Bela stared. “You’re not the first person I’ve heard say those words. ‘We were dead in the beginning.’ The Bone Pirate—Shae—spoke them. Why?”
Kolum, sitting before them, didn’t move as he spoke. “It is an old saying here. Why she speaks it, I cannot say. But surely this is not what you wish to ask?”
Tewrick leaned forward. “You said that you knew of us. ‘Whispers on the wind,’ you said. Does that mean Asryth?”
“I hear much through the Stream. Much that I wish I did not.”
Bela gently pushed Tew back into his chair. “We have a lot of questions. You said you knew why we were here.”
“What we built, you would destroy.”
“What you built,” Tew corrected.
“This is your story? That I alone did this?” The metal man’s body flexed in what might have been a sigh if he’d had breath. “She has done her work well.”
Bela took a deep breath of her own. “Let’s start there, then. We have stories, Kolum. But I’m starting to think they’re half-told and only half-remembered. Tell us what happened. The portals. The war. How all this came to be. Can you tell us that?”
Kolum seemed to think for a moment. “Yes. It is good for you to understand what you do.”
Tew pulled a book from his bag, then a quill and a small glass bottle of black liquid that had somehow survived all that they’d been through. He put the bottle between his hands and breathed on it to warm it up.
The aluman’s blue eyes watched his movements. “You will draw my words,” he said.
The reader smiled. “Yes. Writing. Is it … may I write down what you say?”
Kolum’s shoulders flexed. A shrug, Bela suspected. “If you copy them well.”
Tew nodded. “I will. Thank you.”
“Long have I thought how I would speak of things, though I have had no one to speak to.”
“None of the others can talk as you can?” Bela asked. That would be one question she had answered.
Kolum moved his body to shake his head. “None here. Only to the bones I find do I talk.”
“The bones of the people?” That would answer another of her questions.
“Hard is the ground. But still, I dig for them.”
Bela smiled. Whatever he’d become, a part of him was still human. That had been her biggest question of all. “Proof of humanity.”
“I am glad that it is found. For my story, make it read as if better said. As if spoken by yourself.”
Once again, Tew nodded. “As you wish.”
“Good,” Kolum said. “Do you have a name for those who use the gold dust in your lands? The ones who make magick?”
Tew was frantically rubbing the jar of ink, but Bela could see that he was listening. Writing in his mind. “Evokers,” he replied. “And I think your gold dust is what we call Char.”
“Evokers. Char. Yes. I have heard these words.” Kolum’s clawed fingers flexed and moved on his knees. “I will speak when you are ready.”
Tew shook the jar, looked at it, then carefully secured it between his thighs. Uncorking it, he carefully stirred his quill in its black waters before cleaning the pen’s edge on the glass lip. He opened his book to a blank page and lifted the quill to it. He looked up in anticipation.
He was born for this, Bela thought. Maybe they all were.
Kolum straightened up. Then he began.
*
You must imagine me a man. Not this. I had flesh and blood. I had hands, and if I would have placed them on my chest, I could have felt my heart beating. I could laugh. I could cry. I was mortal. I was alive.
I did not seek power. But power came to me. None of us knows why not everyone can take the Char. Some believe there is something in us, something in our blood, that turns the Char to poison or power. Maybe. But I think it is other than this. I think it is the Char that accepts or rejects us, that blesses or kills us. It accepted me, I know. It slipped into my skin like breath into my lungs. It blessed me. It spoke to me.
I opened gates. Windows to other worlds. The things I saw were things none before me had ever seen. The things I learned were things none before me had ever learned.
The greatest, people would say of me. None smarter.
But I knew it wasn’t the truth. Because my wife, Asryth, was far greater, far smarter. She was not an evoker. She did not take the Char.
But she made magick just the same. Magick from the sweat of her brow, the strength of her hands, and the brilliance of her mind. She grew up in the glow of her father’s foundry. She knew the sheen of metals as others know the faces of their friends. And she saw in the metals things that never were—things unimagined—and she made them real. Machines to till fields. Machines to guard doors. Machines to drive airships. Machines for making machines. What others saw as limits, she saw as problems to be solved. When she needed greater heat to make greater metals—greater powers than man or magick could provide—she found ways to harness the power of the sun itself.
The foundry was quickly the largest in Ealond, and as he grew old, her father grew fat and happy. He was a good man, and his riches did not taint him. Few can say this.
I met Asryth at court. Not long after her father died. She and I were at first fascinated by our powers, I think. Each of us so far ahead of the others. I helped her see ways that magick could infuse her metals. She helped me see ways her metals could enhance and hold my magick. We became friends. And, in time, we grew to be more than that. We fell in love.
The name of our daughter was Ada. She was beautiful. I remember how we told each other that she would be smarter than the two of us put together.
When Ada became sick, when we found out she was dying, we learned we were right.
I do not know which of us thought of my gates first. Sometimes I think it was me, but perhaps I want to spare Asryth the guilt of that. Other times I think it was her, but perhaps this is because I do not want the guilt myself.
The idea was simple. I could open gates to other worlds, but they were fleeting things. Windows opened and quickly shut. What if I could open a gate to a place without death? What if we could pass through it, with Ada? Even more, what if we could end death itself—not just for ourselves, but for everyone? To live is to fear death, and that fear drives so much that is evil in this world. We steal, we cheat, we kill, we create wars, we do all we can to ensure our survival. In the end, we create death from our fear of it.
Doomed to die, we deal out death. End death, and we could end it all.
It took both our skills—her machines, my magick—to find the Life Stream and hold open the window to it. It was dark magick. Bloody magick. It cost me much. But together, we created the portal. Shimmering blue. Perfect.
One of our assistants touched it first. I tried to stop him, but the yearning was too much for him. When he touched it, his soul left him. We saw it. He joined with the Stream and was gone.
It is our flesh that makes us mortal, you see. Flesh is death. The soul is forever. I saw it as a limit. Asryth saw it as a problem to be solved.
We did it, as you know. Two solutions. I created the soulglass, a crystal formed of the most delicate magicks I possessed, which could bridge this world and the Stream, to touch it but remain here. But an eternity lived in a crystal would be a prison, so Asryth built for us new bodies that would never get sick, never rot away. Eternal homes for our eternal lives.
I had only the power to make three crystals at first. One for each of us. And one for Ada.
I went first. I died. I lived. I became that which you see now. Asryth followed. We learned how we could speak to each other, feel each other, through the course of the power that binds together all things in this world. Through the Stream.
No two people have ever been as truly one as we were in that moment. I knew her soul. And she knew mine.
But our daughter—she was, as I said, smarter than us both put together. When she discovered what we’d done, she refused to join us. Said it was an abomination. An evil thing.
She died cursing us.
And we, having become these things, could not weep for her.
Asryth begged me to use my magicks to find a world where Ada still lived, to create a gate to bring her to us, but I refused. She pulled at my very soul, in ways the living cannot imagine. Again, I refused. Her grief gave birth to rage and hatred.
She condemned me, told others that I was trying to keep the secret of immortality to myself. I was driven out of the city, up into the mountains, where I mourned alone.
While I was gone, she used evokers to study what I had done, to make new soulglass. She taunted me with it, let me see it through the Stream. She told me it was because she did not want to suffer eternity alone with me. Perhaps this is so, but I had touched her soul. Even now, I can feel her out there, across so many seas. She speaks only in glimpses, only lets me see what she wants me to see, but I think that there is more to her than hate. I believe she mourns still. And she thought that if the other evokers could learn the secrets of the soulglass, then perhaps they could unlock my ability to open gates, and that they would do for her what her husband would not. They could bring her Ada. It is all she has ever wanted.
But the crystals they made were imperfect. Broken. The metal men they created were mindless beasts, thoughtless until she filled them with whispers of destruction and hate. Of these, she built an army.
When the fighting broke out, it was bloody and terrible. The strength of men is nothing to the strength in these metal arms. And Asryth was using the alumen not just to kill, but to bring her more and more souls for her empty crystals, more engines for the metal men that filled her foundries.
If she could keep making more alumen, all would be lost. So I tried to help those who fought. A group of evokers banded together under my banner. I taught them things I planned to take to my grave. I gave them the power to bring the ice and the cold. To blot out the sun that gave her foundries life.
If your stories say that I broke the world, there is the truth of it. These hands cannot evoke. But I told them how it was done. I told them why it must be done.
When the cold came, the alumen retreated. But war brings more war. It always does.
Asryth told the people that it was magick that had driven the alumen mad, the same magick that had broken the world. Others blamed the machines. People turned on each other. Death fed death. And all the while, the land froze and died.
A group of female evokers left first. They became the Seaborn—hateful of machines, hateful of men.
Group by group, others fled too. The largest of them would become what you call the Windborn. Asryth went with them, to help run their machines, to help them rebuild. They did not know that her alumen followed too.
I stayed behind. I buried the dead. And then I took the single airship that was left. I went far from here. I did not plan to ever come back.
In all these centuries, I have seen glimpses through the Stream of what she has done. She has helped the Windborn learn to use the soulglass to power their airships and their weapons.
But she has also managed a secret alliance with some of the evokers of your Seaborn—they have been learning how to make new soulglass and to open new portals and gates, just as before. She made the preparations for a great gate in the land of the Windborn, and they did not suspect her treachery.
Through it all, she has been patient. Through it all, she thought she had forever. Until now.
She did not expect that the evokers would use their blood-magick against her. When they did, she was nearly destroyed. You have seen her, Tewrick, for I have seen you through her eyes. She is a shell of herself, trapped among the Seaborn. She nearly had everything taken away by the one you called Mabaya. I saw what happened. I was there, in the Stream, that night, looking out through the portal she had opened. I saw Mabaya destroyed.
But I also saw that Asryth survived. I have heard her whispers. She knows that time runs short. She knows you have been sent to destroy the portal that gives her alumen life. She knows she must act now.
She has sent an alumen army against the Windborn—to march and kill.
She has sent a Seaborn fleet against the Windborn—to take her back to the gate she has built.
She has sent out her blood-magickers—to make their final collections of souls to power it.
And she has sent a band of alumen here—to destroy you and preserve the portal that powers her metal men.
*
Tewrick pulled his pen back from the page. Despite the cold, there was sweat on his brow. The jar of ink was half-gone. “Here?” he asked. “To kill us?”
“This I saw,” Kolum said. “For this I have come. I have protected you. I will see you do what I could not.”
The reader nodded. He bit his lip and scratched more lines onto the page.
“Why haven’t you destroyed the portal before?” Bela asked. “All these years it’s been here. Surely you could have.”
Kolum didn’t answer for long enough that Tew looked up from his writing. “For centuries we have been between worlds,” the metal man finally said. “Without life, we live. Without death, we die. To face that forever alone …” One of Kolum’s claws scratched across his knee. “The portal connects us, just as it connects Asryth to the minds of the alumen she made. I do not want to lose her. Alone I will be. Forever.”
Tew furrowed his brow. “But you will destroy it. After everything she’s done—”
Bela interrupted. “I don’t think he will. He said he will see us do it.”
Kolum raised and lowered his finger with a click. “Yes. I will protect you. I will let you destroy it. I will see it done.”
“Can I have one more question?” Bela asked. “You said the crystals in the other alumen, they were all broken. Can they be fixed?”
Kolum pulled one of the pieces of soulglass from his satchel. He held it up in the blue light of his unblinking eyes. “I have collected so many of them over the years. I have studied them. But without flesh, I cannot wield magick; I cannot see with the blessing of the Char. I do not know if they can be repaired. But I would not wish to do so. I wish them all destroyed.”
Tew looked up from his writing. “Destroyed? What happens if they’re destroyed?”
The fog in the crystal shimmered in the blue light before them. “I believe that the broken crystals torture the souls inside,” Kolum said. “I believe, when they are destroyed, the souls are released to become whole again. They rejoin the Stream.”
“To die,” Bela whispered, staring at the shifting shape of the darkness in the soulglass. “At last.”
“Yes.” Kolum put the crystal back into his satchel. “It is for this reason I would make of you a demand, a promise that you will make here in the home where my daughter died.”
Bela looked him in his steady eyes. “Name it.”
“When destroyed is the portal,” Kolum said, “you will help me find Asryth. You will release her.”
Bela heard Tew’s pen scratch to a halt, but she didn’t look away from the metal man whose heart she was beginning to understand.
“And when that is done,” Kolum continued, “you will release me.”