Chapter 37
Ispirit back to the Red Cape, not sure why I thought it’d be a good idea to see Nizzara on her way to meet her betrothed, or why I thought her little bond spirit would allow me a window of time with her. It’s been a challenge, finding those windows while still remaining distant enough not to raise too much suspicion.
When I materialize in a back room, Jasper is readying a pack of food and his gun.
“I have no sway over the rebel leader,” Jasper says as he swings the pack over his shoulder. “His mind is fortified. So, I can’t influence him to meet with you or believe you. We also have to walk”—he grimaces—“a ways.”
I chuckle. “You mean, you have to walk.”
His brows flatten over tired eyes. “Right.”
After taking the sled with Helina, I see how the Red Cape is the perfect establishment for the rebels to commune through since it is near the outer wall, closest to the barren lands.
“Remember,” Jasper says, opening the back door to the morning gloom. “The rogues are different. Don’t mess with them. They are too far gone.” He makes a twirling gesture with his finger beside his ear. “There’s nothing left of their minds to save. Beasts in men’s skin.”
Jasper leads us past trash bins and a few alleyways before stopping at the perimeter wall of Zarr city. He scales the wall.
“No gate today?”
“Nope.” He drops the ten feet to the ground on the other side. “No heavy-ass sled, no stupid-ass gate.”
I fly over and return to a solid being.
He brushes the red dirt off his black pant legs. “So,” he says, “Are you going to tell me why we have to meet with the rebel leader?”
“You haven’t already read my mind?”
He rolls his eyes. “I get tired of touching people. It’s exhausting, you know, sorting through all their thoughts. And this morning I have a slicing headache.”
“They want Mazzar dead.” I shrug. “So do I.”
Half an answer. It’s time I do more to help them and face my fear that I might not find Lo amongst them.
He raises a brow. “I told you; they aren’t a raging army ready to tear down walls. They are mill workers, miners, and families who are trying to survive.”
I straighten my shoulders. “They are my people. I will help them however I can while I’m here.”
By late morning, the wind’s icy barbs whip against us as we walk deeper through the orange boulders capped with snow.
“Wouldn’t it be more comfortable in your spirit form?” Jasper yells over the wind.
The wind shrieks through, too loud to answer. I wouldn’t ask him to trek all the way out here if I wasn’t willing to do it myself. Besides, this is nothing compared to Baratrum.
After a few more hours, Jasper swivels his head east then west, assessing our location.
“This is as good of a spot as any,” he drops the pack and hunkers himself against a larger boulder to block the wind. He dives into the packed lunch and tosses a mineral roll at me. I catch it and turn it around in my fingers.
He shrugs. “You drink rum, so I figured you eat too.”
I sniff. It smells terrible. I toss it back to him, and he catches it.
I crouch down to the orange dirt skiffed with snow. “I don’t need food. I’m dead.” Pinching the dry, cold dirt, I mix it with the snow in my fingers. “But I still have taste buds.”
“I’ll save it for my trip back then,” he says, dropping it into the pack.
“The soil is darker out here,” I say.
“It’s the rogues. All the blood stains the soil, and creates some sort of reaction,” he says through a mouth full of jerky.
“The prophecies,” I whisper.
The King of Kings. I’ve been reading Nizzara’s copy while she sleeps. There are so many passages I don’t remember from my eighth-year studies.
“What?” he calls over a gust of wind.
I shake my head. “You done yet?”
He plops the rest of a butter curd into his mouth and brushes his hands off. Before Jasper can grab the pack, I swing it over my shoulder, taking my turn. “Come on. Let’s go.”
After another twenty minutes, we find an abandoned rogue pit. Human bones litter the blood-red soil under patches of snow.
Jasper bends to examine one of the bones. “This pit is old.”
He waves for me to keep going, but I bend down, inspecting a bundle of bones—the remains of a small child. Grief fills my chest.
“Cannibals,” I say, wishing the ground wasn’t so frozen, so I could bury them.
Jasper gives me a dark, sad nod. “Cannibals.”
“Why? What causes them to be this way?”
“No one knows. It starts as a sickness of bone, contorting people into hunchbacks, then, after a while, they just . . . lose their minds.”
“And Mazzar does nothing about it?”
“If I had to guess, Mazzar sees it as a good population curb, especially because they often attack the homeless.”
I step respectfully around all the bones.
In the late afternoon, we reach the center of the Barren flats where the boulders range in sizes of small cars to the size of small hills. They’re so close together and some piled on top of another, it’s no wonder trucks can’t get through here.
“We wait here.”
Scuffs of boots on rock come from all around, but no one emerges.
Jasper pulls his gun from under his jacket and lays it on a dry section of dirt. He nods at me to do the same.
I summon my shadow blade. Its black, gleaming steel materializes in my hand, and I toss it to the ground beside the gun.
“I’m an illiterate swine,” Jasper says and gestures to me, waiting for my own insult.
“And I’m an ugly celibate.”
He’s right. It is the perfect code to keep Zarr infantries out.
The rustling from around us gets closer until three men and one woman wearing thick winter coats emerge from their hiding place. I wonder who’s provided such attire.
“What is your business?” one calls, holding a spear instead of a gun.
“We have come to speak with the leader,” Jasper says.
The man’s eyes narrow. “Why?”
I step forward, looking directly at the man. I see his memories. His name is Hoack. He’s young, but old enough to remember.
“Because,” I say. “I am King Dagen, and I’m here to serve your cause.”
His spear creeps forward, and gun hammers click from all around me. “King Dagen is dead,” he says.
I turn to spirit in a splash of black mist and witness the shock on his face when I change my frequency to speak only to him. “Oh, yes. I am quite dead.”
His memories spiral deeper and deeper into hardship. The loss of his wife to the rogues, then his son to poor living conditions. The monster inside me is starving. It craves bad memories that roll in hate and despair. I shove it down and return to my solid form so he can study my face. “I am Dagen Corvonna, son of Queen Maven and King Gorrik, born on the sixth moon of the year 3039.”
After a long moment of scrutiny, he finally says, “I will take you to Reb.” His voice has a hardness to it that seems permanent. “He will make what he wants of you.”
I see the rebel leader through his memories as well. They all call him Reb, short for Rebel leader since no one knows his real name.
The guards hold their guns ready as they surround us. One stoops to gather our weapons.
“I wouldn’t touch that blade if I were you,” I say to the man.
He looks up at me as if I meant it as a threat.
“It will hurt you whether I’m holding it or not. Just leave it.”
He backs away from the weapons and opts to leave them both in the red, snowy dirt.
The guards lead us into the crags of the converged boulders through narrow passageways, under boulders wedged above, over rock formations, until we come to a cave of rock leading underground.
“Wait here,” Hoack says.
He disappears into the cave. When he returns, he brings a tall, broad man with black hair and eyes that seem too bright—an unnatural shade of purple. Unnatural for the Zarr realm, anyway. My time as a deathwalker has introduced me to many walks of life in many realms.
The rebel leader stalks with the prowess of a trained warrior, scars on every surface of his tan skin, minus his missing left hand.
His eyes fall on me and they gleam, but his mind is silent. No memories surge from him.
“I had a feeling,” he says with an expression that feels much too old—much too experienced for his young face. “Come. Let us speak out of the wind.”
He leads us down through the tunnel, which is lit by lines of glowing strata flowing through the rock. It takes time for my eyes to adjust, but the further we walk, the more glowing strata blossom from the walls of solid stone.
“I have done my best to protect your people, King Dagen,” he says as we pass many small outcroppings in the wall, carved to form makeshift rooms.
Men, women, and children bustle about, carrying buckets of packed snow and mineral rocks to be ground up for consumption. I study each woman we pass, searching for Lola’s dark waves or green-eyed smirk, but no one I pass is her. Jasper follows in silence next to me, his gaze wandering as if this is his first time in the tunnel.
Reb leads us to his own small outcropping that’s the same size as all the ones we passed. It’s just big enough to fit him, Hoack, Jasper, and myself.
“You believe I am who I say?” I ask as we sit on roughly carved rock benches.
Reb smiles. “I do. I’ve been waiting for you, actually.” He gestures to the giant tunnels of rock around us. “Now that you’re here, it is yours.”
“What?” I was expecting a power struggle; proving my identity, promising titles and rewards in exchange for cooperation. I expected just about anything other than this.
“I knew you’d be back. I also knew you’d take care of them when you came.”
“How could you possibly know that?”
His eyes glint with purple light. “Call it intuition. I’ve trained those who are able and sheltered those who are not.”
I look around to see if this is somehow an ambush or trap, but everyone’s expression seems just as surprised as mine, even Hoack’s.
“But, why?” I ask, trying to understand what could possibly motivate him to do this.
“It was what was needed.” His face falls slightly. “And now, it seems I’ve been needed elsewhere.” He turns to his guard. “This is Hoack, my second in command. He will serve you well.”
Hoack bows his head to Reb, and I see in his memories that Reb has prepared him for this day, telling him that his king would return, but I also feel the blatant disbelief in those memories. I see all he has sacrificed to protect the people here, risking his life to trek back and forth between the city, smuggling people out, toting sleds, grinding mineral dust, and carving new outcroppings.
Hoack takes a knee before me in the same fashion as I am forced to do to Nil. “I cannot offer land or money, but I can offer my loyalty and servitude,” he says.
His eyes widen when I take a knee in front of him and clasp his shoulder. “I offer the same.”
Reb’s eyes light up with some hidden source as he says, “I apologize for such an abrupt meeting, but I’m afraid my time here must end.” He offers a sad grin. “I have nothing but time, and yet, it still evades me.”
He takes a deep breath. On his exhale, black light washes over his skin. He becomes taller, and bigger. Black and purple cosmic tattoos of light appear on his skin, swirling as if they are alive. He is . . .
A Dark Jaxelli.
He sighs a giant release of air, as if he has finally shed a heavy burden. The air around him carries more weight as if the universe recognizes him once again. When his eyes meet mine, they are full of power and depth.
His face contorts in pain. “I’m too late,” he says, before he’s sucked into time and space, vanishing into nothing, and I find myself wondering what he meant.
The room feels vastly empty in his sudden absence, and it is a long stretch of silence before Jasper blurts, “What in the actual hell?”
I climb to my feet, still processing what just happened.
Hoack rises and says in a voice filled with disbelief, “He told me how it would happen, but I didn’t think it’d be so—”
He shakes his head. “I didn’t think it would actually happen.”
“You have no idea who he is?” Jasper asks, his eyes still fixed on where Reb once stood.
“No. Before he showed up, we were just a bunch of runaways, biding our time in the Barrens. He brought us here, trained us to fight, and created a system for food and water. He saved our lives, so we just followed him and respected his wish to stay anonymous.”
Hoack takes me through the tunnels, showing me around and introducing me to the other guards, who appear to be just as much millworkers as guards. One who stands watch over new outcroppings that are being carved out with chisels has a funny angle in his knee as if it were broken and never healed right. He limps as he moves.
Hoack gives me the reports, and I can tell he did this often for Reb. Number of guards, number of new arrivals, water levels, food stores, recent rogue attacks, and reports of the Zarr infantry movements who are running scouts through the Barrens, looking for the rebel groups.
We spend the day learning everything about the rebel camps before Jasper reminds me that we have to return to the club before the trek back becomes too dark, running the risk of a snowstorm or rogues.
Leaving Hoack to run things, I promise to find a way to send more supplies to the camps before we head back toward the city.