Chapter Seventeen
Chapter
Seventeen
Flesh
& Blood
He
remembered when he was a boy.
He had
been reading by his bedroom window, the twilight of the day casting deep hues
across the stone. From below, he had heard laughter. A mob of village children
were playing in the street. Feeling like a voyeur, he had tracked them through
the buildings below, watching the clouds of dust they kicked from the road, the
ripples they left in the crowd.
Something
had overcome him.
Feeling
suddenly brave, Isaac had snuck down his uncle’s tower, climbed through a
window, and gone out to join the village children, who, contrary to all his
fears, had accepted him without a single word, as if he really did belong. They
played through the coming dusk, and the games had been wonderous, the laughter
insatiable, and he had marveled at the instinctiveness of it all, how easily he
found himself cheering and smiling.
When he
came back to himself, night had already fallen.
On the
way back to his tower, a boar from the constabulary had grabbed him by the arm,
giving a rough snort of displeasure. Upon returning home, he found the captain
of the guard giving a stern lecture to his uncle. Berith had barely waited for
the door to close before baring the cane, and Isaac had curled into a ball long
before the lashes ceased. His welts had wept with every step back up to his
room. When he had woken the next morning, a heavy padlock rested on the outside
of his bedroom door.
He had
been seven years old.
He had
never left again.
Now, he
was firing wind across the extraction chamber, knocking the coffins from the
ceiling. All the broken glass became blizzards in the air. He intensified the
gales, concentrated the strikes, blasting the coffins
down into chunks and splinters.
The
only thing louder than the wind was the sound of his screaming.
And he
remembered, when he was twelve, how he had chatted with one of his instructors
out in the yard. The man—Janos—had been telling him stories of his father, the
expeditions, the wild nights at the taverns, how sorry he was to hear of his
capture, and, of course, condolences for the death of his mother, as well. The
man had been friendly, jovial. He did not seem like he was talking to Isaac out
of pity, like most others had done.
He
seemed as if he could be trusted.
In a
moment of boldness, Isaac had asked Janos if he could aid him when it was
finally time to rescue his father. A look of surprise and guilt had crossed the
man’s face. He didn’t remember the rest of the lesson, but Berith had rounded
on him the second Janos departed, accusing Isaac of insolence. He had never
trusted another person again.
After
the coffins were destroyed, Isaac targeted the metal, the extractors, the
pipes, the drainage shafts, all the rusted tracks and fetid tanks, loosing a blizzard of icy spears. He did not stop until the
metal was as brittle as glass.
And he
remembered the days when Berith would leave the tower.
His
uncle would assign some menial labor in the laboratory, the work only designed
to keep Isaac busy. Usually, his uncle would be gone for days at a time, saying
that he needed to attend a college-sponsored excavation, or a research
symposium at the capital, or a committee hearing for the taxation of enchanted
swords. And every time Berith returned from these long sojourns away, he would
always be in a fouler mood than when he had left.
Afterward,
Isaac would put more effort into avoiding his uncle, because the man’s temper
was always worsened by his presence. Now, of course, he knew that his uncle was
training to control the minds of his students.
Parasites.
Berith.
The
Diet.
When
most of the room had been sundered with ice, Isaac began to fire raw sound,
blasting through the rows of machinery, sending clouds of shrapnel screaming
through the chamber. Entire sections of the factory fell from the ceiling, all
of them split and shredded until the pieces of metal resembled the fallen
leaves of a tree. Each eruption of sound stabbed at his ears, and the pain only
drove him further, only made him strike harder and faster, every blast of
splintered metal only sharpening his need to destroy.
And he
remembered all the questions he had ever asked.
Why can
I not use the soul-capture to speak with my father? Why did the sorceress
capture him at all? What was she doing to him? Was he going to come back and
live with us once he was rescued?
The
responses were always the same. Very quickly, he learned to stop asking.
Now,
here, in the extraction chamber, Isaac’s legs gave out before his arms. He
collapsed along a carpet of broken glass and shattered pipes, perched above a
drainage tunnel that teemed with piles of bone. He gasped for air, the blood
and metal spinning around him. A giant pelvis curved like the rising of a
mountain.
Heart
pounding.
Sweat
dripping.
Body
screaming.
And
what he remembered most, what he had always remembered most, were the smiles.
The first time he had toppled a cup with a gust of wind, he had turned and seen
pride in his uncle’s eyes.
Oh, the
joy he had felt.
“Isaac!”
The
extraction chamber was barely destroyed. The room was incalculably large, and
there was so much metal, so many machines, so much crystalized death still
clinging to the tanks and scythes, that it would take him days to destroy it
all by hand. Beside him, the grated floor was littered with shards of metal,
split open tanks, powdered hills of bone.
He
remembered the meals shared in the dining hall. Spiced chicken, fresh olives,
hot bread. A cider, here and there.
Our
little secret, his uncle would say.
“Hey.
Hey.”
He
couldn’t breathe. His lungs did not have the energy to flex. Isaac gasped, his
vision fading, his mind desperate for air.
A hand
rested on his back. He flinched, falling to the floor. He tried to curl into a
ball, lie on his side, protect his belly and organs.
The
cane.
The
cane.
The
cane—
“Isaac.
It’s me.”
His
limbs were twitching, his muscles as stiff as the bark of a tree. He had cast
too much. His body was spent.
He
wanted to lie there and die.
The
hand came again, and another followed, and he was lifted back to a sitting
position. He felt furry fingers, each of them tipped with a claw. He felt a
breath on his neck, a voice in his ear.
“Easy.
Easy, now. Come on.”
The
hands on his shoulders became arms that wrapped around his chest, gently
holding him in place. Breasts pushed into his back. He felt the strap of a
leather pauldron, the cloth of a brassiere, a few tufts of fur.
Warmth.
Zaria.
He
could smell her again.
He
remembered, suddenly, the apprentice tests, the gathered crowd, the spreading
news of a journeyman who had grown proficient in two different schools. The
news was so extraordinary that even an Archon had come to witness the event.
Isaac had shaken the old man’s hand, feeling the cold and wrinkled fingers,
studying the braids in the wizard’s whitened beard. The Archon of the Diet had
told him that he was the most promising mage in quite some time.
Just
like his father.
“Breathe.
Breathe.” Zaria’s arms tightened against his chest, moving in slow,
rhythmic motions. “In, out. In, out. Come on. Breathe.”
He drew breath as best he could, struggling against the
depletion of his muscle. Her hands wrapped around his arms, stroking up and
down. On the floor in front of him, their legs pressed together, pushing
through broken glass and shards of metal.
“I’m
here,” Zaria said, softly. “I’m right here.”
He
gripped her arm. He listened to her voice.
He
looked above his head. The stripes and stars banner hung limply along its
mount, the fabric tattered and ancient. He still didn’t know what it meant. The
necromancers seemed to use it as a symbol of their gods. It allowed access to
their tomb. It was on every mural and relief, every myth of their society.
Red
stripes. Navy blue. Dozens of stars.
Did the
stars represent their gods? Were the red stripes a symbol of blood?
He saw
now that Zaria’s hands were bloody. There were long lacerations across her arm,
some of them already scarring over from the touch of necrotic magic. He turned
his head as much as he could, and his nose went tickling through the thick
tufts of fur on her neck, finding them wet and red. The bones had nearly slit
her throat.
“Sorry,”
he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Isaac—”
“I’m
sorry. I—”
He
would’ve killed her. He would’ve killed all of Berith’s thralls. He had
killed a number of them. They were people from his village, all of the same
age. They had been students, just like him.
Their
bodies. His fault.
“Sorry.
I didn’t mean—”
“For
fuck’s sake.” She hugged him tighter, pressing him to her chest. “Listen to me.
It’s not your fault.”
How had
he gone so long without noticing?
“It’s
not your fault.”
The
training. The imprisonment.
“You
were a child.”
The
shouting, the pain, the resentment.
“You
didn’t know better.”
Berith
saying he would throw him on the street.
“You
couldn’t have known better.”
Berith,
in the yard, holding the cane, sneering that his brother deserved his fate.
“You
were never given the chance.”
Berith
screaming that he was only a burden.
“Gods
apart, that was fucking madness,” Zaria said. “I can’t begin to imagine—” He
felt her growl. “I’d call your uncle a cunt, but that don’t even breach the
surface. He’s lower than shite. The craven rat tried to blame everyone but
himself.”
Tears
began to well in his eye.
“It’s
not your fault,” the hyena said. “Alright? Whatever else there is, it ain’t on
you.” She patted his back. “You did the best you could.”
He
looked away.
She
helped him calm his breath. A few minutes passed. His body recovered enough
that he was able to flex his limbs. When he no longer seemed in danger of
falling into shock, Zaria asked: “What do we do?”
He
didn’t know how to answer.
“I