by Rachel Dunne
A few long moments went by, full of shifting eyes. Joros was finally the one who stood up, with his face still grim and his eyes joyless. “History will remember us as the people who brought an end to the world’s nightmare. This is the moment,” he said, “when the end of the Long Night begins.”
The waiting was finally, finally over.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Keiro had always thought that leadership was mostly paperwork, or coordinating from behind a curtain—a relatively distant thing. That was what he’d always seen with the Ventallo: they’d spent far more time wrapped in their own bureaucracy, and less among the people they led.
Not so with Keiro’s rule under the Twins. They wished him out among the Fallen, talking and listening and watching. Fratarro said it was the mark of a good leader. Sororra said it was the surest way to find any hints of dissent, and quash them.
“We must be as one,” Sororra told him, pacing with her hands clasped behind her back, looking for all the world like a tiny field general. “Now more than ever. The weakness of mankind cannot be allowed to flourish here.”
Earlier, Fratarro might have corrected his sister—he often had, when she spoke of humanity’s inferiorities. She railed against them more often now, and he defended them far less. It was a thing Keiro had noted, but very carefully did not have any feelings or thoughts about.
So Keiro spent his endless nights walking through the mountain—Sororra had declared it was called Atura, and though Keiro used the name, it seemed far too grand for the empty and rattling space. The mountain was steadily filling, as the preachers who had spent the last months wandering the country and readying it for the Twins’ arrival now flocked to their new home. But Keiro had seen the lines of corpses laid out in the hills. So many of the Fallen had perished in the Twins’ initial rise, there were not enough of them left to ever fill Atura.
Keiro walked the mountain in great looping circles, with Cazi ever faithfully at his heels. They walked through the interconnected halls that Fratarro had shaped, around and around the central spiral, and—when he thought he could steal a moment for himself—through the doors that opened out into the night. Sororra had caught him out there once, standing at the ledge and looking to the ground far below. She had asked with a voice that was so artfully neutral, “What are you doing, Keiro?”
“I like to see the world made to your vision,” he told her. “I like to remind myself what we’re fighting for.” The answer had pacified her, or she had thought the lie allowable.
Another time, Keiro had stepped through a door and found Fratarro already there, his toes curled over the edge of the winding outer path. “Hullo,” he murmured, and it was not the voice Keiro was used to—different, somehow. Like it had been when the eyeless mage had brought the stuffed horse.
“Brother,” Keiro said, carefully, neutrally. “It is good to see you.”
Fratarro said nothing, and Keiro moved to stand at his shoulder—not quite at his side, for nothing in the world could have brought Keiro so close to the mountain ledge. They stood in silence for a time, watching the stars.
“I keep waiting for the sun to rise,” Fratarro said, and did not notice the stab of panic Keiro couldn’t keep from shuddering through his body. “It’s like something keeps pulling me out here. I know it’s dawn now, or . . . it would be . . .” He reached up and pressed his hand against his temple. Keiro did not move, or swallow, or breathe—for it was Fratarro’s left hand, the hand that didn’t work, only now his fingers curled and pressed against his forehead, raking through his hair. Fratarro didn’t seem to notice, or to think anything of it, and Keiro was almost entirely sure that the shaking beneath his feet was only imagined. Fratarro simply frowned, consternation writ plain on his starlit face. “I don’t know why I keep coming here.”
Keiro remained silent and still. He knew there had been stories of Raturo’s boy-twin Etarro, who had been raised in and by the mountain, and who had had an unsettling penchant for watching the sun rise. The boy whose body and life Fratarro had taken for his own. Keiro wondered sometimes—and more often, of late—if that boy was truly gone.
Fratarro shook his head and dropped his arm back to his side. “We should go back in,” he said, his voice sounding once more as it always had. “There’s no point in being out here.” He used his right hand to open the mountain door, and before they walked inside, Keiro stared hard at the left hand—and it hung useless, as it always did.
Keiro talked when he could find people willing to talk to him, listened when the dark halls could hide his form, watched everything his one eye could see. He dealt with small things, accolades and punishments, decisions on where to house new arrivals, concerns over the mravigi. He reported it all back to the Twins, who spent most of their time in their room at Atura’s peak. They were rarely alone: they had chosen seven generals, whom Keiro had not known before, and who did not trust Keiro. In theory, Keiro was in charge of the generals, just as he was in charge of all the Fallen; but in practice, Keiro strongly doubted whether the hard-faced, eyeless generals would listen to any command he gave.
In truth, he wondered if any of the Fallen would really listen to him. Keiro felt less and less a leader, and more a spy.
The generals spent long hours in planning with the Twins, because Sororra could not bear to sit idly by and wait, and there was little else they could do yet. The Fallen had gone out in groups of two or three, and each group had taken a blade for the darkness, and most had taken a mage. They needed the blades and the mages back, for they were the best power and protection the Fallen had, but the scattered groups of preachers were slow to return. They had gone to every edge of the country, and were returning at their gods’ call, but feet could only move so fast. Until they all returned, the generals could only plan.
But their plans grew each day, and Keiro stood at the edge of their momentous decisions, and swallowed all the things he might have said.
“Mercetta is weak.”
“It was a cesspool to begin with. It should have been cleansed long ago.”
“A forest will grow stronger after it has burned. Mercetta has always been the heart of the kingdom the Parents would see carry on. If we destroy it, something stronger will rise from its ashes, and we can shape it into the Twins’ vision.”
“Then we’re all agreed. Once we’re strong enough, we take Mercetta.”
Sororra’s teeth shone in a feral smile, and it never ceased to amaze Keiro the things that people could will themselves to forget. If the Parents had not cast her down, Sororra would have seen all of humanity burn. Keiro doubted centuries of imprisonment had changed her thoughts on the matter. She would see something better rise from the ashes of all humanity, and he wondered how long it would be before the others realized it, but he only wondered that when Sororra was otherwise occupied.
He hardly even dared think what a foolish plan it was, that even if the rumors were true and the capital city was destroying itself from within, even if only a quarter of the population remained—it was still far more people than the Fallen had, even once all the wayward preachers returned with their blades and their mages. It seemed a fool’s hope. It seemed a mission almost designed to spectacularly fail.
Fratarro was silent through most of the planning. He sat in his chair and shaped—minor things, like a wooden duck or a small but detailed building made of stone, but they were made with his powers rather than his hands. The generals always crowed over the things Fratarro made, eager to draw the eye of the more enigmatic god, but Fratarro rarely acknowledged them. Sometimes he met Keiro’s eye across the room, for Keiro, at least, knew what the generals did not: that Fratarro should have been able to shape such simple things in a blink, not in the span of hours. But he did practice. Fratarro had only ever wanted to make beautiful things.
“Keiro,” Sororra called, pulling him from his usual reverie. “Have you been to Mercetta?”
“Only a handful of times. And only very briefly—there were a
lways too many people for me.”
She laughed. “You’ll be able to visit it soon enough without that problem. But there is a thing I would like you to do . . . You’ve proven yourself capable so many times, and you should have a place in this strike.”
Keiro bowed low. “As always, I will serve as you command me.”
“We have many advantages over our enemy: a powerful fighting force, a cadre of loyal mages; we have faith; we have the confidence that we are in the right; and we are not afraid of the dark. But these are all things the followers of my parents could match. They have their own fighters and their own mages, their own misguided faith and their own sureties, and they could learn not to fear the darkness. But there is one thing we have that they do not, one thing that they can never match. We have the mravigi.”
Keiro felt a chill engulf him, and in the same instant, sweat speckled his brow and spine. He said nothing, and hoped the sleeves of his robes hid the way his hands curled into fists. At his side, Cazi’s scaled nose pressed briefly against Keiro’s fist.
Watching him intently, Sororra went on, “Your kind has thought them dead for centuries, and those who follow my Parents likely do not even remember that they once existed. They give us an element of surprise that nothing else can—but more than that, they have skills that will prove invaluable.”
Fratarro held a lump of stone in his good hand, staring at it as he meticulously shaped its form. It was still just a lump, the shape he was trying to draw out indistinct, and he was either concentrating too deeply to hear, or choosing not to react to his sister’s words. Or, perhaps, he had known and truly had no reaction to give. Keiro didn’t want to believe that, didn’t want to believe Fratarro would put his own creations at risk after they had suffered so much for each other, after the Starborn had remained so loyal through the centuries of his slumber and imprisonment . . . But Fratarro did not seem to hear, or to care.
“Keiro, you will lead a squadron of the mravigi,” Sororra went on, watching Keiro with the same intensity with which Fratarro stared at his shaped rock. “You will be the first into Mercetta. The mravigi have adapted for tunneling over the long years, and we will use this. They can tunnel into Mercetta and, under your supervision, begin gathering the information we need to form the main of our attack. You’ve always been so close to the mravigi, and with your connection to young Cazi”—and her smile flickered down to the Starborn, who pressed against Keiro’s leg, warm and shivering—“I don’t doubt the mravigi will listen to you.
“They should remain largely unseen, except for strategic moments when their presence can further sow panic—the people will think them monsters in the night. And you, Keiro, will coordinate careful attacks, for the mravigi are powerful and deadly. Under your supervision, you and the mravigi will weaken Mercetta and prepare it for our attack. Your Cazi will be useful in that regard—he is quick, and can relay your orders to the others across the city. You should—”
“No,” Keiro interrupted. He was surprised to hear his voice wrapped around the word, quiet but surprisingly firm. He hadn’t thought he would ever speak—would ever dare to. But he had, and the word hung heavy in the air, sucking all other sound into it. Sororra had frozen, likely with the shock of being opposed, and the generals all held their breaths. Fratarro looked up at Keiro, and blinked slowly. So he had been listening.
Slowly, Sororra said, “I don’t believe I heard you.” Her eyes were bright and furious as fires, and her tone made it clear she was giving him a chance to backtrack down the foolish path he had just begun—and that it was the only chance he would get.
I should take it, hissed the voice in his head that sounded almost—but not quite—like his own thoughts. He had thought it was his own voice for a very long time, and had allowed himself to pretend even after he knew better. Sometimes a delusion made life more bearable.
It would be easier to take this offered chance. To weave another clever lie—that he had been disagreeing with the particulars of Sororra’s plan, not the plan itself—and let the world spin on as it was, rushing toward darkness and destruction. There was life that way, at least, for as long as it was allowed. There was not the finality of an eternity spent among the stars. There was something, and that was not nothing.
Keiro had been choosing the easier thing for a long time, chasing the frantic demands of self-preservation—and it had gotten him here, to this moment, where he said to the twisting voice in his head, No more. There were so many he had failed to protect, so many lost lives who might have been saved if he had only said, No.
Preserving himself meant nothing if he became someone not worth saving.
Dimly, he thought he could hear the sound of a mask falling, and shattering. “The mravigi are not fighters,” he said aloud, meeting Sororra’s eyes and not looking away. “I won’t lead them to their deaths.”
And Sororra’s voice in his head said, So there is a limit to how far you will sink. I was wondering. Outwardly her face was writ with fury, but beneath it there was a gleam in her eye. He had compared her before to a jungle cat toying with its food, and he had never forgotten the resemblance.
“Detain him,” she said to her generals, and they leaped into action, eager to break the tension that filled the room. They grabbed his arms, pressed him hard against the wall so that the stone scraped his cheek raw, so that all his good eye could see were the fissures and cracks and imperfections in the rock. “I will not abide insubordination, least of all among my most trusted advisers. I think you forget, Keiro, the promises you have made. You said it not moments ago: ‘I will serve as you command me.’ I expected more of you.”
Keiro said nothing; there was nothing more he could or wanted to say to her. She could have ordered anything of him, commanded him to any depravity, and he would have done it without more than a faint readjustment of the skintight mask he had become. But the mravigi . . . how could he stand by and let more and worse happen to them? They had been made for flying but had been forced to hide beneath the earth, and Keiro knew the reason for it. It was a good reason, he understood it, but he would never forget Cazi’s screams as his wings were removed.
“I had hopes for you, Keiro,” Sororra went on. Keiro couldn’t see her, could only see the stone before him, but her voice moved like she was pacing. “You showed such loyalty, such promise, such faith. We placed our trust in you. I would never have expected your betrayal.
“But you prove the truths my Parents did not wish to hear: humanity is weak, and fickle, and flawed. Faithlessness runs in your blood, and your first interest always lies with your own skin. You should not be trusted with power, for it will corrupt you beyond recognition.”
Sororra, in her time, had always been fascinated by humanity—so like her and her brother and their Parents, yet so different. She had studied them, and learned about them, and—in learning the ways they differed from the gods—grown steadily repulsed by them. She had never understood why the Parents cared for humanity more than their own children. It was part of what had led to the Twins’ downfall, and it was the part that the Fallen always chose to forget. They liked to think that if they were only faithful enough, they would be spared her ire, or that Fratarro’s peaceable nature would balance out his sister’s rancor. They liked to think the lessons of history would not apply to them.
Sororra had always understood humanity too well . . . and Fratarro, still, did not understand his sister well enough.
“Traitors will not be tolerated,” Sororra said, her voice pacing nearer. “All must know this. Keiro—once loyal, once elevated, once named Godson—must be made into a lesson. Take him away from me,” she said to the generals, “and gather all who reside within the mountain. There is something they all must see, and learn.”
They pulled him away from the wall, and as they marched him from the room Keiro twisted back and forth—not in some misguided attempt to escape, but to scan the floor for star-speckled scales. There was no sign of Cazi in the room. He caught Fratarro
’s eye as he twisted, the god frowning at Keiro, and though he looked entirely himself, there was something of the trapped boy in his eyes.
Two of the seven generals marched him down the winding spiral as the rest scattered, and throughout the long walk down, Keiro could hear their distant voices calling for all to assemble at Atura’s floor. A steadily growing crowd assembled behind Keiro and his escort, and more streamed down ahead of them. There was an occasional hiss or jeer, if someone realized Keiro was the cause of the commotion, but there was otherwise silence—no one, it seemed, was sure of what was happening or why, and under the rule of the Twins, caution served one well.
Keiro hadn’t forgotten that. It was only that he had to live with himself, and caution did not always make for the right decisions.
The floor of Atura was not like the floor of Raturo—there was no arch showing the Fall of the Twins, no chamber for the leaders to gather in, no path deeper down into the mountain’s icy heart. There was only the floor, and a small dais from which Keiro or the generals or even the Twins had sometimes addressed small groups of gathered Fallen. It was strange seeing so many filling the floor now, a large portion of the Fallen’s might assembled in one place—and still, Keiro remembered that there had been a larger crowd for his failed blinding. Nearly a decade ago, when he had been a nameless, unknown preacher seeking to bind his loyalty more fully to the unfound Twins, there had been more Fallen who had chosen to bear witness—whether from their own faith or boredom, there had been more free bodies in Raturo willing to sacrifice an hour of their lives than there were all the people within Atura.
And none of the other generals could see—or, perhaps, chose not to see—that any plan to attack Mercetta was doomed from inception.
The generals cleared a path through the silent throng, leading Keiro to the dais and framing him as they all waited in nervous anticipation. Keiro scanned the crowd and saw no sign of any mravigi, who usually milled about in the mountain. Most tended to avoid people, but some, like Cazi, had found humans they were fond of and often stayed near. There were none of those around now, though.