He blessed your name, and he died on your blade.
It was all so senseless. He’d thought Rune would be with him to the end. The Bloodrat’s support had come easy, through personal assumptions and hopes that Meric had little to do with. It was “the Foglord” he’d believed in, not Meric. Maybe sometimes everyone needed to put their faith in something bigger than themselves. Now Rune’s body was in the tunnels under the earth. The Bloodrats had carried their casualties away after the battle. Too big for any burial, Listener had joined the victims as well–the mammoth had collapsed in the woods, perforated by skinnygun bolts.
After the wounded had been tended to, after the dead had been lined up on the side of the road, Meric had gone back to the pocket in front of the cathedral. The two shattered wheels had been brought before him. He’d gathered the sand-like Fog which had formerly been Plebian armor. Without a larger network, the microscopic machines had been slow to maneuver, but they’d cooperated enough for Meric to reshape the broken wheels. The savages had cleaned the blood and dirt off the vehicle’s exterior. It rolled rough, but it looked okay–and appearances were essential.
It was a cousin of mine, Ebon. He’s young, idealistic. A good-natured boy.
Had that been Ebon in the steamcar? Had Meric killed his cousin? Dominus’s death had temporarily stunted any empathy he might’ve had, but a measure of doubt and remorse was trickling in. Lillian had said Ebon wouldn’t mistreat the poorest, most desperate soul. Not all Plutarchs were monsters. But whenever Meric thought of Dominus’s lifeless face, any vestige of remorse was swept away.
They deserve everything they get.
The unconscious Plebians had been bound in the cathedral and placed under guard. Nog had taken a bolt through the meat of his leg. He’d wanted to press on regardless, but Meric had told him he’d endanger the quest. The injury was a mixed blessing. The cook had three daughters, and they’d been lucky enough to escape the destruction of Red Oak; Meric didn’t want their father to disappear in the Fog.
Meric, Azog, Meliai, Vireo, Tao, and six others had donned the Plebian armor from the supplies they’d stored in the cathedral. They’d each chewed a second stalk of gojun. As they’d prepared, Meric had taken Meliai aside.
“Listen–”
“Don’t,” Meliai had said.
“What?”
“You’re going to tell me not to go. Don’t bother. My father is still in the Fog. I’m going, Meric–for him and you.”
“Meliai–”
“You’re afraid we’re going to die. You think you can hide this from me? I see it in your eyes every time you speak of Panchaea.”
“We may never even reach the White Palace. We may execute the plan and still perish. Or we may save your father and lose you in the process. Do you think he’d want that?”
“What will happen will happen. That’s not the problem. Deep down you still believe the Plutarchs are more than human. You’ve proven they aren’t, but you still think they can’t be beaten. You think it’s your fate to fail.”
Meliai had continued to suit up. A sick had feeling twisted in Meric’s gut. With only her helmet left to don, she’d looked at him with her grass-green eyes and said:
“It is fear of death that keeps people from the Goddess. The body wants to preserve itself, so it convinces the mind we are something separate from what surrounds us. If we let the fear rule us, if we seek only to preserve this flesh, we may live longer, but we will become our enemies–for it was fear that made the Plutarchs, and it will make us too if we let it. Don’t you see? There is no separation. We are the trees and the rocks and the rivers. We are even the Fog. There is nothing we are not. The Goddess is indivisible, her gaija indestructible. The pattern may shift, but we will always exist within it. This is the secret the priestess Ishka told me after my mother’s death.”
Meric had known then there was only one way to stop her. He’d leaned in and kissed her–as his left hand had come up and jabbed one of Rune’s darts into the side of her neck. She’d tensed and pulled back, eyes wide. The slap of her gauntleted hand had left a ringing in his ears.
“You bastard … how could you … how could…”
The helmet had dropped from her hand. Meric had held her as she’d swayed on her feet.
“I love you,” he’d whispered, willing her to understand, to forgive him, as her eyes rolled back in her head. He’d laid her unconscious body gently on a pew and gone out to join the others. What choice did he have? With Meliai in the Fog, he’d be unable to focus on the quest. He’d worry only about her safety. She’d be furious when she woke up. It was the second time he’d betrayed her with a kiss, and he hated himself for it–but she would survive. That was the important thing.
Meric and the nine tribesmen had pressed on alone, taking the steamcar, leaving the prisoners, the wounded, and the dead with a handful of keepers. At a bend in the road, Meric’s group had hidden the steamcar in a copse of trees. They’d weaved through the forest to scout Panchaea on foot before their big move. Meric had thought of the cathedral as being close to the city, but it was a longer journey than he’d remembered. Every step brought him further from Dominus’s body and closer to what was likely his doom.
Then–the Fog.
He stopped short. His stomach dropped. His legs turned to liquid. In single-file, the others halted behind him. Azog gripped his shoulder, squeezing, reassuring. There were no soldiers in the clearing, no one to stop or slow them, no sign of anything odd.
“Are you ready?” Azog asked.
They returned to the steamcar. He went inside and took the controls. Vireo’s red spear and Azog’s spiked hammer lay in one corner. Initially the Red Eagle had refused to unhand it, but Meric had convinced him–barely–that its presence would arouse suspicion. Nearby, the Plutarch’s blood stained the floor.
Focus.
The gojun helped.
The Fog rose before them. The savages escorted the steamcar in the formation Meric had shown them. Most–not all–remembered to keep their hands off their weapons and avoid hunching warily, like the returning legionnaires they were supposed to be. Still, it was nerve-wracking. Meric could only see through a small tinted window. What if there was something he didn’t know? Some signal he was supposed to give? Some specific point to enter the city?
We’ll be dead before we know the turrets have fired.
It took an age to cross the clearing.
The outer wall loomed before them, dwarfed by the massive gray cloud beyond. Meric’s Fog-sense flickered to life. He felt the familiar enlargement, the boundless control. Safety. Security. The feeling was a lie–he’d never been in greater peril. He parted the outer wall, heart beating out of his chest. He could only imagine the terror of the savages around him–they were uncomfortable even in Ozymand–yet in their armor they showed no fear. They were committed.
The Fog swallowed them whole.
They came in at the edge of a strawberry field. The outer wall was vast and unmarked, the river the only distinct reference point. Now Meric knew exactly where they were. Within sight was the same little hill behind which he and Swan had lain in another life. Surreal that he should see it now. He opened the steamcar’s door. The savages hurried toward the vehicle. Half had already piled in when a black-bearded man descended through the Fog, landing nearby.
“What are you men doing? Ebon? Why aren’t you answering your–”
The Plutarch gasped as the Fog closed on him with razorblade tentacles. He void-shielded. A second offensive wave closed on the heels of the first, collapsing the empty space. A faux-steel sphere with foot-long needles embedded itself in the man’s face. Meric could’ve tried bludgeoning him unconscious instead, but a coldness had come upon him. The distant remorse seeping in for his half-cousin wasn’t enough to overcome what had been unhinged by Dominus’s death. He’d crossed a line. The universe was senseless–so he would be senseless. The gojun only made the disconnect worse. Focusing on the Fog, he left his emotions el
sewhere.
His nine escorts were in the steamcar by the time the Plutarch’s body hit the ground. Meric seized the Fog and built a column of pressure beneath the vehicle. The White Palace was a vague and distant mass among the floating palaces above. Meric’s steamcar sped toward it. He gripped the datadrive in one hand. How long until the other Plutarchs realized something was wrong? They would never anticipate such a bold attack. It had been more than a century since anyone had even reached the outer wall. They’d been in power too long to recognize potential weaknesses. The White Palace drew closer. Still there were no signs of resistance. Perhaps things would prove easier than expected…
The steamcar burst into smoke.
An invisible fist slammed the column of Fog beneath them. Eighty meters in the air, savages screamed and fell. Something shot through the Fog toward Meric. He turned it to sand before he knew what it was. He condensed a cloud, hardening the base into a shapeless rubber mass. Their fall halted abruptly.
Meter-long needles flew at him–dozens of them, from multiple directions. He glimpsed the silhouette of a man floating on his right, a woman above him on his left. Meric turned the needles to mist–but his cloud-support liquefied, and again they were falling. Razors formed in their path below. He misted them and conjured another cloud…
Too slow. A savage plunged through, clawing at the air, disappearing into the gray abyss. Meric tried to catch him, but he was interrupted by more attacks. He couldn’t even tell who’d been lost. The coldness inside him turned hot.
He sunk into the gray. There was no emotion, no thought; only raw, angry willpower. This was what he’d trained for, what the gojun was for. He was the Fog. He pulled the savages close. Three layers of protective spheres manifested. He transmitted a program to reform the spheres the instant they changed shape. A ball of Fog as big as a mammoth rolled up through the mist, arcing toward the Plutarch on Meric’s right. The man tried to disperse it; Meric forced it into being. The Plutarch sped away. The ball raced after him. A blade condensed and flew at him from the other direction. The blade burst into mist, only to form twin daggers. They plunged into the Plutarch’s neck and back. He jerked to a halt, and the ball impacted, flinging his broken body toward the streets below.
Meric kept the boulder moving, curving toward the second Plutarch. She screamed curses at him and tried to disperse it. He peppered her with knives, metal pellets, curtains of sand. She was battered away, defending. She was almost out of reach when a shrinking concrete sphere closed around her. She burst the sphere apart before it could crush her–just as a wall dropped from above. She fell into the mist without a sound.
Meric had defeated three Plutarchs, but more would come, and he couldn’t fight them all. They sped upward and onward, toward the White Palace.
“Who’d we lose?” he asked. His voice sounded strange. His focus was so deep in the Fog that he felt alienated from his own body.
“Tao,” Azog said.
The Treeborn’s legendary stealth couldn’t save him from an eighty-meter fall.
Grieve later.
Currents shifted in the Fog, body-sized, incoming. Word had gotten out. It didn’t matter. They would arrive too late; Meric had reached the inveterated underside of the White Palace. Without the code-key, he couldn’t alter the material, couldn’t even sense its presence. But there were more primitive methods of entry. Dispersing the top-halves of his defensive spheres, he pressed the supporting hemispheres against the palace’s underside.
“Quickly,” he said.
Vireo thrust his red spear up into the base of the White Palace. The floor was thick, but it couldn’t stop an atomic edge. Vireo cut a wide circle. Azog went up first, wielding his hammer through the breach–not that it would do a lot of good in the Fog. An escort had been necessary to avoid suspicion across the clearing; otherwise the tribesmen were almost a burden. They could do little but die.
The incoming Plutarchs were almost in range when the last savage climbed into the hole, followed by Meric. A mass of Fog-weapons streaked toward the empty hemisphere. Meric sealed the floor and suffused it with a program, inveterating the new section with a code-key of his own. They were in the holding area–the same room which had once held Meric and Swan prisoner. Two isolation tubes were present. Meric turned them to smoke but ignored the disoriented Plebians within. There was no time to help them.
“Where now?” Azog asked.
“Up,” Meric said.
Vireo cut a hole in the ceiling.
Plutarchs gathered beneath the floor–half a dozen at least, with more incoming–yet the floor remained inveterated. The White Palace was centuries old, and even Abraxas wasn’t authorized to alter its structure. The code-key was only accessible through unanimous authorization from the Circle. They could forge atomblades and cut holes the same way Vireo had–provided they worked up the nerve to further desecrate the ancient structure.
On the second floor, Meric’s group emerged into a black-marble room with cloud-couches, a laserpainter, and statues of extinct animals. A lounge.
“Up,” Meric said.
Vireo began cutting a new hole. A squat, black-haired Plutarch burst through the far door. Azog ran at him, whirling his hammer. The man was startled, but his condescension caught up with him–he sneered, a demigod faced by a petty mortal. A guillotine-like blade swept toward Azog. Meric smoked the weapon and launched a relentless Fog-assault. The Plutarch void-shielded and staggered back. His concentration went to defense. He could spare none for the original threat–until Azog’s hammer caved his face in.
“More will come,” Meric warned.
Vireo’s hole was finished. Meric lifted his followers up one by one with the Fog. A disturbance on the floor below caught his attention. The Plutarchs had made the decision–they were cutting their way inside. On the third floor was a long, empty hallway. Vireo cut a hole to the fourth as Meric sealed the breach below. Above them, occupying the top floor of the White Palace, was an enormous dome. The Lance of God rose from its peak. A Bloodrat hoisted himself up into the dome–and fell back without a head.
The tribesmen took an involuntarily step back. Meric’s rage burned hotter. He shot up through the breach. Three Plutarchs were waiting. A dozen hooks pierced the first before the man could shield himself. Meric pulled, and the Plutarch was ripped apart with the kind of absurd brutality only advanced technology could achieve. One of the others screamed and ran, abandoning the Fog entirely. Until that moment he’d thought himself the most evolved of men. He’d argued against Plebian Fog-access and told his friends about their animalistic impulses. Now his reptilian brain guided his flight. A fist of Fog smashed him into the ground before he could reach the exit.
The third Plutarch kept his head, dueling from afar. Meric spawned four opaque shields and moved them randomly through the Fog. As the decoys absorbed attacks, he forced a river of Fog down the Plutarch’s throat and inveterated it before his work could be undone. The Plutarch dropped to the ground, eyes bulging, hands clawing at his neck.
Meric lifted his escorts into the room. They finished the downed Plutarchs and ran to secure a set of double-doors. Rows of boxy machinery lined the walls–computers. The machinery was interspersed with busts of deceased Plutarchs. The lower part of the dome was painted with a depiction of the struggles of Imperial America. Battles ascended chronologically toward a recreation of the best known part of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel Fresco–but in place of Adam was Washington. The progression with the rest of the mural made it appear not that God was creating Washington, but that Washington had risen to touch God.
In the center of the room was a control station; a circular waist-high bank of computers–right where Diodorus had said it would be. Meric took out the datadrive, remembering the moment he’d received it.
Despite all the evil the Plutarchs have used it for, the Fog is still a tool of inestimable potential benefit, Diodorus had said. Look how easily it can be used to create new goods. Whole buildings assemble
d in minutes. Not to mention the fact that a sizable chunk of our ancestors’ knowledge is preserved in Panchaean databanks. Who knows how many generations it took to build that knowledge? Invaluable information assembled from the thoughts, struggles, and experiments of countless minds–gone in an instant, should the Fog be destroyed.
There was a series of circular grooves on top of the computers at the control station. Meric set the drive into one of the slots and felt it click.
One day civilization will rise again. The loss of our intellectual inheritance could set us back centuries. Millennia, even. The Fog can do much good if the Plutarchs can be forced to give up the one thing they’ve used it so desperately to protect–their own unchecked power. The most powerful technology ever created, and they wield it like spoiled, belligerent children. It’s time someone made them share their playground.
Cryptic symbols scrolled across the top of his vision–the language of the ancients. The machine was feeding information through his implant. He couldn’t read it, but it didn’t matter. When Trajan had written the program, he’d known he might not be the one to install it. He’d planned for the possibility, automated the process so that any tribesman could finish the job.
Beside the control station, a waist-high cylinder coalesced from the Fog. It inveterated itself, a code-key being fed in by the datadrive. On top of the cylinder, a candy-red button formed. A foolproof switch, simple enough for an idiot. It was the decision to press it or not that would prove the real test.
There was a set of silver double-doors at the far-end of the dome. They led into open air–which wasn’t a problem if you were a Plutarch. Meric gathered the Fog and began funneling it through the doors, emptying the dome. He pushed it out until the Fog thinned too much to function properly. Azog closed the doors by hand. Meric felt vulnerable without the Fog, but it too dangerous to keep it inside with what he was about to do. The Plutarchs would use it against him if they could. He stood by the button. He didn’t have to wait long.
The double-doors burst open. A Plutarch hovered in the Fog beyond.
The Last Plutarch Page 32