by Del Law
She’s been fighting for a long time, somehow, and suddenly she’s won.
Kjat falls into Nadrune.
I let go of what’s left of the spire.
I see the top of the tower fall away from me and feel the wind rushing up all through my fur, just like when I’d stand on the roof of the kiva as a boy and those winds off the grasslands would whip through the village.
Then the world goes red and then white, and a tremendous thunder fills my ears and my mouth and it sucks all of the breath from me. It slaps me hard in the air and as I spin and fall I see the Alabaster Tower falling too, falling toward the gardens and then I turn and the ground is rushing up at me fast, too.
But it can’t be the ground, can it? I haven’t fallen that long. Had I blacked out in mid-air?
But it rushes up at me and I smash through the open hatch of it. I hit cold, hard metal face first and all of my breath leaves me again and I pass from one world into the next.
But then the world turns and seems to pick up speed, and I fall off a wall and onto a floor. Ercan is looking down at me.
What the fuck is Ercan Kerul doing in the Hulgliev afterlife, I’m wondering?
How did he manage to make it through the well?
And then I wonder why, of all things, my afterlife smells so very distinctly of Krukkruk.
43.
When the leaderless Akarii are finally driven back to their ships by Kerul troops and the city guard and Capone’s men (he’s brought more of them through somehow—I’m guessing he’s paying the Buhr), the recovery work begins. But I’m forced to watch most of it on the knife from the bed at Ercan’s mansion. When I’m eating, which isn’t often, it’s nothing but bad suburban noodles, which is pretty hard when you’ve only got the use of one arm and I refuse to let the Kruk feed me. Their undertongue treatments are embarrassing enough.
I don’t sleep much. When I do, I’m dreaming of Kjat’s violet eyes. I see my secondfather with that red spear sticking out of him. Mircada is reaching out to me. A Sister wants to tell me something urgent, and I’m searching in the tunnels under Tamaranth for it but all I can find are black feathers. Kjat is calling me. Semper is showing me something on a wall, and it’s a picture of Nadrune. The picture reaches out and grabs me by the throat and I jerk awake, my heart pounding.
There, in the room at night, the flower wrapped around my good arm pulses with a quiet light. The Kruk kneeling at my bedside has her eyes closed and is listening quietly to an iPod, with dual sets of white earbuds running to each of her heads.
In the city, grohvers and their riders are bringing in large blocks of stone from a quarry to the north, and dropping a rudimentary wall in place near the entrance to the lagoon. Slowly the pull of the moons, and those endless tunnels underneath the city, drains the city of water, though the Seventh District is stuck there at the mouth of the harbor, too damaged to move, and that is slowing things down. Buildings emerge from the sea again in the lower parts of the residential quarters, covered in kelp and glowing mollusks. A large tribe of salt-water marmots has to be fought back from the Commons, but Capone’s men seem to enjoy the work. The Warrens drain last of all, another level appearing each day, and it's cleaner than it's been in a century.
With the power back, I’m all over the knife. I’m the "savior of the city," say the newscasters. There are shots of the Alabaster Tower from a distance, the great fight with Nadrune, her great explosion, me falling from the sky and getting caught by Ercan, the whole tower coming down.
Commentators are speculating just what I used to defeat her—some strange Bakarh glyph, shaped like a bird? Something called out of history by the mysterious Te’loria? Talk show hosts are interviewing sages, people on the street, and each other and they all seem to swap the same opinions back and forth without saying anything new.
Fortunately, Ercan doesn’t seem inclined to tell anyone where I am. And I don't answer the knife when it chimes.
Spokespeople for the new Akarii leaders of Nadrune’s Fleet and the Tel Kharan are making conciliatory noises to the other families and to the people in Tamaranth.
The fleet, however, doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Large number of grohvers are flying over them still on a daily basis, just in case.
The Sisters were unharmed by Nadrune going nuclear and the Tower coming down. They hover in the sky now above the rubble. Councilor Ghat—now Chancellor Ghat—had sent the grohvers to bring them into the Residence, but they’d had no luck. It’s as if the lack of a structure around them is merely a temporary issue, and they’re content to wait out the weather until the situation can be fixed.
• • •
Chancellor Ghat discovers something else in the ruins, and asks Ercan and I to the Residence on the third week after the fall of the Tower. She greets us warmly, and then leads us through the empty halls of the Bane. Inside a small chamber, out at the far end, is Kjat’s body.
It had been pulled from deep in the rubble of the Tower by a grohver-rider, Ghat says, and yet she’s completely intact. Her skin isn’t broken or bruised. Her face is unblemished. Aside from the fact that her skin has gone entirely jet black from the strange, overlapping glyphs, she looks like she’s sleeping, only her chest doesn’t move.
There is no sign of a bird in her at all.
“She does not change,” Ghat says. “I don’t understand it, myself. A body will do what a body will do, if you’ll forgive me being direct.” She looks carefully at me, but I nod. “Only hers won’t. It’s as if she’s carved from stone.”
“Could the blast have preserved her?” Ercan asks.
Ghat shrugs. “We might never really know.”
At Ercan’s suggestion, they leave me alone with her for awhile. They’ve dressed her in a simple white shift. She still looks stern, resolute, like she carries some sort of huge invisible weight. I would have hoped she’d be more relaxed in death. I wonder what kind of afterlife she’s in now. I hope there are no birds of any kind in it.
I feel like I should say something to her, this woman who saved my life twice, who gave up her own life for mine. The words won't come, though. I come back each day for three days, smelling of Kruk, walking stiffly down the long halls of the Bane, nodding to the guards at her door, sitting quietly in the old chair next to her.
Until at last they do. They pour out of me, finally. A torrent of regrets and apologies. I hold her small, soft hand in my own and I talk to her quietly, this girl I ignored and never really took the chance to know, with my throat thick and my eyes wet, until there is no more that I can say and so I say it all over again.
Her body, of course, says nothing.
And in my dreams, she is just around the next turn in the tunnel. She is down the next set of crumbling stairs. There, behind that statue.
When I look, though, there’s nothing there but feathers.
44: Ercan
A few weeks after the reconstruction of the Tower begins, Blackwell approaches Ercan with something he’d like to do, and Ercan agrees without even thinking about it. Ercan’s hoping it’ll break the depression that hangs over Blackwell like a dark cloud. He offers to ride along too, and after thinking about it for a bit Blackwell agrees. “It’s off lei,” Blackwell says. “You think you can rough it a little?”
“I can manage. How long since you’ve been back?” Ercan asks.
Blackwell considers. “Ten years. Eleven, maybe.” He shakes his big head, ashamed at something. His voice is quiet, almost a whisper, and Ercan struggles to reconcile this Blackwell, the quiet and troubled one, with the Blackwell he’d met in the desert, the Beast who’d blown apart a ship full of Akarii Retrievers.
Ercan claps him on the shoulder. The Kruk handle the ordering, and when it all arrives they pack it into one of Capone’s trucks: boxes of food and spices, a good generator and spare fuel, seeds and farming tools, and cases of wine from one of Ercan’s vineyards. They go alone. Ercan drives. They head down out of the cliffs, through the Fan, into some back alle
y in the Old City, where Blackwell stretches and strains at the mouth of a trash can until, amazingly, it’s big enough to get the truck through.
Ercan pulls slowly into the tunnel and Blackwell rides on the hood pointing the way. It’s dark here, foggy. Ercan switches on the headlights, but it doesn’t help. Blackwell sniffs the air, makes gestures with his hands, and when finally the fog starts to clear Ercan sees they’re on a wide dirt path running through tall pines.
While outwardly he keeps his face expressionless, inwardly Ercan frowns at what he sees when they pull through what must be a village. Old, grey Hulgliev sit listlessly in chairs outside low, rounded domes that Blackwell says are kivas, houses that are sunk into the ground. Some of them smoke pipes, staring vacantly at the truck as it pulls by them. All of them look thin and tired, he thinks, ready to die. Trash is strewn around the edges of the village, and wood smoke from some small fires moves listlessly back and forth in the air as if unsure of which way to rise. A few small gardens are littered with weeds, leaves blackened by frost. From one standing tree at the edge of the village street hangs the gutted carcass of a deer, covered with flies.
“You should stay in the truck,” Blackwell tells him quietly. “We’re not big on outsiders.”
So Ercan watches through the windshield as Blackwell steps from the craft and walks slowly into the village. One by one, he sees the older Hulgliev sit up straight, sniff in Blackwell’s direction. Their faces light up then, and they rise from their chairs, approaching Blackwell hesitantly as if reluctant to believe he’s really there.
They reach out to Blackwell and take his hand.
They touch his shoulders and his arms and his back wonderingly as if reassuring themselves.
They marvel over the flower on his arm.
Slowly, one by one as though their faces aren’t used to this human expression, they break into grins and then open smiles. They show their teeth, but not in a threatening way.
He is their own Blackwell come back to them. He’s come home at last.
Ercan sees dark tear tracks on the dusty fur of their faces as the men crowded around Blackwell, and while he can’t see Blackwell’s face, Ercan doesn’t need to. He saw the tension in the thick, high muscles of his neck and shoulders, the awkward way he had approached the other Hulgliev. And he sees now the way his fur has gone warm and brown the way his shoulders have slumped and relaxed as the Hulgliev encircle him. He sees the way Blackwell reaches out with the arm that’s not in the sling and draws each creature to him.
The Hulgliev touch their old, grey foreheads to Blackwell’s and they speak words that Ercan can’t hear, but he can guess at their meaning.
Together, the Hulgliev unload and divide the cargo. The men exclaim over the tools, smell the spices, open some of the wine by hitting the neck of the bottles against some rocks and pour it back into their jaws.
Blackwell helps each of the old creatures in turn carry packages and bottles down into their own kivas. As they’re finishing up, an ancient Human dressed in swirled, brightly colored clothes that a Kruk might like comes down from a house set back in the woods. He’s assisted by two servants who may have been even older, and he and Blackwell speak for a long while.
Ercan debates, briefly, going out to meet the man, but he decides to give Blackwell his space.
Ercan can’t hear their voices, but he can see the old man’s eyes glisten in the light of the rising moons. They speak for a long time, and finally he put his arms around Blackwell and holds him.
45: Blackwell
When Sartosh at last let’s me go, the winds are starting to pick up. The Merchant’s Moon is setting and the little Dancer’s Moon is rising, and my feet don’t want to take me where I know I need to go. The kiva at the far end of the row, set off a little from the rest of the group. It’s no different from the others, really, and I’m surprised at how small it looks. Small and faded and old, its masonry crumbling and flaking off into red piles of dust.
I climb carefully down the rickety wooden ladder through the hole in the roof. It’s dark down here, lit only by the sun slanting in through the small hole and the low flame on the hearth. It smells thickly of khar leaf smoke and the dark loam of the dirtnest.
My aunt is in her chair by the fire, and she doesn’t turn as I enter.
All I can see is the back of her head. There is an untouched tray of food and drink on the floor by her feet.
“Auntie,” I say. A curl of leaf smoke lifts up from her pipe and curls around her head in the still air. “Clarinda, I…”
“So you’re the fucking hero now.” Her voice is thick and phlegmy around the vowels of the High Tongue. She doesn’t look at me. “You bring some cast-off food from the big city to your poor little village and expect to be worshipped, like all is made right in the world now. I’m sure those old idiots out there fawned all over you, didn’t they.”
I jerk as if I’ve been struck. My face hardens and my nostrils flare, and what fur I have that’s not burned off goes black. “I had no such expectations.”
“So why are you here?”
“I’ve come back to see my people, Clarinda. My tribe. I’ve come to help if I can, at least a little.”
“Your tribe?” My aunt huffs. “Your tribe! You left us a long time ago, nephew. You’re off running around the world chasing stories. Your ‘tribe’ has worked the fields each and every day. They have gone into the woods to hunt, and up to the Bakarh’s house to grovel and beg for his charity. A ‘tribe’ stays together, nephew. It has no place for someone who turns his back and runs away. Where were you when the frosts came each year? Where were you when the plantings needed to be done, when the well went dry, when the treecats broke through the new fencing and slaughtered thirteen of our hens on one night? It’s not like those cities you like so much, nephew. We work for our livelihood out here. Don’t talk to me about ‘tribe’.”
I sigh. I had been hoping for something, whether I had admitted it to myself or not. I realize I should have known better. “I have something to show you, Clarinda.”
I unwrap Te’loria from my arm and lay it on the floor of the kiva between us. The low sound of it seems to echo in the small room, a quiet hum that draws strength from the earthen walls and floor, from the rounded shape of the ceiling, the way a spark will catch strength from tinder and begin to burn warm and red.
“I have no interest in your toys,” my aunt says. But as the hum of the flower reverberates around her small room she turns her head, and then she slowly worked her way up out of her chair.
She is tiny, I realize, when she turns toward me at last. Small and ancient, gnarled with an arthritic stiffness that makes me wonder if she ever leaves her kiva now. How had she grown so old? Her fur is patchy and matted, and in places where her hide shows through it’s scabby and peeling. Her tunic is stained down the front with weeks-old food. Her teeth are yellow and black from the khar, and her wide eyes are bloodshot and red as they stare down at the flower.
She sets her pipe down and places one hand on her chair for balance, and she lowers herself to her knees next to Te’loria. She reaches out one hand tentatively toward the stem and pauses. She seems to be considering something. And then she grasps the flower in her arthritic claw and lifts it slowly in the air before her and watches it glitter and spark in the light from the hearth.
Her breathing is fast and shallow. She has eyes only for the flower, and she turns it first one way and then another, studying it from each angle, noting the intricate shimmers of the layers of the folded metal stem, the leaves, the living jewel of the blossom.
At last she puts it down and works her way back to standing. She turns away from me again to stare at the fire. “You are deeply evil to bring this here, sister-son,” she says at last. Her voice is low and fierce.
“Evil, Auntie?”
She spins on me, her bloodshot eyes on mine for the first time. Her face is twisted up with rage and she spits at me. “You have no understanding, Blackwell. You
have never known how much we ran, how much we hid, and how it felt when we were discovered again and again and hunted down by those world stealers. What’s left of our tribes now? My dear husbands, my sister, my own glorious son?”
She spits again into the dirt. “With this flower, I could have stood between all of us and destruction! If I were younger, I could have raised such an army of our people that I would have torn their heads from their puny bodies, ripped down their towns, burned their very cities to the ground around them.
“This was our world, Blackwell. Our world first, our world always. Every Human, every Stona, every dirty frog and Kruk have stolen this from us and with this one tool I could have taken it back.
“And you stand there clueless and preening, and you lay this weapon at my feet. You want me to tell you how brilliant or insightful or mighty you must have been to find it?” She makes a slashing gesture with her hand in my direction, claws extended, as if to slice off my head. “You can think again. So what are your plans for this mighty weapon, then, Blackwell? What will you do with this great flower?” Her voice is dripping with scorn.
Her words sting. I open my mouth to speak, and realize I don’t actually know what I’ll do with it.
She turns back to the fire. “As I expected. If you were truly mighty, sister-son, you would stand up for your true heritage and you would drive all of these world-stealers back to where they came from. You would unite our people and make a war that the Hulgliev could be proud of.
“But I know better what to expect from you, Blackwell. You’re a dreamer and a failure. Mark my words, you will squander this thing that has come to you. You will be hunted down and they will kill you, and there may be no one left to pick up after you, and this great tool will fall into someone else’s hands. And the Hulgliev will pass from this world through the wells and will never be seen again. So yes, Evil. You mock me to my face with my own people’s destruction. My brother named you well. Blackwell. Dark death. Little cunt.”