Alexandria

by Kaden, John

  He springs forward silently and drives the blade deep into the man’s back. He gurgles and threshes and Jack drives his boot into his spine and slips his blade out. The other archer startles back with his bow raised and lights off a frenzied shot. It misses by an inch and Jack swats the bow out of his hands with the machete. The voice that seemed fit to doom him earlier now guides him, and he listens to it, and it drives him forward, his blade blurred in the moonlit smoke, opening a stream of blood along his assailant’s throat.

  “No!” Jack wheezes, lurching back toward the stairs where Arana just fled. He bounds down after, three steps at a time, and sees the finely-attired figure of his former King rush through to the parlor toward the door. The fighting has moved further down the corridor as the tribesmen advance, and Arana would have clear passage to the side stairs.

  Jack streaks across the length of the parlor and throws himself in front of the door. Arana staggers backwards and flashes out blindly with his short knife, slicing a mean cut along Jack’s forearm as he tumbles to the floor. His arm webs over with blood and it makes his grip slippery on the hilt. Arana risks a move past him and Jack sweeps the blade through the air and drives him back, then pulls himself to his feet.

  They stop in place and behold one another. Horror spreads across Arana’s face as he looks at Jack, smeared with fine soot and outfitted from the Temple’s armory, looking an exact replica of the men he has sent to massacre so many unnamed villages. Arana throws his knife to the ground and steps numbly backwards and falls against the sideboard, clutching at it with white knuckles.

  “Jack…”

  He slumps back, looking pathetic and defeated. “It’s not me, Jack… It was never me.”

  Jack says nothing.

  “They used me… They lied to me about everything.”

  Blood leaks from Jack’s arm and makes him lightheaded. The glorious King is crying, staring into his eyes with such child-like innocence, so adept at begging sympathy. The innocence looks so real, so fresh and genuine. He remembers what Thomas had told him—a gentle way about him, signs of being a bright young boy. They stare across the parlor, transfixed, each seeing in the other some parcel of himself. With sickening dread, Jack realizes that he does not hate this man. He sees the loneliness in his eyes, the eyes of a child with a hopelessly broken and recast mind. The eyes of a victim. The machete in his hand feels heavy and his mind fills with thoughts of the guilt and troubled sleep he suffered at having killed Braylon and Feiyan, and the blood he only just spilled on the terrace. Blood loss clouds his mind, and the machete begins to lower.

  Arana traces his hand along the sideboard, wrapping his fingers around something, then lunges forward and swings the new blade at Jack’s face.

  The machete is so swift it appears invisible as it slices through the air and splits Arana’s knife hand to the base of his palm. He falls to the floor, clutching his mangled appendage back together, and Jack lands on top of his hinging body and presses him down flat and slides the blade against his throat.

  “Jack…” gasps Arana, “what have I done?”

  He bears down on the blade and whispers two words he never thought he would hear himself speak to this man.

  “I’m sorry,” Jack says, and slashes his throat. His eyes are calm and placid as they gaze through their sooted camouflage, and they are the last thing Arana Nezra the Second ever sees.

  Denit retreats back behind the amphitheatre with those that remain alive, and he stares bleakly at the Temple apex, fearing all to be lost. The arrowfire from the Temple’s narrow windows is too thick to press through, and he drops down off his horse and paces frenetically, trying to suss out their options.

  “Trevor…”

  “Here.

  “Think we could run along top of the theatre and crawl down the far side?”

  “Let’s try it.”

  “Denit!”

  “What?”

  “Denit—they’re here.”

  The thunder of hooves beats down the quarry road, and Denit turns to see Hargrove and Marikez leading the cavalry at breakneck speed toward the Temple.

  The tribesmen have reached the extent of their advance. Footsteps thunder up the stairs from all directions as reinforcements arrive to defend their King. Sajiress lay sprawled across the floor, pierced through in several places. More bodies slumped against the walls. The burnt redwood door is spiked so thoroughly with arrowshafts it is ready to fall to pieces. They turn to run back toward the stairs, but more forces are blitzing toward the top.

  Jack steps into the corridor, carrying the dead King in his arms, and the hail of arrowfire ceases abruptly. He steps over the fallen bodies and wends between the slack warriors like a phantom. They falter back and let him pass, the whole crush of them, regarding him like some supernatural thing, as if me might vaporize before their eyes and light back to the Beyond from whence he came.

  He descends the stairs, blood leaking down his arm, his and Arana’s entwined. He is dead weight. Cold comfort. It means nothing to Jack, but he must do it, because they must see him dead.

  Harried voices ricochet off the tapering interior of the sandstone foyer. Jack crosses the balcony. The Temple’s entire citizenry is huddled below, sobbing and clutching at one another. He steps to the rail and a hush falls over them as they behold the limp body of the man sworn to protect them from the Rain of Fire.

  He lets the body roll from his arms. It spirals through the air with droplets of blood streaming along behind it like a comet’s tail, and it lands with a dull crack and a splash of red.

  As if exerting a repulsive force it drives them back, a widening circle of clear sandstone, at the center of which lay the broken King.

  Madness shatters the astounding calm.

  Nisaq throws his hands high and shouts to pacify them, but he is overtaken by the wrenching and tearing crowd. Desperate to escape, they press forward against the door and throw its bar and burst through. The crush of people spills onto the stairs, with Nisaq there in the midst of it all, jittering on the ground as their feet pass over him, and the crowd screams from the Temple, bleating to the impassive skies their sorrowful pleas.

  Jack stands at the balcony, feet firmly planted, and watches them run.

  Marikez and Hargrove lead their charge against the endless stream of arrows bolting down from the Temple’s high windows. The Nezra are sharp marksmen, picking them off easily as they draw near. Marikez signals them to cut wide and ride toward the cottages for cover. As they gallop around the side of the Temple they see the flood of terrified people, hundreds of them, fanning out in wild directions across the grounds, their thinking minds lost and gone.

  “Here!” calls Hargrove. “Back here, get out of their way!”

  The battleworn group retreats to the narrow walkways between the cottages, lurking just out of the Temple’s range. Horrified families run back to their homes, shrieking as they see the horsemen rifling through the provinces. Some run ahead anyway, slamming their cottage doors and trembling in the darkness. A huge swath of them cuts away and arcs back toward the amphitheatre, darting away in a mad frenzy, unsure of where to find sanctuary, and the grounds are a complete jumble of running bodies.

  Hargrove spurs his horse.

  The riders burst from the provinces and blaze their horses through the rush of wild-eyed people, barreling in a straight line toward the rear doors. The frantic stampede arrests the Temple’s archers mid-shot, straining to aim against the swell of confusion. A few of their shots kill their own and they hesitate on the draw. Sad and bloody shapes of the fallen innocent litter the gardens and lower tiers of the amphitheatre.

  Marikez reaches the door just as swarms of people burst it open and pour through. They ride against the current, single file into the Temple. There are more masses of people climbing the stairs, running to the upper quarters, tears streaking down their faces.

  Lia looks wildly for Jack. She sees the scullery girls from the kitchen, her old friends, fighting with ea
ch other about which way to run. She weaves between the dead bodies on the floor, looking under their sooted veils at the features beneath, ice chilling her veins as she encounters each new one and knows, just knows, that it will be Jack’s face she sees.

  Weapons drawn severely, Marikez and his forces drive them out, rearing their steeds back and pressing them through the doors and out of the Temple. When the rear corridor is cleared, they slide the heavy door shut and barricade it. Trevor rallies a small unit together and they stand watch against intruders.

  “What’s down this way?” Hargrove calls to Lia, looking off down the eerily painted corridor.

  “The sanctum, and stairs to the balcony. Have you seen him?”

  “No, Lia. I haven’t.”

  She drops from her horse and breaks for the service stairs, calling out his name and inspecting every blackened corpse she passes.

  Hargrove and Marikez ride down the macabre corridor, horses' hooves clacking on the sandstone, the frescoes around them turning from terrifying to peaceful as they advance toward the foyer. A colorful portraiture catches Hargrove's eye as he flies past, of a young man with slicked-back hair, a machine-tailored jacket, and a keen light in his eyes.

  The enormous foyer stands deserted, calm and vacant, save for one.

  Hargrove ambles up to the strangely garbed corpse. Dead eyes of a color he has rarely seen outside of pictures stare back at him.

  “This must be him,” he says grimly.

  “It is,” says Jack, peering down from the balcony.

  “You’re alive.”

  He smiles thinly, thrumming at the crest of an adrenaline crash. He moves toward the stairs to meet them in the foyer, a distant ringing in his ears. An old friend is waiting for him at the head of the stairs.

  “I mean you no hurt,” says Karus, showing his empty hands.

  Sajiress limps down the corridor behind him, arrows protruding from his leg and back. He slicks the blood off his sword and makes for Karus.

  “Enah,” says Jack. “What do you want, Karus?”

  “Your friends… I can take you to them.”

  “Where?”

  “The keep.”

  “Everything okay up there?” yells Hargrove.

  “Sajiress needs help. He's hurt bad.”

  Marikez unhooks the kit from his saddle and runs up the steps and rushes back to see to him.

  Karus takes off his shirt and wraps it around Jack’s arm, then cinches his belt around his bicep to slow the blood loss.

  “That’s a bad one,” he says, and takes Jack’s weight against his side and they work their way down the stairs.

  Hargrove takes hold of him at the bottom. The others race over and Karus leads the way down to the antechamber.

  The sentries have abandoned their posts. A fat padlock braces the keep door and Jack hacks at it until it slips free and clunks to the floor. They enter the keep. The row of flat trapdoors is lined up before them, and a central corridor recedes away into the gloom, with many barred doors lining its course.

  Hargrove and Sajiress go from one trapdoor to another, breaking off the latches and throwing them open.

  “Renning!” cries Hargrove, lowering himself to the floor and reaching his hand down to the emaciated form of his compatriot. “Renning, what have they done to you?”

  “Ryan…?” he says, rubbing his eyes.

  He sprawls out on the floor and Hargrove kneels down and tends to him.

  Denit splits the wood of the trapdoor next to them and a high-pitched scream drills through the keep. He looks up innocently and backs away.

  “Ezbeth, is that you?” Karus says, shuffling forward to lift her out of the pit. She lies back on the dirty floor and looks wildly about the room at the band of bloody men.

  Jack moves down the foreboding central corridor. There are no torches. He slides the bars out of their holders and lets them fall to the floor, one after another, until he stands in near-darkness at the end of the line. He goes door to door, searching for his friends. They scream when he enters. He forgot what he looks like.

  “Jeneth? Lathan?”

  The sallow forms huddle and slink back from him, mortified. He moves to the next, creaking the door back wide and stepping through. An atrophied body hurtles into him from the dingy interior and Jack startles. Several more join the fray and he backpedals away, knocking into the opposite wall as the feverish prisoners assail him, dirty fists beating on his chest.

  “Stop!” he cries. “William… stop!”

  “Jack? Is that you?”

  William and the others fairly clobber him on the ground, gripping him in a tight embrace. They burst from their grimy cells and converge in the center of the keep, crying and holding fast to one another.

  “What happened?”

  “I killed the King,” says Jack, not quite believing it himself.

  A soft voice calls out to him from the door, and the sight of her forces the tears he has been holding back to break free. Lia rushes to him and falls into his arms and kisses him until her lips are black with soot.

  Chapter Twenty

  Their walls collapse in cascades.

  The Rain of Fire does not come and their longcast spell splinters and dissolves away.

  A surprising lot of them are finding a new life here, casting off bitter-clung superstition—though the reconciliation has been tenuous at best.

  Some stay gone, apocalyptic cults roaming the forest still, waiting in vain for an inferno of destruction that will never come.

  Already the keep has been emptied—the implements of torture carried out into the daylight and set ablaze, soft gray smoke carrying their wickedness away on the cool Pacific breeze. Relics bearing Arana Nezra’s name or likeness were summarily burned and turned to ash and thrown back into the earth, along with the corporeal being itself.

  Behind barred doors, some whisper that they are happy to see the old regime go, and those voices multiply and grow less hushed with the passage of time.

  The grounds are returned to green splendor, and it made sad work for those tasked with collecting up the bodies and digging their graves.

  Jack stands at the edge of the cliff, looking across the charred field of ruins in the valley. He thinks of his mother. He thinks of the lost village of his dreams, and in a waking daze he sees her shimmering on the old stone promenade, coming closer, and he feels her warmness, and he knows that she is asking for peace. And he knows what must be done.

  “Jack!” Lia is standing by the reflecting pool, smiling. “Come on.”

  Everyone is heading out toward the old quarry road. They pass the towering white palace and skip off to join them. Hargrove is waiting by the side of the road with his hands in his pockets, grinning back at them. Together they fall into the flow of bodies and trek off to meet the incoming band of riders.

  Hargrove sees his daughter and throws his hand high. Nyla rides at the head of the dusty caravan, poised gracefully in the saddle, and she holds in the crook of her arm a shiny silverwhite tablet, glowing brilliantly in a wash of bright sunlight.

  In the summer of 2499, the small group from the forest makes a solemn trip through the enormous redwoods, returning after long years to the place of their birth. They hold hands in a circle in the middle of the promenade, bowing their heads in silence while the forest song whispers to their hearts. They inter their families’ precious remains in the village cemetery, so they can be with their grandparents, and their parents before them, and it is a sacred place to them all. Jack and Lia have talked and decided they will go into the earth there too, someday.

  They stand and breathe in the lingering presences. All else is lost—there is nothing here but memories, and they leave carrying them.

  From out here the Earth is gorgeous, rotating majestically on her invisible axis, aquamarine with swirls of churning pearlescent white. Nightfall slips across the globe like a curtain being drawn. Gone are the arterial skeins of twinkling amber light that once coursed across the surface
of her continents at night. The great land masses turn slowly below, dark as the surrounding emptiness that contains them.

  A lonely vessel glides by, with bold black letters standing out against the stark white metallic surface that read SERAPEUM 587JRX39USA. She is Alexandria’s daughter, a failsafe, an exact replica of the entire precious payload carried inside—the lost knowledge of a civilization in ruins, preserved incorruptible in this digital mausoleum. Only a small blinking green light gives hint of the artificial sentience on this riderless voyage—the electric currents of the olden masters. She arcs off silently into the blackness, having completed thousands of cycles thus far, and prepared to complete many thousands more.

  Far down below, on the distant shores of a dark continent, a celebration is underway.

  Swells of revelers arc dreamily around the radiant white palace, the sandstone tiers laced over with streamers of flowers and hanging lanterns. They carouse along the garden paths and make their way down to the luminous reflecting pool. Tiny metal skiffs with lit candles float on the surface of the water, hundreds of them, and the gardens are alive with magical light.

  Inside, Nyla and Denit pass through the wide sandstone corridors and come to rest by an open doorway, where inside an old man huddles over his desk, bent to his ink and paper.

  “Happy New Year, Dad.”

  “Ten more minutes,” says Hargrove, blowing out the sconce. “Unless my clock’s wrong.”

  He scribbles one last note, then collects up his things and greets them at the door. He kisses her cheek and they head off to the gardens, passing by open chambers where the old sciences are taught by candlelight.

  Lingering on the grand staircase, they meet Sajiress and his reunited kin. He smiles and extends a hand, enamored of the new custom.