Shield (Bridge & Sword: Awakenings #2): Bridge & Sword World

by JC Andrijeski

It took me another moment to identify the look in his gray eyes as sympathy.

  THAT NIGHT, I lay awake on my back, staring up at a bamboo ceiling.

  I wanted to view this rationally––or superstitiously, maybe, the way they did.

  I couldn’t, though. I’d read all the literature about these wars. Supposedly they’d kill all the trees, “blot out the sun,” “make the oceans boil,” “kill everything that crawls or flies or climbs.” Children would be born with defects, disease would run rampant, people wouldn’t have enough food or water or clean air.

  That wasn’t a world I wanted to live in.

  It wasn’t a world I’d wish on anyone else, either.

  Then there was Revik. Some part of me hadn’t given up entirely on having a life with him, even apart from all this. I knew I couldn’t just run off and play house like most people, but I thought we might have some of it––providing, of course, he wanted any of that with me.

  He was already three weeks overdue from when they’d told me he’d be back.

  If I went on what they’d first told me, it was more like a month.

  So I lay there, and worried. I worried about the war, and I worried about Revik. I knew I pulled on him all through it, but for once, I just let the separation pain be there, without trying to cover it over, or pretend I was doing fine.

  I wasn’t doing fine. I hadn’t been fine in a long time.

  Beyond all the rest of it, the seer part and the world ending part and the pseudo-marriage part––I missed him. In those weeks we’d been together on the ship, he’d been my best friend. Despite all of our problems, and everything that went down in the year or so we’d known one another, I still trusted him more than anyone apart from Jon and Cass.

  I wanted to talk to him about this.

  I wanted to talk to him about the war, about Terian, about what I should do. I wanted to know if he thought war was inevitable, too. I wondered if he’d say the same things the rest of them said, that it was a waste of time, trying to stop it.

  Curling up on the thin mattress, I willed him home.

  I knew he wouldn’t feel it, not with a dozen infiltrators monitoring his light, making sure nothing got to him from outside.

  A part of me thought he really did hear me under all of those shields though, and that he understood.

  5

  CAVE

  TERIAN WALKED THE yard, using a bone-handled cane as a walking stick.

  This personality configuration wore a body once called “Terian-11,” before Galaith decimated his ranks. Now, to the other Terians, he was “Terian-4,” or simply “Four.”

  Four was a two-hundred-year-old seer with an alias as a thirty-something human who operated an import-export business out of Beijing. He was unmarried, but had a local girlfriend, an actress named Bai-Ling.

  Now, he was far from her, and from his home.

  Four surveyed the faces turned towards his.

  Unwashed, they seemed to consist only of giant, liquid eyes surrounded by bone-stretched skin. Metal collars of a dull silver ringed filthy necks above protruding collarbones and coarse-spun clothes. The loose-fitting garments looked closer to burlap sacks cut with holes for arms, necks and legs than the shirts and long pants they were meant to approximate.

  Flies lazily circled and clustered in the yard, settling on eyes and untreated cuts scabbing on arms and legs. Most went unswatted by the owners of the flesh they craved.

  The age range in this pen looked to be approximately twelve solar years to twenty. As a result, the seers were small, thin-boned, pale. Most had been separated from their parents at a young age, if they’d ever spent time with parents at all.

  Four sniffed, his nose and mouth scrunching together involuntarily.

  They could certainly wash the product more often. Feed it occasionally, to ensure it developed well enough to be of some value. He’d hose off the whole yard right now if he could, first with soapy water, then with clean––maybe a few times for good measure.

  Still, he knew the realities of water in India and China well enough.

  The problem of water had only become worse in recent years, and promised to be still worse in future. The Himalayas themselves had already become a battleground, as governments on all sides of the great mountains fought over the snow and water from its peaks.

  This particular camp had not been run by Rooks, strictly speaking.

  Even so, the monk he traced through Galaith’s invoices had definitely been paid for through his private funds. While Three dug through paperwork in Bavaria, Four had been tasked with hunting down every bank account accessed directly by Galaith, which meant diving into the endless rattrap of human aliases he’d built over the years, along with dead seers whose names he’d borrowed, seers who’d “willed” all of their financial holdings to him, humans who had been “relatives,” etc.

  The Rooks, even now, with half of those accounts unclaimed or unaccounted for, had a greater GNP than the majority of first world human nations.

  Despite that, Galaith paid this bill with his personal funds, from a secret account, not as part of regular operations expensing. Whatever these monks had been doing for Galaith, he hadn’t wanted it known by anyone who handled finances in the network.

  The anomaly had been intriguing enough that Terian thought to check it out himself.

  He still wasn’t sure what he’d found.

  The seer in front of him, an overweight and severely aged nun of East Indian ancestry, perhaps six hundred years old, looked nervous as she shot Terian over-the-shoulder glances. Galaith’s record books and the monks and nuns themselves called this a “school,” but Terian recognized a work camp when he saw one.

  He should, since he’d run a number of them in his time with the Rooks, and overseen the science arm of a few others. In particular, he’d overseen a lot of genetics work, starting in the period following World War II, when Galaith first took an interest in hybridization.

  Terian had never been overly fond of the camps himself, but one of his personas had a talent for genetics. The seer camps provided an almost unparalleled playground for conducting experiments utilizing both physical and aleimic structures, as well as creating functioning cross-breeds that might fool human seer detection devices.

  Terian followed the woman through a heavy wooden door at the other end of the yard, watching her fumble with an iron key kept on a chain around her neck and inside her robes. He smiled a little at the quaint security system, then followed her into the foyer of an inside chamber, watching somewhat impatiently as she lit a torch from the one hanging on the wall.

  “The electricity is not reliable up here,” she explained apologetically, although Terian had been fairly certain his thoughts were shielded. “We have found that traditional methods are less likely to leave us groping in the dark.”

  Terian grunted a noncommittal response, motioning for her to continue.

  She began stepping carefully down the steep stone stairs.

  “You are quite sure he told you the full extent of our protocols here?” She glanced back at him, her pale, soft face appearing ghoul-like against the pitch black beyond the torch’s reach. “He had no other names on his list. In fact, he was quite adamant that––”

  “Would you like to see the mark in my aleimi again, Sister?” Terian’s voice was calm, the picture of polite. “I assure you, I was debriefed in full at the time of succession.”

  The woman picked up on the edge underlying his words.

  “No,” she said. “The access was clear enough, sir. My apologies.”

  Her uneasiness remained, discernible in her voice.

  Terian glanced at the rough-hewn stone walls, stained by smoke and accumulated mold.

  They walked on in the dark, tunneling deeper into the mountain. Terian found he was out of breath as they descended yet another flight of steep stairs into near-perfect darkness. The air grew increasingly stale the further down they traveled, reeking of stagnant water and decaying pla
nt life.

  He found himself breathing a little tighter, realized he was having what amounted to the beginnings of a panic attack.

  Claustrophobia. That was new.

  He scanned the space, trying to determine if it was his or something imposed by the Barrier field he’d just entered.

  “How much further?” he asked her in Mandarin.

  She glanced over her shoulder from a small chamber that served as a landing, her fleshy face once more contorted by the torch’s flickering.

  “I apologize for the state of our caves,” she said. “The Teacher thought it better if it looked like this part of the structure wasn’t in use, so we deliberately let it fall into disrepair.”

  She began walking again down the next set of steep steps, touching the shining wall with one age-spotted hand.

  “Almost there now,” she said, panting a little. “Not much longer, sir.”

  His interest further piqued, Terian followed her plodding steps.

  A few more landings down, a few more turns and walks through arched stone corridors later, Four saw a flickering light ahead of them. It illuminated a medieval-looking door either sheeted with, or made entirely out of iron.

  A narrow slot stood at head-height, its iron sliding cover closed.

  Just outside the door, seated in a wooden chair, sat a monk with a long gray beard and dark pits for eyes. Terian studied the wrinkled face as the woman put the torch in a second iron bracket on the opposite side of the door. He found himself torn with an odd feeling that he almost recognized that sallow face.

  The old seer stared back at him. The male’s dark eyes blazed with a dull hatred that only served to irritate Terian.

  “You should not be here,” the old man said in heavily-accented English. “You should not have brought him,” he told the woman. “He should not be here.”

  “He has the mark,” she said.

  “I know this one,” the old man sneered. “If he has it, he stole it. He should not be here.”

  Terian lost patience. He pulled the gun from the inside of his coat, pointing it first at the old man, then at the woman. The woman gaped at the gun as if she’d never seen one before.

  “Open the door,” Terian said.

  “You can kill me,” the old man said. “I do not care.”

  “That may happen anyway,” Terian said. “Your godawful stink is enough for murder. But for now, I will tell you this. You get in my way––even if you kill this body of mine––I will be back. And next time, I’ll take out every living soul in this complex, not just yours, old man. I’ll take out hers, and all the young pups upstairs. You wouldn’t want that on your conscience now, would you? All those progeny above, when you’re so short for this world?”

  The old man chuckled. The malice behind it made Terian stare at him again, trying to place the wasted face.

  He knew this being. He could feel it.

  “Bunch of diseased rats,” the old man said, his voice filled with phlegm. “You’d be doing the world a favor.” He stared at Terian’s face. “Yes, I remember you. They said you would come. One day.”

  “‘They’ did, did they?” Terian smiled, but felt anger underlying it somehow. “How nice. Now open the fucking door.”

  “You know who I mean. The two that brought him back.”

  Terian shot the old man in the hand.

  The woman screamed, flattening her back against the iron door. Terian pointed the gun at the old man’s face, glancing at the woman.

  “You’re still not opening the door,” he observed. “And you have a lot of body parts left.”

  The woman half-walked, half-stumbled into the old man, who bent over, gasping in pain, holding his bleeding hand against filthy robes, his long, wrinkled face pale. The woman fumbled across his clothing with clumsy, frantic hands.

  Even now, the old man tried feebly to ward her off. She pushed his hands aside, her own eyes white-rimmed with fear.

  “It’s too late, Merenje,” she whispered. “He’ll only shoot you for it now––and he’ll still get the key.”

  “Let him!” the old man said.

  But Terian had stopped breathing, hearing the man’s name.

  “Merenje?” He turned, looking at the man’s face in the torchlight.

  He’d heard the name before. He’d heard it over and over in fact.

  From the lips of a drugged and beaten captive he’d housed deep in the Caucasus Mountains, he’d heard that name until he’d been irritated enough to silence the voice uttering it. Dehgoies Revik muttered about Merenje and “the cave” for hours at times, hallucinating from lack of water and food. He did it again while begging for the beatings to stop, when Terian pushed him past the point of knowing who he was with or where he was.

  Terian glanced around the walls of dungeon-like space.

  The cave. How many times had he wondered what that meant?

  “What is your clan name?” Terian demanded, pointing the gun at the old man. “Where do you come from? Are you from here?”

  The man laughed, a sound like he’d first filled his mouth with broken glass.

  Terian saw the hard, black eyes shine in the light of the torch’s fire, filled with a bitter meanness, like an attack dog that’s been kicked too many times. It struck Terian that the man hadn’t always been so old and feeble.

  Then he realized something else.

  “You’re human.”

  Four lowered the gun. He stared at the emaciated form in front of him, realizing in a kind of shock that he wasn’t looking at a seven hundred year old seer, but a human being who had seen ninety-plus years, possibly more.

  The woman retrieved the key, and Terian motioned at her with the gun, still staring at the ancient human.

  “Open the door,” he said.

  Turning her back to him, she hastily complied.

  The lock made a squealing sound as if it hadn’t been turned in months.

  When the door swung wide, Terian had to fight to keep from gagging at the smell that flooded the hallway from the light-less hole. Bile rushed to his throat; he covered his mouth and nose with the hand holding the gun. He swore profusely, fighting the impulse to shoot the two people close enough to blame for this abomination.

  “Not so pleasant is it?” the old man sneered. “Hiding the sins of the past? Not so neat and clean.”

  Terian raised the gun, pointing it at him, then thought better of it and stepped around him instead, snatching one of the torches from an iron bracket and entering the small chamber, the sleeve of his forearm firmly over his nose and mouth. He swung the torch in a wide arc, taking in the small stone space.

  The ceiling rose higher than he would have expected, at least twice the height of the corridor outside, but the floor space stood only at about eight-by-eight feet.

  Terian turned around twice in the small cell, then stopped, startled when he saw a gleam of eyes reflect light back from his torch. He’d missed the creature entirely in his first turn around the room.

  Even now, it stood as still as a posed corpse.

  Four lowered the torch, blinking as his eyes adjusted.

  The boy stood with every muscle in his small frame relaxed. Yet his demeanor wasn’t one of subjugation or defeat, like the boys aboveground. On the contrary, his expression was calm, even politely interested. His shoulders sloped down below his neck, his arms below them, all the way to his hands, open at his sides, with delicate fingers.

  In appearance he was adolescent, perhaps fourteen or fifteen years old for a human, twenty to twenty-five for a seer.

  He stood so motionless and his skin shone with such a dull gray sheen he appeared to be made of wax. His eyes followed Terian’s every movement as if gliding on smooth rails, not once jerking or showing a reaction.

  After a few seconds, Terian realized he, himself had tensed.

  He felt as though he were being hunted, watched the way a giant cat might watch the motions of an antlered buck.

  Behind the boy, a palate
of rags and what might have been an ancient mattress stood near one wall of the cell, all the same dark gray with black streaks. The smell concentrated from there, and more so from a bucket that stood near enough to the “bed” that Terian wanted to shove it further away with the toe of his boot, if only to get the image of this creature sleeping next to its own excrement forever out of his mind.

  “What is your name, boy?” Terian said. He found himself fascinated by the black eyes, the utter lack of expression. “Can you speak?”

  The boy’s expression changed.

  Terian saw a dense hatred concentrate in those pupils, so fathomless it actually caused him to flinch back. Hearing noise behind him, he turned. The woman stood in the doorway, as did the old man. The boy’s look of murder aimed precisely at the man with the hole shot through his hand.

  “You did that?” The boy turned to Terian.

  He spoke Prexci of such an ancient dialect that Terian had to concentrate to make out the words. He slid into the Barrier, tried to look at the boy from there.

  Once he had, he focused and refocused his sight, not believing what he saw.

  Above the filthy creature’s head spiraled a collection of structures that nearly gave Terian an erection. A kind of fascinated awe fell over him as he stared at those rotating and glimmering shapes.

  The boy said again. “You did that? You shot him?”

  “Yes,” Terian told him, clicking out. “I did.”

  For a long moment, the boy only looked at the wasted human. Finally, he turned to Four.

  “Yes. I will go with you.”

  Without fully turning his head, Terian spoke to the other two. “What the fuck is this precious bundle of joy?” He glanced over his shoulder.

  The woman turned sheet white. “You said you knew. You said he entrusted you!”

  The old man gave another of those sick, grating chuckles. “I told you. He likely killed your precious Teacher with his own hands!”

  “You wouldn’t be far off with that, old man,” Terian said, raising the gun. “But you still haven’t answered my question.”

  The woman raised her hands to Terian in a kind of pleading supplication, her eyes darting nervously between him and the boy. “You must understand. It was for his own protection. For all of our protection! We feed him well––”