Blade Kin

by David Farland

  Thirsty, Tull got the water pitcher, then opened the drawer where Chaa kept his herbs and looked at them. There were three bowls—powdered roots to make him hear, seeds to open his eyes. Even now Tull could almost feel Garamon.

  The murderer was near, so near. Tull took a pinch from each bowl, chewed it, and lay down on the floor.

  I must open my spirit eyes, he told himself, learn to see. Garamon is near. Tull felt abruptly dizzy, realized that he could hear the ocean outside across the street, the waves lapping, as if he were outside. I must open my spirit eyes.

  Tull dozed, then wakened in a dark pit filled with rubble, bits of broken red brick, some of them whole, all of them covered with lichen in metallic green or flecks of gold.

  He blinked, trying to awake from this dream, but he could not wake.

  This is the Land of Shapes, Tull realized, and he peered about in wonder. He tried to fight back his nagging fears, his worries.

  The sky was the muted ocher of brass before it is burnished, and distant stars burned in it, dull like flecks of mica beneath molasses. Tull rose, looked out, and found himself in a tower overlooking a barren plain of red rocks—no wind rushed through trees, no lark peeped at the sunset. The day seemed bitter cold.

  Around him Tull glimpsed a landscape pocked with similar haphazard towers in the distance, and he glimpsed other spirits, brilliant in hues of purple and silver and fiery red and black, each guarding its little crater of rubble.

  The empty land between them looked like the scarred battlefield of some horrible apocalyptic war, a place where plants and life could never be again, a place of age-old broken stones. Somehow, lifting himself above the rock wall caused Tull discomfort, left him feeling vulnerable.

  He did not understand what kinds of creatures the other glowing beings might be. Some would pop up above their walls momentarily, only to float down, reminding him by their actions of marmots in an alpine meadow, sticking their furry noses from their burrows to test the air.

  The hollow of his soul hovered above ground, a solid dark mass. Tendrils of shadow, like tiny hairs, kept erupting, seeking to escape, but the white lightning flared over the hollow, twisting in a crazy dance, erasing the darkness.

  Tull could see his body dimly: translucent hands, fingers, torso. Only the barest of substance, almost a distortion of space. His line of vision emanated from a position roughly where his head should be, but he could spin and view the world in a 360-degree circle without regard for appendages, as if this translucent body were meaningless in this world.

  Tull explored his surroundings, the crater that he hid in. Better pieces of brick and blasted stones had been clumsily piled to form a wall of sorts, a barrier that encircled him, leaving scant room for movement. Dark shadows filled the crater, and Tull sank in the darkness.

  The ground was muddy and trampled—no clean paving stones for the floor—and beneath the ground a rugged tunnel wound down into blackness, branching here and there. In the tunnel below Tull could see a human skeleton, hand outstretched, carrying a bit of broken stone, as if ready to place it on the pile.

  Tull sank into the cave, observed the skeleton, picked clean by ants and beetles, reddened by dust. The room was similar to his cratered tower, ramshackle and haphazardly created, barely able to support the weight of the stones that piled above.

  Tull hovered over the skeleton, peered into the dark of its eye sockets. Just beneath the bones, the tunnel branched again, leading to lower chambers, where the white glint of bones hinted at more skeletons in each little chamber.

  The silence of the tunnels made him nervous. Tull floated back upward, surveyed the wall around him. A gap on one end showed a place where the stones had fallen, and were in need of support. A stone the right size and shape would do much to repair the wall, and Tull hovered upward, studied the wall, tried to remember the shape of stone he needed. And then floated out of his crater.

  Everywhere were stones, broken and twisted, cracked by sun and rain. As Tull floated downhill, he felt amazed to see that there were far more craters than he had imagined, each with glowing spirit creatures inside. Around him he heard popping noises. He wondered what they were until he saw one large stone crack in half. A moment later he saw two other stones silently join together.

  Among the craters spirits hovered, and all of them seemed to be trying to build houses, as if piling cracked rock were the only occupation in this land.

  Yet most of them failed—they had not built houses or walls at all—instead the creatures sat on the barren plain with only a few scattered rocks standing about them in obtuse piles, contemplating their shelter.

  Tull felt intrigued by their witless performance, their inability to form even the most ludicrous of pits. They seemed as mindless as pill bugs.

  Tull floated down the valley, crossed the small hill, and in the distance saw a great structure, a twisted tower with vast rooms and open courtyards climbing into the sky. Dozens of buttresses ran up against it in odd places. Some buttresses seemed to turn into long running walls that stretched away from the tower for miles in all directions, all lending it support. The tower stood, convoluted almost beyond recognition, as alien in design as if it had been the handiwork of termites or crabs. At the top of the tower a green ball of flame bustled up and down, busily at work.

  A strange compulsion overtook Tull, and he moved toward the tower, floating like thistledown. He glanced down at his legs, found that they were running faster than he would have thought possible, jumping from stone to stone, trying to maintain balance.

  Tendrils of light leapt around the hollow of his soul, surging him forward. On some level he understood that legs were irrelevant in this stony land.

  Along the way Tull looked at the edifices he passed and in one of them—a tiny hovel upon a near empty field—a yellow ball of flame worked trying to hold a pile of stones upright so that his single wall would not collapse. Tull moved in closer, saw the shape of the jellied clot. It was Byron Saman, an old gentleman from town, and Tull suddenly realized that these hovels and fields of stone were Smilodon Bay, as seen through his spirit eyes.

  Tull passed beyond Byron, saw Caree Tech wandering outside a carefully tended little garden of stones set in mounds, one at each corner of the compass.

  Tull moved uphill and realized that this great edifice, this towering monument to oddity, could only be Theron Scandal’s inn. It was true that Scandal had, in one sense, the largest house in town, and that Scandal was a man of grand ambitions, but Tull wondered at the towers’ proportions, and glided up a buttress, crawled into an open window. The grand ballrooms had winding staircases and were enormous and solid, large enough so that everyone in town could have fit in one of them. Not like the pitiful structures in the valley below, yet the rooms were empty of furnishings, littered only with bones, human skeletons reddened with dust. Tull floated up the staircases, through room after room, until he came to a small tunnel at the top of a minaret.

  The passage above was blocked by the emerald glowing beast, the hollow of a soul massive and magnificent. Green tendrils of flame shot around from it crazily, and the beast toiled and fretted around the tower, building as fast as it could, straightening and rearranging. Tull wondered at this, wondered what Theron Scandal was building. Yet as he floated in closer, he saw that the jellied emerald clot was not Theron Scandal, but Phylomon the Starfarer.

  Tull hovered upward, eased around Phylomon, and sat upon a stone wall, looking from the tower, gazing down upon the city of Smilodon Bay: Tull could see better from here, stretches of barren plain where rock had been cleared, sweeping fields punctuated by the grubby dens and hovels of the town’s witless citizens.

  Yet something about the shape of the town bothered him. All across town, where ignorant spirits built as mindlessly as ants, piling one block against another, Tull saw that it had all been brought into harmony, the sweeping fields, the hovels.

  It reminded him of the endless stair above sanctum where an ancient mathema
tician had placed stones and bits of twisted metal on the ground so that the rising sun cast ever-changing shadow pictures on the land. Only on this cracked plain, these piles of stone were not meant to cast shadows. Each structure, each pile of stones was part of a mosaic, a single shape in a grand portrait that covered the countryside.

  Tull let himself rise higher and higher, above the top of the minaret, until the pattern came into focus: Chaa, the great magic crow, was flying across the face of the land. Tull’s house had been the eye of the bird, and the exotic castle of Phylomon was the ruffled feathers at its neck.

  On the high winds Tull let himself sink as he pondered what he saw. Tull had imagined that he was seeing shelters, perhaps the houses people someday dreamed to live in, or perhaps the shelter people thought they lived in.

  Yet over it all, binding the construction together in ways that were invisible to others was Chaa.

  Tull sat, perplexed. He went back to his own little hovel, crawled back into his own hole, and floated down into the tunnel beneath. He observed the skeleton lying there still, and recognized that its skull was human, the shoulders broad, about the same size as his father’s, Jenks.

  Though Jenks is still alive, Tull realized, my spirit eyes see him as dead, because I have rejected him and he is dead to me. In an antechamber that Tull had not noticed before, he found a Pwi skeleton, the skeleton of his mother.

  Yet still nothing made sense. Tull could see things missing from his hovel. Where were Fava and Wayan? Why could he not envision them in his crater? Why were the walls of his hovel so broken and haphazard?

  Tull rose to his wall, saw where it had crumbled. Somewhere there must be a stone to fill this gap, he considered, and suddenly he was shooting forward, blurring over the landscape faster than a ruby-throated hummingbird, faster than a falling star, until he came at last to an open field.

  He stood in town, behind the spice shop. There before him was a stone to fit the breach. He manipulated the clot of his soul, so that the ghostly appendages hefted the stone. It looked right, felt the right size. He brushed off the red dust.

  The stone glowed in his hand, came to life like a hot coal. He looked into it and saw another world, a world of darkness with a tiny man in it—not a painting, not even figures drawn by the most expert hand, for the place had breadth and depth.

  He bent forward, looking closer and closer. Garamon was there, in a dark place, shivering and hungry. Garamon fumbled for a latch, opened a door—and looked out to the back of the cloth shop. The scene faded.

  Tull shook the stone. It seemed solid, rough with splotches of lichens. Only a broken stone of an odd size that would fit the wall of his shelter.

  Chaa had warned him that as his spirit eyes opened, things would change with each progressive vision, but Tull was not prepared for so many changes.

  Before I sought this vision, Tull thought, I had hoped to see the world more clearly, and this is how my spirit eyes perceive the world: people in hovels, recklessly stacking stones, some creating shelters, some … people in hovels, building on the bones of the past, the sagging ruin of previous generations.

  And then he understood. The stones on the plain were incidents, possibilities ripening in time, waiting to happen, waiting to be organized. And the shelter, the hovels that others sought to build were the futures that they constructed for themselves.

  Some of the townspeople were witless, people without vision, taking no thought for the future, and those sat openly on barren mounds; others, like Phylomon, built exotic castles, stretching for miles across the countryside, large enough to fill the whole earth, but often habitable only by eccentrics like themselves.

  There was no ultimate shaper of things.

  If left to themselves, the stones would have continued to propagate, the future would continue, disorganized. A flat barren plain with stones being made and destroyed.

  But Tull could make something of it, build any type of shelter he wanted. His vision of the World Tree only days before had dimmed, to be replaced by this.

  Suddenly shamed by his own little hovel. Tull decided to take the stone back, mend the wall, and begin considering what type of future he would build.

  The copper sky above suddenly darkened, blotted out, and a whining hum rose all around. Tull nearly dropped the stone.

  Above him hovered an immense black orb that blocked out the sky for miles. It was dark, like the hollow of a sinister soul, and Tull imagined that it was as large as a moon.

  It hovered in place, and Tull realized that it observed him dispassionately, just watching. Balls of light floated up into it and were consumed, hapless souls that seemed unable to resist.

  The orb pulled at Tull, inviting him upward, inviting him to ascend like the other, to be absorbed.

  “What are you?” Tull shouted.

  The great ball of darkness closed half the distance, stopped again and waited.

  “Who are you?” Tull asked.

  The earth filled with the sound of thunder. The answer struck him with horrible force, like a great fist, the words compressed into a single thought: “I am the Beast, your god, Adjonai.”

  A river of darkness burst from the sky, stretching out like a finger to touch him.

  Clutching the stone, Tull pulled it close. The lightning of his soul flashed out to do battle, and Tull fluttered and fled.

  ***

  Chapter 15: The Beast Rises

  Shortly after dark, Fava took Wayan down the trail to town, to search for Tull. Where the trail met the road, she heard Tull screaming, the cry of a victim being hacked to death, a scream that shook her very soul.

  She followed the sound to Chaa’s house, passed Zhopila and her little sisters huddling just inside the front door, and ran to the Spirit Room. An icy cold wind seemed to be blowing, spinning lazily through the house. She stopped. The air was oddly clouded and felt as thick as milk.

  Chaa already stood in the doorway to the room, his eyes wide his face pale. He backed away slowly, saying “Fool! What have you done?”

  Fava tried to push past Chaa, but as she touched him, she ran into a wall of ice, a rush of air so cold that it threatened to snap her fingers. Something else was in the room with them.

  She put her hand forward gingerly, felt the cushion of cold, as if she had stuck her hand into a river of freezing ice water, and her fingers disappeared.

  She could see the walls, the room, she could see Tull lying on a woven reed mat within the fog, his eyes open and fixed in terror.

  Chaa grabbed her, pulled her back to the doorway, and she realized the air was thickening.

  “You can’t go in there!” Chaa shouted. “It will eat you!”

  The spirit room began to tremble, and its walls shook. The dagger made from a carnosaur’s tooth tattled from its peg on the wall, dropped to the floor, and lay there spinning.

  The shelves with Chaa’s medicines rumbled, and suddenly the wood ruptured, exploding into a thousand shards. Splinters flew against the wall and embedded themselves like a forest of toothpicks into the shape of a crow, then as quickly pulled out and blew around the room in a maelstrom, as if caught in the center of a whirlwind.

  “What is it?” Fava shouted, recognizing that something invisible had entered the room.

  “The Beast!” Chaa croaked in horror.

  Fava heard water dribbling, saw that a pitcher was hovering in front of them, pouring water onto the ground.

  “You can’t save him!” Chaa staggered backward, pulled Wayan from Fava’s arms and yelled for Zhopila to take the children out of the house.

  “Tull?” Fava called, looking into the darkening room. She pushed against the wall of cold, tried to step into it.

  Tull’s head twisted, and he peered at her, his face stricken in horror. “Stay back, Fava!” he cried and the splinters of wood whirled past her face.

  The bearskin suddenly pulled from the wall and dropped onto all fours, the bear’s claws scratching on the floor like a puppet’s as the r
ug scrabbled forward.

  Pots of herbs splattered against the ceiling, and suddenly the bearskin reared up, filling out as if it were a living creature, and the hide wandered around the Spirit Room, huge and brown, sniffing at the walls.

  From the front of the house, Chaa shouted for Fava to run, and Fava heard Zhopila crying, the children running from the house.

  The bearskin ambled to Fava, sniffed her crotch, watched her from empty eye sockets. It reared on its hind legs and pawed the air, then dropped to the floor like a discarded rag.

  Tull floated up into the air at waist height, rotated so that he faced the floor and screamed.

  Chaa came back into the hallway. He grabbed Fava’s arm, began pulling at her. She pushed him away and Chaa slugged her, hard, knocking her against the wall.

  “Please! Please. He’s dead! You can’t save him,” Chaa shouted, and he began pulling Fava from the house.

  As Fava backed away, Tull’s arms spread wide, and he floated up until he lay splayed against the ceiling.

  The Beast toys with us, Fava realized. Tull began to spin like a pinwheel, arms and legs flailing while his back remained flat against the ceiling, and whatever force held him, whatever kept her from entering the room, was so powerful, Fava could not hope to fight it. She backed off slowly, as she would from a bear—hoping not to attract its attention. She reached the front door.

  Outside, Zhopila and Chaa held each other, sobbing, and Wayan and Fava’s little sisters all stood in the dirt street.

  Fava felt numb, mindless. “What can we do?” she asked, and Chaa shook his head.

  Inside the house Tull screamed one last time, a long plaintive note.

  There was a tearing sound, like the shredding of cloth, and then the back part of Chaa’s house caved in.

  A huge wind roared across the field behind the house, bowled through the forest, snapping two giant redwoods.

  Chaa stood frozen in place, and Fava did not move. From the tearing sounds, she knew that she did not want to go back in there, she didn’t want to see Tull’s mangled corpse shredded on the floor.