Hallett’s eyes drooped. The intimidating shadow of the Hierarkon seemed at last to dispirit her. She stretched forward both hands to place the folio in his grasp. “May I tell you one more thing before I leave the rest to your torturers?”
The Hierarkon’s robe contracted in a sigh. “You can’t erase the guilt of the historian who let you commit these crimes. This one—” his mask swiveled to acknowledge Quarl for the first time “—will suffer the fate of all traitors. His body will be given to the Art for study. Do not waste words on your human concept of ‘mercy.’ ”
“That wasn’t what I was going to tell you,” Hallett said. “Quarl—that’s his birth name, although you wouldn’t care—is as guilty as I am, and he should be proud.
“No, what I wish to tell you is that this parchment isn’t the only thing I stole.”
Her left hand darted forward. Quarl saw the flash of a metallic object strapped around her palm. She seized the Hierarkon’s wrist, and a surge of energy jolted through his body. The voice chamber of the Eldru’s mask magnified his scream into a rock-splitting roar.
Hallett gripped him for a few moments and watched his writhings. When she let go, the Hierarkon crumpled onto the ground and his robe spilled around him like a puddle of oil.
“You Shapers make fun toys, I’ll admit that,” she said to Quarl with a trickster’s smirk. The true Hallett again.
Quarl expected a similar shock to drop him when Hallett reached for his hand, but felt only the warmth of her flesh and a tickle of metal.
“Don’t worry, I’ve shut it off,” she said. “It only has one surge left in it anyway. It was the best I could steal at such a short warning.”
“You—you knew you would have to fight your way out?”
“I knew the Hierarkon was suspicious, so I had to prepare. I didn’t know it would happen today. Or that you would find out on your own.”
She glanced toward the open door, then turned her sea-shimmer eyes back to him. “I said I would leave if you gave me one thing. Will you still promise?”
“Hallett, there’s no time! You’ve attacked a high personage. The Hierarkon has the Spire on alert, and the devil claws and olglim will seize you at the gate. It doesn’t matter what I promise.”
She seemed not to have heard. “The one thing I want . . . is for you to leave with me.”
During the bizarre moments that had just played before him like scenes spinning through a picture lantern, Quarl had resigned himself that he was doomed to end up in the Chirurgeon’s pits as raw material for vivisection experiments. But when Hallett made her request, his world tilted wrong side up, and the cool eyes and the warm skin of the woman were on the upside. He had no choice any longer, and he preferred it that way.
“I shall leave with you.”
Hallett pulled him into the corridor, leaving the stunned Hierarkon on the floor. “You know the passages here better. You take the lead to the front gate.”
“What about the guard waiting for us?”
“My worry.”
He pointed to her bare face. “And your mask?”
“It won’t protect me now. Speed is our best ally.”
Quarl led the way to the central stairwell. Hallett kept her hand wrapped around his arm, and this helped him continue even as his mind begged him to surrender.
They came across a few Eldru along the stairway and the ground floor. The sight of a scholar with a human woman wearing an acolyte’s robe confused these early risers, but no one attempted to stop them as they ran past.
On the ground floor, Quarl led Hallett in a circular route to avoid the Chamber of Lading, and they arrived in the courtyard that was the only way out of the Fourth Spire. Normally no guards stood watch here; even if a slave could pass through the gates of the Core, only an insane one would want to come close to towers filled with the Eldru’s worst witcheries. But in the morning light Quarl and Hallett found a fierce guard waiting in the courtyard.
Two olglim flanked a trio of devil claws, and three more human slaves stood behind them, spread out to cover all ways of escape toward the gate in the wall. The olglim’s gauntlets leveled black powder pistols at the two fugitives on the stoop. They looked on with the mindless glare that never left their once-human eyes, but they gripped onto orders with the tenacity of a ravager shaking apart a kill. The devil claws clutched halberds along the grips designed for their saurian hands, but they had fearsome enough natural weapons in the sickles on their rear legs. The power of the Art channeled through the metal helms latched onto their skulls turned their bestial minds into tools for the Eldru.
Quarl’s knees buckled. He was unused to running, and the exhaustion he had suppressed inside the spire now caught up to him. But Hallett stayed composed. She steadied him with her grip.
“We’ll give them the first move. The one who flinches first is often the loser.”
“Not when he has the numbers on his side,” Quarl muttered. “But, as you said, it’s your worry now.”
Overhead, someone shouted. Quarl twisted his head to look at the tower, and he saw a masked shape leaning from an upper window. The spiked outline was unmistakable. The Hierarkon had recovered fast from the shock Hallett had blasted into him.
The Overseer of the Fourth Spire was yelling command words that only the olglim and the devil claws could understand. They responded, and the front line stomped forward with the two olglim leading the way. The devil claws’ talons clinked across the courtyard stones and the feathers along their necks raised into war frills.
The Hierarkon must have given the order to kill. Quarl understood. Slay a small problem now, before it slips out of the Core and becomes a great problem.
He was ready to die. The Sorrow at least gave him that. And he would rather the devil claws shred him or the olglim shatter his skull with their pistols than end up a prisoner of his own people. He was certain that Hallett would also prefer a fast death. He waited for her to tell him that they should walk forward and welcome it.
But Hallett was smiling like a naughty child with a stolen trinket behind her back. Her eyes flicked to the two leading olglim. She nodded her head at them and shouted, “Now!”
The olglim moved faster than their gutted brains should have allowed. Both swiveled around to aim their outstretched pistols at the heads of the devil claws beside them.
Pistol hammers dropped, black powder exploded and two saurians fell dead.
The other three olglim were too slow to challenge the sudden turnabout. Without new orders to guide them, they died immediately from the thrusts of knives that the two guards drew from under their tunics.
A single devil claw remained. The helm that manipulated its brain had already given it orders. It ignored the rebellious olglim and lunged between them toward the human female. Its jaws gaped and it raised the halberd over its head for a killing strike.
Quarl’s energy surged for an instant. He hurled himself between Hallett and the charging saurian. The move upset the devil claw’s attack, but it still slashed with the blade of the halberd. The edge cut through Quarl’s robe, slicing his shoulder where it would have torn open Hallett’s chest. The devil claw’s body smashed into him, and both fell to the ground.
The agile creature would have gotten back onto its hind legs almost instantly, but Hallett grabbed the short moment of confusion that Quarl had created. She touched the devil claw’s steel helm and unleashed the remaining power from the device in her palm. Energy crackled through the metal and into the devil claw’s skull. The power seared the wiring and the brain wired to it.
Hallett hauled up Quarl by his armpits. Blood stained his robes, and he couldn’t feel anything beyond his right shoulder.
“Can you walk?” she asked.
He nodded, which caused a ripping pain across his chest where the slash continued to gush blood.
<
br /> “We’ll stop the bleeding when we reach the cove. Hold onto me.” She moved him so his fragile body rested against her side and she could free up one of her hands. She waved to the two olglim who had killed the others. “Rouss, Locke, one of you take him from the other side.”
“Is this the one?” asked the man she had called Rouss.
“Yes. And he’ll bleed to death unless we get to the boat immediately.”
Quarl was too overpowered with pain to speak. The sky started to drop into darkness, and the historian could not tell if it were the sun already setting or his vision failing. The muscles of humans were now moving him forward.
Soon all vision fled from Quarl, but his hearing lingered long enough for him to remember a frustrated screaming from high in the Fourth Spire, reverberating through an echo chamber of a mask.
The briny tang of salt filled the air, and the world sloshed beneath him. Quarl thought that he had fallen asleep over his desk with the window open, and the breeze from the Bellinghazer Sea was trying to rouse him.
He stirred and tried to rise so he could get back to his books, but a hand gently pressed him back down. “You’ll tear the stitches. Lie still.”
Quarl opened his eyes, and recent memories started to return. He still had on the saurian-hide mask he had worn since he graduated from Acolyte to Scholar, but that seemed to be the only part of his old life left.
Hallett’s face was set against the night sky. “Thank you for saving my life,” she said.
Quarl didn’t know how to answer. His mind struggled back to the present.
“Humans usually say ‘you’re welcome’ when thanked,” she teased.
“You’re—welcome,” he managed.
Quarl heard waves lapping against wood and the hum of pistons turning a wheel. He lifted his head a bit farther—Hallett did not protest this small motion—and saw the length of a narrow skiff in front of him. A crude Art-contraption in the center powered paddles to either side that pushed the skiff through the Bellinghazer Sea. Steering the boat with a few ropes and a navigation rod were two men wearing the tunics and trousers of servants of the Outer Spires. Sitting nearer were the two who still wore olglim disguises, although they had ripped off the insignia of the Handless God.
Quarl gazed up at Hallett. “Sorrowless?”
She smiled. “All of us. Except you.”
“I’ve heard tales that you had started to band together.”
Hallett nodded. “There are few of us, but more are born each year. If we can escape the Shapers and their servants long enough, our reputation will bring others. At least, that’s what we hope.”
Quarl tried to move his right arm, but the pain was too strong.
“Don’t squirm,” Hallett said. “I saved your arm, but it’ll be a few days before you can help us row.”
“I heard that!” said one of the men at the helm. “I rigged this thing so it’ll at least get us past Iden.”
“Is anyone chasing us?” Quarl asked.
“Someone is always chasing us,” Hallett said. “But we run faster and farther. We don’t have the Sorrow to drag us down.”
“What will you do with me? Drop me off at the first empty shore so my Sorrow will not intrude?”
Hallett laughed. It was a clear, clean sound. If heard in Black Spires, it might have snapped the basalt towers in half.
“You still don’t understand, do you, ‘Master’? You are what we wanted from the Fourth Spire. The parchment I stole may help us—it has records from a memory orb older than your race, maybe from the Lightborn that you deny. But what we really wanted was a Shaper—an Eldru—to join us. I spent a year moving through your hateful city in disguise so I could enter the Core and find an Eldru whose Sorrow was weak enough that I could grind it down until he would follow me. I hoped we wouldn’t have to fight, but when I knew the Hierarkon was suspicious, I flashed a signal to Rouss and Locke in the hidden cove from my window. They disguised themselves the night before and arrived in time to prevent disaster.”
“But, where am I following you to?”
Hallett’s hand swept over the horizon and then up toward the stars. “To Aman-Sah, of course.”
“But you said—”
“That the Eldru would not find it, not through their ridiculous questing. But we will find it when the Sorrow lifts from all of Ahn-Tarqa. That will only come when we know why there is the Sorrow, what happened in the forgotten ages. With the Sorrow gone, something wonderful will take its place.”
“We call it ‘the Rising,’ ” Rouss said. “I don’t know if the name will spread, but we like it.”
“It’s hard to tell you what it is, Quarl,” Hallett said. “You still have the Sorrow, so you can’t imagine life without feeling that life is pointless. But if you come with us, use your knowledge to help us find the secrets of the Sorrow, maybe the Sorrow will lift from you as well. And we will all rise to Aman-Sah . . . whatever it might be.”
Quarl tried to look into her sapphire eyes, but the slits of his mask made her seem distant. He felt a sudden loathing of the covering over his face. The hand of his uninjured arm scraped at it to get it off. Hallett helped him and pried it away. She then flung it into the boat’s wake, and in that moment Quarl forgot that he had ever worn such a thing.
He expected looks of fright or disgust from the others. But they appeared gratified. A Shaper had unmasked himself before them, taken away what made him horrifying. They wanted a real face to look on. They didn’t have the Sorrow to make them fear him.
Exhaustion washed over Quarl again. This time he felt it was safe to sleep . . . sleep for as long as he wished. But he wanted to ask Hallett one more thing before shutting his eyes.
But before he could form the question, he noticed something that the slits of the mask had hidden before. Hallett’s hand rested on Rouss’ thigh, and the man’s fingers intertwined with hers in an unmistakable way. Even an Eldru knew what that touch meant—in humans, at least.
For the first moment in his life, Quarl felt a sadness that did not come from the Sorrow.
He shut his eyes and let the motion of the skiff rock him. Something stirred inside a pocket of his robe, and his hand grasped at it and closed over a warm, furry body. The jehol had fallen asleep in his pocket where he had placed it back in Hallett’s room. He lifted the tiny mammal out onto his chest, and he fell asleep with it curled in the nape of his neck.
The Dualist
written by
Van Aaron Hughes
illustrated by
FREDERICK EDWARDS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Van Aaron Hughes lives in Denver, Colorado, with his wife Beth and his children Griffin, Kyra and Noah. He grew up outside Seattle, went to UCLA where he met Beth, then to law school at Berkeley, before heading to the mountains.
Aaron has practiced law for twenty years, highlighted by two trips to the United States Supreme Court. He wrote the winning briefs in Central Bank v. First Interstate Bank, a landmark securities fraud case, and briefed and argued Sutton v. United Air Lines, a major case interpreting the Americans with Disabilities Act. The Supreme Court’s adverse ruling in Sutton was later overturned by Congress.
Aaron fell in love with science fiction and fantasy at an early age, after stealing his father’s stash of Robert Heinlein books, then discovering Isaac Asimov and Ursula LeGuin and Clifford Simak. He returned to the genre in law school in hopes of retaining the ability to speak in a language other than legalese. He writes SF and fantasy book reviews and author interviews for Fantastic Reviews and the Fantastic Reviews Blog.
He has often attempted to write fiction over the years, but only recently managed to complete a few stories he wasn’t embarrassed to let anyone else read. His fiction has appeared in the political protest anthology Glorifying Terrorism, edited by
Farah Mendlesohn, and the webzine Linger Fiction. “The Dualist” was his first submission to the Writers of the Future Contest.
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR
Frederick decided a long time ago that he would not be an artist. He did not let encouraging words from others influence his outlook. Artists were weird, and art meant expressing feelings. Frederick would attempt to suppress his passion for creativity, but with no success.
He prepared to attend Northern Arizona University, where he would study a subject that would lead to an easier, clearer career path. Instead fate brought him back to his hometown of Tucson, Arizona. Eventually he would receive his BFA in illustration from the University of Arizona. By the time he received this diploma, he was a combat veteran, had two children and was working with the developmentally disabled.
Months after graduation, he moved to Virginia with his two children to stay with his sister and work on his master’s in education. This opportunity also gave him a chance to work on his fine art and illustration skills. When he is not studying or picking on his children, he can be found focused on exercising. Besides that, he is probably working on a painting for someone. He has accepted that he cannot live a complete life if he does not embrace what he tried to abandon so many times before, his art.
The Dualist
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the world. He provided for all creatures and all were content, save one. The Evil One could not bear to be subject to God’s dominion. He deceived many of God’s angels and led them in rebellion. He confronted God, and so great was the power of his will that he began to force God from the heavens. But the Evil One was seized from behind. Astonished that any but God Himself could overpower him, the Evil One turned to see his new adversary and beheld the face of God. The Evil One was cast into the stinking, moss-covered pit, at last understanding the essential truth of the universe: There are Two.
1.
We have entered Doubletown, Envoy,” Fernandez announced over her shoulder.
Writers of the Future Volume 27: The Best New Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Page 16