Child of Sorrows

by Michaelbrent Collings

  I should go help.

  But what could I do?

  She was a fighter, probably the best alive –

  (or at least, I was before today)

  – but other than that she was just a teenage girl. Someone who had little experience compared to most, other than that given to all Dogs. The experience of fighting, and living in an ever-growing shadow of death.

  Is that all I am? All I'll ever be?

  With that, she knew she had to get up. She forced herself to move, though her side ached so badly she was sure she must have broken a rib. But there were people who would have been hurt worse, and if she could do anything – anything at all, even lift a rock off someone's shoe – she had to do it.

  That was what they were here for, after all. What they'd been doing these past months in the palace: trying to make things better, if only a small bit at a time.

  She grimaced, both in pain and remorse. The Cursed Ones had thought all it would take was replacing Malal. Getting rid of the Chancellor –

  (Still alive!)

  – and then they could just make everything somehow better. But they quickly discovered that there were two options open: either make their overthrow public, and watch the Empire tear itself apart as it lost the dynastic rule it had known for a thousand Turns; or work from within, and try to make things better at a frustratingly slow pace.

  They had chosen the latter. Some changes came quickly – getting rid of the kennels, for instance. But even those had unimagined repercussions. The children sold to the kennels were sometimes the way poverty-stricken families made ends meet. Without the kennels, there was more starvation in Fear than ever. And what to do with the thousands of children suddenly released, most of whom had no idea who their parents were, or where they came from? A few families had come forward to reclaim their children, but most were either too ashamed or too uncaring to do so.

  The children had been put in hastily-constructed tent cities, overseen by as many men and women as the Imperial Throne could arrange for on short notice. But even there, the children died – either from disease, old wounds, lack of proper care… or just simple despair.

  We haven't made anything better at all.

  "Stop moping."

  Brother Scieran had appeared at the door when she was halfway there. There was a young man behind him, one that Sword recognized as one of the palace Patches. Brother Scieran nodded to him and the man moved toward her.

  She tried to wave him off. "I'm fine. There must be others –"

  Brother Scieran scoffed. "I saw you. You're not fine." He looked at the Patch, who had stopped between them. "Do your job. If she tries to resist, hit her until she stops."

  The Patch looked equal parts confused and worried. Sword didn't envy him, caught between the best – one of the best – warriors in the Empire and the force of nature that was Brother Scieran.

  She sighed and slumped back in the chair she had just abandoned. Nodded to the Patch, who stepped forward. Each Patch had basically the same Gift, but each exercised it slightly differently. This one laid his hands on her head, then let them drift slowly down her face, her neck. They touched her shoulders. Wherever they went, a pleasant warmth followed. She felt sleepy.

  "Let yourself rest, girl," said Brother Scieran.

  She shook her head. Forced her drooping eyes open and then stood again. "No. There is too much to do." She twisted at the waist. Her side still hurt – quite a bit – but it was at least bearable. To the Patch she said, "That's enough. Go see to those who most need it."

  The Patch nodded. Started for the door. "You," she said, and he turned back. "Don't do what you did for me. Not again. Don't waste time on the ones someone says are 'more important.'" She looked at Brother Scieran. "Help who needs it most, regardless of rank or station. If anyone questions you…." A hint of light appeared in her hand. The threat of flame. "Send them to me. And keep doing your job. Until you can't anymore, until you drop."

  The Patch nodded, and looked somehow relieved, as though that was what he always wanted to do, but rarely was able to.

  "Stubborn," said Brother Scieran.

  "With people like you around, how could I not be?" she answered, then strode from the room, heading toward the damaged part of the palace. Brother Scieran fell in behind her with his triple step of foot, foot, cane.

  The closer they got to the area the old man had destroyed, the worse things looked. People moved in and out of various rooms, holding bloody sheets, curtains – anything that could be used to help the wounded. Glancing in rooms she saw people laying on beds, tables, and desks. Some had Patches helping them – a few wounded only slightly and quickly able to rise and help others, but many beyond complete healing, even through the magic of the Gifts. They remained where they lay, some unconscious, some gasping in pain. She saw one of those angrily shove a Patch away, propelling him toward a woman on a chair. "Her first," growled the man, even as a spasm of pain wracked him.

  Sword's jaw clenched. These people didn't deserve this. Some of the men and women in the palace had been corrupt – as with any beauracracy, there were good people and bad. But she and the other Cursed Ones had been working hard to identify them and either send them to prison or at least remove them from their stations. So most of the people still in the palace were guards, cooks, maids, manservants, and any of the thousand souls who lived and worked in a place like this.

  "Why did he leave?" she said.

  "What?" Brother Scieran was looking at the wounded as well.

  "He could have destroyed us. Destroyed everything. Why did he leave?"

  Brother Scieran didn't have to ask who she meant by "he." He shrugged. "You heard what he said. He wants to make Malal suffer."

  "So he'll be back. And it will be worse the next time."

  Brother Scieran didn't say anything.

  Sword saw a girl on a table. Dressed in a chambermaid's outfit, staring sightlessly up at the ceiling while Patches worked feverishly on another woman nearby who could only be the girl's mother. And it all happened to the tuneless song of screams: a person pinned under a huge piece of stone, so large that it took two Strongs with all their magic to lift the masonry away, to show another body that Sword could already tell was beyond help.

  One of the Strongs caught her eye. Like all Strongs, he was small, almost delicate-looking, though his magic enabled him to lift many times his own weight. The Strong nodded at her, and in his eyes she saw the terror of being strong in a place where strength meant nothing.

  Or perhaps his eyes simply reflected what she knew was in her own gaze.

  The Strong moved on, out the door and to the next place where his might could be useful. He walked quickly, but still there was something broken in his gait. Brother Scieran followed him, though Sword wasn't sure if the priest went to follow the small man himself, or saw someone else who needed his ministrations.

  Sword continued on.

  Place after place, room after room, pain after pain. And then it just… ended.

  The pain was still there, but the rooms were not. The hall simply and suddenly ended. This was where the armored man's blast had turned stone and mortar and wood and cloth and everything else that made up the spaces where people lived to nothing but dust and air. The corridor ended jaggedly, a line of rock that turned to crumbling edges open to the outside.

  Sword looked up and could see this whole part of the palace above and behind her, extending ten or more rods up. Corridors and rooms had been cut apart in cross-section, and she could see flashes of movement as people worked in those open spaces to save coworkers, friends, and strangers.

  She suddenly felt very small. The power she had could bring down an Empire, but here in the face of an armored madman and his two helpers she could do nothing but watch.

  "No madman. Mad, yes, but not a madman."

  The old man's words echoed in her mind. She tried to comprehend them, to pull meaning from the puzzle he had spoken. She failed. Another failure.

/>   Before her, the castle continued down for another three floors before it reached the ground. In front of her there was nothing but air, with a sloping mountain of rubble leading to the ground directly beside the wall.

  She saw movement in the rubble.

  Without thinking, she was sliding down the rocks, crashing to her hands, falling to her back time after time, but never stopping, never halting her downward progress.

  The movement stopped.

  She kept moving, rushing forward in her semi-controlled fall. When she reached the spot where she had seen the movement, she dug into the rock beneath her knees. Pebbles ran down the hill as she dislodged stone after stone – some as large as her head – and pushed them away.

  She saw a hand. Small. So small.

  She started screaming for help. But no one came. No one heard.

  She kept digging. It was a little boy. Brown hair matted down by dust and sweat and the blood that flowed from the deep cut on his scalp. The cut was deep enough and bad enough that Sword couldn't wait for anyone to come to her aid, for a Patch to notice her. She had to get the boy out of the rock and up the hill, even if his back or spine had been damaged already. Leaving him was more dangerous than moving him, because leaving him would mean watching him bleed to death in a grave of stone.

  She pulled more rubble off his body, clearing away enough that she could drag him free. She hoisted him to her. She could handle weapons with ease, no matter their size. Her Gift did not apply to people, though, and even this boy was heavy for her. She looked up, screaming for help once more, knowing none would come.

  The boy was turning visibly white in her arms, his lips going blue.

  She couldn't climb. She fell instead. She simply let her legs go out from under her, pitching onto her back with the boy held tight against her stomach and chest. Sliding haphazardly down the rubble, unsure what to do beyond try to reach the bottom, to regain her feet, to find a way to help this child.

  The rocks bit at her, tore the back of her head and neck. Blood soaked her shirt. She fell to earth. Stood, still miraculously carrying the boy.

  One of the sheared-off sections of the castle was right beside her: not a hall this time, but a room that had been cleaved in half by the fall of the palace. No one in it. She ran through. A door in the back. A hall beyond. People running. No one paying attention. Not to her, not to the boy in her arms.

  "He's dying!" she cried. And no one heard, because they were all dying here, this close to the fall of stone.

  Then someone did hear. A hand reached out. Rested his hand on the boy's head. The tear to his scalp suddenly knit – not completely, but some.

  "That's all I can do right now," said the exhausted man, the Patch who had just helped the child. Then he was gone in the press of bodies, off to help someone just enough to perhaps cling to life, then another and another.

  Sword brought the boy to the nearest room. No table empty, no bed free, so she laid him in a corner. A flaming knife appeared in her hand, and she cut a strip from a nearby curtain and wrapped the boy's head.

  "Live," she breathed, and kissed him.

  Then left him, to find more she could save.

  17

  Udo pulled the candle from its holder. It was small, burned away to a slim cylinder of wax that would burn away to nothing more than a thin wisp of smoke in only a few more moments. He used it to light a new candle he pulled from the desk, then with the last of the first candle's flame he melted the wax on the bottom of the new candle so it would stick to the holder.

  The first candle went out. It had served its purpose. It would never light again.

  Udo leaned close to the parchment on the desk. The candlelight flickered, making the drawings on the paper –anotomical diagrams of chick-fowl – seem as though the birds were in flight.

  The other High Academics who worked in the Aviary made fun of him for using candles. "Glo-globes last longer. Gods, they last forever," they all said. "Why waste time lighting candles, when they're so much dimmer and make such smoke?"

  Udo just smiled. As a High Academic, his every decision was supposed to be motivated by logic, by learning. And, as a High Academic, he was keenly aware how impossible that was. So some Turns ago he had abandoned it as an ideal. That was why he let himself use the candles: they were less efficient than glo-globes. But the simple fact was… he liked them.

  He liked the way they smelled, the smoke when they lit and when they extinguished, a tangy, sharp odor that reminded him of the fires his grandfather built when he was a child. The stories the old man told.

  He liked the way the wax dripped, the way the candles drooped and eventually melted away to nothing and reminded him that time was passing. That life was moving along. Easy to forget when your only company was glo-globes and books, which never showed that they cared about the time. But the real world did care, and so should the men and women of the Great University. The Gods had always urged their children to keep away from the world's ills, but never hide from its cares. The shrinking wax reminded Udo of that.

  Most of all, though, he loved that flicker of flame. The movement it gave to the pictures he studied. The illusion of life it provided to figures and diagrams of creatures who had sacrificed themselves to the furtherance of knowledge.

  In Udo's eyes, the birds who died under his knife, to be studied and drawn and so, hopefully, understood a bit more, had a kind of eternal life. The flame gave that life motion, and provided his life with meaning.

  Though it is hard on the eyes.

  Worth it.

  An Academic entered. He removed his fedora and bowed. Udo thought his name was Glen or Glan or something like that. Another man who hoped to earn the silver chain of a degree with honors, to be worn around the neck, to mark him as one of the elite – a High Academic.

  As though that matters.

  Udo himself hardly ever wore his own chain. He didn't care who knew of his honors or accolades. He cared about his birds. About his books. About making the world a better place by acting himself as a candle – albeit a small one – to brighten the darkness of ignorance.

  People asked him what he thought he was really accomplishing. "Just birds. Who cares? Why not study at Medicine or even Meteorics?"

  Even the Academics who studied under him – like the idiot waiting at the door – didn't understand. They just chose the Aviary as the fastest, easiest course to their chain and the honors of men and women.

  Glen/Glan cleared his throat. Udo didn't bother turning to him, just said, "Yes, what is it?" with what he hoped was enough irritation to get through the man's thick skull.

  "It's… quite late, sir."

  "Late? Who cares about late?"

  "Well, I mean… that is…." Glen/Glan cleared his throat again.

  Udo finally turned to the Academic. "Are you ill?"

  The other man flushed. "No. Just…." He sighed. "It's actually not just late. It's the middle of the night."

  "Knowledge never sleeps, boy."

  The Academic's flush deepened at being called "boy." And, in truth, Udo wasn't that much older than him. Glen/Glan was probably in his mid-thirties, and Udo only had forty Turns to his name. But he had been a High Academic for fifteen of those Turns – a genius of the highest order – and they both knew it. Just as they knew that it more than entitled Udo to call the other man "boy" if he wished.

  But Glen/Glan didn't have to like it. And he showed that fact clearly in his face.

  "Knowledge may not sleep, but I have to, at least occasionally." Then, aware of the fact that his ascension to High Academic depended in large measure on Udo's approval, he added a grudging, "Sir."

  Udo sighed. "What's your name again?"

  The Academic's flush deepened to a dangerous level. "Golan, sir. I've been here for two Turns."

  "Two Turns?"

  "Yes."

  "And do you know why I have trouble remembering your name? And why I am still at work here when all the other Academics sleep?"

>   Golan's expression soured. "I have no idea."

  Udo laughed. "Yes, you do. You think it's because I'm a narcissistic know-it-all who is so obsessed with things that fly that he's forgotten how to deal with things that walk – if he ever knew in the first place."

  Golan said nothing, but his expression was clear enough: Udo had hit the nail on the head.

  Udo gestured for the younger man to join him at the desk. After a moment – and a quick flicker of exasperation – Golan did.

  Udo pointed at the page he had been studying. The anotomical drawings of the chick-fowl. "What do you see?"

  "Chick-fowl."

  Udo nodded. "Yes. A bird. Which is what we study at the Aviary." He looked hard at Golan. "But why do we study them?"

  "Because they're interesting?" Golan didn't even try hiding the question in the words.

  Udo laughed. "All right, perhaps I should have asked why I study them. You study them because you want your chain, then you want to start teaching – preferably in a different discipline – as soon as possible."

  Golan had the decency to attempt a protest. "No, sir, I –"

  Udo waved him off. "That's all right, Golan. I've been here fifteen Turns, and no one – not a single one – of my students has ever understood. Not really." He pointed back at the parchment. "Why do I study birds? Why not horses, or woollies? Why not men? All fascinating, all worthy of attention and study. So why do I spend my time in the Aviary, virtually alone. What is different about the birds? What do they have that nothing else has?"

  Golan looked at the parchment a long time. "They… fly."

  Udo shook his head, tsk tsking as he did. "So do many insects. So do we, for that matter, in our air-cars. No, not flight. Think."

  Golan kept staring. The minutes passed. The candle melted. "They have faster heartbeats than other –"

  Udo cut him off. "No, no, no. Any anotomical differences are not really differences at all. Every one can be found in other creatures – individually, if not as a whole. Birds are an amalgam of the pieces the Gods have already used for other animals. No, the answer is not in what they are, but what they do."