URIEL WIPED digital spreadsheets from the top of his desk, sliding them out of the way with an annoyed gesture. He grouped others, bringing them down and arraying them beneath his fingers.
The numbers. What did the numbers say? Mr. Galath . . .
Why? Why couldn’t Uriel make sense of the world like he could these sheets and statistics? He was never wrong – not with numbers. When they’d demonstrated the Sympathetic Thermal Conduction mechanisms, who had guessed the exact bids that each participant would present? Uriel. When Mr. Galath had come forward with his Advanced Artificial Entity matrix, who had predicted to the day – to the day – how long it would take the government to develop regulations? Uriel.
The numbers didn’t lie. War. Why would Mr. Galath want war, after all of these years? Any of their devices could have been used militarily. They’d always put protocols in place to prevent such things. Now . . . now they went to militaries and took bids.
What was the man working on? The new secret – it had to be incredible, amazing, transformative.
Uriel would find the answer. Men should make sense. If they listened to reason, they would make sense. Perhaps if governments focused more on what was logical, rather than killing one another, the world would work as it was supposed to.
Adram passed by. “Staying late?” he asked.
Uriel didn’t look up.
Adram patted him on the shoulder anyway. “Look, no hard feelings. I don’t mind that you tried to sabotage me.”
“You don’t?” Uriel asked. That didn’t make sense, even if he had been chosen by Mr. Galath. Uriel looked up, but Adram really did look pleased.
“You should be angry at me,” Uriel said. “I tried to stop you from getting your way.”
“Nah. It’s cause and effect, Spunky. It’s like . . . you’re hardly a person. No offense there! It’s a compliment. You’re like a machine. Data in, data out. No emotion!”
Uriel pressed his fingers against the table until the tips were white. The display warped, spreading a little halo of color around each finger. “Did he say . . . ?” Uriel barely kept his voice in check. “Did he say what it was about? The special meeting?”
Adram leaned down. “I’m gonna live forever, Uri boy.” He winked, grinning, then stood up straight. He obviously shouldn’t have said anything, but the bounce to his step as he moved off – humming to himself and doing a little slide on the carpet as he took the corner – spoke volumes of his euphoria.
Live forever? Impossible. Even for Mr. Galath.
Or was it? Uriel turned back to his spreadsheets, then hunkered down. He spent an hour teasing information from accounts that were nested inside subsidiaries and shell corporations, and a strange string of answers began to form. The moon? What was Mr. Galath doing on the moon? And these bunkers around the country? Uriel couldn’t think what else to call them, judging by the specs and supply lists.
Mr. Galath was getting ready for war. What have I become a part of? Suddenly nauseous, Uriel sat back in his chair. No place on the planet would be safe. If the greatest mind of their time wanted war, then what safety could there ever be?
His eyes drifted to the picture of his son sitting in its little frame on the desk. Uriel stared at that picture, taken two years ago. In fact, he looked at it so often that he was sometimes surprised when he saw Jori in person – the child didn’t quite look like the picture.
Uriel knew that little piece of paper better than he knew the son it represented.
What am I doing? he thought. Death was coming. Destruction. Hell . . . it was already here, in most of the world. And Uriel worked late nights, looking at a picture instead of holding his son?
He stood up and shoved his chair aside and looked at the clock. Seven. Jori would be home from practice for dinner in a half hour.
A half hour. He could make that.
He didn’t bother to shut down his desk or its screen as he left. That felt sinfully negligent to him, and so he found himself smiling.
He had worked all his life for Mr. Galath. The man had taken Uriel’s sweat, but he would not have Uriel’s blood. Not tonight.
THE SCHOLARS of ancient days had a great deal to say about the soul. They claimed that the idea of an immortal soul was simply wishful imagination. Instead they spoke of the Quantum Identity Pattern: a state of matter that could be attuned to a certain configuration – a set of memories and a personality.
The Q.I.P. allowed every person to remain themselves even as their cells died and were replaced. Scientists explained that there was nothing “eternal” about personality – that it was an illusion, but one that could be manipulated. They said the illusion could be perpetuated, associated with one form after another, to create a sense of a continuing identity.
Raidriar rejected these explanations.
Yes, this science had given him immortality. The scientists themselves, however, did not see the majesty of it all – they saw only bits and numbers. When your eyes were forever squinting at a single tile, you easily missed the beautiful mosaic of which it was part.
He was immortal. The scientists were wrong, and their explanations were the frantic excuses of little men failing to grasp something vast. It was Raidriar’s self – now free from that prison – that flew on wings of time, to true freedom. It was the God King who opened his eyes in his Seventh Temple of Reincarnation. It was really him, immortal ruler, who gasped in a lungful of fresh air – starting these lungs breathing for the first time.
He was not just some personality, fabricated from quantum entanglement and made active by chemical process. It was him. A new body, but an ancient soul, seizing again the life that was his birthright.
He breathed in and out, lying naked on the table, looking up at a fine bamboo ceiling. He did not like how familiar that feeling of death was becoming. Even with his mind partitioned, the trauma of his captivity sequestered, it was like septic flesh. He knew he had died far too often recently. He could not banish every memory of his captivity. He needed some recollection.
Without that, after all, he would not be able to summon the proper spirit of divine wrath against those responsible for his imprisonment. Yes, a little memory would help his vengeance be all the more sweet. Memory of what Ausar had done to him, memory of his pain and frustration.
Vengeance . . . against the Worker.
As Raidriar’s Devoted hurried into the room to serve him, he contemplated his rage. An ember deep within. Not a fire – no, a fire consumed and left its host as ash. An ember was a truer flame – less transient, more powerful.
Yes, he hated Ausar, but that hatred was nothing compared to his hatred of the Worker. It was so clear now, how the Worker had manipulated them all.
Raidriar’s Devoted knelt around his table, eyes down, for he had not yet covered his face. One of them – a hook-nosed man that Raidriar recognized only vaguely – held out a ceremonial mask to him, head still bowed.
Raidriar sat up. He had constructed this room to evoke a sense of serenity. A hushed brook bubbled outside, accompanied by the sounds of rattling bamboo. The floor was draped in finely woven mats, the room lined with plants instead of metal. Metal surfaces reminded him of the old days. Days before . . .
He despised those days.
“How long has it been?” Raidriar asked, reaching for the mask. “How long was I . . . away?” Men such as these did not need to know the details of his imprisonment.
“Nearly two years, great master,” said the Devoted offering the mask.
Two years. An eyeblink by the reckoning of the Deathless, but still a dangerous amount of time. What plots had the Worker executed during such a period? Dared Raidriar hope that the creature had spent the time licking his wounds and recovering from his long imprisonment?
Raidriar took the mask. “Where is Eves,” he asked, “my High Devoted?”
“Dead, great master,” said the hook-nosed Devoted. “Six months ago, in bed. We believe it was his heart.”
Pity. Raidriar had grown fond of Eves. Still, he was accustomed to the fleeting lifespans of mortals. He could not turn a corner without half of his staff dropping dead from one silly malady or another.
He moved to put on the mask, but froze. Quick breathing from the Devoted. Sweat on their brows. Had that been a tremble in the voice of the one who had spoken?
Raidriar narrowed his eyes. There, on the inside of his mask, he spotted a tiny row of very fine needles. Needles that would pierce his skin as he placed the mask over his face.
Poison.
So, he thought, you got to my Devoted, did you?
How inconvenient.
Raidriar twisted from the table, bringing a fist down on the shoulder of the lead Devoted. He then smashed the metal mask into the face of another. The rest leaped to their feet in a frantic, terrified scramble.
“The prophecy is fulfilled!” one of the Devoted yelled, lunging for Raidriar. The fellow was a thick-necked man with wide hands. Raidriar let the man get hold of him, bringing them close enough together that Raidriar could press the mask – and its traitorous needles – against the man’s face. He fell, twitching.
“The Dark Father has arrived!” another was crying. “To arms, to arms! It is–”
That Devoted was cut off as Raidriar grabbed him by the throat and spun him about into the path of several others, who had just pulled out swords to attack. The man he held went down in a spray of blood, and the two who had slain him stepped back in horror at having stabbed their ally. One even dropped his bloodied sword.
Raidriar kicked that up into his hand and sliced it through the man’s neck in one smooth motion.
“Thank you,” Raidriar noted, then caught another Devoted by the arm as the man lunged for him. Raidriar twisted the man about, pulling free his shawl, then kicked him aside. Raidriar reached up and twisted the shawl about his face to hide it from these lesser beings.
“And thank you,” he said to the shawl-less Devoted as he rammed the sword through the man’s back. It was convenient that his priesthood could be so helpful, even as he slaughtered them.
He was still naked save for the shawl, but at least the most important part was covered. These treacherous dogs were not worthy of gazing upon the visage of a full Deathless – even if it would be the last thing they saw.
Four remained, including two who had run into the room when they heard the yell for help. Raidriar’s Devoted could all fight – he made certain of it – but they were no match for him. He was a Deathless with thousands of years of practice, not to mention a body crafted to the peak of physical capability. It was hardly a fair fight.
Still, one of these could always get in a lucky blow, which would be problematic. Raidriar backed carefully around the fallen High Devoted, whom he’d hit first. The man was groaning but climbing to his knees. Raidriar planted a foot in the man’s stomach, then cracked him on the head with his sword butt.
Nearby, a set of armor on the wall awaited Raidriar. It hung on its mountings, opened up like the husk of an insect recently shed. With that, he could . . .
But no. They were ready for his arrival. The living Devoted regarded him as they would a snake. Shouts still sounded down the hallway, passing the word of his awakening.
The Worker had prepared this place well. The armor would be a trap.
Raidriar lunged for it anyway.
The four Devoted relaxed. The change was subtle – a slight lowering of the swords, a release of breath. Ten thousand years taught one to notice such things, if you paid attention.
And Raidriar did. He always watched and studied. He was a king – and you could not properly dominate that which you did not understand.
His lunge for the armor was a feint – he hit the release latch, tumbling the suit to the floor with a crash. He leaped across the slablike table where he had been reincarnated, then separated one of the Devoted from his arm with a swing. The man went down, screaming.
The other three engaged him at once. On one hand, he was proud that they showed such bravery in fighting, rather than fleeing. But on the other, he was disgusted. They knew the ancient protocols known as the Aegis code. True honor lay in engaging foes one at a time. Raidriar himself had instituted these codes millennia ago, seeking a more honest form of combat between men. Even the most brutish of his daerils followed the code. To have his Devoted ignore it, particularly in fighting Raidriar himself, was an insult.
He dispatched the three with little trouble. Such a waste. He stepped over to the High Devoted, but the man was out cold from the knock to the head. That left only the one whose arm he had separated from its shoulder. Raidriar strode over and lifted the bloodied man into the air with one hand.
“What did he say about me?” Raidriar asked, curious. “How did he turn you?”
The Devoted squeezed his eyes shut and started whispering a prayer. To Raidriar himself, of course.
“I’m right here,” Raidriar said, shaking the Devoted.
“I will not listen to you, demon. You may wear the form of my master, but you are not him. He warned us of your coming. In his truth I bask, in his name I die . . .”
“A Soulless,” Raidriar guessed. “The Worker has given my crown to a Soulless, has he?”
A Soulless – a copy, a body awakened without the actual Q.I.P. to inhabit it. Such a thing was possible, but creations such as this were unstable, their memories flawed, their personalities erratic.
“I put protocols in place to prevent something like this,” Raidriar said to the Devoted he held. “Why did you not spot the lies? You were trained better than this.”
The Devoted was too busy dying to reply.
Raidriar sighed, dropping the Devoted in frustration. The rest were dead or unconscious, save . . . Yes, the bulky man that still wore Raidriar’s mask. He knelt beside the fallen Devoted, noting the steady rise and fall of his chest. Raidriar pulled the mask free, needles sliding out of the skin of the cheeks and neck. He smelled the poison . . . what was left of it.
Nightdew. It was meant to bring unconsciousness, not death. A temporary way to incapacitate a Deathless. Left too long under the influence of such drugs, the soul would break free to seek a better vessel, but it would work for a time. The Worker would rather not have Raidriar killed and his soul freed to travel to another rebirthing chamber.
He checked the armor next, but as he’d suspected, it was useless. The joints of the elbows and knees had been welded together. If he had stepped into it and allowed it to enclose him with its automatic locking mechanism, he would have been trapped and immobile.
They should not have tried the mask. If he had simply been allowed to put on that armor . . .
He stood, increasingly annoyed, and investigated the deadminds in the room. He was locked out of any important systems. He could access the lesser functions, however – likely he had been left some small amount of control, so as to not arouse his suspicion should he look at his deadminds before putting on his armor. But anytime he tried to change something, the deadmind gave him some kind of excuse, speaking in a flat-toned feminine voice. The excuses were what might have been called “error messages” in ancient days.
He did manage to find an image of himself, supposedly created only one week before. A powerful figure in lean, smooth armor. The face was masked, so it might not matter if the fake was a true Soulless or not, but it was his voice that accompanied the image.
“My loyal Devoted,” the recording said, “cower and give awe. My prophecy is at hand, and my enemies work to deceive you. Stay alert and serve your lord.”
It did sound like him, but it grandstanded too much. The Worker liked theatrics, but Raidriar despised them. One could know merely by looking at him – seeing the way that he stood, hearing the way he spoke – that he was of the elder Deathless. Trying so hard to emphasize it only made the impostor seem pathetic.
Raidriar shook his head, keeping alert for the arrival of more foes. Daerils would be on their way, those who had been built for fighting. One would not be a problem, but several of them might possibly stand against one of the Deathless.
Raidriar turned to leave the mirrorlike deadmind, but hesitated. What was this? A tidbit of information that he could see, but not manipulate. Prisoners in the dungeons. Not the Soul Cells, but the ordinary cages for mortals. Could it be . . . ?
He could find out nothing more. Well, he would need to pass near those cells in his next task, which would be to reach the central deadmind core of the temple. Perhaps it would be profitable to make a slight detour to investigate.
Before that, however, some clothing was in order.
The armor was useless – no profit in trying to repair it, for he hadn’t the time nor the resources. He pulled some cloth from a cabinet and affixed it about his waist in the form of a simple wrap that hung from waist to knees. It was an appropriate costume for a god, despite its simplicity. The wrap left his chest exposed, displaying a body perfected – it had a certain classical elegance to it.
The cabinet also contained a gold-plated necklace. He picked it up and activated its light-bending properties. The device still worked, and bore no needles or other traps. Likely an item with such simple magic had been beneath the Worker’s notice. Raidriar removed the shawl from his face, then put the necklace around his neck.
He turned to inspect himself in the mirror. The necklace projected an illusion around his head, hiding his divine features. The image was that of a regal green mask with dark eyebrows. Larger than life, the jade mask’s features would not change when he spoke.
No, Ausar had been fond of that style of face. Instead, Raidriar settled on the head of the jackal. The ancient symbol had already been old when he was young.
Knowledge of things like that disturbed him, deep within. Those ancient gods . . . they seemed so similar to Deathless. But Raidriar had been alive when the process to create immortals had been discovered. He remembered it. The cold table. The agony of loss. Coming back for the first time . . .
Too much metal. Even still, he remembered that day because of its metal surfaces, reflecting his face . . . and his tears.
Regardless, the first Deathless had been created near that time, and not before. Of this he was reasonably certain. The ancient gods of before his time could not have been Deathless.
But knowing that did not stop him from wondering anyway.
A tall figure darkened the doorway. Raidriar turned, bringing his stolen sword to the side as the newcomer entered. It was a daeril with hauntingly hollow features and a skeletal ribcage that protruded from its skin. It did not attack immediately, but made the sign of an offered challenge.
Raidriar smiled. His Devoted, so civilized, had shown less honor than this brute. The Worker and Devoted alike undoubtedly hoped the daerils would ignore such protocols, but this thing had been created by Raidriar himself. It was better than that.
“It will be an honor to slay you,” Raidriar said, pointing his sword at the creature. “I do enjoy inspecting my handiwork now and then.”
He stepped into the proper stance, and the contest began.
SIRIS RODE in silence.
His horse’s hooves beat a familiar thumping rhythm on the packed earth. A . . . horse. His imprisonment had only been two years. This should not feel so strange for him.
Two years and two thousand lives – many of them very short, a few days at most, a few moments at least. He felt those lives all heaped upon him, like dirt upon a newly buried corpse.
Was he supposed to just move on? Forget the pain, the isolation, the anger? If he had just been Siris, he could almost have done it. But the man he had become in that prison, the Dark Self, was not something so easily forgotten.
“I see you managed to grow more facial hair,” Isa said, riding beside him. “Looks itchy. I’ve always wondered – how do you stuff a beard like that inside a helm? Doesn’t it stick out the breathing holes?”
Siris grunted. They rode through dusty scrubland, broken here and then by plateaus and foothills, with distant mountains behind. He remembered passing through this empty place on his way to the Vault of Tears. It seemed like forever ago.
Isa turned their course along the rim of a large plateau. “Typically,” she said, “it is customary for someone who has been rescued in a dramatic way – such as you just were – to fawn over their rescuer. Joyous exultation and all that.”
Siris rode in silence.
“I can say your part, if you want,” Isa suggested.
He shrugged.
“Very well. ‘Gee golly, thanks for saving me, Isa. I sure am happy you done did that.’”
“‘Done did’?” Siris asked, looking up. “‘Gee golly’?”
“Well, I’m not terribly good at accents in your stupid language, but you’re a farmer boy, aren’t you?”
“No. You know what I am.”
“I do – you’re a hero.”
“That’s not what you said when you first found out I was Deathless.”
“I will admit,” Isa said, “I was surprised.”
“Surprised? You were outraged. Betrayed.” He looked away from her, scanning the hilly scrubland. “I understand. I felt the same way.”
“You are a hero, Whiskers,” she said. She sounded like she was trying to convince them both. “At least, that’s how you’re going to act – because that’s what I’ve made of you.”
He looked at her, frowning. She simply smiled, and then guided her horse into a small canyon.
Siris followed, joining her when she eventually dismounted and stepped up to the far wall of the canyon. She pulled back some scrub brush, revealing a small cavern mouth – a tunnel into the rock. Together, they pulled the dead brush away, making a hole wide enough to bring the horses through.
The inside of the cavern reminded him of growing up in the hills outside a city that had been built within an enormous cavern. This was much smaller, but it smelled like home.
How many lives have I lived? he wondered. My home was not truly my home, no more than a crab’s temporary shell is its home. That’s just a skin to be discarded, once outgrown.
They wound through the tunnel, continuing eastward. Isa got out a rod that glowed like a torch when the top was twisted, but it didn’t let off any heat. One of the wonders of the Deathless, he supposed. Had these things been common to him, once? Why did his kind hoard this sort of knowledge? Wouldn’t life be better for everyone, themselves included, if such wondrous items were part of everyday use?
“What did you mean?” Siris asked. “About you having ‘made’ a hero of me?”
Isa continued through the tunnel without answering. Siris followed, growing annoyed, but stopped moving when he heard a noise. It seemed to be coming from inside the wall. He reached for the sword that Isa had given him, but she waved him down.
Stone ground on stone, and a section of the cavern wall slid back. Scout post, Siris realized, noting the holes in the rock he had mistaken for natural depressions. Someone here could send warning – probably by pulling a string or making some sort of noise that would echo in the cavern – if enemies came through the tunnel.
A youth peeked out of the scout hole. Though the boy wore a sword strapped at his side, he couldn’t have been older than fourteen. He stood up straight and saluted Isa, then glanced at Siris.
“Is it . . . him?” the boy asked.
Isa nodded.
The boy stood up straighter. “I . . . um . . . oh! Sir! Mr. Deathless, sir! I’m Jam.”
Siris glanced at Isa. Behind him, his horse snorted and tugged against the reins. Jam blushed, then fished out an apple, which he tossed to the floor awkwardly, then saluted again. “Sorry, Mr. Deathless, sir! Grummers likes his apples.”
“I see,” Siris said as the horse crunched the apple.
“I’ll tell the others!” Jam said, then scrambled down the tunnel. He soon started yelling. “He’s here! She found him! He’s here!”
“What did you tell them about me?” Siris demanded of Isa.
“The truth,” Isa said. “With some extra . . . extrapolation.”
“‘Extrapolation’?”
She tugged on her horse, continuing. He joined her, the tunnel having widened to the point their horses could walk side by side.
“I thought you were dead,” she said softly. “Killed for good by the Weapon. Then the God King returned . . . but worse. In the past, he’s always kept order – too much order for my tastes, but structure can be a good thing.
“Well, that stopped. He let thugs take over cities, allowed chaos to reign. He seemed angry – like he just wanted everything to burn. I hadn’t thought the world could get worse than the tyranny of his Pantheon in days past, but it could. It did.”
“I’m sorry,” Siris said. “It was my failure that led to this.” That wouldn’t have been the real God King, but an impostor of some sort, sent by the Worker. “What did you do?”
“I fled, of course,” she said, blushing. “Left the God King’s lands, found a safe, free city ruled by a lesser Deathless and her cabal. Good taverns in Lastport. I got a job with an information dealer.”
“That’s what I’d have expected from you. There’s no shame in it.”
“No honor either,” she said softly, then shrugged. “News kept coming in of Raidriar’s lands, bad news. It seemed to be spreading all over, infecting lands nearby. I thought of you, and what might have happened to you . . . so I started telling stories. About you – the Deathless who had fought for us, the Deathless raised by a human mother. The Deathless who had died trying to free men from tyranny.”
She glanced at him. “I made up a few doozies, I’m afraid. Really great stuff. You’re the substance of legends now, Siris. I figured you wouldn’t mind, being dead and all.”
“Not so dead after all.”
“Yeah. I was shocked when the stories started to come back to me changed. They spread faster than an autumn cough, Siris – people were telling them all across the land. They latched onto the stories about you. They were all waiting for something to believe in.
“When the stories returned to me, they’d changed to include the promise that you were going to come back. I guess it fits the trope, you know? The returning hero? Nobody from the old stories ever really dies. There’s always another story. It got me thinking. Had I fled too quickly? Had I given up too easily? So I started to dig. I found what had really happened to you. I started to tell stories of your imprisonment too, and people came to me. Well, one thing led to another . . .”
Ahead, light in the cavern indicated an opening. Indeed, the tunnel ended, revealing a small valley and an entire town nestled between hills. People flooded from log buildings. Barracks, by the look of how many of the men carried swords strapped to their waists.
There were hundreds of people here. All coming to see Siris, calling that “he” had arrived.
“You started a rebellion?” Siris asked, looking to Isa. “In my name?”
“Yeah.”
“You started a rebellion!”
“All right, yes, you don’t have to rub it in.” She grimaced. “Against my better judgment, I took charge. Somebody had to. The idiots were getting themselves strung up, making a ruckus but accomplishing nothing. They needed focus, someone to bring together the malcontents from all the villages, organize them. I figured since I was the fool who started those stories, I should be the one to keep the rebels from getting themselves killed.”
She looked at the oncoming crowd. “Honestly, they don’t have much in the way of wit.” She hesitated. “Heart though . . . they’ve got a whole lot of that, Siris. That they do.”
Siris felt a sense of grimness as he watched the people approach, looking at him with awe, hesitance, expectation. Why should this adoration bother him? He’d been raised as the Sacrifice. He was accustomed to notoriety.
Except . . .
The Dark Self – it knew what to do with followers.
Siris had never been trained for leadership. He was a solitary warrior, a Sacrifice sent to fight and to die. The only part of him that knew anything about leading others was that buried part, those instincts he didn’t fully understand.
It responded to the devotion these rebels showed him.
“Well done,” he said to Isa, then smiled proudly at those who had come. “Well done.”
THE RAIN had grown worse by the time Uriel reached his car. It pounded him as he worked to get the door open, briefcase in one hand, umbrella in the other. He climbed in, the car starting on its own. The two-seater vehicle was intended primarily for commuting. Practical. The numbers made sense.
Adram didn’t drive a practical car. He drove a car that growled when you started it. He bragged about it frequently, talking about how he worked on it himself, tweaking the engine. It didn’t even drive itself – it was old, and considered a classic. That made it exempt from the legislation requiring all cars to have a self-driving mode in case of emergency.
Uriel’s car didn’t growl as it started. It hummed pleasantly, and Beethoven – “Romance for Violin and Orchestra” – started playing as Uriel shook the umbrella and pulled it into the car.
“Hello,” the vehicle said in its sterile voice. “Road conditions are reported dangerous. It is strongly recommended that you engage self-driving mode.”
“Like I’ve ever used anything else,” Uriel said. How could he work on the way home if he had to pay attention to driving? He’d purposely bought a car where you had to fold out the steering wheel if you wanted to drive yourself. He tapped on the display, telling it to drive him home, and then blanked the windshield, which tried to show him news stories. Mary’s work again.
Uriel settled back for the drive as the car pulled out of the parking lot – his was one of the last there, other than Mr. Galath’s limo – and took him through the rain to the freeway. He opened his briefcase and tapped idly on the display inside, retrieving some company health insurance reviews he’d been going over. But found himself too distracted to work.
Mary probably won’t even be there when I arrive, he thought. In this weather, she’ll have gone to get Jori so he doesn’t have to ride his bike home.
A surprise, perhaps? Maybe he could pick up dinner. She often got Thai for him, even though she didn’t like it much. Had she put in the order already? He looked up some places, trying to find which had the best deal, until his car pulled through the splattering rain up to his house. It stopped at the curb.
The curb?
Uriel looked up, frowning. Why was there a car parked in his place on the driveway? A bright red car, bulletlike, old-fashioned and dangerous . . .
Adram’s car.
SIRIS BECAME a leader.
It happened just like that. He gave his Dark Self a little freedom, and it transformed him.
When Isa introduced him to the troops, he knew to nod and commend them on their bravery. He knew to ask the captains if their men were being properly fed, if they needed new boots. He knew to bolster the men with compliments, rather than pointing out that they looked half-trained, that a third of their number saluted with the wrong hand, and that their uniforms didn’t match.
Isa, at his side, relaxed noticeably. “You’re good with them, Whiskers,” she whispered. “A regular dominatrix.”
He raised an eyebrow at her. “Where did you get that word?”
“I read it.”
“What kinds of books have you been reading?”
“Whatever I could find! Not enough people read out here – most of them are illiterate. It’s not easy to find books. I read it, and assumed it meant dominating, commanding . . . like a leader, right? No?”
He smiled. “Not really.”
“Stupid language.” She dug out her notebook and made a notation.
Once the inspection was done, they followed the captains to the rebellion’s version of a command center – a log cabin with maps on the inside walls.
As they entered, one of the men asked Isa where to find the latest scout reports, and she just shrugged. “Why are you asking me?” she said. “Talk to the scouts, dimwit.”
Siris smothered a smile. She was hardly a natural leader – while she was clever, she did not know how to deal with people. Not without insulting them a few times, at least.
The commander of Isa’s “troops” was a weathered, white-haired woman named Lux. Those scars on her face, and the way she scowled perpetually, made her seem part daeril. She hadn’t come to meet him with the others; instead, she looked him up and down as they entered the command center, then snorted.
“Hell take me,” she said. “You really are one of them.”
“You can tell by looking?” Siris said.
“You all look like teenagers,” Lux said. “Pampered teenagers with the baby fat still on you.” She turned toward the maps on one of the walls. “Eyes are wrong, though.”
Curious. She had seen Deathless without their helms or masks on, then? Siris filed away the information. “Too old?” he asked, stepping up beside Lux. Isa joined them.
“Yeah, you know too much. But the greater part is because you’re just too damn confident. I’ve never met a boy your apparent age who is so sure of himself. Arrogant, yes. Confident, no.”
He didn’t feel particularly confident – but the Dark Self was. And, he supposed, she was probably right because of it.
“You’ve had combat experience,” he said.
“Served under Saydhi during the Broken Cliffs campaign. Heard you offed her.”
“I did.”
“Permanently? Gone for good?”
“Yes.”
“That’s not supposed to be possible,” Lux said, still looking at the maps.
“It is now,” Siris said. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? I killed her, and you realized that they could be fought.”
She eyed him. “Know too much,” she said under her breath. “Yeah, definitely one of them.”
And, startled, he realized that he did know too much about her. Not this woman specifically, but her type of person. He had lived for a long, long time. Buried deeply within him was an instinctive understanding of someone like Lux. She’d always fought for Saydhi loyally, counting herself lucky at least to not be one of the poor sods who had to work the fields.
That had built in Lux a certain guilt, perhaps even a resentment. She was happy to not have a worse life, but felt that she profited from the sacrifice of so many others. When Saydhi had fallen, it had come to Lux like a moment of revelation and light. The Deathless could actually die. They weren’t gods.
Siris would bet she had resigned her post that very day.
“What kind of training do your soldiers have?” Siris asked.
“As much as I could give them in six months,” Lux said. “We have done a few raids on the God King’s thugs, killing everyone involved and leaving signs to make it look like wild daerils were behind the attacks. He sent troops and wiped out the nearest batch of those, though, so if we try it again we’ll need a different cover.”
She hesitated.
“That was just training,” she continued. “A skirmish, not a full fight. I worried that anything more would reveal us.” She looked at him. “This is not a rebellion, Deathless.”
“It’s not?”
“No. It’s a desperate group of fools who need something to believe in. If you want a real rebellion, you’re going to need a real army.”
“No,” Siris said. “You’re wrong.”
She cocked an eyebrow at him.
“To have a real rebellion, General,” he said, meeting her gaze, “we don’t need an army. We just need to convince everyone that we have one.”
“A lie.”
“Isa tells me that there is a rising air of malcontent,” Siris said. “We need the people out there – the townsfolk telling stories about oppression, the cobblers who are tired of taxation, the farmers who are starving – to believe that fighting back has even the smallest chance of working. Then you’ll see a rebellion. Do you have any intelligence on the enemy?”
“Some,” she said. “I brought what I could with me when I abandoned my post – some stronghold layouts, troop numbers, things like that. A few of the people who joined us also worked for the Deathless, and they brought information too. That, mixed with what we’ve stolen in our raids, gave us something to work from. It’s random and spotty, though.”
“Bring it to me,” Siris said. “I want everything you have.”
RAIDRIAR DISPATCHED the golem – last in a series of combatants – with reluctance. He had been hoping to recover some of these to serve him. Who knew what resources he would be able to find once free of this place?
But it was no use. The golem had only the most basic of deadminds, and Raidriar could not reason with it. It collapsed, shaking the ground with an awful crunch.
I need to be faster, Raidriar thought, moving deeper into the catacombs beneath the temple that housed his rebirthing chamber. The Worker could be sending more resources. Each moment spent fighting was a costly delay.
He had finally reached the dungeons. Raidriar pushed through the doors, sliding his swords into sheaths at his sides as he did so. He’d stolen these off a particularly well-equipped daeril – one he’d been fond of, unfortunately. Despite his initial pleasure at the contest, this business of fighting through the place had left him depressed. He was like a master huntsman being forced to put down his own loyal hounds.
He counted out three cells in the dungeon, each of which was fitted with a thick, windowless door. Breaking down such a door was beyond him, even with his fit body; instead, he took off his ring. It was a simple loop – the type that fascinated his daerils. They carried his old castoffs and failed experiments with great pride. He looked at the small display on the inside of this one. Seven years and three months. Had he really needed that much healing? That would push this brand-new body to its mid-twenties already.
Normally, he wouldn’t care. He had bodies to spare, and this one – like his others – had been modified to restrict hair and nail growth so that healing would not leave him with an unsightly mangle of a beard.
Yet he didn’t know how many bodies he would have access to in the near future. He might need to keep this one fit, rather than running it ragged, healing it to the point that it grew to middle age in the course of an afternoon.
I will have to be more careful with healing, he thought. His body’s Deathless nature would heal him slowly on its own. Unfortunately, when surrounded by enemies and lacking his armor, he had often needed the ring for a quick burst of restoration.
He shook his head, tucking away his ring in a pouch he had tied at his waist. He then fished out his others. One teleportation ring. That could be useful; it separated into two different loops, and when one was activated, it would teleport the smaller ring to the larger. You could use it to summon a weapon in a moment of need, for example. Unfortunately, the process did not work on living flesh.
He tucked that one away and inspected the third. Constructed of black metal, it looked like iron fresh from the forge. He held it cautiously. They knew so little of the element they called Incarnate Dark. Even the Worker had always seemed wary of it, though he – and his scientists – spoke of it in their usual scholarly way, explaining its import in the universe and its influence on the movement of celestial bodies.
To Raidriar, Incarnate Dark was just another tool. A dangerous tool – in other words, the best kind.
He slid on the ring and summoned from it a small shield of force that fit his palm and fingers like an invisible glove. He felt only a faint tingling. An anticipation of energy to come.
He allowed a tiny amount of that energy to seep through, a fraction of a drop of Darkness Incarnate. His shielded skin reflected the energy – or the not-energy – outward. Raidriar pressed his hand against the wooden door.
The door crumpled.
The darkness pulled everything toward it, ripping the door to its fundamental pieces, sucking them inward. Wood cracked and popped, as if an invisible hand squeezed the sides in with an awful strength. In seconds, the Incarnate Dark had been expended, leaving the door in shambles, the greater portion of it simply . . . gone. It had been sucked through the tiny portal in his ring that was connected – like all of the rings – to a distant power.
The cell now open, Raidriar stepped inside.
URIEL ENTERED his house, laughing to himself. The storm would probably cover his entrance, wouldn’t it? Perhaps he should be more quiet.
He laughed anyway. Of course. He moved up the stairs, leaving wet steps. He pushed open the door to the bedroom. Mary screamed, reaching for blankets. Adram scrambled out of the bed in shock, falling to the floor.
Uriel took off his jacket, shaking the rain free. “You know, this makes sense,” he said, chuckling. “The world makes sense for once. I could actually have guessed this would happen!”
Adram – a look of sheer panic on his face – barreled out of the room, carrying his trousers. Mary was weeping. Why should she cry? She hadn’t been hurt.
Uriel sat down on the bed. “I stayed late too many times, I see. That’s a number. I can add that in a column and see what it creates. If it had been another person in the office talking about his wife, I probably would have noticed immediately what was happening.” He looked toward her. “But it wasn’t another man’s wife. It was you. The flaw was never in the numbers. It’s in me. I can’t see them when you are involved.”
“Uriel . . .” she said, reaching a trembling hand toward him. Below, Adram’s monster of a car roared to life.
“Now, now, don’t worry about me. I don’t have emotions, you see. Adram explained it all. I . . . I don’t . . .” That wetness on his cheeks. Rainwater, obviously. He took a deep breath. “Jori?”
She glanced wildly at the clock. “Jori!”
“I’ll go for him,” Uriel said, standing. “I hope he’s not riding home in this. And then, weren’t we going to have Thai? Something special. For me . . .”
Uriel walked toward the door.
“Uriel . . .” Mary said. “I’m sor–”
“Stop. You don’t get to say that.”
He walked out. Where had his smile gone? The situation really was amazing. Perfect, even. That he should be so oblivious. He–
Tires screeched outside.
TWO FIGURES – dirtied, blinking against the sudden light – huddled inside the cell that Raidriar entered. A stout, bald man stood up on trembling legs, raising a hand toward Raidriar. Then, the man fell to his knees and bowed himself.
“My God,” Eves breathed, “you have returned.”
Excellent. Eves, Raidriar’s High Devoted, head of his priesthood. “Ever known the truth,” Raidriar said, repeating a passcode set up between him and Eves should there ever be a question of Raidriar’s authenticity. Because of the possibility of Soulless copies, it seemed wise to have such a protocol in place.
Eves’s shoulders relaxed and he looked up. “It is you. Oh, great master. I have failed.”
“I noticed.” Raidriar waved for Eves and his companion, a younger man, to rise. “How complete is the impostor’s domination?”
“I do not know, great master. I was not suspicious of the creature at first. It wasn’t until the second day that I demanded the sign from him. When he could not produce it, I tried to raise the Devoted and Seringal against him. Great master, my rival among the Devoted – Macrom – was ready, and he turned them all against me.”
“Curious,” the God King said. “So he was informed of the plot ahead of time.”
“It seems that way.”
The Worker had found a way to communicate while imprisoned. Had he led Ausar to search him out there in the first place?
The answer was obvious. Of course he had.
“Macrom had been whispering poison to the others for some time,” Eves said. “We who remained loyal fought them, but most of the Seringal sided with the impostor. All that remain of your true Devoted are myself and young Douze. We have been imprisoned here for months upon months, great master. Perhaps years . . .”
Raidriar grunted. He had hoped that Eves would at least have some information for him.
“Great master?” Eves asked as the other Devoted bowed and gave obeisance. “Macrom . . . Did you slaughter him in a particularly painful way?” Eves sounded hopeful.
“Thin fellow?” Raidriar asked. “Upturned nose?”
“That’s him, great master.”
“Hmmm. I may have actually left that one alive. I don’t fully remember.”
“That is . . . somewhat uncharacteristic of you, great master.”
“I haven’t entirely been myself, lately,” Raidriar said, stepping through the mangled remains of the door back into the dungeon corridor. The two Devoted followed, Eves limping noticeably. His robe was stained from old blood and ripped on the left side – the sign of a wound that had long since healed. That was good to see. Raidriar would have been annoyed to find his High Devoted unwounded. Eves should not have been taken alive without a fight.
“Great master,” Eves said, barely keeping pace. “We two are weak, for it has been very long since you vanished, at least by the reckoning of mortals. You deserve much better servants than myself and this one. That stated, great master, I offer my most sincere prayer of thankfulness to you for our rescue. I did not give up hope during the long, dark days, for your triumph was assured. I did, however, worry that I would not be worthy to be released, following my failure.”
Raidriar waved an indifferent hand as they walked the quiet hallways. “You have proven useful in the past, Eves.”
“Thank you, great master.”
“Besides, I’m fond of you. You remind me of your grandfather.”
“Toornik? Great master . . . didn’t you execute him?”
“Hmm? Oh, yes. Sword through the gut after he tried to embezzle tax monies, if I recall. But if I hadn’t liked him, I’d have hanged him by his ankles in the sun and let him starve.”
“Ah, of course.”
The catacombs had grown suspiciously silent. Raidriar frowned, expecting more daerils – or even several Seringals – to appear and challenge him. No further enemies appeared. Surely he hadn’t yet slain everyone in the temple.
No challengers presented themselves as he and his Devoted approached the stone-walled core at the center of the temple. Here, a burnished wall of reflective steel was inlaid with an etched mural depicting Raidriar’s glory.
The God King stopped before it. When had this etching been made again? Two, three thousand years back?
That’s right, he thought, dredging the depths of his organic memory. That blind sculptor who etched by touch. He had taken seventeen years to create this etching. It was exquisite. I really should have visited this more often, he thought as he tore a hole through it with the Incarnate Dark.
Beyond lay silvered surfaces. Like the old days – metal everywhere. He entered, his Devoted following with heads bowed in reverence. Spiderlike machines scuttled along the walls and the draping cords – those tiny machines were the caretakers of this place, this throwback to another time. A far worse time, when men lacked direction and gods were things only found in books. A time that had proven that mankind was incapable of self-rule.
Raidriar approached a mirror that was hooked to a central hub of wires and steel. It was dust-free, thanks to the caretakers, and the mirror . . . the monitor, as they used to be called . . . turned on when he touched it. He tapped slowly at first. How long had it been since he had been forced to use a touch interface for longer than a few taps?
Fortunately, those memories were secure and pristine. He reversed the Worker’s lockout, at least for this one facility. He couldn’t expand his influence farther, unfortunately. The same fail-safes that allowed him to physically take control here prevented him from doing so remotely for his other palaces, rebirthing chambers, barracks, and castles.
Still, it was something. Now that he had full control of this facility, a quick survey of the place showed him that many of the traitorous Devoted and soldiers had gathered in the rebirthing chamber, where he had left their leader. That man slumped in a chair, conscious again, as the others ministered to him. A dozen or two daerils guarded the approach to the room.
Raidriar shook his head. Cowards. A flick of the screen locked them in that room. Another locked the daerils in, preventing them from escaping their hallway. For good measure, he locked all of the other doors in the temple, trapping the rest of the Devoted and the soldiers in their quarters.
These, he gassed to death. There was no such option for the rebirthing chamber, unfortunately.
“Wait,” a voice asked from behind. The Devoted who had been imprisoned with Eves. “Great master? There are ways to release poisonous gas into the chambers of the Devoted? Why would you need something like that?”
“To kill them, obviously.” Raidriar inspected the fellow. Young and narrow-faced, he had very large ears and a malnourished build.
“But,” the Devoted continued, “I mean . . .” He paled, realizing that Raidriar’s jackal-eyed gaze was still on him. He gulped audibly and retreated to the other side of the room.
Nearby, Eves sighed audibly. “I’m sorry about Douze, great master. He’s my sister’s son. I’m not entirely certain he’s suited to your priesthood, but what can one do?”
Raidriar turned back to the terminal, inspecting the state of his empire. It was not encouraging. Since he’d been gone, the Worker had assumed thorough and complete control. Key Devoted and other officials had been replaced and protocols had been set up, subtly, to prevent Raidriar from retaking power. The prophecies were one method, but he found others. His castles and governmental offices had enforced orders for communication silence. Even with control of this facility, he wouldn’t be able to contact others to reestablish his authority. Information could go out from the false God King, and it could go back to him, but the various substations could not contact one another.
But why? Raidriar thought as he searched this station’s records for what little information he could find about the rest of the empire. The other members of the Pantheon . . . wait, what was this? Insults and offenses. The Worker had systematically used Raidriar’s Soulless to alienate all his former allies.
The Worker had gone too far. His empire was crumbling. The policy of isolation mixed with over-insistent demands by the Soulless, and the result was chaos. Raidriar’s lands fracturing, despotic worms – lesser Deathless – seizing territory and grabbing what they could. Villages starving, bandits running wild, untamed daerils raiding government officials . . .
Why would the Worker do this? Why seize the empire, only to abandon it to chaos? The Pantheon could have been a great resource to him, but instead the Worker threw them aside. Isolating the different stations made it difficult for Raidriar to take control, but it also made running the empire practically impossible.
He throws away so much just to hinder me, Raidriar thought. I should be flattered.
He was not. The move did not make sense; the Worker couldn’t have known Raidriar would escape. What was happening here . . . it was insanity.
But the Worker was not insane. He was clever, subtle, and brilliant. Raidriar’s confusion meant that the Worker’s plots were beyond him. Raidriar was too far behind to even grasp what his enemy was doing.
That terrified him.
He checked on a few more items – including his secret kingdom to the south, where he was called by different names. Excellent. That seemed to be untouched. If all went very poorly, he could travel there and rebuild.
He would rather not. It would mean abandoning this empire, admitting defeat, and allowing the Worker to drive this realm into the ground.
Raidriar memorized what he felt he would need from the information, then set the machine to wipe itself. He took his Devoted from this holy hub, stepping out as the spiderlike keepers began to deactivate and drop from walls and wires. They clicked against the ground like falling coins.
He walked from the temple structure toward the sunlight, traveling down a long tunnel that would open onto the plains beyond. How could he reclaim his empire? He would need resources, allies. Unfortunately, going to the other Deathless would be dangerous. They would see him as weak. Beyond that, he wasn’t certain any of them would be all that useful against the Worker. The creature would have them all in hand, and would have prepared for Raidriar to try turning them.
Raidriar needed to do something more unexpected than that–
Thump.
He stopped, looking up out of the metallic tunnel. Something blocked the sunlit sky just outside, casting an enormous shadow. A four-legged monster with tattered wings – half machine, half rotting flesh. No artistry to it at all.
Raidriar sneered. At least he now knew why there had been no further resistance. The Worker had sent this beast. It meant that Raidriar’s escape had indeed been noted, and his edge – if he’d ever had one – was no more.
Bother.
The beast smashed a limb down, crushing the tunnel opening. Raidriar rolled free, weapons out. He heard a pathetic scream from behind. The two Devoted being crushed. Raidriar growled, launching himself forward, trying to get beneath the beast’s four stubby legs. Monsters like this had trouble if you could get underneath them . . .
A large mouth gaped on the bottom of the beast’s body, full of fangs and dripping drool. Now that was just plain wrong. The beast lurched downward, trying to shove him into the maw. Raidriar dodged away. The thing left chunks of decaying flesh on the ground where it scraped and smashed.
“At least,” Raidriar said, “send something of beauty to try to kill me!”
This was an insult – and knowing the Worker, a deliberate one. In addition, there were likely traps set up at other rebirthing chambers. If Raidriar died here, when he awoke . . .
He’d just have to avoid being killed. Raidriar growled as the thing snapped at him with its proper mouth – not the one on its underside, but the one at the end of its long neck. The creature looked like a dragon out of fanciful mythology – some of the Deathless were positively neurotic about creating such things. Only its skin was more leathery than scaled, and along with its long, clawed hands it had four trunklike legs. They’d probably used an elephant as a base, grafting on wings, clawed forearms, and a sinuous neck.
Honestly. Q.I.P. mutants and creations were supposed to make sense, supposed to look dangerous and deadly – not horrifying and monstrous. There was a difference.
As the abomination swiped a clawed hand at him, Raidriar twisted his sword deftly and sheared free a few of the clawed fingers. The machine part of the beast – a large section of its back that leaked ichor – glowed with lights, and the beast screeched in anger. Raidriar dodged another snapping hand.
The head is a distraction, he thought. It’s kept alive by machinery, not by a brain. A kind of undeath.
Raidriar sheathed one sword, then reached into his pouch and fished out the teleportation ring. Then, he raised his blade and dashed at the beast.
“I am not some peasant to be toyed with!” Raidriar shouted.
He dodged under the creature’s inevitable swing, then leaped, slamming his sword into the beast’s leathery side. He used that handhold to heave, pulling himself upward to scramble onto the monster’s back.
Here, he whipped out his other sword. The thing lurched.
“I am not an irritation!” Raidriar rammed his second blade into the monster’s back, using that for a handhold as the thing thrashed and lurched. It smelled awful.
“I am a God,” he shouted, rolling across the beast’s back and slapping the key of the teleportation ring against the machinery keeping the monster alive.
It thrashed again, throwing him free. He slammed to the ground nearby with a grunt, ribs cracking. He rolled over, then took the second half of the teleportation ring and hurled it while activating its summoning property.
The machinery vanished from the beast’s back in a flash of light, then it appeared nearby, teleported to the thrown ring. Only non-living matter could travel with the ring, after all.
The monster dropped with a thump, ichor spilling from the hole.
Raidriar groaned, rolling to his knees. That was the problem with these terrible hybrids. Not organic enough to be considered fully alive, but not machine enough to have proper shielding. He lurched to his feet and walked to the machinery that he had teleported, a lump of metal and wires about the size of a small table. He found the lens, through which he knew the Worker would be watching.
“These are my lands,” Raidriar hissed, leaning in. “And these are my people. Remember that, Worker. You do not take what is mine.”
He picked up a rock and smashed the lens with a swift motion.
THIS, SIRIS thought, holding up the next sheet of paper, does not make sense.
Isa was right. The brutality in the God King’s lands was astonishing. Raidriar’s empire was declining rapidly. Barely any coordination between its pieces, local minor Deathless taking up dominion of their little fiefdoms and ignoring decrees from the fake God King, villages starving because shipping had broken down.
He could have fixed this easily, Siris thought, turning to the next report. It’s like he doesn’t care.
A knock sounded at the door. Siris looked up from his reports and maps. He sat in the top room of the command center. It had its own window, which he left open to the cool mountain breeze.
The newcomer was a woman in an apron and a dark grey cotton dress. Nice clothing, for a peasant. She was one of the cooks, likely someone who had run from direct Deathless employ.
“Mr. Deathless, sir?” she asked from the doorway.
“Don’t call me Deathless,” Siris said, smiling. “It’s nothing for me to be proud of. I’m Siris.”
“Siris, sir,” she said, then curtsied. She was one of several dozen who had come to him during the last few hours. Isa was sending them up, he assumed. Soldiers, grooms, the town chandler, and now a cook.
The Dark Self was furious at the interruption, but it adapted quickly. He would need the good will of his minions.
They aren’t minions, Siris told himself forcibly. Hell take him . . . the more he leaned upon the Dark Self, the more those kinds of thoughts crept into his mind.
“What can I do for you?” Siris asked.
“I just wanted to see you,” she said. “With my own eyes.” She looked at him adoringly.
The Dark Self was pleased.
“You’re really going to kill him?” the woman asked. “The God King?”
“I’ve killed him already,” Siris said. “Hundreds of times. I’m going to do something better. I’m going to free us all.”
And after that, he’d be the only remaining Deathless.
She withdrew, and Siris settled back, disturbed at the realization of how desperately he wanted to be the only living Deathless. How much could he trust himself? Once, he’d blamed these instincts on the Infinity Blade, assuming that it was corrupting him. The truth was far more disturbing. There was no corruption – no exterior object to blame. This was him.
The piece of him that knew how to lead, how to inspire men and make them eager to follow, was also the piece that had oppressed and destroyed.
Another sound distracted him from his reports, but this time it wasn’t someone at the door. It came from outside. Siris tried to work, but the boiling dread of the Dark Self – mixed with his frustration at the Worker’s unseen plots – kept him from being able to focus.
Instead, he rose and went to the balcony to investigate the sound – that of children playing. He stood up above, watching them for a time, then glanced at the steps going down. The balcony had its own set, of course. Isa ran this place. There would always be a back way out of any building she ordered built.
The Dark Self wanted him to get back to his studies. So, defiant, he did not.
He started down the steps instead.
ISA SHOVELED soup into her mouth, eating quickly. There was so much to do, now that Siris was actually back. So many people she needed to make sure he met, so many plans he needed to know.
She ate quickly. Little time could be spared for food, even good food like this. The rebellion ate well; she saw to that. She’d keep these people strong.
When the cook returned from upstairs, she sent the next man in line – the last one. A lanky soldier named Drel that the others looked up to. She’d found him raiding Deathless on his own, spreading stories of Siris. Now he’d get to meet the real thing.
She nodded, sending him up the steps. Before she could return to her food, however, she heard a familiar voice coming from the front of the building.
“Hereherehereherehere!” She could barely separate the words one from another. She smiled and stood as TEL scrambled into the room.
The thing – it wasn’t really a he, though she often thought of it that way – wore the shape of a rabbit. A rabbit made completely of entwined brambles, colored like dead brush. It crackled as TEL moved, hopping through the door at a bolt.
“Stop!” she snapped at the thing.
“Master has returned,” TEL said. “Master lives. Oh, this is very good. Very good.”
The brambles suddenly collapsed and a small man-shaped thing made out of wood – matching the floor – crawled out of what was left. TEL took the substance of things he touched, and changed shape at will.
She kept feeling she should be able to find a way to use that more than she did. The thing didn’t like to listen to her, however. She could barely get it to do scouting duty.
“He’s upstairs,” Isa said. “But give him time to get done with the person I just sent up.”
“How much does he remember?” TEL asked, dancing from one foot to the other, like a child needing to piss. “Is it bad, very bad?”
“I don’t know,” Isa said.
He seemed different from the man she remembered – but then again, it had been two years.
“I need to speak with him,” TEL said, moving toward the stairs. She stepped up to stop him, but hesitated as boots thumped on the steps.
“Back so quickly?” Isa asked Drel as he appeared on the steps.
“Well, he’s . . . um, not up there.”
“What?”
“He’s not up there, sir.”
She hated being called “sir.” “My Lady” was far worse, though. She was not, and had never wanted to be, a lady. Confused, Isa stalked up the steps. TEL pushed past her, scrambling up more quickly.
Siris wasn’t in his room. Isa felt a moment of panic. Had an assassin attacked?
Don’t be an idiot, she thought at herself, entering the room. He’s immortal. Who cares about assassins?
She crossed the room, and noticed the door to the balcony cracked open. TEL joined her as she stepped outside.
“So you’re saying,” Siris said from down below, “that being ‘it’ is a mark of dishonor? But if only one person can be ‘it,’ is the position not one of distinction and exclusivity?”
A child’s voice replied. “You’ve gotta chase people when you’re it.”
“And in so doing, emulate the predator,” Siris’s voice replied. “Rather than the prey. Why doesn’t everyone want to be this ‘it’? That seems the preferred mode to me.”
“If everyone wanted to be it,” another young voice said, “then the game would be stupid!”
“But–”
“Just run, mister!” another child said.
Giggling followed. TEL moved toward the steps, but Isa stooped and grabbed him. “Wait a moment,” she ordered quietly.
Amazingly, he obeyed. Isa moved to the edge of the balcony, and found Siris – immortal, Deathless, Sacrifice, and possibly the world’s greatest living swordsman – playing a game of tag with various children of camp.
Isa leaned down, crossing her arms on the balcony railing, watching. Seeing him again had raised an entire host of emotions. Hope that this thing she had begun might actually have a chance at success. Embarrassment for the way she’d treated Siris, all those months ago.
And also hatred and betrayal, deep down. Emotions she didn’t like, but which she also couldn’t control. He was Deathless.
Watching him play tag helped change some of those feelings.
He played for a long while, though eventually the children ran at the dinner announcement. Siris watched them go, wiping his brow, then turned to climb the balcony steps. Only then did he see her.
He stopped halfway up. “Oh! Um.” He looked over his shoulder at the children. “I never–”
“‘Never got to play games as a child,’” Isa said. “I know.”
“Not that I remember, anyway,” he said, climbing the steps to join her. “TEL!” he said, noticing the small creature for the first time.
Isa cocked her eye as Siris ran up. He was more excited to see the golem than he had been to see her? It was hard not to feel a little offended by that.
“Master, you’ve been reborn too many times,” TEL said. “Oh, this is bad.”
“It is bad and good, TEL,” Siris said, sighing. He reached the top of the balcony, and turned to watch the children as they ran toward the dining hall.
“Isa,” he said. “Tell me of Siris.”
“What? Yourself?”
He nodded.
“Uh . . . you’re kind of strange? You are also Deathless, and rather tall. And . . .”
“No,” he said. “Tell me of the man they think I am. Tell me what you told them, the ‘extrapolations,’ as you put them. Tell me the person I need to be.”
She collected herself, gathering her thoughts. “You want stories of Siris, do you?” she began. “Stories of the Deathless who fought for ordinary men?”
He looked to her quizzically.
“It’s how I start,” she said. “You want to hear it as they did? The stories? Well, stories I have. Too many stories. Stories like rats in the wheat, fat and glutted upon my thoughts and memories. It’s time that you heard them.”
URIEL CRADLED his son’s limp body. Rain pelted him. Tears from far above.
Adram stood to the side, a trail of blood washing from the cut on his head and streaming down his face. He raised his hands beside his head, blabbering nonsense, eyes wide.
“Jori . . . Jori . . .” Uriel whispered, shaking.
“I didn’t see him!” Adram screamed. “The rain! I couldn’t see him!”
The too-red car rested with one tire up on the curb, the other on the mangled remains of Jori’s bicycle.
“This is your fault, Uriel!” Adram bellowed into the rain. “You . . . you should have stayed at work! You were supposed to stay late! You did this! You forced this!”
“Yes. I did.” Uriel laid down the broken body. “Cause and effect.”
“Yeah . . .” Adram said. “Cause . . . cause and effect . . .”
“No emotions,” Uriel said, rising.
Killing a man turned out to be more difficult than Uriel would have expected. Even as Uriel had Adram pinned up against the car, hands around his neck, the man fought back. Adram was wounded, dazed from the wreck, but he was still stronger than Uriel and managed to batter his way free.
As he was running away, Adram slipped on the grass, just as Uriel noticed a large wrench in the passenger seat of the man’s car. Presumably for “tweaking the engine,” as Adram always said. Uriel picked it up, hefting it, feeling its weight. It would do for fixing other problems.
As Adram scrambled to get to his feet, Uriel stepped behind him and slammed the weapon down. Heavy as the wrench felt, it still took a good five hits to break the man’s skull open.
Fortunately, the rain washed the blood away. That kept things neater. Cleaner.
RAIDRIAR FIDDLED with the machine parts of the abomination he’d slain. Behind him, the carcass slumped where it had fallen, mouth open, one tattered wing toward the air. Teeth had begun to fall out of the mouth with a sound like dropping pebbles. Lacking the machinery to sustain it, the thing was literally falling apart.
Raidriar pulled out some wires. This was why he’d always preferred independent organic minions, crafted through Q.I.P. mutation. The best of them could even breed true. Independent, capable of thought. That was true creation. This sloppy piece, this was nothing more than a monument to mediocrity.
Eves approached. The High Devoted bore a few new scratches on his face, but had otherwise survived the collapse of the tunnel. His nephew, however, was another matter.
“Your funeral service was properly morose, I presume,” Raidriar said, twisting two wires together.
“I commended his spirit to your care, great master,” Eves said softly. “Your wisdom was profound in letting him survive to see your return before taking him.”
Raidriar grunted, twisting the ring from his pouch into the center of the wires. He eyed the Devoted.
“It was for the best, Eves,” he said.
“Great master?”
“This way, the lad fell in battle,” Raidriar said. “Frankly, he was annoying, and I was probably going to execute him eventually. At least this way, he had an honorable death.”
“I suppose, master,” Eves said. “It’s just . . . I don’t know what I’ll tell my sister . . .”
“When you talk to her, give her my condolences,” Raidriar said. “And send her something from me. A basket of fruit or some such.” What was the proper gift for the death of a mortal, these days? He could never keep up with their traditions, which were nearly as fleeting as the lives of the mortals themselves.
Raidriar reattached one final wire, then stood up. He backed away from the machine.
“You will want to take shelter,” he noted to Eves.
The Devoted ran. Smart man. Raidriar stepped away more carefully, clasping his hands behind his back – though he wore his healing ring in case anything went wrong – and watching patiently. The machine sputtered and sparked, then the modified energy output spurted a column of pure darkness directly at the structure ahead.
Raidriar’s Seventh Temple of Reincarnation was marked by calm rocks and a field of green bamboo set into the tops of the hills here. It shook, the entire structure groaning, then collapsed upon itself like crumpling paper. Rocks and stones broke free, crashing to the ground as the core of the hill itself was swallowed by the Incarnate Dark.
The machine finally sputtered and died, leaving nothing behind but a gouge in the landscape where the temple had once sat. Raidriar strolled forward, still bare-chested, wearing sandals he’d stolen from a dead daeril. The machinery he’d worked on had become encrusted with a material like obsidian.
Eves stumbled up hesitantly beside him, looking from the glassy machine to the hole in the hillside.
“When the Worker sends minions to investigate,” Raidriar said, “they will find this symbol of my rage. And, of course, your vengeance upon my fallen Devoted is complete.”
“Thank you, great master. It was . . . satisfying to observe.”
Raidriar folded his arms. He had done this, in part, because he felt it was unexpected. Under most circumstances, in this position he would have secured this location and used it to start rebuilding his empire. The Worker would expect that to be his move, and would plan for it.
Hopefully, this would send a message directly to the Worker. You cannot anticipate me.
But now what?
He needed allies, resources. He needed to slay the Soulless who sat upon his throne and reclaim the Infinity Blade.
He needed to do the unexpected. The unanticipated. Something daring, something that the Worker would never consider. Fortunately, a plan had already started to blossom in Raidriar’s mind.
He smiled. “Come, Eves,” he said, turning and walking away. “We have an appointment with an old friend, and I would not wish to be late.”
SIRIS SCOOPED out the last bite of goopy violet pie and shoved it into his mouth.
He’d spent much of his youth worrying about maintaining peak physique for fighting the God King – only to discover that as a Deathless, his body would basically keep itself that way on its own. Without help. True, he had an odd body for a Deathless – he still didn’t completely understand what had been done to make him be reborn as a child, rather than an adult, all those times. But it was still hard not to feel cheated by his youth spent training all the time. He should have allowed himself to relax, now and then.
He settled back, savoring the flavor of the pie. TEL sat next to his chair, wearing a metallic shape almost doglike in appearance. The little construct seemed very happy to have Siris back.
It felt nice to be wanted. Not as the Sacrifice, or as the Deathless who would save humankind. Just as himself. As the day grew long, he’d lit an oil lamp and turned back to his research on the rebellion’s status.
He felt more . . . himself than he had in some time. Playing with children, eating pies – these were things that made his Dark Self retreat. The experiences actually felt new to him. That was surprising, for during the months since he’d realized he was Deathless, he’d started to assume that he’d done everything in his life, even if he couldn’t remember most of it.
Experiences like these, however, shocked him in their freshness. Many activities were faintly familiar to him, but playing games with the children . . . no haunting sense of recollection, no instincts speaking to him from a time before.
Could it be that he’d lived thousands of years, but never taken the time to do anything purely fun? Could he have lived as a Deathless and never eaten everberry pie, or swung on a tire swing, or gone swimming in a warm summer lake?
He held up the scout reports and forced himself to study the facts they showed. A crumbling empire, a Deathless who didn’t seem to care about ruling.
He could play, he could eat, but he couldn’t let those activities only define him. He had work to do. So what was the Worker doing? What could Siris learn from his actions?
On one hand, Siris was pleased to see the Worker so obviously distracted. It gave Siris’s rebellion a chance. They might be able to gain enough momentum, raise support among the people. Perhaps by the time the Worker realized what had happened, there would be no stopping them. Deathless were immortal, yes, but they still fell in combat. They could be pulled down by a half-dozen soldiers, forced to reincarnate. They could be bound, held captive. They could be defeated, even if they couldn’t be killed.
They were not nearly as dominant as the people believed. Fear and tradition kept the people in check more than anything else.
So Siris was happy to see this chance. But it also worried him. If the Worker of Secrets wasn’t focused on administering and ruling his empire, then what was he doing? And just how much should Siris fear it?
Wait a moment . . . Siris hesitated on a page, which was a map stolen by one of the people who had fled the Deathless. Siris held it up, noting the list – written in old Deathless script – of what the facility contained. One item on the list struck him.
He then flipped through the stack of papers, searching out a list of the God King’s strongholds that Lux had described. Underneath each one was a scout report on its particular defenses. Lux had planned to attack one of these next, to steal weapons, rings, equipment – but she had hesitated, worried about retaliation.
The facility that Siris had noticed was isolated, infrequently supplied. It seemed to have been completely forgotten by the Worker. Could he really have left something so important unguarded?
This facility . . . Siris thought, instantly understanding the implications. This is what we need.
The Dark Self moved within him. Siris felt a chill. It wanted to go here. Wanted that facility, and badly.
A knock came on the door. Siris lowered the papers quickly, startled, ashamed – though he doubted anyone else in the valley could read the symbols on this particular map.
Isa stood in the doorway, leaning against the frame. She still wore her leathers, as if for fighting, her arms folded, hair in a simple tail. She always seemed ready to take off in a moment, prepared – even anxious – to be on her way. Settling down here, taking charge, must have been very difficult for her.
“Well?” she asked.
“It’s a mess,” Siris said with a grimace, waving his hand over the piles of notes.
“I meant the pie.”
“Oh.” He looked at the empty plate. “Well, it all kind of . . . vanished.” He scratched at the side of his head. “I might need another one to really make a determination.”
Isa snorted, strolling into the room, coming to look over his shoulder at the papers he’d been studying.
“What you told me about the army is true,” he said with a sigh. “Our soldiers are a determined group, but we have a long way to go before we can become a realistic threat to the Deathless.”
“Yeah,” she said, speaking softly.
“If we’re going to grow this rebellion,” Siris said, “you and I will be doing a lot of the work. I’ll need you to infiltrate, gather information, pry secrets from Deathless hands.”
“Good,” she said. “That’s a whole lot more appealing than acting as a nursemaid to this lot. They come to me asking about everything. Hell take me . . . if I have to listen to one more man whine about his bunkmate snoring, I’m seriously going to start stabbing something.”
She settled down at the table to his right, crossing her arms on top of the stack of maps.
“You really think we can do this?” he asked. “Lead a rebellion? Change the world?”
“No,” she said. “But I think you can.”
He settled back. “You’re not starting to believe your own stories, are you? Me slaying dragons, rescuing thousands of people, murdering Deathless while swinging on ropes from palace to palace . . .”
She smiled. “No. But I’ve seen you with them, Siris. You are a leader. A real leader.”
The Dark Self stirred, and Siris felt satisfaction from it. It knew. It knew he needed it.
No. He knew. He had to stop thinking of it as a different thing from himself. The Dark Self was him, not some alien thing. For all he wanted to play with children and eat pies, that wouldn’t save his people. Getting to this facility on the paper in front of him . . . that would give him a chance.
“I guess the greater truth is,” Isa said, “it’s not important if we win or not.”
He looked up at her.
“Something has to change, Siris,” she said. “The world, the people in it . . . Well, sitting around with my nose in a mug, not looking at anything happening around me – that’s not working for me anymore. So we’re going to fight instead. You’re going to lead, and I’m going to . . . well, do whatever the hell it is I do.”
Siris nodded, meeting her eyes. “You’ve changed.”
“It’s been over two years.” She looked back at him, defiant at first, but then relaxing. He found himself remembering the days – short though they had been – that he’d spent with her. Days he had sincerely enjoyed.
Her hands rested a few inches from his own. She moved one closer to his.
“I’ve changed too,” he warned. “Those years in the prison, they were . . . difficult.”
“I can believe it. I wasn’t expecting things to just pick up where they left off. Hell, you’re still Deathless, and . . . Well, what I did wasn’t about us. Not entirely, at least. It was as much about those people down below.”
“Thank you,” Siris said, resting his hand on hers. “Thank you for coming for me. You don’t know what being trapped in there was doing to me, Isa. I don’t care about your reasons. Just . . . thank you.”
She nodded.
“There’s a problem, though. I’m not good at leadership.”
“Sure you are. They–”
“I’m not, Isa. I grew up isolated, treated as a doomed Sacrifice, forced to practice swordsmanship instead of spending time with others my age. I know nothing about leadership.”
She frowned.
“Everything I know about being a leader,” he said, “comes from somewhere else. Other instincts. Not me – or at least, not the me I want to encourage. If I’m to lead here, I’m going to be relying upon the methods of our enemies.”
“We can’t fight a war with brave songs and good intentions, Siris. You’re our weapon. They forged you, yes, but we can use that.” She hesitated. “And I trust you.”
Hell take me . . . He met her eyes again. Then, making a decision, he slipped a paper off the stack – the map with the facility he’d been looking at earlier.
“Then we’re going to strike here,” he said. “How soon can the men be ready?”
“Immediately.”
LESS THAN a week later, Siris crept along the shelf of rock, following Isa and two members of her strike team. He tried not to look over the ledge’s side to his left, or at the sheer drop there.
He wasn’t certain what would happen if he died falling off that cliff. He couldn’t awaken at the rebirthing chamber near Saydhi’s lands, the place where Isa had taken him over two years ago. That had been destroyed by the Worker.
Perhaps his soul would find another rebirthing chamber. More likely, he’d end up lying broken on those rocks below until his Deathless body regenerated and he woke up. But a third possibility worried him more than the other two – the possibility that he’d be reborn as a child again, as he’d done so many times during his centuries as the Sacrifice. He had grown accustomed to – though not particularly comfortable with – this life as a Deathless. Losing his memory again, his identity, frightened him.
It frightened the Dark Self even more.
Isa held up a gloved hand ahead, and the team stopped. The two other men with them – Isa had introduced them as Dynn and Terr, expert scouts – were as silent as she was. Siris was amazed at how they could move without their steps making sounds on the rock.
Siris wasn’t as good as they, but fortunately he wasn’t some lumbering lout either. Apparently, Ausar had been reasonably accomplished at stealth. Perhaps thousands upon thousands of years of life left one reasonably accomplished at just about everything.
Isa moved on ahead alone, leaving Siris with Dynn and Terr, all three crouching on the ledge. A cool wind gusted over them, and Siris settled himself to wait, one gloved hand against the mountainside to his right, the other gripping the edge of the pathway to his left. He could feel the sharp rock of the ledge through his glove; the thing felt frail to be supporting all four of them.
Their week of travel had brought them high in the mountains, away from what passed for civilization in the God King’s lands. Siris’s breath puffed in front of him. He wore his helm strapped to his back, and was clothed in supple leathers with a tight chain shirt. The bulk of their raiding force – almost a hundred strong – waited below with Lux, closer to the front of the stronghold. Hopefully, traveling at night and eschewing cookfires had allowed them to approach unnoticed.
The sky was starting to dim; they would attack at dusk, as Lux had suggested. It would be light enough for his troops not to need torches, but late enough in the day that the guards might be drowsy from long hours on duty.
As they waited for Isa to return, Terr turned to Siris. Lanky and mostly bald, he had an oval face and an angular nose. He wore assault armor, tight chain and a breastplate, manufactured light and strong, Deathless style.
Terr looked Siris up and down. These two scouts had spent most of the trip scouting ahead. “You really don’t look like much, you know,” Terr said softly. “Without the helm. Just a regular guy.”
“Thank you,” Siris said.
Terr cocked an eyebrow. Not the answer he’d been expecting, apparently.
“Is it boring?” Terr asked.
“What? Waiting?”
“No. Life. Being thousands of years old. Doesn’t it get dull, after a while?”
“I don’t remember any of it,” Siris said.
“Nothing?”
Siris shook his head. “Not before this life.”
“A Deathless with no experience. What good are you, then?”
“Draw your sword and I’ll show you.”
“Hush, you two,” Dynn said, glancing back at them. He immediately blushed. “I mean, hush, Terr. And Lord Deathless, if you don’t mind.”
Siris smiled at the way Terr rolled his eyes; there seemed a familiarity between the two of them. Brothers, he decided, though they didn’t share much family resemblance.
Isa prowled back to them. “No guards on our direct path,” she said. “But be careful anyway. They have guards on the tops of the fortress, and the Deathless like to set daeril guards hiding in the least expected of places.”
They continued forward, rounding the mountain cliffs, approaching a stronghold set into the snowy heights, like a slab of iron deposited from orbit.
Orbit, Siris thought. I barely know what that means. A word from the old days, uncovered in his mind like last fall’s leaves.
Their path led around to the back of the iron fortress. Lux and the others would be making their way up the main incline, but with those murder-holes in the face of the fortress, charging the front would be suicide. They needed to get the gates open and hopefully distract the archers inside.
Siris and his team buckled themselves together with ropes, then began a careful scale up and around to the upper back of the fortress. Siris spotted a few guards on the ramparts, walking back and forth, but they mostly kept their eyes forward. Hopefully, in the dusk, they’d miss the small figures climbing along the cliff face.
Not enough guards, Siris thought. The Dark Self knew. There should have been more up there.
“This feels like a trap,” he whispered to Isa as they scaled down the rock face, shadowed by the setting sun. They came down to another ledge.
She nodded, but said nothing more. The four of them rounded the back of the fortress. They didn’t go to the ramparts – that would be suicide. Instead, they made their way to the back right corner of the fortress, about halfway up its side. Steel walls blocked their way into the building. A small window just above – far too small to slip through – indicated there was a room here.
The brothers hung back as the rear guard, leaving Isa and Siris to cover the last distance to the fortress on their own. They kept low, beneath the window. Once they arrived, Isa peeked up, then ducked back down. She nodded. The room beyond was empty.
Siris took a deep breath, pulling out a glove and gauntlet, with a ring affixed to the finger. He slid it on, then made a fist.
“You sure you can handle this?” Isa asked.
“Sure. I’ve used the other rings. How hard can this one be?”
She gave him a flat look. “I’ve seen entire villages sucked into one drop of Incarnate Dark, Siris.”
“What . . . Really?”
“Well, all right. One village – run by one of the lesser Deathless, looking to elevate his position. And I kind of sold the ring to him. But he did ask me to retrieve it.”
She shifted uncomfortably. “It was long ago, before I stopped taking jobs from Deathless. This one thought . . . well, I told him not to play with the stuff. He wouldn’t listen to a mere mortal, and he paid well, so I got it for him. I left just before he activated it.”
“The whole village?” Siris asked.
“It was awful. Whole place just . . . crumpled. Don’t know how to explain it any other way. I was just outside of town, riding as fast as I could. I swear I felt something straining to pull me into it. Like the darkness itself was alive.”
“Hell take me,” Siris said, looking at the gauntlet. Then he pressed it against the wall. His palm shook, but he knew, like always, how to control the element. It felt natural to him.
Even years ago, when he’d first attacked the God King, the Dark Self had protected him. It felt the same way now. Siris didn’t know how to manipulate the Incarnate Dark – but Ausar did. The corner of the wall crumpled, the steel straining and cracking. An opening formed before them. At the end, a small bead of metal – no bigger than a marble – dropped to the ground with a terribly loud thunk, as if it weighed far more than it appeared it should.
The process was louder than he’d have wanted. He nodded to Isa, who slipped through the opening, raising her crossbow. Sure enough, a guard peeked his head into the room just as Siris was following Isa through the hole.
He got a crossbow bolt in the forehead.
Siris caught him and hauled the body into the room. They waited a few tense minutes, but no other guards arrived.
“This really feels like a trap . . .” Siris said.
Isa nodded, peeking out into the fortress hallways. Stark, made of cold steel. Creating something like this would cost a fortune, but for most of Siris’s kin it was a fortune barely missed. Why build a fortress entirely of forged steel in the mountains?
Well, why not?
“I agree,” Isa said. “It’s too quiet, too easy. Do you want to withdraw?”
Siris shook his head. “If it is a trap, then someone already knows too much about us – and our rebellion is doomed anyway. Maybe it’s easy not because we’re expected, but because the Worker’s empire is in such a state of chaos.”
Isa nodded. Siris dug out his helm, slipping it on. Isa went without one, but Dynn and Terr both slid on helms, covering their faces. An old tradition, started by the Deathless.
“Dynn, watch our retreat,” Isa said. “Terr, with us.”
The three of them slipped into the corridors. They were poorly lit, the occasional window slit providing the only light. Siris and the others wound forward and downward through the fortress, but passed no guards. The place had an eerie feeling of having been abandoned.
They reached a crossroad, and Siris grabbed Isa’s arm, pointing to one side.
The gate is this way, she mouthed.
I know, he mouthed back, then led them the other direction.
She followed with a soft sigh of exasperation. However, it was possible a full assault wouldn’t be needed. Their target, the facility’s heart, was just around this way . . .
He reached a corner and peeked around it, expecting to see nothing. Instead, he found himself looking right at a guard.
Siris felt a moment of sudden panic, but held it in. He was looking at the back of a uniformed guard, one of the God King’s elite soldiers. An entire rank of forty or fifty stood here, facing the wrong way. Inward, toward the center of the facility.
What the hell? Siris thought, holding a finger to his lips and gesturing for Isa to look. She peeked, then looked back at him.
What the hell? she mouthed.
He shrugged, then gestured them back the other way. He wasn’t about to try to take an entire rank of elite soldiers on his own.
Once they were a good distance away, Isa took him by the arm. “They’re guarding the wrong way.”
He nodded.
“That’s a rebirthing chamber, right?”
He nodded. It was one – that, and something else he hadn’t yet told her about.
That room was the basis for this entire assault. Yes, the fortress had supplies they could steal – rations, weapons, Deathless technology. Their greatest advantage as a rebellion, however, was Siris himself. One of the Deathless. But to make full use of that advantage, they needed a rebirthing chamber.
Of course, that alone wasn’t going to be enough, not by a long shot. The Dark Self knew it. Siris had really come for something else in that room, another piece of ancient technology – one far more rare.
“Come on,” Siris said. “Whatever has drawn their attention, it’s to our advantage. Let’s break this place open like a walnut.”
The three of them continued on toward the front gates. They crossed almost the entire distance without incident – but then Siris heard a hissing from behind.
He spun, hand on his sword. The daeril must have been prowling the hallways on watch. It wore a mask – it was favored among its kind, then. The wicked, horned thing accompanied a body with twisted limbs, knotted like wood but colored red. It hissed again behind its mask, but raised its sword in a sign of challenge, after the ancient ideal.
“You hit it straight on,” Terr said, voice muffled by his helm. “I’ll come in from the left.”
“No,” Siris said, raising his sword to acknowledge the challenge. “I will face it alone.”
“Don’t be a fool,” Terr said. “I realize that you can’t die, but if you let the thing raise the alarm, we could be done for. We should fight it together–”
“No,” Siris snapped, striding forward. “It showed us honor. I must return that honor.”
“It’s a monster!”
Siris ignored him, falling into a dueling stance.
“This is ridiculous,” Terr hissed.
Honorless peasant, Siris thought, snarling softly. “Go on,” he said to Terr and Isa. “I stay to duel.”
They left, and Siris fought.
He’d practiced with the sword all his life. Fighting was something familiar to him, something noble – one of the few skills he felt that he had earned, rather than just inheriting from another self. True, he likely owed some of his prowess to his ancient self, but he had worked hard during his youth to grow, to progress. Whatever skill his former self had once possessed, he’d added to it during this lifetime.
The beast also fought with skill – it was indeed among the God King’s most elite of creations. The duel ended in the familiar way, however, with Siris slamming his sword into the beast’s chest, sinking it in deep. The thing growled softly, blood from its hidden lips spilling out through the front of the mask.
“You did well,” Siris said to the daeril. “You fought with honor and prowess.”
The thing sighed, almost seeming content as it slid off his sword and stopped moving. In some ways, he envied the creature, created for a single purpose and living its life simply, doing nothing but fulfilling that purpose. He doubted it had ever questioned its existence.
Siris wiped his blade clean as Isa returned.
“I’ve killed the bowmen in their watchposts,” she said. “Terr is at the gate.”
Something thumped in the near distance.
“Onward, then,” Siris said, rising and charging back toward the inner chamber where the God King’s soldiers awaited.
ISA SURVEYED the dead, stepping carefully to avoid the blood, both human and daerilic. Old instincts itched at her to search the bodies, but she suppressed them. It had been a long, long time since she’d been forced to sink so low as to rob corpses. She held no illusions that she had grown beyond such things – you did what you needed to in order to survive – but this was not the day for looting.
This battle had been far too easy. It had felt like a trap up until the end. The soldiers had been crowded around the entrance to the rebirthing chamber, swords out – as if they fully expected the threat to come from inside. Lux and the troops had been able to take them with a surprising degree of ease.
They’d lost men, of course. That was part of what Isa hated about leading, and was why she had Lux perform the actual management of the troops. Isa avoided looking at the faces of the fallen. She would ask their names. Later. For now, she stepped into the rebirthing chamber, passing Dynn and Terr, still helmed and armored, standing guard at the door.
Don’t deceive yourself, she thought. You might not be robbing bodies, but today is about plunder. You’re still a thief, you’re just a higher-class one.
That thought actually comforted her.
Siris sat inside, hands clasped before him, helm off, blood in his hair. Not his own. It had dried, crusting.
What was she to make of this man? Half the time he seemed so confident, as if he could stride off a cliff and not fall, gravity itself too intimidated to inconvenience him. And then there were the haunted times. Eyes that had seen too much. Shadows moving behind them.
She had a habit of preferring dangerous men. This one, however, was a different beast entirely.
She stepped up next to him, then ran her fingers along the edge of the tub device. Attuning Siris to this one would allow him to awaken here quickly, and would rejuvenate and strengthen him when needed. Dials, buttons, and wires connected it . . . things she didn’t understand, and didn’t really care to.
“We have our quiver,” she said, speaking in the blunt language of this island continent, where the God King ruled.
“Quiver?” Siris asked, looking up.
“You are the weapon, Whiskers,” she said, tapping the device. “This is just for reloading.”
He smiled wearily. “This was too easy, Isa. Why were the guards so frightened?”
“I know,” Dynn said from the doorway. “It’s actually quite obvious.”
“Is that so?” Siris asked. “What, then, were they so frightened of?”
“Me, clearly,” Dynn said.
Wait. Isa frowned. Dynn’s voice didn’t sound right.
Siris suddenly leaped to his feet and ran toward the soldier. Terr backed away, confused, as Siris and Dynn clashed.
No. Not Dynn at all. Someone laughed behind that helm with a familiar voice.
“You!” Siris said, swiping his sword at the impostor. “What did you do with the man who wore that armor?”
The laughter continued.
That was the God King’s voice.
Oh, hell, Isa thought, reaching for her sword.
“They were worried about me awakening in here,” the God King said, stepping back from Siris. “With good reason.” He held up a hand as Siris prepared to strike. “As much fun as it would be to kill you again, Ausar – and honestly, I’m already growing nostalgic for the experience – I can’t spare the time to indulge myself. Neither, I believe, can you.”
“Your empire is crumbling, Raidriar.”
“And your little rebellion is doomed. He’s planning something dangerous.”
“Have you figured out his endgame?” Siris asked.
Raidriar shook his head. “No. You?”
“No idea.”
“It’s big,” the God King said. “He tossed aside the Infinity Blade as if it were nothing. Whatever he’s working on, he doesn’t consider you, me, or this empire to be a priority.”
Siris hesitated. “Damn.” Finally, he lowered his sword. “Damn.”
Isa looked from one to the other, as they sheathed their swords and walked toward the other side of the room. Almost like old friends.
What, she thought, did I just miss?
She gestured for the other guards to secure the chamber. “Keep the door closed,” she ordered, “and see if you can find Dynn. He might be back in the room where we entered the complex.”
Terr ran off immediately. Others stood guard behind the door as Isa closed it. She went over to where the God King and Siris were talking.
“You need me,” Raidriar was saying.
“Hardly,” Siris replied.
“Oh? And the machinery in this chamber? You were going to move it on your own? Have you any knowledge of how to disassemble it, how to set it back up? Do you even know how to work it?”
“We could leave it here, make this our base.”
“And stay exactly where the Worker knows he can find you?” The God King left his helm on. He wouldn’t show his face to those he considered his lessers.
“Where is my soldier?” Isa demanded, stepping up next to Siris.
The God King looked her over. “He is alive,” he said. “I realized that Ausar would whine and moan if I killed one of his little rebels, even if they are all my subjects.”
“Where?” Isa demanded. “In the room where we entered?”
“Obviously,” the God King said with a wave of the hand. “Calm yourself, child. I barely even harmed him. He didn’t need that hand; he has two, after all.”
“You monster,” Isa said, lunging at him. Siris caught her by the shoulder and pulled her back.
“Honestly,” the God King said, “no need to fuss for something so minor. You mortals break so easily, one would assume you’d be accustomed to it by now.”
“You–” Isa started.
Siris took her by the shoulder. “He’s taunting you, Isa. Don’t rise to it.”
She cut herself off, fuming. If Dynn was dead . . .
“You do need me,” the God King said, turning back to Siris. “I brought one of my loyal Devoted, one of the few mortals I allowed to develop expertise in Deathless technology. He can disassemble the machinery here and set it up somewhere else. Some location you choose.”
“Fine,” Siris said. “Very magnanimous of you. And your part in it? What do you gain?”
“We defeat him, and I get my empire back.”
“Like hell you do,” Isa spat. “We’re not going to rebel against him, only to give everything back to you.”
“And him?” the God King asked, amused, waving toward Siris. “You think that giving the empire to Ausar here will be any different?”
“He won’t rule.”
“Oh?” the God King asked. “I find that . . . unlikely. He has always loved to rule. He’s never been good at it, granted, but he does love it. Don’t you, Ausar?”
Siris didn’t reply, his lips a tight line.
“Regardless,” the God King said, “it isn’t important now. First we need to defeat the Worker. Anyone’s rule would be better than the chaos and misery he has sewn since his return. Mortals or not, these are my people. I will not abandon them. We can discuss the nature of our . . . alliance later.”
“I don’t trust you, Raidriar,” Siris said.
“I should hope not! You’re a fool, but not that big a fool. But you also know that I will keep my word. So I vow to you that I won’t move against you, as long as the Worker rules. I will have my man set up this equipment as-is, installing no hidden subroutines, no Q.I.P. alteration algorithms. We will be allies until our common enemy falls.”
Siris met the God King’s eyes.
“You know this to be the right course,” Raidriar said. “Just as I knew you would come here. As soon as I considered, I knew where to find you.”
“Fine,” Siris said, holding out a hand. “But the equipment stays under my control. You swear not to use it without my approval.”
“Fine,” the God King said, sounding annoyed within his helm.
“We need a place the Worker won’t think to look for us,” Siris said. “Do you know of any such place? A place secret even from those who work with us, to preserve a layer of security.”
“Well,” the God King said as they clasped hands. “I do have a few hideouts that were not in my records. You can choose one of many.”
Isa stared at them both, horrified. “This can’t possibly be right, Siris,” she said.
The God King looked to her. “Isn’t she the one who killed you with that crossbow bolt, all those months ago?”
“Yes,” Siris said.
“I suppose I have to like her, then. I assume you’ve chosen her to be first.”
“First?” Isa said. “First what?”
“He didn’t tell you?” the God King said, sounding amused. “About this place?”
“What about this place?” Isa asked.
“Raidriar . . .” Siris said.
“First? First what?” Isa snapped.
“You were going to have to tell her eventually, Ausar,” the God King said, strolling through the room, nodding toward the rebirthing tub and equipment. “Best to get it over with quickly. Like an execution – one swift chop.”
Siris sighed.
Isa looked to him. “What’s he talking about?” she asked, feeling a chill.
“This isn’t just a rebirthing chamber, Isa,” Siris said. “It’s a Pinnacle of Sanctification.”
“A what?”
“A device for making new Deathless, child,” the God King said, his voice echoing in the metallic room as he turned toward her. “Your hero plans to create his own pantheon of immortals – and you are to be the first of their ranks.”