Chapter 21 #2
“Probably checking for ambushes. Communicating about what’s ahead to the others.” He motions, barely visible now in the rapidly vanishing glow. “Hopefully everyone else realised the same; as long as they didn’t get spotted when it passed, they should be waiting for us in the garden. Let’s move.”
We venture once again into the dark, our progress as fast as the lack of visibility allows. Five minutes. Ten. Even adjusted as they are, my eyes make out only the blackest of shadows, the vaguest of outlines that suggest where walls might be. My heart never ceases to pound.
And then more light ahead. Too soon.
We slow, but this illumination doesn’t seem to be coming toward us so we creep forward, hugging the wall.
Caeror wordlessly directs Tash to wait in the nearest tomb—the iunctus’s entire body is trembling, a miracle he’s made it this far—and then slips past me, peering around the rocky corner of the next chasm bend.
“Oh, gods.” He whispers it. Sinks back against the stone for support, white. There’s agony in his voice.
He motions desolately with his head for me to see.
Heart dropping, I carefully position myself and then peek.
Parallel red lines near either wall provide much of the light, the substance from the Gleaners’ blades inscribed somehow onto the chasm’s floor for at least a hundred feet.
Clearly showing everything in their radius.
The bodies are arranged neatly between the two.
There are at least a few dozen of them; it has to be the majority of the Qabrans, maybe all of them. We’re close enough to see the glistening crimson patches on their robes, the angry slices across their faces and arms. I recognise most by sight, though I do not know their names.
A half dozen Gleaners hover thirty feet up, motionless as they keep guard. Facing away from us, standing on the ground amongst the corpses, is another. As I watch, it raises its red-pulsing blades. Brings them both down sharply into a woman’s chest.
She gasps, and bucks against the burning stone piercing her body, and begins to talk.
I shudder and pull back. Look at Caeror. He is staring into nothing. For the first time since I’ve met him, the light utterly gone from his eyes. I don’t know what to say to him.
“We can’t get to the gardens.” Every part of me wants to show my empathy but we don’t have time to dwell, not now. “They’re waiting right outside.”
“Some of the Gleaners must have come straight here. They knew. Someone got caught. They knew.” Caeror breathes the words into the void, and then seems to come back to himself. Blinks and clenches his fists and straightens. “Gods. We’re trapped.”
We huddle back into the shadows of the nearest tomb, though it will do us little good. Doing our best to think through the fear. “You’re sure there’s no other way out?”
Caeror nods, grimly certain. I risk another look around the corner. The Gleaner has moved on from the woman, now listening impassively to a man twitching and moaning his secrets as the blades skewer him clean through. “What will happen to them?”
“Same as anyone they catch, I assume,” says Caeror hollowly.
“So they’ll take them back to Duat.”
He looks at me. “They’ll spear them with their Vitaeria, to make sure they’re still viable after the journey. Carry them back with a blade through the heart.” He’s seen what I’m thinking. “It won’t work, Vis.”
“It might if I can command one before it tries.” My mind races. Sick to my stomach, terrified at what I’m suggesting even as I say it. “I take control of the Gleaner, and I get it to take me. It’s not that different from what we were thinking.”
“The Gleaners will all fly back together. As a swarm. It’s why we planned to separate one out. The others will notice you being carried.”
“Not if I get it to stab me too.” Kadmos’s lessons often involved medicine and the body, those months leading up to the Academy.
“A chest wound won’t kill me, not if it’s from a Vitaerium sticking through me.
I just need to make sure nothing vital gets hit.
Which I can tell the Gleaner to do, if I’m controlling it. ”
“Rotting gods, Vis. It will be agony. And you’d have to pretend to be dead. The entire time.”
“I know.”
We stare at each other, and I can see him wanting to tell me no. But he has no answers. No alternatives. In the end, silence becomes his affirmation.
“We need to lure one away. It won’t work if one of the others sees,” I note quietly. Dazed that this is really happening, but aware I don’t have time to second-guess myself. “We need to do it now, before any of the ones still out there get back.”
“I can do that.” Caeror exhales. Grim and reluctant, but he sees the necessity of it as clearly as I. He indicates a tomb. “Hide in here. Tash and I will draw it past into the next one. You’ll have to imbue it, and tell it not to communicate anything is wrong, before it realises you’re there.”
I give him a look; we’ve discussed how I might control a Gleaner more than anything else since I arrived. He gives me a wry, nervous grin. Claps me on the shoulder. “Alright. Alright. Luck, Vis.”
He pauses as if to say more, then grimaces and ducks away.
I conceal myself in the darkness of the tomb Caeror indicated; there’s a minute as he presumably informs Tash of what is happening, and then a cough. Not loud, even in the emptiness of Qabr. But enough to faintly echo.
Nothing for five seconds. Ten.
Then red light creeps across the entrance by my feet.
My heart drums a painful beat. Only one Gleaner, I’m fairly certain; no overlapping shadows to indicate different sources of light. The illumination slows and then pauses, as if the thing outside is looking around.
The lightest scuffling of foot against stone from the tomb next to me. The light moves again, darting this time. Brightens considerably as it narrows to a sliver, angle sharp. The Gleaner moving into the entrance of the next tomb.
No time to waver. I stride out soundless and purposeful. A broad figure stands just inside the doorway, scanning the room, blades burning by its sides. Caeror and Tash will be hiding behind the sarcophagus. Certain to be discovered as soon as the creature proceeds.
Three steps. No hesitation. Grasp its shoulder.
It’s not easy. This is not like practicing on a calm and compliant Tash.
The muscle beneath my grip immediately tenses and it’s all I can do to hang on as it flinches, twists.
But my constant practice this past month, all my hard work at the Academy and my training at Villa Telimus before that, pays off.
I push through. Imbue it and do all I can not to see it as a monster, but a man. Just another man, surprised.
Connection.
The Gleaner is there. I can’t sense its thoughts—I never could with Tash, either—but I am aware of it, in a way that is uncomfortably personal. Its senses are all there, if I want them.
“Don’t do anything that could draw attention to us. Stay where you are.” I choke out the words in a whisper. Jerk my hand away once I’ve said them. Stumble back, fear menacing my focus as I wait with pounding blood and held breath for any sign that my attempt has been unsuccessful.
The Gleaner just stands there. Motionless.
I exhale. Are you still connected to the other Gleaners? Nod for yes. I think the words as if I were saying them out loud. Imagine I’m directing them at my mental image of the creature. It’s harder, to send these nonverbal instructions as clear thoughts. But prudent.
It nods.
Do you have a name? Tell me softly, if so. Knowing, having a word that the iunctii identifies as itself, seems to help.
It opens its mouth, and a faint, wavering groan comes out. I clench my fists. I can’t risk looking, but it sounds as though it has no tongue.
Then, to my wary surprise, it uses its burning obsidian blade to illuminate something on the nape of its neck. A tattoo. Neat and small and black. I look closer.
Duodecim is your name? I grimace as it nods.
Written out rather than the number, but it means “twelve” in Vetusian.
I doubt it’s a birth name. Check the next few tombs without looking at me, Duodecim.
Do it as slowly as you can without arousing suspicion.
I can’t risk it laying eyes on us in case Ka is watching through them.
I wait until Duodecim has moved obediently away before whispering into the renewed darkness. “It worked.”
Caeror and Tash’s silhouettes emerge from behind the sarcophagus, and I feel as much as hear my friend’s excitement as he grips my shoulder in enthusiastic celebration. “Well done.”
“Now we just need you two safe. I could tell the Gleaner to distract the others in front of the garden, draw them away so you can—”
“No.” Caeror’s interruption is gentle. The creature in the tomb over finishes its checking quicker than I’d have liked and emerges, red light temporarily splaying over us as it moves to the next.
Caeror’s expression is taut but sure as the darkness reclaims it.
“Too risky. They’ll know something’s wrong, and you getting into Duat is too important. ”
“Then what?”
“I have an idea, but we don’t have time for explanations. Every second we wait is one that the other Gleaners might notice this one’s missing.” He unloops his Vitaerium from his arm, presses it into my hand. “You’re going to need this.”
I shove it away. “So are you.”
“There are a couple of spares past the garden. And if I can’t get in there in the next hour, I’m dead anyway. But if you want to survive what you’re planning …”
I hesitate, caught between the need to argue and the frustration of knowing I can’t. I conceal his Vitaerium and then mine by strapping them to my thigh, shivering at the fresh flush of power. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”