10.

 

The deep wound across Bau’s throat began knitting shut the moment Zaifyr’s blade left his skin, but he did not bother to keep hold of the man. He had gained Fo’s attention, had stopped the Keeper as his hand tightened on Ayae. It did not matter if Bau, clutching his throat, was scampering out of his reach. Oh, Zaifyr knew that if he wanted to kill Fo, he would have to kill the Healer first. That was obvious to him, just as it was to Ayae. But her tactic to drive the Keeper back to the other, to cut one down to reach the other, had been brutal and fueled by rage, and had failed.

He would not make the same mistake.

“They have gone to take them into custody.”

Reila, earlier.

Her cold hands pressed against his throat, probed behind his ears, and stopped only when he brushed her hands away a second time. “Fo has been releasing diseases into the city.” Her voice was soft, for him alone. “Both he and Bau are trying to stop us from going to Yeflam. Ayae and others are going to stop them, put both in chains. But you know neither will be arrested. Neither will agree with that. They will fight. They will—”

He did not need to hear the rest of the words, to hear, they will kill. He had staggered to his feet, his mouth dry, an awful taste in it that he could not identify. He found water, but it didn’t help. The last of Fo’s poison, he decided annoyed, spitting on the cobbled stones. By then, he was out from beneath the tents, leaving the white wave of their shape behind, heading toward the Keep.

Movement felt good. Each step made him feel better, undid the sensation of not feeling right in his skin, of feeling as if he was both too big and too small for the tangible frame he felt thrust into. The charms in his grasp helped a little, reassured his panic. Each step did the same. And each step did more: it helped him adjust to the haunts he could see, the dead that milled in the street, that were moving slowly, as if they were also coming awake, that their awareness—limited as it was—returned to them.

Slowly, he came up to the Spine’s Keep, the burning tower a beacon that drew only him and no soldiers. He was surprised by that—Heast, he thought, spitting again—but had little time to think of the intent behind it.

Ayae and Fo were fighting.

And Bau.

Bau stood behind both, his stillness revealing his focus, his burned clothes an indication of the fight so far, the broken ground likewise.

He did not make a sound when Zaifyr grasped his head and wrenched it back.

“I have waited for this a long time, Qian.” Before him, the scarred Keeper approached in a measured stride, his heavy sword easily held in his right hand. “I knew it would come. If I were to create fate, if I were to truly be a god, then this moment would happen. It simply must. There was no other way for it. Others urged me not to want it so. Aelyn warned me against it, specifically. She said I was too young. She said that I had not understood what age meant, but she was wrong. She came to Asila after it had fallen, after you had fallen. But I was in it when it fell, an ageless, blind beggar, a man without a family.

“I heard you walking through the streets, heard your conversations with the dead, heard your urges and your tears.”

“I am sorry you experienced it, Fo.”

“I am not.” He stopped, the dirt black, the bloody stain of those who died by his hand. “I held what you did against you for many years. For much of my youth I wanted to break open your tower. I sought it out once, and stood before the door. I could not open it, no matter how I tried. Was it luck? I do not know, but I have come to accept what happened there and in Asila. I have peace in terms of emotion and of event. In hindsight, I believe that is what stopped me from opening the door, and it is what has brought us here today. Today, I will show the hypocrisy of our lives to be true, I will return us to our natural form, to where we fought for our dominance, where our power decided the fate of the world.”

“You’re a fool.”

Fo’s lips curled into a snarl and he took a step forward, only to find that he could not.

The hands that emerged from the ground to grasp the Keeper’s ankles came from a haunt, but it was not the haunt that drew itself out of the ground in an agonizingly slow set of movements after the first set of hands. The second haunt, an old miner, wrapped his cold hands around Fo’s to stop him raising his arm.

“The War of the Gods was terrible.” To his left, Bau, his throat a heavy red line, struggled to his feet only to find that he was held down by another pair of haunts. “It was not that the gods fought that was the horror. Those battles were barely witnessed, except for their aftermaths. That was the true tragedy. It turned the weather extreme. It made for decades of drought. Decades of flood. We lost the sun. We had famine. We had plague. We had war. Species were killed entirely. Entire civilizations were destroyed.”

“They can be remade!”

“By who?” A hint of anger entered Zaifyr’s controlled voice. “By you? You want to start a war but cannot even realize that you are a victim of one! You lack the simple self-awareness to realize that the War of the Gods never ended, that we have been living in its carnage for thousands of years.”

Behind the Keeper Ayae climbed to her feet, the flame from her swords gone.

“There is a child, Fo. A true child of the gods,” Zaifyr said. “It was here, but you didn’t feel it. You felt only Ger’s death and exalted in that. You did not see what he freed himself from. But you will. You will see things power can do. You will see what the war has done to us.

“I will show you.”

Aelyn would not forgive Zaifyr for what he had done.

She would call a trial in Yeflam, to hear and judge, but in the moment his will flushed through the dead in Mireea, he knew that it would be a farce. His death would be decided for him, and he accepted that. It was necessary to show them what was at stake: to show them that a god, a true god, did exist and what it had done to generations of souls, to over ten thousand years’ worth of dead. Dead that he alone had seen and heard, a horror that he had thought his own, a weight he must carry forever.

He had been wrong. It was not his punishment. He ran his power though the cobbled streets of Mireea, flushed it through the haunts that rose from beneath the rough, wooden gates dividing the city; to the generations who had lived in brick houses and hotels; to those who stood on the Spine of Ger beside soldiers; and to those who lived in the fallen cities beneath. With his power, Zaifyr made clear the horror that he had lived with for thousands and thousands of years: that the souls of the dead did not move on, that they were trapped, their personalities dwindling into a desire for warmth and food.

For a moment, for just one, single moment as his consciousness was connected to so many, Zaifyr was tempted by the dead.

He thought of giving them warmth and sating their hunger, of doing as he had done in Asila. But, it was just for a moment, for when his eyes opened he saw Ayae. On her face was a look of horror, born by the dawning realization of the tragedy unfolding around her. He had seen it earlier, when she learned what he had done in Asila and had stepped away from him. It struck him at his very core, a recognition of what he had felt for so long, the horror he had tried to become immune to in the crooked tower. And as the needs of the dead assailed him, he retained his control. He closed his eyes to the vision of Ayae, but his sight did not leave her and he kept his will strong, directing the dead to the one crime he had known he was going to commit, the one act that was intended to change everything. With it, he would ensure that his brothers and sisters would no longer sit idle.

Fo screamed first, a cry for Bau as his scarred flesh was torn from his body, his bones revealed to be black and brittle. But his cry went unanswered as Bau, unable to stand, found his flesh stripped, cold hands and mouths plunging into him, opening his stomach even as he thought to heal the wounds. Wounds that healed over the haunts, over the forms that had a sudden tangibility, though not of a kind to be trapped in the knitting wounds. And as more of the dead came to him, more and more of his power was tested until it gave way. His body, all its flesh and blood torn apart in a frenzy, was consumed, just as Fo’s disease-ridden body was.

Once they were done, Zaifyr left his power in the dead—not as haunts that only he could see, but as ghosts, for all.