Numenera

by Monte Cook

  Stepping across the floor of the sleeping space jars her bones. And whatever’s in her bones that feels pain. Muscles. Heart. Mostly her heart. They’d been so close. And now they are even further than they’d been before. Rillent knows they are out here. That they tried to take him down and failed. That she is still alive. She is sure of it.

  Will he come for them? Of course he will. No question. The only question is when and how. They need a new plan. But before that, they need to find out Rillent’s plan. What he knows. What he’s going to do. She’ll gather everyone in the morning. Whatever time it will be next. Make a plan together.

  The pennon is mostly dark, beyond the dim glow of the liquidlights that line the walls. There’s no natural light in here, so dark is as dark does. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s still night outside. Although she’s guessing so, since everyone else seems to be sleeping.

  Everyone except for the figure inside the tech room. She can see someone pacing in there, crossing the door, a grey shadow. It’s not Delgha. Delgha never paces. Clearly not Kyre, unless he suddenly awoke and raced past her in the dark to pace the floor. And Thorme never went in the tech room if she could help it. Certainly not alone. “Too cold, too sharp, not enough human.”

  That leaves…

  “Quenn?” she asks as she nears. The thin figure inside pauses in its stride as she leans on the doorframe. She shivers from the cool air. Delgha’s rigged up a system for one of the devices, which needs cooling to run, and it always makes the room seem overly chilly. “Can’t sleep?”

  The tech room is the smallest room in the base. Egg-shaped, with a far end that narrows in, so small that you’d nearly have to crawl to reach it. The front end, where she’s leaning now, is large. Taller than three humans. Rounded. Loaded with tech. More devices than Aviend can understand or even want to. Most of this is Delgha’s purview, and Aviend is usually very happy to leave it to her.

  Pacing still, though the space is almost too small to hold his steps. He has to about-face every few seconds. He’s barely hobbling anymore at least; Thorme did good work on his injury. It’s clear he’s been awake for a while. Pacing this whole time? She wonders. For so long at least that his turns have taken on a kind of dance-like flow. She doesn’t think he’s aware.

  Quenn doesn’t answer her obvious question. “Who are you?” he asks. “I mean, really?”

  She sighs, the last drycough of spike-legged creatures escaping her lungs. She isn’t ready for this, but she’s not sure she ever will be. She’s always too brash, too harsh. Never has the right words at the right time. Unless it’s for Kyre. It’s like she can see what someone needs so quickly. But then her response gets caught up in the netting of her brain and tangles on the way out.

  “Ask me something more specific,” she says. “Something I can answer easily in the dark.”

  “Are you the leader of this group?”

  That’s a valid question. But not one that’s easy. Of course he wouldn’t know that. Ask anyone else here and they would say yes, without hesitation, that she was the leader. Ask Aviend herself? And.

  “Not really,” she says. “We’re more of a collaborative effort. We’ve been working to…” The last of the sleep is gone, but the aches remain. Haunting reminders.

  “I know,” he says. “Return the rightful balance of power to the Stere. Kyre said the same thing. But… by what right? I mean, I’d be happy to see anyone beyond Ar… Rillent in charge, but who are you to think you can take him down? So many have tried. So many have failed. Rillent took down Ovinale. The whole clave. He took down Arch Enpelia.”

  His voice is rising, getting frantic, fearful. Words pacing in time to his feet. She can see he’s been in here even longer than she thought. Left alone with his own thoughts. Panicking. She wishes Kyre were here. He’s so much better at this sort of thing.

  She pushes her hands together. Presses the webbing between her thumb with the thumb and forefinger of her other hand. It calms her. She wishes she had a way to calm him. Yesterday, she would have. She would have said, “We won’t fail. We have a plan.” They don’t. They had a plan. But that plan failed. For Quenn. Because of Quenn. There is nothing in the world that would make her say that aloud.

  So she says what she can. “We won’t give up,” she says. For the first time since she yelled at the black beasts to move, she feels a glint, a spark, a warm glow of hope. Maybe not all is lost. Maybe they can rebuild. “We’ll make a new plan and…”

  The hopespark doesn’t catch. It dies into blackness mid-sentence.

  Quenn stops pacing. In the half light, she can see his face. His too-thin cheeks. The pendant rising and falling with his chest. He waits, unmoving, in the dark for her, until he can wait no longer. “And what?” The hope, the eagerness in his voice is so sharp it cuts her in the soft places beneath the bone.

  “I don’t know,” she says softly. She doesn’t. For the first time in such a long time, she is still and uncertain. Moving is easy. Standing here in the not-knowing is so hard.

  “You said Rillent took down my mother. Did you know her?” She sees his face, the struggle beneath the skin, and realizes that he didn’t know. Still doesn’t know. And why should he? Ovinale’s clave was large and powerful enough to extend its services beyond its own village, but not to the point where others would know family lines. “I’m Aviend Enpelia.”

  His stillness is stunning, filling the small room.

  “Enpelia?” he says. “As in Arch Enpelia.” It doesn’t sound like a question, but she thinks that it is.

  “Nuvinae, she…” Is? Was? She doesn’t know how to talk about it, skips over the verb that defines the distance between the living and the dead. “My mother.”

  In a movement so fast she can’t catch him, Quenn crouches in front of her. He rocks on the balls of his feet, puts his palms in his opposite elbows. He makes a small noise of pain, moving his hurt leg so. His forehead lowers so far that his voice is muffled by the bend in his throat.

  “Forgive me,” he says. “Arch Enpelia. I didn’t know.”

  “No,” she says. “No, no, no. That’s not…” Now she really wishes Kyre were here. He’d have the boy risen and moving on to some other topic already. While she’s just standing here, stuttering. Does she touch him? Yell at him? Beg him?

  She puts her hand on his shoulder – he’s so much bonier under his heavy cloak than she expected, and she’d expected pretty bony. Rillent really did his number. She wonders if he realizes how lucky he was to get away alive, and thinks he probably does.

  “Please get up,” she says, finally. “Truly. That’s not what…”

  She blames her loss for words on sleep deprivation and anguish, but knows it’s not entirely true. There is too much pain in her depths still that makes it hard to talk about.

  “My mother was an Aeon Priest and clave leader. Neither are an honor that I have held.” She is surprised to find herself falling so easily back into the formal language of her upbringing. Her mother was an Aeon Priest to her core, and a leader in every bit of her skin. Try as she might, she couldn’t impart her deep knowledge of the numenera to her daughter, but she’d given her the ability to at least pretend to be the latter, even if Aviend forgot it more than she remembered.

  “You should be, though. Rightfully. Rillent…” There is no faltering attempt at respect this time, no pretending to believe that Rillent is true Arch. Quenn is still crouched, but raises his head toward her. It’s the first time she sees him show anything akin to anger. There’s a lot of it in there, behind his eyes. She wonders what else he keeps so well caged. Did he bring it with him, or learn it in Rillent’s trenches?

  “Come,” she says. “Will you sit with me?” She holds her hand out to him and helps him rise. There is a low bench along the back of the room, amid devices and boxes and various sundries. She slides the bits of some project of Delgha’s – brainbuds, maybe? – off the bench and gestures. Sit. Tries to make it more of an invite and less of a perceived dem
and.

  Quenn sits next to her, fiddling with his pendant. It makes a soft whoosh as the pieces of it slide around beneath his fingers. His movements are thoughtful, but given over to rote. She imagines how many times he’s done this very thing with this very pendant. The innumerable number of times his fingers have slid over it. At home, and then in the trenches. And now. She’s surprised Rillent didn’t confiscate it. Realizes that Quenn must have kept it well hidden.

  “You grew up in the Stere. You know that the passage of the leadership doesn’t work that way in a clave,” she says. “Lineage is for kings and queens, not Aeon Priests and claves. Rillent was appointed by the people after my mother…” Was killed. Was killed. Was killed. “Died.

  “Besides,” she adds, because she can’t stand to stop talking with the word died the last thing on her tongue. “I’m not an Aeon Priest. Nor do I have any desire to be one. So I can’t lead a clave or become Arch.”

  That’s more than she’s said about all of it in a long time. It makes her tired. But she can tell Quenn has something on his mind. And so she leans back to the wall and waits.

  “How weird,” he says. His voice is soft. Musing. “I expected the stories of a long-ago religion to be true, and they were not. But I never believed the stories about this. I thought they were just a falsity. Another myth that people tell themselves because they want it to be real. Like Gavani. Or like how Rillent really does just want to save us all. I never did believe the stories of Nuvinae’s daughter and the Night Clave, and it turns out you’re the most real of all.”

  Now it’s her turn to be shocked into silence. She’s glad she’s sitting. She’s not sure she would be able to stand through what he just said.

  “Did Kyre tell you that? Who we are?”

  It’s one thing that she and Kyre had kept from their childhood. When they used to sneak down into the underground tunnels beneath the clave to hide from the boredom of everyday life. “We are the Night Clave,” they’d say in unison, fingers pressed together. For a long time, she thought they’d left the name behind in the drit and dirt as teenagers. Then came Rillent. And the need for a name that showed the word clave meant something again. A collective where the numenera was used for knowledge and good. Not for power and death.

  “No,” he says. “Who else could you be? In the trenches and the trees, people whisper the Night Clave like a prayer. Or like a god.”

  “There’s no such thing as gods,” she says. And regrets it. Of course it’s possible that after everything, Quenn still believes. Why does she say such things?

  “I know,” he says, surprising her. “But people need something to believe in, don’t they? Why not you? Why not the Night Clave?”

  He’s asking if she really is the Night Clave. If they’re the gods everyone believes they are. The weight of the question makes her want to cry. And run back to bed, borrow some of Kyre’s dreaming bliss. And make a new plan, a perfect, unfailing plan, for destroying Rillent’s power. Once and forever.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” she asks instead. “Rillent, I mean?”

  “Not much to tell.” Whir with the pendant. He doesn’t look at her. “He hooked my dad, my younger brother, into becoming trenchers. The usual promises. I begged them not to go, but…” His shrug is more in his elbows than his shoulders, but it says everything.

  “When?”

  He makes a show of thinking, although she’s pretty sure he doesn’t have to. She’s thinks he knows exactly when. He’s buying time so that he can speak without breaking down. She looks away, through the door into the darkness of the pennon. Gives him the moment. “Two years ago now.”

  “And you?”

  “I went to get them back. I thought…” He trails off, shaking his head. “It doesn’t matter. They’re dead, both of them. Worked to… In…” His voice falls apart, a choke of anguish and anger rolled into a shuddered breath. She can tell by listening that even after everything, after Quenn had known his family had been killed at Rillent’s boot, that Quenn had fallen too under Rillent’s spell. That he can’t forgive himself for that.

  She leans against the wall, feeling the pain as the back of her head presses to the curve. It’s a pain she can hold on to, and she does.

  “Good men, smart men, have fallen to Rillent’s power. There’s no shame in that,” she says. “Rillent got Kyre too, you know.” It’s not the kind of thing Kyre usually shares, but she thinks if he were here right now, hearing this, he’d say the same.

  “But not you?” he asks.

  She thinks of herself, at the side of the crater. Rillent’s face in her mind, his purple eyes taking her down and down. “Not like that. Rillent and I have a… different relationship.”

  “I can imagine,” he says. He clearly means because of her mother, but that’s not it. She doesn’t correct him, though. It’s so complicated and she never has the words. Not even for Kyre. Not even for herself.

  “You were there a long time,” she says. “Kept yourself alive.” It’s a question, if he wants it to be.

  “I needed to find my family,” he answers. “I let Rillent do whatever he wanted. Did whatever he wanted me to do. The things, the things I di–” The rest of the word chokes out and dies away. He shakes himself, hard. “I learned the kubrics inside and out – they’re all the same in there, every one.”

  “But none of them had what… who… you were looking for.”

  “No.” The word fades away.

  The silence stretches. She keeps thinking one of them will get up to go, but neither of them does. The pain in her head keeps her awake for a long while, but she’s pretty sure she’s dozing by the time he speaks again.

  “How are you still secret?” he asks. “How does Rillent not know about you, not know you are here?”

  “He does now,” she says. Bites her tongue, but too late. She really should have stayed in bed. “Well, not where we are. Rillent doesn’t care about religion or temples. Useless, as far as he’s concerned.”

  “And that makes it the perfect place to hide,” Quenn says.

  “It did,” she says. “But unless Rillent has suddenly reverted to a much kinder, gentler version of himself since I last spent time with him…”

  A small noise of disbelief from Quenn.

  “…then he will use everything he has to hunt us down and find us.”

  “And kill you,” he says.

  She doesn’t disagree, although she’s not certain. Rillent will kill the others, without doubt. He’ll have Faleineir start, let the varjellen strip away skin and heart and mind, and then Rillent will finish it. But will he kill her? She’s not sure. She thinks he’d find other purposes for her. Worse things.

  “Thank you for saving me,” Quenn says. “I wouldn’t have made it.”

  I know, she thinks. It wasn’t all for you, she thinks. But it was. It was for all of them. Maybe most of all for Kyre.

  Instead, she says, “What now? For you, I mean?”

  “Now I go back to Nalloc.”

  She’s heard of it. Wettown, it’s been called, not inappropriately. She can’t remember where it is. Steremoss is a big wood. Dotted with little towns. How far from one of Rillent’s kubrics? How far from his destriatch?

  “You could stay and help us,” but even before she completes the sentence, he’s shaking his head no.

  “Why? For real?” He said “family” before, in front of everyone. She wanted to see what he’d say now.

  “I promised my sister I’d come home. With or without them. I’m the last one she has. She is the last one I have.”

  He looks at her coyly, up through his lashes, as if daring her to counter what he’s about to say. “Besides, I’m no fighter.”

  She wants to say, “There are many ways to fight,” but she will not give in to challenge when she can see he’s made up his mind. He already knows that there are many ways to fight. Of course he does. And he knows too that he’s a fighter. He fought himself into Rillent’s hold and out of it aga
in. The words are a way for himself to feel better about going. She doesn’t begrudge him that. Nor will she take it away from him.

  “When will you go?”

  “Soon,” he says. “I was just getting up the will to leave when you got here.”

  “We can go with you. See that you make it through in case Rillent has patrols.”

  “No,” he says. “You’ve done enough.” It sounds almost bitter, but she doesn’t think he means it that way. It’s hard to be in someone’s debt. Especially when it’s nothing you asked for. It can make monsters out of the best men. She doesn’t think it will make a monster out of him.

  She doesn’t push for him to stay. It’s not her way. She wishes it were, sometimes.

  “Before you go, would you be willing to come with me first? Just for a moment? There’s something I could use your help with.”

  He says yes, not as one who wants to say yes, she doesn’t think. Maybe as one who’s afraid to offend. It makes her sad. It’s one of the things she despises about power, even pseudo-power like what he’s giving her. It leaves so little room for people to choose what they want.

  Still, she’s grateful for his unquestioning acquiescence. That must have been rough under Rillent’s boot. And rougher still to break from it. She thinks beneath his frailty and youth, he’s got so much more strength than one would guess.

  This room is Delgha’s space. Of all the things scattered about the room, only one of them is truly Aviend’s. The stronglass orb hanging in the air above the central table. It was her mother’s, one of the few things she could salvage in the destruction. It’s just big enough around that she can’t wrap her hands fully about it, but she does so, as much as she can. The orb comes to life beneath her palms with a quiet whirr.