Down Among the Dead

by K. B. Wagers

  Think, Hail, watch him. Where are his weaknesses? Portis whispered the order in my ear.

  He doesn’t have any, I protested under the pressure of the assault. He’s so quick, I can’t keep this up—wait—right there.

  Aiz moved fast, but he had too much weight on his front leg, and his right arm lifted a little too high when he swung, leaving his ribs open.

  I feigned at his head with my left hand, following up with a punch from the right that slipped under his elbow and slammed into his ribs.

  “Good one,” Aiz wheezed, clearly in pain, and I felt a surge of triumph. But then he straightened and gestured. “You can do better, come on.”

  “You healed yourself.” I dropped my hands, stepped back. “I’m not fighting you. You’ve got an endless advantage. What’s the point?”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll heal you when you need it until you learn to do it yourself. The point right now is the fight.” Stepping in, he threw a punch. I didn’t block it and the blow snapped my head to the left. He drove a knee into my gut, holding me up when I would have dropped to the mat, all the air gone from my lungs.

  “You fight, you die,” Aiz whispered in my ear. “You come back and do it all over tomorrow. It’s the only thing that matters. You know this. It’s in your blood. You’re not an empress made for sitting on a throne. You’re a fighter. You always have been. Let your grief go, Hail, and let the rage take its place.”

  I dragged in a breath, beating back the nausea through sheer force of will alone, and caught his hand before he could grab my face.

  I didn’t recognize the sound coming out of my throat, the snarling rage of a wounded animal, but Aiz did. His smile was patient, his right hand dug into my shoulder; then he twisted sharply, and I felt the socket give.

  “Get up.”

  I stumbled to my feet, pain screaming through every nerve ending. According to my smati we’d been fighting for an hour, far longer than should have been possible. Aiz had healed me twice, bursts of energy that kept me going past the point of collapse. His energy was fire and pain almost worse than the injuries they healed, not the heat of Mia’s energy that seemed to make the whole world come alive.

  I reveled in it. It was the punishment I deserved for letting everyone around me die and being unable to follow.

  I was bleeding from a cut above my left eye. Three of my ribs were broken and every breath was a hot lancing stab of pain. There was something wrong with my right knee and my right wrist, but I threw a punch at him anyway and he slapped it away with a sigh.

  The other Shen had trickled out, my guard included, though Talos and a woman I didn’t know still remained propped up on a bench on the far wall, their heads bent together as they critiqued my performance.

  Aiz wasn’t uninjured, but I was the worse off of the two of us, almost staggering drunk with the pain and the residual energy of his healing. That sang through me like an entire bottle of Hestian whiskey.

  “You need to move faster.”

  “You need to hold still,” I replied.

  He blocked my second punch, catching my fist and stepping into me, kicking my leg out and slamming me to the mat again.

  “When you go up against these beings, Hail, there is only pain. You have to learn to get past it and fight on the other side.” Aiz’s voice sounded like he was teaching a roomful of children, not standing above my battered and bruised body.

  Rolling to my side, coughing blood up into my mouth, and spitting it at his boot was the only defense I had against the kick I knew was coming. My remaining ribs shattered under the impact, pain blotting out my vision, and my scream was only a low moan of air escaping.

  “There are two lessons, Hail. The first one is this. Fighting is pain and death. Nothing more, nothing less. It is not your brain. It is your heart. When you know this, when you realize there is no difference between breath and no breath. You can use it to win instead of letting the fear of dying drag you down among the dead.” Aiz bent over and touched three fingers to my cheek. More pain lanced through me, the healing worse than the injuries he fixed, and this time my scream bounced off the walls.

  “Take her back to her rooms,” he said.

  Talos went to a knee at my side and put a hand on my chest as I tried to sit up. “Give it a second, take a few breaths. That first time gets you a little out of sorts.”

  “What he means is he threw up twice the first time.”

  I blinked up at the woman smiling down at me over Talos’s shoulder. Her head was half shaved, the remaining hair so pale blond it seemed almost silver, and her eyes were the same warm brown as Talos’s.

  “I am Vais,” she said, stepping around to my other side. “Take a deep breath, kiddo, and we’ll get you on your feet.”

  Two Shen grabbed me by the arms, pulling me to my feet and holding me upright as my legs refused to support my weight. With their help I stumbled down the corridor. They opened the door without knocking and I flinched away from the sudden exclamations of my people.

  “What did you do to her?”

  “Easy.” Talos lowered me to the ground and backed away. “She’s fine. Might be a little wobbly but otherwise unharmed.”

  “She’s covered in blood,” Johar snarled.

  Talos’s reply was garbled and then cut off by the sound of a slamming door.

  “Dark Mother.” Gita fell to her knees next to me, Alba right behind her. “Hail, what did they do to you?”

  “I’m all right,” I managed, my voice slurred as I rolled onto my back.

  “You’re bleeding.”

  “Was. Not anymore.” Smearing the blood from my face with the back of my hand, I lay there and waited for the universe to stop spinning around me. The laughter was inappropriate, but I couldn’t stop myself. “That was wild.”

  The answering silence was oppressive, and I cracked open an eye to watch as Johar and Gita alternated between staring at each other and at me. “I’m fine. It was a lesson,” I said, though my legs still failed me when I tried to get to my feet and I landed heavily on my hands and knees.

  Johar muttered a curse, reached down, and lifted me with one arm around my waist, practically carrying me into the bathroom. “Alba, get the water on.”

  “I can do this myself.” My protest was nothing but bravado.

  “Shut up.” Johar stripped my clothes off, muttering under her breath the whole time. She walked me into the tiny shower, holding me against the wall with one hand while she scrubbed me down with the other.

  I clung to consciousness, protests and curses of my own bouncing around the bathroom as Gita and Johar wrestled me out of the shower and into clean clothes.

  “There’s no sign of a drug in her system,” Gita said as they laid me out on the bunk.

  “Judging from the amount of blood, he beat the shit out of her and then healed her,” Jo replied.

  “Couple of times.” I managed, this time, to swallow my laughter. “It’s fine.”

  “Pendejo.” The simmering anger in Johar’s voice should have worried me, but the edges of my vision were closing in around me. “I’m no expert on the Shen but that’s probably what’s got her high as a kite.”

  “Why would he do that to her?”

  “I don’t know,” Johar replied, her fingers gentle in my hair. “Whatever the reason, it’s not good.”

  “M’okay.” I reached up, missed her hand, then caught it on the second try. “This is good. I deserve this.” I gave up and let the blackness drag me under.

  8

  I slept through the night without a nightmare, only the strange echo of Fasé’s ghost calling my name. My people were subdued the next morning, their sidelong glances driving me from the rooms and toward Mia’s an hour earlier than our normal breakfast time. She still welcomed me in, though she stared into my soul with those gray eyes of hers and sighed sadly. “Oh, Hail. I am sorry for this.”

  “Aiz said you were special, why?” I sat with my back pressed against the wall and my knees pulled
up to my chest. Something about her sorrow ate away at the furious desire to fight that Aiz had woken, and I didn’t know what to make of the new conflict in my soul. I didn’t want to go back to the grief, I wanted to stay in the heat of rage and the taste of blood in my mouth.

  Mia moved to the counter nearby, and the smell of something that was almost—but not quite—like chai filled the air.

  “When my father and brother broke from the Farians, some Farians went with them. Including a member of the Council of Eyes.” She looked up at the ceiling for a moment and then returned to her task. “I sometimes wonder if so much of the Farians’ hostility is tied into the idea that we stole him. But Jibun just wanted out from under the Pedalion’s rule.”

  “So he came with them when they left Faria?”

  “Yes, and he’s been with us ever since.” Mia grabbed a pair of glasses and the delicate teapot and set them on the floor next to me. She sat on the opposite side, wrapping her own arms around her knees. “He died shortly after my father, but I was there and stopped the assassin from stealing his soul.”

  I recognized that smile, having seen similar ones on my own face, and knew that the assassin hadn’t survived the encounter.

  “Jibun is safe and guarding the place of return.”

  “Place of return?”

  Mia nodded. “The place where Shen go when they die. Thanks to Jibun, we were able to prevent our souls from returning to Faria when we died. Aiz, the others who can, are reborn there and grow up safe from the grasping claws of the Pedalion.

  “Occasionally some take the risk of being reborn for the cause. They come back on Faria and try to evade detection by the Pedalion, try to whisper our truths to others. It is dangerous and valiant work. They are heroes far more than my brother or I.”

  “This is all fascinating, but it doesn’t answer my question,” I said.

  “Oh, yes.” Mia’s laughter danced through the air. She poured the tea; the purple liquid filled the cups, steam curling into the air.

  That looks like the moment just after sunset on Yaga, Hao’s ghost said.

  “I liked it there,” I murmured before I could catch myself, and took the cup Mia offered with a smile. “Sorry, I was remembering something.”

  There was sadness and understanding in her gray eyes. “The weight of your grief will crush you if you don’t learn to let it go. The rage doesn’t make it go away, Hail; it only hides it from your heart.”

  “My question?” I prompted, lifting the cup to my lips and taking a sip. Whatever this was it definitely wasn’t chai, but it wasn’t bad. There was smoke and flame in the inhale, a softer floral that faded under the onslaught.

  Mia waited a beat, sipping her own tea, before she spoke. “I am like Fasé, like Sybil and Jibun. I am even more improbable because of my mother’s humanity, but the universe wanted me to see—and so I do. According to some, that makes me special.

  “According to the Pedalion, it makes me an abomination. They cannot have an uncontrolled seer. Let alone one who is half human. It’s why they were so quick to have Fasé come home once word reached them of what she’d done.”

  “And I helped them.”

  “Don’t blame yourself, Hail. They would have taken her by force if you’d resisted, and at that point it only would have led to disaster.”

  “It must be a comfort to be so certain you know how our lives are going to play out.” I put my cup down. “I’m sorry, that was unnecessary.”

  “No, it’s fine. And yes, sometimes it is a comfort. Other times it is an unbearable weight. I am not sorry for the choices I’ve made. They’ve all been done with a full awareness of the outcomes. Make no mistake, Hail. I am committed to this path I’m walking. You will need to make a decision which way to go and soon.”

  “I already made a commitment to protect my people.” The words burned in my throat. I hadn’t. I hadn’t protected anyone. Not my sisters, not my mother. Not Emmory and the others.

  “And you still can, but this is more,” Mia said, holding out her hand. “Going to Faria with us and fighting these beings is just the first step. Let me show you what is coming and then you can choose.”

  I stared at her hand for a long moment, desire and fear going to war in my chest. But there were no ghosts to save me this time. “Dailun used to say to me—less violence, not more, is always an option. But everywhere I turn, there it is.”

  Mia tipped her head curiously at my words. “I promise not to stop you if you still want to go home after what you see,” she whispered. “I will take you home myself. You can withdraw to your empire. It will keep you safe for a time. There is some blessing to the amount of empty space between you and the rest of humanity. But death will come to wipe away everything. If you’re lucky you’ll die before you see Indrana in ruins, but it’s unlikely.”

  I looked up at her and whistled. “That’s blunt.”

  “I have no time for anything else. You need to see, Hail. You need to let go of your grief and channel your anger into this fight. It is the only way to keep everyone you love safe.”

  Mia’s hand was steady, unwavering as she held it out to me. I looked at my own and dragged in a breath. I reached out, slapping my palm down and closing my fingers around hers with a muttered “Bugger me.”

  Heat lanced through me and my vision whited out. Her hand was smaller than I’d expected, her fingers slender, but her grip was firm. It anchored me to the ground even as the images slammed into me.

  Death and destruction. Beings of light so bright it hurt to look directly at them. Emmory dying, his hand sliding out of mine. Pashati under fire from ships that looked like upgraded versions of the Shen and Farian ships, sleek and deadly. I was alone on a battlefield soaked in blood, one arm bound to my chest, the other clutching a gun.

  It was endless. So much I could barely take it all in. Battles in the black. Graveyards of thousands of destroyed ships. The skies filled with fire. More bodies than the survivors could bury and so the funeral pyres lit up the night. My empire and all of humanity in utter ruin.

  I jerked away, knocking over my cup as I scrambled a meter away from Mia, my eyes wide and my heart hammering in my chest.

  “Take a breath, Hail. It’s overwhelming.”

  “It was a jumbled mess.”

  “I can’t force you to see, Hail. That’s not how it works. If it was a mess it’s because you’re not ready to trust me.”

  “Apparently my instincts are on point even if my brain isn’t.” I only just managed to keep from saying body instead of brain and bit down on my tongue so hard I tasted blood for real. “What the fuck was that?” I rubbed both hands over my face.

  Emmory. I’d seen him dying. But how was that even possible when he was already dead?

  “That’s what’s coming, Hail.” Mia put her hand on my arm and I stiffened, my thoughts flying away like a flock of startled birds. “We don’t know what they are, but if you and my brother don’t kill the gods, then these things will come from outside the galaxy, somewhere out past the stars, and kill us all. They are the fire that will burn everything down—humans, Shen, Farians. No one is safe.”

  “She said she deserved it, Gita, like it was some kind of punishment.”

  I paused just outside the door to our rooms as Alba’s declaration reached my ears, and leaned against the wall. Mia had held Talos back with a smile and an “I trust you to go back to your quarters, Hail.”

  Eavesdropping? How un-imperial of you, Hao said.

  “I know,” Gita replied. “She’s convinced herself they’re all dead and that she’s responsible. Aiz is only going to encourage that because it feeds into what he wants from her.”

  “Which is to go on some suicide mission with him,” Johar said.

  “Precisely.” Gita sighed. “And she’s going to say yes. You know her; even if she weren’t bound up in grief, if you dangle the choice of walking away or saving the world, which one do you think Hail’s going to choose?”

  Jo’s laug
h was humorless. “Saving the world, every fucking time.”

  “What are we going to do?” Alba asked.

  “I don’t know yet,” Gita replied. “You keep digging, though. We need to get word out somehow. Even if everyone died in that explosion, someone is looking for us. The least we can do is wave a fucking flag around and scream that we’re here.”

  They’re going to get themselves killed.

  I waved an annoyed hand through Hao’s face and he vanished, but not before rolling his eyes at me.

  The trio had fallen silent. I backed up a few steps as silently as I could manage and then shoved my hands into my pockets and strolled for the door.

  The future Mia had shown me was still bouncing around the inside of my brain like a hot coal in a pot—all fire and loud fury. Only now it had to contend with the conversation I’d just overheard. How could I tell the three women pretending not to watch me what was coming? How could I tell them that I was going to have to do the one thing we’d tried so hard to avoid?

  Fighting was my only option—Indrana’s only option.

  I sat down on my bunk with a sigh, trying to get the words in order in my head so I didn’t sound like a babbling fool.

  “Hail.”

  I looked up at Gita, raising an eyebrow at the absence of my title. “Gita. Sit.” I patted the bunk next to me. “You two come here.”

  Johar and Alba crossed the room, sitting on the other bunk facing us.

  “I have made a decision, but I wanted you three to hear it before I tell the Cevallas. Yesterday’s fight was a lesson, not a punishment, not some sadistic fetish of Aiz’s. What I’ve seen today is—” I blew out a breath. “I am, as you can see, fine. I don’t expect you to understand this, but I do expect you to not challenge my decisions.”

  “With respect, Majesty, you’re not fine,” Gita replied. “I know I said do what you needed to and I wouldn’t protest, but this? This is not what I meant. You can’t let him do this to you.”

  I looked at her. “I can and I will. He’s not going to do anything to me I don’t agree to. Let’s be honest, Gita, fighting is my greatest talent. And when the whole galaxy is at stake, it seems a small price to pay. If I fight these beings with Aiz, there’s a chance of stopping what’s coming.”