by Matt Wallace
Dyeawan’s blood freezes even as the space between her temples is lit aflame. She can’t stop looking at their faces, one after another, all of them carved by death’s hand into masks of torment and longing and pain and terror. None of them died naturally, and none of them wanted to experience eternity here in a watery grave off the coast of a hidden island.
She turns from the sight of the bodies, feeling her lungs begin to burn and her cheeks straining painfully. Dyeawan swims for the tenuous light above. Her veins are ready to unravel from both the lack of air and the rush of repulsion and confusion emanating from her mind. She explodes through the surface of the bay. She clings to the nearest boulder, wrapping her arms around it like a small child seeking solace against the leg of a parent. She sputters and coughs up seawater, tearing away the cord binding the lenses to her face. She casts them away violently.
Dyeawan feels Edger’s hands closing around her forearms before she actually sees him attempting to lift her from the water.
“Don’t touch me!” she shrieks, the outburst shocking even her.
Edger releases her. It is ten times more difficult to pull herself back up onto the rocks than it was to dive from their edge, but Dyeawan claws and scrapes until her legs are free of the tainted water. Edger remains silent, blending into the background as he watches her drag her body to the foot of her tender.
“I could not tell you,” Edger says, almost as though he’s reassuring himself. “I could not simply tell you. You had to see it. You had to see them. It was the only way. I am so very sorry, Dyeawan.”
“What have you done?” Dyeawan demands in between ragged breaths. “Why would you… who are… why did they…”
She climbs up onto the litter of her tender, lying upon it like a funeral cairn.
“They are no one,” Edger explains. “Like you were. Like I was. The difference is they had nothing to offer Crache beyond the burdens with which they were born. Not like us. Their fate was simple. They were intended for liquidation. The rest of the planners would have seen their bodies burned or buried or experimented upon until we could discern a way to use them to feed crops or the like, but I wouldn’t have it. I had them placed here to keep them close, to remind me of what must be done, and because of the kinship I feel toward them. They are family, in a way. Wouldn’t you agree? This is, in its way, our familial burial plot.”
Dyeawan cannot stay the tears that overwhelm her eyes. Her mind races to find any reasonable way to not accept what she’s just seen and what she’s hearing, and at every turn her mind is met with a closed door.
“They did not suffer,” he assures her, sounding almost offended, as if she’d already made the accusation. “They were ferried here in small groups after being plucked from the streets or dungeons. They were given a hot meal and mulled drink. The herbs secreted in that drink are a perfection of nature. They drew them into a deep, all-consuming sleep. Each slumbering body was then gently and respectfully lowered into the waters of the bay. None of them ever felt a thing, I promise you. I insisted on that.”
He waits for Dyeawan to speak, even if only to allow her to vent her initial shock and anger, but words continue to fail her.
“I have spent a great deal of time explaining the inner workings of Crache to you. Most of those lessons have consisted of telling you what Crache is not. Now you have to understand what Crache is. Crache is balance, Dyeawan. It is a perfect, harmonious balance of people and purpose and resources. That is what is essential. That is what feeds the fire burning in the forge of Crache. There simply is no place in our society for those people below. They can serve no useful purpose. Regular citizens will never accept them. They live only to drain precious resources. I give shelter and purpose to the few I can justify having here in the Planning Cadre as helpers and staff, Makai and the others, even you when you first came. However, that space is very limited.”
“How did you know I was capable of more when you first met me?” Dyeawan asks.
“I didn’t. I hadn’t an inkling of how remarkable your mind is. It was sheer luck. You were like a bird with a broken wing, even for… our kind. I have a severe weakness for broken birds. That’s all.”
Dyeawan has spent her entire life starving in the streets alone. She had nothing to begin with and then had her legs taken from her. Until this moment, however, she’s never truly felt defeated.
“Why would you show me this?” she asks miserably. “Do you expect me to be grateful?”
“I’ve told you, Crache has no rulers of name, only a bureaucracy composed of endless councils and committees. That is, of course, wholly on purpose.”
In that moment, hearing those words, Dyeawan understands why.
“People usurp rulers,” she says with certainty. “But they cannot rebel against a ruler who does not exist.”
“Correct. A ruler is a target. A bureaucracy, on the other hand, is an endless forest in which the discontent lose both their way and their will to rebel, with nowhere and no one to focus their ire upon. We give them no direction, no bull’s-eye for any anger or frustration or malice they may harbor against the state. However, no nation can function without strong leadership. If our fate was left to a Crachian committee, the Capitol would topple within a week. There must be a ruler, even if their name is never spoken and no monuments are ever erected in their likeness.”
“I understand,” she bitterly affirms.
“Dyeawan… would it surprise you to learn I am that ruler? Would it surprise you to learn the final word on this nation’s fate falls to me? That I administer the Protectorate Ministry at my will?”
Dyeawan doesn’t answer right away. It should surprise her, of course. The fact that this afflicted little man of advancing years, living in a ruin on a tiny island, is the master and commander of a nation such as Crache should be shattering news. Yet somehow she’d silently accepted that Edger was in control of all this. Perhaps it is because he became her mentor, her teacher, her sole source of knowledge, direction, and approval. He has been the master of her ultimate fate.
It’s easy enough to believe those that control you must control everything.
Slowly, she shakes her head.
“Of course,” Edger says. “Of course it wouldn’t surprise you. Very little does. But do you appreciate the scope of that? Do you appreciate the responsibility, the singular weight I bear?”
Dyeawan turns over on the litter and pushes her torso up, carefully folding her legs beneath her and settling atop the tender in her usual position.
“You still haven’t explained why you would allow me to see such a thing as this.”
“It is exceedingly simple. I would choose you to succeed me. I would choose you, not only to lead the planners after I’m gone, but to truly rule all Crache.”
His words aren’t any more believable than the reality of what she just witnessed at the bottom of the bay, yet Dyeawan cannot deny the truth of both.
Her next question is obvious. “Why?”
“The others, they possess keen minds and a breadth of vision for invention and innovation, but they are planners, not rulers. They do not inspire people. They barely see people. They certainly do not empathize with them. I see in you the potential to be both. That is a rare thing, as rare as you are. I believe you will one day exceed anything I have managed to accomplish, perhaps anything my predecessors did. Your mind is that unique, and your temperament that suited.”
“And to you being a ruler means exterminating anyone whose purpose isn’t obvious to you?”
“If you are to be Crache’s future, you have to know how Crache functions. You have to see and know every single cog and wheel. What lies at the bottom of this bay is an atrocity, but it is a necessary one. You must be able to reconcile that fact and truly accept it if you are to ascend to my position one day. Do you see?”
Dyeawan nods. “I believe I finally do see through your eyes, Edger.”
“But can you accept what you see?”
“I have
no choice, do I?”
“You have more choices than most, Dyeawan. You are one of a very few people to truly know all sides of Crache. Now I’m offering you the opportunity to shape its future. So I ask you again, do you accept?”
In answer, Dyeawan extends a hand toward him.
Though his face remains ever unreadable, Edger’s body seems to visibly relax.
He steps close to her tender, taking Dyeawan’s hand in his.
Edger hasn’t noticed her other hand reaching beneath the litter of her tender for the object concealed there. Dyeawan raises like a knife the small bellows with its hollow needle. She does not stab Edger, however. Instead, Dyeawan brings the point of the needle down into the neck of Ku, the wind dragon, piercing the creature’s flesh and squeezing the bellows tightly.
Edger, acting on instinct more than anything else, quickly slaps the bellows from Dyeawan’s hand, loosing the needle from Ku’s neck. The bellows flies over the edge of the piled boulders and disappears into the waters of the bay.
“What have you done?” he demands.
“I’ve just killed you,” Dyeawan calmly informs him. “I’m very sorry.”
The bony pipes rising from Ku’s back begin issuing an eerie chorus of crackling wind. It’s not a sound being filtered from Edger’s throat; this is the result of an event occurring inside the wind dragon’s small body. Ku, perfectly docile a moment before, begins writhing in a frenzy against Edger’s flesh.
Edger’s hands fly to his neck as he realizes that Ku is becoming feral. Dyeawan imagines what the expression on Edger’s face would look like were his features capable of forming any expression at all. His fingers attempt to pry Ku from his throat. The hollow protrusions on the creature’s back begin whistling like a boiling teakettle. The rest of Edger’s body seizes as the wind dragon closes its jaws, biting through the patch of flesh its mouth would otherwise harmlessly occupy.
Edger would scream if his throat were still sending sounds through the wind dragon’s body. In his panicked agony he tears Ku from his neck, the wind dragon’s mouth taking a large chunk of the man’s throat with him. Thick red blood begins regurgitating down the front of his tunic. Edger squeezes Ku in one hand until those long backbones pierce Edger’s palm and he crushes the wind dragon’s tiny body, very nearly popping the creature’s yellow and black eyes from his skull.
Dyeawan watches him stumble backward, the strength fleeing Edger’s legs even as his command over them wanes. He falls against the God Rung, sitting awkwardly at the base of the monolith as his life’s blood continues to gush from his torn asunder throat.
Dyeawan paddles a few feet closer to him.
“I learned well the lesson of Greenfire, my little duck,” she explains. “I’ve been studying other animals since that test, reading everything I could find and examining live specimens when I could. I was particularly interested in wind dragons. I took a portion of Ku’s blood while he was last off your neck, in the highest heat of his mating cycle. I tried injecting it into different creatures. It sent all of them into a killing frenzy. They weren’t easy experiments, but I knew it would be worth the effort. I’d like to think that, at the time, it was just simple curiosity. But the truth is I always knew this could happen. I knew one way or another I might have to make your death look like an accident, as though Ku had entered his mating cycle prematurely while on your neck and killed you.”
Edger is attempting in vain to staunch the flow of blood from his neck with one hand, pressing his palm into his throat and in fact only making matters worse.
“I am truly sorry, Edger. I owe you so much. And I have learned so much from you. I hoped… I hoped so hard for you to be different from the Aegins in the Bottoms, from the men who led packs of other men like feral dogs. But you’re not. You are what happens when those people are smart enough to see a world beyond themselves and the little place where they’re born and raised and live their lives. You are the world they make when they are given the chance to make a whole world. There’s no room for people in your world unless they serve your purpose, and I’ve lived under the yoke of such men long enough.”
Dyeawan’s gaze sinks from Edger’s face, ever as much the monument as the monolith rising above him, to the hand still clutching the crushed body of his beloved wind dragon.
“I’m sorry to you, too, Ku,” she says. “You didn’t do anything to deserve this. But perhaps it’s better this way. You’re free now.”
Edger removes the bloody, tremor-wracked hand from his throat and extends it toward her, fingertips straining in his final few moments of life.
Dyeawan only shakes her head, wiping the tears from her eyes with the sleeve of her planner’s tunic.
“Thank you for everything you’ve done for me,” she says. “I hope at least a part of you understands. I hope you can forgive me.”
Edger’s arm gradually falls until it rests at his side. His head lolls forward, and in the next moment the rest of his body finally matches the slackened death mask of his face.
When she is certain he’s gone, Dyeawan looks up at the God Rung hanging above Edger’s head. She wonders if the people who built it deceived themselves about what they’d created the way they deceived those whom they subjected to its judgment.
That is the lie I won’t tell, she promises herself. That I’m somehow better than my actions, no matter how dark they are. That is the lie that turns you into the people who made the God Rung, and people like Edger.
High above them, the rain finally begins to fall.
DAWN IS THE MOMENT YOU WAKE
THE LIGHTS OF THE TENTH City are a swarm of fireflies in the darkness somewhere very far away.
From a high window on the nation’s border, Evie watches the farthest bastion of Crachian civilization and her patchwork rebel army’s next destination. The Tenth City seems quiet at such a distance, peaceful, but Evie knows the entire city must be bustling, even at this late hour. Skrain and Aegins will be fortifying the walls and the approach to the gates.
Have they told the people, Evie wonders? Have they told them anything? Have they even bothered to feed them a string of lies to conceal the fact that an invading force has seized control of the western border and has its sights set on their city?
Invaders, Evie thinks to herself. We’re invaders now.
Behind her, Sirach stirs beneath the silken sheets of the bed they’ve shared since taking the garrison. Their temporary quarters once belonged to a Skrain captain and the steady string of pleasure girls and boys who kept them entertained at night. They’ve uncovered evidence in the form of perfumes and oils and several toys hidden beneath the bed, none of which belong in a military barracks.
Evie isn’t certain even now how she and Sirach ended up together; everything immediately following the Battle for the Border, as the Legionnaires are calling it, felt unreal to her, like a dream. Nothing ever feels wrong in a dream. There’s no hesitation and no inhibition.
Enjoying each other’s body has undeniably brought her repeated bliss. However, Evie can’t deny that taking her first bath in months was even better.
Evie listens to the rustling of Sirach gathering the sheets around her naked body and slipping from the bed. Her bare feet padding across the room make even less sound, and in the next moment Sirach envelopes Evie in the sheet, pressing against her bare back and embracing her gently.
“Can’t you sleep?” she asks.
Evie lightly grips Sirach’s arms and leans against her gratefully. “I barely remember what sleep feels like.”
“Then I feel I’ve failed utterly at my task.”
Evie smiles. “Not at all.”
She rests her chin on Evie’s shoulder. Sirach’s gaze fixes on the lights in the distance.
“It’s like one big, bright jewel with a thousand eyes that sparkle in the dark,” she says. “And we’re going to pluck it from the bedrock.”
“You make it sound quite lovely. You have a gift for that. A siege, however, and sacking a
city isn’t lovely. It will be wading knee-deep through streets filled with blood and shit and screams of pain and fear and death. It won’t look like a jewel then.”
Sirach grins, kissing along the outline of Evie’s collarbone. “You know what I really like about you?” she whispers.
Evie tenses, feeling the prickling of flesh that should be wholly unrelated to her shoulder.
“You’ve seemed to develop a lengthy list over the past few nights,” she says.
“Besides those things,” Sirach amends.
“What’s that?”
“You utterly refuse to become what you quite clearly have become.”
Evie shakes her head. “I don’t know what that means.”
Rather than explain, Sirach poses a new question: “Are you saying we shouldn’t attack the city?”
Evie takes a deep, resolute breath. “No, we have to. Right now Crache can still control what’s happened here, or at least the knowledge of it. As long as they have that they’ll do everything they can to quietly wipe us out before the people learn about what we’ve done. There’ll be no bargaining with them until we hold something real.”
“One of their cities,” Sirach says.
“One of their cities.”
“And you truly think they’ll bargain with us?”
“I have to hope. Taking the Tenth City will be a miracle, even with more of your people and every band of B’ors within two hundred miles. Holding it will be impossible.”
“We’ve defied the odds thus far,” Sirach muses. “Largely thanks to that beautiful mind of yours, of course.”
“Then let’s hope I don’t run dry of ideas.”
Sirach glances over her shoulder at the closed door to their quarters, more precisely at the shadow of two large boots eclipsing much of the torchlight streaming under the bottom of that door.
“Do you think Bam is jealous?” she asks Evie quietly. “Or do you think he’s enjoyed the sounds escaping this room as of late?”
“I didn’t ask him to stand guard,” Evie reminds her. “I never do. I hope it hasn’t hurt him. He has a good heart. Simple. There’s not enough simple in our world.”