Numenera

by Monte Cook

  Another beast pushes out of the darkness into the light. This one missing its belly. Everything else teeth and tail. Hindquarters that hunch and scrabble. Blue as Kyre’s light. Not furred, but spined and spiked.

  She is sure there are more coming. Rillent’s army. Destriatch. Crourhounds. Black beasts of meat and machine and murder.

  The first two start to scrabble up the slope. They’ve all gone silent. No howl. No song. Not even the rocks they stir up make noise when they fall. She sees they will be on the kid in a heartbeat. In a stride. In the opening of a maw.

  Catching shadows or silence or some other thing that should be there but is not, Kyre’s head cocks, angles, carries with it the long scope. First to the beasts, then to the boy. Then, dropping the launcher, up to her.

  Kyre is asking her a question that she does not have the answer to. She thought she would do anything to kill Rillent. But it turns out, she is not, as she thought, as she told her mother in her head, willing.

  “Kyre,” she yells, because she has no other choice, no other action that makes any sense to her. “Choose!”

  At her yell, the destriatch give up their silence, scrabbling faster, screaming their song of blood.

  At her yell, Rillent turns.

  At her yell, everything falls away.

  It’s as though she’s got the zoomshield down, but she knows she doesn’t. She remembers once, a long time ago, years ago surely, pushing it up. Because of purple. Not this purple. This is eyes. Rillent. So close. Irises, purpled. Big as moons. Bigger than her. Eating her up. She sees wolves in his eyes. Maws of bloodied teeth. Coming. No, here already. The skin of her face breaks and burns. Gores. Holes down to her bones. To her teeth. The cold of the air through her eaten skin.

  Welcome back, little one.

  “Out,” she means to say. “Get out of my skisting head.”

  He doesn’t go. He never does. She knows that everything is lost. Like it was lost so long ago. When she was small. And her mother was there-not there. Ghost mother. She misses her. Rillent will take care. He will take away the black bad. Bring back her mother. She wants that, doesn’t she? To see her mother again? Yes.

  Over Rillent’s silent voice, “Aviend. Look at me.”

  No. She won’t. She wants the promise in the moons. She wants one more day, one hour, one minute with her mother so she can say something important and true. Something that will not leave her with this hearthole.

  “Aviend.” Shaking her now, taking her away and she won’t go. She won’t.

  But she does, and there is Kyre’s face. His beautiful, not-Rillent face. His plain dark, not-Rillent eyes. Her mother falls away. The promises dissolve. The truth is here, in the broken dirt and the wolflily death cloy and the touch of Kyre’s hand to her face.

  “He caught me,” she says. “He…”

  “I know,” Kyre says. He is heart incarnate and she just wants to fall into his being, see only him, until she can forget the color purple forever.

  The boy is there too, behind Kyre. Hands and knees. Panting. His hand drips blood. The gash on his leg – what made him teeter his way up the slope – is giant. Gaping. “You chose,” she said.

  “I did,” he said.

  The right choice, she knows. Although it feels very much like the wrong one right now. He gives her a nod. He knows.

  “How long…?” did Rillent have his hold on her? It felt like seconds and eternities, all crumbled like an egg in a dangerous hand.

  “We have to go,” Kyre says. “They’re coming.”

  Not far now, the hounds, coming. Rake of nails and claw. Panting. Snarls. No more songs now. The time for singing and hunting is over. It is the time for the death and the destroy.

  “Yes,” she says. “You two. Take the ride.” The dispatcher will only take two of them to safety.

  She knows already that Kyre will say no. Not that the boy shouldn’t go. They’ve already brought the boy onboard. And what you asked of the philethis, you took from the philethis. But he would say that Aviend should go and he should stay. That she’s a liability with Rillent. Although that’s not how he’d put it.

  But they’d decided this already, all of them. If things went wrong, she would get Kyre out. Alone. If things went wrong, she was the contingency plan. If things went wrong, she was not supposed to leave this ledge until everything in front of her had died. Or she had.

  This time, it’s her choice and she’s already chosen it. She turns the device. Levels them both into the machine’s light.

  “I’ll meet you back at the base,” she says. “You know I will.”

  It’s the first promise to him she’s ever risked breaking in the very telling.

  And then she makes them both disappear.

  As Kyre flickers out, there’s movement. A small ceramic globe flies toward her. Aviend catches it, more instinct than skill. His detonation cypher.

  She starts laughing. He knew she’d catch it. He knew she’d send them off without her. Probably as soon as he saved the boy, he’d known. And he’d made a backup plan. She has never loved anyone so much in her life as she loves Kyre Makara right now.

  So. This is it. Her moment. She stands and fights and dies. Or she gets creative and finds a way to survive.

  Aviend bobs the ceramic ball up and down in her palm. Once. Twice.

  “Come on, you horrors!” she yells over the side of the crater.

  Then she waits.

  The destriatch climb, pack and hound, becoming one and many, swarming up the side. They’re working together, laddering over each other up the steepest parts. Un-slowing. Plowing up the incline toward her.

  She resists the urge to toss the cypher right the fuck now. She waits. A few feet. A few more. Her blood thumps in her ears, echoing the hound’s horrible song, their scrabble and howl.

  She holds until she can taste the electricity of the closest one on her tongue. Until she can practically feel its metal and meat breath against her hand.

  She lobs the detonation in the middle of them. Waits until she hears the tck-tck of the pre-explosion.

  And then she runs like hell.

  Traveling through space and time was never smooth, but this one was particularly bad. Kyre barely tossed the cypher off to Aviend before the edges of his body softened, stretched, snapped back with a whistling urgency. His knee barked on something in the dark – tree? rock? something else? He couldn’t tell. He hit it hard enough that it was sure to leave a bruise, but not so hard that it felled him. His stomach flipped upside down, then righted itself with such force he felt like something in there actually dislodged.

  But those things he’d come to expect. A hundred trials and you got used to losing the edges of your skin.

  It was the other pain that caught him off guard. The realization of what had just happened was only beginning to settle on him, a fine-powdered dust of mistake that could choke you if you let it. They’d failed. Rillent was still standing. Not just standing, but now he knew about them. They were still out here. Still alive. Hunting him down.

  And Aviend? He didn’t know. They’d never fought the destriatch before. He’d seen them, of course. But only in the beginning. Once, they’d been predators. Now they were something much, much worse. They’d become what everything became beneath Rillent’s hands. Death incarnate.

  He’d known Aviend would send him through the dispatcher the second she told him to choose, the second he’d known what his choice would be, had to be. He’d gotten her the cypher in time, but just barely. They hadn’t expected the destriatch. None of them had. Not at the kubric. So cypher or no, he wasn’t sure it was enough.

  It all came back to this: they’d failed. Chosen to fail, maybe, but that was still failure. Everyone’s work, gone. Their one hard-fought chance, gone. All of their planning, wasted. All of their equipment, used up or lost. He’d held on to the launcher through the climb and the dispatch, but the corrosion had eaten through most of it already. There was no saving it.

  And
the feeling he had no box for, no pretty words to disguise it with: relief. Relief that he was not a murderer, a killer. He was just a man. Himself. Unstained by someone else’s blood. Had he chosen right? Yes. No. He didn’t know. Not yet. Relief, followed by guilt and fear.

  Rillent had seen them. Or Aviend at least, and he hadn’t just seen her. He’d stepped into her mind as easily as he had back in the beginning. Kyre wasn’t sure which was scarier – knowing that despite all of her hard work, Aviend hadn’t been able to keep him out, or knowing that Rillent now knew they still existed, that they were still alive in the world. In the woods.

  They would have to face that later. First, he needed to get the boy safely to the base. Their loss was for nothing if the boy died out here. Then, he’d find Aviend. He hoped – such a bright and brutally thin hope – that she’d be back at the base waiting for him, for them. But he’d seen them, Rillent’s crourhounds. He’d heard them. Felt their murderous rage, embedded and nurtured by Rillent into a palpable thing. He would not lose Rillent and Aviend in a single night. He would not.

  Next to him, the sound of twigs breaking and then a low sound of released breath. A retch, quickly followed by another, deeper and more pained. It took some getting used to, traveling via device rather than by body or beast. And then to land here, camouflaged even from yourself.

  “Stay put,” Kyre said in the direction of the sound. “It’s just the effects of the dispatcher. We’ll have light in just a–”

  And there it was. Not light so much as reflection and amplification of what little light there was. But it was almost enough to see by.

  Beside him, the heaving figure on hands and knees took a shaky inhale.

  “Better?” Kyre asked.

  A nod that didn’t get a chance to finish, and then another, quieter round of retching welled up from the downed figure. Kyre’s own stomach, still roiling from everything that had happened in the last few minutes, threatened to join in. He pushed it back with a press of his glove.

  “Can you stand?” he asked, after it had been quiet for a few moments. “The reflector doesn’t last very long, and we need to get moving.”

  The boy pushed himself up. He wavered and nearly fell. Kyre reached out a hand and caught him. He’d expected the boy to pull away, but he leaned in, let the help come.

  The boy was something else. Not a boy at all. Not as Kyre had first thought. Just lean and hunched into himself and just young enough that he was still uncertain about where his bones belonged inside his skin. Old enough that he hadn’t been born inside Rillent’s trenches.

  He wore the clothing of one of Rillent’s trenchers though, black on black, dusted at the shoulders and the hems with the silver-hued powder that the mortar hawks spit out. Kyre’s dad had died in those colors; he would recognize them anywhere. Just like the heatsear behind his ear, which perfectly matched Kyre’s.

  A loop of black metal rested upon his neck and below that, a bit of leather or string that Kyre couldn’t make out. He’d been overworked and underfed, from the looks of the hollows below his cheeks, for a long time.

  He had a long slice along his neck that looked like it once went down slick to the bone. Recent enough, but not tonight’s foray into opening skin. That he’d reserved for his hand and his leg. The hand was the worst, once, but now it had settled into a slow drip of blood that wetted the earth beside his feet. It would keep until they got back to the base.

  What did worry him was the long gash running down from the outside of the boy’s knee nearly to his ankle, splitting his pants and his skin, wide enough in places that the flesh around it gaped open when he moved, revealing the mottled white and pink of sinew and fresh blood. That one would need some attention, and soon.

  The boy was shaking, but didn’t seem scared. Relieved, Kyre thought. Surprised to have made it out alive. And likely exhausted down to his bones. Rillent did that to you. To everyone. Until he killed you.

  “What are you called?” Kyre asked him, lowering his voice to softness and calm. The boy reminded him of a creature, startled awake by the light of a gun.

  “Quenn.” Not a note of the shake in his voice, even as his body rattled. He looked around, as if he was seeing his surroundings for the first time. They’d landed in the midforest, on the far west side of the Stere. It was the safest place they’d found for a landing – far enough from Rillent’s border patrols and kubrics that they wouldn’t be spotted. Far enough from the base that it wouldn’t draw anyone’s gaze there either. But that meant they were a hike from the base, and farther still from where Aviend was fighting for her life against a half dozen crourhounds.

  But you couldn’t tell from where they were standing. Here, it looked as if they were in an all-white room. Floor, ceiling, walls, even the whispering, wavering plants wore a sheen of alabaster…

  …which kind of matched Quenn’s eyes. Kyre thought Quenn might bolt, if he could only figure out how to get out of the illusion. The refraction was confusing, even for someone as experienced as Kyre. But it kept them from being seen. Not smelled or heard, but it was a start. One that would only last a matter of minutes.

  “I don’t know what’s going…” Quenn’s dialect was one that Kyre hadn’t heard in a long time, not since he was a kid. It swallowed the second syllables of the words, turning going into gong. Northern, Kyre thought. Far away from where they were now. Far away from where he’d found himself in Rillent’s trenches.

  “It’s a light refractor,” Kyre said. He didn’t know how much Quenn knew about technology, so he didn’t elaborate other than to say, “It will keep us hidden from sight for a few minutes.”

  Quenn’s eyes were still too large, too much white around the edges. He shook his hands, the injured one sending fine droplets of blood into the air.

  “Quenn. Quenn, are you going to pass out? Throw up again? Take a deep breath. We’ve got to go and we’ve got to go fast, so I need to know you’re with me.”

  After a moment, Quenn shook his head, then winced. He reached his gored hand toward his cheek, then thought better of the action, and carefully lowered his hand to his side. The lump in his throat bobbed as he swallowed before he spoke. “No.” Nah. The dialect was tickling something in the back of Kyre’s brain, but he couldn’t focus on it enough to place it. He’d worry over it later.

  All he could think about was Aviend. Aviend and Rillent. Aviend and the horror destriatch.

  He swallowed it back and focused on the steps in front of him. Delgha had once called him unemotional, and if you knew Delgha, that was saying something. She hadn’t meant it as an insult, but he hadn’t been able to explain. Rillent did that to you. Taught you to keep the things you loved inside a tiny locked box that no one was allowed to look at. Because to let someone see was to let someone take it away.

  “All right, Quenn, here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to patch you up a bit. Enough to keep you alive…” He stopped and looked at him then. There was a lot to be learned from someone’s reaction when you told them flat out they might die, even if you used nicer words.

  Quenn seemed more scared than anything to hear the word “alive,” as if he’d already come to terms with his inevitable death and Kyre was suddenly giving him hope. A hope that he wasn’t sure he wanted. That was a low start. And a good one. It meant there was a place to go, and that place was up.

  “And then we’ll go from there,” Kyre finished as he pulled a few tools from the pouch at his side. Talk to him. Keep him focused. “So, you’ve either got a brehm brain or some brehm balls, I’d say, running from Rillent. Which is it, do you think?”

  Kyre was pretty sure he already knew the answer, but he wanted to know if Quenn did. He took a small glowglobe from his pouch and beckoned for Quenn to hold out his unmarred hand. “Lift this and hold it close to your leg. Left side. So I can see the…” He’d been about to say hole. “To patch you.”

  “I think the latter,” Quenn said. La’er. “Though my sister would likely disagree.” S
o he did know his own strengths. It was fitting together, how he’d gotten as far as he had without being killed. What he hadn’t figured out yet was how he’d gotten under Rillent’s boot in the first place.

  “Your sister’s a trencher?” More distraction for the boy, who was beginning to shake as Kyre peeled back the blood-soaked edges of the split pantleg and exposed the broken skin.

  “No.” His silence said there was a great deal more to that story but Kyre didn’t ask it. He thought there might be time enough if Quenn wanted to tell it. It would be better if it waited until they got back to the base anyway, so everyone could hear. Stories often lost something in the retelling, he’d found. The first time was often the best.

  The boy’s leg was open nearly to the bone. Clean though. Seven teeth. And something straight and sharp enough to make a single, deep slice. A maiming slice. Kyre knew the shape of this wound.

  “I need to fix this, Quenn, so you can travel,” Kyre said. “But I’m no chiurgeon. Not by a long shot. And this is going to hurt like a mad mother ravage bear.” Not as bad as that, but he wanted to prepare him.

  Kyre waited until he saw understanding in Quenn’s eyes, then he put his fingers to the edges of his skin. Quenn was sweatsheened, his skin slick and gritted, his muscles set tight beneath Kyre’s touch.

  He brought Quenn’s leg forward until the glowglobe shone away the shadows of his skin. That gash deserved some of Thorme’s handiwork – her tiny fingers made the cleanest stitches he’d ever seen. Kyre’s own skin was testament to their artistry, in the nearly invisible seams along his shoulder. But the best he could do now was a temporary binding, to keep it clean and closed while they made their way back to the base. Then he’d turn him over to Thorme.

  She was going to love that. He could already hear her, tsking her tongue loudly as she sewed, more to make a point than for any other reason. Tough love that one. But love just the same.