Amazing, thought Lila, unable to pick a single aspect of the genius of this entity that didn’t impress her.
I am glad that you think so. I am happy to have served.
Was it? Could it be? To what was she speaking?
I am a biological imprint of minds bound in a durable encasement of technomagikal crystal. The metascience is complicated, however, and the procedure could not be replicated in this age. I was made by the Lordkings of Menos, the men who fled to Carthac to rebuild their empire. They took with them, from Menos’s treasury, a crystal of an old empire—though no one from that time before had been able to use its magik. My makers, though, were able to use that magik. They awoke the stone. I am the result of their ritual.
But why? For what purpose were you made?
The Mind contemplated her existential question, leaving her to be assaulted by the obstreperous music of the Straits. Lila believed she could see a glimmer of gold off in the dark. Then the Mind spoke. I am sorry, Navigator. I do not have information on that subject. Much of my facility and use I am determining only now, since you are the first to have woken me. The souls of which I am made—
Souls?
A neurological imprint cannot be created without impressions derived from a biological matrix. To make a brain, one requires brains. To make life, one requires the spark of life—or of many lives, in my case.
Of course no Menosian invention could have been ethically produced, Lila reflected angrily. How many people had died to create this fascinating entity?
May I continue? I hear your thoughts, and sense fluctuations in your telemetric currents that indicate a state of sadness. Do not feel sad. My biological components were all quite young, their neural networks hardly formed. I believe my creators showed what you would call mercy. My components’ youth was necessary to facilitate the gestation and development of my pathways.
It was talking about children, a sacrifice of innocent lives. Somewhere, Lila’s stomach heaved. Why? she asked once more.
I regret that I still do not possess the information you have requested. I was never touched by my makers; they never awakened me with their Wills as you have. I know little about the reason for my being. But I possess many memory banks of data on the western seas and on many of the archipelagos of that region. It is possible that my makers wished to pilot me there.
Lila could think of nothing to say.
Is that all, Navigator?
Yes.
I am happy to have served. Please enjoy the comforts of your journey.
Even as the golden spot she’d seen grew into a pool of sunlight in the clouds, and the black hands of the Straits finally surrendered the lordvessel to compassionate waters, Lila was unable to find peace. She was thinking of children—those she’d murdered in Menos, as well as the many she’d saved and adopted during her reign as Queen of Eod. Finally, she thought of this one child of many souls that had waited in a dark tomb in the earth for a thousand years for the simple pleasure of a touch.
III
“I won’t leave him,” declared Lila.
“How do you know it is male?” replied Erik.
“I simply do,” Lila replied. “I have adopted and raised enough urchins through the centuries to know how children work. I can tell the sex of a child even if he or she is covered in the grime and ash of an atrocity.” A thought pricked Lila’s heart: two filthy infants, young Dorvain and Leonitis, saved from the pyre that was to end them. She stared off into the distance, remembering.
Erik huffed. After the lordvessel had made a grating landing upon the southern shores of Meadowvale and Lila had returned from the crow’s nest, they had begun disagreeing over what should be done with the Mind. It swirled with misty twists and pulsed with occasional dim light, as if listening to the two hiss back and forth. Erik felt the relic should remain as they’d found it: in the dark and forgotten. Erik had even considered shattering the Menosian object, but Lila’s pleas had stayed his hand. Caught in this deadlock, they’d wavered for many sands.
“We cannot leave him, Erithitek,” said Lila. “What if another were to find him? Someone wicked? You do not realize the brilliance, the uniqueness, of this artifact. I can think of no other comparison but Eod’s Hall of Memories. Even that intelligence displays none of the extraordinary sentience I have seen in the Mind.”
“The Mind?”
“That is what I am calling him, until we can think of a better name.”
“You want to name it?”
“Possibly. Every creature deserves a name, my knight.”
She slunk over to him, her serpentine grace and stare enchanting him, and then ran her hands over his shoulders. Erik knew he was being manipulated. He smelled her pheromones blossoming like flowers, teasing him with sweet pleasure. Connected as they were, he could sense her need to beguile him. There was a different aspect to her allure today, a magnetism that was more than carnal. Under the queen’s candy, spice, and brandy aromas, Erik smelled a puff of sulfur, of magik. Whatever spell this was, though, he was able to resist it. Drawing determinedly upon his willpower, he pulled the two of them apart and held her by her wrists.
“There’s no need to coerce me with your charms,” he said. “I shall do as you desire. You need only ask. If you wish to bring the artifact with us, the only question that remains is how to remove it from its clasp.” He paused, and his gray sea and rumbling storm inside of Lila turned turbulent for a speck. “I warn you, my queen, that if your attachment to this relic becomes anything like your fixation on Taroch’s hideous curse, I shall smash it into splinters neither man nor magik could put back together.”
Erik’s ferociousness, his awareness of the games she usually so adeptly played with men, flushed the queen with shame. “I am sorry. I did not…Magnus never caught…never chastised me for wielding my influence—”
“I shall never be like him.” Erik scowled, but then his face quickly cleared. He smiled as he said, “Your charm is certainly like a sword to the heart...and loins.”
Doomed, soul-bound fools in love, they felt emotions run and melt like ice every time passion flickered between them. The knight and queen came together, and their caresses and tongues expressed forgiveness for any criticism and ill behavior. In a sand, they sank down upon the cold metal stairs. Unable to escape their clothing quickly enough, they pulled their pants down just far enough for his prick to enter her. The heat of their connection whirled them away: to seas and storms, to golden fields and candy-scented breezes. They each came in specks, Erik thumbing her secret switch of pleasure while he pulled in and out of her inch by inch. But their release soothed none of their lust, especially not Erik’s. She was a marvel to him. Even her mouth felt extraordinary: harder, somehow, as he probed it deeply with his tongue.
This was their final carefree moment: soon, they would face the world and the legions of enemies their actions had created. Recklessly, they fuked and kissed and tumbled up and down the iron stairs. By the end of their dance, they were naked, soaked, and shivering like a couple in a rainstorm. They held one another, whispering sweet promises in their heads.
Throughout their lovemaking, the Mind had sat pulsing on its perch, busily analyzing their curious auras and physical exercises.
IV
Erik was able to extract the Mind from its clawed base by using his brute strength to peel back and then snap off the pedestal’s black fingers. As soon as the bloodmates were in possession of the artifact, they left without lingering for romance. Lila fashioned a sling from her torn cloak and swaddled the artifact in it, carrying it as if it were a baby. She sensed that this intimacy bothered Erik, but he held his tongue. The Mind could apparently create access and entry points anywhere on the ship. Thus, they were only mildly astonished when they stopped in the hall at a spot the Mind recommended to Lila—who could hear its voice whenever she touched it—and watched the metal wall vertiginously spin, then flow into a gangway that led down to a noisy shore.
The lordvessel ha
d driven itself right up onto a beach of crumbled granite. Gulls, busy cracking open clamshells, squawked angrily as Lila and Erik left the lordvessel through the newly ejected tongue of black metal. They walked down a rubble bridge. Lila spotted swarms of sinfully red crabs fighting the draw of heavy dashing tides. When they had descended lower, standing now amid seaweed-strewn pools, Lila, still touching the Mind, asked it to seal the hull. The lordvessel could not be entered again without the Mind’s command. The bloodmates splashed a path to less water-pitted shores and left a trail of footprints on a beach that glistened in defiance of the sun’s might.
That light and its heat, Lila feared, were simply a prelude to all that Kor’Khul would bring. Do not think about tomorrow. Do not think about yesterday. Only the here and now matters. In response to that thought, Erik’s hand found her back. Onward they strode, silent and united, each supported by the other’s strength.
Soon the beach was behind them, and they climbed a gradually rising green hump that met with other mounds and stretched into a rolling horizon. Once they had descended the first hill, Meadowvale’s charm blew over them in honeysuckle breezes. They walked through grass and wildflowers, and tried not to bother the hidden finches, the wild horses that grazed atop exposed granite skulls in the land, the many rabbits Erik saw poking white-furred heads up and down in the grass like moles. These creatures noticed the dark warrior, too, or smelled his obsidian grit and sweat, and they gave him and the queen a wide berth.
Welcome to the new natural order, said the queen after noticing the animals’ behavior. You’ve become a lord in this realm.
The afternoon passed in a gentle lulling flow. Before long, the sun readied for its sleep in the west. Night’s red hand reached for the travelers, and they bunked down for the evening in a valley between two great hills, one partially stripped of green like some of the others in Meadowvale. Erik made a mercifully swift kill, bringing back a pair of hares that were then strung up over a fire lit by Lila’s Will. Firebugs came out to play for the audience of two, and the bloodmates watched their dances, Lila wrapped in Erik’s arms.
Lila felt as if her heart should be grieving: she had once watched a similar performance from these dancers with Magnus back in Willowholme. However, that moment was now centuries past. When she hunted for emotion in those remembrances, she returned only with anger for Magnus, anger stoked by his rape of her, his pretense of being a man, his deceptions about his brother and their connection. Finally, I know how it feels to be with one man, one soul. I do not feel myself splintered and lost anymore. Indeed, Erik’s hale arms and the smell of his stone-powered sweat upon his tunic crushed these other reflections, and they were the last impressions Lila knew, or desired, before dreaming.
Her knight heard her thoughts, yet commented not. He’d loved her since the day she’d touched him in Eod. She still fought with terrors from her past, but to him, their tale was unfolding as it should.
Erik waited until he felt her presence far away and dreaming, then kissed his sleeping queen upon her forehead, her cheek, and her hand, which he lifted to his lips. “Goodnight, my queen,” he whispered. He himself, though, did not sleep. Now a lord of strength and stone, he no longer felt the need for it. Instead, the unnatural knight watched the firebugs whirl in helixes, correctly intuiting their next patterns. He listened to the heartbeats of the animals around him—they could echo like thunder, but he was quickly growing accustomed to absorbing a thousand scents and sounds every speck. Occasionally, he shifted to comfort his queen or to adjust the burden of the crystal eye she refused to release. Catching sight of her gold cameo in the moonlight, he fantasized about a world in which there were no Immortal kings to damage everyone and everything with their puerile thirst for identity. Damn Brutus and Magnus, he thought.
V
The next day they continued their travel through land that was sunny, peaceful, and full of nature’s songs and creatures. Around noon, however, they came to a point in the hills that was split by a road. Warily, they took the path; it would make for a faster journey, though they would have to remain alert for other travelers. Lila offered to mask them in sorcery, but Erik rejected the idea. Erik felt he would be able to sense any approaching beings. Something about her knight appeared harder today, Lila found, and his insides were a quiet, brewing storm. He didn’t seem partial to conversation. While padding down the dirt-trodden trail, Lila’s hand wandered to the sphere trundled up and bouncing against her chest. The Mind spoke to her the instant she touched it.
Good afternoon, Navigator.
Good afternoon, she replied. I am surprised you are still attuned to the passage of time. I thought you were blind unless awakened.
I am always awake. Always seeing. However, I have no one with whom to share my sights when there is no connection between your skin and mine—I need the kinetic spark of your telemetry interacting with mine. Otherwise, we cannot speak.
Intriguing, alarming, and slightly sad, thought the queen: this entity inundated by experiences it could discuss with no one. How much can you see? How far?
Far. Ten thousand and ninety-six paces ahead, for example, I detect friable soil and a growing stratification of silt. A desert. If the barometric pressures do not change, I predict a storm will form in the desert, bringing winds of one hundred spans per hour. At your current pace, though, you and your mate should safely miss it.
My mate? You use the most curious terms.
The one with whom you swap blood and other excretions. The patterns when the two of you copulate are elaborate. I would say they resemble snowflakes, though I am only referencing data related to winter precipitation; I have never seen snow. There are astra that form in clusters—singing clusters—within the chambers of your forms. I do not understand the concept of beauty, but I find the complexity of your union a subject worthy of further scrutiny. The Erik is not like the Magnus. I have seen the Magnus’s pattern, too, in your memories. It is very complex; it contains so many astra and molecules I cannot analyze its makeup. A universe to your galaxy. I believe it is beyond my analysis.
Yes, Magnus is a mystery. A sneer darkened the queen’s face.
Palpitations and increased circulation indicate a state of hypertension or rage. You are angry when you think of your other mate. Is that because of what he did to you?
Lila gasped and took her hand off the Mind. Through her exposure to it, it had mined her soul and extracted her darkest pains. Erik turned, showing concern and tepid rage. Lila sensed a sympathetic fury behind his glower, a fury directed at Magnus and the event that had fractured all of Central Geadhain. One incident of incredible violence from her husband—possessed or not—was all it had taken to send every old reign crumbling into the sea. She’d neither confronted this pain nor dealt with it. Instead, she’d hidden, gone mad, and ruined a kingdom. She had become the horror that she’d suffered. I have raped and reaped the world: of its children, its culture, its history.
Lila stopped in the road, frozen by remorse. Her feet no longer obeyed her. Her heart would not heed her and stop its hammering. Surely, she would have wept, screamed, or fallen into the dirt if the man of obsidian had not forced her to speak.
My queen, you mustn’t condemn yourself.
I have been fighting the wrong enemy.
Menos had to be stopped. We had no choice.
I do not mean Menos, my knight. Am I no better than the man who soiled me?
Magnus?
Yes.
Together, they rumbled. She’d become a cloud in his storm. Lila leaned into him. At last, she whispered the thorny secrets she’d borne since Magnus had left her for Zioch. I want to know why he chose me a thousand years ago. I want him to apologize for what he did. I want the world to know of the crime that drove me mad. I know that he blames himself for succumbing to the primal temptations and influences of his brother. But how sincere is his guilt when he declares you and I criminals, and the world remains ignorant of his sin?
Erik allowed the be
ast of his jealousy, the black side of his thoughts, to bleed out into his queen. As a matter of pride, he said, as a matter of justice, as part of the code I have always upheld, he should not be allowed to keep this sinful secret. I loved him, I worshipped him, and he betrayed every virtue that he extolled. Would a better king have been able to resist his brother? Was Magnus ever as strong as I believed? Or merely weak, a puppet to Brutus’s—or his own—sick desires? I want to fight him. I want to beat the answers from him with my fists of stone until he is as bloodied as you were when he left you. I would have killed him that night or died trying. I want to humiliate him as he did you. I don’t want him dead—
Feast of Chaos (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 3) Page 36