by Mark Eller
The warmth was totally inside him like being washed by a gentle rain. His skin tingled. Invisible fingers smoothed down his hair.
"Could you?" he asked.
A sigh of peace ran through him.
There is only One God.
Aaron lifted his head. "What?"
In all the worlds, in all of creation, there is only One God. I am that God.
And finally, Aaron understood. There was only One God.
Almost. Understood.
Some aspects of divine reasoning threw him for a loop. For one, he did not understand why God had chosen him, a failure, a man who had struggled with temptation and lost.
There were other things he didn't understand. He didn't understand why his Chins weren't worried over hundreds of Clack's warriors entering the encampment unchallenged less than a week earlier.
Hours later, when he recovered from his conversation with the One God, Choin How explained the last. Choin's hand was missing, as was his arm and a small part of his shoulder, victims of Harris's debacle. The rifle he loved was lost to one of Bill Clack's warriors. Because of his injuries, Choin How could no longer be a glorai. He was now considered one of the yermod, an elder.
Every time Aaron looked at the man he remembered sending Choin off on a long, almost impossible journey to find the shell casings he carelessly left lying on the ground. Despite Aaron's expectations, days later, Choin returned with a handful of those casings.
Now his hand was missing. Aaron supposed the man was lucky. The battle he lived through was notable for its low survival rate. Only two other wounded, and fifty unwounded escaped.
"We are safe," Choin explained to Aaron's concern. "They broke the sacred ceremony. Our offering to God has been defiled, so they must pay penance. For three years they are our servants, but first they must go into isolation for three months. I have been told the dishonored warriors numbered more than twenty thousand."
"Are you telling me none of those tribe's people are allowed to fight for Clack?" Aaron asked, not daring to believe. "You're saying twenty thousand people have to serve the three hundred of you?"
"Yes," Chain answered. "The situation will be awkward since there are so many of them and so few of us. Their representatives are trying to work out the details. Most will serve us by serving Emperor Turner."
"Twenty thousand people have just been added to my troops?"
Aaron felt stunned and somehow betrayed. His people, under the command of Mac Harris, had suffered a horrendous defeat. Two thousand people died, two thousand, and at a small price to Clack. In contrast, the death of two people during a nighttime raid cost the enemy twenty thousand warriors. More, those twenty thousand could end up fighting for him.
"In three months, after the isolation, they will be yours," Choin How said sadly. "I do not think we have that long."
Frowning, Aaron nodded reluctant agreement. His planned generalship was gone. His support staff had been a hobble instead of a help, and he had no idea where most of his few fielded troops were located. Ard Chuk was out there, he knew, but where and how many people Ard Chuk had with him, Aaron had no clue. All he knew was Clack had just lost the use of one of his generals and twenty thousand warriors.
Aaron wasn't sure, but he didn't think he even had twenty thousand people in the field. How many more troops did Clack have to send against him?
Depression swept through him, washing away the little hope Choin How's news had raised. Perhaps Selena and the others had been correct. Maybe his best choice was to hand the entire thing over to Clack.
"I need to think," he told Choin How, but he lied. What he really needed was a drink.
Flicker
Chapter 17
The musty air smelled of damp wood and sea salt, of stale brew and fresh vomit.
Aaron sat on a stool with his hands resting on top of the wooden rail running along the bar's front edge. The light was dim, cast by a few flickering lanterns and a couple beams of sunlight peering through the windows.
The murmur of voices was low, restrained, and subdued, a far cry from what this place would sound like when the early evening and late night hours arrived. Then most of the sailors on leave and those seeking a berth would arrive in force. For this time, only a few early risers with nothing better to do were there.
Some of those, a group of four, sat around a table, playing poker for the high stakes of quarter coppers. Six others sat at the bar, quiet people who had nothing better to do than make love to their cups.
Aaron had once loved this city, this N'Ark. It seemed like his love disappeared several lifetimes ago.
Raising his cup, he drank it half down. This bathtub ale was a far cry from the Runeburg White he once preferred. It tasted bitter and rough but was exactly what he needed. He felt angry, lost, and alone. He dared not go near those people he called his friends. Involvement with him only got people killed.
People like Aybarra and two thousand Chin warriors. Among those dead was Delmac, a man who loathed Aaron, a man Aaron secretly admired because of that loathing. Now that he was gone, Delmac would never get the chance to look down on Aaron's dead body.
Aaron hoped Amanda had used her common sense. He hoped she had boarded her boat and traveled the river back to her ship. She did not need to be in his life.
Lifting the cup once more, he finished off his sixth or eighth or twelfth helping and tried to catch the tender's eye. The woman deliberately avoided him.
"Trouble," he heard somebody murmur.
"Not one of us. Shouldn't be here."
"Slight build. Might be some fun."
Aaron smiled to himself. Not so long ago he wouldn't have been called slight. He would have been described as little, as short, until Zisst's God born alien flesh merged into his body, giving him new height.
Gods but his life was cursed.
Why had he been chosen?
He needed another drink. The pain was still in there, churning and roiling around in his gut. He still sat upright, and that seemed wrong. He should be lying down with his feet pressed against the far end of a cheap pine coffin.
Aaron really needed another drink. The woman behind the bar still ignored him.
Decision made, Aaron rose and started to climb over the bar.
"Hey, you!" She saw him now. "You can't do that."
He ignored her. Laughter sounded.
"Get down from there."
A hand clutched at him. Aaron twisted around, grabbed the hand, pulled, and placed a foot in the woman's belly. She folded with a gasp, and Aaron felt no remorse over hurting her. At one time he would have allowed her to pull him away. At one time he would have done anything to avoid hurting a woman.
Straightening, she came after him, so Aaron sent his other foot into her jaw, knocking her to the floor.
"Son of a bitch!"
They came for him, pulled him off the bar top and beat their fists into his body, bruising him, hurting him.
Aaron loved it. He stuck back, using every skill Sara Perkins and Harvest Patton had given him.
They fell before him. Two, four, they fell, but others came, and they held him, sending hard fists into his belly and face. Aaron's knees sagged, and he could do nothing but absorb punishment. Gagging, he spewed bile when a fist sank backbone deep into his belly. He gasped as another fist connected with his ribs and felt a sharp pain, indicating at least one had snapped.
If he were lucky, the broken ends would soon pierce his lung.
"Hol' thar. Hol' up I tell ya! I'll ha' none o' this in me bar. Ban ya all, I will."
Hands released Aaron, allowing him to fall to the floor. Drink and pain made his vision waver. Somebody cursed, and then his left hand shrieked fire when a boot stomped on it.
"Enough o' thet!"
An indistinct form leaned over him. Something, a hand, forced his head to turn so he looked straight up. Aaron's vision grew fainter. His senses wandered, the result of drink or the beating, he didn't know or care.
"'is
hands say e's not one o' us," somebody said belligerently. "Shouldn't be har."
"I know this'n," another voice said as the last of Aaron's senses faded away. "Sailed with 'im once. Has problems, 'e does."
And then they were gone, and Aaron sank deeper into oblivion, hoping this was death.
* * *
He wasn't dead.
Damn.
Aaron woke in a strange bed, lying beneath clean sheets with his broken ribs bound. His vision was blurry, the result, he soon realized of eyes almost completely swollen shut. His face hurt. His belly too, and every time he breathed, a sharp pain answered.
Experimentally, Aaron lifted his left arm and studied it with almost useless eyes. The hand, he saw, was wrapped in bandaging. It hurt like a bitch.
Good.
A stir of sound, a rustle of cloth, and a slight cough drew his attention. Painfully turning his head toward the noise, Aaron saw somebody sitting in a chair near the head of the bed. His neck, he discovered with the movement, also hurt.
"I thought we moved past this point," the figure said. "The last I knew, you'd given up drinking and were finally being responsible."
"Felicity," he tried experimentally.
"The same," Felicity Stromburg answered. "You do realize how lucky you are? First you are alive."
"That's a matter of opinion," Aaron told her.
"We'll get back to your condition later. Your second bit of luck is you chanced into a bar owned by an old sailing mate of yours, Crusty Bill. To bring you up to date, Bill found himself a woman who said she liked a silver necklace he owned. Since he came with the necklace, she married him and then made him quit sailing to help run the bar."
"You seem to know a lot about him," Aaron commented.
"I've been studying sailors lately," she said, "He's interesting, and that's your third bit of luck. I stopped off to talk to him not long after you went lights out."
"Great." Figured. He couldn't even get himself beat up properly. With an entire world to choose from, he picked a place with two serious strikes against him.
"I'm kinda wondering if your choice was deliberate," Felicity said. "At first, I thought you'd just fallen off the wagon, but you mumbled a bit in your sleep so I decided you were trying to hurt yourself."
"I just wanted to get drunk," Aaron protested.
"You're lying, of course. I've enough working Talent to know. Still, I'm sure you thought you only wanted to get drunk. The thing is there are a lot of places where you could have bought alcohol. Most wouldn't have got you almost killed. No, Aaron my old friend, I'm afraid some frightened part of you wanted to die."
Closing his eyes, Aaron drew in a deep breath. "It isn't pretense. The world would be better off without me."
"I'm sure you think so," she said calmly. "Personally, I'm not positive you're wrong. The emotional pain you feel is so strong it's assaulting my unboosted Talent. Worse, there's a great deal of hurt you've buried so deep you're not even aware of it. Something in you wants to die, but something else believes dying is the greatest mistake you can make."
Not answering, Aaron lay with his eyes closed, wishing he were alone.
"You could have used your weapon to put a bullet through your brain," she pointed out. "If you wanted to die so badly, you could have transferred yourself to someplace deadly. A more subtle way to die would have been lessening the protection you've placed around yourself so you'd be vulnerable to assassins."
"Wouldn't work," Aaron finally said.
"Pardon?"
"The assassin part wouldn't work," Aaron repeated, thinking of Martha Hines. For reasons beyond his understanding, she had decided she no longer wanted to kill people for money. Instead, her choice of rehabilitation was to work for him as a security expert. As part of her rehabilitation, she pointed Galesword's law enforcement toward the Londonary Guild House.
"They can't make up their damned minds," he continued. "The assassins we don't catch switch to my side."
"Why don't you tell me what's going on? I'll tell you why the biggest part of you wants to live."
* * *
When a gentle knock sounded on his hospital door, Aaron ignored it. He felt too emotionally and physically drained to deal with another visitor. Felicity's interrogation the day before had been wringing. Crusty Bill's later visit had been uncomfortable because they shared few memories not involving dead people.
Eyes fastened on the ceiling, Aaron's mind tried to forget Felicity's words.
"I can't handle it, and I don't know why," Aaron told her. "I made myself hard. I learned not to care, but gods damn it. I can't stop thinking about them."
With a gentle smile, Felicity had shaken her head. "Aaron, my dear friend, your problem has always been you care too much. No matter how much you lie to yourself, that fact will never change."
She left an hour later when the doctor arrived to explain Aaron's injuries. Most, the doctor said, would heal, but not his hand. Because of the multiple breaks, it would always be a twisted claw hanging at the end of his arm. When the swelling went down hospital staff would try to move everything mostly back in place, but the hand would never be the same.
The doctor sounded apologetic, but Aaron was glad his hand was maimed. He was so glad he knew he would not hire detectives to track down Doctor Gunther so Doc's Talent driven gift could heal it, so glad he would not seek out Heralda whose God driven gift could instantly set his body to rights.
Aaron did not want his body healed. He did not want his hand remade.
Two thousand dead.
Felicity had agreed their deaths were his fault. He had delegated responsibility into the hands of others. He ignored the daily needs of his empire by placing its running into the hands of Melna and Patton. He had given the planning of his war into the hands of hired strangers, and he had placed his warriors under the command of a man who understood war but not the way the Chins fought.
Mac Harris, Felicity explained, had learned to fight with horses and swords and spears, with shields and bows. He had fought battles where two forces lined up on opposite sides of a battlefield, where flanking maneuvers and open field tactics were the call of the day.
Like so many leaders in Aaron's own world, Harris designed his strategy and tactics to fight his last war, not the present one. Harris had not fully understood the difference firearms would make to his too familiar trade.
Yes, Aaron had been at fault. He had been at fault for that folly and for so much more by not realizing Clack would find a way to better arm his people. When Aaron should have concentrated on war, he became immersed in building a city. When he should have anticipated Clack's plans, he searched for histologists to explore a cave. Both mistakes had been terrible lapses in judgment.
Aaron's main problem, according to Felicity, was he didn't think it moral or right to defend himself against Clack's ambitions. A not so hidden part of Aaron thought the loss of life would be less if he allowed Clack to win. Aaron, Felicity said, had the brains and resources to win this war if he accepted responsibility for running it. However, before he could fight it, he had to win a war within himself. He had to decide if victory was worth thousands, or even tens of thousands, of lives.
Aaron did not have an answer for her.
The knock sounded again. The door opened, and footsteps approached.
"Your breathing tells me you're awake so you might as well open your eyes."
Aaron opened his still swollen eyes.
Karen smiled down on him with gentle concern. Aging and dumpy, with her professor's nearsighted eyes and a dimple permanently incised into the side of her chin, Amanda's life-mate looked at Aaron, and her smile became a frown.
"I got a letter saying you were here," she said. "It was sent by a woman named Felicity Stromburg. Do you know her?"
"A friend," he answered.
"Her letter sounded worried," Karen said. "I can see why. Mister Turner─"
"We've been through this before. Call me Aaron."
"A
aron then. I have to ask, have you any word on Amanda? It's been months since she left, and I've only had one letter from her. It wasn't very informative."
"She was fine the last time I saw her," Aaron said, glad he could finally deliver something resembling good news. "A bit frustrated though. She wanted to do a little task, but a histologist and several others refused to let her do it."
"Oh?" Karen sounded concerned. "Something dangerous?"
"Not really," Aaron lied for the woman's peace of mind. "She wanted to explore a cave. There are paintings on the ceiling and artifacts inside. Amanda wanted to dig into it all, but they insist on taking things slowly."
"Yes, that sounds like Amanda," Karen said with a thin smile. "She's so driven she even has to get involved when she's on her first ever vacation." Her smile faded. "Aaron. I don't have long. Classes start in a week, and I have a lot of preparation to do. I only came to see how you're doing and to deliver something Felicity said you needed."
A nurse entered the room with the hand of a small child clenched in her own. Reluctant, the child hung back, trying to hide behind the woman's leg as she pulled him toward Aaron.
"Chase?" Aaron asked.
"Your daddy has been hurt," the nurse explained to the boy as she stopped beside the bed. Karen took a step back, removing herself from this scene.
"Hurt?" Chase peered at Aaron from around a leg. "Da?"
"Hey, boy," Aaron said. "I'm afraid your daddy doesn't look so good right now."
Hesitantly, Chase released the nurse's hand. She helped him climb onto Aaron's bed.
"Sorry," Chase said. His hand stroked Aaron's face. The touch hurt his bruises, but Aaron did not protest.
"Sorry," Chase said again. Leaning his small head forward, he kissed the center of Aaron's split lips."
"I love you," Aaron said, pulling Chase to his chest with his good arm. Chase's arms wrapped around Aaron's sore neck.
Something cracked inside Aaron as he held his son's small form. Something cracked, and a thing long put away, a thing frightened of hurt, of pain, of rejection, and all the other lousy things that happen to a person who dares to love, lifted away. Something found its way into the well of God Power within him. The two mixed, intermingled, and the new compound wound its way into the thin crevasses of Aaron's heart, into still bleeding wounds. Something else entered him, changed him, and Aaron knew he had somehow absorbed another Zisst. From thousands of miles away, the animal had become a permanent part of his body. The inner cavity within, the thing containing a part of the One God, felt fuller.