Semper leads me up to where Nadrune sits in a chair before them, her great head in her vast hands. She’s still attended by two mages who bathe her in aether. I can’t take my eyes from the Sisters for long, though. When I reach Nadrune I fall to my knees beside her, before them.
“Blackwell,” someone says. It’s a voice I recognize, and when I turn my head Mircada is there, too, over near a window and dressed in something long and flowing.
I should say something.
I should acknowledge her.
I remember that I feel something, but I can’t quite reach that feeling to know what it is.
The Sisters are overwhelming. I can’t answer, can’t think—I turn back to stare at them.
I imagine whispering, passing like static between them, and I can almost make out the words.
I think all of my fur is standing on end.
“Hulgliev,” Nadrune says. “It’s about time.”
A thought occurs to me and it passes out of my mouth before I can stop it. “You don’t even know my name, do you Nadrune.”
She looks at me sharply, and then looks around her taking in the Sisters, the view of the city, her fleet out in the open ocean, and the fighting still going on in the garden, the streets and out at the mouth of the harbor where Ghat’s Seventh District has settled. She raises her arms in the air? “What does that have to do with anything right now.”
“Because they do,” I say, nodding to the Sisters. "It's Blackwell."
And I know I’m right, because just then, the three Sisters all turn to me.
Their third eyes open, their fat lips part and they began to sing.
It’s as if I’m in a dream. Their crazy song is nothing like you or I would think of as music. The closest thing would be the sounds of coyotes in the wild—strange yipping and howling that’s all over the scale, high pitched chitters and low rumbling growls, barks and yowls that have no rhyme or rhythm. It’s the sound of ghosts in the desert. It’s the sound of all of your past and future catching up with you at once. It strips me down to my essence, tosses me into a torrent of gale-force winds, holds me up high right next to the sun where everything I know about myself is burned away until I am just a tiny blue stone, a small brown bird, a passing thought in someone’s head and nothing more than that.
I don’t understand the language or the music at all, and yet I know what they’re saying. They are evaluating me, judging the long and tangled string of my life. Their chrome eyes spin and twirl, growing to the size of moons and I understand that there is great concern here, great worry and doubt about me.
I am wanting, I will always be wanting.
But I also understand that there is some cause for hope, too, and as I begin to hear their separate voices I get that the hope is led by the third Sister, the one we pulled from the sea. She’s arguing for me with the others. Defending me for something, though I don’t know why, and I don’t know for what.
Semper’s eyes are bright and shining, and he’s fallen to his knees beside me.
Mircada is beside him, too, her eyes wide and afraid, her mouth open.
Nadrune has gone pale. Her eyes flash with anger and rage.
Then, the newest Sister begins a new chant. This one is deep and resonant like the sound I’ve heard monks make in one of the mountain temples Sartosh had taken me to as a child. But this chant was far deeper, so low it made the stones of the Tower shake. This chant speaks of history and time, of greatness and great wrongs, of Dekheret and the Hulgliev Farsoth and the great leaders that had come before them, of challenges faced and overcome and both disasters and triumphs that have changed the face of the world as we’ve known it.
The Sisters have been here for an eternity, the chant says. They were watching before, they are watching now, and they will be watching when the suns die and the worlds turn to blackness.
The two other Sisters join the chant then, and I realize they are singing to me now. Directly to me, about my mother and fathers, of my parents' mothers and fathers and the ones that had preceded them all back down into history.
And of me. There is a need for me to take my place in this long line of succession, whether I want to or not. There are things I need to do, burdens I must accept, and I can no longer avoid a place in the world even though I might want to.
Even though it was easier not to.
I know they see me. They see all of my deep self doubts, all of my fears, and all of the inner turmoil that I hold myself back with.
Yet the third Sister speaks clearly now, in words that transcend language.
She tells me to rise. She tells me to come forward. She opens her mouth wide, wider.
I step inside, onto her great metal tongue.
And then she swallows me.
37: Semper
T
he singing is overwhelming, insane. He wants to hold his hands over his ears, shut his eyes and curl into a ball, and yet Semper realizes that as a sage and a student of Akarii history, he will never again stand at the
making
of real, momentous history like he is right now.
As the Sisters started to sing, and to actually rise up from their thick pedestals and hover there in the air before them all, he falls to his knees. He tries to resist the urge to prostrate himself entirely and place his forehead on the floor and leave it there in awe, the way Nadrune’s mages and the Kerul woman and now even Nadrune herself is doing.
Instead, he tries to remember even the smallest details, so he can write about this later. For that’s his role here, he understands that—he will document this for the world so they can know what took place. The way the light from the wards outside seems to flicker over the Sisters, as if they are underwater. The way the air in the room swirls around them, around the circular room, extinguishing all of the mage-globes as if they had been candles or torches, blowing tapestries from the walls and stripping them to the bare stone. The way Blackwell steps forward, an expression of wonder on his face that Semper has never seen on him despite all of the Akarii wonders he’d shown the man.
The Sister they had pulled from the sea opens her mouth, and there’s a loud burst of air pressure, a popping sound that’s almost deafening. Outside the wards flicker.
There’s the strange, frustrated cry of some sort of great bird just outside of the warding, somewhere beyond the dome.
The floor beneath them shakes and within the Sister’s great mouth he sees a great steel tongue extending. Her throat is deep and dark, and there’s a rushing of wind into it, the smells of coriander and the ocean. Semper feels dizzy and wonders if the tower is swaying. Sparks of aether spin in the air all around them.
Blackwell steps up to the Sister’s lower lip and seems to hesitate for a moment.
He looks back at them, at Mircada.
She raises her head as though he’d called her. The exchange a long, wordless look, and then Blackwell cocks his head to one side, as though the Sister has said something and none of the rest of them have heard it.
Then he steps inside and the Sister’s mouth claps shut with a deafening crash.
It’s so loud he wonders if the ships in the fleet have heard it.
Without any transition then, the Sisters are back on their pedestals. The swirling wind is gone. The room is dark and silent, lit only by the wards outside.
In the distance, he can hear the ocean.
Nadrune pushes herself off the floor. Semper knows her incredibly well now. He can see the jealously and rage written there on her face, the deep envy that it was Blackwell the Sisters had spoken to and not her.
And, he’s surprised to see, there’s a good deal of awe in there, too.
See, he tells himself. She is still human in there somewhere. She opens her mouth to say something to him, and then closes it again. He nods. He knows something of how she feels.
A sound of clapping from the doorway startles all of them, and they turned to see Bakron Akarii there, with a phalanx of Stona marines behind him all in their shining white armor.
Semper feels his chest tighten, his breathing go short. What is this?
“Nice effects,” Bakron says to Nadrune. “Very impressive. You get your Sister, and she will not talk to you. You finally get your Beast back again, but oh! Again he walks out on you! Did you capture it all for one of your broadcasts, Nadrune, with some creative editing? Or are you ready to tell the world the truth, that you’ve been dumped two times by the same animal?”
Nadrune sputters with rage, and her eyes light up with the fire that’s always within her. “Lieutenant-Marshall…” she begins
“Spare me.” Bakron makes an obscene gesture at her. Then he turns to the Stona at the head of his group.
“Take them,” he says. “Take them all.”
38. Blackwell
T
he Sister’s throat is a corpse road, but it’s not like any road I’ve ever seen before. Normally it feels like I’m pushing through fog, or stepping behind the curtain in a theater. I can hear people murmuring, talking, but they’re usually far off and indistinct. I’ll be wrapped in strange smells, and the shadows of things happening on either end of the road will fade in and out.
Not this time. I step down her throat and I’m in a tunnel or some sort of tight space, from the sounds of it. Everything feels close, and the sound of my breathing is loud.
It smells like a kiva, the thick smell of woodsmoke. The rich loam of a dirtnest. I reach out, but I can’t feel any walls. It’s completely dark.
I step forward, and there’s soft dirt beneath my feet now. I walk for awhile. Nothing changes.
Then I hear voices.
They’re speaking the Hulgliev High Tongue, something I haven’t heard in ten years.
One voice, thin and raspy, is talking about hunting. Another is arguing about the ownership of some tool, though it sounds like he’s arguing with himself. A third is calling out for water—he’s terribly thirsty, could someone spare him a bowlful? I can’t tell where the voices are coming from.
All the voices are men’s voices.
“
Sibling, I bring you greetings
,” I call out formally. There’s no answer. All of the voices keep on talking to themselves, and there are more of them now. Men are bragging about battles I’ve never heard of, fighting over food, sobbing. Someone screams now, over and over again.
“
Siblings
,” I call. “
Where are you
?”
“
They can’t hear you
,” someone says. I jump because it sounds like he’s right in front of me. “
They’re dead, you know
.”
I can feel all the fur on my neck stand up. “
So I’m…”
“
In our afterlife, brother.”
“
I’m not dead
,” I say.
I’m feeling slow on the uptake, but you’ll need to cut me some slack here.
“
Cheer up. You will be soon.”
He laughs, not unkindly.
The voices are all pretty loud now. I feel like I’m back in that Dead storm, but this time it’s all filled with invisible Hulgliev. “
I thought it would be, well, calmer here.”
“
I think it is for some. The calm dead don’t need to speak so much, do they
?
Particularly when no one else will hear them
.”
“Who are you?” I ask in Fhirlo, suddenly suspicious. His voice sounds familiar. It’s deep and rough like he’s been smoking and drinking a little too much.
“The guy that’s going to help you get where you’re going, Blackwell. Don’t overthink it. Can you follow me?” He’s moving off to my left.
I nod, like that does any good. I follow the sound of his footsteps in the dirt. I have to swivel my ears around—it’s hard to hear feet over the other voices, but as we walk the voices grow fainter. It also seems like it’s getting a little lighter, but I can’t be quite sure.
“Is it crowded in here?” I ask.
“I don’t know.”
“There aren’t many of us left. Alive, I mean. I’d think there’d be a lot of us waiting.”
“There could be. But there are more out there, too, than you know right now.”
“Are there any women in here?”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you.”
I’m sure I blush, but he can’t see me. “Hulgliev women. Waiting, I mean.”
“Again, I don’t know. But I’m guessing not—there never were many female souls. They’re probably not kept waiting very long.”
I swallow, not sure if I want to hear this answer. “So, what else do I need to know?”
He laughs again. “So much more than I can ever tell you, Blackwell. Watch your eyes, ok?”
There’s a blinding light, then, as he opens a round hole in the ground. I look in, and I’m staring down, or up, a long stone well. Rusted metal rungs are embedded into the side of it. At the far end, I see sky and smoke, trash blowing around, a lot of movement that I can’t really make out this far away.
“Head towards the light,” he says, joking. “I’ll see you back here in a little while.”
I look over at the other side of the well. He’s all in shadow, and I can’t see his face.
“How little?”
“Climb,” he says, pointing down.
I nod, lower myself into the well and get going.
Before long, I realize I’m climbing upside-down—things have turned and my feet are in the air instead of the other way around, and I have to swing myself around on the ladder.
I’m near the top when I hear the explosions. A dark shape swoops low over the mouth of the well, and I duck. I hear the hiss and splat of magefire. I take Semper’s knife in my teeth and peer over the rim.
The first thing I see are two Hulgliev, pinned down beneath a giant black bird of some kind. Then bird is immense with these gigantic black wings, a long and narrow beak, a huge cranial ridge that stretches back along its head, and massive talons that dig into the stone floor of the room we’re in.
The room is a hanger of some sort—a high ceiling, some big doors open to the outside. More of those birds fly across the opening, some of them with marines in their claws. Beyond the two Hulgliev is a podship that looks pretty familiar. There’s a creature there I don’t recognize, with a head that’s all snout and five eyes spread across the bridge of his nose. She’s dressed in an elaborate gown that looks like it’s made from fog and strips of silver, and she’s holding a long wooden box in six-fingered hands that have long, curled nails and many rings.