there.

  Hail’s breathing grew quicker, and she crouched down again, pressing a fist against her chest, and for a brief second Isavel thought maybe she was still in pain - maybe this was all the fog of injury and blood loss. She took a cautious step forward, but the hunter scampered away, raising a glowing palm to face Isavel, her face red and angry as tiny hexagons of blue pearled in her deadly palm.

  “I did everything for you!” She shouted, coughing and sputtering with the effort. “I protected you, I followed you, I did everything I could! And you make me your friend , and give your heart out to a woman who fought you, who abandoned you, who ignored everything that makes you special.”

  She wouldn’t shoot. She couldn’t possibly shoot. Isavel still tensed; she knew it was not impossible, but she had to say something. “Everyone else sees the foreigner, the village girl, the brute of a warrior, the Herald, the fucking angel of whatever - even you. She didn’t give a shit. She saw me . Behind the shield and the titles and the aura. She looked at me and I saw it in her eyes, I felt it in her hands - she came to me , not to the Saint Herald.”

  Hail winced in frustration. “But that’s who you are! Saint Isavel Valdéz, Herald of the Gods, all those things - the gods made you into something - something that was supposed to be wonderful! And you accepted! You did what they asked! You gave yourself to it!”

  “What other option did I have?” Isavel pointed to Crimson’s flickering red pillar. “Everyone was dead. I thought there had to be a reason! Some kind of plan! But there isn’t, Hail. The gods are just more children with dead parents. The universe doesn’t care about them any more than us. So we’re free . It’s hard, it’s confusing, we’ll make mistakes. But this whole damned world was a wasteland and our ancestors looked at it and decided it could be better! Compared to that, how hard can it be to choose our own damned paths in life?”

  Hail was staring at her in a mixture of confusion and anger, but Isavel didn’t let her get a word in.

  “So what’s left? Me. My will. My heart. My want. And what I want is not to be some gods-blessed avatar of justice, some hermit who falls into the arms of her confidant because power isolates her from anything else. I want your friendship, I want your companionship and trust, but I want something Ada gave me even more. I can’t lie to you and pretend you give me everything she did.”

  “She’s gone! She could be dead for all you know!” Hail slammed her smouldering hand on the ground, hexagons of light fading into her skin again as her palm slapped the cold floor.

  Isavel’s shoulders tensed. It couldn’t be, of course. It was just Hail saying things. She knew , somehow, that Ada was alive. “I’ll find out for myself one day, and if she’s gone I’ll have to look into myself for another path.” She gripped the stone in her hand. “I won’t make you my backup. You can’t possibly want that. That’s why it’s back around my neck. Because it’s true .”

  Hail looked up at the ceiling and screamed in frustration, striking her fists against the ground. She didn’t shoot anything. She breathed heavily for a few moments, eyes closed, visibly straining not to keep shouting. She was looking more and more tired, and she wasn’t alone. Isavel’s muscles were sick of all the tension that couldn’t be gotten rid of by hitting things, and she was starting to feel sore just from the stress of the conversation.

  She tried to breathe deep. Yelling wasn’t getting anyone anywhere. She turned away from Hail and paced back to the centre of the room, still feeling her heart rising in her chest and the heat prickling across her face. She needed to cool off.

  She made it around the metallic basin of Crimson’s pillar twice before Zoa suddenly appeared in front of her. So absorbed in her thoughts and her mood, she hadn’t even noticed the coder approach, and it took her a second to recognize the rage written within that blue-framed face.

  She was just fast enough to notice Zoa’s balled fist fly towards her, and then it connected with a blinding sting and a wave of pain that snapped her head sideways. She almost staggered, but kept her feet planted. The inside of her cheek had cut itself on her teeth, but that was so easy to fix the warrior’s gift would do it for her, and coaxing from the medic’s gift only helped a little.

  She turned her head back to Zoa, glaring into her furious eyes. “I know you don’t like me, Zoa, but -”

  “Gods damn you you blood-gargling cannibal shit! My brother died!”

  It didn’t escape her that Zoa had chosen to use the most profane version of the word for cannibal she knew of, one of the last things anyone would call anyone else. “What does that have to do with -”

  “Shut up.” Zoa fumed at her, the feathers from the dead rokh bristling from her head and shoulders as though they were part of her. An angry hooting came from across the chamber, surely the wraith, but Isavel didn’t take her eyes from the coder. If Zoa had decided it was time to throw down, now of all moments, so be it. She still had a lot of tension in her back and nowhere for it to go.

  “You want to punch me again?”

  Zoa took a deep breath, held it for a second or two, and let it go. “I heard all your fucking shouting. You knew, didn’t you?”

  “Knew what?”

  “When you took the dragon’s gift.”

  She blinked, taking a second to understand what Zoa was trying to get at. “I knew what had happened - I thought the gods -”

  “If you didn’t know, you should have.”

  “So what?”

  “So tell me. What if you had taken the medic’s gift before? On Earth?”

  Isavel saw the frustration tearing in Zoa’s eyes, and she felt even worse. “Zoa - Zoa, he died too quickly -”

  Zoa did lunge, now, shoving at her shoulders, and in the weaker martian gravity Isavel briefly lost her footing and stumbled back. “You don’t know that!”

  “Zoa - there was nothing -”

  “Ghost-loving cannibal traitor godsshit piece of - what, you won’t dirty your precious angel hands until something personal is on the line, is that it? Should Ren have grovelled and followed you around like a dog and tried to kiss you better when that heretic witch -”

  She balled up her fist and felt herself tense, and Zoa broke off her sentence, waiting. That wasn’t it - it wasn’t so crude. She wanted to hit back, but realistically she could punch a lot harder than Zoa. She bit down. She breathed through her nose. She considered, not for the first time, whether was
Zoa was saying was true.

  If she had been truly uncowed and unrepentant, she might have started hunting down and collecting new powers as soon as she had eaten that dragon’s heart. At the very least, she would have realized the vanishingly improbable opportunity of finding a medic on Mars, and taken it upon herself to do something about it. But the thought never crossed her mind - it was too outrageous.

  It might not have saved Ren. It would not have saved Erran. But she realized, with a pang of pain, that it might have saved Tharson. For that failure of imagination, he now lay dead. And who else might it yet save? She looked to Kelena, who seemed deeply concerned, and felt only the barest relief that all these recriminations were taking place in an Earth tongue the swordswoman barely understood.

  Because when Hail’s life had been on the line, and when she looked to Ada for inspiration instead of the gods, breaking the rules had finally crossed her mind.

  But was that because of Hail and Ada, or was that because of what Crimson had showed her - because she had fallen from that column of light awash in the realization that all the hierarchies and rules she had been taught as a child were unnecessary, were contingent? That the world and its rules did not need to be what they were? And that, of all beings the gods themselves were built to simply never think to defy the deepest rules by which they lived?

  Could she really have made such a choice at any point sooner, being who she was?

  She tried to relax her shoulders, and nodded. She noticed Hail was watching her now. “I followed rules for a long time. Who knows. Your brother might be alive if I broke those rules sooner. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. Not until I knew that the rules were…” She glanced at Crimson. “Decided, not discovered. Now I can decide differently. I’m sorry.”

  Zoa huffed at her. “How do I know you’re not just going to keep getting us killed and doing nothing about it?” She looked around the room. “Shit. Of everyone here, you’d care the least if I died, wouldn’t you? You’re such a walking disaster I might be better off killing you in your sleep. It’s not like you’re helping.”

  Isavel noticed Hail tense in the corner of her eyes at the threat, but she also noticed how Hail didn’t respond. She turned away from Zoa, running her fingers through her hair, and sucking in deep breaths. Zoa was right about that - she had yet to do anything for anyone else here. She glanced around the room, slowly. “Anyone else?” Her face still smarted, but the pain was fading quickly. “Come on, if anyone wants to get a punch in, I’m feeling generous.”

  The words felt haggard and tired, though, and in any case Tanos and Sam did not take her up on them. Instead they watched, crouching some meters away, looking more nervous than anything. How close did they think things had come to real violence? How close had it actually come?

  She switched to ot tharsis , for the meagre benefit of the two who had the least idea what was going on. “Anyone? If you want to shout at me, now is the time.”

  Yarger simple grunted wordlessly, but to her surprise Kelena did take a step forward. She did not look angry, but Isavel had seen her kill more than one martian with that cool look on her face. “I’m not sure what all the shouting was about. But I gather we’ve failed in coming here, haven’t we?”

  She pursed her lips. Crimson certainly couldn’t help them… but Isavel had to make her own plans, now. She looked at Hail, at Sam and Tanos, and Kelena and Yarger. And at the wraith, off in its corner, watching her so quietly she was almost certain it felt guilty somehow, for its part in all this. “Crimson can’t help us, no.”

  “Crimson.” Kelena addressed her god directly. “If what she says is true, why did you help her companion? Why do you speak to her, when you’ve ignored us for -” Her grip tightened on the Red Sword, and for once that made Isavel almost smile. “For centuries?”

  “It costs me little. And I thought she had promise. An earthling, and a strange one at that - but no. She has nothing to offer. You should leave - Azure cannot see you here, but sooner or later he will send more to hunt you.”

  Azure. Isavel nodded quietly, remembering what she had promised herself. She had three things she wanted to do, she recalled. One was done; Hail lived. She spared her friend a glance, and hoped that time would mend the new wound she had traded for the fatal one; but it was done. It was time to take the second step.

  She turned to face Crimson. “Actually, Crimson, I do have something to offer.” She glanced at Kelena. “And you, Kelena. I think - I can solve this.”

  Crimson’s voice sounded skeptical. “After the past several minutes, you will forgive me for questioning your ability to solve disputes, Isavel.”

  Her expression faltered at that, embarrassment rippling across her skin, but some bolder part of her dared try to smile at that. “Do you know my titles, Crimson?”

  The god recited them as though from memory, though perhaps the gods of Earth were relaying them to her at that very moment. “Dragoneater Saint Isavel Valdéz, Herald of the Gods, White Lady Witch, Angel of Glass. They do not interest me.”

  “How do you think I got them?”

  “As I understand it, titles are a peculiar cultural tradition extant in the region of your birth. You must have impressed some humans. And, admittedly, some of their gods.”

  “The gods of Earth thought they could make use of me.”

  “You disappointed them, too.” Crimson’s words seemed to cast no judgement, but they bit nonetheless. “You questioned too much, hesitated too often. They tell me you were plagued with confusion and uncertainty and meekness, and that you shied from a spotlight so many of your peers would have fought dearly to see shine on themselves.”

  Hearing it put so bluntly was not altogether pleasant, but she closed her eyes for a moment and kept her head high. “Maybe they’re right. But I’m done. You may not be the root of the world, but you’re still a god - look into me and tell me I’m not determined. Tell me I’m not dangerous.”

  She thought Crimson might laugh, if it were in a god’s nature to do so. It apparently wasn’t. “What are you proposing?”

  “Make me your Arbiter.”

  The silence surprised her, and she was about to repeat herself when something flickered off to the side. One of the watchers in the chamber came alive with a warm yellow glow underneath its seams, and as it bobbed towards her it projected an androgynous, featureless yellow silhouette into the air before her. Amber.

  “Fascinating.” Their cool voice was warmed by an undercurrent of mirth. “We all knew you were a rogue element, but I’ll admit that even as I was keeping his eyes off of you, I wasn’t sure what the fuss was about.”

  Kelena stepped forward, her eyes sliding between Isavel and the yellow shape as she addressed her gods. “Amber, too? Why her? After five hundred years, why this earthling?”

  “Because she is not afflicted with the old curse laid on martians and earthlings alike.” Amber reached out to touch Isavel’s cheek, and she was surprised to find their finger felt solid. “Because sooner or later, she might upset the balance we’ve lived under for well over five hundred long turns around Sol. She might begin to uncover secret words carved into stone the rest of you could never see. Her mind and body might begin to do strange and unpredictable things. And she might even bear children immune to that curse, that technophage, which would have ripple effects we could never foresee.”

  Carved words? She remembered the names on the stones in the hall, remembered Crimson’s understanding of what they were. Only then did she realize she had never before imagined words might be frozen in visible form like that. Stories and histories made solidly immortal for the ages.

  Crimson added to that. “That was the original basis for Azure’s interest - and concern. He notified us that he was trying to instrumentalize you, in order that you not disrupt the order of things here. Our interest and interference concerned Azure further. Red Rise and many smaller settlements, unfortunately, have paid the price - and for nothing, so far. We must continue to obey the unnecess
ary and sadistic commands from the old Arbiter that drive Azure’s actions.”

  “I thought it was necessary.” Kelena gripped the Red Sword by the hilt, as though for confirmation. “It’s always been the same story - there are too many of us.”

  Crimson answered quite defensively. “It was true, once, but truths change as the world beneath them changes. I have seen to that.”

  Isavel nodded. “But you wouldn’t need to obey his commands if he wasn’t the only Arbiter, would you? So do it. Give me that.” She let herself grin, but it was not a happy grin. “I demanded the gods’ power once before, and they refused me. If you’re going to refuse me, too, then do me the favour they did, and kick us all back to Earth.”

  Amber was nodding along, though. “Isavel would make a convenient Arbiter; she can upset the balance, but she is also not martian. She has no vested interests in the power struggles of martian peoples or cities or cultures. Crimson has seen into her - she wants to leave Mars, and almost certainly will if given the chance. If she manages to resolve our differences with the Arbiter, Azure can provide her with one of the few space-worthy ships we still have. The reaction she has provoked in our Arbiter, and the convenience of a second Arbiter who has no ulterior motives and simply wants to be left alone, makes this an appealing offer.”

  Crimson’s pulse of light strained in its pillar towards Isavel. “But we cannot anoint you without the consent of the current Arbiter, and he refuses. Indeed, after I asked him, he decided to murder you. You will not be safe when you leave these halls, and it appears his promise to reward you if you returned the Red Sword to him is now void.”

  Isavel blinked, still not used to the speed with which these gods could confer. Well. She wished the gods had shown more discretion, but what was done was done. “What about your zeroth law? Do not let humanity come to harm? Aren’t Azure’s cullings harm? Especially when you, Crimson, know it’s unnecessary? ”