Etherwalker

by Cameron Dayton

  So Enoch had no other choice but to offer them solitude or death. All of them chose death. No matter how incoherent, how insane—every specter had an animal longing to finally, at long last, die rather than hang in solitude. They left a trail of silent, windblown corpses behind them.

  As night fell, and a cooling wind began to stir, Enoch staggered to a halt. Sera gasped to see dark lines running from his ears, down his neck, and staining his vest. It was blood. Dried blood.

  “Water,” he croaked, and Sera hurried from G’Nor’s back to bring him her skin—his hung empty at his side. He lifted it to his lips and drank deeply, then held it back to her. “I think . . . I think I’ll stop here.”

  With that, he collapsed to the ground and slept. Sera pulled him up against a silent girder and called G’Nor over to help her unpack the tent. They made camp there, among the dark, metal trees. The sand was warm enough to sleep comfortably, especially after days of soggy marsh, and neither felt safe lighting a fire. Enoch hadn’t moved since they laid him between them, with G’Nor at the mouth of the tent. Even Mesha seemed to know that there was no hunting here—she curled up on Enoch’s chest, her fur as gray as the sand, and scowled. Sera gave the shadowcat a piece of meat and then shared a dry meal with G’Nor as the stars came out.

  “We can’t hope to continue like this for much longer,” she said, partly to herself and partly to the large beast breathing softly at her side. “Even if we had enough food, Enoch is killing himself.”

  She could see G’Nor’s signed response silhouetted against the stars through the open tent flap. He told her that Enoch had found his vigil and must be allowed to see it through. Sera shook her head.

  “People are not Ur’lyn. And Enoch is more than this. There is more to what he can do than killing these sad relics. And every begging, pleading specter that he kills takes something from him. I’m watching the light go out of his eyes.”

  G’Nor thought for a while, then exhaled with a growl. His forepaw made three simple movements.

  “No,” said Sera. “I don’t believe he was born to kill. He has a different destiny than that.”

  And with that, she laid her head back against Enoch’s shoulder. Mesha sniffed at her hair and then turned over, preferring to sleep away from the interloper. Soon the slow, easy sounds of slumber were all that could be heard.

  Chapter 22

  “The glory of the world is in the patterns, in music and war and love.

  Thus music, and war, and love combine in a pattern that glorifies all of the world.”

  —Pensanden chiasmus

  Enoch awoke to Sera’s gentle nudging. His head still ached from the dark, heavy work of the day before, but a night of deep sleep had helped. He sat up and rubbed at his eyes, then gratefully took the skin of water Sera offered him. The sun was already up and gently warming the eastern side of the tent.

  “G’Nor left at dawn,” said Sera, nodding towards the open front of the tent.

  Enoch felt stupid for not having noticed the absence of the giant predator, but he decided to forgive himself a little fogginess after a day spent killing specters.

  Sera’s voice had a softness in it, a concern that he’d never heard before. She leaned over and brushed something off the side of his neck in a way that Enoch imagined could be considered “motherly.” Enoch was comforted by the gesture, but he found himself wondering if he really wanted her to feel that way towards him.

  “He signed that he scented water—that we need water if we are going to continue like this.” Here she took a small swig from the skin, barely a mouthful, before pushing the stopper back in and swinging the bag around her back. Enoch just nodded, still feeling cloudy-headed and strangely distant.

  Wake up. Focus. Another day of killing.

  He rubbed his eyes again and crawled from the tent, then helped Sera fold it up into a portable size. Without G’Nor here, he would have to carry the canvas packet. It wasn’t that heavy, but he knew that over time the walking and direct sunlight would make the weight oppressive. Luckily one of the straps that bound the tent could be slung over his shoulder, allowing Enoch to carry it like a satchel. He adjusted the strap so that it rested snugly against his vest and turned to face the path.

  The nearest girders were empty, stretching on up the ridged dune in front of them. There was an odd randomness in the placement of the specters, sometimes heavily clumped in row after row, and sometimes spaced apart. Enoch realized that this was why he had stopped last night—his mind had been searching for a pattern in the placement of the impaled creatures and had determined—correctly—that this would be a good empty stretch. Enoch peered into his afila nubla and found the pattern: the bodies were placed in a representation of the mathematical constant pi. The impaled group counted as a number, and the empty girders represented every other number. So the first three girders had been occupied, then one left empty, then four occupied, then another empty, then five occupied—3.1415 and so on. Yesterday had ended on a long stretch of nine corpses and finished with what appeared to be a comfortable space of seven naked girders. With the even, syncopated spacing of these sand-brushed steel teeth, that meant that the night had passed beyond the shouting distance of whichever specter awaited them over the top of the dune. And, if this pattern held true, it would be a single occupied girder followed by another empty set of six.

  Let’s just hope that whatever circularly-obsessed madman has created this pattern is willing to stop at the 40th decimal place. I’ve got a few nines on the road to 50 . . .

  “You’re . . . smiling?”

  Sera had come up beside him while he was lost in thought, and her face held an expression halfway between amused and worried.

  Enoch blinked his eyes and blushed. Was I really smiling about pi?

  Sera walked around to face Enoch, placing her hands on his shoulders. The amusement was now entirely replaced by concern.

  “Enoch?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing, I . . . I just found this pattern in the specters and—” He looked down at his feet, unsure of how to describe this. He shrugged and ran a hand through his hair—releasing a surprising cascade of sand that seemed to be timed perfectly with an errant gust of wind. Sera took a step back, sputtering, wings spread in alarm. It was too much for Enoch—he started laughing.

  Sera blinked the sand out of her eyes. Enoch tried to cover his mouth, but after a moment she joined in laughing. Enoch imagined that it was the first time that such sounds had echoed off these gray dunes in centuries.

  The laughing angel brushed a tear from her eye, and Enoch had a worried thought about water conservation. This only generated further paroxysms of laughter that left him winded.

  Sera finished before him and tried to pull a serious face. “Ok, ok. If we’re done laughing, it might be smart to put our minds towards surviving this trek through the desert.”

  Enoch tried to stifle the last few giggles that bubbled up from his chest.

  “I’m sorry,” he gasped, the words trailing up as he fought to gain control of himself. “I . . . I just . . . it just feels so good to laugh.”

  She nodded.

  “Of course it does. Things have been pretty grim for a while—it’s nice to remember that we are still kids.” She brushed some of the sand off of his vest. “I mean, it’s nice to remember that you’re still a kid.”

  He smiled, noticing that this conversation was the first one in a while that he’d had with Sera where he didn’t feel awkward. Maybe we are really starting to become friends now. Maybe I don’t have to worry about whether or not she likes me.

  Sera, as though guessing his thoughts, smiled and shrugged, stretching her one functional wing to its full extent. Enoch found the gesture to be incredibly charming and expressive. Not wanting to ruin the moment, he tightened his lips into a pragmatic line and turned to survey the road ahead.

  “As I was saying before you started acting childish, there is a pattern at work here. Whoever is responsible for placing the s
pecters here is doing so in a numbered sequence, a mathematical constant that represents the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.”

  He looked up to see Sera rolling her eyes.

  “Are you really trying to explain simple geometry to an angel? To someone who has been tailored with an innate sense of shape, distance, and perspective?”

  Enoch was blushing. Luckily, Sera took pity on him.

  “But no, I didn’t catch the pattern.”

  Not sure what to think about that, he decided to plow on ahead.

  “It means that whatever mind is behind this corpse path is one familiar with numbers. With patterns. It’s a mind I can figure out—maybe a mind I can defeat.”

  “Well,” said Sera, “you may have some idea of how the mind works, but you have no idea what kind of fangs, claws, and muscle lays at its command.” She pointed up the road. “We should probably get moving and trust that our fangs, claws, and muscle get back from their hunting trip before we find out.”

  Enoch nodded and started taking down the tent. Mesha hissed and tumbled out of the collapsed canvas, furious to have her morning nap interrupted. Enoch just smiled and lifted her onto his shoulder, immediately regretting the decision as she shared her opinion of him with slowly retracting claws. Satisfied at his wincing and sharp intake of breath, she gave a short sigh and curled around his neck like a furry scarf.

  “At least we’ve got our backup claws with us until then.”

  * * * *

  The numbers proved to be true. The pattern continued in sequence, and the happy sense of discovery began to be replaced with a feeling of foreboding. It is one thing to deal with cold numbers—another thing entirely when the numbers are raving souls hung in the desert sun by some mad design. Enoch and Sera’s cheer soon dwindled and evaporated with the heat. G’Nor did not return. The water disappeared quickly.

  And then they found Rictus.

  He was at the tail end of the line of nine completing the 50th place of the sequence. Enoch had stopped looking too closely at the specters since it made his task more difficult—especially when dealing with the quiet ones. Rictus was quiet. It wasn’t Sera’s hand on his shoulder that caused him to look up; it was her sharp intake of breath.

  “What . . . is this one doing?”

  Rictus had his bare face lifted to the sun, arms spread and legs hanging limp and motionless. The specter’s toothy mouth was open, his back arched, and he appeared to be frozen in the final gasp of a lightning strike victim.

  At first Enoch feared that he might have already pushed the specter, his mind dazed from the sun, thirst, and a morning of killing the dead. He stumbled towards the base of the pillar and banged the side of his fist against the hot metal. “Rictus, no.”

  Sera gasped. “Enoch? Is this . . . ?”

  But then Rictus’s right arm windmilled around in an arc and rested against the spike protruding from the center of his chest. Sera let out a cry of surprise.

  Enoch looked up. “Rictus?”

  The specter’s fingers were moving now. They were sliding through an odd sequence of straight and curled gestures, rhythmically—a rhythm that his head began to nod to as well.

  Enoch took a step back. Still nodding his head, Rictus opened his eyes and windmilled his arm around again.

  “Ok, that was the longest air guitar solo of my life. Little help, Shepherd Boy?”

  * * * *

  The hole in Rictus’s chest had already begun to close by the time Enoch and Sera got him to his feet, the nanites from his LifeBeat working furiously to fix the previously irreparable damage with an intensity that turned the visible metal cables running through his ribcage bright red with expended heat. Enoch tried to fill Rictus in on all that had transpired since that horrible battle under Babel, his time with the King, and the discovery of G’Nor and Sera. They wept over the loss of Cal and were silent for a long while after Enoch had finished.

  Sera was silent during the reunion, kindly recognizing that the two friends needed time to unwind their grief and sudden, unexpected joy at finding each other again. Kindness aside, Enoch noticed that she kept staring at Rictus’ wound, seemingly fascinated by the odd motion of rippling, steaming flesh that writhed across the specter’s chest.

  Rictus finally noticed the angel’s focus on the puckering wound as well and pointed at Enoch with a frown.

  “Your new friend here should know that it’s not polite to stare at a gentleman’s sucking chest wound.”

  Sera blushed and looked away.

  Rictus chuckled and held up his hand to the angel. “Enoch will tell you that my sense of shame rotted away years ago, miss. Not too long after I lost my ears, if memory serves.”

  She bit her lip and shook his hand with an apologetic nod. Enoch thought it was brave of her to shake hands with one of the raving ghouls they had just spent long hours destroying.

  “You’ve never seen nanotech biomolding at work?” said Rictus. “I assumed the angels would know about this sort of thing. Your kin should have pretty extensive records of it all—should be the few remaining folk around who couldn’t be surprised by remnant tech.”

  Sera frowned. “Most of our archives were destroyed when Koatul cut down the Spires. We’ve been trying to recover what we can ever since, but . . .” She fluttered her hands in frustration. “There is not much left that has not already been destroyed or corrupted. Any recovered disks must be blessed through a dozen cleansing ceremonies, and our Windroost only has one aging librarian.

  “But no, I haven’t seen nanotech like this. Your kind have grown scarce since years before I was born. That’s what the elders say.”

  Rictus looked beyond Sera, nodded towards the path of now-quiet pillars that disappeared into the distance. “I had always assumed that it was just the expired warranties, well, that and the gradual descent into suicidal madness. But when I saw what has been done here, how many of us have been hung out to dry here . . .” He turned to Enoch, teeth gritted.

  Mesha tightened her grip around his neck, sensing Rictus’s anger.

  “I think I’ve found my purpose, etherwalker. I know what you have been doing along this path, and I know it was a mercy. There is no saving my kind. But I can return a little vengeance on those who have caused this anguish.”

  Enoch heard something new in his friend’s voice. Resolve?

  “Who, Rictus? Who put you up here?”

  “The Swampmen?” said Sera, frowning.

  Rictus chuckled. “Oh no. Those soggy zealots couldn’t hold me captive for long—their poisons are less than effective against my nano.” He pinched the parchment skin on his cheek.

  “They ambushed me during a particularly moving ballad, which is unforgivable. It cost them four nets, seven arms, and a pair of lives before depositing me on the sand.”

  He paused to adjust his leather jacket, clucking his tongue as he emptied sand from the pockets. Enoch knew that Rictus was just drawing the tale out and rolled his eyes.

  Sera raised an eyebrow. “So how did you—”

  “Lose my guitar?” Rictus interrupted, frowning. “Swampmen took it. Dropped it in the damn swamp. That’s when I stopped lopping off arms and started really hurting them. They were able to get enough lassos around me to take my sword, too.”

  The angel realized she was being toyed with and decided to let it slide. Enoch liked that about her.

  She raised a finger, then sighed and lowered it. “So once you arrived in the desert, you noticed all your skinny friends were hanging from iron posts and decided to hop up and join them?”

  Rictus smiled and gave Enoch a lidless wink, a gesture the specter had mastered which involved an interesting choreography of brow and cheek muscles.

  “No ma’am. I was brought here by Váli.”

  It was an odd, foreign-sounding name, like something from a dead language.

  Sera just smiled and nodded. Waited.

  She can be patient through one of Rictus’s jokes. I like that.r />
  Rictus cleared his throat, realizing that the game was over. Which was good because Enoch had been through some of the hardest days of his life. His head hurt and he was thirsty. As happy as he was to see his friend alive—or at least mostly alive—this wasn’t the best time for light talk.

  “At least, the Swampmen call him Váli. They’ve got this thing for old Germanic names—something from before the machine times. The Germans thought their gods were messed-up whack jobs who could be selfish and lusty and violent. Not the perfect, loving gods we dreamed up afterward. The Swampmen feel like it was the all-powerful tek gods—your folks, Enoch—who ruined things. In fact, that and your friend’s pretty wings may be why they decided to bring you here for sacrifice rather than just killing you outright for crossing their sacred lands. Their hatred is like a holdout from the bad, old neo-luddite days after the Schism.”

  Rictus tapped at the box at his chest.

  “You’re lucky you didn’t have one of these. Anybody more . . . closely tied to tek from the fallen gods—say, someone kept alive by microscopic robots weaving organic polymers into their dying flesh—is given to Váli. He lives at the center of the desert, but he travels the Path of Agony whenever a new specter is delivered. I was his most recent ‘gift.’

  “Váli is a monster. That word doesn’t have as much meaning as it used to, back in my day. But even in a world thick with witches and manticores, he is terrifying. Váli is . . . something that the Swampmen revere. He is the sum total of all that they hold most sacred. Biology without restraint. Strength without steel.

  “And,” said Rictus, “I am going to kill him.”

  He pointed towards Enoch’s swords, ignoring the stunned look on his friend’s face.