Chapter 21 #3
“I’ll take my job over yours.” He chuckles shakily.
As terrified as I feel. His rictus grin briefly lit crimson again as the Gleaner slides to the next tomb over.
“And Vis? What you’re about to do? It’s all that matters.
You have a chance to save the people we love.
You have a chance to save worlds, and if there was anyone I would choose to give that responsibility to, it is you. ”
He embraces me briefly and fiercely, then rips himself away and retreats with Tash into the darkness of Qabr.
I am left alone in the shadowed archway, and though I know what I have to do next, fear arrests me.
A pain promised is often worse than pain itself, my mother used to say. Dread anticipation makes me vacillate, red light ebbing and receding as Duodecim moves on yet again. I surely don’t have long before its absence becomes suspicious.
I retreat into the tomb. Focus on the link in my mind.
Come back and search the first tomb again, Duodecim.
I crouch down behind the sarcophagus. Look thoroughly, and when you find me, act as you normally would, but stab me so that I survive.
Make sure it looks to anyone watching that you’ve killed me.
I convey the spot on my chest I think it should aim for.
Missing lungs and arteries. Not obviously far from my heart.
Then put me with the other bodies and when it is time, make sure to get me to Duat alive.
Seconds pass. Then red light slinks into the room. Creeps across the stone. I huddle farther into the shadows of the sarcophagus, despite myself. Mouth dry. Breath painfully short. I am living a nightmare from which there is no waking.
The Gleaner fills my view, its red blades blinding. I scramble back. Fiercely resist the urge to change my mind, to command it just to leave and hope I can find another way. Caeror is gone and everyone else here is dead. This is my only chance not just of getting into Duat, but survival.
It strides forward and I put my hands out in an instinctive defence; it bats them away, slicing deep, leaving stinging gashes across my arms that match the wounds of those I saw earlier.
Then it raises its granite blade and with a smooth, swift motion, spears it into me.
I try with everything I can not to react and yet still release an agonised, shocked shriek. Fire pulses through my chest. I taste blood as I bite down on my tongue, reducing the sound to a low moan. True panic clouds my mind along with the pain. This won’t work. This won’t work.
I am being picked up by my skewer; the blade cuts deeper and a soft moan escapes my lips.
Every muscle screams against the instinct to bunch up, to shift and try to ease the injury the blade through me is doing.
But I do all I can to school myself to stillness.
Take a shaky, shallow breath, though even that allows the razor edge of the stone to cut new slices in my flesh.
The pain is still there but it’s encroached upon.
Not fading, but more overwhelmed by the rush of fresh vitality that flows from the blade into me.
Through me. Pooling around the injury, in particular, and sealing it as best it can.
The worst of the agony suddenly washes away, even if the burning remains a searing discomfort.
I allow myself to go limp. Let me see through your eyes, Duodecim.
The stomach-churning twist of vision, the disconnect between what I’m seeing and what my body is doing.
But I’ve practiced this too. I watch as the Gleaner dispassionately delivers my bloodied form to the line, pulling its burning blade from my chest and then rising, rejoining its peers in guarding the space again.
I lie there. Seeing myself distant below.
My Vitaeria keep me awake, keep the wound from being fatal.
Every breath is cautiously shallow and strained and agonising.
At least one rib is cracked. Cuts that are smaller only relative to the chest wound cover my arms. Bright red lines that refuse to bleed, thanks to the imbued Will in me.
I feel obvious, but none of the other Gleaners even glance at me, their questioning of the dead apparently done with for now. There is pain for longer than I can say, and then movement. Other Gleaners, collecting some of the far forms.
Before I can panic, Duodecim is descending. Claiming me. Too far away from any of the others for them to hear the low, agonised gasp that escapes my lips as he stabs me once more.
We rise into the air. My breath is short, the pain worse and I can feel consciousness slipping away, but I hold on fiercely. Close, now. This is it.
I float in a haze of torment through desolate Qabr. Am dragged through the narrow tunnel, every part of me scraping roughly over stone, and then into the icy night of the desert.
I do not know how I survive. Some part of me takes refuge behind the eyes of the Gleaner, though it does nothing to dull the pain.
We move as a pack, a swarm, the sky darkened with twisted forms carrying bodies impaled by glowing red.
Mostly I allow Duodecim to control its own body, but occasionally I command him to watch the others, assessing their movements, their actions.
More than anything, trying to distract myself.
There is not much to see, though. They are emotionless, stare straight ahead and move as one, each motion eerily similar to their neighbour’s.
Just as Caeror insisted. Reliant on human senses, but not human.
Copies of one another that are predictable in action and reaction, only the various strengths of their respective bodies acting as variables.
Monotonous silver sand. Sharp chill slicing my bare torso and face. Every moment is an age in which all I want to do is move, shift to try and find some position that doesn’t leave my chest screaming in agony.
But I endure.
And then, finally, we reach the glinting, moonlit obsidian of Duat.