Chapter 9 Samson
SAMSON
I have read of a deeper, darker power… This power fed visions to Alabore, led him to the desert, and tormented him into subsequent madness… The Eternal Fire does not rage because it is angry; it rages because it grieves.
—from the letters of Aahnah Madhani Ravence
They trailed after him then, the believers. He recognized most from the medic tents, but there were new faces too. More bystanders began to stop and mutter as he left the medic tents and made his way toward the ruined wall.
“The Prophet.”
“Is it him?”
“Did you see how he healed her burns?”
One man stepped back and spat. It landed right before Samson’s feet.
“His eyes are blue and cursed,” the man said. “He is no Prophet.”
Beside him, Chandi stiffened. But then the mother strode forward, her child in tow. She stood before the man, her eyes raking him from head to toe, and laughed. Loud and strong, her body shaking. She laughed in the man’s face and presented her arm, where Samson had blessed her with his sign.
“But your eyes are not cursed, are they, brother? See, then. See the proof.”
The man sniffed, but his eyes skittered past her and met Samson’s. “Well?”
Samson looked at him and then Elena. She stood apart, her lips pressed together, her jaw tight. He could sense her Agni roiling in agitation. She did not know how to hide it from him or how to read his. So many things you don’t know, he thought. So many things he wished he could tell her.
But she refused to meet his gaze. Without a word, Elena turned, and while the crowd watched him, eyes wide and expectant for evidence of another miracle, he watched as she disappeared from his view.
A strange ache traveled through him then—not the pain from summoning Agni, but a deeper, insidious sting as if someone had gently slid a dagger through his ribs without his noticing.
He did not understand it, this new hurt.
Nor why his throat closed as if he had tasted something sour and sharp.
“Prophet,” the mother called.
He turned back to them. So many faces, Sesharian and Ravani, believers and nonbelievers, some leaning forward as if, by simply being closer, they could touch his godliness, while others stood back, wary yet watchful. Those were the ones on the precipice. The ones who just needed a simple push.
Samson counted the Sesharians in the crowd.
Only seventeen, among fifty or so. And yet they watched him with a kind of hope that made him want to crawl away, unseen, and also rise above.
To show them that finally, finally, they had a chance to be free.
That they, the ones who had lost their home, who suffered the torment of various nations, could be victors.
He stepped forward. “I do not dance to your whims,” he said to the man. “You have your proof. Buuut”—he smiled, drawing out the word—“who am I to turn away a man of god?”
He unsheathed his urumi from his waist. The sudden slither of steel hissed through the air, and several people stumbled back. The man blanched. With a flick of his wrist, Samson ionized the blades, and blue flames furled down, crackling with electricity.
“From now on, no man shall be denied healing. Ravani and Sesharian will be treated equally, and if you disagree…” He looked at the mother, who dipped her head, muttering apologies. “I can take away your pain, but I can also return it tenfold.”
He turned on his heel, sparks flaring in his wake. He left them gawking as he hopped on a cruiser and started the engine with a roar. Though he did not know where Elena had gone, he could sense her Agni. It was bright and agitated, like a diya full of too much oil. He needed to find her—
Chandi slid into the seat beside him.
“What—” he began.
“Go to the wall,” she said. “There’s something I need to show you.”
Before he could respond, she reached around him and gunned the engine.
They rode through the gates of the northern wall and stopped in a wide basin the color of rust. Black Scales snapped to attention.
“Blue Star,” one said.
Though he was tall, he had a curved stoop to his shoulders as if he had been forced to walk through low spaces. A crescent scar hung from his eyebrow. A former miner, one Samson had dug out from the rubble and named his master of arms.
“Akino.” Samson looked up the western face of the basin, where soldiers had set a perimeter. “What have you found here?”
“A… messenger,” Akino said.
“From whom?”
Akino exchanged a glance with Chandi. “Will you climb?”
They scaled the basin, and when Samson pulled himself up over the lip, he heard a strange hum. Around the boulder, he saw that his men had formed a circle around an object. No, not an object. He walked closer, and Akino shouted a warning. There, seated in the center of the perimeter, was a man.
A man made completely of black sand.
Two sensors made of steel floated around the man as he—it?—sat serenely with pulse guns pointed its way.
“What is that?” he asked.
“We’re not sure,” Akino said. “But it’s not safe to draw closer. If we do, it starts to melt.”
“Melt?” Samson looked between him and the strange figure. “Show me.”
Akino carefully crept forward. The man, the figure, the thing—Samson was still not sure what to make of it—made no move. Akino took another step. At once, the sensors gave a loud, singular hum.
Samson stilled. He heard his men shift, the soft creak of gloves curling around triggers.
Akino glanced back, as if to reassure them.
He then took another step. The sudden susurration of sand filled the air as the man began to melt.
Sand spilled down. A cheek caved in, revealing a cold, metallic glint that sent a jab down Samson’s throat.
He could recognize Jantari steel anywhere.
“Get back!” he barked. “Now!”
Akino retreated as the man continued to shift.
A shoulder rippled down and swelled, the sand pooling around the knob of an elbow as if water around a bend.
And then its right side gave a sigh. Samson gasped as he saw a blinking light, and then he was shouting, his men were stumbling back, and Chandi had her hand already on his arm, tugging him.
But he could not burn, didn’t she know? He wrenched himself away, only to realize, a moment too late, that Chandi wasn’t pulling him back, but forward.
He cried for her to stop. She stood her ground, facing the man of sand as it began to stand. A blue blinking dot appeared out of its side, where its liver should have been had it been a real man. The sensors hummed twice. A warning.
“Chandi,” he called.
“What is it that the Arohassin would tell you?” she said.
He blinked, momentarily too stunned to reach for her. “Chandi, that’s a bomb. Move back.”
“What was their training mantra?”
“They, they—” He remembered his mentor’s voice, ringing through his ears as he lay on his stomach, wounded and punished. “‘Be persistent, be obedient, be wicked.’”
As he uttered the last word, his throat closing and then spitting the last syllable, the humming stopped. The sensors swiveled away, and the man dissipated in a rush of sand that gushed forward and brushed his feet. Reflexively, Samson took a step back.
There, floating where the man had been, was a metal lotus. It reminded him of the ones used to power gamefields. A blue light blinked in its center, and then flared.
“Ruru.”
And then he was drowning.
Salt water stung his throat as he swam with all his might. Blood darkened the water. He could not tell if it was his or his mother’s. His sister’s. But he could still hear their voices calling out to him. Warning him.
Run, Ruru, run!
The Jantari had rushed back to their boats, but he had ripped holes in their hulls with his urumi.
A few tenacious fools jumped into the sea to chase him.
Plop. Plop. Each successive dive rattled through his chest like the shock waves of a bomb, tightening his lungs as he spat out bloody water.
Plop, plop, plop. The waves smashed him back.
A stone pierced the wet, soft skin of his shoulder, and he opened his mouth to scream—and drowned.
Fishermen had found him, half-dead, holding on to driftwood.
A miracle, they called him. Blessed by the Great Serpent.
They had recognized him, of course. Son of the priestess, the last of his great family. They had ferried him away before the Jantari found his whereabouts, put him on a ship headed to Rysanti, only to whisper in his ear, with a deep urgency, to go to Ravence.
We refugees are welcome there.
But his arrival hadn’t felt like a welcome.
They had looked down on him, called him a rat.
Told him he was unwanted. And it wasn’t until he had found a boy with the eyes of a Jantari and the sweet tongue of a Ravani, a boy who had the same sharp angles and hunger in his eyes as he did, that he revealed his true name.
“Ruru.”
The thing spoke again. A low, strangled sound escaped Samson’s lips. He staggered, and through the haze of panic and pain and confusion, he was aware that the petals of the metal lotus had peeled back, revealing a small holopod.
“We come with an offer, old friend,” the pod intoned. “There are no conditions other than you consider it carefully. We await your response.”
The voice, clipped, staticky, ensnared him tight. It was faintly feminine. Chandi moved to grab the holopod when the lotus blinked once more, and another voice spoke, one horribly familiar.
“Sam, old boy,” Akaros said.
He flinched, as if struck. It had been many suns since he had heard that voice.
A lifetime since he had been a broken boy bleeding out on the training floor, Akaros towering over him.
You should have listened, Ruru. He moved to touch his back, his scars, before he realized what he was doing.
Samson forced his hands down. He tried to steady his breath, but his heart tripped over itself.