The sky was dark and without substance; it chased a red line until the line became nothing. Night took the sound from the world. It muffled it, the sound of a boy and his bird clawing up from a trapdoor to crouch among the scarps, and the sound of the trapdoor falling shut. They spoke, but it was indistinct. The daytime had been loud. One of them had not earned more than a wink of sleep, and the other never did. The dark which sapped the energy of the desert invigorated the boy, because it was cold, and because there was work to be done.
The pair moved circuitously, protruding just a head’s height above the remains of a rampart. The fort was little more than a collection of these, a corpse made of foundations and crumbled walls. It had been a long time since the bailey had protected anything worth protecting. Now, it protected Mircea Vedova and his metal bird, Nimbus. He had already said all of his words in the basement to the bird, but neither had he been ready for the quiet.
He thought of the warband which they had walk move up, day by day, once the sun had fallen. It was in service to the Holy Empire. It ought to have struck dread into him, seeing the banners proceed from night to night. He’d watch them split. Some moved on northward. Some split east. They ought to have inspired bile. But now, the boy thought of his distant people just north. They would have met. It was useless to think of it. By morning they had perceived the sounds of conflict, and the bird had confirmed it. So they would go forth and join the vultures.
*Not useless, *the bird answered, and it startled him. Metal sheathing, skin-thin and burnished, clucked as Nimbus ambled alongside the boy. *You could find them still, warn them. But I’m worried that it isn’t a good night for seeking the charnel field. I heard them still dying an hour ago. Some of them might not have. Maybe someone won. Maybe someone dug in, *it protested. Its head swept to and fro, with a clean hiss of plates on plates.
The boy huffed through his nose. “No,” he said. This time, the night permitted the sound of his voice. It echoed across the old stones. “The corpse collectors will come. I won’t give up my right at first choosing. As for the Dadzhvoy,” Mircea said, cringing at the association he had gained to the word. He huffed again, playing at black humor. “I’m sure we’ll see them there.”
The boy stopped by a big crumbled work of rock and balled his fists up by his sides. He suddenly felt sick, and stood there swallowing gulps of night air, with lips thin to keep the blowing sand out. The desert air felt like a bad dream. It wasn’t hot anymore, but the air buzzed like it still was. He couldn’t picture himself anymore. He tried not to see himself in the shine of the bird, it was a face which had ill associations to him now. He didn’t burnish the bird except to keep the sand from wearing it down.
*You shouldn’t be so quick to assume they’re already dead. They’ve been guerrillas for generations. Find the army, see where it’s bound. Let them know, *the bird replied.
“Quiet,” he hissed. The wind whistled at his words. The bird had answered a part of his reply he hadn’t voiced aloud. He had thought to say, and as for giving warning, there’s nothing for me there, now.
- *The boy scrutinized the bird’s face for any hint of dissent. Its eyes glittered emptily. He huffed again. A part of him had wanted it, but the bird was silent. He wanted to get it to understand the why of it all. Why it was pointless. Besides, he had to look after himself before tethering himself to another brush with death. He looked out across the desert. It was upsettingly serene, like it refused to reveal its hostility. Perhaps he had misremembered his home. The season had been mild since he’d returned.
They left the haunt together. From the ridge further on, Mircea reckoned no passers-by could tell the ruin was inhabited. The remaining towers stood half-demolished like broken-off ribs with all the meat picked off. The banners had been southeast of the hilltop the last they had come, but now they were gone. In their place was a smoky horizon, like a badly-hung curtain.
Mircea had reckoned the warband would have gotten further north before this happened. He ambled a ways through the desert, kicking sand as he went. The bird puttered beside him, carrying a knapsack full of his tools. It was only the absence of stars that made it clear that the sky was clouded.
Soon, the smoke grew close enough to smell. The air was thick with sand where the ground had been agitated in the fighting. Black smoke and black sand, with the faintest smell of burning flesh. Mircea put on a grim face and scuttled over the ridge. At the foot of the hill was a blasted plain, littered with the newly-dead. He pulled a scarf tight around his face; soldiers were rarely without disease, with wounds that must have been festering in the desert suns for hours.
The ground was pockmarked with small holes. Corpses, horses, and weapons littered the lip of each crater, in the process of burial into the sand. There were long black burns at odd angles, where some of the sand had vitrified. It was dark and clumpy elsewhere. The footprints beaten into it were dense and disordered. The impression was obvious: a great struggle. A decisive struggle, he noted, by the amount of the dead who wore Imperial uniform.
An emboldening struggle. Mircea did something he did very seldom. He thought of his father. Less the man he knew, more the man the Petroviches called Stefan. The Dadzhvo here would be bolstered by this victory, despite the losses plainly in the sand before him. He scrutinized the bodies, the Dadzhvoy among them; strong fighters, all, well-muscled. The sinew was well formed when he looked at the juncture of shoulder and arm on a body, just under the surcoat. But it was missing fingers.
The next few were not intact. As for the Zedari, some cut apart in the sand, others fused to their helmets, a few largely integral; the Zedari did not deserve his assistance. It would be ironic and nothing more. He looked to Nimbus. The bird only commented the obvious: *I still think it’s a bad idea to be here so early. I keep hearing movements on the wind, *it said. Mircea heard them too.
The low flatland and the wind brushing through made it impossible to resolve from where, but there were voices. When they resolved to a language he knew, the language of his people, and not another he might have dreaded, it did not relax him. His heart fluttered, coming into his constant awareness. An uneasy rhythm as he scanned the horizon, and kept low to the sand.
The voices stayed at a constant volume for a time. They were passing around the ridge just ahead. He crept up from where he had pressed himself to the ground, almost straddling a corpse in close inspection. Nimbus looked at him forlornly. He said: Maybe it’s time to quit all this. You look like a vulture, barely a person. You hate the smell, hate the corpse-stench on your coat. What would they think if they saw you? A ghoul, a necrophage? The obvious has come and gone. They’re not following you. You killed him. It’s over.
- *Mircea crawled a ways forward. He let himself breathe, cycle the dead-smell out of his lungs there in the sand. Then he rolled himself over and looked up at the sky. All the familiar stars were in place. A few years was far too short for that vault to change. When so much beneath had. He heaved until the nausea was gone and looked at the bird. Keeping his voice low, he said, “You were right. First choosing wasn’t worth the risk.” He paused, quickly leading with a “But.”
The bird looked on unfazed.
“It can’t be over. One of these bodies should have been the key. One of them will be, when I find it. Then it’ll be safe to accept I killed him. Being a vulture won’t kill me,” Mircea said, fighting himself to keep his voice low. His heart skipped. He no longer heard the voices. He realized he had lost them in his tirade. His blood ran cold, he scuttled to his feet, almost stumbling on the sand.
They’ve just come to see the aftermath. Come, we’ll go back together. Safer this way, said Nimbus. The bird stuck out like a sore thumb, even though the brass was scuffed dim. Now at his feet, Mircea started to move towards him, signalling him to move back. These hadn’t been voices he recognized. That shouldn’t have disquieted him. Far worse would it have been if he had.
But Mircea couldn’t stop thinking about the bird’s point. It enraged him, because it echoed a little voice in his heart, one that urged prudence, prudence, prudence. “Prudence won’t save me,” he said, aloud. “Didn’t save father. Too fucking* *complacent, ’til it fucked us all.”
【“Who’s there?!” a voice called from the dark, and his face ran hot. He pulled a cowl over his horns and darted low. He threw his cloak over Nimbus, so he wouldn’t shine in the moonlight. His heart pounded in his ears. “We just want our dead,” the voice came. Young. Feminine. Accented, Dadzhvoy, as he had thought, but they were calling out in Zedarijuce.
*Go to them, *the bird said. *You aren’t their quarry. *A flicker in his heart echoed the sentiment. It agonized him, wheedling him from the safer, from the wiser, and for a moment, Mircea Vedova considered it.
“We have an archer,” the voice called. “You, there! At the south of the bowl. Zedari corpse-collector, I wager?!”
“Wrong,” Mircea replied, faster than was prudent. *But a good choice, *the bird said, even if hasty. His heart raced. “Wrong,” he said again, this time in Dadzhvoy, in his and their language. He looked down. He clenched a fist, now hopelessly bound to this course of action. Fuck it all. It had all been a mistake. Since when had Nimbus, the poor, brilliant thing, had the right of it, over him?
“What tribe?” came the reply, and far off came the sound of footfalls spilling sand down the ridge. “Wouldn’t be the first *imperial *to learn the mother tongue.”
Mircea’s clenched his teeth. Somehow, the horror of the comparison exceeded anything that he had let into his mind yet this night. Or was it all gone? The accent, the correct speech? “No tribe,” he replied. “Well, none you’d recall. But Dadzhvoy. I came to see for myself the might of the Holy Empire, marching its way into the sand. You and yours that did this,” he said, thinking madly over the larger contingent still working its way north. “It serves them fucking right.”
“Come closer,” came the voice. The tone of command was gone, but this was no suggestion. Mircea eyed the bird. A considerable sprint of sand was between him and the ridge behind, where he could hope to escape a bowshot. The bird was silent. It forsook him. Slim chance became slimmer. It made him furious to be pinned down like a rat by his own.
“Come over the ridge,” he countered. Internally, he seethed. He wanted to clamp his eyes shut, because they’d started to burn. He kept it down. “I’m alone.”
“My hunter marks two.”
The bird seemed to smile impassively. Its glassy eyes twinkled, as though genuinely curious to hear his reply. Slowly, he took his glance off of the bird. He shrugged, and, glibly, thought to say, “Two can be alone."】 good
Finally, the source of the voice crested atop the ridge. In the moonlight, he saw a pair of horns, though the rest was hard to resolve in silhouette. She started down from the far hill, but stopped, a few steps down, to shout something inaudible over her shoulder. A few more shapes crested, then silently proliferated down to the charnel field. Then she continued. Mircea Vedova remained at his station, near to the top of the hill. In the distance, he picked out a bow, not slackened, but lowered.
His heart quickened, realizing a moment faster than his mind that his last chance to flee would soon be gone. The arrow was still on the string. He hated the thought of one flying even inches from him. He hated it to his gut, so he stayed put and fiddled with his hands until the woman– girl, really, by her posture– came across the sand and stopped at the foot of the hill.
“Then your name, stranger,” the girl said. She had a burnt orange tone to her, as well as Mircea could tell in the dark. Her horns were simple, and not to full growth. She was younger than he was, though barely.
“Mircea,” he said. A pause came then, one he couldn’t justify, but he just couldn’t get his tongue to hit it right. “Vedova.”
“I don’t know any Vedovas,” she replied. “I was hoping we could help your case, Mr. Vedova—”
“Mircea,” he cut in, though the unease lingered long after her face went sympathetic and the pang of anger faded. “Or not at all.”
“And I don’t know you. But, eh, methinks a liar would have picked a name I was like to know. Kritamera of Vidurawar,” she said. The name had little meaning for him, except that the sound was faintly familiar, as it was like to be. It didn’t do for him to go noting anything resembling the comforts of home. Comfort was the danger, he thought, with a sidelong glance to the bird. At best, more Oskars.
*Which is hardly fair, *the bird said. He snorted. Kritamera gave him a look, half like surprise.
“Did I say something funny?” she started, but turned her look on Nimbus, finally realizing what it was under the cloak. Mircea sighed. He needed to get back. He didn’t need to spend time he didn’t have explaining his work, magnificent as it was in this case. Kritamera’s face turned to faint confusion, then awe. “It’s… all a machine, isn’t it? The bird.”
His lip curled, reflexively. “Yes, my design. I suppose it impresses you?”
“Impresses me?” Kritamera replied, leaning back, and set hands on her hips. “Well, I’ve not seen it’s like.” Then she pivoted, and Mircea found the new direction less than appealing from the moment she reopened her mouth. “You have no tribe. Are you alone, Mircea Vedova?”
He stuck his chin up. The words felt dead, even before he said them, but he turned a glance on Nimbus, and started, “Alone,” and infixed a huff through his nose. “I am never alone. Nimbus is constant, reliable.”
Kritamera started to nod, but countered, “I would like to show the design to my kin. My father is Uttares.” She stuck out her chin in turn. “You stand on his victory.”
Despair. Not at the invitation, despair blossomed. It blossomed at what ought not be called a victory. A moment of survival against an innumerate foe, celebrating the making of two score of corpses. It was cruel to call it a victory. The phrase ought be reserved for mockery.
Far worse, he was considering accepting. He felt it turning within him, he balked when he found himself agreeing when– There will be provisions. The conversations will be short, we shall return soon, and wealthier for it. Or else, if the Zedari come upon them...– Nimbus cut in. He let his gaze linger on the bird a long while.
“Tell your bowmen not to shoot me,” he said, and Kritamera turned, beckoning as she did. She seemed happy, and he found it unseemly.
- You fear victory, *Nimbus said.
“Yes,” he said. Kritamera turned, and he dispelled her interest with a black look. *I am a testament to why one ought fear victory, *Mircea thought.
Then I’m not here, the bird said with a look. And you’re with S–
- *He shut his eyes and caught up with Kritamera.
As promised, he was soon before Uttares, headman of the Viturawar. He introduced himself, long-windedly, as such, and ‘signatory to the Treaty at Trijawac’. Mircea flared his nostrils; hence the bloody affairs with the Zedari. There was a piece that the bird had been right about. As much as he had tried to mold himself into something efficient, he found he couldn’t leave, not without giving warning that their victory was hollow, that he’d seen more on their way.
So it was that he was there when Uttares, at the head of the tents, looked him with hunger in his eyes, glittering out from under one broken horn. “The machine, is it fit for war?”
It was certainly true that the machine could be used to keep this hopeless crusade going, at least another turn. Something must have changed in his face, because both father and daughter now turned to him, pointedly.
“Forgive me,” Uttares said. “Inventor. I see the edge you’ve put on its wings, the plates over its mechanisms.”
“It can,” said Mircea. He gave Uttares a scrunched-up kind of look. “It is my protector. But merely a first draft, and not soon enough for this war you’ve already embarked on.”
Uttares turned aside. His face masked a flicker of frustration, but not well. He was big, well-muscled. Better muscled than any of the corpses. “What war has a Dadzhvo ever embarked on, blood of our predecessors? What war but the always-war?”
He bit back every incisive response he wanted to level, mocking their small-mindedness. He told himself he envied it, and walked his eyes over to his wondrous machine. In the language only they shared, he said, with the maw of despair widening in the hollow of his chest, I feel fucking wealthy. Like I said, nothing and less for me here. Well, about fucking time I put this incessant dream to rest.
-
*Dimly, he was aware that Uttares had started to speak again. He disregarded it, awaiting Nimbus, whose eyes flickered in a constant pattern. *But they’ll see. One day, *it blinked, in a scintillating blue. *You’ll help them see. *
-
*He stopped himself at the precipice, right before the messy bundle of it all fell out of him and he laid it all into the bird. When he looked to Uttares, the headman sighed. “But I suppose you must have your time to think over this commitment, Mr. Vedova.”
He did not correct it, for the moment.
Suddenly, recognition flowed through Uttares’ face, which was broad now that Mircea looked at it, a sparkling burnt umber. It was scarred, the nose done worse than his own. “You bear an Elvish name, Inventor,” he said, almost carelessly.
Mircea scoffed, almost incredulous. “Is it? On me?”
Uttares’ nostrils flared. Perhaps finally tired of the lack of decorum Mircea could not bring himself to amend. Kritamera stepped, ever so slightly, between them. Mircea watched the frustration ebb, only for a moment. He put a hand on his daughter’s shoulder, and stepped forward. A bull of a man, looking down on him. He was taller than even Oskar had been. “I do not doubt my daughter’s heart, in bringing you to this place,” he said. “You seem hungry, misbegotten. You are young, and you are frightened.”
Mircea’s jaw set, bearing together at the nerve of the headman. He mirrored the gesture, stepping closer. It took nerve he didn’t have, but he put his chin out. His cranium felt like it was in a vise.
“I find myself worried for my kin, though,” Uttares said. “You will say nothing of your people, blood of our predecessors. You speak as though half Zedari, or more.”
“So am I a spy?!” Mircea said, lurching towards Nimbus, and seizing the cloak. Reflexively, he covered his creation, deeming Uttares momentarily unfit to even examine it. His molars bit cheek. “Am I a fucking mole, in your small-minded assessment? That I would be so hesitant, to shackle myself to the world’s longest and most pathetic attempt to avoid tragedy by running headlong through nightmare after nightmare after nightmare? Well I would! I would be so fucking hesitant,” he said.
Uttares started to speak.
“Shut up,” he said, and stumbled over a few repetitions, jerky and distended. “Well, I would be *so *fucking hesitant that I’ve stopped thinking about driving my head into the nearest barricade. The ignorance—” he gnashed his teeth, his tail coming, dartingly, to life— “No. I have a better purpose than your industry of self-destruction. But for your benefit, yes. While you scream headlong into death, bringing countless others to their righteous demise, as all of our blood have ever been able to righteously do is die,”
Mircea laughed, sudden and unmitigated, like a spray of sparks. Uttares clapped a hand on his shoulder and jostled him, but he grasped onto the hand and balked, haltingly. Uttares pressed his lips. “I’ll forget your accusations,” he said, in a voice that felt like danger.
“While you do this,” he said, a little shakily, rage coming to his salvation, giving force to his words, “I will solve death. Unmake this injustice. I will right this wrong. That is my work, and I will not redirect it.”
Uttares’ lip broke from its hard line, his face drifting somewhere towards purple. Kritamera stepped between them. Suddenly, Mircea was aware again of the hand on his shoulder. It seized him with terror, and he struggled to pull away. Kritamera put a hand on his other arm. He couldn’t move if he couldn’t pull away. He thought he might be able to, but with Uttares that came into question. Especially without Nimbus. He felt himself blanche.
Kritamera came about, and looked at him. It wasn’t a hard look. “Let’s go out to the feast,” she said, and glanced at her father.
“Return to me when you’ve thought my proposition over,” Uttares said. “Feast well to my victory. I will not apologize for saving my own.”
Ahead of all of the tents, a number of tables were set out. The tribe was decently sizeable. Evidently few had been lost in the fighting. That matched what he knew, from the corpses piled in the field. So it had been a victory. He sat, with Kritamera at his side. Some hunk of a fighter was to his left, though he’d been firm. Nimbus was between them.
His stomach had felt positively tiny. It made it hard for him to eat, but the flavor was faintly nostalgic. This, too, brought on nausea, but interpreted through the haze of hunger, which had been constant since he’d returned to the desert, he piled on food. Briefly, he caught a look of amusement on Kritamera’s face, one he warded off with a dim look.
Mircea spent much of that dinner in silence. When he thought of his conversation with Uttares, he fumed. He couldn’t imagine going back to him now. The nerve of asking him to come crawling back, when Nimbus was merely the first step in the road. Fixation on the first step. Was it so endemic to all of them? Everyone who hadn’t been forced to see, the way he had.
The bird’s head swiveled over. Its eyes buzzed. Meanwhile, Mircea scanned the crowd. Many of them had the look of warriors, of which many were wounded, likely from the day before. He wondered if any of them would survive the larger contingent. Just as like, this place would be empty by the next evening. A few of them might survive, they might escape, if they were protected by others.
So he couldn’t see the victory Uttares saw. It would be ruined soon after the dawn, under the high suns. There were wounds, yes, cuts, bruises, gashes wrapped in plaster, but what appalled him more were the few who lacked limbs, or eyes, or for whom they were broken beyond repair. The bird caught his eye, with a head tipped. It said *he could repair them, show them to leave. He could replace their limbs, with the craft that he had meant for the dead. They could be whole, and they could survive. *
- *But Mircea Vedova could not tie himself to their fate. He leered at the bird and answered it with nothing more than a look. It knew as well as him what the limits of his presence here were, and as parts of the table trickled away to fill the spaces between the feast and the camp plan, and the air filled with song and the flat sand with dance, familiar songs, he looked away again.
One of the Dadzhvoy came past him and slid a bowl of something hot and spiced, more of what he had been eating prior. Mircea Vedova would only in retrospect recognize the archer from the corpse-field, and only with strain, and with doubt. Something inside Mircea broke at the gesture, and he stared at the man with plain malignance until he left him to eat in peace. At that point, few, including Kritamera, remained by the tables, by the edge of camp.
She was trying to explain something to him, that she understood he might not want to see the man who drew a bow on him. She tried to tell him the man’s name. It didn’t stick in his memory. Kritamera continued this, this attempt at a conversation. Nimbus pled with him, too. Pled with him to act on his pity, and to offer more than a warning. *Uttares would not heed him. *He knew that. He turned, abrupt, away from Kritamera.
In their own secret language, a language of thought, free of the limitations of sound and form, vision and hearing, Mircea told Nimbus that those who would listen, would listen. They would have their chance to demonstrate or defy their helplessness, their myopic fixation with running themselves into the ground. He could not help them. He didn’t have the time, not without binding himself to their fate, too. It was too much of a risk. A warning would have to be enough. He—
Kritamera leaned in front of his deadened gaze, her face written over with frustration. Her eyebrow pitched like she had been mid-question. She had been. She jerked a finger towards the circle of dancers, to the singers, to the rest of the camp. Briefly, Kritamera possessed a fiery temper. A brow fell, and she asked again. “Come, dance with me,” she said. Her face, in turn, suggested she was still doing her best to be hospitable, a misplaced concern that Mircea still struggled to tolerate.
For a moment, he was stupefied, struck from his argument with Nimbus by the gesture. It was a ridiculous suggestion, he determined quickly. But it didn’t matter. She put a hand on his, and Mircea Vedova was gone.
He didn’t recall coming to a stand. He only recalled jerking his hand back and stumbling, suddenly feeling his weight over his feet. He tripped over his words. “I’ve decided, I’ve made my decision.” he said, startingly. “I have words still with your father. Certainly no thanks to you.”
His footing was still uneasy when he was back under the headman’s pavilion. Eating, pausing, even a moment, had granted him a momentary clarity, and for only a moment, the grandeur of the tent was plain around Mircea Vedova. He forbade it from amazing him, but he could read, as plain as words, the account of countless victories. Uttares’ horns were banded, several times, in several precious metals. Silver, gold. Adamantine stuck out, green and heavy. This perplexed Mircea, where had he won it?
He was looking past Mircea, at his camp. Even when Mircea sat, Uttares did not initially dignify him with his attention. One of his bodyguards, a big man, held Nimbus outside. He nearly hadn’t entered, but he found himself unable to leave. He had to be heard first, at least for his absolution. He could see it clear as day, as he waited for Uttares to turn. He would hear his words and stir to glory. He would confirm Mircea’s suspicions and, simultaneously, justify his exit. He would run himself and the camp into the ground, and Mircea would pick through the corpse-field. This he knew.
“Mircea Vedova,” said Uttares. “That you have returned to me tells me you have seen sense. That you have eaten and sat as a guest at my camp tells me you have returned to your faculties, after earlier. As such, let us speak of how your machines may aid my kin. I invite you to speak freely.”
*Ha! *Mircea thought, only realizing moments late he had laughed aloud. He bit his cheek, but disdain was plainly displayed on his face nonetheless. If Mircea Vedova had been planning to come to an arrangement, to strike up ties here, with the headman of Vidurawar, he might have had to compose himself. But Mircea Vedova was not. He shivered, then said, rushingly, “Speak freely? In my experience, that is never an invitation to negotiate. But join you, die by your side? A… waste. I think not. There is no worthy death, headman, surely you must have realized that by now. If you do not believe I can bring you a future, a better future…” he trailed, then shook his head. All the while, Uttares looked on with a new expression. A changed expression.
Uttares gave him a look of pity. Anger boiled through Mircea’s body.
It mounted, layering a seizing quiver onto Mircea’s voice, but it didn’t break the surface when he continued, “Leave this place. Go north, past Ojo Valacsi.” He was balanced on a knife’s edge, above the horror of his own words. He let out a humorless laugh. He let it strengthen him, even as Uttares’ look shifted grim and hard.
Mirthlessly, the headman extended a hand.
“No,” Mircea barked, with a fervor which surprised him. But he wouldn’t Uttares see the gesture shake him. He put his chin out, willing his tail still, though it continued to threaten to flick.
“Speak sense, boy,” Uttares said, and Mircea felt his jaw lock. In Uttares’ face, epiphany built. “Why go north? Are you a spy, after all?”
“Because,” Mircea spat, gnashing his teeth. “You think yourself mighty, powerful? That was the reserve force you killed. The rest, the van, the mages? They’re still coming!” He rolled every word into a bullet, and they seized him with an airy and inane laughter he tried to keep boxed in his chest. “So go on, take your men to glory! But I’ll have no part of it,” he said. “Or leave.”
His outburst was met with silence from Uttares. He had stumped the titan, this mountainous lump of a man. Uttares hunched over, pressing a fist close to his own chin. He said nothing. Mircea’s nostrils flared a few times in sequence, his irritation slowly draining. Uttares made a bitter face, one he turned on Mircea, for once returning a hint of dark mirth. “You think I don’t know more are coming? What use are you to me?” he said, with finality. “You can keep the succor of my hospitality. My men shall not harm you.”
Mircea’s mouth twisted into an ugly gash. “I don’t care,” he said. Something within him cracked, and he missed Nimbus sorely.
Not even Kritamera came along to see him beyond the perimeter of camp. Nimbus turned towards him with a forlorn look. He returned it, then rolled his eyes, with a forced scoff. Silently, they two returned to the ruin, where he slept without dreams in a shelter beneath the ground, surrounded by his equipment, as hot as the sand at midday. When he rose again, fitfully, through the next few days, his mouth was dry, and exhaustion clung onto his bones. Uninvited yet come was a deep, raking sorrow. One which, rising from his pile, he answered with resolve.
Not resolve. Something cheaper. Something which rusted, or burnished, at least. He had no doubt that Uttares had made his stand. The caravan, the Vidurawar, were gone. When he emerged from his refuge, the sky was thick, like sourceless smoke. It didn’t bleed; he’d slept past the sunset. It was cold in his bailey without walls. He moved slickly down the redoubts, Nimbus in silent tow. The bird had no words of reassurance for him, nor words of condemnation. Not even the frothing black energy which sometimes possessed him had the power to convince him there was anything he could have done to stop the Vidurawar, and Uttares at their head, from going to their deaths.
Sand whisped by his feet as he walked. He took off his glasses, attenuated to magic, rather than focused for sight, and picked out a plume of smoke, mere inches from where he had predicted. Farther north than he had expected. No matter, he said in his heart. He had stipulated no conditions on his work, on the real way he had set out to help the Vidurawar. To return to them that which was now lost to him. For though Uttares had been more a fool than he had dared fear was possible, he was certain Uttares would now agree.
For a second, Mircea allowed his face to slacken. He looked to Nimbus, daring its mocking commentary. “What? Out of barbs about seeking another corpse pile? About my people’s marvelous ability to live just long enough to die in the dirt another day?” He rolled his eyes, sweeping a gesture and a look out into the desert. “Of course you are. Because I was right all along. But, Nimbus, that will not always be the way. One of them will have another chance, a chance to learn a better way. When it is proven…”
Nimbus’s head swiveled. There was a slight clatter– perhaps sand had infiltrated between its plates. Both eyes blinked to full intensity, saying, I don’t know. I’m just a metal bird.
- *Mircea sneered, rushing a few paces ahead of his automaton. “Of course. When I have proven the means, never again will they suffer in this way. Not from grief, not from the agony of mutilation, nor from the Holy Empire,” he said, spitting the last few syllables. He turned about to the bird, levelling a well-aimed foot into a prominence of sand, which ran down the face of the dunes. “But of course. I shouldn’t have expected understanding, even from you. You’re just…” he said, holding onto the words with his teeth, “a fucking metal bird.”
Nimbus’s head swiveled the other way, and Mircea’s heart skipped. Suddenly, he felt cold, and dreadfully alone.
Hoarsely, he said, “I’m sorry,” and then he added, “Nimbus. Don’t…” he said. He paused, waiting for the bird to catch up, then squeezed his eyes shut to vanish the landscape around him. He started to amble forward again. “Don’t, Nimbus,” he said, at a whisper. The bird’s head swiveled the other way. There was nothing in its glittering eyes.
It was not long before the horizon vanished beneath smoke and drifting sand. Huge clumps of it choked the air, rising slowly and ever higher, even in the dead air. The thicker the sky grew, the less it felt like night, but rather like nothing, neither day nor night. Just a clogged and backlit sky. Following the drifts of sand chasing to the ground, he began to pick out once again the signs of battle. A far larger host had swept through and met the Vidurawar. He made himself ignorant of the Zedari losses, and set to inspecting the corpses of the Dadzhvoy. None among the Zedari were deserving of his gift, he was certain.
For a time, he hoped to come upon the corpse of one of the large warriors who had sat alongside him at the feast. He once suspected he had, but the corpse was far too badly burned and cut to identify. The next few were much the same, but from where he sat aside one of the fighters, he spotted a small knoll, upon which a number of felled imperial soldiers surrounded a great motionless form. Uttares, was his first thought, and his approach merely confirmed it. Beyond the knoll was another, larger, corpse field. The sight left a terrible hollow in his throat.
Some of the strongest among them, those he recognized from the caravan, had died alongside carts, laden with tents and containers for provisions. Not far from Uttares was the pavilion, loaded for carriage. Six soldiers lay dead around it, though its wheel had been hacked off. Mircea came to a stand, a sudden and horrible nausea rising in his throat. Cart tracks crisscrossed the ground, all leading to the north. He traced them in his mind’s eye, leading from the south, from where he had seen the caravan. He looked again at the corpses, now no longer selecting for the strongest or the most intact. He saw faces whose names he had not committed to memory. Not warriors, all, but a cross-section of the caravan. The Vidurawar here had tried to flee.
*Uttares had listened. *Mircea lowered his head and looked down at the headman, now a ruin of gashes on the ground. He squeezed his fist and was helpless to prevent a strained sob from escaping his throat.
“Fucking… You!” came a startled cry. Half-remembered, Kritamera. Mircea looked towards the sound of a great spilling of sand down the side of the knoll, where the girl with burnt orange skin rushed to the top, a shapeless rage burning out from her eyes. “After speaking to you,” she huffed, words spilling out in a jumbled rush, “My father, he—” she repeated* he* several times— “He lost himself, he had us move north. They caught us. I don’t know if anyone escaped,” she said, a horrible scream edging into her voice.
- *“Just me,” she repeated, “Just me. Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell me at the start? I could have convinced him,” she said, her words turning to an agonized lowing. Her eyes burned red. She was shaking with fear and Mircea, for once, could not despise her for it. “You sat at his table the whole evening, and only at the end did you tell him!”
Mircea looked down again. His mind raced, howled to defend itself, and then he shook his head, looking out at the desert beneath him. The butchery which littered it. “No. He wouldn’t have. Couldn’t have. He was always going to fight them, even when it was hopeless. He should have run, used the desert. But he couldn’t have believed me, not before I’d explained myself.”
Kritamera let out a harrowed laugh, taking another dogged step up the hill. “I could have convinced him,” she repeated, though without much force of belief. Her eyes unfocused, and a sob shook through her like a storm.
Mircea shook his head. “No,” he said. “It wouldn’t have been enough time. He already knew—” he stuttered— “He already knew. He must have been convinced, in the end, or by something else. But, Kritamera,” he finished, looking back to her. His face felt heavy, even as he tried to maintain a stony expression.
She didn’t look back, but her nose slowly drew up into a snarl. “What could you possibly have to tell me?”
Mircea Vedova’s lip curled. “If you have to ask that, it means you hadn’t been listening,” he said, and shook his head. “I experienced a grief like this once. I saw it all. And the horror that did it spared me like it was nothing.” He dropped his head down to Uttares, like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Somewhere in him, anger came to a simmer. “The greatest injustice I shall ever endure…” he began, “...is that none but I shall ever* need *to suffer this fate again.”
Kritamera’s grimace finally broke. It collapsed, replaced which a short, bemused laugh, before she said, “What?”
“I said I would solve death,” he said, defying the theatrics of his statement with a mere shrug. “Understand this, Kritamera. The miracles of the divine are not beyond reach, just… veiled in showmanship and cruel chance. The deception of worthiness, the fortune of those few who have returned ‘by the grace of the Divine!’—” he said, seized by a sudden excitement— “I will take his body from this place. I will return him to being, he will confirm my methodology. And—” he stuttered, *and, and, and,— *“And then the rest. All of us.”
Mircea Vedova licked his lips. His face felt twitchy, cycling from expression to expression, as he scrutinized Kritamera’s face. Shock. Shock dawned into horror. No, this was all going wrong. “What you are feeling, Kritamera, I know it,” he said. He scoffed, though the scorn was directed elsewhere. “I’ve carried it. Well, it’s carried me. That’s not a life, just some fucking shitfest to slog through, and you are a fool if you believe there is strength in taking on undue suffering. But you don’t have to subject yourself to this. Please, I can fix this all. I can bring him back, and then, the rest of them. Into bodies which don’t die, don’t hurt, don’t suffer as I have. As you might otherwise.”
Kritamera stared, aghast. “What are you going to do to him?”
Mircea spoke without thinking. “Make him right again,” he said. Kritamera’s expression resolved. A hard expression, grim and certain.
“I don’t believe you,” she finished.
Mircea shut his eyes. The moment he had seen Uttares, he had expected this. Feared the man would be unyielding, then turned to relying on it. Like brittle iron, he’d seen the type before. Loved the type before. He knew how it would end before it did. Maybe he had hoped against himself, but in the pavilion, all he could think of was the quality of the flesh, the life force, the being. He would suit the role, first to receive his salvation. Kritamera did not deserve this loss, dually at the hands of Zedari and her father’s inflexibility. Mircea pressed his eyes shut. But she wouldn’t like this part.
Kritamera took a step.
Mircea pulled his crossbow and shouted, “Don’t come any closer!” He trained the crossbow on her center of mass, as best he could tell. He trembled, even as the trained weapon gave him certainty. Her face turned to amazement, then its horror redoubled. It *did *pain him to hurt her, in this way. Her pain was no stranger to him, nor the fear she must feel at that moment. “You fear what it would mean for my claim to be true,” he said, an agonized pleading bleeding through his face, against his will. “Let me prove it to you.”
She stopped. A purplish hatred broke through the horror in her expression. Her cheeks filled in the same livid color, she said, “It wasn’t enough to doom us all, was it? For my father to die? Now you have to take him from me a second time, while his corpse is still warm?!”
Irritation finally won out. Mircea narrowed his eyes. “You’re delirious, your grief has taken hold of your faculties. You’re not thinking clearly. I’m not going to take him, I’m—” he stuttered— “I’m going to bring him back. So whatever you’re going to say, save it. Let me prove it, first, let that be atonement enough,” he said, and dug his nails into his palm.
“Delirious?!” Kritamera echoed, then went for a step.
“No closer!” Mircea barked again, jerking with the crossbow. He tossed his head to Nimbus, which approached Uttares’ body and gathered it up in its wings. When it had secured the body, it tottered back slightly.
Mircea Vedova watched Kritamera lose her nerve. She rushed him, past him, and Mircea hesitated. He was utterly aware that the second he loosed the bolt he lost power, either Kritamera was injured, or dead, or she had no cause to fear him. He brandished the thing furiously, but when she sped past him, going for the corpse, he signalled again, and Nimbus lifted up into the air with the body in hand. Mircea once again brought the crossbow between them. “Leave!”
When Nimbus had lifted the body far out of reach, Kritamera was left dumbstruck. For a long time there was nothing written on her face except for an ever-changing expression, told in little twitches. She heaved; something had given out.
“Leave,” Mircea said. She looked at him, a baleful and sidelong glare. He dared not flinch. He’d known they would be hard to convince, a symptom of a culture of death and hopelessness, but something within him died with it. The part of him that had hoped he could get through to Kritamera, to return her father with her blessing.
After ages of that single withering look, she withdrew. Mircea waited until he could no longer hear her footfalls on the sand to leave.
Two days had been, Mircea supposed, a hasty estimate. The better part of two weeks ensued, in the inescapable heat of that ruin’s undercroft, as he labored over the body of Uttares. Uttares had died whole but horribly gashed, and though there had been no need to manufacture a limb to replace a ruined stump, as he had feared when he first took sight of the wreck, he had washed and sewn each wound, and scaffolded over those which could not be closed with metal plates. The result was a gruesome sight, especially as embalming would have rendered the organs beyond the point of revivification.
In the most laborious phase of his pursuit, near to the beginning, Mircea Vedova had had to transfer volumes of his blood, transformed into a quickening serum by the first proof of his art, into the body. This, of all of the stages he had to swiftly bring the body of Uttares through, was the most proven. In the dismallest cellars of the undercroft, Mircea had a small midden of miscellanea– scraps of bodies, small desert creatures, a hand– which he had kept from decay by the application of this serum. The fruits of a summer spent tirelessly perfecting the process could be seen in a hand of a Zedari duelist, scarred over– wounded and healed after the point of death.
Yes, Uttares’ body had been incorruptible by decay or time for a week when Mircea, sweating through his undershirt by the candlelight and night-time heat of the cellar, could no longer avoid the final step. All else in the process had been proven, well over. A thin cut he had made in the soft flesh by the throat had closed, far faster than a wound ought to. The body hadn’t even twitched. The eyes responded to light, they moved– though vacantly– for a period of four hours by night, and this pattern matched his own.
Should this step– his final step– fail, or prove to be impossible, the effort would be vain. This was what Mircea had worried over for long hours. As he grew unable to ignore it, Mircea despised his own indecision. He hated his trepidation, not merely for himself, but for Kritamera. What gift could this be said to be? The return of the body of her father, not ressurrected and merely revived? He ground his pride to dust; Lo, the corpse could bleed and close wounds! A triumph it had been, and certainly a further step to maintain a full body without rot. But the process would be nothing without drawing a tether to Uttares’ vital essence and calling him back.
Mircea quit his chambers for the surface, cradled by the stones of his great, absent fortification. The night air chilled him, slicing through both the sweat-drenched shirt and his whirling nerves. He scowled at the depth of his indecision, he tried to forbid it from himself, and finally merely searched the rocks for Nimbus. He felt as though he had gone a week without seeing a hint of the bird, and yet, the moment he looked, the bird was there, puttering softly beside him.
He gave the bird what felt like a particularly stern look, but where the sand had burnished his plates, he could– for a moment before recoiling– make out his own face. Puffy eyes and his mouth a short bow of pain, underneath a dark fringe of hair. Mircea Vedova did not think of Kritamera, he agonized himself with the fact that he did not. The issue of where she could have gone, when bidden to leave, only just punctured that refusal. Instead, he took clumps of hair and pushed them up to his forehead, and leaned his head against Nimbus.
The sun was starting to rise. It was a line of red, searing and treacherous in the east. Two ruddy contusions in the black run above cast the desert in brilliant orange, and Mircea Vedova turned to his bird in proper. “I’m going to do it,” he said, and kicked up from the ground. The bird said nothing, and silently, Mircea Vedova returned beneath the ruin. The weight of anticipation seemed like a just-withheld flood, liable to crumple his ribcage and crush his heart within.
His instruments would be the needle and the scalpel, the first dually-purposed, to bring his blood out, and to feed the serum into the corpse. The second was cruder, simpler. It would impress the language which would convey Uttares’ vital essence, by blood and his alchemy, and seal it back within its body. The language was flawless, though the method was– by necessity– untested. The animals he had revived had come to life when instilled with the blood alone, low enough as beasts and far enough from his understanding that their revivified behavior could not be distinguished from the normal. But Uttares slumbered. It would work.
Neither could he have picked an incomplete body, or one he did not wish to see saved. When risen, a consequence of his formulation, it would be bound to him. Given an incomplete body, this life would be fragile and agonizing. Given an unworthy subject, he would always seek to cast the newly-risen out on its own. For all the cruelty which Kritamera perceived in him, for the doubt the Vidurawar had borne, Mircea Vedova would not abandon his creation. Thus Mircea Vedova would only create that which he would not abandon. He bade the shaking of his hand to stop.
Now merely trembling, he surrounded the body in his determined language, etching painstakingly and with even spacing. The scalpel-point had been devised to leave wounds the body would not swiftly seal, though if he was slow, he would still have to start anew. In the end, he split each etched form open twice, drawing a sluice for the blood that oozed from each to the next. A machine at the head of the table cycled in blood and produced the basal stage of his serum, inert but nearly prepared.
Mircea was never quite ready for the pain. A torn-off piece of leather sat between his teeth when he sunk the trochar into a vein, and the machine came to life. The process would require a considerable sacrifice, one Mircea could only provide himself. When enough of the serum had been prepared, he stopped the conversion, though it continued to draw out his blood. He nearly leapt when the candle burned out; merely at the end of its wick, though he hadn’t noticed it grow dim.
As he felt his heart speed his blood racing through his arm and out the trochar, he jostled a switch into position. It filled out a sigil; the air accepted his sacrifice, turning it from matter to steam. The serum in the machine was enriched, and began to pump into Uttares, a bluish substance, which filled out the carved channels in his body. His heart beat again, continually cycling blood through the trochar, through the second valve, through the sigil, and a simmering sound as whatever essential force governed such things accepted, and accepted again. At last, the serum brimmed from each of the etchings.
At that moment, Mircea Vedova felt an agony beyond any pain he had ever experienced. Atop the table, an imperceptible change swept over the body, and it was heralded by a burning pull in his arm, the price exceeding that which the trochar had just drawn out, and chasing up his veins. The feeling of it seized him, and panting, he pulled out the trochar. It left him on the floor, a trickle down his arm, and a sob racked through him.
And then Uttares moved. Mircea had not seen his eyes open again, for once driven by some will beyond Mircea’s own. A convulsive force agitated his limbs. They splayed like a spider’s legs curling after the moment of death, but in reverse, slowly settling by his side. Then he came to his feet. In a roaring instant, the hulk of flesh was upon Mircea, driven either by sheer inhumanity or a rage so thick and so dense no humanity could be picked out from within it. A thick hand chased for him, but by some dumb luck, the cart with the alchemical machine on it was between them, and the body stumbled. Mircea shot to his feet and fled the undercroft.
Night had come again when he surfaced. Uttares emerged within moments, and faster than any hope to evade, was upon him again. Mircea scrabbled for his crossbow, finding it loaded, but its shape difficult to get hands around, and the thing that was Uttares pressed down, its eyes filmy, yellowed, and malign. Mircea curled his fingers around the grip. Uttares clamped a hand on his shoulder, he shimmied, but was caught fast. The ground left him, first his back– his back *had *been to the ground, then his feet. He kicked, grasped aloft in midair.
The other hand grasped his, crushing his knuckles over the crossbow-grip, until his finger bent away from the trigger. His heart pounded, he squeezed his eyes in hopes the thing would come to some sense, but it would not.
Nimbus, his saving grace, appeared. The full extent of his wing struck Uttares sidelong, and the thing huffed, briefly doubled over. Mircea was brought along, dragged across the ground as it recovered, but swiftly, it grasped Mircea back up, and slammed his back into the ground. The crossbow nearly left his hand. His fingers protested when he tried to better his grip, and the thing was still over him. A revivified heat coming off of it, through its grasp, it closed one hand around his throat.
Mircea did not feel his breathing constricted, though it grew very difficult. Rather, he felt a terrible pressure in his head and his jaw, one which did not abate, even as his eyes bulged. Nimbus’s wings clattered again and again into Uttares’ back, but the serum, Mircea realized, over the pounding in his head, his success, would damn him. Nimbus could not disable him, not permanently. He tried again to fix his grip on the crossbow, but his fingers were growing difficult to command.
A thick haze built, his sight grew dark. Uttares’ full weight was now upon him, pressing down onto the little bones of his head. His heart fluttered madly, straining against the oncoming dark. If he could merely bring his hand up, level his shot…
It wasn’t a shot he could see. He could scarcely feel the trigger, nor its pressure, even with his finger laid across it.
He couldn’t move. It was like there was something on his arm. Sheer terror pumped through his head, his hand twitched, he nearly opened it, just to feel it, but that would have lost him the crossbow.
He couldn’t die.
No, Uttares couldn’t die. His body could heave, as Nimbus swatted uselessly at it. Could his protector not save him?
He would need to unmake Uttares. That was a shame, because he wouldn’t be able to do that now. Anger seized him, but could not bring him to overpower the hulking thing atop him. It held him on the edge of consciousness. So he could bear full witness to one more fucking disaster.
One more shitty twist in a cheap fucking opera.
Every opera Mircea Vedova had ever seen had been expensive. He’d still hated them, because it had been S–
Not with that fucking name in his mind.
He perceived he was shaking. He heard Nimbus’s plates slide across each other, its actuators hiss. He heard footfalls.
“Father?!”
The pressure released. Mircea’s hand acquiesced, it came up. He squeezed. He didn’t feel the trigger jump. He saw the bolt go through Uttares’ head and Uttares toppled and wasn’t a thing anymore.
Between oncoming sleep and suffocating wakefulness, Kritamera– it had to be Kritamera– came and took the body. Perhaps she had tried to kill him. Perhaps Nimbus had saved him. He awoke, dry-mouthed, surrounded by ruins, his ruin. He was rail-thin. He was coated in sweat, blood, and sand. Long before he could move again, when first his mind came into being again, he sobbed.