Children of the Bloodlands

by S. M. Beiko

  Natti stood slowly as the woman surveyed them from under heavily lidded eyes, and unbidden, Natti went forward.

  “Ma?” she choked out, her face a raw open wound.

  The woman did not smile. She looked out at all of them, her voice rising, the voice of the still water behind her. “The world is in pain. The sea itself is choked. The Empress bids we wake her now. Because we have all suffered losses, and the worst is yet to come.” This time the woman did look at Natti, her stony expression cracking, only slightly. The recognition was real. Something passed between them. But Natti sat down, face hard, and the ceremony went on.

  “Many have travelled far. The road has been a jagged one. But now we call with a united voice to our Empress and her heart. We open the way to the Abyss. We make clear a path for they who will lead us to war.”

  Maujaq was silent amongst them, yet he went forward to the woman and bowed his head. All around them, the drums and dancing had begun again, rising in a frantic rhythm, louder and faster, and Phae saw the water behind them rising, spreading, separating. The ice parted, and a glacier that had at first been so far away was now rushing towards them, as if it had a hidden engine attached to it.

  Phae had been too busy watching the incoming ice to notice that Natti had stood, too, and followed Maujaq. The two stood before the woman, and Natti held up the claw she’d woken with. The woman nodded, and she turned to Maujaq, running a hand over his black-stained pelt. She held them both, and her long hair rose with a flash of water springing from the sea like a wild and tremulous eel darting around her.

  Phae didn’t know what to do. She was paralyzed, hands so tight at her sides the knuckles cracked. But it was Aunty who stood next and shuffled towards the circle as more darts of water shot forth. She looked to Phae and held out her arm for her support, and Phae was grateful for the prompt to move.

  The golden circles shimmered. The drums were deafening, the dancing a frenzied mania. The sky was almost painfully clear as the glacier loomed close, and the sea round it shifted, lifting it, turning it over to its searing blue underbelly.

  In the half-moonlight, something flashed, like a just-waking eye. The sea water hung about them in a sheet, and the summoning woman bent back in an ecstatic dance that seemed out of her control. All they could do was watch as with her movements the glacier rose higher and through it shattered a splintering crack that, with one final thrust of the woman’s open arms, sent the glacier bursting in a rain of diamond dust that blizzarded around the gathering. When the snow cleared, there was only the stone.

  The wind whipped higher, and the sea hung above them, dangerous, forbidding. Phae looked up through the arms she’d raised to protect her face and saw in the waves the shadows of the gliding, mysterious bodies that called the waters home, oblivious to being ripped from their moorings.

  Then the sea fell on them, before Phae could take a breath.

  ~

  All Natti could hear were the voices. Thousands of them, a raging flurry, angry for having been woken. She knew, beyond the water and the waves and the crushing sensation of passing into another realm, that the voices came from the stone. And that it was because of the stone they were still alive.

  Phae hadn’t been so careless as to think the Sapphire would protect her; she had cast a wide and beautiful net to protect Natti, Aunty, the summoner, and Maujaq. The rest of those who had made this happen, those taking part in the ceremony, were probably back on shore, waiting to see if they would be successful.

  To what end, Natti could only guess.

  “Are we —” Phae started, her voice sounding distant despite being at Natti’s and Maujaq’s side. “Where are we?”

  “The Abyss,” Maujaq replied. He didn’t hesitate; there was a searing joy in his voice, as if his soul had been returned to rights. And it had. Natti took it in; they were beneath the sea and the waves, an infinity of water. And she, too, felt like she was back where she belonged. Where she needed to be.

  The summoner only had eyes for Natti, and when she opened her arms, Natti leapt into them, fierce.

  “I thought . . .” She pulled away, not wanting to say it. “You disappeared. Like the others.”

  Natti’s mother tried to banish the despair from her eyes with a smile. “I know, love. I didn’t want to leave you. But all of us have to take the Ice Road home, in our way. I was called back here. I didn’t know how it’d be, but it was violent.”

  Whether it was from being in a realm of Ancient or from the power Siku had given her, Natti couldn’t say — but just by holding tight to her mother, the water’s surface showed her how her ma had come to be here. Coming home from her shift. A car pulling up next to her. Rough hands dragging her in, knocking her out, a fight. Driving for hours and hours north. A river. They hadn’t known that the water would be the safest place for her, that you can’t drown a Seal. The water spoke to her, desperate. Took her here. She would be the one to call the glacier back up, and the stone in it. This had been her destiny. And she would have to wait, long painful years, until her daughter found her own way back.

  “Could’ve called,” Natti sniffed. “Could’ve told me you were okay.”

  Her mother’s face twisted. “Even Seals have tenets. Everything in its time. We had to trust, you and I. And it wasn’t for nothing.”

  “No,” Aunty said. “Really something, all right.”

  Natti’s mother rested a hand on Aunty’s upper arm. “Thank you. For seeing her here where she belongs.”

  “But —” Natti interjected. “I can’t . . . it’s not —”

  A flash, one voice among the deluge. A wave within a wave, and from the Sapphire bloomed a maelstrom in the water. A great body rising, with a long smooth tail. With a crown of fish bones and hair as wild and untamed as any ocean.

  Ryk.

  She surveyed them all with a gaze as stabbing as a tide. In one hand she held a jagged bone harpoon as if it were an extension of her arm.

  “Long has my heart slept in the waves,” she said, and the sound was all around them and inside, even in Phae’s protective bubble. “Grave must be the tidings to wake me.”

  “They are.” Natti’s mother went forward, flanked by Maujaq, and the two knelt in deference. “First Matriarch, Empress of the Abyss. A child of the Bloodlands has blackened the blood of the world. We need your avatar now more than we ever have.”

  Ryk seemed to weigh each word of the petition like a pebble in her puckered mouth. Natti hadn’t ever seen drawings of Ryk; she had only the vision she’d imagined from Aunty’s stories. But not even her imagination could measure up to the powerful woman towering before them, the left hand of Ancient, and the warrior twin to Deon, First Matriarch of Fire and Foxes. If only Roan could be here to see it . . . Just thinking of her pained Natti. What was her friend possibly going through?

  “Great unrest with my sister stones. I feel it across the current.” Ryk turned to stare out into her vast kingdom as if to listen. “Heen’s heart corrupted. Deon’s faltering. What hope is there for the Sapphire to be sent into the world if these have already fallen?”

  “Fallen?” Natti repeated, dumbstruck, as if Roan’s fate had already been decided.

  “Surely the Moonstone —” Natti’s mother tried, but Ryk silenced her with a glare.

  “The keeper of Phyr’s stone moves to reclaim the Opal. But he will fall short. His mortal heart will not be able to do what he must. And he will suffer for it.” Ryk lowered her harpoon, pointing it at each of them. “My Inua brought you all here so that I may choose one to bear the stone.” And as she knew it would, the barbed spear halted before Natti, so she met it with a nod.

  But Aunty shuffled in front of it, straightening her back as best she could. “And I choose to bear it, Empress.”

  Natti faltered. “Aunty, no —”

  Aunty held up a shaking hand, and it seemed that even Ryk was consid
ering this.

  “Grandmother,” she admonished, “long have you been in the world. Truly you have been blessed with power and you have seen much. But you, like my Inua, are corrupted.” The sharp tip of her mighty weapon touched Aunty’s chest, parted her jacket to show the black stain that matched Maujaq’s. Her eyes darted to Phae. “Even a Deer could not heal this.”

  Aunty nodded. “The fight will come soon enough, and I’m dying anyway. Might as well make the most of it, eh?”

  Natti didn’t know what kind of balls it took to try to pass sarcasm over a Matriarch, but Ryk tilted her head back and let out a laugh to rival a group of barking seals on an open bay.

  “Truly I am spoiled for choice,” Ryk shot back, and the stone lunged for purchase in Aunty’s forehead before Natti could stop any of it. Aunty’s body stiffened, was swirled in a violent twist of jagged light, and suddenly Ryk was Aunty, and Aunty was Ryk, and the bone harpoon was in the aged, powerful hand of the woman who had cared for Natti since she was a child.

  Natti, her mother, and Maujaq gaped in awe, but the Abyss still twisted and raged around them.

  “We have our Matriarch.” Natti’s mother nodded. “But there’s yet another purpose for us here.”

  “Not us,” said Aunty. “Her.”

  She levelled the harpoon now at Phae, whose antlers glistened in the shadow of the water, brow knit in concentration and fear.

  “Me?” she balked.

  Aunty nodded, the fish crown and her iron hair a huge and thunderous halo. The currents whipped faster, and when Phae ducked, the forcefield around her quivered.

  “It won’t be enough to send the Sapphire after Seela. It’s only a part of it. But there’s another stone, the last stone, that is necessary for all of this to play out,” Aunty intoned.

  The currents were guided missiles, and they blindsided Phae, pulling her into the waves. Natti leapt forward, tried to catch her, but Maujaq held her back.

  “Wait!” she screamed. “What are you —”

  “The Horned Quartz,” Aunty said, raising the harpoon above her head in both hands and commanding the sea like she was stirring a boiling pot. “Find the heart of the Glen. Find the ruler of that stark land. If Fia finds you worthy of it, finds this world worthy of it, the Horned Quartz would be yours to wield. That is why you came with us. I see it now. As I see far too much . . .”

  If lightning could blast beneath the water, it ricocheted off Aunty’s long, barbarous spear, making a fist of water that dragged Phae in its furious undertow.

  “With this Ancient current I send you there and pray you find your way back again,” Aunty said before she jabbed the weapon down like an axe, and Phae was catapulted into another realm.

  Son of the Wind

  “You are losing sight of your purpose, young master.”

  The darkling summoning tower was filled with ashy smoke, the oily kind from burning tallow. The red rings beneath Killian glowed faintly like plague wounds, Urka’s great furnace roiling at his back.

  “You question me now?” Killian allowed himself the grin. As Seela, he was sure of himself, but there was a sliver of him that was still human. Even though he’d let most of it go in exchange for his part in all this, Urka wanted it all gone. But a demon would never understand.

  “You are the Great Hammer,” Urka repeated, as it had every day and night since Killian had been blessed anew in that train station. “You will build the road to the new world. The bridge that our masters can cross. You were given their power and their promise. The Fox-girl. She was not meant to live.”

  “No. But she will be the one to open the door at my side. You’ll see.”

  Killian heard Urka raise its mighty arms and cut the air with its knife-fingers, agitated. “But the work . . . the work could be in jeopardy.”

  “Calm yourself, servant.” This time Killian’s smile dropped, teeth on edge. Seela stirred inside this frail mortal body, growling. “I ken what I’m about. And so should you. Bring me more children. I want cities blanketed with the trees of my homeland. I will make the world ready for my forebears, and no mistake. You do the digging, and I will build the bridge.”

  The rings stilled. In each of them the smoke hung like gossamer, and shapes took form: before him, a serpent with the body of a woman, her head crested with a cobra’s hood that could have been a crown. Another to Killian’s right — a beautiful man with four impossibly long arms bent in supplicant gestures, his face obscured by the same mask of bone that Killian carried as Seela. And the third, to his left, the strongest, the one that had not yet spoken and never would until they hung in the heavens with their siblings. They were dual-gendered, their spine on the outside of their body, eyes white, ears wide, mouthless, with the body of a horse.

  “Zabor. Kirkald. Balaghast.” Their names were an incantation on Killian’s tongue. They joined hands around him.

  “Our one true child,” they said.

  A rustling, footsteps. The Darkling Family in the red smoke collapsed with a sigh as if someone had blown them out, and Killian twisted, face contorted. A small gasp as the source dashed for the door, small feet slapping down the stone steps two at a time.

  “The little one,” Urka said, sharpening its axe-hands, “does not know her place.” Urka bore down on itself, grinding deep into the stone and the cliffs and travelling with haste, at Seela’s command, to crack the earth from the inside. Urka knew its place. So did Killian. So did Saskia, deep down.

  “She knows it right well, in fact.” Killian smiled again in the silence, and he let the dark move him.

  ~

  “And you’re safe?”

  Eli felt his mouth twitch. “In a manner of speaking.” He huddled closer to the roof’s air vent, pulling his wings around him like a coat. He’d been up here a while, trying to come back to himself, but he still felt stunned. He was lucky he’d made it up here at all, and unseen.

  “It’s all over the news —” Barton’s voice, cutting in front of Solomon’s. “They’re just playing it on a loop, everywhere, on every network . . . can’t you stop it?”

  “I already told you —” Eli bit back a rush of pain “— he touched the stone. Did something to it. It’s like it’s shorted out. I’ve never . . .” Never lost control. Never lost the ability to control anyone else.

  “There were injuries.” Solomon came back on the line. “But no deaths. Just those trees. And the destruction. It was —”

  “A big show,” Eli finished for him. Spectacle. But not just that. He’d seen Roan there, in the midst of it. The core and source of the destruction. Seela had her on the front line — and whether by his will or no, he’d changed her into something else. “Seela wants Mundanes to see Denizens. He got what he wanted. And he wants to divide the world further than it already is.”

  Eli had tried for hours to reach out to her, the way they’d done when he’d been trapped, stone to stone. It was the only way he’d found her at all. West, it’d said so clearly. But either she was too far away now, or he was too out of sorts to do much else but cough up blood and shiver deep into his wings. He couldn’t feel the Opal anywhere. And he couldn’t feel Roan.

  “What are you going to do now?” Barton again, voice low, other voices climbing in the background. “Are you going after her? After Seela?”

  “I don’t know,” Eli lied. “The Moonstone is . . . its power. My power. It’s inhibited.” Come on, he shut his eyes tight, pressing the phone harder into his head as if willing the electromagnetic pulse to charge through him, kickstart the stone like a worn battery. “For all I know she could be dead. Seela could have the Opal. I don’t know.”

  “Come back.”

  Eli perked up. “What did you say?” He sat up, peered around the air vent towards the sun setting on the western horizon over the city. The roof was empty, the wind a steely howl.

  “What?” Barton said. “
I didn’t say anything. But look, you should get back here, Eli. I don’t know how you got there so goddamn fast, but you have to return. Charter a plane. We’re in damage control. So many people saw it all happen. Regular people. Networks originally tried to spin it as a stunt for a movie, but the buildings, the destruction . . . it’s being labelled as terrorism now. Governments are getting involved. Is there a precedent for Denizens coming under arrest for their powers? Are we all hooped now?”

  Eli couldn’t stand the panic in Barton’s voice. “I have to stay in the field,” he insisted quietly. “I’m not coming back. Not without the Opal.” He hung up, threw the phone aside, and watched it shatter against a chimney stack.

  “Come back.”

  This time Eli was on his feet, wings raised painfully and ready for flight. The shadows on the roof were vibrating, moving, rising. They took the shape of a body right in front of him, peeling back to reveal a face partially concealed by a mask of bone.

  Eli lowered his arms. “Harken?”

  There were no eyes, just the mouth. So much like Seela he couldn’t bear the comparison. The shadows were peeling back, and there, at the centre, was the Dragon Opal.

  Maybe Eli had nodded off in the seconds between tossing the phone and taking a breath. The air stilled, and scattered pigeons were frozen above her head like an augury.

  “Where are you?” Eli asked. “I can’t . . . reach the stone.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s getting crowded in here. Soon there won’t be enough room for all of us.”

  Eli stared. “Us?”

  She nodded. “The darkness. Me. You. It’s getting harder to breathe.”

  Maybe she was asleep, too. Was she talking about what he’d seen in the street? The dead, dark fox warrior, who should have been Deon but wasn’t. Corrupted had been the best word for it. Had Seela infected her, turning her against even herself?