Dusk (65 page)

“Some strange stuff happened on this end
too,” Tanner added, checking Cyrus’s eyes to make sure he was
okay.

“So Mundi wasn’t on the other side of that
thing?” Milliken asked eagerly.

“Kalem
is
Mundi. Always has been. This
was all his doing. But it gave me an idea. We take the Apostates
back to Earth. They can have their reprieve, and I can have my
druthers.”

“How will we get them there?” Tanner’s
perplexed look intensified.

“The ships under the pyramid.” Cyrus stood
now, arching his shoulders to send hollow pops down his re-aligning
spine.

“But how will that stop Mundi?”

“Mundi plans to emerge as the savior to a
starving Earth, bearing gifts of gold. But it is hard for people to
starve if they don’t need to eat.”

The bewilderment in Tanner’s face subsided
like the shadow of a waning eclipse, “The Eos.”

“What use is gold to a man that has learned
to live off the light?”

“But how?” Milliken asked.

“How do we get the Apostates and the ships
together?” Tanner added.

“That, given our current situation, may be easier
than it seems.”

Torvald saw Cyrus sitting by himself in a
dark corner of the compound. Normally, when he wandered off by
himself to contemplate, it seemed best to leave him to his
thoughts. But today it seemed as if something was amiss, as if
whatever kept him going was winding down. Torvald believed that
when someone had something pressing on their mind, that once they
could no longer take the pressure, they would speak up, but this
seemed different. Belligerence kept Cyrus going as much as pomp
kept Paeryl—they were things that could be construed as negative
qualities, but the fact that they used them to keep the wavering
worlds around them on the level made them qualities to be admired,
despite not being healthy prescriptions for everyone. Perhaps that
was why, despite drastically disparate approaches, they had so much
respect for each other. It was most assuredly why Torvald had
respect for both of them, even though he may not have expressed it
clearly. But here, Cyrus seemed as if whatever fire had burned
within him was dwindling.

“Are you okay?” Torvald asked, kneeling next
to Cyrus in the shadow of the promontories.

“I’ll be fine,” Cyrus said
unenthusiastically, continuing to stare toward the side of the
crater.

Torvald smiled, staring at the orange aura
over the summit. “You know that day Sifu ransacked us in the
Paracelsus?”

Cyrus nodded wordlessly.

“You know what was going through my head when
I ran into your room?”

Cyrus turned to face him.

“I didn’t know what you would do. Hell, I
didn’t even know you that well. But something about you told me
that if anyone could stop him, it would be you.”

Cyrus nodded again. He paused for a moment,
and before Torvald was about to speak again, he let out a guttural
sound. Torvald turned to look at him and words finally formed in
Cyrus’s mouth, “Can I ask you a question?”

“Anything.”

“In Eurydice, when we escaped, you said you
froze. What got you unfrozen?”

Torvald let out a light chuckle, “You know, I
remembered something from my childhood, but the clearest thought
that passed through my mind, and I’m almost ashamed of it now, was
that you were in trouble, and if I didn’t help you, I wasn’t going
to make it.”

Tanner was walking over to them from the
light corner of the crater carrying his Bible with a stern look on
his face. “I came over here because my ears were burning.” Then he
smiled wider than he had smiled since the day cycles on the
Paracelsus. “I heard the whole reason you had to land the
Paracelsus at half-speed was because you went back for this.”

Cyrus shrugged.

“I also heard you took on five Echelon
soldiers single-handedly, and that you set yourself on fire.”

Cyrus shrugged again.

“Incredibly stupid,” Tanner added with spite,
eliciting a scowl from Cyrus, but arresting his attention, “but
thank you.” Tanner reached his hand forward to shake Cyrus’s, but
when Cyrus accepted his, Tanner yanked him from the ground and
hugged him, patting him brusquely on the back. Cyrus felt something
warm and wet against his ear, but when Tanner finally pulled away
from him, there was no trace of it on his face.

“You seemed a little lost without it,” Cyrus
said matter-of-factly.

Tanner smiled again, wiping his face for
certainty. “You know, losing it, may have kept me from hiding
behind it. Maybe stepping from behind the duck blind will make it
easier to find what I’m looking for. Especially since what I think
I’m looking for is me.”

Cyrus patted him on the back. Torvald looked
to Tanner and spoke, “Don’t you turn sacrilegious on me too. I
think one heathen in our van is enough.”

Even Cyrus smiled now.

Torvald did not smile, but inside he felt his
mind at ease. This was still the same Cyrus. Whatever had stricken
him in that storage room was fleeting, temporary. And that’s what
made Torvald run to that room that night cycle. What got him to
fight through Ashan soldiers to get to Cyrus—the only thing that
could lift Cyrus’s spirits was the need of others to have theirs
lifted. Cyrus, himself, may not have realized it, but it didn’t
matter.

Cyrus nodded, but before he could turn, Cyrus
said more to himself than them, “How could Kalem do this?”

Tanner stopped for a moment and grabbed Cyrus
by his shoulder until he raised his head. “You see this,” he held
up his Bible, “this helped me through a good part of my life. So
did training. But coming from the Scar was the worst I’ve felt in a
long time—maybe the worst ever. And you know what brought me out of
it?”

Cyrus looked as if he may have known, but he
did not feel like it was his place to say.

“You did. And it wasn’t with sweetbars and
houndshit. It was with the truth. The truth. All these years, I’ve
been looking for it, never realizing it was always right in front
of me. You were right.
We
are the truth. No more, no less.
And as you say, the only reason it’s so hard to find is because we
always look for it where it isn’t.” Torvald could see some of the
fire rekindling in Cyrus’s eyes, but it wasn’t enough for Tanner.
“Remember, after the shock of it all, it’s still here.” He took his
hand from Cyrus’s shoulder and tapped him forcefully over his
heart, “so how in Hell to come is what you believe
today
any
different than what you believed
yesterday
in there?” He
tapped him in his heart again with enough force to move his torso,
his voice was louder now, bellowing, and tiny droplets of spittle
sprayed with each accent. “I understand betrayal hurts, but we
ain’t quite at the bottom of this barrel of monkey shit just yet,
so hurt or not, we need you. And I’ll be goddamned, you hear me,
goddamned
, if I let
you
bow out before we do. So when
you get yourself together, you come see us so we can finish this,
complete.” The look on Tanner’s face was stern, unyielding, but
Cyrus met his eyes. The strength of Cyrus’s own gaze returned as
his jaws clenched, raising his temples slightly with each
contraction. They stood that way, face-to-face, for a moment that
was as unyielding as their opposing stares, and then Cyrus took a
short step back, clasped his right fist in his open left hand, and
bowed his head. Tanner met his bow, and then, as they met eyes once
more, hugged him again and whispered something long-winded and
sincere in his ear. Torvald wasn’t quite sure he heard the words
Tanner said to him, but he didn’t need to, he felt them too.
You
may have lost a son and a brother, but you have gained an entire
family. Your legacy is in all of our hearts. And we, even through
the Cimmerian fires of Hell itself, we will never leave
you
.

• • • • •

The EMD 423 was an amazing piece of
technology. No matter how many times Septangle Dagobert Manitoba
watched a target pass by unawares while he sat there in plain view,
he had difficulty keeping his skin from crawling as he wondered if
this one would see him. But they never did. Not even today, when
the Apostates stopped four times to scan the area both coming and
going. He had been ordered to keep watch over the fallen Earth ship
Paracelsus after the salvage crew’s shift ended each DC, and each
DC, glimmer mode activated even upon approach, Dagobert sat next to
an outcropping of rocks, waiting for something he never expected to
happen. But today he was surprised.

The skiff had shown up so close to
shift-change that Dagobert initially thought it was a salvage crew
returning to retrieve something. But there had been no chatter on
the radio frequencies he was monitoring, and the four men who had
emerged from the craft had spent under an hour inside the ruined
husk of the outmoded space craft before emerging with several boxy
pieces of equipment levied on conveyor lifts.

They had not dallied, but rather moved
quickly and efficiently back into their skiff. On the holomonitor
zoom, Dagobert had easily identified them as Apostates from the
sparseness of their clothing and the jaundiced tint to their
skin.

They had turned their skiff away from the
sun, and had moved toward an outcrop of hills barely visible from
this distance. Fortunately for Dagobert, he was able to move his
craft in behind them, as with their backs to the sun, the twilight
haze rendered his glimmer ship even more difficult to detect.

Dagobert issued an alert call and began
transmitting his telemetry to the Metatron network. He dropped back
to ensure stealth, but he made sure to keep the skiff on his
holo-imager.

They were most certainly leading him back to
the base of operations that had eluded the Echelon for too
long.

He would receive another vertex for this.

• • • • •

It took several evensongs to convince the
elders to agree to Cyrus’s plans. Several presentations on the
ecologies and habitats of Earth were necessary to get them even to
consider leaving their home, however inevitable an Echelon attack
was. The prospect of losing the sun once each day cycle had been
abhorrent to them, more abhorrent than the potential of predators
and diseases that would be alien to their bodies. After considering
different regions, and after Cyrus and Milliken gave warning that
the climates of the planet might be altered after the Advent, they
decided on landing initially in the Fertile Crescent. While they
deliberated, Torvald and Davidson prepared the soil processing lev
from the Paracelsus to carry the Eos, while Toutopolus, his arm
healing but still in a sling, worked with Darius to figure out
optimum conditions for the Eos in the ship’s hold. Jang used wiring
schemes he phreaked from the Echelon network to plan how to most
efficiently connect the suncasters to the ship they were planning
to requisition from the pyramid, and he worked with Doree to
facilitate the most effective way of transferring the Xerxes and
Agamemnon units to the new ship that Tanner had already christened
The Sweet Chariot
. Tanner spent the time training Apostates
and scientists alike with renewed vigor. His original liveliness
had returned, as if whatever demons had surfaced in Eurydice had
been exorcised, or at the very least, relegated back to their
respective cages in the depths of his consciousness. Cyrus himself
felt something he had not felt before. For once, he was able to
realize an end to all of this. He knew Kalem well enough to know
that he would not leave this to this end. He anticipated Kalem
would come back in some capacity or another, but he looked forward
to it—any resolution to something that taxed the souls of so many
would never quite be resolute until whoever was at the helm on
either side met face-to-face; there would be no mate in this match
unless it was king-on-king. And even though he knew that day would
be a dark one, he looked forward to it, because though the light
had been reintroduced to him in a way he could never have
anticipated, darkness was now an inexorable part of his soul—and
that darkness demanded its reprisal.

As the finishing touches were placed on each
of the necessary requirements, and the elders finally conceded to
all the terms, Paeryl pulled Cyrus aside one evensong. He was
uncharacteristically quiet, but with the lower volume came a candor
that was not indicative of him; he was a man who said what was on
his mind as far as it pertained to the arid world around him, but
he never moved to speak so much about himself—at least he hadn’t
before. “It seems for once there is no reason to ask,” he smiled,
patting Cyrus on the back.

“Yes, finally, I feel like we are winning,”
Cyrus himself smiled, returning the pat on the back.

“You have given me something I never imagined
I could possess,” Paeryl’s eyes were fixed on Cyrus’s, the creases
at the corners of them and around his mouth shuddered, but the rest
of his features seemed relaxed.

“What’s that?” Cyrus met his gaze, but was
unsure of where the conversation was going.

“A solution. A goal. Something
to
win,
finally, that might set all this to rest.” He smiled, stilling the
wrinkles of his face.

Cyrus nodded, unsure of how to respond. “Your
people are lucky to have such a wise and compassionate leader.”

“Yes. Yes they are,” Paeryl’s lack of modesty
seemed odd, until he gripped Cyrus’s shoulders with both hands and
held them there, a lone tear streaking from his own eye, and Cyrus
realized he was not talking about himself.

“But I… I can’t…”

Paeryl just nodded, strengthening the
embrace. “You already have.” He shook Cyrus’s shoulders firmly, and
then turned to walk away. But before he walked into the light cast
by the setting sun, he stopped and faced Cyrus again. “Our people
need only one leader, and that leader is plenty strong. I have
decided to stay here, to rescue any wayward souls that may wonder
into the wastes of Asha from the darkness of the Miasma. Just as
you have done for us.”