Blightcross: A Novel (43 page)

“What they don't realize,” Vasi said, “is that when the shadow men run out of humans to take, they will just take lower forms of life. Plants, animals, insects. This is crazy, it is not a solution at all.”

Muffled voices called out all around them. Retching, coughing, pleading.

“The poison soldiers.” She had nearly died from their gas once before, and didn't want to tempt fate with a second opportunity.

She crept through the wreckage. A few blocks away, the war machine lumbered and righted its askew weaponry. Its metal no longer gleamed and shone. Now it showed a darker, dull finish, and parts of it sported gashes and scorch marks.

Vasi caught up to her. “Rovan is still up there. We have to get him down.”

“I'd love to, but how? And you're forgetting that he's the shadow men's leader now. What are you going to do once we save him?” She glared at the war engine. “I spoke with Helverliss. He thought it to be obvious that your missing piece is humanity itself. He says there had to be... oh what was it he said... a mediator involved in the opposing forces, if they are not to completely nullify everything.”

Vasi blinked and became a motionless idol. “That's it... the damned circles. Even our Ehzeri family knots showed the answer. Three powers, not two. But it's not what you think.”

“Dannac, what do you—” Capra whirled to face him, but he wasn't there. “Dannac? Where did you go?” She then spotted him sprinting away.

“I've got something to take care of. I'll meet you later!”

“But—”

“See you at the book shop... later.”

There was a note of uncertainty in his voice—one Capra was sure she'd never heard. But he'd disappeared into the smoke, and all she could do was take his word.

Vasi gasped and gazed to the sky. The sun now was barely a sliver on the horizon, and the machine's flame guns bathed its torso in an orange glow. Behind it, the refinery's smokestacks glowed in a similar fire. Despite the creeping darkness, Capra made out streams of shadows gathering around the machine.

“They're retreating?” Was it because of Sevari's troops?

“Regrouping, not retreating.” Now Vasi looked at her with an intensity she had never seen out of the woman. “Capra, things are desperate. You need to know something.”

“What?”

“You are Ehzeri.”

Capra's heart clunked at Vasi's words, like random junk tossed into gearwork. “That doesn't make sense.”

“Don't think about it. There's no time to think or explain. You have my family amulet, you have Ehzeri features, and you showed aptitude.”

Capra touched her face, ignorant of the grease and dirt she was spreading along her cheek. The face, her face, was not Ehzeri. Capra Jorassian was a prime example of a common Valoii woman, ignoring her capital offence. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because now that I have a family member, one with
vihs
-
draaf
, we have another option. We can alter... we can call upon a powerful force. Without it causing mass devastation.”

“Whoa, this is crazy. Look—I have olive skin, standard Valoii hazel eyes, and look at my damned nose.”

“You have just described a typical Ehzeri. You have just described the typical citizen of the Bhagovan Republic. There is really not so much difference... except in beliefs and priorities.”

Vasi pulled on the chain around her neck. On the necklace hung an amulet identical to Capra's.

So someone way back in Capra's family had come across the same artisan, probably during the war. It meant nothing. They were wasting time with this nonsense, and just to make things that much better, Dannac had vanished.

She resumed her cautious jaunt through the rubble, peered behind broken walls and bits of twisted furniture.

“Capra, listen to me. If you can't accept that you are the enemy you were sworn to destroy, just listen to this. You can access the same power I have. If we do it together, it can multiply by a factor of hundreds. I know how to do certain things. Certain things only done on the battlefield. Things I haven't been proud of, but with your help, might work for the better.”

It was too much. Magic, of all things. No, it wasn't something she could deal with at the moment.

“I am going to start a working, and I want you to play along. What I'm going to do is channel aspects of both these creatures. I now understand the painting. Helverliss forgot to account for the archons.”

Capra skidded to a halt. “Archons? What do they have to do with it? They came way before anything to do with Akhli.”

Vasi shook her head. “Akhli
was
an archon. This is what we've all been missing. The archons are the mitigating factor. They are the mediator between the two forces. Helverliss thought it was humanity, but he was wrong. Archons are what keep them in line. Humanity is just a... just an aberration of perception. The human is a void, a gaze, nothing really... the archons were created as a necessity when the other two primordial forces came into being. Three circles, they must all touch each other, else all will cease to be.”

“I don't understand.”

“I am going to imbue us both with the essence of the fire giants and the shadow men. Then we will combine our efforts to... become an archon. A true archon, one who knows its place. I could just allow the archon my family imbued me with to take over, but without your help, I would be a mindless destroyer no different to the fire giants.”

“How? What good is that? And how can I turn this archon of yours into a helpful one? I don't know what you're asking of me.”

“Would you trust me?”

“But Dannac—”

Vasi took her hand. “Stop. When you feel sick during thunderstorms, when you feel this uneasiness you cannot get rid of through exertion or sex or whatever it is you did to deal with it—these are all symptoms of pent-up
vihs
. You have to accept what I mean to do, and allow your threads to work with mine. It is family... this is how we do things. You may think you are Valoii, but the connection is there.” There was a hint of guilt in her voice.

It was stupid, but if she could make up for her crimes against the Ehzeri, she would try it.

And it just might help to defeat the machine. The chances were better that Capra would defeat the damned jumble of engines with a clothesline and a stick, but it was technically possible.

Normally, smoke was nothing Dannac's eye couldn't penetrate. But every few steps, something would warp in his view. The sudden changes made him dizzy, and he would duck into an alley, breathing heavily, clutching the hand-cannon. Something wasn't right. Nothing was right in Blightcross, but in this case—

The hand-cannon fell from his hands, and his arm jerked behind him. The attacker whirled him round and slammed his face into the bricks.

“Hello, old friend.”

A familiar voice. Yet he still saw no hands, no person, restraining him.

“Just a cordial reminder, Dannac.” The attacker's form materialized. “We made your sight, we know how to counter it.”

“Yaz.”

“Good man.”

“I was looking for you.”

Yaz released him, though his weapon was still trained on Dannac's chest.

Dannac could not express in words the gratitude he felt about regaining his sight. But the last person he wanted to see on such an occasion was Yaz. There he stood, and even with his inhuman sight, Dannac could not mistake the man's thin mouth and trimmed beard.

“You're lucky I didn't kill you when you pulled me aside, Yaz.” He wasn't a fool—Yaz could have, and always will be able to, kill him. But he couldn't bring himself to admit it openly.

“I didn't want to complicate things by speaking to you in front of those women you've been consorting with. Now, about your eye. Did you get what I want?”

There was no way to know for sure, but he could only assume that Capra had done her best to expose the gem to the clock tower's inner workings and secure areas.

Yaz rubbed together his slender hands. “Chemical weapons troops, gigantic walking machines... Sevari has surprised me. If I can get even a glimpse of what he's done for my government, I'll be taken care of for life.” He brought out a small metal sphere. “This is the remote device I threatened you with.” He handed it to Dannac. “As a show of good faith.”

Dannac ran his fingers along the smooth, cold metal. “Good faith?”

“Of course, I will have to take you in to extract the images from your mind. It is a painless process, so don't worry. All that is needed is for our surgeons to apply a special beam of light to the eye, and it will reflect back the images from your mind.”

“Then take the eye and leave me alone.”

Yaz flashed an unnaturally patient smile. “The eye must be in your head during the process. How else would we extract the images from your mind? The whole mechanism is integrated into your brain, you see.”

Dannac stuffed the sphere into his pocket.

“Now, another thing I'll need from you, and this is all in good faith, remember, is your Valoii friend. When we escape from here, it will be under somewhat vague pretences, all right? I don't care what it is. Say you paid me for transport, whatever. After she is comfortable, we'll drug her, and before you know it we'll be in the Republic drinking to another victory over Mizkov.”

Capra. Assuming she survived whatever it was she planned to do, could he really turn her in?

Did he really think he had a choice?

“In case you forgot, dear friend, you have no choice.”

“I could kill you.”

“That would be dishonourable.”

“It would. But that does not mean I cannot do it.”

“But you won't, because you know that there are a thousand agents just like me, and we are a petty bureaucracy. We hold grudges, Dannac. Big grudges. The next agent might destroy your remaining family, or the entire village you came from. They are quite creative.”

Dannac had done worse, and more than once. One sure thing—he was no good to anyone dead.

“You are sure your government needs a Valoii soldier to interrogate?”

“Oh yes. They usually die long before we get close enough to capture.”

He sighed and checked his cannon. “Let me find her.”

“Work, Capra. That's all you have to do, work hard.”

It didn't make sense. None of it did—not Vasi's strange instructions, and not the way it seemed as though every moment until now had been a dream. The sensations were colours nobody had ever glimpsed, a kind of sight nobody had ever possessed, a silent voice demanding of her things about which she knew nothing.

The world around her faded and flattened against itself, a false backdrop. Now when she gazed around the darkness, the shadows and the giants both shone like fiery beacons. There were six giants left, and they all were stomping towards the war machine.

She began to understand that this distant power pressing through her was what Vasi needed, and that she could pull more through if she concentrated, like opening a tap.

“How much of this do you need?”

Vasi gazed into the distance with flaming orange eyes. “As much as you can pull from the structure.”

“And what's this going to do for us?”

“Give us the ability to fight them in the only way possible.”

All of this effort, this strange concentration, this half-existence in some negative realm, and Vasi wasn't even preparing a final blast of holy fire that would solve everything in a flash?

A breath later, there was a flash, but not of holy cleansing fire. It was a flash of stopped time, a moment captured, a thought suspended.

Capra could no longer make out the giants or the shadows. The world around them was buttressed by a frame of blue streaks. She reeled in a thrall. Any word, idea, or symbol she tried to think of to integrate the experience fell through the metal grating that was her awareness, like trying to scoop water with a fork.

And in another flash, Vasi sent a tendril of blue cord shooting from her forehead. There was no time to even question it before the cord pierced Capra between her eyes. She reeled, stumbled, clutched her head as if a spike of
something
buried itself deep inside. Her skin crawled and tightened and her body cried out in a flurry of aches, but she stayed frozen in place. She had to trust Vasi, or there wasn't any point in trying to fight these primordial forces.

A burning raced through her body. Vasi had disappeared, and when Capra's mind began to clear, she realized that she was no longer Capra. Her body was strange. A tail flicked behind her, and the contracting muscles rippled up her back.

As soon as it had happened, Capra once again found herself kneeling amid smoking rubble and calamitous cannon fire.

She saw the shadows as orange flame, the same as what the giants had become in her mind's eye. Now there hung in her mind a kind of kinship, an understanding with them. She felt the power of the giants, their ravaging urges, their dislike of calm rationality, and the shadow men's calculating individualism and desire for their own way. A kind of strength flowed through her, and an impulse to destroy the giants along with their sworn enemy.

It was a bloodlust.

She began to search for Vasi, until a voice inside answered her.

I am right here, inside you. Kill them while you can! We can only hold this form for so long...

This form? She looked at her hands. The veins throbbed and her fingers seemed longer than usual, and the skin darker.

The part of her that had resisted the transformation became horrified at being combined with another person in this one strange body, but exerted no influence.

Everything is as it should be. This is not the same as before... we will only kill the shadows... only the shadows...

It was time to get back to work, and so she dashed through the ruins, towards the war machine. The speed, the power, so new, almost intoxicating. An equal footing with these monsters from primordial times.