by C. A. Lang
or is this right?
—and she leaped off the machine, despite that she could barely fly with a half-scorched wing. She sailed for a few seconds, skimmed over the writhing ground, and could not help skidding across the sand when her momentum died.
In the distance, the ground coughed gasps of black smoke. The burning oil wells, ignited by the machine’s haphazard cannon fire, seemed to belch in concert with the spasms Capra felt underneath her.
The sand flowed against her, towards where the sinking had begun at the feet of the war engine. She pawed at the mountain of sand pushing her back the way she had come.
Her wings beat madly, but the rush knocked her over before she could fly. The wave carried her into the widening hole.
The damned cannons and well explosions must have caused earthquakes.
And the entire desert seemed littered with sinkholes.
Pipelines buckled, and the black blood of Blightcross spurted into the air, until the sand devoured and silenced the geysers.
Capra clenched her jaw and jammed shut her eyes against the onslaught. It was only an attempt to make her end more comfortable. Even Vasi’s conscience did not try to convince her that survival was likely.
There was plenty of company—this hole was the size of a small village, and swallowed equipment, roughneck camps, and of course, the shadows and their commandeered war machine. At least she had succeeded in that...
There was a drop. No longer did she roll and suffocate. Below was pure black, and the world was collapsing into this abyss. She twisted and flailed, her thoughts bouncing between joy and utter horror. The size of the hole struck her like a mace to the head—she couldn’t comprehend the blackness swallowing the desert, as though the world were imploding into the infinity of the night sky.
She was resigned. That is, until the war machine fell past her, flailing and chugging as though it might affect its own fate. Rovan still hung on, and for the first time, Capra knew that he was genuinely scared.
You have to!
She came out of her daze and spread her wings. At first, she careened to the left, but remembered to compensate for the damaged right wing. She scooped Rovan from the falling machine and pulled into a nearly vertical climb, face broad against the moonlight. During her ascent, she passed two fire giants falling to their inevitable deaths in the pit. The earth’s rumbling still echoed in the great hole.
Once she passed through the opening, back into the smoky desert air, she beat her wings in a frenzy. The screams of giants permeated the skies, chilling cries that pierced through Capra’s exhaustion and pain, made her shudder with revulsion.
Already, the form made of both herself and Vasi began to disintegrate—Capra felt a strange rending sensation, as though from a torture apparatus. In her wings, back, legs, it was too much to continue. She tumbled to the ground, Rovan still in her arms.
Just before they hit the dust-lined street on the outskirts of the city, Capra fell into her own black abyss.
It couldn’t be, yet Dannac knew that the two women bleeding on deserted paving stones were his companions. He relaxed his grip on the cannon, bent to check Capra’s injuries. Whatever she had done, it had worked: he had watched with his own enhanced eye the explosions in the well, the sinkhole that swallowed both the shadow men and their war engine and the remaining fire giants.
What had she done? What had the strange, silvery light been that he had glimpsed shooting from the hole?
He listened for her breath, felt her pulse. Both were strong. He checked Vasi, and she was also alive.
Now it hit him why exactly he had come to find them.
There was no escaping Yaz or his successors. He should have let himself die on the battlefield, never have gotten involved with the Republic’s spies. Sure, they helped his people when convenient, but it was all manipulation.
And now, he had no choice.
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
There were two colours: the blue of sky unstained by industry or the smoky breath of war, and the reddish-brown of the land. When Capra looked at her hand, it appeared drained of any colour, as though she were an apparition. The tents stood as still as boulders, despite the wind that tossed dirt into Capra’s face and whipped around her hair.
“Hello?” There had to be an Ehzeri around. “Hello? Anyone?”
Only when nobody answered did she realize that the wind lashing her made no sound either. As she walked, the experience became a series of disjointed flashes, like the sparks of visibility in a thunderstorm.
In the next instant, she clutched a crossbow. In the other hand sat the deceptive weight of a phosphorus grenade.
She wandered among the empty tents. Inside one she found a charred corpse. In the next, a steaming bowl of rice, and vacant place-settings on the rug. And in another, she saw herself.
A version of herself in twin braids and a cropped cotton top. Around her navel were traditional Ehzeri tattoos. On her neck was... nothing. No military brand.
Capra stared at this version of herself, watched her write on a scroll. She crept closer, the other continuing to write away without a single break in her motions. Her scratching made no sound. Only Capra’s own heart drummed, the rest of the world going on in this dead silence.
She wanted to touch her double’s face. She dropped to her knees in front of the girl. Still, no sound, no indication of noticing Capra’s presence.
A wave of grief overcame her, and she tried to blink away the stinging in her eyes. She wept, and the phosphorus grenade flipped from her hand, rolled on the carpet as silently as a Valoii assassin’s knife drawn across an Ehzeri militant’s throat.
The grenade’s detonation made no sound, either.
A muffled voice demanded something, but she couldn’t make out what. She winced and hauled herself upright. The sky was red, and the air slightly cooler. There was an eerie quiet about the city.
A black form darkened the sky in front of her. Her eyes focused and she saw that it was one of Sevari’s men, fitted with a strange mask and outfit.
“I said, are you capable of walking, Valoii?”
She took his extended hand and stood. “What... happened?”
“Temblors. All across the oilfields. They’ve been known to be unstable, and it seems they cracked at just the right time. Saved the city, they did.”
She vaguely remembered tearing out the war machine’s guts of metal cable and cogs, and the ensuing explosions. “But how... how did I do it?”
The soldier ignored her strange question and led her into the street. There were groups of bruised and burned people huddling around carriages. People sprinted across the square to meet the open arms of friends once thought to be among the dead.
Something didn’t make sense.
A bulge in her tattered leather. She reached into the pocket and grasped a hard object. She nearly dropped it when she realized that the object was Dannac’s eye.
A heaviness pounded her chest, and she ran away from the soldier, screaming Dannac’s name. She screamed at every group of the reunited, and the only responses were the kind of tolerant stares meant for raving trauma victims.
But it was no use. Dannac had left. That was why she now held his eye in her palm. It was clear to her why he had planted his eye on her person and left. She was his insurance—the keeper of the images his Republic allies wanted.
So he had chosen to run, rather than hand it over. Why did he care? Ruining an ally of Tamarck and Mizkov was his reason for living, yet he had withheld the eye from them. It made no sense.
There was no use in trying to understand. Clearly she didn’t know Dannac as well as she had assumed. There would be time to sort it out, after the aches healed and things made sense again.
She hopped into one of the Corps wagons, despite that only days earlier, these same soldiers were under orders to kill her. It didn’t matter now. Sevari could jail her forever, for all she cared at the moment. One of the haggard citizens passed around a gunnysack of ration
s, but Capra waved them away. Fatigued, yes, but without any appetite whatsoever.
Even the rumbling of this wagon’s engine stirred blurry impressions of the war machine. The strange existence as an angel made flesh. Vasi.
She, or they, or it, had slammed into the ground. That much she remembered.
It wasn’t enough. A missing piece gnawed at her. Where was Vasi?
Just thinking of Vasi kicked her into a hazy recollection.
The shock of splitting into her own body. Vasi lying in the street. Rovan on the ground, chest rising and falling, eyes glaring with the collective madness of the defeated shadows.
They couldn’t still think they had a chance, could they? There he had been, gleaming with a maniacal grin, reaching towards Capra with his bloodied hand.
She had barely been able to stand. She crawled over to him, clutched his bloody head in her arms.
It was automatic. The pressure across his throat, the locking position of her arms—the economy of death as outlined by Valoii training doctrine. The shadows would only return if she let this last one remain in their world.
“Vasi, I’m sorry.” She used the last of her strength to clench harder, to hopefully put him out of his misery quickly.
And that was all she could remember.
“They say that almost half of the population followed those damned things into the hole,” one of the passengers said.
“Did you see the silver light pass out of the hole?” asked another.
Thus began a round of speculation. Capra wasn’t interested. It could have been her, it could have been an exploding machine component.
She knew she was no angel, and nothing could convince her otherwise. Not even if God himself fitted her with the commonplace golden pike and wings of the archons.
The wagon passed a tent painted with a rudimentary blue emblem displayed by surgeons. There were mostly Ehzeri standing around it. The wagon stopped for a few passengers who wanted medical attention.
Just below the wagon, a young woman bent over a boy. His face was bruised and black, and—
Rovan.
The girl looked up at the morning sun with glistening eyes and a look of abject guilt. Vasi.
A surgeon, or at least a young man who acted like one, came to Rovan’s side. Capra wanted to jump off the wagon and explain or apologize or console—anything—but she did not.
“He won’t wake,” Vasi told the surgeon.
Oh, Vasi, he’s dead.
The surgeon performed a quick examination. Why would he bother?
“I’m sorry. All of his functions seem to be intact, but he must have suffered a profound damage to his mind.”
Alive? She hadn’t even killed him properly?
The surgeon stood, and scanned the crowd. “I am afraid he may not recover. If you mean to keep him alive, he will need constant treatment.” He appeared to be hiding a scowl, likely at the prospect of an Ehzeri having to deal with the financial burden of such a patient. He shuffled to the next casualty, went on as though the previous one had never existed.
Maybe she would see Vasi again in the future, but for now she couldn’t face her. There were questions that she wasn’t sure she wanted answered.
Questions such as how Capra could enter a vihs working complex enough to bind two people into a single form with no experience or hereditary ability, or what Vasi’s wild claims had really meant.
Ultimately, she decided that she didn’t care. It was over, and she still had to figure out a way to stem the flow of Valoii soldiers sent to kill her. The gods had interfered in her life, the very ones she didn’t care to acknowledge, and as far as she was concerned, they could damned well keep trying, for all the difference they had made.
Just as she’d finished the thought, she startled at the sight of the unmistakable tattoo of a Valoii soldier. The man's naked upper body was a canvas of inflamed skin, scored and burned, on which the Valoii characters remained undamaged, almost defiant. Supine, lifeless, eyes replaced with sheer blackness...
Alim?
She stood and peered round the others packed against her. “Alim!” she called. By the time she thought to hop out, a group of nearby city workers had already loaded Alim and other corpses into a vehicle.
He wanted to kill you. Don’t forget that. And he sure wouldn’t be feeling sad about leaving your body behind if he had to, so stop thinking you’re a monster for letting him be taken away to some industrial crematorium.
The wagon let her off near Orvis Dunes, and she walked the deserted street that had seemed like such an oasis in this industrial hell only days before. A few of the interesting shops and apartments had caved in, but there still stood Helverliss’ bookshop. The block of buildings sat in its grimy, half-restored colonial glory as though its historical nature had shielded it from this momentary diversion of insanity.
It amazed her to smell fresh brewing shalep, and she moved her tired legs faster. The closer she came to the café, the more she heard strange sounds: baritone thumping, a strange keening, and chords of some radical harmony.
She entered the café to find it brimming with the same people she had met here before, and there was a combo playing on the little stage. The bass player smoked a cheroot as he played, and the violinist still bled from a gash on his head. The harmony they played had no pleasing centre of tonality, yet it seemed fitting.
The man at the counter didn’t ask for money when she approached the counter and waved randomly at the chalkboard. He just gave her a mug and a pastry, and she sat among the other residents of Orvis Dunes, listening to the strange music, while the city around them smoldered.
All of the patrons, including Capra, gazed at the entrance each time someone new straggled in. But this time, she nearly spat out her drink.
Limping along, smoking a cheroot, was Helverliss. At his side, Irea braced him. He nodded and collapsed into a seat across from Capra, while Irea went to the counter.
“How the hell...”
He showed a sliver of a grin. “I wasn’t going to just sit and wait for you.”
“I’m sorry. Things happened and I wasn’t able to retrieve you.”
“Don’t worry about it. As luck would have it, Irea had escaped and found me. But by the time we made it out of the tower, nobody really cared about us prisoners.”
She leaned back and rested her boot on the table. Something in her wanted to kill him for creating the painting. Maybe the thought was a remnant of the archon creature, or just a bad mood. Nevertheless, she flashed him a smile and told him how they had defeated the chaos. He slammed his fist into the table when she reached the part about the archon. “Of course. How could I be so stupid? An archon is... well, the missing piece. The ring that completes the knot. The aberrations that arise when one is taken out are...”
“Quite fatal, I imagine.”
“Which is why your friend was not at heart a real archon. Why she was flawed, why she was only suited to destroy... the Ehzeri didn’t know how to properly construct these things.”
She shrugged.
“Humanity was never a mediator. The human subject is what happens when the knot is complete. Imbalances cause delusions and chaos...” And despite the bloody wounds, his livid complexion, and his frail voice, he seemed full of life again. “This will give me much to think about.”
She stole one of his cheroots. It had been a while since she’d last tried smoking. “All I care about is that I survived being turned into an archon.”
“About that.”
“Hm?”
“Well, I had already begun to work on a theory relating to psychoanalysis. One involving vihs in people such as yourself. Since you claim to not be an Ehzeri, there might be some other explanation for your ability to use the power in concert with Vasi.”
She let her foot drop from the table and leaned in close.
“The traumatic event you witnessed at a very young age caused you to empathize with the Ehzeri in a profound, subconscious way.”
He turned away to cough. The man should be in a surgery, not a café. “Vasi was mistaken. I am sure that with further investigation, I would find that you were not actually Ehzeri, but that your subconscious was able to access their characteristics as a result of the extreme fear you felt. A child’s mind cannot comprehend brutality, and so your ability may be an infantile complex meant to deal with how you witnessed someone murdering those people. I did not glean the details of the memory from the painting, but...”
“I’d rather not know right now.”
“But this could be a groundbreaking case study. Do you want to live on believing in some far-fetched tale of misplaced heritage?”
She exhaled through her nose, the smoke tingling and jabbing her senses awake. “I’m more concerned with my payment.”
For a long time he said nothing and stared at her. Probably trying to work his strange theories around her. But what if he were right?
Did it even matter? It was something she would have to figure out later. There were far too many thoughts in her mind whose voices eclipsed any curiosity about why she had been able to do the impossible.
At last, Helverliss sighed and squished his cheroot into the ashtray. “You didn’t exactly return my painting.”
She gave him a cold stare. “I think I did far better than that, Noro. That painting was a mistake.”
“What of your friend?”
“Dannac’s gone. Personal issues.”
For a long time he said nothing. He stood with his hands in his pockets, which, Capra noticed, were empty.
“Noro?”
Helverliss met her eyes. “They looted my shop. I had thought my savings to be safe, but clearly the shadows gave the mob some way to... I don’t know. Perhaps they read my mind.”
Capra’s throat tightened. She leaned forward, rested her forehead on her hands. The hair draping across her face reeked of sulphur, oil, and blood. “Of course,” she mumbled through her hands. “Noro?”
“Ehm. What?”
“I hope you die in a fire or something before I’m rested enough to kill you myself.”