Shower of Stones

by Zachary Jernigan

His words were not, despite the evidence of his own eyes and hands, for the dead. He concentrated and projected them in a simple but taxing extension of will, broadcasting on a wavelength he alone had discovered, a wavelength unheard by anyone except the five ones caught in between, those unique souls who lingered in the spaces between life and death.

  Souls who, for many millennia, he had believed were constructs of his own madness.

  “Sisters. Brothers,” he said. “This is the thing I would not admit aloud until now, but with the world on the brink of death, it seems a good time to unburden myself—of delusion, perhaps, though if I’m to be honest (and why shouldn’t I be?), I know there is no perhaps, no maybe. There is no delusion, only truth. Or rather, I should say madness and truth. In each of the lives I live, in each of the voices of the past I let overtake me, your voices are clear. You are a constant, even in the madness I’ve allowed root. Your voices grow weak. They fade in and out, but they’re always here.”

  He laid his left palm flat upon his chest. His right fist closed, and slowly his smile faded.

  “You might wonder, why is it that brother has never spoken to us before—why has he not sought to make contact with us? It’s a good question, for which I have no proper answer other than cowardice. I died with you, and then woke to bury you. Some contact wounds, and never heals. You may as well ask why I’ve avoided Adrash. Fear. Fear of what you’ve each become in the absence of your bodies. I know myself, even when I’m not myself, for that person is only myself in a different guise, living another life. I do this so that I avoid absolute madness.

  “And yet I do not—cannot—know you. Not any longer. I am a body, and you are … I don’t know what you are. Besides, it’s been too long. I’ve forgotten too much. I’ve chosen to be alone, and grown used to it. Being alone is easier than having a family. When you have a family, you are responsible to each other. It’s easier to navigate the world without that burden. Why should I be the one to live with it? Why must I be the eldest?”

  He sighed, shook his head. That last note of petulance, he wished he could take it back, reword it. It was too late in his long life to express such things, even to the wind. Every word—he should not have spoken any of it. There was too much to say, and he was failing to communicate any of it.

  A northerly wind flowed over the rooftop, and he shivered.

  “Listen to me,” he said, disliking the weak sound of his voice. The act of projecting, of summoning ancient words and buried sentiment, had exhausted him. And he still had not voiced the most important of what must be voiced. He disliked entreaties.

  “Listen to me,” he repeated, nearing a whisper now. “Look at the sky tonight, and know there is need for us yet. Yes, even as we are, mad and lost and even half rejoicing in what has occurred. We stood together once. We can do so again.”

  He closed his eyes, breathing deeply for the space of twenty doubled heartbeats.

  “Please. Help me keep the world alive.”

  ‡

  He listened, growing colder and more convinced of his foolishness as the moon and shattered sky passed slowly overhead. Less than an hour went by, yet it felt like three. When he finally admitted defeat and stood, his joints creaked. A new weight had settled into his bones. He suffered a moment of lightheadedness and wondered—were he a normal man, if the moment would have inspired suicide. Perhaps it was the perfect time to pitch himself from the roof.

  If he were a normal man, release would have been just that easy.

  Not for the first time, he considered the curses placed upon him.

  The first:

  To be so unreasonably loyal to mankind, knowing what he knew of its members. Their pettiness and greed, their pretensions of greatness. He had suffered more of their failures and fought in more of their wars than Adrash had, yet he was the one who could not fail to sympathize with them, to want more for them. Oh, he had killed many of their number (just as often in joy as anger, truthfully), but this was no contradiction. Humanity existed as a mass, and only exceptionally as individuals.

  And individuality? This was his second curse:

  To be alone. To think on the scale of a god, and have no other gods except the ones that had abandoned you. To have known how it feels not to be alone, and to have squandered it.

  He considered aloneness as he descended from the rooftop and entered the games hall from which he ran his new territory. The air was warm inside, but not uncomfortably so. Despite the number of men and women gathered in friendly competition, it was not loud. People greeted him, though not warmly. They tried—they always tried—but he was simply too intimidating, too alien, looking nearly like a man without at all being a man. Furthermore, he was their leader. He moved among them like a predator, with odd grace for such a large person.

  “Shav,” said Laures, his first lieutenant, a woman chosen for her intelligence, but also for the fact that she rarely spoke more than his name. It amused him slightly, the fact of her faith: she worshipped the goddess Ustert. If only she knew what kind of creature his sister had been, how dependent she had been upon her twin, perhaps she would not be so warmly inclined. Usterti believed all the wrong things about their goddess. They had robbed her of her love, made her into a solitary creature.

  He nodded to her on his way out the front door.

  Into the street, peaceful again. He looked either direction and set off south, intending to inspect the barricades …

  ‡

  And fell to his knees.

  Out in the night, closer than he could have imagined, a voice spoke—a voice he recognized instantly—a coincidence too extraordinary given where his mind had only just passed.

  Vedas Tezul, it said.

  Shavrim toppled onto his side and shook violently upon the ground, struggling against the shock to his body and mind. He fought to order his thoughts, to respond before the connection was severed, but before any true headway could be made a second coincidence announced itself, its voice fainter than the first but equally distinct after so many thousands of years.

  Churls Casta Jons, it said.

  “I … I …” Shavrim stuttered, jaws cramping and jumping. “I … will … will …” He bit down hard, speaking through gritted teeth. “Find … you.”

  ‡

  He received no confirmation that either had heard. He lay immobilized in the street until early morning, when his lieutenant Laures found him and dragged him inside. She said nothing. He stared up at her as she struggled with his awkward weight. He would not thank her, yet a portion of his mind felt gratitude, though not for her current efforts: perhaps thinking of her faith had allowed his mind to open just enough to let his sibling’s voices in.

  I am coming, bother, he thought. I am coming, sister. We will be together soon. We will seal our fate, as a family.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE 10TH TO 13TH OF THE MONTH OF SECTARIANS THE NEUAA SALT FLATS TO DANOOR, THE REPUBLIC OF KNOS MIN

  After the sun set, Churls shaved her head with his razor. She considered why she did it and arrived at no answer. She had never been one for symbols. Her hair had been short enough for the purpose, already.

  Afterwards, she cut a long rectangle of fabric from a sheet and wound it around her sinuous torso, flattening her breasts before fastening on a tight, stiff leather vest and back scabbard.

  Another almost unnecessary act: her breasts were small enough, as they were.

  She sneered at her face in the monastery’s one mirror, a vanity item she had been surprised to find in the building’s cellar, and wiped at a bead of blood on her scalp.

  Her reflection unnerved her. Nearly a week spent in bed recovering from from her injuries, followed by two weeks of waiting for her daughter to bring back good news from the city, had resulted in a visible change in her appearance. Her arms and thighs were thinner than she preferred. The freckles on her cheeks and shoulders, typically a near-solid mass of brownish red, had faded to a speckling.

  She pulled on the pair of the
rough woolen pants she had found in an alcove. They were looser than she preferred, binding in odd places. Why could men not fashion pants that fit properly?

  The back of her neck began tingling.

  “You can come in now, Fyra,” she said.

  Her daughter sharpened into existence at Churls’s side, colored all in shades of white but for the pale blue of her eyes. She stood to within a few inches of her mother’s shoulder, and had not been alive for well over a decade.

  She screwed her features into a grimace. “It looks … bad. And it’s bleeding in the back.”

  “Forgive my clumsiness,” Churls said. “I had a beard when I was your age, but it fell out when I had you. As a result, I’m a bit rusty at all this.” She met the girl’s unimpressed gaze and fought to keep the hope from showing on her own features. “You’re sure you’ve got a fix on them? You’re sure—about all three of them?”

  Fyra nodded. “For the third time, mama, yes. I’ll lead you right to them. If you want, I can …”

  Churls buckled her belt. “I don’t want. To quote you: for the third time, no. Also, to repeat myself, we have no idea what will happen to you if you’re attacked by whatever sort of mage Fesuy’s hired to shield Vedas and Berun from sight.” Not to mention keeping you at a long arm’s length, she did not add. “It’s enough that I let you scout. I won’t risk putting you in the midst of a fight with someone that strong.”

  She caught the slight upturning at the corners of the girl’s mouth. “And yes, that means I just admitted you’re very strong. Still, you’re not as strong as your mother. Not in the same way. And you’re definitely not as mean. I won’t hear any more about it.”

  Her daughter said no more. A surprise. Churls had expected a rebuttal.

  She felt grateful, but also slightly awkward about the exchange. Their banter, a thing that had only started in the absence of Vedas and Berun, seemed to proceed naturally enough between them—as it should have for a mother and daughter alone, surely—yet Churls could not escape the fact of its novelty. She and Fyra had never talked that way while the girl lived. She doubted its authenticity. Furthermore, to speak so casually inspired a sense of disloyalty. She could not sustain a constant state of worry over her missing companions, but suspected she should at least make the attempt.

  Fyra cleared her throat. Made a throat-clearing sound, anyway.

  “You’re crying, mama.”

  Churls wiped her eyes with a tattooed forearm. “Shit,” she whispered. She breathed deeply into her stomach. “Fyra. You will not accompany me. I do this alone. Do what you like for me now, but you don’t set foot beyond these walls. I need you to say you understand me.”

  To her credit, the child did not immediately agree. Churls approved.

  “I understand, mama,” Fyra said, “and I mean it this time. I won’t leave. But first, you need to promise me something. Something big.”

  “What?”

  “You need to keep your promise. You need to tell him about me. About us.”

  Churls tipped her head back to stare at the bare rock ceiling. The room suddenly seemed too close, crowded, as if the dead had gathered at her daughter’s word. To hear Churls’s answer.

  “You don’t know what you’re asking,” she said. “There’s no war against Adrash. Vedas failed to rouse anything but ire and violence. His speech threw the world into discord.”

  She pointed heavenward, gesturing beyond the tonnage of stone separating them from the wrecked night sky. “He damned us all, and you know what, girl? I don’t care, because in the end he was right. We’ve been living under threat for too long, cowed and in denial. If we all die in flames, we all die in flames, and there’s nothing to be done. Not by you, not by me. I just want him back, and I’m going to get him back. Him and Berun. Beyond that? You can’t make me care beyond that—not right now.”

  Fyra’s hands tightened into fists at her hips.

  “You lied to me.”

  Churls’s head dropped. A growl built low in her throat. Suddenly, the seven-hour hike to the city seemed like an interminable delay. She wanted everything over and done. She would see everything over and done, and then she would think.

  She spoke slowly, carefully. “I’m not saying I won’t tell him, Fyra. I’m just saying it’ll make no difference if I do.” She looked up, offered the girl a weak smile neither of them believed. “Now, please, do what you’re going to do to help your mother save the day, alone, and then do nothing else.”

  For a moment, Churls thought her daughter would refuse, but the girl merely rolled her eyes and stepped forward into Churls, filling her with warmth and light.

  ‡

  The Nehuaa Salt Falts comprised nearly half of the area of northwestern Knos Min. The flat, featureless landscape had once been the bed of an inland sea scholars called Littleshallow, and now provided salt for an entire continent. A rainless, lifeless, maddeningly uninteresting terrain, it seemed the whole of the world when one traveled upon it. Any destination rose out of the cracked white floor as though floating, mountains and cities alike standing still in the vague distance, never growing any closer until one gratefully stumbled into them.

  Twenty miles of this landscape lay between the monastery and Danoor.

  Churls barely registered the distance or the time it took to cross it. She did not look behind her once to see the hills ringing the monastery fade into the night. She barely looked at the city before her. She ran, legs solid yet spring-light beneath her, losing herself easily in the rhythm of feet hitting earth. The quietly rational part of her mind worried what Fyra had done in order to allow her access to such an immense reservoir of energy—worried what the wage would be when it inevitably ran out, and whether or not she should have saved it for later—but she easily silenced it.

  Too easily, she reasoned, and dismissed this too with a smile.

  Her fear, a thing she had barely allowed a voice. Erased entirely.

  Her annoyance at being forced into a concession, posing as a man. Gone.

  Point in fact, she had not felt this good in a long time, certainly not since Vedas and Berun’s abduction. In her current state, she found it surpassingly simple to absolve herself of the guilt she had given free rein for the last month.

  It had not been her fault, the ambush. She could not have prevented it, given her knowledge at the time.

  Her anger had fled, as well. Berun had been right to swat her across the room—an action that knocked her unconscious while simultaneously depositing her behind a row of crates. She had not appreciated how quickly the constructed man came to his conclusion and acted to keep her from being taken as well.

  Of course, no one liked waking up alone, abandoned in a dangerous city with a shattered clavicle and a row of broken ribs. A twenty-mile walk back to safe shelter would not help, either.

  No wonder Fyra did not like being ordered to stay away. She had sobbed (rather, made the ghost motions of sobbing) when Churls collapsed at the top of the hill overlooking the monastery. Churls had nearly killed herself by walking so far with such injuries.

  “You should’ve called to me, Mama,” the girl had said. “I would’ve heard. You make me so angry.”

  Churls grinned at the memory. Damn, but she was enjoying herself.

  The euphoria lasted until the moment she entered the city’s outskirts and forced herself to a walk: an act that was like stopping a massive grinding wheel with bare hands, or swimming against a swiftly-flowing river. A sense of sadness overcame her, as of an opportunity lost. She could have kept going, cutting around the city, running until exhaustion overcame her. There she would have collapsed, succumbing to sleep without worry …

  “Stupid useless fucking …” she whispered, feeling like a fool.

  The moon and scattered spheres of The Needle loomed full in the west, casting ample light into the deserted streets. When she had last passed through this part of the city, there were still people about, but now the buildings at the outskirts of Danoor stoo
d abandoned—that, or the people who lived in the low, red clay residences were keeping quiet, lights out.

  She kept to the shadowed side of the street, moving deeper into the city, drawn without pause toward the target Fyra had planted in her mind. She unsheathed her short, dull sword and gripped the blade near the hilt for balance.

  It felt good in her hand, warming to her touch quickly, as though coming to life.

  She found herself grinning again, and realized she had been humming.

  “Kill Rhythm,” Battle March of the Third Castan Infantry.

  ‡

  The guard tried to scream. His tongue flicked through his teeth, pressing wet and warm against her palm. She clamped her hand tighter to his mouth as his life flowed down the front of his shirt. His struggles slowed, stopped, and she lowered him gently to the ground.

  She admired the small ceramic knife in her hand—it had been the guard’s only a few seconds ago, before she slipped it from his hip sheath and used it to slit his throat—and decided to keep it. She would finish Fesuy with her own sword, but the thought of using a Tomen weapon to strike the first blow struck her as poetically sound, appropriately disrespectful.

  A quick circuit around the house revealed no further guards, a fact which confirmed her impression of Fesuy Amendja. The man was arrogant, stupidly so. After the risky maneuver of leaping over the heavily-sentried barricade (an act that seemed to have cost her the last of Fyra’s imparted vitality), she had encountered few men and even fewer women, all but three of whom she had been able to avoid. Those three had died easily.

  Though the sun still sat a half hour below the horizon, to have so few people about in a contested area seemed appallingly neglectful.

  She picked the front door lock and entered the darkened two-storey building, dragging the dead guard with her.

  Immediately, she felt it. The muscles of her jaw suddenly tingled, as though she had bitten into a lemon. The sensation built until it was an ache, which quickly spread throughout the bones of her skull into a steady, pounding throb. Her knees nearly gave out, but she leaned her back against the door and rode out the worst of it. Surely, whatever Fyra had done to her caused an increased sensitivity to whatever magics were in the building.