Shadow (Bridge & Sword: Awakenings #4): Bridge & Sword World

by JC Andrijeski

  “What is it, then?” Allie said.

  Balidor’s thoughts must have been louder than he realized.

  “I don't know,” he said.

  Just then, the first person collapsed onto the pavement.

  Balidor watched in numb disbelief as the flyer’s camera panned sickeningly, following the body to the ground. The woman’s avatar faded, revealing the face of a twenty-something Asian girl with black hair and a heavily made-up face. Trails of blood streamed from her eyes and ears and nose, obscuring her features, making trails through her foundation and lipstick.

  The camera left her face in time to show the next body fall.

  Within seconds, there were too many for the cameras to capture.

  Balidor watched it happen, unable to tear his eyes away, but he couldn’t believe it.

  He grew aware of high-pitched voices, but they didn’t come from the falling bodies.

  They came from the feed reporters’ rising voices in Cantonese and English. Only then did Balidor realize Allie must have turned down the audio commentary while watching the skirmishes earlier. Those voices rose now as Jon raised the volume of that commentary with his headset.

  The screen split into three different views of the carnage as the feed commentators’ voices rose to a hysterical pitch as more and more bodies fell. Balidor now recognized words in Japanese, Russian, Spanish and German as his translation key switched between them.

  The whole world was watching this.

  Yet somehow, it wasn’t the terror and horror in those voices that echoed inside Balidor, or that worsened the cold feeling in his gut.

  It was the silence.

  As reporters narrated the carnage, the people collapsing to the pavement made not a sound. Somehow, that silence made it nearly impossible to comprehend the reporters’ words.

  Balidor watched them fall without any attempt to stop themselves, without uttering a single protest, without changing expression. He watched their avatars flicker, then disappear, before the camera swiveled and captured another as it died and collapsed.

  It all happened too fast for Balidor's mind to catch up. More than half the crowd had already fallen to the pavement before Balidor became aware of another sound, something that also seemed to creep only slowly into his awareness.

  It was screaming.

  These screams were nothing like what he’d heard before, when he and Cass were outside the building. It wasn't the sound of an angry mob, high on emotion and adrenaline. It wasn’t even the sound of people panicking, afraid of being shot.

  Instead, it was a high-pitched, irrational sound, like a rabbit caught in a snare.

  It reminded Balidor of what they used to call “battle fatigue,” or “shell shock.” It was the sound of pure, unbridled terror––the kind of terror that ripped a person out of their moorings, sending them spinning totally out of control.

  Then Balidor noticed something else.

  Only one group in the crowd was screaming.

  It was the seers.

  Seers backed away from fallen, falling and swaying bodies, screaming in horror and disbelief as more and more humans slammed unceremoniously into the pavement.

  Most of those falling were already unconscious or dead by the time their limbs gave out. They landed flat on their backs or directly on their faces. A few were kept upright artificially by the surging and fleeing crowd, but the vast majority fell like a tree falls––straight down, with no visible resistance at all.

  The seers were watching it happen.

  They tried to move out of the way only to trip over more bodies, press up against more bleeding faces, more staring eyes, more death. So they screamed, caught within a maze of bloody corpses. Once they started, they didn't seem able to stop.

  It took Balidor’s own shell-shocked mind a few seconds more to understand why only seers were screaming. Then he realized the truth.

  The seers were the only ones left.

  All of the humans were dead.

  3

  CAGED

  DEHGOIES. REVIK.

  Nenzi. Ewald. Rolf.

  Alexei. Simon. Merrick.

  Sword. Intermediary. Syrimne d’Gaos.

  There had been others––other names, other people, other states of being.

  They all blended now, grew meaningless.

  He knew himself now as she knew him. Damned. Broken. Caged.

  He knew himself in her eyes, even when she tried to gouge his out. Even after she tried to kill everything he was, everything he ever had been, he saw himself in her.

  He sat chained to the floor and wall of a green organic metal room.

  Revik stared up the high walls, feeling his chest start to hurt again. His head and body throbbed, pulsing a slow, nausea-laden heat as he took in the dimensions of the space.

  Something felt off in the room, above and beyond the heavy collar he wore around his neck. Thick binders imprisoned his wrists and upper arms. But it wasn’t just the physical restraints.

  He felt cut off, alone.

  Not just alone.

  They’d broken him.

  He didn’t know how she’d done it, what she’d done to him, but he knew it was her. She was the only one he’d let close enough. She was the only one who could do this to him, who would know how to hurt him so badly.

  He’d always known that, but he’d thought…

  He thought she wouldn’t.

  He thought she wouldn’t hurt him.

  His head throbbed, forcing his eyes closed against the overhead lights. They weren’t bright, but everything hurt. Everything hurt so badly he could rarely think about anything else. He could only endure it, do whatever he could to lessen it in any way.

  He couldn’t cower in here forever, licking his wounds.

  He had to get out. He had to remember.

  She’d crippled him somehow. She’d smashed something that held together the pieces of him, that gave him internal order. Without that thing, whatever it was, he drifted, lacked cohesion. He did not cohere.

  Separation sickness didn’t explain it.

  Separation sickness didn’t break his mind until he got lost in the fragments, half dead in the spaces between thoughts, terrified of falling into a black pit that held nothing. He got lost in that dark place, even just standing at its rim. He stared into that pain and dread, choking on a smothering feeling that wouldn’t let him go, wouldn’t let him breathe.

  Whatever it was, it strangled his light, even beyond the collar.

  It choked his mind, submerging him in dark coils.

  He hated her. He hated her for making him feel like this.

  They’d chained his ankles as well. Protocol, perhaps. Perhaps she told them to, out of fear––or because her boyfriend, the Adhipan leader, advised her to do it.

  He wondered, almost at a distance as he fought back the rage that wanted to rise, to spiral higher and hotter in the forefront of his mind, whether it was the same room they’d used to simulate his wife’s death less than a year previous.

  He wondered if it was the room where his wife fucked her lover for the first time.

  He couldn’t hold onto that thought, either––even now.

  His mind broke apart, leaving him staring down at a cold, dark abyss.

  Nothing remained. Nothing.

  In this place, he ceased to exist.

  HE JERKED, FULLY awake before he knew the difference.

  He fought it, even as he looked for danger, for what woke him.

  The seething pit opened, as soon as he was fully conscious, a darkness glimpsed only with the edges of his light. It terrified him, drew him, made him sick. He teetered on its edge, watching it, fighting not to fall deeper.

  He knew what lived there.

  He couldn’t articulate it to himself, that knowing, but the feeling that lived in those spaces felt older than he––older than the stories he used to explain to himself who he was. The feeling was beyond simply familiar; it felt like Truth.

  Trut
h guarded, watched over. Lured.

  It had a consciousness all of its own.

  It had hungers.

  A demon, perhaps. A demon crouched behind shifting masks.

  He could see it now. Recognize it as his. It wanted to eat the flesh off his bones, to cut into him with sharp teeth, knead his skin under razor-like claws. Stripped of life support, the easy civilization he wore like a second skin, there was––

  Nothing.

  It wanted that, too.

  He felt it waiting. It was patient now, especially now, with him so broken.

  It had only to wait.

  His arms ached from where they’d been wrenched into odd angles behind his back. The two sets of dead-metal organics, one at his wrists and the other at his upper arms, were braced with a bar behind his back. They couldn’t give him organics, of course. If he broke the collar, it wouldn’t make much difference, but he understood the logic.

  Safety and precaution, redundancy with initial––backup and primary.

  He’d been unconscious when they attached those, of course.

  He’d become an animal to her.

  He was an animal to himself down here, too––an animal they would have been wiser to put down, not just lock away in another bottomless pit.

  He always got free.

  Sooner or later, it would happen this time, too. Even when he didn’t want to be freed, he was, by someone or something. This wouldn’t be any different.

  Arendelan ti’ a rigalem… destiny is harder.

  His uncle told him that. His uncle taught him the meaning behind what he’d become, what he’d been called here to do.

  The hard path. He’d heard it even from his mother, even before.

  But his mind couldn’t stay there, either.

  Isthre ag tem degri… to lead is sacrifice.

  HE OPENED HIS eyes. Lights flickered back to life, sensing his returning consciousness, and he blinked, unsure if he’d slept, or simply lost more time.

  He felt it then, the drug. He could feel the sedative wearing off.

  He was already being hunted.

  He tensed, but a part of him welcomed it.

  He could fight what he could see. What he could smell, even taste, he could fight. Whatever this was, it wasn’t his mind; it wasn’t the demon lurking in the dark. His senses wove around him keenly, telling him all he needed to know, even with the collar.

  He’d been trained for this.

  He’d been trained.

  They would be watching him. She likely stood on the other side of that glass, watching him with her pale, jade-green eyes. Studying him. Maybe reading him even now, since the collar made it so she could do so with impunity, without him knowing her in his mind.

  Even now, after everything, the realization hurt. Wanting lived there… a wanting to touch her light, to weave back into hers.

  Anger tried to assert itself, to live in the spaces between breaths.

  He let the anger in. He welcomed it. Needed it.

  The anger held the demon in check, made it easier to breathe.

  He bit his tongue until he tasted blood, and control lived there, too. He could hurt himself. He would hurt them, sooner or later. He wanted to feel something, anything––even pain, even from her. All of it would lessen the call of that black pit.

  Anyway, he’d always operated better with concrete goals, with a puzzle to concern the parts of him that continued to fight that darkness.

  He sidestepped the fear and confusion from the broken fragments, and wondered again how she had done this to him, how she had destroyed his mind.

  She was the Bridge. Perhaps that was all he needed to understand.

  Everyone wanted that in him. He’d seen that, even when he was a child. He knew about that darker place inside himself, that place where eventually, everyone wanted to go. It drew them like a drug. It called to them, made them want to experiment on him, to feel it through him.

  They all wanted what lay buried beneath his feet.

  Perhaps that was the demon’s song, too.

  He fought the call of that darkness in himself, fought to control the emotions slamming through his light, sparking currents in the sight-restraint collar around his neck…

  …when the door to his cell opened.

  He turned his head. He looked at the door before he could stop himself and stared at the seer standing there, unable to look away.

  The other male gauged his expression. His gaze remained clinical, focused.

  His clothes were neat, Revik noted.

  Pressed, they fit him perfectly. His chestnut brown hair was artfully combed. His black boots looked polished, straight out of the box. His gray eyes held the gravity of a man sure of his own righteousness, a man prepared to be generous to his inferiors.

  He looked like… what did Allie call him?

  An aging movie star.

  A timeless handsome, his friend, Kuchta, would have said.

  The thought spun him helpless briefly, sliding him closer to that night-blackened pit.

  Kuchta.

  A name he’d forgotten.

  Lives lost. Laughter in the sun.

  A field overlooking a valley rimmed by diamond waves…

  He’d loved her. He’d seen her dead, too.

  The gray-eyed man continued to study him, eyes wary. After what may have been a calculated pause, he walked closer with deliberate strides.

  Revik felt his whole body stiffen, even as something in him grew entirely still.

  Gods. It was something simple at last. Something pure.

  They could torture him. They could do whatever they wanted.

  It wouldn’t matter.

  He would kill this motherfucker if it was the last thing he ever did.

  It was a goal worthy of the sacrifices that would come before. It was a goal worthy of the training.

  …Training.

  “Hello, Dehgoies.”

  The elder seer stood over him, but Revik hadn’t shifted his gaze upwards. He found himself eye-level with dark, armored pants and heavy, semi-organic boots––boots so polished he might see his own face in them, at the right angle.

  He felt his jaw harden as the brief flash of clarity slid away, leaving him in the flickering lights. He could feel the dark again, that wavering space below.

  The knees in front of him bent smoothly, bringing the gray eyes level with his.

  Revik stared into the face of Balidor, leader of the Adhipan.

  He studied him, thinking about where he might start. Perhaps he would start with the face. The face seemed appropriate, given Kuchta’s thoughts on the matter. She could help him. She could tell him what made that face so special, so much better than his own. She could give him insight into the female mind, human and seer.

  She could tell him how to take those things away, one by one.

  “Are you going to talk to me, Dehgoies?”

  Emotion slid forward. He stared at his own feet, feeling the darkness creep forward, entangling him.

  Kuchta. What had he been thinking just now? She couldn’t help him.

  She was dead.

  He frowned, trying to pull back the threads of his mind. His uncle would have beaten him bloody by now, for being such a sniveling child. He would have had his jaw broken, if he’d been in training, maybe one of his hands. His uncle never would have tolerated this. Never.

  He would have put him back in the hole.

  Tied his hands to his feet. Starved him. Given him to Merenje to play with.

  He’d survived that. He could survive this.

  His uncle prepared him.

  He’d been weak, but his uncle made him strong. He’d been undisciplined, but his uncle helped him with that, too. He taught him to be strong. He forced him to be strong. That strength had saved his life, more than once.

  It would save him now.

  Revik met the other male’s gaze. The heat in his chest grew difficult to breathe through once he had. He stared at the other seer, t
aking in the lines of his chiseled, almost-human features.

  His wife had thought this man handsome. He had felt that on her, too.

  “Ah, yes.” Balidor smiled, his eyes still level on Revik’s. “She told me that, as well.”

  The other man paused, still studying his eyes.

  “Does it bother you, Dehgoies, such a trivial thing?”

  Revik didn’t lower his gaze.

  When he didn’t speak, the older man rested his arms on his thighs. After another pause, he cleared his throat, gesturing lightly with one hand, his voice casual. He spoke Prexci, the seer tongue, framing his words in a precise, almost scholarly accent.

  “This is childish, you know. This blaming of me for your domestic concerns.”

  Revik felt his breath fight its way through his chest.

  “Frankly,” Balidor added. “I don’t see how this is what concerns you, given the predicament you are now in. Or how the blame for these circumstances falls on me.”

  When Revik still didn’t speak, the older seer clicked to himself.

  Revik followed the motion of his jaw with his eyes.

  Balidor sighed.

  “She wasn’t terribly difficult to seduce, Dehgoies,” he said, opening his palms. “Nothing like what I would have imagined, going in. So things at home couldn’t have been all that healthy and harmonious, yes?”

  The light gray eyes studied Revik’s, flicking briefly from one to the other.

  “I let her think it was her idea, of course,” he added. “…That wasn’t particularly difficult, either, brother. Your wife is a bit naïve, you know.”

  Revik could not take his eyes off his. He kept his expression still; his gaze didn’t move from those mild-appearing gray eyes.

  The other man continued to appraise him, hands loose where they hung from his propped forearms.