by James Maxey
At this moment, there was a cough from the dust cloud behind us and we all nearly jumped out of our skins. Sorrow stumbled out of the fog, hacking up dusty spittle. She was wrapped in the coat her father had draped over her, and dragging a black walrus coat taken from one of the ogresses. In her other hand she held some oversized boots. She tossed the coat to Infidel. “Figured you’d be pretty chilled by now.”
“Getting colder every second,” Infidel said, softly.
“What happened?” Sorrow asked, through chattering teeth. “After Purity knocked us for a loop, I was running back to join you when the ice in front of me split open. I was trying to work my way around it when I heard a lot of shouting. Then, poof, dust everywhere. I’ve been jumping from floe to floe, completely lost, until I saw the light of the Gloryhammer.”
“Your father succeeded in killing Glorious,” I said. “Dust was all that was left.”
“Oh,” she said.
“To complicate matters, Glorious said he’d sent the sun away,” said Infidel. “He said it would take about a month to turn into a speck in the sky. After that, permanent winter.”
“I see,” said Sorrow. She sat down on the ice. Her lips were completely blue. She stared out into the distance, not looking at any of us. After a moment, she sighed and shook her head. “Two minutes ago, my biggest worry was that I was going to lose my toes to frostbite.”
Her toes were dark black and shiny. She started to put on the boots, which were about three times bigger than her feet, when Aurora knelt before her and said, “Now that I have the Jagged Heart once more, I can treat your frostbite.”
She took Sorrow’s right foot in her huge hands, rubbing them, then paused.
“Um,” she said, “this isn’t frostbite.”
“What do you mean?” asked Sorrow.
“For some reason, your toes are covered in black scales. It’s like snake skin.”
Sorrow’s eyes grew wide as she stared at her toes.
I asked, “Maybe Rott is somehow –”
She held up her hand, cutting me off. “I don’t want to talk about it. I’ll deal with it. Somehow.” Then she quickly pulled on both boots and stood up. She said, “A more pressing question is, where’s my father?”
“Somewhere out in the dust,” said Infidel, waving in the general direction she’d left him. “I punched his lights out.”
I thought this was an unfortunate choice of words.
“Do you want me to go find him?” Infidel asked.
Sorrow shook her head. “If I saw him again, I’d kill him.”
“I’d be okay with that,” said Infidel.
“I wouldn’t,” said Sorrow. “The greatest curse I could place on my father is to let him live with the full weight of his actions upon his conscience. Death would be too merciful.”
Before we could further debate the appropriate fate for Judge Stern, I heard a distant cough. I spotted what looked like a naked woman stumbling towards us on an adjoining ice floe. She looked exactly like Infidel.
I asked, “Is that –”
“Purity!” Sorrow growled.
Aurora placed a beefy hand on the young witch’s shoulder. “Hold on. It’s not her.”
The woman who looked like Infidel coughed again and rubbed soot from her eyes, as she reached the edge of her ice floe. She stared at us as if we were ghosts. Which, I guess, we were.
“Aurora?” she asked, utterly confused. “I thought you were dead!”
“Menagerie?” Aurora asked.
“Yeah,” she said, frowning. “What the hell’s wrong with my voice?”
The woman looked down, her eyes going wide.
“This wasn’t one of my tattoos,” she said, scratching her head.
“You’re alive again,” said Infidel. “Don’t complain.”
“Again?” asked Menagerie. “I was dead?”
“We’re all dead,” said Aurora.
“I’m pretty certain I’m alive,” said Infidel.
Sorrow nodded. “My heart’s beating as well.”
Aurora sighed. “Fine. If you want to be picky, I suppose that only Stagger and I are truly dead. The rest of you have living bodies that came to the Great Sea Above via the Jagged Heart. I can send you back, if you’d like. Then you can freeze along with the rest the world.”
“I feel like there’s a lot I’m missing,” said Menagerie.
Aurora began to recount our adventures, filling Menagerie in on all that had happened since he died. As Aurora spoke, Infidel sat down next to Sorrow. We had our arms wrapped around each other. She sat the Gloryhammer in front of us. It glowed like a heatless campfire, as we listened to Aurora recount the most horrible ghost story ever.
The hair on the back of my neck rose as I thought more about what I was doing. I was staring at a hammer. I was staring at a hammer that was glowing. The hammer was glowing because it had been carved out of the sun.
“I know how to save the world,” I said.
“You know I married you for your brains, right?” said Infidel.
“The Gloryhammer’s part of the sun,” I said. “Earlier, when I touched it in the material world, I felt waves of horrible loneliness wash over me. As a spirit, I could sense the soul of Glorious inside the hammer. But when I grabbed the hammer here, I didn’t feel anything. Glorious was no longer inside the sun at this point.”
Sorrow’s eyes opened wide. “The sun has been primed to hold a soul...”
“And now it’s empty,” I said. “I, on the other hand, am a spirit with barely even a phantom body to cling to any more. What if I could merge my spirit with the sun? I could guide it back to its proper path!”
“Give me a second to figure out if that’s brilliant or stupid,” said Infidel.
Sorrow frowned, shaking her head. “This wouldn’t be something you could do for an hour or two and be done with it. Glorious had to guide the sun constantly, for three thousand years. If you could be joined with the sun, its material form would supply your spirit with the energy to endure for eons. You would have to maintain your vigilance on a scale human minds cannot grasp. Can you be trusted with such a task?”
“I can if it means that Infidel has a world to go back to where she can raise our daughter,” I said. “I accept the task gladly.”
“Stagger,” said Infidel. “You can’t!”
“Why not? What’s the flaw in this plan?”
“Living inside the sun drove Glorious crazy,” she said. “It’s bad enough that you’re dead. Now you want to be insane as well?”
“Glorious went insane because he was alone,” I said. “But I’ll never be alone. I’ll always have you. I’ll know that as I move the sun through the sky that my light is shining upon you. One day it will shine on our daughter, then her daughters, and if I have to keep rolling the sun across the sky from now until the end of time, I’ll do so. How many men can say that their actions will truly be important a thousand years from now? I want to do this. I must do this. Not to leave you, but to be with you forever.”
Infidel kissed me hard. When she pulled away, her eyes were glistening with tears. “You old fool. You were always too damn good at talking. Do what you have to do. No matter what, I will never, ever stop loving you.”
“This is all very touching,” said Sorrow. “And all completely moot. Menagerie here can occupy his new body because there’s a tiny portion of his original blood within it. I was able to bind Stagger to his driftwood shell with the essence of his spiritual blood. But there’s nothing here that we can use to bind him to the body of the sun. It’s not just a matter of him flying inside the sun and wishing it to move. He’s got to have some link, a blood-bridge between the material and spiritual worlds.”
“The bone-handled knife!” I said. “Its hilt is made of dragon bone. It held my blood after I was killed. If there’s still a trace left within it...”
Sorrow perked up. “That could work. Where’s the knife?”
“It was in Purity’s boat.”
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br /> “So it could be anywhere,” said Sorrow, looking around at all the carnage. “It’s probably at the bottom of the sea.”
“The Great Sea Above doesn’t really have a bottom,” said Aurora. “If something sinks, it sinks forever.”
“Let’s hope it didn’t sink,” I said.
Menagerie said, “If I had my old powers, I could change into a wolf and sniff it out. Tracing down Stagger’s scent would be a breeze.”
“Purity was able to shape-shift even without tattoos,” said Infidel. “She was better at it that you, in fact; she could do hybrid forms.”
Menagerie looked deeply offended. “Hybrid forms are decidedly not better shape-shifting. Animal bodies have been honed into perfect tools by natural forces. Blended forms are for amateurs. I became the whole animal because I was a true master of the craft.”
“No need to get snippy,” said Infidel. “In any case, when Nowowon killed you, part of your body survived as a tick. Purity could shift into any creature from which your body had drank blood. There was me, obviously, then a hound dog, a pelican, and now a whale.”
“Hmm,” said Menagerie, rubbing his chin. He closed his eyes as a look of concentration passed over his feminine features. His face elongated as fur sprouted from his body. He dropped to all fours and a moment later he was in the form of a bloodhound.
“Excellent,” the hound dog said gruffly. “First of all, I’ve never been so happy to have fur. Second, if the knife is near, I’ll find it.”
He loped off, sniffing the ice, leaping from floe to floe.
“There’s one last problem,” I said. “Let’s say this works. I’ve got a pretty good idea of what path the sun follows through the sky. I mean, it rises in the east and sets in the west. But, up here, how do I know east from west? How do I judge if the length of a day is enough? I don’t want to screw up the world with a half-ass job.”
“If only we could contact my father’s astrologers,” said Infidel. “He’s got an entire squadron of scholars whose whole job is to watch the sky. They can tell you the exact time of every eclipse for the next dozen centuries.”
Sorrow tilted her head as she studied Infidel. “I’m sorry, but who, exactly, is your father?”
“Oh. I forgot, you didn’t know. I’m the real Princess Innocent Brightmoon.”
Sorrow chuckled, until she realized the rest of us weren’t laughing. “What? Really? You’re not making fun of the dwarf?”
“Nope. I’m the genuine article. Of course, I’m not really welcome company in my father’s throne room any more. It’s not like I can ask him to get his astrologers to help out.”
“Maybe you won’t need to,” I said. “Glorious said he could see and hear people through the Glorystones, the same way that Greatshadow can spy on people through candles. If I were merged with the sun, maybe the astrologers could communicate with me and help guide my movements.”
Sorrow sighed. “Looks like I can’t let the old bastard die after all.”
“What? Who?” I asked.
“My father,” she said. “Infidel might not be able to ask a favor of the king, but my father can. We need to send him back to the material world with the mission to get the king’s astrologers to work with you, assuming Menagerie can find the knife.”
“Good plan,” said Infidel, standing up. “Give me a minute.”
She leapt into the air, rising a few hundred yards. She slowly turned, surveying the landscape, then darted off, vanishing behind the remnants of the dust cloud. Not thirty seconds later, she was back in view, dropping beside us with an unconscious Judge Stern draped over her shoulder.
“He was coming to when I found him. Had to give him a little tap to make him cooperative,” she said as she laid his limp body before us. “He should be up and about any second.”
“Let’s bind his hands and feet,” said Sorrow, tearing off strips from his robes. “Gag him as well.” She grabbed a pocket and ripped it. A glowing ring fell out and danced across the ice. It was the glorystone ring Brother Will had worn. Had this been the unseen object he’d paused to take when his shipmates had been devoured by maggots?
Sorrow showed no sign of grabbing the ring, so I snatched it up. As she finished tying up her father, Menagerie returned, still a hound, jumping back across the cracked sea ice, the bone-handled knife held in his slobbering jaws. He dropped the blade before me.
“Sorry about the spit,” he said. “It’s impossible to put a bone in a dog’s mouth and not get a little slobber.”
“Apologies aren’t necessary,” I said. “Good dog.”
“Don’t make me bite you,” Menagerie growled.
“Give me the knife and the hammer,” said Sorrow. “I’ll need a moment with each to attune myself to their magical resonance. If you and Infidel have any last words to say to one another, now is the time.”
Infidel handed over the hammer, then picked me up, rather clumsily now that she wasn’t filled with magical energy. I can’t guess how heavy I was, devoid of legs and guts. She carried me about fifty yards away before setting me down. We were near a second ogress Sorrow had reduced to a skeleton. Infidel liberated her walrus-skin coat, spreading it gore side down on the ice. We lay upon it, wrapping it around us for warmth.
“I wish I had some body heat to contribute,” I said.
“You’re like a damn ice cube,” Infidel said with a sigh. “At least I can’t complain about your cold feet.”
I laughed, but only briefly. “I’m sorry.”
“That you’re cold?”
“That your last memories of me will be as a semi-frozen, half-devoured corpse. I wish you could remember me the way I was.”
“Who says I can’t?”
“Gruesome memories have a way of sticking,” I said.
“Baby, I’ve been a mercenary for all my adult life. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t decapitate or disembowel someone. Any nightmares I used to have about blood and gore faded away a long time ago. My nightmares have matured considerably. What they’ve lost in grossness they’ve gained in unnerving plausibility.”
“Do you have nightmares often?” I asked.
“More than I let on,” she said. “As my feelings for you grew stronger over the years, I used to have nightmares about hurting you. I used to have this one nightmare where I’d kiss you and break your teeth, and wind up with blood in my mouth. And, now... well. There’s a new one.”
“What?”
“I’ve been dreaming about our baby,” she said. “Wondering if she’s going to be normal. She was conceived in the land of the dead. You weren’t... you weren’t in your real body. You were just a kind of imitation life. Will our baby really be alive? Or will she be half-alive, half-dead?”
I brushed the hair from her cheek. Ordinarily, this would have been intended to comfort her. But I couldn’t help but notice that the fingers I moved her hair with were pale white and puffy. Even against the ivory tone of her delicate skin, my flesh looked dead and bloodless. The iciness of my touch couldn’t have been a pleasant sensation.
“She’ll be fine,” I said, dropping my hand to my side.
“How can you know that?”
“First of all, when you were almost dead, I could see our baby’s aura. It was bright and clean, like a little white star in your belly. Nothing corrupted by death could have shone so beautifully.”
Infidel nodded, looking thoughtful.
“Second, the Black Swan said she’s met our daughter. That old witch never misses an opportunity to dig her claws into you. If our daughter were some kind of monster, she would have said something.”
“That’s kind of a negative logic, isn’t it?” Infidel asked. “Drawing a conclusion based on something that wasn’t said?”
“Then here’s number three,” I said. “I didn’t take it seriously when I was a child, but I grew up in a religion that believes that a Divine Author has written out all of our lives. I spent most of my life thinking this was bullshit, but now... Well, I didn
’t believe in ghosts, either. I’ve seen too many amazing things since I died to dismiss any possibility. Maybe there really is some guiding force out there with the job of making sure that everything works out for the good. Our lives sometimes feel like ships without a captain, at the mercy of the wind and the waves. But maybe there’s someone with his hands on the wheel after all, guiding us toward our destinies. If Zetetic is right, then maybe just believing makes it true. You’ve had a tough life, Infidel. But I can’t help thinking that you’ve become who you were always meant to be, and that there are even better things in store. You’re going to be a mother, and you’re going to be amazing.”
Infidel blushed slightly. “Aw,” she said, as she hugged me tightly.
“So the pep talk worked?” I asked.
“Not in the least,” she sighed. “But I love you for trying. This is the Stagger I’ll always remember. You’re the guy who never stopped trying to make me happy. Hell, you even died and remain more of an optimist than me.”
“I do these things because I love you,” I said.
“And I love you,” she said. “And nightmares are only nightmares. What happens in my sleep doesn’t matter in the least. When I’m awake, I remember your courage. When I’m awake, I fight off all my fears just by remembering your smile.”
I reached into my pocket and produced the glorystone ring. “Here’s something else to remember me by.”
I tried to slip it on her left hand, but it was too large for her slender fingers. We finally discovered it fit her thumb.
“It’s sweet,” she said. “But I liked your hair ring better. It was so much more personal.”
“This is personal, too. I just stole this ring. We spent our lives together as thieves. What could be more appropriate than a stolen ring? As a bonus, if Glorious really could see the world through Glorystones, perhaps I’ll be able to see you. I can be there as our daughter grows up.”
Infidel kissed me. It felt as if the power of the Gloryhammer were surging through me once more as I hugged her tightly. Then something cold and wet pressed itself into the back of my neck. I opened my left eye. In my peripheral vision, I spotted furry dog legs. I broke from the kiss and turned to face Menagerie.