Song of Sundering

by A. R. Clinton

  It didn’t matter what she did now. For her, it was over.

  She looked across the table, Kingston offered a consolatory partial smile. She nodded to him, “I need to put together some instructions for my aide and other council members. We need to figure out what they—”

  Kingston reached out and placed his hand on top of hers, squeezing it, “Ayna—you need time to grieve. The war is over, so there is nothing so important that it cannot wait for you.”

  Ayna jerked her hand away from his, looking over at him. It won’t take long for them all to start trying to take over now that the immediate crisis is over.

  Kingston looked back at her, “Ayna—I mean it. Every other issue can be put on hold.” He arched an eyebrow at her, “I am assuming there is no major tragedy awaiting us in the next few weeks that I don’t know about—am I correct?”

  Ayna reluctantly nodded. “Nothing in the next two weeks, no. We have at least three weeks until the next world ending cataclysm.” she said, then paused, “I could use the time.” She looked over at him one more time. He seemed concerned—whatever happiness he had over James still living was carefully hidden from her. Ayna took a slow breath, “There is one issue—with the Blight project—I think continuing work with someone overseeing it is important. Not to mention the ongoing rationing of supplies and supporting the refugees.”

  “Between Vitalus and I, we can take care of whatever small pressing matters there are. Just delegate what you want to who you want.”

  Ayna nodded, standing from the table. Kingston took the cue and stood. He offered a half bow and walked to the double doors. He paused at them, turning back to her, “If anyone can survive the Xenai, you know it is Shara.”

  Ayna bit her lower lip to hold back a sob. Kingston gave her another sad smile and left.

  Ayna sent a message to Erde, copying Kingston Cross and Vitalus on it, delegating the lab work to Kingston and directing Vitalus to take over the Artificer and BloodSmith conflict. Her aide would have to pull in a team to handle the refugees and supplies. She packed up her satchel and stood. She had no idea if Hafi had even sent anything to Jo.

  A fresh bout of sorrow overcame her. She threw her satchel against the wall, relishing the second of release that accompanied the tinkling of glass shards and metal inside the bag as it hit the wall then the floor. She targeted a feral scream at the satchel and then left the room, leaving the pile of fabric and glass behind as she ignored the concerned look from her aide.

  The next several days were like a blur of delegations and awaiting messages from Hafi. He didn’t send much—Coilsen had felt guilty about Shara being taken on his watch and had offered to accompany Hafi out west. Ayna stayed in Jo’s library, grateful for Kingston’s willingness to coordinate the scientists. He had suggested coordinating with Praha, who had also started to discover Blight deposits near them—Ayna hadn’t even known they had found any. She felt a sliver of gratitude that Kingston was competent and quickly picked up directing the project. Despite her misgivings, Hunt was willing to step forward and wear the public face of the effort, quoting words carefully crafted by Kingston—enough to let the public know they were making progress without revealing that a new Sundering was hanging over them.

  “How are you, Ayna? You know we don’t need to keep these calls going. Everything is smooth.” Kingston reassured her a few times each day. She still took each report on a live call with Kingston and Hunt, then would send individual inquiries to Praha to make sure that they agreed with her team’s assessments. She had always been in the middle of everything because no one else wanted to be, but now that the Underground had inexplicably stopped fighting and the Xenai army had retreated to the west side of the mountains, everyone was willing to run Prin for her.

  Part of her willed herself to accept it at face value and be grateful for the help. Another part assumed that if everything was still going badly, that no one would allow her to take time to grieve for her daughter being taken by the Xenai; they’d expect her to work just as hard at all hours to come up with solutions.

  Ayna stood up from Jo’s desk. She could hear him out in his shed building something. He’d been spending most of his time there when she was working. When she wasn’t working, he was cleaning something or just generally around her, even though they found little to say to each other. Jo’s two girls had returned to the U and the Academy, respectively. The silence of the house was as comfortable as it had always been, despite each of them one noticing how the other filled their time with habits they had when they were worried. Ayna had started reading a dozen books from her backlog, putting each one down a few chapters in, once she realized that the material built too much on earlier information she hadn’t really been paying attention to.

  She checked her messages, then tried a new book.

  Two weeks seemed like an eternity to Ayna and Jo. Ayna stepped back from her communication, leaving the work to Praha and Kingston alone. In that time, a whirlwind of progress was made with the Blight project—but their success was overshadowed by the latest news from Tani.

  Not long after her latest feed on curing some forms of cancer with the Blight implants, the army was officially recalled. Jo took Ayna’s LightTab away after watching her stare at the two headlines side by side.

  “Tani, gifted Prin scientist cures Leukemia.”

  “Shara Shae, The Peace of Prin, brings the troops home.”

  The time for sorrow had to end. She had to prepare Prin for what was next.

  75

  Jon

  Jon poked at the sleeping Inari boy who was face down in his cot and snoring. He groaned and waved his hand around in the air, trying to hit whoever was rousing him. He missed Jon by a few feet. Jon poked at his leg again.

  “The fuck—let me sleep. I have an injury, you cruel bastard.” James’ voice was flat but alert; he wasn’t going to fool Jon.

  “Get up. You stink of sweat and blood. It’s like a damn birthing room in this tent.”

  “It’s too cold, you filthy liar. I don’t want to hobble more today. Just let me die here.”

  Jon slapped his leg. He wasn’t sure if it was the leg James was stabbed in, but he didn’t really care, either. He adopted his slowest mockery of the drawl he heard from the Ceafield hunters that passed through, “Gen’ral told me to git ya, so I’m gittin’ ya. If ya left here to die, then I’ll die too. I don’t know how ta steal food from mountain lions. Seems like a bad idea. And us Grimers are only good for thiefin’.”

  “If I feed you to them, I might be able to hobble away.”

  “I would barely make a meal. You’ve got that fat half-Terran body. They’ll probably think I am a skeleton, risen from a grave, and pass me by.”

  “Well, apparently I smell like the rotting corpse, so they’ll probably eat your fresh skinny ass, instead.”

  “My ass is super fresh.” Jon made a show of twisting around to try to look at his own ass. He heard a stifled chuckle from James. “You saw that, so you’re awake. Come on. General Indo is taking it slow for all you living but dying fuckers, but we’re dying out here in the dry cold. It might kill more of us than we save.”

  James opened his eyes all the way. “Could have gotten some extra coats off the dead.”

  Jon spread his arms out so the three coats he was wearing in layers became visible, “Us walking skeletons don’t hold much heat.”

  “You just want my fat half-Terran body.”

  “I’m going to go get my dagger and be back to poke your fat ass some more.”

  James groaned, “If you walk away now its just going to take me longer to get out of this damn cot.” He rolled onto his back then used his hands to ease his left leg off the side before swinging his other over. He pulled himself up to a seated position, wincing as he moved. “Heard anything?”

  “All is silent on the Peace of Prin.” Jon reached out and helped James to his foot, supporting him as he pulled the crutches from where they were propped up against the tent pole and
handed them to James.

  James let out a huff that ended in a groan as he put his weight on the smooth, matte black crutches. “She won’t stay gone. She’ll figure out how to destroy them; to come home.”

  Jon sighed, “Even she can’t take on thousands at once. I don’t think we’ll ever see her again.”

  James said nothing, but batted his hand a few inches from the crutch grips. Jon moved out his way and James hobbled past, saying nothing more. The damn kid didn’t know how to relax—or set proper expectations.

  Jon sauntered out behind him. They were a day’s walk from Prin, now—if they weren’t moving so slow with their injured. It was understandable. The roads were slick with ice as the snows melted and froze again. Crutches couldn’t move fast and had to be teamed up with someone to guide them away from the worst ice patches. Jon wasn’t sure how they were going to get down the final hill on the road to Prin. Maybe they’d just sled down on their asses. The men being dragged on cots would fly down that thing. Jon watched James, moaning and sucking in air as he moved. It would be easy to volunteer James as the test subject for a crutch toboggan.

  James stopped, turning his head slightly to talk over his shoulder at Jon, “Nothing at all? They have to know something about where she is being taken—especially with Hafi going after her. They can’t expect us to just sit on our asses while they’re withholding information.”

  Jon grunted and leaned forward to poke James’ back, “No, they expect you to move your ass.”

  James made a noise somewhere between a grunt and a growl at him. “I’m not as accepting of these type of situations as you Undergrounders have become.”

  Jon pushed down the urge to swipe the crutches out from beneath the stupid boy, “Me fighting the situation of the Undergrounders being used as pawns to protect the Topsiders is why I was even found and sent to this damn war. You should shut your damn pretentious mouth. You won’t always have an army around you for protection from reality.”

  James scoffed, “Yeah, I’m upper tier, milking and caring for cows my whole life. I’m the cream of the crop... and I know how to make it!”

  Jon said nothing, continuing to saunter behind James. He could find the ice patches on his own.

  76

  Ayna

  Ayna rubbed her eyes and glanced over at Jo, sleeping next to her, as she opened another report. In the time it had taken to read the last report and send a directive on handling the situation, another three reports had come in. The Underground was in chaos, and each report she read made it clear that the problems were going to spread to Upper Prin. The peace between the Artificers and Bloodsmiths had erupted into a war. Somehow, each faction had gotten ahold of the Blight Crystal and they were making every move they had to halt the progress the other had made with the crystals, while simultaneously trying to garner the support of the public. When that failed, they resorted to just killing each other.

  Knowledge of each group’s usage of the crystals had been the spark. The Artificers had exposed Tani’s experiments using the Blight to stabilize the embedded elements first. However, that had backfired when she released a series of documents showing her use had been limited to rats, and she had a careful plan for many more phases before she would even consider Terran testing, no matter how many willing subjects she had. Of course, Ayna and the Blight crystal team, including Kingston Cross, knew that was a lie. But the ‘evidence’ that Tani provided seemed to appease the Underground.

  The Bloodsmiths retaliated to the Artificer accusations about Tani with evidence of the Artificer’s own malfeasance. Videos of Artificer experiments were making their way onto the SatNet daily. Their irresponsibility was mostly in their lack of control over their creations. Once they confirmed that an amulet was working, whether as intended or not, it was promptly sold to the highest bidder. Over the last week, the highest bidders had stopped being other Artificers, and the amulets had made their way into the hands of the general Prin population.

  At first, the videos had been tame curiosities. The first showed a Terran boy, barely more than ten, working with an Inari boy. The Inari guided the boy through some motions using his own amber amulet. A plant, placed ten feet away from the boys, moved with the motions of the Inari. The small leaves and branches waved in time with his arms until the boy stopped moving and the plant fell still. The Inari stepped back, and the Terran stepped forward with his red Blight amulet. He mimicked the motion of the Inari boy nearly perfectly. The plant began to move, following the Terran boy’s motions.

  It took a few moments for the differences to become visible. When the Inari had bent over and swung his arms around, the small plant had done the same in a smooth display, like a wind was coaxing it into a graceful set of dance moves. When the Terran using the Blight amulet made similar movements, the plant moved, but the movements were rough and jerky, as if the plant was being snapped and broken. After several minutes of repeated movements, the reason became clear. Rather than using natural forces to move the plant, the Blight amulet was forcing the plant to evolve into a thing made to move. Where the plant bent over, it had grown thicker until something like a knee or a knuckle appeared where there was once only a smooth stalk. When the Terran boy stopped moving, the newly evolved plant kept buckling and collapsing under the weight of its evolution. It was no longer what it had been; it was something new.

  As more and more videos of the Blight amulets came out, the effects grew worse. One showed a well-meaning child using a Lifecasting spell on their sibling, who was coughing and gasping for air. The small girl looked as if she was about to suffocate. The elder sibling explained, before entering the small girl’s bedroom, that Lifecasting had failed and she had been discharged from Central and sent home to die. The brother walked into the room, pulled out the red shimmering Blight amulet and began the source motions of a healing incantation. Halfway through the motions, his sister began to cough. The boy continued the work as his sister doubled over, coughing into her hands until blood was flowing out of her mouth. The boy’s hand was trembling as he clutched the amulet harder, but continued. As his sister gasped for each breath, the video caught his own breathing, becoming more and more labored, and the sound of tampered sobbing.

  As the boy neared the end of the spell, the girl collapsed. A small stream of blood flowed from her mouth as she lay motionless, staring at the camera. The brother’s hands stopped moving. He stepped closer and placed a hand on her shoulder, nudging her softly. The girl jerked and coughed, her whole body shaking. With that last convulsion and cough, a spray of blood erupted from her neck and mouth, covering most of her body and bed. The boy, and everyone who saw the video, could only stare at the girl as she took deep, rapid breaths from the series of slits that extended in rows from her jaw to her collarbones.

  The city was drowning in its own fear. Ayna’s attempts to regain control of the amulets had failed. The Prin Guard was overwhelmed and unable to find the more than a few of the crystals circulating. So, she stood in the tenements that had been turned into a makeshift prison.

  “It’s a good solution, Ayna.” Kingston reassured her again. She looked at his face, covered with concern, as he looked at her. What is he so concerned about? She brushed off the thought as he gave her a head nod and left, heading to the States House, where a roomful of representatives waited for her to provide an update on the Xenai and the ‘Underground tensions’.

  Ayna paced through the small room. Despite the ‘tensions’ extending throughout all of Prin, the Reps continued to call it the ‘Underground’ tension, as if that somehow absolved them of responsibility for the situation. She thought back to her deal with Bobi. Maybe they are right to absolve themselves of responsibility. Is it anyone’s fault but mine?

  She turned and placed her hands on the rusted chain-link fence. She could almost feel the press and heat of the dozens of bodies that would fill the cell by midnight. Her Prin Guard were already building additional cells. The lists of all the illegal users of the Blight cryst
als that they had compiled from the SatNet were long. There would be no escaping the repercussions, but somehow taking these steps to insure the safety for their citizens made Ayna queasy. All her life had been spent encouraging the people of Prin to find new and innovative ways to do their work, and ultimately to live better. It may have been within the power of her position to define how far is too far, but she still felt like she was whipping her own children for doing as she taught them.

  She let go of the rusted fence, looking at the imprint of the links pressed into her skin. She would temper her impulses with these marks. She had to remember the people. She fingered the grooves as she made her way out of the formerly abandoned home on the wrong side of Prin’s wall and thought of each name on the dossier that would end as a name awaiting a trial that may never come, as she rehearsed her words for the men and women who waited for her back in Prin.

  I’ve got to get that poor boy with the sick sister off the lists.

  “Will it be enough? What about searching for and destroying all the samples?”

  Ayna blinked. Destroying dozens of lives isn’t enough?

  “Seizing the samples has failed—we don’t have enough soldiers to enforce the restrictions we’ve put on Blightcasting. I plan to announce an open drop. Everyone will be given two days to drop off any illegally acquired samples at the drop without repercussions. Anyone found with Blight after the two days will be arrested.”

  Vitulus opened his mouth to object to such casual treatment of the matter. Ayna could feel his disdain for her handling of the situation before a sound came from his mouth, so she continued, “Frankly, until the army returns, we have no other options. The Prin Guard was stretched in duties before this issue came up. We have to be able to rely on our people to be able to see what’s best for them — which is why I will also announce an expanded research effort, which anyone can apply for—whether they want to experiment or be experimented on.”