Chapter Twenty-Three Cat
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Cat
They rest most of the next day. They lie curled against each other, arms and bodies intertwined.
Cat wakes in fits and starts. Elician sleeps on.
Partho brings them food and the camp outside bustles with enough gossip that even the Blue Guard members stationed outside Cat and Elician’s tent can’t keep the words from carrying over.
Everyone wants to know exactly how a Reaper healed someone, and what it means for a Reaper and a Giver to work together.
It’s like the gods working as one, one particular voice shouts with a touch too much exuberance.
It’s all Cat needs to hear before he extricates himself from Elician’s side.
He pulls Marina’s journal from his bag and tells the Guardsmen at the front of his tent that he wants to be alone.
They hesitate, clearly unwilling to heed that request, but he walks and keeps on walking, and he is grateful when they do not follow.
It takes him a long while, but he reaches the edge of the encampment and from there makes his way to the desolate city of Endura.
He walks through the remains of the door they destroyed.
He finds Endura’s tallest building, a watchtower in the city centre, and he climbs to the top just so he can see the whole of the city in all directions at once.
The sky is blanketed with the glow of countless stars.
Untold wonders twinkle down above him, but off on the horizon there is an occasional flicker of another light too – the light of some faraway town that has not yet faced ruin.
Outside the city walls, life exists. It breathes in and out.
It makes noise. It exists, and time moves on for it.
Even if here, in this town where not even ghosts will tread, there is nothing but silence.
Cat opens Marina’s journal. He thumbs through the pages of her life. He reads through her scattered thoughts and recollections. Reads, as well, as she recites a story about the gods.
Life was born to a great barren nothingness. He emerged, shapeless and undefined, and he longed to fill all the empty spaces…
Cat knows this story. He knows how it continues too.
How when the world became vast, and the canvas too great for only two to manage, Death breathed her talent into the worthy and Life graced the chosen with his strength.
Reapers and Givers were both meant to carry out the duty of their gods.
To give life or to give death and to think nothing except the understanding that it was their purpose to maintain a balance.
‘All of creation is in balance,’ Elena Morsen said once.
‘All that ensures that we remain in balance is the knowledge that the end is not truly an end. That so long as we have purpose in our existence then we cannot be erased, only reformed. We will return to try again. And for that reason, all life is sacred, and so too is every death.’
Endura is quiet.
There is no life here. Not anymore. Not yet.
The balance that had been maintained, Cat knows, is over.
But why did Death herself come to see it done?
he wonders. Why here and not in Alerae? Why this town, a border town certainly, but small and meaningless in terms of significance?
It lacked much of the value of Altas. Its people were hearty folk, but no different from anywhere else. So why them?
And the only answer he can come up with is: Why not Endura?
What does a god care about the values of commerce or trade? Of strategic outposts or military capabilities? Gods barter in life and death, and Endura had the lives she wanted to see dead. Perhaps that is the only thing that mattered in the end.
Footsteps echo up the staircase that leads to Cat’s perch.
He recognizes them immediately, and he embraces the noise that reminds him of his own purpose.
The trapdoor that seals off this part of the watchtower opens, and Elician pokes his head through.
Cat leans back on his hands, twisting to watch as Elician scrambles up out of the hole and closes the trapdoor behind him.
He shuffles forward, sitting at Cat’s side and letting his legs dangle off the highest part of the tower.
‘You found me,’ Cat murmurs.
‘I found you,’ his husband agrees. ‘Partho is worried about you.’
‘I just wanted to be alone.’
‘Do you want me to leave?’
‘No, I don’t need to be alone from you.’
Elician smiles, soft and gentle and pleased.
He nudges Cat’s shoulder with his own and Cat tilts.
Lets his head rest against Elician in a position that comes so naturally after so many weeks of practice.
‘Tell me what you’re thinking,’ Elician entreats, wrapping his arm around him.
Five words that a simple inquisitive hiss could have accomplished.
Or perhaps it is more like six words masquerading as five. Contractions are funny like that.
Elician smells like dust and sweat, earth and water. It is sour and stale, and Cat treasures the scent anyway. It is warm as it enters his nostrils, and it fills him with a creature comfort that reminds him of living in the cool dark pits of the Reaper cells.
Reapers are not encouraged to touch others.
A touch means death and death means ending.
Reapers are kept as solitary things so that they can ensure that life flourishes for as long as possible.
Perhaps for some, it is better that way.
Perhaps it would have been better if Water and Earth had not evolved enough to provide consciousness to the creatures they made.
If those consciousnesses did not strain for life more than Water strained for death.
‘I’m thinking about water…and earth…’ Cat replies.
‘Of souls in the water moving from one place to another but barricaded by stones you have to move aside. Everywhere except for here, where nothing flows at all.’ Elician had been so very specific in his explanation on how he brought back the people of Altas.
And now, Cat feels it all around. Water, earth…
and a great yawning emptiness where something else should be.
Every body is filled with a mixture of the two.
Inorganic compounds, made mobile by the water that carries them to creation.
And yet, ‘What do you think a soul is made of?’
Elician frowns at the question. Cat presses on.
‘If a body is a physical thing, a manifestation of water and earth – then what does it mean when a soul cannot be found? If it isn’t made up of either of those…
then what is it? Why can’t you, or anyone, simply…
restart the chemicals that make a body work?
Force action into a corpse whether the soul is there or not? ’
If death is an end, permanent and unforgiving, then what is the difference between a body touched by Death and a body touched by a Reaper?
‘I don’t know, love,’ Elician answers at long last.
‘What did they feel like when you moved the boulders in the water?’ Cat asks. ‘The souls…when they passed you, what did they feel like?’
‘It…it felt like the wind. It felt like standing on the edge of a cliff, with the ground so far below you that you can’t quite see it properly.
And then, there on your own, something brushes along your arm.
It isn’t rough or hard, it isn’t soft or gentle.
It is nothing at all, and yet it must be something because you felt it.
There on your skin. And you can turn and look in every direction, you can squint as far as the eye can see, but it will not be there.
And sometimes the wind is swift, and sometimes it is slow.
It is a presence, but it exists entirely of its own making.
Unwilling to be grasped or contained. For if you contain the wind, it would cease to exist. When I moved the boulders, when I let them move again, it felt like that… just like the wind.’
And there is no wind in Endura. There is no soul to be found. ‘What do you think Life wants?’ Cat asks.
‘Life?’ Elician asks.
Cat hisses in agreement. He shuffles closer still, warming himself against Elician’s side. ‘You’re a Giver,’ he explains. ‘Givers follow Life, don’t they? So, what do you do for Life? What does he desire?’
Cat knows his own answer, with respect to Death.
It is embarrassing, in a way, how easily it came to him and how useless it seemed in the end.
He does not care what Death wants of him.
Death made him a Reaper. She saw him drown, and she gave him something of herself rather than let him return to the earth.
As far as Cat has ever been concerned, he does not owe the Moon Goddess, Death, anything.
Being a Reaper has been a curse for his entire life.
Fen was terrified of him when they first met, and he still is not sure if she has fully accepted him or merely made an exception for him that fits inside her own social values and moral codes.
He is different because he is her friend, but the rest of his kind…
are best left ignored and cast aside. Elician has never feared him; it made caring for him that much easier.
But it is Lio that Cat cannot truly quantify.
Lio did not fear him, exactly, when they first met.
He was cautious, certainly, but he existed near Cat with the knowledge that if something happened, Elician would save him.
It had given them both the start of a relationship that had no other comparison, and when Lio returned from the cells, that relationship had been twisted around a rod of understanding.
Somehow, Lio understood that which Cat had never thought could be explained.