The Man Without Hands

by Eric Malikyte

  Soon he came to the cavern’s exit, a great mouth that was filled with great stalactites. And there she was. Sitting, huddled against the rocky wall, watching the snow fall from the cavern’s mouth.

  Her eyes found his and Reysha jumped to her feet.

  “You’re alive!” she shouted, rushing to him and trying to wrap her arms around him, but stopping when she realized she couldn’t fit her arms around him with the shackles still on. “I thought you were dead.”

  That familiar warmth spread out from his stomach. He retrieved the keys from his pocket and unlatched her shackles.

  He looked her in the eyes. She’d been crying.

  They embraced.

  “They’re all dead, aren’t they?” she said.

  Sage shook his head. “I don’t know for sure, but it looks that way.”

  “Good.” She spat at the snow. “That’s what they get for all of this.”

  Sage stood up, looking to the cloudy horizon outside the cave entrance, and the seemingly never-ending trees that populated the forest beyond it. “Yeah...but what now?”

  Her eyes were hollow. “I was almost tempted to return to the city. Mother...never even came to my trial.”

  “We can’t go back there,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “I’ve got some supplies.” He gestured to the pack he’d slung over his shoulder. “It’ll last us a while, but we need to find shelter.”

  “Well, I have no ideas.” She chuckled, wiping the tears with her freshly freed palms.

  He thought for a time, and then an idea came to him. “I think I’ve got one.”

  She forced a smile onto her face. She was beautiful. “Then let’s go.”

  They marched out through the storm, leaving the abaniel restraints to be buried in the falling snow.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  TAKARUS

  He drifts alone through an endless spiral tower. Its great, crumbling arches are mere silhouettes against the backdrop of a pulsing abyss.

  There is something moving in the darkness, something barely visible, slipping and slithering through broken corridors and chambers long since lost to the material world. The tower is shattered in many pieces at the roof. He floats out and realizes that he’s drifting across the ground. The tower must have fallen. He looks behind himself and sees it broken in five pieces. The base of the tower is moving up into the pulsing abyss somehow, as if it sits atop a floating landmass.

  The movement in the dark is clearer, but his eyes cannot make out what it is. Snaking vines? Tendrils? His heart races. He peers ahead and can make out a cave structure ahead. He’s moving toward it. It’s so dark. He can’t stop himself.

  He thinks he can hear a voice calling his name.

  Takarus was certain that he was dead. It felt like he was floating in that unending darkness. Was he in the abyss? He could hear faint groans in the distance that echoed and bounced off of imperceptible walls.

  He thought he heard his sister crying, but when he tried to call to her his voice failed him—catching in his throat. For he knew what happens when Sulekiel die. There is nothing waiting for them in the long darkness, nothing but the twisting tendrils of Malo’thul’s many hungry mouths, waiting to feast on their souls in its eternal slumber beneath the First City.

  The groaning, he could almost hear it growing louder. Perhaps it was the sound of Malo’thul itself, searching in the darkness for him?

  He could feel a rope tightening around his chest.

  He tried to move as he would move his body, but found that his legs didn’t work so well now that he was dead. Maybe he was stuck inside his body still? He was no longer so sure what happened when you died.

  The rope tightened; his heart thundered through his chest so loud that he was certain it would give him away.

  He tried to move his arms, and found that he could feel air on his dead skin. So strange that his astral body would feel so much like his living one. He heard something stirring and froze completely. He thought he saw movement, the stirring of vines or tentacles in the dark.

  The rope snapped! He screamed into the darkness. His guttural, damaged vocals bounced off of the cavernous dark.

  “Takarus!” It was his sister’s voice, but how could he be sure it was her? Malo’thul was a trickster, they said. “Takarus, is that you? I can’t move. I think we’re under the rubble from the tower.”

  A likely scenario. He could imagine them being so unlucky as to outlast their fallen brothers and sisters by mere hours—until the air in a small contained space of rubble ran out.

  No, he said to himself. It’s Malo’Thul, he wants to eat your essence. Answer, and you’ll lose all that you were and all that you are.

  “Takarus!”

  A dim, flickering light spread out in the dark, illuminating a large collapsed slab of stone that stretched overhead, sandwiching with others, creating their own personal little rubble-filled coffin. It was only around five feet in height, and maybe twenty feet wide. His sister was pinned beneath a pile of boulders, her back to one of the slabs that was keeping the rest of the tower from coming down on their heads. Her eyes squinted in the dusty haze as she held up a small withering flame in her battered hand.

  “Please, brother—” She stifled a coughing fit with her free hand. “—we have to find Father.”

  Seeing her calmed his mind, quieted that momentary madness as though it had never been there. Takarus looked down at his legs. They were covered by rubble as well. He could still feel his feet and his toes beneath, so they weren’t broken. He couldn’t say the same for his sister. They were lying almost ten feet apart. She was sitting up, her legs covered by debris, while he found himself lying on his back, covered in rubble.

  No, a voice clawed its way to the surface. This is a trick, an illusion! Don’t answer the voice!

  “Damn it!” Kirana shouted. He felt a pebble bounce off his head, tossed from his sister’s free hand. “Did the rubble damage your brain, brother? Help me find Father!”

  His fear ebbed, and the idea that he wasn’t dead became slightly more real in his mind.

  “I thought we were dead,” Takarus said. His voice felt faint, like something was sticking to the walls of his throat. “And that Malo’thul was coming to claim our souls in the abyss.”

  Her eyes widened. Had the same thought occurred to her upon waking? “Takarus, I can still feel Father. He’s alive. Do you have any strength left?”

  He searched inside of himself and found that he did have some strength left. His Sulen burned dimly inside, but the fall must have taken a lot out of him. How had they survived?

  Takarus remembered falling, Father protecting them with a barrier and then...crashing noises...slamming into something hard...Father’s body bouncing...Kirana rolling away and forming a barrier around herself out of reflex...himself doing the same...

  That must have been it. Somehow their barriers had saved them from the worst of it.

  He sat up, struggling to put his hands beneath the rubble covering his legs. He started by clearing the smaller rocks out of the way first; he could feel his hands pulsing with heat from injuries he must have sustained during the collapse of the tower.

  Why had Father done it?

  The answer was obvious. There had been no other option. Those two were not Shar. They were something else. Something worse. Their energy had been vast, hypnotic, like a never-ending gyre. The Shar he’d faced, by comparison, had been like a speck of dust. If they had gotten into a drawn-out fight with those beings, there was no question that not even his father could have won.

  Their bodies, their hideous forms, lingered in his mind’s eye like the afterimage of a searing flame. Skin of a worm, eyes covering the chest, a head that’s no more than a mouth filled with blackened teeth. Spiked tail thrashing through the air, legs like a sea scorpion, eyes aglow like lanterns on a head like an engorged, pus-filled boil.

  Takarus shuddered and put them from his mind.

  The smalle
r stones went clicking and clacking as he tossed them away one by one. With those out of the way, and his head finally feeling clearer, he put his hands beneath the largest of the stones and gave it a pull. He felt his cheeks run red as he tossed it aside and let it crash into the smaller pile of stones next to him. The other stones were easier, and he could feel the blood circling back into his legs.

  He was a lot weaker than he’d thought...those rocks shouldn’t have given him so much trouble.

  “Well?” Kirana’s voice had all the makings of her trademark pushiness, despite its airy quality. “Can you stand, or are you just going to lie there?”

  Takarus bent his legs first, then brought himself into a crouch. Slowly, he stood up, taking care not to bump his head on anything. Kirana’s light had dimmed considerably in the time that he’d taken to free himself. She’d taken more of a beating in the collapse than he’d thought...he wasn’t sure if he wanted to know what he’d see when he removed the rubble covering her legs.

  Images filled his mind of Elder Geidra’s body flailing in the darkness, blood spilling from the wound in her chest—spiraling out ceaselessly as the life left her eyes.

  He shook his head to clear those terrible images and went to his sister’s side. Up close, he could see the cuts running across her face. A trickle of blood ran from her mouth to her chin. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

  “Hurry,” she said quietly.

  His hands hurt more than they had before, but he cleared her legs of debris. Good, there were no other serious wounds. He held his breath while she tested her weight with his help. Just because she looked whole on the outside, didn’t mean she wasn’t broken within.

  “I feel his Sulen...below us.” Her arm shook as she raised it to point down into the rubble.

  “How are we supposed to get down there?”

  She could barely stand. She needed rest and food; so did he, for that matter.

  “Stop looking at me like that,” Kirana said. “I’m fine. Can you keep digging? I don’t think blasting our way out is a good plan right now.”

  Takarus nodded, walking his sister to a spot where she could lie down. “Rest.”

  Kirana nodded, leaning against a protrusion in the rubble. Takarus moved to where she had pointed.

  “Dig straight down, I can feel his Sulen from several feet below,” Kirana said.

  He started moving smaller stones. His hands felt like they were wroth with thousands of tiny knives as he worked. He chuckled to himself. Maybe he was delirious, but their circumstances reminded him of a time when they were very young.

  “What’s so funny?” Kirana asked, her voice wheezing.

  “I was thinking about when we were children,” Takarus said. “Do you remember the time we were hiding from the other children in our class, because we wanted to play instead of study our techniques?”

  She nodded. “Father whipped us.”

  “Remember that cave we tried to seal up with rocks?” He laughed to himself again. “We thought that was how doors were made.”

  “Children are stupid.”

  “Then there was that time we tried digging a hole in the basement floor to reach the center of Gaiulen.” There was a breeze coming from below; he must have cleared a small breach in the rubble, but it was hard to tell since his sister’s light had gone out. He didn’t want to put further strain on her, so he lit the way with his own aura. There was a hole now, about the size of his fist. His head had cleared a bit; he could sense Father’s faint Sulen. “I thought Father was going to beat us again for that, but when he saw us there, digging—you bossing me around at the top of the hole, and me paddling dirt away with all four limbs—he only laughed and asked us to fill the hole when we returned from the center.”

  “It’s what Mother would have done,” Kirana said, her head nodding back and forth.

  He ceased digging briefly to find her hand in the dark. “Stay with me, Kirana.”

  She brushed it away. “Keep digging.”

  He nodded and returned to his duty. They were quiet for a time, their only companion the settling sounds of stone rubble around them, threatening to give in to gravity’s command.

  “Tell me another story from our childhood,” Kirana said, her voice even quieter now.

  “Okay. How about that time you caught Sage and I climbing the cathedral—”

  “Not that one. Not him.”

  “Right...”

  He hadn’t thought about Sage since he’d awoken. The rope tightened around his chest again, and he could feel it threatening to squeeze the words out of him.

  It was a struggle to dig and think of a story from their childhood that hadn’t involved Sage. He’d been his best friend, despite his father’s disapproval. Takarus still remembered Kirana stomping her feet below them as they climbed the cathedral. Sage had laughed at her and sworn that she was actually turning red. And she was; her aura had burned brightly around her. His sister always had so much trouble controlling her emotions. Eventually her stomping and yelling had drawn the attention of Father, and they were both forced to come down.

  When asked why they were doing something so dangerous, Sage had said that he’d never done it before and wanted to see what the city looked like from the top of the cathedral. Kirana had said that was stupid and he was stupid. Both Takarus and Sage were given three hours of balancing on the Pillars of Thought, a rather difficult punishment for their age, especially considering no one had gotten hurt.

  Sage had always been adventurous, and Takarus had always loved that about him. While he was content with his own life inside the city, Sage yearned for knowledge, yearned for the sky, and most of all, yearned for adventure.

  Takarus almost couldn’t blame Sage for keeping it from him. For going to the surface himself... It was obvious now that the High Elder had never planned to let him attain the rank of Valier. The look in his eyes when they didn’t call his name...

  It hadn’t just been pain. It was like his whole world had come crashing down.

  The rope snapped again, and the words came spilling out like water from a bucket dropped by stupid, careless hands. “He didn’t mean it.”

  Kirana’s tired eyes snapped open. “I said I don’t want to talk about him!”

  “Well, it’s true, damn it, he didn’t mean to cause any of this.”

  “That doesn’t bring any of them back!”

  He felt his heart sink deep into his gut. The faces of dead Sulekiel he’d seen along the way to the Tower of Judgments filled his mind’s eye. She was right. Ignorance did not excuse the results of his former friend’s actions. And it did not excuse his own complacency in blindly believing Sage was innocent when the truth had been so plain for him to see.

  “What is it, brother?”

  Takarus looked his sister in her golden eyes, feeling tears well up. “It’s my fault too.”

  “It’s not.” But her eyes betrayed her, for they stabbed at him, accusing him of his crime. It should be him lying dead in the mouth of Malo’thul.

  “I’m sorry, I—”

  There was a cracking sound, a shifting of balance, and then he was falling into another darkened abyss. His sister called out to him, but it was too late. For a moment, he accepted his fate, and was even glad that justice would be served.

  But it was a foolish thought. His butt smacked against the rough, rubble-strewn ground of another pocket. He groaned and stood up, checking himself over for injuries. He was okay.

  “Are you alive?” Kirana asked.

  “Yeah, unfortunately.” Takarus said.

  He heard her sigh. The light from his aura erupted around him, casting silhouettes of jagged stone all around him, and one that was familiar. He almost allowed madness and terror to break through when he saw his father dangling from his arm between two sections of the tower that had crashed together. Blood dripped onto his unconscious and battered face. His arm looked like it had been crushed flat by the walls, but he was breathing.

  “I
found him!” Takarus said, rushing to his father’s side with an uneven jaunt.

  “Is he okay?”

  He almost didn’t have the heart to tell her. “He’s breathing.”

  Kirana crawled to the edge of the hole he’d fallen through, and he could tell by her sudden gasp of air that she saw him.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Takarus said.

  “Help me down there.” Before he could rush back over to her, she was attempting to roll over the mouth of the hole.

  He caught her as she lost her grip on the opening and fell through. “You need to be more careful.”

  “I’m—” She struggled to her feet with his help. “—fine.”

  When he was sure that she wasn’t going to collapse right in front of him, he turned his attention back to his dangling father. “How do we get him down safely?”

  “His Sulen is weak.” She started forward, limping and struggling to his side. “If he keeps bleeding like that, we’ll lose him.”

  “Neither of us are in any shape to move those walls, and even if we did, that might cause the whole place to come crashing down.”

  “I know that, damn it!”

  He averted her heated stare. “Sorry.”

  She sighed, and studied their father for a long, breathless moment.

  He could feel the rubble settling beneath his feet. The cracking and the slow rumbling was ceaseless, almost like a constant percussion, a choir beckoning them to their deaths.

  “We have to sever the arm,” Kirana said, leaning against the wall.

  “What!”

  “Look at him, brother, it’s completely crushed. We have to cut it off and burn the wound to stop the bleeding.”

  “He will never forgive us for—”

  “Would you rather he be dead?” she screamed.

  He stared at his feet, ashamed at his own cowardice.

  “You’re the one that has to do it,” Kirana said. “I’m too weak.”

  The cavern started to spin; he felt last night’s dinner come rushing up to his throat. “No, no, I can’t.”