Pathfinder Tales: The Redemption Engine

by James L. Sutter

  "Arathuziel's lock!" Salim pulled the heavy lock out of the interior pocket where he'd stuck it. "I forgot all about it."

  Maedora squatted down to study it. "What is it?"

  "A talisman," Salim said. "From the angel Nemeniah and Malchion tried to pin things on. He said I could use it to call him, as long as I was within range."

  Maedora looked around dubiously. "Is this within range?"

  "Only one way to find out." Salim held the lock in both hands and closed his eyes. "Arathuziel—if you can hear me, we know who framed you, but we really need your help."

  Time passed. After a minute or so, Salim opened his eyes.

  "Well?" Maedora asked.

  "It was worth a shot. We must be too far away." He stuck the lock back in his pocket, then lay down and pulled his robes up over his head to get a bit of shade. Maedora stood over him while he slept, seemingly content to stare off silently at the horizon.

  The next day was harder. As they walked, Salim fished a small silver coin out of his pouch and stuck it in his mouth. The disk tasted of metal and a thousand grimy hands, yet sucking on it helped his mouth stay moist. Still, he could feel himself weakening, the dry air rasping against his throat even as he tried to breathe exclusively though his nose.

  Aside from the occasional bout of bickering, he and Maedora walked in silence. Salim supposed that small talk wasn't something psychopomps were particularly well trained in, especially ones specializing in interrogation. Then again, much the same could be said about him.

  Instead, Salim let his thoughts wander. As always when he let them slip the leash, they went scurrying down the same rabbit holes. His life as a priest-hunter in Rahadoum's Pure Legion. His wife, Jannat, who'd died been brought back to life through his ill-considered bargain with the goddess. Neila, the girl he'd met in Thuvia, who'd offered to join him in his isolation—a gift he couldn't bring himself to accept.

  All leading to this—an unmarked grave in an endless desert. But hadn't that been exactly what he'd wanted? When he'd cut his own throat that night in a Thuvian inn in an admittedly short-sighted effort to escape his bargain with Pharasma, he hadn't expected an afterlife. No paradise or just rewards. He was a Rahadoumi atheist, and that meant that when he died, he'd defy the gods in death as he did in life. His spirit would go to the great graveyard outside of Pharasma's Court and stay there, peaceful in the dirt, waiting for the end of eternity.

  Now here he was, in a place even more solitary. Hidden from all the gods and monsters that hoarded souls like misers counted coins. He could finish the job he'd begun that night a century ago. Simply sit down and wait for thirst to take him, or slit his wrists with the Melted Blade and wet his dry mouth with his own blood. Maedora would walk on, eventually finding her way to somewhere new. She had the time. Either way, Salim would finally be free.

  He closed his eyes and breathed deep, pulling the idea in. Testing it.

  He breathed out again and opened his eyes.

  No. Maybe once that freedom would have been enough, but if so, that time was gone. Maybe it had never been enough at all. Salim wanted freedom, but more than that, he wanted to win. To beat the angels who thought they could take away the one choice mortals really had. To show Maedora and the rest of the psychopomps what a mortal was capable of. Most of all, he wanted to remain as a living reminder to Pharasma and all the other gods that while she might own his service, she didn't own his soul.

  Dying would be quitting. And Salim didn't quit.

  "You're laughing again," Maedora said.

  Salim hadn't noticed. "So I am," he croaked.

  "What's funny now?"

  "Just appreciating how neatly I've been played when the best revenge I can come up with against the Lady is to keep doing my job."

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  On the third day, Salim fell.

  He didn't notice it happening. One moment he was stumbling forward, trying not to think about his swollen tongue and the way his cracked throat screamed for water. The second he was lying facedown on the ground, his nose slowly leaking what little moisture he had into a puddle beneath him.

  Maedora paused and looked back at him. "Aren't you going to get up?"

  Salim attempted to sit up, then realized that he no longer had the strength. "I don't think I can." He touched the blood from his nose, then licked it off his hand. It made his mouth sticky.

  The psychopomp watched for a long moment, then sighed and walked back over. She bent down.

  "What are you doing?" Salim asked.

  "Demeaning myself," she replied, then rolled him over. She put one arm under his back, the other behind his thighs, and lifted. Salim rolled against her chest, and she cradled him like a parent carrying a child to bed. Then she began to walk again.

  Salim's last thought before he lost consciousness was of how startlingly soft her webbing was.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  "Salim. Wake up."

  Salim stirred. His head pounded, and he felt withered, his blood like thick sludge in his veins. He had no idea how long he'd been asleep. "What?"

  "Something's different."

  He opened his eyes and managed to flip himself over in Maedora's giant arms so that he was facing outward.

  The ground was no longer a blank expanse. Here and there, little patches of black grass sprang up like ink drawings, narrow lines fanning out from clustered bases. The sky had changed as well. The shapes that passed like storm clouds behind its wall were more vigorous now, the shadows they cast darker. They pulsed and squirmed, and where they were thickest the sky seemed to bulge down toward the ground, its silver belly distorting into new colors—metallic reds and golds and greens

  "Put me down."

  Maedora did, and Salim stumbled to the nearest clump of grass. It was no taller than the length of his hand, and its pointed leaves had the same sort of unreal, half-finished look as the rest of the landscape. Salim broke off one of the stalks, and was disappointed to find that the break produced no moisture. Grabbing a fistful, he tugged upward. The clump came loose easily. Its roots were stubby, rudimentary things that bored into the glass, more anchors than siphons. Salim tossed it aside and began chipping frantically at the empty root tunnels with his dagger, cracking away chips of the strange earth. Yet even when he'd dug deeper than the roots ever had, there was still no sign of water. He fell back, exhausted.

  Maedora studied the grass. "Can you eat this?"

  Without bothering to look, Salim shoved a clump in his mouth. It was dry, like chewing on paper, and cut his blistered tongue savagely. He spat it out. "Apparently not."

  "Still," Maedora said. "It's a good sign."

  Salim was too weak to do anything but nod.

  They continued on, heading toward the brightest and most active regions of sky, and several hours later were rewarded with their first glimpse of movement on the ground.

  It was large, perhaps the size of a horse, and quadrupedal. Saying much more about it, however, was difficult—like everything else in this godsforsaken backwater, its shape was more suggestive than detailed. A box-like lump of a head. A broad, partially translucent body, with vague shadows inside that were presumably organs. It had no visible eyes or ears, only a wide mouth that opened like the lid on a traveler's trunk as it leaned down to graze on the unnatural grass.

  "If I kill it," Maedora asked. "Can you eat it?"

  "Kill it?" Salim coughed a laugh. "You clearly didn't grow up in a desert. Don't kill it unless you absolutely have to—just bring it over here."

  Maedora muttered something about bossy mortals, then laid Salim down on the ground with surprising gentleness. Head swimming, he leaned over to watch her work.

  Now that she had a purpose, Maedora's steady plodding pace vanished. Without bothering to sneak—for what could she hope to hide behind?—she sprinted forward, her enormous body moving faster and more gracefully than Salim could have imagined. She leapt.

  The strange beast looked up from its mouthful of black grass jus
t as Maedora hit it at the shoulder, knocking it sideways. Instantly, thick ropes of webbing shot out from her wrappings, encircling the creature and holding it tight as it kicked and shook, its mouth open in a silent scream. Maedora lay atop it, pinning it to the ground until it ceased struggling. Then she stood and allowed it to do the same, leading it back toward Salim on a spider-silk halter.

  "That was impressive," Salim said.

  "I was made to combat more than half-formed cattle," Maedora snapped, but Salim thought she sounded pleased. "If you're not going to eat it, what's it for?"

  "That depends on if we're lucky," Salim said. "Hold it still."

  When Maedora had it securely in a headlock, Salim drew his dagger and made a two-inch-long incision along the beast's opaque shoulder. It shook once, violently, then seemed to accept its fate.

  Out of the cut welled faintly pink liquid.

  Salim put his mouth to the wound and drank, sucking greedily. The blood was mild, tasting vaguely of iron and some sort of bland starch, but it was wet, and that was what mattered. Salim didn't bother to consider whether or not it was poisonous—at this point, anything that didn't kill him outright was worth it.

  When he'd gulped several mouthfuls, he made himself stop and back away. The cut on the beast's shoulder healed quickly, the flesh knitting to a faint scar.

  "So you're a vampire now?" Maedora asked.

  Salim wiped pink blood from his lips. "Old nomad trick. If you're starving in the desert and kill your horse, you can eat some of it, but the rest will go bad, and then you have no horse. If you cut it, though, you can drink the blood and still keep the horse." He nodded to the creature. "I don't know how it gets its water, but I'm betting that as long as this thing has grass, it'll keep making blood. Which means that we just bought ourselves a lot more time."

  "Does this mean I won't have to carry you anymore?"

  Salim smiled. "Eventually." Then he sat back on the glassy ground and closed his eyes.

  paizo.com #3236236, Corry Douglas , Aug 10, 2014

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The Antipode

  Three days later, they came to the tower.

  At first it was just a faint vertical line bisecting the lower half of the sky, bright white save for a dark nub where it met the horizon. Salim had grown used to the now thoroughly chaotic movement of the sky's colors, the suggestion of shapes beyond its edges, and it was a shock to see the blazing line standing arrow-straight against it, piercing its flesh and disappearing from view.

  That wasn't a metaphor: the line really did seem to pierce the sky, wounding its heavy belly and sending tendrils of color leaking down around the line like funnel clouds. They twitched and writhed, clearly attracted to yet never quite touching the white line, becoming dancing pillars between land and sky.

  "Well, that's something, at least." Salim was sprawled across the back of the weird, half-formed quadruped that he'd come to think of as the Clay Horse. It wasn't the most elegant way to ride, but the creature was too wide to sit comfortably, and he had nothing but his robes to use as a saddle. Either way, it beat walking. "The next question is: what is it?"

  "I don't know," Maedora said. She sounded troubled.

  "Anything is better than nothing," Salim said. Though they'd begun to see more of the clay horses and larger clumps of dark grass, even the occasional scraggly line-art tree, there was still precious little to relieve the landscape's boredom. "Without proper landmarks, I can't estimate distance worth a damn, but it feels big to me."

  "It's not just you."

  They adjusted their course to head toward the line, Clay Horse plodding along slightly faster now as Salim dug his toes into its weirdly flexible hide.

  Salim turned to Maedora. "Do you think—"

  Something shot through the air ten feet above them. Salim shouted and ducked, and Maedora followed suit. It was gone in an eyeblink, retreating into the distance with the speed of a crossbow bolt, invisible save for a faint rippling of color in the air behind it.

  "Now what the hell was that?" Salim demanded.

  Maedora stared after it. "It's headed toward the line."

  Sure enough, the trail of iridescence was already dissipating, yet Salim could see that its course was as Maedora had said.

  They continued. As the hours passed, they began to spot the strange ripples with increasing frequency. Though none came quite so close, several shot past near enough for Salim to get a good look at them. He realized that his original impression of something barely visible—his sense of a presence without actually being able to see just what had buzzed past them—was more accurate than he realized. Each flying object was totally translucent, a silver-blue distortion in the air that trailed half-visible ripples of shifting color like a comet's tail. Each disturbance was egg-shaped, and their sizes varied from that of his thumb to some that must have dwarfed elephants. Each sped directly toward the line in the distance, leaving only their strange wakes.

  Slowly, the object on the horizon resolved. What had been a shimmering line grew whiter and brighter, until Salim had to shade his eyes. It stood like a bolt of lightning that refused to complete its strike, wavering slightly but never breaking its connection between the ground and the point where it lanced through the sky above, disappearing into somewhere Salim's eyes could no longer follow.

  The dark spot at its bottom grew as well, stretching and lengthening into a tower of monolithic proportions. Its base had to be at least as wide as Kaer Maga, and it rose in a thin cone, twisting and coiling around itself like thread around a spindle. The whole thing seemed made of stone so dark gray that Salim would have said it was black, if not for the darker shadows that gave its spiral ridges definition, and it shimmered like abalone shell.

  They moved closer, passing well clear of two enormous funnel clouds that screamed and kicked up clouds of color several miles off to either side, shaking like feral beasts chained to invisible stakes. At the tower's base, the air rippled violently, like a clear but rushing stream.

  It took a moment for Salim's eyes to recognize what he was seeing: thousands of those comet-things plunging toward the tower from all directions, but especially from the bases of the pseudo-tornados, creating a frothing, frantic mass in the air. They swirled and followed the tower's spirals up, growing less chaotic as the ridges and canyons of the tower's near-vertical surface channeled them into a complex weave. They surged up the sides of the mountain-spire until they reached the needle's tip and fired up into the sky as the line of blazing light.

  Beneath and between the canyons guiding the river of energy diagonally up the tower's flanks, archways and windows gaped like dark maws, or shone with their own dim lights. New shapes, figures with apparent substance and purpose, moved about inside them, or floated with a censer-bearer's grace through the translucent tumult at the tower's foot.

  A trio of these figures broke off from different points of the tower and flew toward Salim and Maedora, growing from distant dots to more discernible forms as they converged.

  They were like nothing Salim had ever encountered. On the left, a swirling mass of blue-gray smoke formed an orb that looked disturbingly like a giant eye, but one that sprouted four arms and its own comet tail. On the right, a jagged crystalline mass like the heart of a geode unfurled four arms, each of these splitting at the elbow into two sets of forearms and three-fingered hands. Between them floated something like a giant's hooded cloak, yet beneath that dark cowl was nothing but inky blackness shot through with points of light like the night sky. As Salim watched, he felt a sudden, gut-twisting shift in perspective, as if that central figure were a cloak-shaped hole in the world, and he was being drawn into it, down into a vast sea of night where—

  Next to him, Maedora gasped. "Aeons."

  Salim shook his head to clear it. "What?"

  "They're aeons. The Balancers. The one on the left is an akhana—I saw one once before, on the Spire. But no one ever sees more than one at a time." A note
of awe crept into her voice. "There are so many...."

  Salim was familiar with most major residents of the planes, but even so, before this moment he would have called aeons little more than myths. According to scholars and mystics, aeons were primal forces of balance, created to maintain equilibrium in the multiverse—without morality, without emotion, and generally without logic decipherable by other races. If you took it as a given that things like archons or devils were extensions of their home planes, manifestations of universal ideals, then aeons were extensions of the multiverse as a whole. They acted as reality's guardians—or, if you wanted to get really philosophical, as its hands—keeping the clockwork humming along smoothly. They bowed to no god, honored no creeds. More importantly, they didn't grub for souls like most other planar races, which was why they were so rarely encountered.

  "So what are they doing here?" Salim asked.

  "I think they're about to ask us the same question."

  The trio floated closer, stopping ten feet away and hovering effortlessly a few feet above the ground. The ones on the left and right were roughly the same size as Salim, but the one in the middle—the cloak-shaped hole—was even taller than Maedora, its dark mass finite but still somehow giving the impression of continuously unfurling at the edges. There was a long pause as the creatures regarded the trespassers.

  Salim's head exploded.

  At least, that was what it felt like. When Anamnesis had touched his mind in Xavorax, it had been like a dozen fists hitting him at once, the words accompanied by a dizzying array of images. Yet if those images were a flurry of snow, this was a whirlwind. Pictures slashed and tore at him from inside his head, blown this way and that, with never the same subject twice. Newborns wet and screaming, still tied to their mothers, gave way to soldiers coughing up blood on the battlefield or sailors drowning at sea. Oracles delivering prophecies and slaves struck from their chains, or cowering beneath a master's lash. Worlds born new from swirling motes of light, and suns expanding outward to consume their fragile children.