“Your son shall have the Spear of All Spears. Your other warriors will go better armed as well.”
Mother Raptor looked at him warily, dark eyes stern.
“And what will you expect in return, oh Foglord?”
“I expect, when the time comes, to call on some of your people … to do what you already want to do. To take the blood of those who rule the Fog,” Meric said.
*
When the Spear of All Spears was presented to mother Mother Raptor, she held the gleaming red weapon with reverence. Meric warned her not to try the point; it would shear through her finger before she felt the pressure. It was lighter than wood and more durable than steel. He’d engraved artful designs and pictographs of eagles along the shaft. He demonstrated the tip’s piercing power on a piece of fogplate. Mother Raptor was a hard woman to impress, but there were unshed tears in her eyes as she promised the Red Eagles could be called upon for help.
The Red Eagles were the fourth tribe in Meric’s growing alliance–fifth, if you counted the Bloodrats. He’d provided their leaders with personal gifts and their people with tools and goods. He’d worked to assuage concerns and suppress old rivalries. It had been more than a month since the conversation with Diodorus, and Meric had thrown himself into his new role. Every waking moment he worked in the Fog, practiced in the Fog, thought of how to break the Plutarchs. At night, he brought out the datadrive. That’s what Diodorus had called it–the translucent black hemisphere, the key to Trajan’s plan–wondering if it really worked.
Rune was his most frequent visitor, his ambassador to the Bloodrats. Rune’s support confused Meric, however. It seemed to go beyond the strict trading nature of his relationship with the tribe. Rune often watched him forming Fog-goods. He was one of the few savages with no apparent fear of the dead city.
“This place doesn’t frighten you?” Meric asked after Mother Raptor’s departure.
Rune’s eyebrows went up.
“Any spirits here belong to my ancestors,” Rune said.
“…Belondame uppers,” Meric heard. The man’s accent was still thick and fast, with occasional unfamiliar terms, but Meric had learned to parse out the words.
“You mean they lived here?” Meric asked, frowning.
Rune nodded.
As far as Meric knew, only one group had ever lived in Ozymand. Suddenly he realized where the Bloodrats had gotten their atomic-edged blades.
“You’re descended from the people of Ozymandias.”
“Do you not know this?” Rune asked, brow furrowed.
“I do now. Why did your people leave the Fog?”
“The Great Foglord was dead. Shiazu the Wildheart killed him after he failed to take Panchaea. The god Osha visited Shiazu in the form of a rat, and taught him many things. Knowledge of the deep places. Of the past. Of the future. Shiazu told my people the Foglord would return one day, that Panchaea would fall when he did. Our ancestors would rejoice and a new age would dawn.”
Meric stopped himself from gaping. That’s why they were helping him? A prophecy made by a madman?
“Trajan was a–a Foglord. Why didn’t you support him?” Meric asked.
Rune looked taken aback, as though Meric had missed something obvious.
“The Great Foglord warned our people never to trust those with silver eyes. When they commune with the demon who gives them their powers, the demon borrows their eyes, and their sight is tainted. They see only what the demon wants them to see–this is where the silver comes from. But all men know this. You test me for sport.”
“Forgive me,” Meric said, turning away. He didn’t trust himself to ask further questions. Malthenian was right. The Bloodrats weren’t in it for weapons and goods alone. They would take those things, but there was a deeper issue, a cultural one.
Godsblood. They think I’m the one they’ve waited for.
The sound of the lift descending echoed down the corridor. Meric wasn’t expecting anyone after Mother Raptor. A figure came toward them. His breath caught.
It was Meliai.
Diodorus had told him of her return weeks ago, but he had yet to see her. Meliai had been scouting the main Panchaean legion on her own. Returning to Red Oak and seeing the destruction, she’d hid in the forest. She’d found tracks and signs of battle, but no survivors. Finally she’d called on an isolated tree-house concealed in a thicket east of the mountain. Nog’s relatives lived there. Among them was Trin, a young woman who’d fled the destruction. She’d told Meliai of all she’d seen, including the death of her husband, and how some of the survivors had left for Ozymand.
Meliai’s return had brought immense relief. Meric had left the Fog to catch a glimpse of her, but no luck–she was staying with her cousins two kilometers into the forest. He’d felt a sharp upwelling of bitterness then, knowing she would avoid him. His guilt had laughed at him. But she was alive; that was the important thing.
And now she’d descended into Ozymand.
Meric stared at her, afraid to move, as though he might spook her. She was carrying a small cloth bundle, but all he saw was her golden hair, her grass-green eyes, her supple body. If he’d wondered why he’d thought of her unceasingly, why he looked for her unconsciously in every glimpse toward the forest, her presence made the answer abundantly clear. She carried an atmosphere all her own, and only after he’d breathed it did he know how polluted the air was elsewhere. She was the color in a gray world, the scent of flowers in an ocean of rot. To touch her was a hallowed notion. To be near her was enough. Here was something the Fog could not reproduce. He barely noticed Rune’s departure.
Meliai stared at Meric for a long moment. He tried to speak. Words had abandoned him. There was a natural intensity to her expression. She broke the silence.
“You have a plan to break the Plutarchs,” she said.
Diodorus must’ve told her. He wanted Meric to forget the Fog and go elsewhere. Perhaps this was another ploy to keep him from invading. If so, it would fail.
“I have a plan,” Meric said.
“You ally other tribes. You would lead them into the Fog?”
“I will do what is necessary.”
Meric expected more questions or protests. Instead, Meliai stepped forward and held out the bundle she carried. He took it numbly. Wrapped in the cloth were stalks of a leafy yellow-green plant. Gnost had called it demongrass.
“Gojun. To help you focus. We will chew it in battle. You should know its taste,” Meliai said. Her voice was measured, the emotion suppressed. Her eyes swam with hidden things. There was a sense of tension, vibrating, held back by a string. This was his first conversation with her since … well, since she’d beaten him unconscious. He hardly trusted himself to respond. He handled the stalks of gojun instead.
“Do not chew it too quickly, or all at once. There is fierce and wild gaija in the plant. Too much of the Goddess’s energy will burst your heart,” Meliai said.
“Did you say we will chew it in battle?” Meric asked.
“Of course. I’m going with you,” Meliai said.
Meliai stared at him, daring him to challenge her. Meric’s eyes drifted to her lips.
“Meliai, I…”
He wanted to say something about Trajan. To apologize for the unforgivable. He wanted to tell her how he wasn’t the person who’d slipped toxic mushrooms into Nog’s stew. As he tried to summon the right words, however, she turned on her heels and stalked away down the corridor. Meric stared after her, angry at his failure, the gojun clenched in his hands. After she was gone, a cold fear sprung up. He couldn’t let her go to Panchaea. There was something rather obvious about the plan that Meric had not consciously admitted…
He was going to die.
It was an unheralded fact in his mind. He took the palm-sized datadrive from the pouch beneath his shirt. Even if the plan worked, there were too many uncertainties, too many Plutarchs. He would see the job through to the end, but in all likelihood those who went into the Fog would perish. For tha
t reason, he couldn’t let Meliai be among them.
Her mind was set, however. How could he stop her? She was as ungovernable as an animal in the wild. Better not to tell her just yet. Sighing, he put the black hemisphere away and held up a stalk of demongrass. He’d seen the savages chewing it. One had even spit it into his visor at Jarl’s Ravine. Meric never would’ve guessed he’d try some himself … but he never would’ve guessed he’d be opposing the Plutarchs from the Fog of a dead city either. Life took strange turns. He raised the gojun to his mouth.
It was crunchy and bitter, the leaves minty. The feeling came on in smooth increments. He’d chewed a second stalk before he was aware of the difference.
Why is that buzzing so loud?
The deep humming noise filtering up through the floor seemed inordinately loud. The fluorescent lights in the corridor were also buzzing. Meric moved deeper into the Fog. It didn’t help. The noise absorbed him. It seemed to take on a shape. Could it have always been this loud? There was a sense of unreality to it, of falseness–not that the sound was less real than before, but that it had never been real, and he’d only just become aware of it.
A strange feeling overcame him. His mind condensed like a shrinking cloud. The cloud had been spread thin before, casting a feeble shadow. Now its edges joined the center; its shadow gained depth. The lens of his thoughts came into greater focus. Awareness was more palpable. Each beat of his heart vibrated through its cage of flesh.
Meric looked at the gojun. His focus shifted from sound to sight. A sudden fascination took him: the bright green stalks, the intricate beauty of the leaves, the reflections in tiny drops of moisture. Each plant, each leaf, was a world unto itself. No wonder the savages said gojun was filled with the energy of the Goddess. Who was to say it wasn’t? What did description matter when the words could never match the reality? Meric knew at once that he could never share the essence of the experience with anyone, that the fundamentals would always be lost in translation.
He turned his attention to the Fog. Other concerns went far away.
The Dance of a Thousand Knives was good daily practice. It pushed his Fog-control to the limit. Outside troubles were muted. During the Dance, he could be something other than that tragic failure of a self that existed beyond the Fog. He had a natural aptitude for it–if interaction with a brain implant could be called natural–yet still he’d come nowhere close to the intricacy of Trajan’s display.
Now, under the gojun’s influence, Meric’s focus dwindled to a dimensionless point. He lost all sense of his body. Controlling the Fog had always been intuitive, but this was a new level. Gray tendrils enwrapped his body like the smoky fingers of a benevolent god, lifting him. A bright sphere formed, morphed into two, into four, into sixteen. The spheres flattened into blades. They spun through the air, whirling in an intricate dance, splitting and splitting. One-hundred-twenty-eight. Two-hundred-fifty-six. They shifted colors, reversed, fell into patterns, spun around him in synchronized aggregations. Time phased out. The moment existed–nothing else. He was one with the Fog. It was beautiful.
Slowly, very slowly, his focus began to slip. Pieces broke away, feckless, wandering down mental corridors. Exhaustion crept in. Weakness. Meric let go. He was utterly drained. He wanted to laugh. His Dance had surpassed even Trajan’s. No wonder the savages used gojun in battle. He’d dismissed it as native foolishness, but it had a powerful purpose. Perhaps he did have a chance.
The next morning, he changed his mind. Depression crushed his soul. He sat with Nog, Azog, Diodorus, and others eating breakfast outside the hollow hill. Mobius was gathering scraps in his tiny hands. Meliai had come too. But the food was tasteless. He’d been deceiving himself. They had zero chance against the Plutarchs.
“Eat. When the Goddess departs, the body mourns,” Meliai said.
Was that it? Meric forced himself to chew and swallow.
The gojun’s aftereffects lasted most of the day.
*
The first part of Meric’s plan saw mixed results.
Rushing back from Panchaea, Tao reported that forty men and a steamcar had left the Fog. Meric called together a group of Treeborn, Bloodrat, Steelspear, and Blackheart warriors. They would pick up Red Eagles as they headed south. Meric himself would lead them…
“You’re becoming something to them,” Diodorus had told him a week earlier. “Something more than yourself. A symbol. A ‘Foglord.’ Men close to you may follow you, but the others will follow your reputation. Symbols are easy to follow. Men can die, but symbols endure. You can’t always stay in the Fog, Meric. When you’re outside, find a way to inspire these people. Make them believe in you.”
So Meric had taken one of Trajan’s ideas. Every day for a week, he’d gone into the thicket where the pair of domesticated mammoths were being kept, and he’d fed them. Talked to them. Scratched their hides. One was more accommodating than the other. He’d found himself telling it secrets as he talked. Goals and desires he hadn’t revealed to a single human being. It was strangely gratifying. Listener, he’d named the mammoth. On the third day, he’d placed a harness on Listener. Toward the end of the week, he’d sat in that harness. The mammoth was almost four meters tall.
As the savages gathered in a small clearing south of Ozymand, preparing for the journey, those with keen senses frowned at a tremble in the forest-floor. Silence fell. They looked north to see the Foglord in matte black armor, an atomblade on his back, riding toward them on a massive black mammoth. The Blackhearts thumped their chest rhythmically. The Bloodrats made whooping sounds. The Treeborn clacked small sticks against the nearest trees. Azog’s broad face broke into a rare smile, and he laughed wholeheartedly. Meric looked for Meliai, but by the time he saw her she had turned away.
Guided by Tao, the group hurried south, making excellent time with the scout’s intimate grasp of terrain. They picked up a dozen Red Eagles from Mother Raptor’s territory. Sleepless hours were spent maneuvering ahead of the legionnaires. The Plebians’ goal was thought to be an abandoned salt-mine. The Fog couldn’t simulate raw materials; now and then the Plutarchs sent men to gather salt, sulfur, and so on. After heading west across the river, the legionnaires had followed an ancient road. Fall was coming, and a scattering of red, yellow, green, and brown leaves were piling up on the forest floor, overflowing onto the road … making traps that much easier to conceal.
“They expect savages. They’ve been trained to fight savages,” Meric told his followers before the attack. “Instead, we will give them something they’ve never faced. Something they’ve been taught to fear even more. Something they’ve almost forgotten they believe in. They expect savages. We will give them demons.”
The warriors were given thin, Fog-wrought pelts to drape over their armor. The pelts were covered in faux red fur with manes of thin black spikes. What looked like teeth and eyes were embedded in odd places in the fur.
Meric had decided on the demon ruse while running a program in the Fog. People ran programs in their heads as well, he’d realized. Societies ran programs. Nature ran programs. Everywhere were predetermined stimuli and responses. The Plebians had been trained to take their lives if captured by savages. But they had no trained response to demons. Some might still bite their poison. He could only hope to get to them before they did.
Meric saw little of the actual trap. He and Listener waited out of sight. The steamcar rustled the leaves as it rolled over the old road–as it passed close to an ancient sewer. There was a sudden crash. Shouting. Dust rising. A section of the road had dropped away, the Bloodrats having reduced its support to a thin layer of dirt and leaves. Almost half the legionnaires dropped with it. Nets rained down on the others. Some ran–only to fall into smaller pits concealed by the leaves. Demons dropped out of the trees and tore off Plebian helmets. Darts sprouted in Plebian necks, shot with pinpoint accuracy by Rune and other Bloodrats.
When it was over, Meric led Listener out of the forest. In the black armor, his face was hidden.
Those in the smaller pits were all unconscious. Not all had been hit by Bloodrat darts. Some had been bludgeoned. One likely wouldn’t survive. Two more had bit their poison. Meric’s stomach churned in grief and doubt. He didn’t recognize them, but it could’ve just as easily been Dominus or one of his other friends. Three Plebians had also been stabbed, despite his orders. He would have to find out who’d done it, and if they’d been forced to it or not. More guilt to shoulder. It would come in the night, in quiet moments. First he had to deal with the survivors.
The unconscious were dragged into the forest. Their false teeth were pulled. They were bound and guarded. Then Meric walked his mammoth to the edge of the larger pit, where the steamcar and almost half the legionnaires were trapped, dazed, and frightened. It was a delicate situation. Their helmets prevented the use of knockout-darts, and if they knew they were being taken by savages, most or all would bite their teeth.
“I am Hazmothus, lord of this forest,” Meric said, picking the name of a lesser-known forest spirit. “Fogborn are not welcome here. Yet I have respect for your masters. I do not wish to anger them. You will be given food and water and sent east. You will deliver a message for me. It will require time to compose. Until then, you will remain here.”
Food and water were handed down to the Plebians. The underground tunnel had collapsed around the pit, closing the passage at both ends. In the forest, Meric waited. Night fell. Few of the soldiers ate, but one could only go so long without water. By the second day, all had taken a sip. The colorless solution within was slow and subtle, a Bloodrat concoction, stronger than what they used on the darts. When it took hold, the victim would sleep for a day. When all were snoring, Meric pulled their false teeth.
The Last Plutarch Page 27