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

by JC Andrijeski

  …As a result, it would be expedient that we gain the attention of the Austro-Hungarian forces. Win their favor through something suitably dramatic, for which they have no reasonable explanation. We wish for the patronage of these humans at the outset, if only so they can aid us in weakening their rival human powers. More importantly, this will disguise our true goals at this delicate point––or at least confuse the issue. In particular, we mustn't underestimate the threat of Russia to the east. The Germans cannot fight this bear alone, not if they are divided, and forced to fight in the south, as well.

  The young seer nods again, gesturing his understanding, but he is not really listening.

  His own concerns are more immediate, and more personal.

  How will I know when it is right? he asks. I cannot see all of them.

  When the two armies are about to meet, the time is right, his uncle responds easily. Just begin as close to that point as you are able to reasonably estimate.

  What if I cannot control it?

  His uncle only looks at him, his yellow eyes glittering faintly.

  “Does it matter all that much, nephew?” he says aloud, in old-tongue Prexci.

  Looking at him, Nenzi swallows. After another pause, he shakes his head, clicking a little to himself in nerves.

  “No,” he answers in the same language. “It does not.”

  “Then begin, nephew. When you are ready.”

  Nenzi’s eyes return to the night-kissed field and its winding, moonlit river.

  He sees even more humans massing, moving swiftly but surely across uneven ground. Some look ready to dig into defensive positions, readying themselves for the onslaught from the north, but his eyes remain with those in the rear, who carry the ammunition and the fuel. He focuses on guns, big and small, seeking out anything combustible he can find in the rolling army.

  As he does, he begins to feel for the different places he needs in his light, the structures he will use above his head.

  Then, it happens.

  It whispers by him, a shift in the air.

  A command is given, somewhere below.

  He watches the lines begin to converge.

  Without taking his sight off them, he slides deeper into his light.

  A symphony erupts over his head, coupled with a now-familiar feeling––a nearly sensual loss of control. The folding happens next, and he feels it like the unclenching of a fist he’s held so tightly he’s forgotten the reason for its grip.

  He fights to hold onto the map that seethes through his light, telling him where he must aim those flames, what to do with them once they are free, but then there is that merging into everything, into light and air and other living flames. The vibration of living things, swimming around him, lifts him out of his body altogether.

  He lets out a gasp, lost in a world of meaning inside those shifting particles.

  His nerves and adrenaline and anticipation make it happen faster than usual, more intensely. A kind of collapse occurs, between himself and the rest of the world.

  His heart opens in the same breath.

  He feels them, all around him.

  The light of the worms, rolling into and between the guns they carry, the clothes they wear, the trees they hide behind, the earth on which they stand. He feels them there, a sea of heart and striving and need, and he wants so badly to give them what they want, to reunite them with the light from which they were born…

  Pain overwhelms him.

  It is almost love.

  It combines with a repressed grief he can barely feel in its entirety. He slides through them, and his mind goes blank with feeling. All the practicing he’s done, the training he evokes, only helps him pull it back a little, and then, not for very for long––not for more than a breath or two before it explodes out of him again.

  A wave of heat rolls through him. He uses it to try and connect with them, to connect with all of them, to liberate them, give them the peace they so desperately want––

  Tears are running down his face as he directs the course of that folding arc.

  He feels bones crack, ammunition light up, and he’s already moving out of the rear lines, and into the mass of them.

  The sounds are those of a stage play, not real, only incidental. The voices in his head come from their lower selves, not the high flames he feels above.

  He feels their confusion, their fear as their comrades fall around them, as he twists spines, breaks necks, stops hearts. He tries to ease their suffering, even in this, annihilating their fear by extinguishing their lights before it can fully blossom.

  He sets them free.

  He moves into the other side of the line without thought.

  There are no borders that make sense here, no uniforms, no sense of justice either side can claim. He continues through the sides until time disappears, until he is lost.

  All that matters is the Light.

  All that matters is that he free as many of them as he can.

  I’lenntare c’gaos untlelleres ungual ilarte.

  May the gods love you and keep you, beautiful ones.

  Y’lethe u agnate sol.

  It is for you I am here…

  WHEN HE COMES to, the sky is lightening, but it is cold.

  He feels pain in his head, a throbbing in his light and heart he doesn’t recognize, even as his limbs tremble from lack of light.

  No––not lack of light.

  They tremble from new light, light supplied from someone and somewhere else. He doesn’t know its source, feels half-sick from the amount of it. His aleimic structure bears the influx, but it leaves him off-balance, dizzy, unable to focus.

  The light doesn’t feel like his own, not yet anyway.

  He hears laughter, foreign and loud-sounding in his ears.

  Voices echo from nearby, and they are loud with sound, boisterous in emotion. He can hear drink in the cadence of their words, the clink of bottles or glasses and what sounds like utensils scraping the bottom of metal dishes.

  He tries to remember how he got here. His mind shifts backwards, moving into the darkness behind his eyes, until he feels––

  “Hey! The runt is finally awake!”

  A strong laugh brings his eyes upward.

  A face hangs over his, dark eyes and a heavy mouth crossed lightly by an age-white scar. The Chinese-looking seer peers down at him, holding the curtain to a bunk that he realizes only then had cut him off from the rest of the room. The older seer grips the fabric in one hand and stares down at Nenzi with a bleary and at least partially drunken grin.

  He understands now, at least, where he is.

  He is back in the tents, with his unit.

  Fighting to keep his eyes open, he holds up a hand to shield them from the light. Remembering who he is to them, he forces his voice lower, into a surly cadence that is matched only by the obscene hand gesture he gives the older seer in the pause.

  “Fuck off,” he says, to emphasize the point. “Leave the curtain closed, will you?”

  “Do you intend to sleep for the next two days, little Nenz?”

  “I will if I want,” he says back, his voice close to petulant. “What the hell did you give me, anyway? Or did you just bash me on the head when I wasn’t looking, to keep me out of the fight?”

  “Give you?” Wreg laughs, but that time, a harder edge touches his voice. “You knocked yourself out in the first hour of battle, runt. Jonas barely dragged you out before the Hungarians mistook you for a Serb and shot you just for the hell of it. They had to house you in here, like an old woman, while the rest of us fought in your stead…”

  Wreg’s smile widens then, turns more genuine. The next words that come from him seem to come from another man almost, bursting out of his lips in his excitement.

  “You missed it, my young brother!” he says, clasping Nenzi’s shoulder. “You missed seeing Syrimne wipe the dirt with their human asses!”

  “I missed… what?”

  “Syrimne, my brother! You
missed seeing our Syrimne take on the humans and teach them what it means to fight our people!”

  “Were they fighting our people?” Nenzi asks dryly. “I thought they were trying to kill one another, brother Wreg. This hardly seems like a victory for us.”

  “It may have started that way, but they know exactly who they are dealing with now, runt! You can be assured of that!”

  Nenzi battles to sit up, forcing his arms under his shoulders.

  At once, his head starts pounding again, until it feels as though the pulses might splinter his skull. Reaching up, he feels the bandage someone has wrapped around his forehead, and the stickiness of blood in a lump at the back of his skull.

  “What are you drinking, Wreg?” he says. “Whatever it is, spare me a glass, won’t you?”

  “Did your uncle not tell you? Syrimne was to do his first test on this day.”

  “He mentioned it, yes.”

  “Mentioned it?” Wreg says in disbelief. “And did he ‘mention,’ you little prick, that our intermediary single-handedly ended the battle of Cer in under an hour’s time? That he did it before the humans themselves had managed to exchange more than a dozen shots between them?” He grins wider, as if unable to help himself from sharing the news, even with a young seer he dislikes. “Did he tell you that, runt? Did he?”

  Nenzi forces his eyes up. He blinks into the light, wincing against the pain. That part, at least, he doesn’t have to fake.

  “Did you see him?” he asks only. “Syrimne. Did you see what he looked like, Wreg?”

  “Only from a distance, my young brother.”

  “And what did he look like?” Nenzi says. “From that distance?”

  “He was older than you… and younger than me,” Wreg replies. “He had dark skin, and looked Asian to me… only with light brown hair. I could see little else, at the distance.”

  “He sounds like a fairytale,” Nenzi says, his voice a grumble.

  “A fairytale? That fairytale killed almost 60,000 humans today, and in under an hour.”

  “Sixty… thousand?” Nenzi stares up at him, not able to hide his bewilderment. “Sixty thousand? That number cannot be correct. How is that even possible?”

  “He is Syrimne d’Gaos. That is how it is possible!”

  “But the Serbs,” Nenzi says. “They barely had that many in troops!”

  “He did not only kill Serbs, my young friend.” Wreg smiles, obviously enjoying the reaction he has finally managed to wrestle from him. “He started with the Serbs, but then he moved into the lines of the Austro-Hungarian army, once he had decimated most of their enemy. Both sides were running before they knew what was going on. We intercepted calls for surrender from the military leaders of both armies––almost within minutes of one another!”

  Wreg’s eyes shine now with a kind of fevered light.

  “I have never seen anything like it, brother Nenzi!” he says, raising his hand in the signal of an oath. “No seer on that field has ever seen anything like it. The day of the human is over! Our slavery is over! They will not dare to imprison and rape and torture our people anymore, not with Syrimne there to stop them!”

  Nenzi cannot answer.

  He stares at the floor under his feet, his mind lost in a haze of moving particles and half-remembered light. He fights it out of his aleimi, keeping the cloak around him that his uncle has instructed him to wear around the other seers. He knows there is a good chance that they will discover his identity eventually. His uncle is adamant that he remain anonymous for as long as it is remotely possible to do so, and he understands that, too.

  So he only nods at Wreg’s words, frowning.

  “Can I have that drink, brother Wreg?” he asks then.

  The other seer smiles, grabbing his arm.

  The mood of celebration is infectious in the small tent, but Nenzi cannot help but be bewildered by it all, lost in the triumph he feels in the lights of the other seers. They hand him a bottle, which turns out to be from the Austrians, and open it for him before he has managed to focus his eyes on the fire they have burning under the hole at the center of the tent’s roof.

  Later that morning, there is singing.

  Nenzi can only watch, smiling a little as they begin to howl like wolves and sing off-key the old traditional songs he only just remembers from his childhood.

  It pleases him, to see them like this.

  To see them flying high on adrenaline and regained hope, even if he cannot fully share it with them, makes him feel warmer towards their lights than he ever has before. He listens with a kind of wonder, unable to feel the freedom they feel, or the triumph––or even any real sense of accomplishment. Rather, he is pleased that he has pleased them.

  For most of that night, that is more real to him than the reasons for their laughter and affection.

  Once or twice, it crosses his mind, the flaws in what he has done, the loss of control––

  The deaths.

  Pain cuts at his heart. His mind grapples with the number Wreg told him.

  But he cannot force himself to dwell on that.

  So he simply sits there, by the fire, his head bandaged as he listens to them laugh and exchange stories of what they saw. At no point in their back and forth can he quite believe their words.

  At no point is it real to him that they are speaking about him.

  38

  EXHAUSTED

  BLEARY-EYED, I listened to Balidor in frustration, barely able to keep the emotion from my light, much less my voice.

  “I understand all that,” I said, when he paused long enough to take a breath. “But I want you to untie him. I want you to take the chains off him, at least.” I motioned at the tank. “He’d be collared still. He’d still be locked inside. I just want you to let him move around like a person, not like some animal we have tied to a tree.”

  The older seer looked at me, his gray eyes faintly incredulous.

  “Do you even know your mate, Allie?”

  I felt my jaw harden. Looking at him, then at the man on the other side of the transparent organic pane, I folded my arms.

  “Absolutely not,” the Adhipan leader growled. “I don’t even like having him in there with the same chain configuration for as long as we have. To have his hands and legs unsecured, even in a locked room––it is completely out of the question, Allie. Completely.”

  He looked at me with hard eyes. “You should know this by now. You should take your sentimentality out of this, and look at who he is.”

  I stripped the emotion from my voice. “He’s better now. You said so yourself.”

  “He has not attempted to rape you lately, it is true,” he said, scowling. “I would hardly consider that fact alone a measure of his overall stability. And in any case, he is a prisoner, and prisoners, by their very nature, attempt to get free.”

  “He’s through the worst of it. He shouldn’t even be a prisoner for much longer.”

  “Through the worst of it?” Balidor gave me another of those incredulous looks. “Allie. What makes you think he will get through this at all?” When I felt my fingers curl into fists under my arms, he caught hold of one of my hands, looking me in the face. “You have gotten him to feel some of these things, it is true. It is making him different, we have all seen it. But Alyson, you still have absolutely no idea what he is going to do with this information.”

  “Do with this information?” I said.

  “Yes,” he said, emphatic. “Do you think any of what he is seeing is significantly more palatable now than it was back then? He will need to determine some way to exist past this point… or not. You still have no idea what he will do.”

  Tugging on my hand, he softened his expression. Somehow his empathy threw me more than his anger, maybe because I was tired enough to let it in. Or maybe because I was so used to him angry these days that when the anger vanished, I didn't know how to fight him.

  “Allie, he could eat a bullet when this is over,” he said, his voice soft. “H
e could go fanatical religious again, like he did in the past. He could decide he needs a few more decades in snow caves.” His eyes hardened to a faint steel. “…or he could decide everything that happened to him and everything he did was fate. That his uncle was right, all along. He could go back to being bent on avenging the seer race. Only this time, he would be doing it from a place of greater logic and purpose––”

  “Or he could decide to just deal with it, ‘Dori.”

  “Meaning what? Go away, live in the mountains somewhere? Resume his daily penance ritual for the next four hundred years? You do not know what you are saying, Alyson. You have never had to face a life debt of this kind! The truth is, you have no idea what he will do to incorporate this information. Assuming he can incorporate it.”

  I shook my head at him, biting my lip.

  “Alyson––” he began, sighing.

  I cut him off.

  “You’re right,” I said. “I don’t know what he’s going to do. Because he could also decide to let us help him. He could decide to let Vash help him, and Tarsi. He could decide to try and leave all of that other crap behind, and just be who he is now.”

  “Which is what, exactly, Alyson?” Balidor said.

  “My husband.” I felt my face tighten at the pitying look that rose to his expression. “And more to the point, The Sword, Balidor… Syrimne d’Gaos! You talk like a human, as though that name were synonymous for evil, but it’s not. We could use him, ‘Dor. In fact…” I swallowed, looking back at the tank. “We need him.”

  “We need him?”

  “I need him,” I said, giving him a warning look. “And so do you, whether you’ll admit it to yourself or not. We can’t do this without him.”

  Seeing the anger returning to his expression, I lowered my voice, stepping closer.

  “I know you think this is all personal for me, ‘Dori… and I get that, I really do. It is personal for me. But that’s not all of it. When I say we need him, I don’t just mean the old Revik, the guy I married. I mean the real guy, Syrimne d’Gaos. We need all of him.”

  When the Adhipan leader only clicked at me, giving me a level stare that told me exactly what he thought of that idea, I flung out a hand in frustration.