Victor, Vanquished, Son

The man laughed at that. “Do you hear that, Lin? We aren’t real.”

The woman reached out to touch his arm. “It’s an understandable mistake to make. After all this time, I imagine we look mere shadows of what we were.”

That took Ceres a little aback. On impulse, she reached out for the man. She found that her hand passed straight through his chest. She realized what she’d just done.

“Sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be,” the man said. “I imagine it is a little disconcerting.”

“What are you?” she asked. “I saw the sorcerers above, and you aren’t like them, and you aren’t like the memories either, because those are just images.”

“We’re something… else,” the woman said. “I am Lin, and this is Alteus.”

“I’m Ceres.”

Ceres noted how close the two stood to one another; the way Lin’s hand lingered on Alteus’s shoulder. The two had the look of a couple very much in love. Would she and Thanos ever end up like that? Presumably not that transparent, though.

“The battle raged,” Alteus said, “and we couldn’t stop it. What the sorcerers planned was evil.”

“Some of your kind were no better,” Lin said with a faint smile, as if they’d had that conversation many times. “It happened so fast. The Ancient Ones imprisoned the sorcerers as they were, their magic blended past and future together, and Alteus and I…”

“You became something else,” Ceres finished. Sentient memories. Ghosts of the past who could touch one another if nothing else.

“I get the feeling you didn’t fight your way through everything above just to find out about us,” Alteus said.

Ceres swallowed. She hadn’t expected this. She’d expected an object, perhaps something like the point of connection holding the spells above together. Still, the Ancient One in front of her was right: she had come there for a reason.

“I have the blood of the Ancient Ones,” she said.

She saw Alteus nod. “I can see that.”

“But something is restricting her,” Lin said. “Limiting her.”

“Someone poisoned me,” Ceres said. “She took away my powers. My mother was able to restore them for a little while, but it didn’t last.”

“Daskalos’s poison,” Lin said, with a note of disgust.

“An evil thing,” Alteus said.

“But a thing that can be undone,” Lin added. She looked at Ceres. “If she is worthy of it. I’m sorry, but that is a lot of power for someone to have. We have seen what it can do.”

“And given what we are, it would take a lot to undo it,” Alteus said.

Lin reached out to touch his arm. “Maybe it’s time to see new things. We’ve been here hundreds of years. Even given the things we can create, maybe it’s time to see what is next.”

Ceres paused as she heard that, the implications of it sinking in.

“Wait, healing me would kill you?” She shook her head, but then thoughts of Thanos, and all the others on Haylon, interrupted. If she didn’t do this, they would die too. “I don’t know what to say,” she admitted. “I don’t want someone to die for me, but a lot of people will die if I don’t do this.”

She saw the two spirits look at one another.

“That’s a good start,” Alteus said. “It means that there is a reason for this. Tell us the rest. Tell us everything that led up to this.”

Ceres did her best. She explained all about the rebellion, and the war. About the invasion that had followed and her inability to stop it. About the attack on Haylon that was, even then, putting everyone she loved at risk.

“I understand,” Lin said, reaching out to touch Ceres. To Ceres’s surprise, there was a sensation of pressure there. “It reminds me a little of our war.”

“The past proceeds in echoes of itself,” Alteus said. “But there are some echoes that can’t be repeated. We need to know if she understands.”

Ceres saw Lin nod.

“That’s true,” the ghost said. “So, a question for you, Ceres. Let’s see if you understand. Why is this still here? Why are the sorcerers trapped like this? Why didn’t the Ancient Ones destroy them?”

The question had the feel of a test, and Ceres got the feeling that if she couldn’t give a good answer to it, she wouldn’t receive help from these two. Given what they’d said it might cost them, Ceres was astonished that they were considering it at all.

“Could the Ancient Ones have destroyed them?” Ceres asked.

Alteus paused for a moment, and then nodded. “It wasn’t that. Think about the world.”

Ceres thought. She thought about the effects of the war. About the blasted wastes of Felldust and the wreckage of the island above her. About how few of the Ancient Ones were left in the world. About the invasions, and the people who had died fighting the Empire.

“I think you didn’t destroy them because of what it would take to do it,” Ceres said. “What’s the point of winning if there’s nothing left after you do it?” She guessed that it was more than that, though. “I was part of a rebellion. We fought against something that was large, and evil, and made people’s lives worse, but how many people have died now? You can’t solve something by just slaughtering everyone.”

She saw Lin and Alteus look at one another then. They nodded.

“We allowed the sorcerers’ rebellion at first,” Alteus said. “We thought it would amount to nothing. Then it grew, and we fought, but in fighting it, we did as much damage as they did. We had the power to wreck whole landscapes, and we used it. Oh, how we used it.”

“You have seen the things done to this island,” Lin said. When I heal you, if I heal you, you will have that kind of power. What will you do with it, Ceres?”

There was a time when the answer would have been simple. She would have brought down the Empire. She would have destroyed the nobles. Now, she just wanted people to be able to live their lives safely and happily; it didn’t seem like too much to ask.

“I just want to save the people I love,” she said. “I don’t want to destroy anyone. I just… I think I might have to. I hate that, I just want peace.”

Even Ceres was a little surprised by that. She didn’t want more violence. She simply had to do it to prevent innocent people being slaughtered. That earned her another nod.

“A good answer,” Lin said. “Come here.”

The former sorcerer went among the glass vials and the alchemical equipment that seemed to exist in illusory form. She moved among it, blending things and shifting things. Alteus went with her, and the two of them appeared to work in the kind of harmony that could only come over many years. They poured solutions into new containers, added ingredients, consulted books.

Ceres stood there to watch them, and she had to admit that she didn’t understand half of what they were doing. When they stood in front of her with a glass vial, it almost didn’t seem enough.

“Drink this,” Lin said. She held it out to Ceres, and although it all seemed insubstantial, when Ceres took it, her hand met solid glass. She held it up, seeing the sparkle of golden liquid that matched the hue of the dome around her.

Ceres drank it, and it tasted like drinking starlight.

It seemed to wash through her then, and she could feel its progress in the relaxation of her muscles, and the easing of pains she hadn’t known were there. She could feel something growing inside her too, spreading out like a system of roots running through her body as the channels along which her power had run regrew.

When it was done, Ceres felt better than she had since before the invasion. It felt like a deep sense of peace spreading through her.

“Is it done?” Ceres asked.

Alteus and Lin took one another’s hands.

“Not quite,” Alteus said.

The dome around Ceres seemed to collapse inward, the contents disappearing as they turned into pure light. That light gathered on the spot where the Ancient One and the Sorceress stood, until Ceres couldn’t make them out in it.

“It will be interesting to see what happens next,” Lin said. “Goodbye, Ceres.”

The light burst toward her, filling Ceres, brimming through the channels of her body like water along freshly built aqueducts. It filled her, and it kept filling her, pouring in so that it seemed that there was more power resting within Ceres than there had ever been before. For the first time, she understood the true depths of the Ancient Ones’ powers.

She stood there, pulsing with power, and she knew the time had come.

It was time for war.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Jeva could feel the tension growing with every step as she made her way up toward the meeting hall. The people of the gathering place stared at her the way she would have expected people outside their lands to stare at one of their kind: as if she were something strange, different, even dangerous. It wasn’t a sensation Jeva liked.

Was it just that they didn’t see many with the markings of priestesses here, or was it something more? It wasn’t until the first insults and accusations came from the gathering crowd that Jeva started to understand.

“Betrayer!”

“You took your tribe to the slaughter!”

A young man stepped out from the crowd with that swagger that only young men could manage. He strode as if he owned the path leading up to the house of the dead. When Jeva moved to step around him, he went to block her.

Jeva should have struck him just for that, but she was there for more important things.

“Step aside,” she said. “I’m not here for violence.”

“Have you forgotten the ways of our people that completely?” he demanded. “You dragged your tribe to die in Delos. How many came back?”

Jeva could hear the anger there. The kind of anger that even her people felt when they lost someone close to them. Telling him that they had gone to the ancestors and that he should be happy would do no good. In any case, Jeva wasn’t even sure that she believed that right then. She had seen the pointless deaths of the war.

“But you came back,” the young man said. “You destroyed one of our tribes, and you came back, you coward!”

On another day, Jeva would have killed him for that, but the truth was that the mewling of an idiot didn’t matter, not compared to everything else that was going on. She moved to step around him again.

Jeva paused as he drew a knife.

“You don’t want to do this, boy,” she said.

“Don’t tell me what I want!” he screamed, and lunged at her.

Jeva reacted on instinct, swaying out of the way of the blow, while she lashed out with her bladed chains. One wrapped around his neck, wrenching as she moved with the speed of long practice. Blood sprayed as the young man clutched at the wound, collapsing to his knees.

“Damn you,” Jeva said softly. “Why did you make me do it, you idiot?”

There was no answer, of course. There was never any answer. Jeva whispered the words of a prayer for the dead over the young man and then stood, lifting him. Other villagers followed her as she continued on her way, and Jeva could feel the tension there now where there had been jokes before. They followed her close as an honor guard, or the escort of a prisoner to her execution.

When she reached the House of the Dead, the elders of the village were already waiting for her. Jeva padded in on bare feet, kneeling before the endlessly burning pyre and tumbling her attacker’s body into it. She stood there as it started to burn, looking around at the people she had come to convince.

“You come here with blood on your hands,” a Speaker of the Dead said, stepping forward with his robes swirling. “The dead told us that someone would come, but not that it would happen like this.”

Jeva looked at him, wondering if it was true. There had been a time when she wouldn’t have questioned it.

“He struck at me,” Jeva said. “He was not as fast as he thought.”

The others there nodded. Such things could happen, in these harshest parts of the world. Jeva let none of the guilt she felt show on her face.

“You have come to ask us something,” the Speaker said.

Jeva nodded. “I have.”

“Then ask.”

Jeva stood there, collecting her thoughts. “I ask for aid for the island of Haylon. A great fleet attacks it, on the orders of the First Stone. I believe that our people can make a difference.”

Voices called out then, speaking at once. There were questions and demands, accusations and opinions, all seeming to blur together.

“She wants us to go to die for her.”

“We’ve heard this before!”

“Why fight for people we don’t know?”

Jeva stood there, letting all of it wash over her. If this went wrong, there was every chance that she wouldn’t be walking out of this room. Given who she was, she should have felt a sense of peace at that, but she also found herself thinking about Thanos, who had saved her at risk to himself, and about all the people who were stuck on Haylon. They needed her to succeed.

“We should give her to the dead for all she’s done!” one called.

The Speaker of the Dead stepped next to Jeva then, holding up his hands for quiet.

“We know what our sister is asking,” the Speaker said. “Now is not the time for talking. We are just the living. Now is the time to listen to the dead.”

He reached down to his belt, pulling out a pouch of the sacred powders mixed with the ashes of the ancestors. He threw it onto the pyre, and the flames leapt up.

“Breathe, sister,” the Speaker said. “Breathe and see.”

Jeva breathed in the smoke, taking it deep into her lungs. The flames danced in the pit below her, and for the first time in years, Jeva saw the dead.

It started with the spirit of the man she’d killed. It stood from his burning corpse, walking through the flames to her.

“You killed me,” he said in something like shock. “You killed me!”

He struck her then, and though the dead shouldn’t have been able to touch the living, Jeva still felt it as surely as if he’d slapped her while he was alive. He struck her, and then he stepped back, looking on expectantly.

The rest of the dead came to Jeva then, and they were no kinder than the young man she’d slain. They were all there: the people she’d killed by her own hand, the ones she’d led to their deaths on Haylon. They came to her one by one, and one by one, they struck out at Jeva, in blows that left her reeling, knocked her flat, reduced her to something holding herself on the ground.

It seemed to take forever before they stepped away from her, and Jeva was able to look up again. She found herself looking at Haylon, the island surrounded by ships, the battle raging.

She saw the ships of the Bone Folk slam into those attackers, punching a hole through, their warriors spilling out onto the shore. She saw them fighting, and killing, and dying. Jeva saw them dying in numbers that she had only seen once before, in Delos.

“If you take them to Haylon, they will die,” a voice said, and that voice sounded as though it was composed of the voices of a thousand ancestors at once. “They will die as we died.”

“Will they win?” Jeva asked.

There was a brief pause before the voice answered that. “It is possible that the island might be saved.”

So it wouldn’t be an empty gesture. It wouldn’t be the same as on Delos.

“It will be the end for our people,” the voice said. “Some will survive, but our tribes will not. Our ways will not. There will be so many more joining us, waiting for you in death.”

That brought a flash of fear to Jeva. She’d felt the anger of those who had died, felt their blows. Was it worth it? Could she do it to her whole people?

“And you would die,” the voice continued. “Announce this to our people, and you will die for it.”

Slowly, she started to come back to herself, finding herself on the floor before the pyre. Jeva put a hand to her face and it came away bloody, although she didn’t know if that was the strain of the vision or the violence of the dead. She forced herself to stand, looking out over the assembled crowd.

“Tell us what you saw, sister,” the Speaker of the Dead said.

Jeva stood there, looking at him, trying to gauge how much, if anything, he’d seen. Could she lie in this moment? Could she tell the assembled crowd that the dead were all in favor of the plan?

Jeva knew that she couldn’t lie like that, even for Thanos.

“I saw death,” she said. “Your death, my death. The death of our whole people if we do this.”

A murmur went around the room. Her people had no fear of death, but the destruction of their whole way of life was something else.

“You have asked me to speak for the dead,” Jeva said, “and they have said that in Haylon, victory would be bought with our people’s lives.” She took a breath, thinking about what Thanos would have done. “I don’t want to speak for the dead. I want to speak for the living.”

The murmurs changed tone, becoming more confused. Becoming angrier in some spaces too.

“I know what you think,” Jeva said. “You think I am speaking sacrilege. But there is a whole island of people out there that needs our help. I saw the dead, and they cursed me for their deaths. Do you know what that tells me? That life matters! That the lives of all those who will die if we don’t help matter. If we do not help, we allow evil to stand. We allow those who would live in peace to be slaughtered. I will stand against that, not because the dead require it, but because the living do!”

There was uproar then in the hall. The Speaker of the Dead looked at it all, then at Jeva. He pushed her toward the door.

“You should go,” he said. “Go before they kill you for blasphemy.”

Jeva didn’t go, though. The dead had already told her that she would die for doing this. If that was the price of gaining help, she would pay it. She stood there as a point of silence in the middle of the arguments in the room. When a man ran at her, she kicked him back and kept standing. It was all she could do right then. She waited for the moment when one of them would finally kill her.

Jeva was quite confused when they didn’t. Instead, the noise in the room died down, and the people there stood in front of her, looking her way. One by one, they fell to their knees, and the Speaker of the Dead stepped forward.

“It seems that we will go with you to Haylon, sister.”

Jeva blinked. “I… don’t understand.”

She should have been dead then. The dead had told her that it was the sacrifice they wanted.

“Have you forgotten our ways so completely?” the priest said. “You have offered us a death worth having. Who are we to argue?”

Jeva fell to her knees with the others then. She didn’t know what to say. She’d been expecting death, and had life instead. Now, she just had to make it count for something.

“We’re coming, Thanos,” she promised.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Irrien ignored the pain of his wounds as he rode south along tracks already turned to mud by the passage of his army. He forced himself to stay tall in the saddle, not letting any of the agony he felt show. He didn’t slow or stop, in spite of the many cuts, the bandages and the stitches. The things that lay at the end of this journey were too important to delay.

His men journeyed with him, making the ride back to Delos even faster than they had pursued their assault on the North. Some of them were moving slower, shepherding lines of slaves or wagons of looted goods, but most rode with their lord, ready for the battles that were still to come.

“You had better be right about this,” Irrien snapped across to N’cho.

The assassin rode beside him with the seemingly infinite calm that he always projected, as if the rush of a horde of Irrien’s finest warriors behind him was nothing.

“When we reach Delos, you will see, First Stone.”

Reaching Delos did not take long, although by the time they did it, Irrien’s horse was breathing hard, its flanks lathered with sweat. He followed as N’cho led the way away from the road, into a space filled with ruins and gravestones. When he finally stopped, Irrien looked around, unimpressed.

“This is it?” he demanded.

“This is it,” N’cho assured him. “A space where the world is weak enough to summon… other things. Things that might kill an Ancient One.”

Irrien dismounted. He should have been able to do it with grace and ease, but the pain of his wounds meant that he hit the ground heavy-footed. It was a reminder of what the assassin and his colleagues had done to him, and one that N’cho would pay for if he couldn’t deliver on his promise.

“It looks like a simple graveyard,” Irrien snapped.

“It has been a place of death since the time of the Ancient Ones,” N’cho answered. “There has been so much death here that it has left the way on the cusp of opening. It merely requires the right words, the right symbols. And of course, the right sacrifices.”

Irrien should have guessed that part from a man who dressed like one of the death priests. Still, if this one could give him the means to kill the Ancient Ones’ child, it would be worth it.

“Slaves will be brought,” he promised. “But if you fail in this, you will join them in death.”

The scariest part of it was that the assassin didn’t react to that. He kept his equanimity while he paced to a spot that looked as though it had been the site of a mass grave, while he took out powders and potions from his robes, while he started to make markings on the ground.

Irrien waited and watched, sitting in the shade of one of the tombs there and trying to disguise how much his body hurt after the long ride. He would have liked to have ridden into Delos then, to bathe and dress his wounds, perhaps to rest a little. But then his men would ask questions about why he wasn’t here, watching all that happened. It wouldn’t look strong.

So he sent men instead to fetch sacrifices, and a list of other things that N’cho said he required. It took more than an hour for anything to come back from the city, and even then, it was a stranger collection than anything he’d demanded. A dozen death priests came along with the slaves and the unguents, the candles and the braziers.

Irrien saw N’cho smile at their presence, with a confidence that told Irrien that this was no trick.

“They want to see how this is done,” he said. “They want to see if it is even possible. They believe, but they don’t believe.”

“I will believe when I see some results,” Irrien said.

“Then you will have them, my lord,” the assassin replied.

He went back to the space he’d marked with the symbols of his craft, setting up candles and lighting them. He gestured for slaves to be brought forward, and one by one he tied them in place, affixing them to stakes around the rim of the circle he’d drawn, anointing them with oils that made them squirm and beg.

It was nothing compared to their screams as the assassin set them alight. Irrien could hear some of his men gasping at the casual brutality of it all, or complaining about the waste. Irrien just stood there. If this did not work, there would be more than enough time to kill N’cho later.

It did work, though, and in a way that Irrien couldn’t have predicted.

He saw N’cho step back from the circle, chanting. As he chanted, the ground within the circle seemed to crumble, giving way similar to how a sinkhole might have opened up in the dust wastes Irrien was used to. The screaming, flaming sacrifices tumbled into it, and still N’cho kept chanting.

Irrien heard the creaking and the cracks as the tombs started to break open. A grave near the spot where Irrien was standing tore apart with a sound of ripping earth, and Irrien saw bones being pulled from it as if by a whirlpool, sucked in toward the hole in the ground and disappearing without a trace.

More followed, pouring in as if drawn to the space, hammering toward it with the speed of thrown javelins. Irrien saw one man impaled by a thigh bone, then carried forward into the pit. He shrieked as he fell, and then it was quiet.

For several seconds, everything was still. N’cho gestured for the death priests to come forward. They came, joining him, obviously wanting to see whatever he was doing. Irrien thought they were fools for it, putting their desire for power in front of everything else, even their survival.

Irrien guessed what was coming, even before a great, clawed hand reached out of the cavern that had opened up and snatched at one of them. The claws punched through the priest, then started to drag him down into the hole while he begged for mercy.

N’cho was there while the creature clawed at the dying man, wrapping a light silver chain around the creature’s limb as easily as if he were hobbling a horse. He handed the chain to a group of soldiers, who held onto it gingerly, as if expecting to be the next victims.