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

by JC Andrijeski

  Today he looked tired, sad, even somewhat at a loss.

  And, well… old.

  When he spoke, his voice reflected all of those things, too.

  “Alyson,” Vash said. “We warned you of this.”

  I averted my gaze, feeling my jaw tighten.

  His voice grew gentler still.

  “I, myself, told you this,” he reminded me. “Way back at the beginning, when we first spoke of these things, I told you what the Dreng do to those who work for them down here.”

  Feeling my jaw harden more, I nodded, not quite meeting his gaze.

  When he didn’t go on, I refolded my arms.

  “You said they got addicted to being in their constructs,” I said, acknowledging his words with a gesture. “You said they got addicted to the power, to the endless supply of light. You said they got addicted to the amplification of skill sets, along with access to the skill sets of other seers.” Looking up, I met his gaze directly, biting my lip. “You didn’t say they’d lose their fucking minds if they left, Vash.”

  Vash held my gaze without flinching.

  His voice was just as gentle as it had been before.

  “I told you of the ways in which they strip their servants of the ability to utilize their own light,” he said, his dark eyes shining that compassion again. “I explained to you in detail what happened to him the last time, when he left the structure of the Pyramid. I told you of the work that had to be done to rebuild his aleimic structures, to make him self-sufficient once more. I told you what we had to do to him as Syrimne, once he’d been disconnected from Menlim and the Dreng. In all of these situations, a deep dependency had been created.”

  “This was different, though,” I said, looking around at all of them again. “He wasn’t in the Pyramid this time. He wasn’t with Menlim.”

  Balidor coughed.

  I glared at him, then returned my eyes to Vash.

  The old seer clicked softly, his voice sad.

  “It is much the same, Alyson,” he said.

  “Allie,” Balidor said, giving me a level look when I turned. “He lived, full-time, in a construct of the Dreng. He slept in it. Worked in it. Likely designed and redesigned it to suit his needs. A construct housed over the physical residence of a large group of adherents functions in much the same way as the Pyramid. It may not have been as sophisticated, but it served very much the same purpose.”

  “But I lived there!”

  “You lived there as a guest, Esteemed Bridge.” Balidor bowed towards me politely, but I heard the edge undercutting his words. “No offense is meant when I say, to compare these two things is beyond meaningless. His light operated as a part and function of that living construct, in a state of full or partial symbiosis. He was leading them, na?”

  Inclining his head, he didn’t wait for my response.

  “As a result of that leadership status, he became one of the construct’s primary pillars. One of those holding and maintaining it for all of the others who lived inside. To do this, he had to be completely immersed in the functionality of the construct, as well as in its power sources, at all times. That means a direct line to the Dreng, Allie.”

  Pausing, he tipped his hand towards me again, another gesture of respect, according to the old forms, but one still tinged with anger.

  “You, Esteemed Bridge, did not.”

  I looked at him, at all of them.

  “I was connected to him––” I began.

  “Not enough,” Balidor said. His voice grew into a mutter. “…although that was changing, too.” At my hard look, he shrugged, keeping his face expressionless. “You told me as much yourself. Your relationship to the construct was changing by the end. You would have noticed those changes more, had you remained with him there.”

  “But he doesn’t even seem like the same person.”

  Balidor’s voice sharpened, now carrying an open anger.

  “He is exactly who he always was,” he said, that edge rising in his light. “Only it is visible to you now, Esteemed Bridge. The illusion was this man, ‘The Sword,’ whom you knew in those hills. Without the crutch of the Dreng, and the construct propping him up, you see past the illusion perpetuated by the Rooks. The illusion that he was a wholly integrated, stable being acting autonomously, according to his own wishes––”

  “As opposed to what?” I cut in.

  “As opposed to a puppet of the Dreng,” Balidor replied, blunt. “Which is what I have been telling you for at least a year now that he is, Esteemed Bridge.”

  From beside him, Dorje raised a hand, trying to calm Balidor, but the Adhipan leader ignored the gesture, staring only at me.

  “You claimed you understood, Allie. Clearly you do not. Once his light was reunited with the parts of him that were Syrimne, he became entirely incapable of functioning on his own, without the assistance of the Dreng in some form.”

  “But what does that actually mean, ‘Dori?” I said, hearing anger reach my voice. “I need more to go on than that. I need you to explain to me what happened to him… what’s wrong with him.” I swallowed. “And how we fix him.”

  Balidor rolled his eyes, seer fashion, making a dismissive gesture with one hand.

  “‘Dori––” I began angrily.

  But Vash spoke up before I could get any further.

  The softness emanating from his light forced my eyes back to his.

  “Balidor is essentially right, Alyson.” His voice held a compassion and patience the Adhipan leader’s did not. “It is why your husband returned to them in the first place.”

  I flinched, startled. “You mean after D.C.?”

  Vash gestured a yes with one hand.

  “He needed them, Alyson,” he said. “He could not handle the reintegration on his own. If such a brutal process can be called something as neutral as ‘reintegration,’ given the state he lived in as Syrimne.”

  Clicking softly, he shook his head sympathetically before adding,

  “I truly cannot imagine the depth of his terror when he was reunited with that part of himself, Alyson. You had asked me once, why he did not find you right away, after what occurred in D.C. I think now it is likely he simply wasn’t capable of it. He likely wasn’t capable of doing much of anything but finding his masters once more, and asking them to help him put the pieces of his mind back together.”

  He sent me images along with his words, clearly enough that I had no response at first. For a moment I could only sit there, digesting what I’d felt, staring at the metal tabletop between my splayed fingers. Despite my sharp words with Balidor, nothing in me felt angry.

  The anger in me had petered out. I wasn’t sure the hollowed-out feeling that replaced it was much of an improvement, though.

  I knew what Vash was trying to tell me.

  I’d slowly pieced together about half of Revik’s personal history since I’d learned who he really was, with the help of Vash and even Revik himself. While I stayed with Syrimne in those mountains, he told me pretty much anything I wanted to know about his early years. He even told me things he remembered from his childhood––parts of it, anyway.

  He told me less about Menlim and what Menlim had done to him.

  I’d heard from Tarsi, Revik’s only living blood relative, that he’d had a family once, who loved him dearly. The Sword, the version of Revik I’d grown to know in those mountains, had nothing to tell me about them––not even their names.

  Vash told me the Dreng had likely restored his memory only selectively, despite Revik’s claims that he remembered all of his life following his reintegration.

  He’d been six years old when they’d taken him.

  A few decades later, my husband became the most hated, feared and revered seer to ever have lived.

  To the seers themselves, Syrimne d’Gaos remained a legend, some kind of avenging angel.

  To humans, especially those who encountered him during World War I, or had family who died because of him, he was more like the a
ngel of death.

  Clicking softly, in the cultured, older style of seer verbal cues, Vash raised a long-fingered hand, making a regretful gesture.

  “From the very beginning, Alyson,” he said, as if he’d been listening to me think all this. “…He was being groomed for this type of dependency. They did this so he would be less likely to fight their plans for him. They did it also so he could not leave them when he grew to be a man. The Dreng and Menlim broke his mind, then held the splintered pieces of his personality in place. Your husband was incapable of living independently, Alyson. He truly was broken… in a very real sense. While he was being trained as Syrimne, they deliberately fractured his mind, giving him situations he could not handle.”

  “Situations he couldn’t handle?” I refolded my arms, feeling my throat tighten more. “Like what?”

  “I do not know the specifics, dear friend,” Vash said, his dark eyes softer. “But whatever they were, they forced him to split himself, to create personalities that could cope. The process made him pliable. It also made him entirely dependent on the Dreng for the integration of those personalities––and for the stability required for sanity.”

  Pausing, he gave me another regretful look.

  “He needs them, Allie. Quite literally. It is why, when we brought him down the first time, during the war, we compromised. We removed the parts of his personality that we knew to be unstable and put them in the vessel of the boy. We knew of no other way to give him back the ability to govern his own life. It was that, or leave him a slave to the Dreng.”

  I tried to think about the old seer’s words, to make sense of them.

  I tried not to feel like I’d murdered him again, like I’d somehow murdered the man I loved wholesale while trying to help him get free.

  I’d wanted more than anything to get him away from those people––especially Salinse, who was blood cousin to Menlim and seemingly cut from the same cloth. I wanted him away from the Dreng, away from the influence I could feel they had over his light, and increasingly, over his mind.

  More than anything, I hated how subservient he was to them, even when he pretended he wasn’t. I hated how he made excuses for them, for Salinse, for his own behavior when he was following orders. And I really fucking hated how Salinse treated Revik, the one and only time I ever met the fossilized seer in person.

  That smug attitude of propriety over my husband made me want to punch him in the face, bare-knuckled, about twenty or so times without stopping. I didn’t realize until later why it made me so insanely angry. Then it hit me.

  Salinse treated Revik like a pet.

  A prized one, sure… maybe even a beloved one.

  But a pet, nonetheless.

  “So is he stable at all?” I looked at Vash.

  “Right now, no.”

  “Will it get worse than this?”

  “I do not know that either, my dear. If he follows the same patterns as before, it could get worse, yes. But essentially, he will shift personalities as he needs, to evade our attempts to reach him. It will seem worse at times than others, as some of these personalities are more benign than others, but essentially his condition will remain the same.”

  I bit my tongue, hard enough to taste blood.

  Shaking my head, I tried to focus back on the problem at hand.

  “Do we need to provide him the same kind of structure somehow?” I scanned the Barrier space, trying to think of ways this might happen. “How do we do that?”

  Balidor clicked at this in irritation, but Jon snapped at him.

  “Hey, man… why not stop the petty crap and help her with solutions?”

  I glanced at Jon, swallowing. I’d forgotten he was there.

  He loved Revik, too.

  Balidor gave him an equally hard stare. “I’m not in the habit of pretending there are solutions to problems that have none, young cousin.”

  “Or looking for one when you’d rather none existed, apparently,” Jon muttered.

  “You can go ahead and help your sister maintain her delusions,” Balidor said. “Or you can be a real help to her and assist her in embracing reality.”

  “You can give up if you want, man. We all know your stake in this.”

  Balidor’s lips pressed together, tightly enough to form a dark line in his face.

  Before he could speak, I held up a hand to silence them, looking at Vash.

  “Can we help him?” I said. “What can we do? You have some ideas, right?”

  After a long pause, the old seer purred another of those clicking sighs, leaning back in the high-backed chair. Gazing solemnly at my face, he folded his hands over the front of his robe, lacing long fingers.

  “I honestly do not know, Alyson,” he said. “I would have said no before. I would have agreed with Balidor, that he cannot be helped, not in this form. It is, in fact, why we split him. The breaks were too severe… the insanity too great. He viewed us all as his enemies. He did nothing but try to thwart our every attempt to reach him. We tried to show him compassion, even affection…”

  Vash sighed again, gesturing a sign for futility as he clicked softly.

  “He was like, how is it you say in America… a broken record? Stuck on the same groove. Unable to get off of it, or to position himself objectively. He genuinely could not see himself or us in any but the one way. We were the enemy in his eyes, and he fell back on his training, on what Menlim taught him to do when in the hands of the enemy.”

  “And what is that?” I said warily.

  “To kill us all,” Vash said, smiling faintly. “Or, perhaps more accurately, to defeat us, in any way possible. To counterattack. To remain on the offensive. Even if it meant his own death. He was taught to never give in, Alyson––to never cooperate, never show weakness, never surrender an inch of ground, no matter what was being done to him. His ability to withstand coercion in any form is remarkable, really. I don’t believe there is anything we could do to him physically that would make the slightest bit of impression on him––”

  “You mean torture,” Jon cut in, his voice angry again.

  Vash didn’t respond immediately, but his dark eyes shimmered at Jon in a kind of pained silence. He looked away just before he shrugged with one hand.

  “Not entirely,” he said. “But yes. In part.”

  “You’ll never beat him that way,” Balidor added, giving Jon a dismissive look. Folding his hands across his own broad chest, he sighed as well, but his held more anger.

  “We tried to break him. Numerous times.” He looked at me. “We tried everything. It was not a short project, our attempt to resurrect the man who had been Syrimne. We tried every tactic at our disposal, gentle and hard, to reach him. Including torture.” He gave Jon another level stare. “At times, that seemed to be the only language he understood. Unfortunately, it was also the least effective, as Vash says. I wondered at times if he even enjoyed it.”

  Jon looked away, his face flushed with repressed fury.

  “It made no difference, cousin,” Balidor told him, raising his voice. “Nothing we tried did, and we tried many more soft methods than we did hard.” He glanced again at me. “He shut us out so completely that we were forced to admit defeat.”

  “But he can’t,” Jon blurted. “Not anymore.”

  Seers from around the table swiveled their eyes in his direction.

  “Can’t what, cousin?” Dorje said, from his right.

  Jon looked at me.

  “He can’t keep Allie out. He can’t.” He looked at me, his eyes faintly pleading. “That’s right, isn’t it, Al? With the bond between you, he has no choice but to let you in. He can’t keep you out. Even if he wanted to… he can’t.”

  Before I’d really processed his words, every eye in the room had turned to me.

  Still staring at my splayed fingers, I replayed Jon’s words.

  Once I had, hope bloomed in my chest.

  It was a small hope, so small I found myself scared to believe in it at all, scared
even to acknowledge it. But it wasn’t nothing.

  “Yeah,” I said, clearing my throat. I glanced around at the rest of them, seeing the forbidding look that had already risen to Balidor’s eyes.

  “Yeah, Jon,” I said again. “That’s exactly right.”

  Vash surprised me then, maybe surprised all of us.

  He chuckled.

  I was still staring at that smile, trying to decide if it was real, when he chuckled again.

  5

  WHAT DO YOU TALK ABOUT?

  I WATCHED WITH held breath as Balidor walked out of the organic cage.

  It was only the fourth time I’d watched him go in, although I knew he’d been in there a lot more times than that. His face looked roughly the same as it had the other three times I’d seen it at the end of one of these sessions.

  He didn’t look at me before turning to shut the door to the tank. I watched as he locked it methodically, activating the main lock with the keypad to the right of the organic hatch and twisting the wheel that activated the pressurized seal with the outer wall.

  The door looked more like something attached to a bank vault than a prison. The organic material alone, even without the dead metal locks, measured over three feet thick on each side. I estimated it at closer to five in the center, where most of the mechanics lived.

  I had deliberately stayed away from the security station, where I could have seen, and even heard their interaction.

  Now, looking at Balidor's face, I wished I hadn’t.

  I watched the Adhipan leader approach where I stood, feeling my whole body grow colder when I saw the anger underlying the grim look on his face.

  Swallowing, I touched his light cautiously with my own. “Well?”

  “He cannot get free,” Balidor said. “The collar will hold.”

  I felt my hands curl into fists at my sides, but my whole body hurt. I had to get used to that pain. Chances were, I might have to get used to it for the rest of my life. I stared at the pressurized door, avoiding the thick, organic window with my eyes.