by Ben Galley
“If it is to be,” Shahn said, “it is to be.”
Maja opened her mouth once more, but a new hiss rose to supplant whatever sound she was about to make. It sounded like coiling serpents, and Maro felt a shiver greet his spine and slither up to the nape of his neck. He felt somehow soiled, and looked toward the tree called Sightless only because he did not want to.
The former Willows with their black eyes leaned further now, looking like wasps or things that could sting like them as they threatened to emerge from their porous nest that was really a prison. Maro thought they were looking at Maja until Brega fell to his knees and cried out. Maja reached for him on instinct, her motherly need the only thing left of love in her, but a twitch from Shahn and those around him held her.
The Sightless had chosen to speak to Brega, and such an exchange could not be undone lest death break it.
Brega twisted and writhed among the moss and roots. He rolled and spilled himself down into a shallow pool and could have ended up face-down and drowning and none would have stepped in to help him. Instead, he stared up at the sky, his yellow eyes looking sickly, lips quivering as the Sightless showed him its sights and told him its secrets. Maro thought him a coward and weak, though truth be told he had never been selected so and could not know.
A part of him wished for Brega to be among the Chosen. He was the only great warrior among the Raiths. Most of them relied on their mastery over bird and beast to do the fighting for them. Not Brega. There was some fire in him. Some thirst to kill that made him hunger to do it up close. Maro had never been in a true fight, but Brega had. The Raiths were fewer than the Willows and the males like Shahn who protected them. They had need of their young.
Maro knew he was the best among the Chosen. He knew it beyond a shadow of a doubt. No matter how good a match Kai could give him on her best days, he would kill her in the end. Brega was something new. He was angry and violent and full of the need to prove something, and while most among the Willows considered passion to be the antithesis of victory, Maro thought there might be something to it. He very much wanted to see, in any event.
Unfortunately, it did not appear as though Brega would survive his silent, writhing exchange with the Sightless, never mind a bout at the end of whatever weapon Maro chose to stick him with.
Maja shook with anticipation, and Maro knew that whatever hatred had first set these tribes on one another would only deepen from here, fermenting like the cold fruits and seeds in the sludge and bone below their feet. It was fertile ground to grow a thing that was already sharp enough that Maro could scarcely imagine that the tribes had been unified before the War of Sages touched the green leaves of Center.
Was the Sage’s challenge meant to unify them? A last gift to forge a champion out of a fractured land? One who could stand up to the might of the brothers he had turned against, the would-be gods who ruled over the Landkist of lands far and wide that Maro would never see? Or was it a final joke? A jest meant to doom the land to hate and misery once and for all?
Maro supposed he should find the time to care.
As he watched Brega twist and turn, as if in the throes of nightmare, Maro drifted. He thought of the Sage of Center and who he might’ve been. The hero of this land, who had turned against his own and rallied the tribes of the Emerald Road under a common banner. A yellow banner that was said to shine like the sun above the highest canopies.
Under his command, the people of the Emerald Road had fought with the Sage of the East, Balon Rael, with his gray stone towers and his armored guards. There were no Landkist on those lands. None blessed with powers of sight like the Willows or the control of beasts like the Raiths. There were no stone-throwers like those rumored to the south, or Embers that had burned out in the deserts of the west when the Eastern Dark had come calling.
There were just men in metal suits, and swords that could part a thousand-year-old tree from roots that had held it up all the while. They were blessed by their Sage, whose strength and cunning were only rivaled by his cowardice, for the Sage of Balon Rael did not fight. He did not walk beneath the branches of Center nor spit its champions on the end of a blade of his own. He watched and waited and sent others to do the dying for him on the back of some long-ago quarrel between the wizards that ruled it all.
Maro found it difficult to thank the Sage of Center whose name was never known. He had never seen him. Had never met anyone who had. The Sage had disappeared a generation and more before. And so, Maro couldn’t know why he had decided to help them in the first place, and guessed it to be a thing of mutual gain or selfishness. Either way, not for them.
Most thought the Sage had withdrawn from the affairs of the World completely. Rumors swirled that he had walked the ways of the vast wood, like a ghost of regret and longing. He had been dead a long time when they found the blade, shining with the emerald fire that was said to have made the Sage up. Those who tried to wield it died, betrayed by its lingering conscience and the disdain it held for their skill. A missed parry that should have been found. Perhaps a glancing blow that should not have been fatal, for the blade had a mind of its own and a will that set it apart.
Perhaps Shahn could have tried to wield it, but Maro had seen him fight. He cared too much, was the problem. He was as hardened by fighting as the rest of them, but he cared if he won. Maro and the children arrayed among them had never known enough to care, though Maro knew some of the others did in secret.
Vela thought she was meant to wield the blade, to unify their people once more and then to strike out for the other Sages in their many lands and towers. Maro had heard her say as much in her sleep as he thought how best he’d kill her. Sohr thought he’d use his tricks to win the blade and then bend it to his will. He had nothing of love for his people or the things they’d made him do, but Maro knew he hated them most for what they’d turned him into. He learned Sohr’s tricks. More important, he’d learned the way he thought them up. There was spite in that one, and spite was tied to caring.
The others among the dozen were varying shades of good to great with any manner of killing tool, but Maro didn’t fear them. They each had something they cared about or tried too much not to. If there was anything of truth to the whole lot of them, it belonged with Kai. She had been born mute or had never felt the need to speak, but her eyes told a story Maro thought he might like to know in another life.
A pity, as stories were born of want.
Maro had no story and needed no story. He had no wants and suffered no dreams. He was not blessed with love and didn’t long to give it off. He thought about one thing above and below all else throughout his thirteen years, and that was how best to kill the things he might’ve cared about, had the World been something other than what it was.
He had thought about this day, and as Brega stilled in his thrashing pool that was now flecked with foam and dyed with mud, Maro felt relief that he could finally get on with it.
And then he gasped and Maro knew he lived, and sighed at the delay.
Maja sank to her knees and raised Brega’s black hair from the pool. He coughed and choked at her, and whatever love was in her eyes was quickly supplanted by that lean hunger Maro had seen before. She looked from Brega toward the Sightless and smiled wickedly, turning the look on Shahn, who grimaced.
“He is Chosen, then,” Shahn said. He stood aside and swept a hand out, indicating the raised mounds of moss that Maro and the others stood atop and among.
Brega had no time to catch his breath and Maja didn’t let him. She got him up and shoved him forward, and in the place of the hissing of the Sightless, Maro heard the cawing of a hundred crows as the Raiths and their beasts observed from the forest at the borders of the clearing.
Maro saw fear in Brega’s eyes, but the look was covered soon enough. He forfeited his razor gauntlets, and the warrior who took them was careful not to prick himself on their brown edges lest he die in such agony as only th
e Raiths could devise. Brega chose the mound between Maro and Kai to stand atop. He looked from one to the other and then to Vela and Sohr and the other seven he would try to kill to get that blade.
Brega was the only Landkist among the Chosen, a fact that was not lost on Shahn and the others, who looked from one to the other and back to the young Raith.
“Use of your gifts below the Sightless is forbidden,” Shahn said. Brega made no move to indicate he’d heard. His yellow eyes were fixed on the roots beneath the twisted trunk. And as they widened, Maro followed the direction of his gaze and felt his own eyes dry as they were held unblinking.
The mounds farther ahead began to shift and move, with dark brown and black clods tumbling out of the seams as the land’s mossy skin broke and exposed the guts beneath with all its worms and black beetles. Maro took the smooth skin of the buried bark for the backs of slithering snakes, huge and undulating like those found in the humid south and east—the sorts of snakes that would take a man and then come back for his family later on.
The former Willows with their black eyes shrank back into their shadows, though Maro could see the hint of their swaying as they joined in some song he would never know and never wanted to. The great arches of root that formed bridges wide enough for three to stand abreast atop croaked and complained as they drew apart to form doorways and expose black caves beneath the trunk, and a smell hit Maro that made him grimace. It was rot and death mixed, and there was a poison to it that threatened to make his head swim even before he plied its depths.
“His legacy is tucked within those roots,” Shahn said, and Maro knew the man who was the closest thing any of them would ever have to a father did not believe it as the words escaped him. “Claim it at any cost, and allow its light to show you the way out—and us the way forward.”
Maro cast a lingering look up into the trees on the edges and saw Kai doing the same from the corners. The Sightless was not a thing worthy of hate or reverence. It simply was, and all its vacant eyes might as well have been ravens from the land of dreaming or shadows from the World Apart that occasionally sent its beasts in to be cut down beneath the blades of Center.
But the Willows, with their white eyes and all-knowing dispositions, with their prophecies and gathered truths that were only a goat’s intestine away from being the same as the Blood Seers of the west; those were beings worthy of hate. If Maro could find the time for it, he thought he might give them his.
Instead, he was the first to begin his march on the path others had set him on without asking his permission or getting his say. His hands hung loose at his sides and his eyes looked forward, meeting the black that stretched away below a tree that was a gateway as the other children followed him with clenched fists and hard-set jaws. One glanced back at a Willow who had been nice to him and Maro knew he would be the first to die.
Was this a portal to the World Apart? Was it a gate to that below realm of fire and black burning the northerners called Hell?
Maro stopped thinking on it the moment he crossed the threshold and saw the tunnels laid out before him like a maze of untold depth and memory. He felt the others closing in and thought to turn around, knowing he could kill many here and now with nothing more than his hands and bare feet. But they knew it too, and as he ran the images, he did not have to bring them to their natural ending before knowing they would join together to bury him under a rage of beating fists and lashing nails. He would die if he tried it.
And so, he ran, splitting off from the rest. He caught a flash of movement to the side and knew Kai had the same idea, her black hair standing out between the latticework of serpentine roots as it picked up the glow of the white mist that clung to his ankles and made them clammy and wet. The sounds of murder followed him as the others set upon each other. He heard one shrill voice cut short on the edge of a crack that resounded like an ended statement and knew he had been right.
You couldn’t look back in a land like this. Maro had known that above and he knew it now, though this land was as foreign to him as any outside of the scope and green majesty of Center.
He ran fast as caution would allow, climbing over and under roots that blocked his way and using more energy than was necessary to keep his blood warm in the cool and damp. He ran far enough that he knew he should have come out on the other side by now, and he gave it up as a trick of the Sightless, perhaps a function of the pungent odor that smelled less like rot and more like sweetness and wine, the deeper and farther he got.
There were tricks to this land that went well beyond anything Sohr might’ve dreamed up, and Maro felt himself smiling as he thought of how far it went and how varied its many paths and trails were like to be.
After a day and more, he gave in to his disappointment. He no longer ran, but rather walked and tried to keep his boredom from showing. He looked back at the milky trails he’d left behind and gave up wondering whether or not he had passed that way before. He thought to sleep once or twice, until he passed a crumpled body that once had been Vela tucked in an alcove. Her throat had been slashed and Maro wondered if one of the children had managed to grow his nails out long enough to do the task. He hadn’t seen anything sharp in all the lands he’d passed with their slick roots and lattice walls and ceilings. Perhaps the teeth had done it.
Maro regretted not fighting at the start. He thought he might’ve won, even if the rest had come against him. It was difficult to fight a wolf. Sometimes more so if too many tried it at once. Still, the risk was too great, he told himself. He’d have died, and one of the others would get to see the blade that would be the doom of most of them and perhaps the salvation of their people first.
That seemed a waste.
Finally, when boredom nearly took him enough to make him foolish, Maro thought of shouting, letting his voice carry through the dusk and murk of the conjured lands below the hateful tree. And then he came upon a task worth doing.
It was Ganeth. Perhaps the best fighter among the lot, aside from Maro himself. Maybe Kai, though he was stronger than the both of them by a margin. It was a wonder he had not sired children of his own. Such were his muscles and veins. Maro supposed he could have, had the need arisen and had it been allowed.
The dark-haired and dark-eyed boy was standing in a bowl that spilled out from his tunnel’s ending. Maro entered cautiously, wary of a trap, but he thought there must be few left alive now, and Ganeth had never been one to rely on others. Maro nodded at him as he walked the edge of the bowl that was like one of the rootnests to the southwest. Its bottom, where Ganeth stood, was made of dirt and detritus, and its top was made of the same twisted roots and serpentine growth that made the whole of the land up.
He was naked, like Maro. There was nothing in this place to cover oneself with, and Maro had never much cared for modesty. That was a right reserved for those who planned to live long enough for it to matter. They two would not.
“Come down,” Ganeth said, as much an invitation as a command. Maro could see no weapon in his grasp and the first swelling of something close to fear welled within him. Ganeth was large.
Nevertheless, Maro obliged. He climbed down the rooted nest and stood before Ganeth. He was fast and Ganeth knew it. Their eyes met and roved over all the scars and raised ridges that hinted at the muscle beneath. The killing stuff.
“Have you met others?” Maro asked. Ganeth’s knuckles were too brown to be the work of dirt and clay alone.
His only answer was the beginnings of a circle that was a prelude to a steady advance. Maro matched him, the two meeting eyes and locking as they wheeled the bowl and came ever closer, like vultures approaching a kill.
Maro was the faster, but being fast counted for little if you went first. He knew this and so did Ganeth. Still, for all his outward calm, Ganeth carried an anger in his steps. It was why he had done the most killing since coming here. Maro wondered absently who it might’ve been. He wondered if it h
ad been slow and thought it was not. Ganeth might be angry, but he was too blind to think. He’d kill quickly if he could, the better to find another to break or squeeze.
A breath that came out halting and Ganeth covered the smaller distance between them faster than Maro would have thought, but not fast enough to matter much. He evaded the larger youth’s grasp and skirted away like a bird aflutter. That made Ganeth angry. His look showed as much, all teeth in the place of lips pulled tight enough to bleed.
He came on again, and again Maro dodged. He thought of striking back that time, but knew Ganeth had yet to commit. Knew he had something waiting for him. And wasn’t that the best way to trap and kill?
Maro was no bird. He wouldn’t be caged. He wouldn’t be caught. He wouldn’t be killed.
On it went, with Ganeth’s attacks coming more frequent and less planned. Once, he caught Maro on the edge of a jab that bloodied his lip and chipped his tooth. He smiled as he tasted the blood and Ganeth roared like a jungle cat. He was dead and they both knew it, but if he hadn’t meant to die here and now, why then did he call Maro down into the pit with him? Why not find another? Why not live another hour? Perhaps a day?
Why fight the best, and before the end? More questions than Maro was used to asking himself when it came time to fight.
Maro left the questions behind as Ganeth came in again, his blood so high it nearly spurted from the white edges of his eyes. This time, Maro was caught by design. Ganeth wrapped his great trunks for arms around him, fingers interlocked behind Maro’s back like a vice. He lifted with a grimace that verged on a manic grin, and at the top of his arc and before his fatal squeeze, Maro made himself taller.
His knees were bent, and as they tipped, Maro shot the balls of his feet down into the hard-packed dirt. He thought he heard bone crunch beneath and then knew he did above as his brow smashed Ganeth’s nose and unmade it, along with whatever sense had been behind it before.
Ganeth fell with a softer thud than Maro would have expected. His dying was quick, but there had been pain. Maro could tell by the way he frowned and by the fresh wet that made its tracks down his dark cheeks. It was as if he was crying without knowing why. There was less red. Maro hated seeing death without red. It seemed wrong to him, as if life should continue so long as the red remained within and not without. It was a badge of death, but Ganeth would only lie still and rigid and add his rot to the rest.