The water is full of gaija, Meliai had said.
“Did you ever find her?” Meric asked.
“No. She found me. One night I was on the bridge, looking out over the water, when I heard a voice from behind. It was her. She wore a black robe again. I could only see a bit of silver at her temples, but I knew. Ah, Meric. I could tell you she was beautiful–but what would that mean? A lot of women are beautiful. For me, no one will ever compare to her.”
Diodorus stared into the pool, eyes glassy and distant.
“What did she say?” Meric asked.
“‘What are you always looking for down there?’”
Diodorus chuckled.
“She’d seen me looking over the railing a hundred times, you see, and she got curious. I’d only seen her once. She wasn’t a water-spirit. She was a Plutarch.”
Meric’s lips parted in surprise.
“I didn’t know at first. She’d made her eyes darker somehow. She liked to walk in disguise among the Plebians. She was curious about how we lived. When she came down from the clouds, she’d float over the river, looking for a place to descend. That’s when she started seeing me on the bridge. All that time I was looking for her, she was watching me.
“We became friends, though visits were one-sided. She wouldn’t tell me where she lived. She appeared out of nowhere, mostly at night. I didn’t learn she was a Plutarch until … well, until we were more than friends. It was a shock, as you might imagine. I dealt with it as best I could. She even took me to visit the floating palaces. I didn’t care for that. You’ve seen how it is. The only Plebians up there are treated like personal property.
“Looking back, it didn’t last long. It seemed long. Longer than all the years since. That was my time in the sun, as the People say. You feel a sun like that, then go back to living in the dark? Pretty soon all you can do is remember how bright the light was, how good it felt. It’s hard to come back from something like that. From loving someone.”
Diodorus stooped for another rock and turned it absently in his hands.
“Of course, I always knew it had to end. We were living on borrowed time. She had a husband. They’d married for the wrong reasons. A political thing among the Plutarchs. Her family gained from it. I guess even Plutarchs need to please their parents. Her husband was old and manipulative. She’d let life carry her along, let others decide things, and by then it was too late. She’d been married a decade when we met. She felt like a stranger in her own home. There was a reason she walked among the Plebians at night.
“Her husband was destined to find out. Among the Plutarchs it’s acceptable to keep a slave or two for purely physical reasons. But she spent far too much time with me, and anyone who looked closely enough would see it was something more. We never wanted to be apart. Then she learned about the baby.”
A knot twisted in Meric’s stomach.
“Baby?” he asked, mouth dry.
Diodorus nodded.
“She was having some tests done, something unrelated. Being pregnant never entered her mind. Maybe if it had, she would’ve sent her mother out of the room. News got out before she could stop it. There are plenty of Plutarch bastards in the streets of Panchaea, but all with Plebian mothers. Rarely if ever does a Plutarch woman have a half-Plebian baby. Slaves take infertility pills. But I wasn’t a slave. We were in love. Naturally, everyone assumed the child was her husband’s. Even him. They were bound to find out otherwise–from the baby’s eyes, if nothing else. Still, Judith went along with it for as long as she could.”
“Judith,” Meric whispered.
He heard his half-sister’s voice again:
We have the same mother, Meric. The same Plutarch mother.
“You don’t mean…” Meric began.
Diodorus looked up from the rock his hands. He nodded.
“I didn’t know until you returned. Until I heard your story. But there can be no doubt, Meric. You were that baby. You’re my son.”
CHAPTER 19
“Impossible,” Meric said. “My father died in the Wildlands.”
“Your foster father. He was a friend of mine, a patron at the spirithouse. He and his wife had miscarried. I knew they were good people. When it became clear time was running out, Judith snuck you out of the clouds, and we delivered you to your new home. We made them swear to do all that was necessary to convince everyone you were their child. They would tell their friends and relatives she was four months pregnant. Then they would hide you indoors until an early ‘birth.’ After that, they could say you were sickly and keep you out of sight until the age-gap wasn’t be so noticeable. Things must’ve worked out, because here you are. After they took you in, Judith brought me to the perimeter-wall. She disabled the turrets. We … said goodbye.”
Diodorus turned away.
“It had to be done. There was no choice. Abraxas was her husband. He would’ve killed me and you. I had a chance in the Wildlands, but it was too dangerous for a newborn. I begged Judith to come, but she had her daughter to think of … and for a Plutarch, the Fog itself is no easy thing to give up. Life in the Wildlands–it can be harsh. I got lucky. I survived long enough to trade with some tribesmen. Found Trajan’s lot. Judith … Judith said she would look for me when Lillian was older. But I think maybe she knew this was one crisis she couldn’t survive. Abraxas would not allow her to survive it. I was a fool to ever believe otherwise. To think love alone would see us through. To think we’d be reunited. I gave up hope years ago, but back then I believed it. She would not have taken her own life. That she would not have done.”
Diodorus finished in a whisper. Meric stared at him.
This is my father.
The words had no meaning. There were no memories to associate them with, nothing to attach the knowledge to. Anwa Babi had eaten his fill of that era. Meric might as well have applied the phrase to a tree or a rock. The information was ungraspable.
And yet he saw the small things, things he’d already noticed on some level, peculiarities that took on new significance. The tilt of an expression. The identical shade of blue in his eyes. Diodorus’s gait as he’d made his way through the forest. Things that could’ve been coincidence but which had an underlying signature, a cohesion that only became apparent when you knew enough to look for it.
This is my father.
Tentatively, he put a hand on Diodorus’s shoulder. The Plebian stiffened briefly. He faced forward with a sigh. Tears glistened on his cheeks. He looked up at the trees as leaves whispered in the breeze.
“I get why Meliai and the others come here,” Diodorus said. “It really is beautiful. ‘God is a volcano, not a vendor. A river, not a ration token,’ Trajan used to say. I lost what faith I had when I learned the truth about the Plutarchs–but I know exactly what he meant. Nature has a divinity all its own. It was never meant to serve us. Nor were we meant to be so deeply separated from it, as we were in the Fog. The world is a trial by fire, but it’s a cleansing fire, a fire that burns away our impurities. It’s not something that carts us to work for our convenience or conjures petty goods when we kneel at an altar. God’s Will. They told us that was God’s Will. We should’ve known they were false from the start.”
Meric’s hand had dropped away at the mention of Trajan. He rubbed his swollen eye by mistake and flinched, then pressed it harder, angrily. Pain and guilt squeezed his insides. Diodorus perceived the trouble.
“Don’t blame yourself too much, Meric. Didn’t you hear me? Big mistakes run in the family. Mine was failing to save your mother. At least I had a chance. You were trained for yours your whole life. The Plutarchs covered your eyes and tied your hands behind your back, so don’t take all the credit for walking off a cliff.”
“Yes, but it was Trajan who paid for my blindness, when he was only trying to show me the way. It should’ve been me,” Meric said.
Diodorus took a deep breath.
“Maybe you ought to make it up to him then.”
“Make it up to h
im? He’s dead, for Fog’s sake,” Meric said.
“Yes, Trajan is dead. But his dream is not. You see, Trajan had a plan…”
Meric’s brow contracted.
“What are you talking about? What plan?”
Diodorus’s eyes twinkled. He leaned in conspiratorially.
“A plan to save his people. A plan to destroy the Plutarchs.”
Meric stared at him, incredulous. Was he joking? Not now. He couldn’t be. Yet the Plutarchs were untouchable in the Fog. The tribesmen had zero chance against them.
“Tell me,” Meric breathed.
“When the time is right,” Diodorus said, clapping him on the back.
“Why not now?”
“Right now you’ve got to go to Ozymand and prove your worth to the People. And I’ve got to see the elders about sending that blonde bastard with you.”
*
He was lying to me, Meric thought the next day aboard the steamcar to Ozymand. The preparations had been depressingly reminiscent of his first trip. A spacious steamcar, engine abandoned, replaced by a mammoth. Meric couldn’t tell if it was the same animal. Nog, Azog, and Hestia were all present. Meliai was not.
“Isn’t she coming?” he’d asked Diodorus before their departure. The older Plebian had come to see them off.
“She’s disappeared into the forest again. No telling when she’ll be back.”
“But I just saw her this morning.”
And what a sight. She’d been almost unrecognizable. Demonic. Her naked body had been caked in a paste of mud and dried blood, etched with arcane symbols. Her eyes had stood out all the more, burning like green fire.
“I saw her too–just before she left,” Diodorus had said. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d have thought she was a damn forest spirit. She didn’t have her father’s ashes, so she killed a panther and mixed its blood with dirt from sacred ground. Ishka blessed the mixture and carved out the symbols on her arms. She’s asked the Goddess for revenge against her enemies,” Diodorus had told him.
Meric wondered if that included him.
Bound in the steamcar was a significant new member of the group. One both necessary and unwanted: Gallatius. The Plutarch’s capture was finally wearing on him, though he maintained a shallow smirk and seemed to think it all a bit ridiculous, as though his predicament were beneath him. Meric did his best to ignore the man. Trajan’s supposed “plan” still occupied his thoughts.
He had to be lying.
Diodorus had probably only aimed to give him hope, because hope was something Meric desperately needed. His waking hours passed in a numbing haze of depression. He’d spent his whole life in unwitting service to a pack of immoral, scheming tyrants. He’d watched his friends die for them. He’d killed the only man who’d ever told him the truth. There was no coming back from that. Something else bothered him too, minor though it may have been compared to the destruction of his old life.
He missed the Fog.
All his life, his devotion to the Plutarchs had covered a deeper desire–to be one of them. To live in the clouds, to speak to the Fog. His sampling of that power, however terrible the surrounding events, had only whetted his appetite. For once, he’d been bigger than his body. He’d had a sixth sense. He’d remade the world by the merest of mental efforts. However much he hated the Plutarchs, however much he despised himself, nothing could compare to that pure, unnatural ability. For an hour, or half an hour, Meric had been a demigod.
He felt guilty for liking it, for craving the same power which had corrupted the Plutarchs. The same power which had allowed them to dominate Panchaea. Yet he wanted it back. He couldn’t let it go. Ozymand thus held a secret appeal for Meric. The Fog and Diodorus’s hint of a “plan” were the only flickering candles in the smothering darkness of his mind. Knowing Swan’s fate was tied to his would’ve been enough to keep him going, but it was not enough to make him want to keep going.
Meric and Gallatius were bound and guarded at all times. Their escorts meant to redeem themselves. A day out from Red Oak Grove, Meric began to feel woozy after dinner. When his condition worsened, he knew why.
Whitecrowns.
They’d cooked them into his dinner. He was violently ill for the remainder of the day. He sweated through his clothes, wretched until he had nothing left, and still he could only moan and lay on the floor for hours.
“Oh, come now, dinner wasn’t that bad,” Gallatius said.
It was pure agony. Colors and shapes swirled together in nonsensical geometries, continuously changing, adding to his nausea. Every time Gallatius talked, Meric wanted to choke him. It began to seem like the savages had overdone things. Perhaps he’d die. But he wasn’t that lucky.
The next day he was starving and achy, but he didn’t dare eat. Tao and another savage had sped south to recover the abandoned pontoon; the mammoth couldn’t cross the river without it. As they waited for Tao to return, Nog brought Meric a partial leg from a wildcat. Mobius poked his head out of Nog’s pack to sniff with interest. Meric just stared at the offering.
“It’s safe. You’ve had your taste of misery. Can’t blame us for returning the favor, eh? But there’ll be no more of that. You’ll need your health. Nobody else is going to make those goods in Ozymand.”
Reluctantly, Meric reached for the meat. Gallatius straightened, showing sudden interest.
“Ozymand?” he asked.
No one had told him where they were headed.
*
The Fog emerged as a distant tingle, an itch in a phantom limb the size of a city. He felt it as they approached the hollow hill, as they stepped onto the lift and descended into the man-made abyss. Gallatius was confined to the steamcar. Though he planned to consult him, Meric couldn’t risk taking the Plutarch into the Fog.
Hestia was scared half to death on the lift. The others were solemn and tense. There was a belief among the savages that sinister passages lay beyond Ozymand–tunnels leading deeper into the earth, where dark spirits made their homes.
“Listen. You are to stay within sight of the corridor,” Nog said as the lift descended. “Go no further into the Fog. The elders don’t trust you. I can’t imagine why.”
Meric’s frustration surged. He’d been looking forward to a certain amount of freedom in the Fog.
“Do you really think I’d try to leave again? Where would I go? The Plutarchs want me dead,” Meric said.
“You are to stay within sight of the corridor,” Nog repeated, slower, as if speaking to a child. “If you do keep going…”
Nog gestured at Hestia, who held a skinngun. He and Azog held two more. Meliai came to mind, seemingly at random. She hated him, yet he missed her. He felt a fresh wave of guilt, anger, and regret. The feel of those pouty lips against his…
It was never meant to be.
The intensity of his sudden longing was almost overwhelming. That such a thing should never be fulfilled–his fists clenched, trembling. The lift jerked to a halt. Nog groped for the panel in the wall. Fluorescent tubes lit the corridor. Meric set off for Ozymand. Again he noticed the deep hum coming up through the floor. His Fog-sense, his phantom limb, ballooned as he reached the end of the corridor. The outer mist enveloped him.
“That’s far enough,” Nog shouted. None of the savages would enter the Fog. They stood anxiously near the entrance to the vast chamber, hands on their weapons.
Meric stopped. Relief washed through him. Even in the outer layer, he was more than himself. He was vast, changeable, powerful. He gathered the Fog into a great gray ball and rolled it through the air. He spun it around itself, squashed it into a disc, sent it soaring toward the chamber’s ceiling–where the mass burst into formless mist and melted away into the haze. The hint of a smile touched Meric’s face. His eyes were unnecessary. He had other eyes now.
Nog had told him what to make: mortar and pestle, farming tools, pipes, skinnygun bolts, fishing nets, skinning knives, bowls, belts, a hammer, chisels, backpacks, rope, buckets, glass pane
s, and one small statue of the Goddess. Weapons too. Attachable claws and curving, scythe-like blades that ran from elbow to hand. Long, thin blowguns. A handful of atomblades. Most of it was for the Bloodrats. Runners had already retrieved the stranded goods from Trajan’s crashed steamcar, so Red Oak did not have a pressing need for new goods. The trip had been arranged for two purposes: to pay the Bloodrats and to test Meric’s “sorcery.”
Many of the goods were easy to shape. Sculpting them was scarcely harder than imagining them; he shaped each mass with the muscles of his phantom limb. Object-density was perceived as a kind of pressure, like a pinch in his brain. Color was equally easy to determine, a flavor in his mouth. He could push it around an invisible palette, and the mass would turn blue or red or white or yellow.
Beyond that, things grew complicated.
The rope had to have the proper flexibility and strength. The fishing nets had to have tiny, identical holes. And how could he make fabric? Everything had a texture and a color and a shape all its own. When he had three good questions, he took the lift back to the surface. In the steamcar, Gallatius listened with a mocking smirk. He shook his head and said:
“One day, a mouse fell into a lion’s den. The mouse had hit its head and lost its memories. When it saw the lion, the mouse said, ‘It has a tail, and I have a tail. It has four paws, and I have four paws. It has teeth, and I have teeth. I must be a lion!’ So the mouse ran to the lion and woke it up and shouted, ‘brother!’ And the lion gobbled up the mouse in one bite.”
Meric’s rage surfaced. This was the same man who’d stolen Swan out of the strawberry fields, who’d done unspeakable things to her. The same man he’d saved from being sold to the Bloodrats. He shouldn’t have expected cooperation, but the mocking smirk and the superior attitude were too much. With difficulty, he waited for the anger to pass, composing himself before speaking.
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