CHAPTER X

 

White mist rose behind them, boiling from the heat of Izhar's channeling. Sidge kept a close watch on the dark shapes darting in and out of the fog. Parallel to their own escape route, he caught sight of the Paint plowing through the marsh and disappearing between a tangle of trees. Indiscernible horrors followed the panicked animal. After all the trouble the horse had caused him, he prayed its wild spirit would save it.

Ahead, his mentor and his brother dangled over Chuman's broad shoulders. The giant slogged through the marsh at first but soon shattered the grip of the mud. Powerful lunges became great loping strides, and Sidge struggled to keep up in the wake of water and song.

He sloshed to one side to avoid being swallowed in the submerged trench left by his guide. Jostling across Chuman's back, it wasn't clear if Farsal was still breathing.

Over and over Sidge recalled images of the acolyte being dragged from the hollow tube. The terror on his brother's face as he spotted Sidge, indistinguishable from the winged monsters. The smell emanating from the severed legs. That smell.

Sidge's stomach gurgled. His mouth moistened. A hellish nightmare fought to enter his brain.

"No," he hissed.

Onward they pushed. Darkness fell, and the lesser insects and beasts sang songs to drown out the distant, mystical beacon. At one time Sidge thought their conversations joyful. Now he knew them to be chirps and gurgles of mute, brutish observers to an unfeeling world. Their calls simply reinforced the fact they had survived another day to pursue the eternal cycle.

A blind pursuit like their own headlong rush into the marsh. Futile. Pointless. Sidge slowed.

The marsh grass thinned and the sludge thickened. Clouds gone, the brackish water reflected the night sky like a black mirror splintered by crooked tree branches. Sidge dipped a hand in the tepid mixture and silt ran thick between his fingers.

Perhaps he deserved to die here.

Die in this place, home to his true nature, where creatures like him waited to devour his friends, his family. Die as a monster, a beast, no more elevated than the chorus surrounding him. What did it matter if he were to surrender?

Chuman's gait slowed, and he cast a piercing stare over his shoulder. Waning moonlight caught in the giant's eye, one spot of brilliance among the shadows. His momentum lost, Sidge felt himself sinking, unable to move.

Izhar groaned. The former master's unkempt hair dangled like tree moss into the murk lapping at his forehead.

"You are going to drown him!" Sidge churned toward Chuman.

The giant heaved his shoulders and his passengers shifted higher, out of danger. Another groan issued from Izhar but Farsal stayed quiet. Sidge reached out to part a lock of grimy hair and see his brother's face.

No, nobody deserved to die here. Especially his mentor and his true brother. And he himself was an Ek'kiru. He only happened to look like the marauders. It was all a terrible twist of fate. If he could get them out of here, he could prove it.

"Will you need to rest?" asked Sidge, fighting to maintain his composure.

"I will tire," replied Chuman.

Chuman looked left, then right, and left again before finally deciding on a direction. After a shuffling turn, he plowed onward. Sidge remained close, his hands ready to support Izhar or Farsal should they slip again.

The ground rose as they angled for a muddy spit packed around a cluster of stunted trees. Dark roots veined the mud like a brood of serpents. Only a few lonely trees sprouted there but their many limbed canopies provided shelter and concealment.

Sidge gestured to a clear spot and Chuman placed his burden gently on the ground.

While his antennae tickled with Izhar's ragged breaths, the air around Farsal was stagnant. Caked in grime, tormented limbs tight and stiff, the acolyte could've been another exposed root. Sidge leaned close and dared to run his antennae across purpled lips, searching for the faintest sign.

Nothing.

Farsal's mouth hung partly open, teeth hidden behind a frozen grimace. A smile, once so effortless, gone.

"My brother!"

Sidge collapsed, four hands kneading at Farsal's robes. He ached in a spot deep inside which threatened to cinch tighter and tighter until his insides snapped. It overpowered the desolation of the marsh and pulled that emptiness inside him.

Less than a turn of the moon ago, they'd been in the Temple courtyard preparing for the pilgrimage. Farsal had taught him everything about driving the wagons. While they'd worked, he'd told stories of traveling to Stronghold with his well-funded Master. The other acolytes would boast of the many pilgrimages they'd undertaken, yet Farsal spoke with an eagerness to share, not flaunt.

A life spent among the cloistered walls of the Stormblade Temple and Sidge knew he'd been a fool. A fool not to recognize the others' disapproval and understand the true value of the man laying before him. Nobody had ever seen their trained bugman as a true brother.

"Nobody except you," whispered Sidge. He choked back his sobbing and sat up. Robes hung in fibrous patches along the acolyte's shattered body. "You, of all of them, believed I'd become a Cloud Born."

Sidge shuddered and rose. He looked at his own robes, stained but whole. The white stole hung heavy from his shoulders.

He picked his vestments up hem-first to roll them toward his thorax until he could slip his wings from the hand-stitched loops. The process was difficult, wings glued down by water, slime, and patches of ichor and blood. When he finally shivered free, he took the robes to the water's edge.

Clouds of mud bloomed into the already dark water. Sidge knelt and worked his hands through the fabric, scrubbing out dirt, blood. He wrung them dry as Chuman watched. Again, he thought he saw sadness creep across the giant's wooden features.

His hands found the wing loops, and he ran a finger down the neatly stitched lines. He thought of Kaaliya's smile. How happy she'd been to see his wings. Of Farsal, when he asked if the modifications had been made to impress her.

"Foolish, but they were, brother. I forgot my way. I'm sorry they are not whole."

Hands shaking and throat cinching, he knelt at Farsal's side and carefully pulled the robes over the body. Next, he draped the stole across his brother's shoulders.

"You are the true Master here." Izhar's restless form loomed large in his lenses.

Sidge turned and began to dig.

He swallowed tortured cries as he scooped out the earth in a gap between the roots. His antennae drooped into his eyes, the effort to hold them straight too much to bear. Before long, the ground became more rootlets than mud, and he pulled and snapped with all four hands, digging more and more furiously. The pain in his thorax began to escape in cracked sobs.

Chuman clambered into the shallow hole. Wordless, he began to rake his powerful hands through the earth. They'd soon cleared a space deep enough it began to fill with water, but Chuman continued to bring up oozing fistfuls of mud.

Drained, Sidge stumbled out of the hole, taking one final look at his true friend. The man who'd made him feel…human.

"I'm sorry. By Vasheru's name, I'm so sorry."

This paragon among acolytes, a master in every way but name, should be laid to rest in the Sheath where a Master could call down the Fire to sweep away his remains, forever one with the Storm. But they were so far away from home. The thought of watching Farsal's lifeless form jostling with each step, cold and slowly rotting, the fermenting death taunting his antennae the entire way—no, it had to be here.

It was the best he could do.

With Chuman's help, he lowered Farsal's body into the grave. Chuman reached down to slowly press the remains beneath the water, into the mud, and Sidge had a sudden urge to tell him to stop, to check and make sure no breath remained. Then he recalled the eyes, wracked with terror and pain, and his mouth, gaping, darker than night. He couldn't see that again.

When they were done, Sidge knelt next to the grave and furrowed his mandibles into the earth. He uttered several mantras which he thought appropriate. Gambora's Sacrifice. The Rite of the Eternal Storm. Finally, the Four Corners, the verses which had begun their pilgrimage.

Next to him, Izhar moaned. Sidge turned his mandibles to face the battered Cloud Born.

"We should leave him as well," said Chuman, once more cold and lifeless.

"Excuse me?"

Sidge clacked his mandibles but found his earlier anger, detached, like a skin beginning to shed. No emotion showed on Chuman's face this time. Whatever he was, despite the earlier hint of compassion, this must be his true nature.

He turned his attention back to Izhar.

"He needs rest, that is all. Channeling Vasheru's Fire with such power…I have no idea how much strength is required."

"Yes, you cannot call on Vasheru." said Chuman.

"I call," whispered Sidge. "He doesn't listen."

Silence filled with the almost imperceptible whir of Chuman's insides and the distant song. "You hear the call. To listen is your task, not his."

"I wish I didn't hear it. I'd rather channel, feel Vasheru's praise and make my brother proud."

"I am broken too," said Chuman, a phrase he'd spoken before but this time it came as though revelation had struck him, a hammer on wrought iron. Frustration creased his flat brow as he wrestled with the words. "We are broken."

Sidge nodded.

Chuman wandered toward the bank and dropped into the mud, his back against a waist-high root. Methodically, he began to scan the marsh.

Sidge waited beside Izhar, being sure to keep Chuman in his sight. Mantras or even Izhar's teachings did not mention such a man—undying, metal, one who feeds on the very power meant to vanquish the Attarah's foes.

If the giant were a monster—a monster like him—at least he had Vasheru's favor.

"You have yet to explain exactly what you are."

Chuman stopped scanning to stare at the scraps of robe clinging to his body. "I am an acolyte."

The response took Sidge by surprise. "No, what were you before?"

"Nothing."

"You mean you don't know?"

"I was nothing before. Then I was given these robes. An acolyte is all I wish to be, but the song calls."

The words almost made sense to him. Sidge felt the same way.

"Why would Gohala, of all the Cloud Born, even bother with you?"

"Master Gohala, yes. He also asked what I was, but he asked differently."

"How?"

"He asked who made me."

As much as he'd once loathed Gohala, the man had been on to something. Izhar had revealed the unyielding purist had once sought knowledge in the places least expected of him. "What did you say to him?"

"The Jadugar. They made me."

"They?" Sidge's antennae crept toward the sky, and his mandibles hinged open. "Tell me what you know of them."

"I know they forged my bones. Poured life into my mouth. Spoke words of making into my ear."

Despite himself, Sidge let Izhar slip completely from view as he leaned toward Chuman. "Why?"

Chuman stared, unblinking. "I do not know, but we are no longer theirs. We serve many masters and seek the pillars, called onward by the song."

Onward. Mute observers. Sidge listened to the thrum of the insects and wished he could succumb to their mindless droning. The mystical song remained, though, and the tainted atmosphere of the marsh again began to seep between the joints of his chitin. He quietly recited mantras, it didn't matter which, anything to gather the frayed edges of what he once thought himself to be.