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

by JC Andrijeski

  Fool, she says. Trickster.

  I point to the image of a turtle, under the earth. That one looks familiar, too. What is he?

  Wisdom, Tarsi says. And traditionally, it is she. She points to a being I hadn’t seen, woven into the fabric of the oceans. “Dragon” would be close in English. Not quite that. Not quite fish. Perhaps it is more accurate to call him “Birth.” He and Wisdom are creation, male and female. Closer to the Chinese meaning of dragon than that of European humans.

  Her eyes turn back towards mine, as pale as stars.

  Some of these beings do not incarnate down here in an individualized form, Bridge Alyson. Not in the way you or Syrimne have, at least. They are much more Barrier beings, unable to function in a stable way on this plane.

  I look around at the other images. We haven’t covered a third of them.

  Do you understand now? she says.

  Understand? I look at her. Understand what?

  She smiles, and her smile is patient.

  Why Death is your responsibility, she says.

  19

  NOT SO EASY

  I DIDN’T SLEEP well that night.

  Piled high in furs, mostly yak and cow skins, I didn’t want for warmth, and the bed wasn’t too hard.

  It was him. The separation pain came back as soon as I closed my eyes.

  Mixed with that came a paranoia I hadn’t experienced since he first left for Egypt. I knew it was irrational. Whatever Revik did to skirt the truth when it inconvenienced him, I’d never known him to lie to me outright. He’d made it pretty clear he expected monogamy from me, and that he had a fairly all-encompassing definition of what that meant.

  Besides, if he wanted some before I got back, he was smart enough to do it somewhere other than Seertown.

  That train of thought didn’t help my mood much, though. Nor did the realization that I’d left him with a hell of a hard on, not unlike both times he’d turned to others in the past.

  Somewhere in all my worrying, I did fall asleep, though.

  I know this, because I was awakened by the girl the next morning.

  I finally got a name out of her––Hannah, of all things––right before she handed me a cup of that steaming brown drink. I dragged myself out of the pile of furs only to be handed another mug, this one holding the requisite yak-butter tea.

  That, and the freezing cold air coming through the open windows didn’t improve my mood much. One lovely thing about seers in Seertown was that most were westernized enough to have a healthy appreciation for espresso.

  Tarsi didn’t waste time.

  After I stretched and sluggishly pulled on clothes, I felt a nudge in my mind. She sat on the same rug that lay on the flagstones by the fireplace. Looking down, I noticed the rug was a significantly smaller and less elaborate version of what I’d seen in the Pamir cave.

  She patted the wool, her eyes pointed.

  Dragging myself to my feet, I walked over to sit cross-legged beside her.

  I tried to ignore the tendrils of light I felt encircling me tentatively from somewhere else.

  He was in bed. I felt him lying there, staring up at a whitewashed ceiling.

  It struck me suddenly that wherever he was, it didn’t feel like Seertown. A whisper of panic bloomed in my chest; I backed off before it fully blossomed, trying to keep it from him. I didn’t try to determine where he was––or whose bed he might be in.

  I glanced at Tarsi, still feeling him in the edges of my light. I knew he wasn’t asleep, and that was enough to make it difficult to keep my focus.

  I watched Tarsi motion to Hannah, who crouched by the stone fireplace, stirring something in a hanging iron pot. Hannah smiled at me shyly with those straight, white teeth as she handed me a second bowl of the coffee-like drink.

  “So where do we start?” I asked Tarsi.

  Tarsi held up her hand.

  As soon as she unfurled her fingers, I…

  …AM SOMEPLACE ELSE.

  I stand in a field.

  It is so still and peaceful I am startled, almost overwhelmed by the tranquil beauty of its isolation. I had expected violence, I guess.

  Scenes of war, people shouting or screaming.

  Instead, a shockingly bright sun pierces the clouds, nearly blue-white in color.

  I am alone. Mountains rise in high walls on all sides of where I stand. Tall grasses wave at my thighs, floating down a hill and around a lake so pale it appears to be made of ice. Above the lake, more jagged, snow-covered peaks cut the horizon.

  I recognize this place, but I don’t know why.

  The world feels different here.

  It is more alive. Or maybe less broken somehow.

  Cries break the silence. The wind fills with the dark stutter of birds’ wings, more than I’ve ever seen in one place. They rise up like a cloud, a dark spiral that banks in the blue sky. I shield my eyes so I can watch them shift direction, the uniform beat of their short wings. The tree near me is filled with them, seconds later. They dot the branches like small sentinels, cooing to one another and chirping, flickering between branches.

  Bees pollinate wildflowers around grasses that brush my thighs. I see those scruffy, donkey-like horses that the old humans call Kiang standing in clusters, heads bowed against the breeze. Then, in the midst of all of this peace and tranquility––

  I hear a shout.

  I drop to a crouch.

  I am somewhere else, deep inside a dark-green forest. It is different than the forest I glimpsed from that grassy hill beneath a blue-white sun.

  Dense trees close in around me, blocking light, leaving it cathedral dim. Moss-covered rocks litter the sloped earth. I wonder if I am in Asia still, but that doesn’t feel right.

  I am still puzzling over where I am, how it connects to where I was an instant before, when the stillness is broken by another yell.

  “Get him!”

  A lithe form sprints past me down the sloped forest floor, whooping as he leaps a fallen trunk. More figures bound by; they fan the hill in a jagged line like wolves, rushing headlong down it, shouting.

  They are children.

  “Head him off, Stami! Don’t let him get too far ahead!”

  The owner of the voice stands above me on the same hill, closer than I know until his words bring my eyes abruptly up to his perch on top of a gray boulder. His rounded cheeks and pink lips belong to someone maybe twelve years of age, but his chest is already barrel-shaped, his hands large enough to cover my face. Although his eyes and bone structure are vaguely Asian in appearance, his hair is as white as chalk, his irises a deep black.

  He is too large for his age, I think.

  There is something wrong with him.

  “Head him off!” he shouts. “Stami! Don’t let him get to those thorns!”

  I see their prey as I follow his stare. Darker than the trees, the smaller form moves swiftly, flicking between trees like a deer. He runs silently but all-out, his entire being focused, an inhaled breath. Unlike the other children’s, his feet are bare. His skin is dark. Black hair sticks to his head with sweat.

  I let my eyes follow his winding trail through the trees, and after the barest pause I am seeing through him, through his eyes… then his mind.

  He knows these woods.

  If he can shake Stami, the fastest of his pursuers, he might get away in the thicket at the other side of a small stream. If he has even a few seconds’ lead on him, he might make it. He has done it before.

  I think of Brer Rabbit and his briar patch––

  When a tall boy slants out from behind a cluster of brush and leaps. He catches hold of the smaller boy’s shirt. He drags at him, flinging him sideways and into the dirt, tripping his legs like a wolf bringing down a deer. They tumble in pine needles and moss and mud by the edge of the stream.

  They struggle.

  The black-haired boy fights to get up, but the taller boy grabs his hair, clothes, his ankle, slowing him down until the others close the gap. A fe
w jump into the fray with abandon, flattening the black-haired boy in the mud just a yard from the stream.

  I hear a cry from him.

  It is heartbreaking. A defeated cry.

  They jerk him upright.

  He reaches his feet, panting, alone. He wears the aloneness like a cloak, and it pulls at me, resonating with my separation pain.

  I cannot help but feel for him. I want to intervene, to pull him from the hands of these other children, who feel like animals to me, randomly cruel, endlessly hungry. I want to protect him, but I can’t reach him through the time that stands between us.

  I am beside them now.

  My light feet disappear inside a cheerful stream filled with colorful stones. The place is so beautiful that the fear vibrating the air doesn’t quite compute. It doesn’t belong in this cathedral of sun and leaves and distant birdsong.

  The dark-haired boy stands unsteadily, his leg hurt. Three larger boys hold him while he struggles, each a head taller or more. Almond eyes look out from behind his shaggy, black hair. His face is round and bruised, his skin tanned from long exposure to sun.

  He looks tougher somehow than the others, like he’s spent more nights outdoors. Like he’s gone longer without food. The boy who first tackled him cocks his fist and punches him inexpertly in the mouth. The same boy, who I know is called Stami, hits him again.

  Then, the white-haired giant arrives.

  He does the talking. I don’t know what language they speak, only that, if I wasn’t in the Barrier, I wouldn’t understand them.

  “Lesson one, Nenz.” He clicks his tongue in feigned sympathy. “What happens when shit-blood worm-fuckers break rules?”

  The dark-haired boy stares at Stami, then at the giant kid with the white hair.

  My vision flickers back and forth, from his to my own. Again, I want to stand between him and this strange, albino boy with the cruel, deep-black eyes. But this has already happened. It already exists out there, as a recording in time.

  Gerwix, my mind whispers.

  This is the giant’s name.

  Gerwix, laughs. “Nenz! Is it my birthday? Are you giving me an excuse to beat you until you piss blood? Do you love me so much, runt?”

  The dark-haired boy’s face flinches.

  For him, I don’t get a name, not apart from what the giant calls him. Yet somehow, I know he is the one Tarsi and I have come for.

  It scares me that he is so real, so vulnerable.

  “I didn’t break any rules,” he says sullenly.

  “You were talking to her. We saw you.”

  Stami jerks a knife from a sheath on his leg, holds it to the younger boy’s face, showing it to him. Gerwix, the white-haired giant, smiles.

  “You want her, Nenz? Is that what you were doing? Trying to get into her clothes?”

  Stami, the taller, handsome kid lays the knife on his bare arm.

  Fear returns to the darker boy’s face. “No! No… I wasn’t doing anything!”

  “Liar. She’s Stami’s girl. Leave her alone.”

  “She talked to me!”

  Stami presses down viciously with the knife and the dark-haired boy screams. Stami keeps cutting, twisting the blade up his arm and shoulder to his neck. The dark-haired boy screams again, struggling against their hands.

  Blood runs down his side, wetting the top of his pants.

  A few others laugh, but their laughter is nervous now, tense.

  Only Gerwix’s chuckle sounds real.

  Stami’s voice is lower, and I hear real anger there. “Your uncle pays girls to lie with you, freak. Stick with the unwillings, leave the real girls to us.”

  The white-haired boy steps forward.

  Still smiling a little, he motions for Stami to lay off with the knife.

  Stami hesitates before pulling it off the darker skin. He makes a show of wiping the blade on his pants, as if he got it dirty skinning an animal.

  Gerwix’s laugh is ugly; it belongs to someone much older.

  “Don’t be greedy, Stami.” He motions them to turn the boy around, untying the front of his pants. “I think we can give Nenz what he wants.”

  The laughter grows nervous again. Despite some shuffled feet, no one leaves, though. Two back off as they stare, fascinated as the white-haired boy grabs the smaller one by his hair, forcing him to his knees.

  They are already ripping down his worn pants when my mind catches up with what is happening. I just have time to see the dark face grow resigned as he is forced prone over a log. Even with his head, shoulder and arms bleeding from the knife, he fights them, his thin arms and legs jerking and writhing in a futile, animalistic panic.

  Despite his struggles, it is clear that this ritual is familiar, that it’s been played out already, that it will play out again, that he lost the moment Stami caught his shirt and dragged him into the mud…

  I SNAPPED OUT.

  I sat cross-legged on the rug, fighting an overwhelming urge to cry, to beat at the old woman sitting across from me with my fists.

  Instead, I sat without moving on the rug, trying to breathe, breathing too much, staring at her clear eyes until I finally had to look away.

  It had been cruel, what she’d shown me, the kind of brutal animalism that always crushed some part of me. But it wasn’t only that. The grief coming off that boy, the awareness behind his eyes, the depth of the depression he carried––it had been more than I could bear. It was more than I could even feel all at once.

  There was too much of it; it was too raw, too real.

  A part of me had been crushed inside his small frame, and I couldn’t get out.

  That part held more feeling than I’d felt in every day I’d lived put together, even with my dad’s death to MS, my mom being murdered by Terian, losing Revik, thinking Jon and Cass were gone.

  It was enough emotion to break someone’s mind, if they lived in it long enough.

  Tarsi studied me carefully.

  “You see, Bridge?” she said. “Killing him not so easy as you think.”

  I still fought to breathe. “That was him? Syrimne?”

  “Long time ago, yes. When he was whole.”

  “Whole.” I looked at her, fighting my way through emotion that still contorted my light in knots, causing spasms in my arms and neck. I was still trying to process it when, realizing I couldn’t, I let it run through me instead, like waiting for a storm to pass.

  After another moment, my voice was almost normal.

  “What does that mean?”

  “He was broken, Bridge.” Her eyes still studied mine, her scrutiny on the surface. Death is just one facet. It is a role, traded from life to life, possibly even among different beings. Much like Bridge.

  Her eyes sharpened, looking for understanding.

  The person moderates the role… keeps it in check. On its own, Death can be incredibly destructive. It is important that you remember that boy. He was whole once. He was a real person. Death is a hard path. The hardest of all.

  A kind of dread washed over me as I took in her words.

  We’d only just started. That glimpse of childhood brutality had been the prelude to our hunt, not the hunt itself. It was simply her way of introducing me to our quarry.

  I could feel from her that it was also a test.

  She wanted to know if I could handle this.

  Thinking about how that one scene likely fit into the longer timeline of this being she called Death, I honestly didn’t know if I could.

  Again, I remembered something Revik said to me.

  To find anyone or anything in the Barrier, he’d said. You must become what you seek. The Barrier is resonance, Allie. It is what we seers do… we resonate with things. This is all we do.

  To find him, I would have to become Syrimne.

  20

  CLAUSTROPHOBIC

  REVIK STOOD ON the rim of a burnt-out crater.

  The scorched pockmark ate through two thirds of a fortress-like structure made of black stone. If
he hadn’t seen the pirated feeds of the building exploding outward, he might have thought a meteor had hit the mountain. The crater still smoked in discrete sections of the blackened part of the pit.

  Trees had been knocked down as far away as a mile from the epicenter.

  Leaning carefully to gaze down over the edge, he tracked body parts stuck in poses from where they’d been embedded in rock, earth and powder. Easing back so that his weight stood more securely at the rim, he glanced at Balidor.

  The gray-eyed seer frowned without returning Revik’s glance.

  They’d only been there an hour, and already, Revik was getting used to the smell. It brought back memories of wartime, especially the ovens.

  Wincing, he averted his gaze, tracking the movements of the rest of the infiltration team.

  Adhipan members spread out along the rim of the crater. A few had begun to climb down inside to get a better look. Revik recognized a number of faces, both from the flight from India and the training camp outside of Darjeeling. Others had been flown in from China or elsewhere just the day before. Around forty operatives were now casing the site, at least ten of which had arrived at the school before Revik and Balidor.

  Revik understood why they were climbing into the hole.

  Not only would they be collecting physical evidence, but the best and easiest way to collect imprints of the bomber was to get as close to the bomb itself as possible. Whatever fragments may have survived the blast could be anywhere from the blast site itself to a few thousand yards from there, but they would start at the center and work out.

  So he understood the logic, but he still wasn’t looking forward to that portion of this exercise.

  Given the sheer level of devastation, they might have to do it the human way, at least in part. Meaning they might have to conduct an analysis and search based on the chemical imprint and other physical properties of the blast. Explosions had a habit of obliterating aleimic fingerprints even more thoroughly than the physical kind.

  Something else struck him as he looked around.

  “This isn’t where it started.” He spoke English, unthinking. He turned to Balidor, switching to Prexci. “Was there any evidence that this might be a secondary site?”