Etherwalker (29 page)

“I want you to take Mesha. Go back to G’Nor and follow me along this road. But . . . follow at a distance. I don’t want you to see this.”

Sera nodded, placing the shadowcat on her shoulders. She squeezed Enoch’s hand and turned to go. She paused.

“I would walk with you, Enoch. You don’t have to do this alone.”

There was a low growl, and they both looked up to see that G’Nor was approaching.

Sera smiled. “He would come with us, too. He says we are a pack.”

Enoch smiled grimly. He was grateful for their offer, but he didn’t know how to tell them that he didn’t want them to see this. He didn’t have the energy to even try. This was going to be . . . hard.

He turned and looked up at the specter, wondering if there was anything to be said.

Sera read his thoughts. “Sometimes, the angels delivered eulogies at the passing of honored people. Would you like me to say something, Enoch?”

He nodded gratefully, eyes somber. Sera stepped up to the girder with the flailing, one-legged specter and raised a hand. Her voice was clear and carried in the thin desert air—and it sounded richer, more volumetric than anything Enoch had ever heard before. He realized that he was hearing the finely-tuned voice of a messenger Seraph, custom-crafted for its regal, momentous tones.

“We are here to mark the passing of this . . .” She pursed her lips in thought. “We are here to mark the passing of
these
poor souls who have been trapped in this wasted land for reasons we do not understand, and for a space of time beyond our comprehension. We are here to bring an end to their suffering.”

She turned to look at Enoch, who appeared to be satisfied by her words. The specter above them had ceased his rattling movements, staring down at Sera intently. His sanity had returned, for a moment.

“You deliver a mercy many do not deserve, angel. I have railed against this iron for centuries, broken my arms and leg off into the sands below. I do not try for freedom, though. I try for death.”

Enoch tried to take advantage of the dead man’s clear mind for some answers.

“Why are you up there? Do the Swampmen hang all their criminals on these iron trees?”

The specter trembled, tilting his head to the sky.

“The Swampmen, those eroded gene-whores, they only bring us to the desert. They only care to rid the earth of the post-mortems, those who rely on tiny robotics to survive rather than evolved flesh. It is a twisted continuation of an ancient argument between the two great transhuman schools. Sure, most of us whom you call specters have devolved into lunacy,” and here he jerked his bony head towards the rows of girders trailing behind him, “but there are many of us here whose only crime was to try and live beyond our era.”

Enoch narrowed his eyes.

“Then I won’t kill you. Or any of those who are innocent here. Will you help me separate them from the rest?”

The specter’s trembling grew more violent. His leg began to beat a slow march on the hot iron girder. Sanity was fading.

“Won’t kill me? Won’t kill me? But, but you promised mercy! You promised! There
are
no innocent here, boy. Liar boy. Nobody who has lived these long centuries is innocent!”

The specter was kicking faster now, and Enoch saw that his window for information was closing. He stepped closer to the girder.

“If the Swampmen only released you to the desert, then who put you up here? Who drove the nail through your chest? Who did this?”

“Oh, just follow the road and you’ll see, liar boy. You will see how our payment is just and our jailer is fitting. Maybe maybe maybe he will have a nail saved for you? Maybe mercy maybe maybe maybemaybemaybe . . .”

Enoch stepped back and lowered his head.
I can’t do this. He is twisted and crazy and sad, but he doesn’t deserve to die.

Sera’s voice, now just her normal tone, came softly from behind him. “End his torture, Enoch. He has suffered too long.”

“But why me? Why do
I
have to be the killer here?”

“Because you are their only hope for mercy. You are the only one who can end this.”

Enoch’s shoulders slumped, his head dipped even lower. There was a moment of quiet, of resignation. Then the specter gasped and went still. Enoch imagined that he heard a contented sigh as the ghoul’s skull rolled back to rest, open-mouthed, against the girder.

“Let’s go,” said Enoch. “We have a road now and a purpose here.”

Sera climbed on G’Nor’s broad back, unfurling her one unbroken wing to cast a shadow over the trio. It made the heat more bearable, and travel was going to be slow. There was another specter up ahead, and he had seen what Enoch had done. Already they could hear his cries for mercy.

*  *  *  *

The girders seemed to be part of some unfinished construction—a jagged frame thrusting up from the sand-strewn road for miles. Occasionally the sand drifted apart under the path in the ever-present breeze, and Sera could see deeper spaces under the girders—spaces filled with dark and massive machinery. This “road” was only part of some greater construction that wound throughout the heart of the desert. That was interesting but hard to focus on in the face of more dire concerns.

“If we keep going at this pace, we are going to run out of water in another few days,” said Sera.

Enoch walked just ahead of her and G’Nor, at the edge of where her wing shadow could reach. Killing the mad specters for the past several hours was draining him, but he ignored her repeated requests to stop and rest. He had a look of numb determination on his face and would only pause in his steady trudging from girder to girder to take the occasional drink from his rapidly shrinking water skin.

G’Nor rumbled something to Sera, and she looked down to see his forepaw move through a series of signs.

“I know, my friend. He needs to stop. I am almost ready to get down and knock him over before he kills himself.”

G’Nor exhaled, blowing sand from between his claws.

“No, I don’t think you should knock him over. He might not get back up if you do it.”

So they followed Enoch. It was long, miserable work. The girders were evenly placed about ten yards apart—just far enough to keep the specters out of conversation range, another cruel element of this torture—and some were vacant. Sera gave up trying to figure out the meaning behind it all. Some of the specters were wild, lost in their insanity and unable to make a coherent sound, just an unending babble of broken words. Some boasted of their crimes and threatened to do horrible things to Enoch once they were down. They spoke of vile deeds with some sense of nostalgic glee, as though their long lives gave them the right to bring horror, fear, and pain down on “the mortals.”

Those seemed to be the easiest for Enoch, and he learned to push them dead as soon as they were in earshot. Harder were the ones who seemed genuine and decent, the ones who begged to be let down, who promised anything, everything to be set free. These ones Enoch spoke to, tried to find more answers about what had happened to them, and how they had ended up here. Again, stories differed. Some blamed the Swampmen, some blamed the devil, monsters, witches, ghosts . . . and some claimed to have nailed
themselves
to the girder to atone for their evil ways. No two stories were the same. There was no way to know which were liars, and so many had obviously perfected the art of doubletalk after centuries of practice.

So Enoch had no other choice but to offer them solitude or death. All of them chose death. No matter how incoherent, how insane—every specter had an animal longing to finally, at long last, die rather than hang in solitude. They left a trail of silent, windblown corpses behind them.

As night fell, and a cooling wind began to stir, Enoch staggered to a halt. Sera gasped to see dark lines running from his ears, down his neck, and staining his vest. It was blood. Dried blood.

“Water,” he croaked, and Sera hurried from G’Nor’s back to bring him her skin—his hung empty at his side. He lifted it to his lips and drank deeply, then held it back to her. “I think . . . I think I’ll stop here.”

With that, he collapsed to the ground and slept. Sera pulled him up against a silent girder and called G’Nor over to help her unpack the tent. They made camp there, among the dark, metal trees. The sand was warm enough to sleep comfortably, especially after days of soggy marsh, and neither felt safe lighting a fire. Enoch hadn’t moved since they laid him between them, with G’Nor at the mouth of the tent. Even Mesha seemed to know that there was no hunting here—she curled up on Enoch’s chest, her fur as gray as the sand, and scowled. Sera gave the shadowcat a piece of meat and then shared a dry meal with G’Nor as the stars came out.

“We can’t hope to continue like this for much longer,” she said, partly to herself and partly to the large beast breathing softly at her side. “Even if we had enough food, Enoch is killing himself.”

She could see G’Nor’s signed response silhouetted against the stars through the open tent flap. He told her that Enoch had found his vigil and must be allowed to see it through. Sera shook her head.

“People are not Ur’lyn. And Enoch is more than this. There is more to what he can do than killing these sad relics. And every begging, pleading specter that he kills takes something from him. I’m watching the light go out of his eyes.”

G’Nor thought for a while, then exhaled with a growl. His forepaw made three simple movements.

“No,” said Sera. “I don’t believe he was born to kill. He has a different destiny than that.”

And with that, she laid her head back against Enoch’s shoulder. Mesha sniffed at her hair and then turned over, preferring to sleep away from the interloper. Soon the slow, easy sounds of slumber were all that could be heard.

Chapter 22

“The glory of the world is in the patterns, in music and war and love.

Thus music, and war, and love combine in a pattern that glorifies all of the world.”

—
Pensanden chiasmus

Enoch awoke to Sera’s gentle nudging. His head still ached from the dark, heavy work of the day before, but a night of deep sleep had helped. He sat up and rubbed at his eyes, then gratefully took the skin of water Sera offered him. The sun was already up and gently warming the eastern side of the tent.

“G’Nor left at dawn,” said Sera, nodding towards the open front of the tent.

Enoch felt stupid for not having noticed the absence of the giant predator, but he decided to forgive himself a little fogginess after a day spent killing specters.

Sera’s voice had a softness in it, a concern that he’d never heard before. She leaned over and brushed something off the side of his neck in a way that Enoch imagined could be considered “motherly.” Enoch was comforted by the gesture, but he found himself wondering if he really wanted her to feel
that
way towards him.

“He signed that he scented water—that we need water if we are going to continue like this.” Here she took a small swig from the skin, barely a mouthful, before pushing the stopper back in and swinging the bag around her back. Enoch just nodded, still feeling cloudy-headed and strangely distant.

Wake up. Focus. Another day of killing.

He rubbed his eyes again and crawled from the tent, then helped Sera fold it up into a portable size. Without G’Nor here, he would have to carry the canvas packet. It wasn’t that heavy, but he knew that over time the walking and direct sunlight would make the weight oppressive. Luckily one of the straps that bound the tent could be slung over his shoulder, allowing Enoch to carry it like a satchel. He adjusted the strap so that it rested snugly against his vest and turned to face the path.

The nearest girders were empty, stretching on up the ridged dune in front of them. There was an odd randomness in the placement of the specters, sometimes heavily clumped in row after row, and sometimes spaced apart. Enoch realized that this was why he had stopped last night—his mind had been searching for a pattern in the placement of the impaled creatures and had determined—correctly—that this would be a good empty stretch. Enoch peered into his
afila nubla
and found the pattern: the bodies were placed in a representation of the mathematical constant
pi
. The impaled group counted as a number, and the empty girders represented every other number. So the first three girders had been occupied, then one left empty, then four occupied, then another empty, then five occupied—3.1415 and so on. Yesterday had ended on a long stretch of nine corpses and finished with what appeared to be a comfortable space of seven naked girders. With the even, syncopated spacing of these sand-brushed steel teeth, that meant that the night had passed beyond the shouting distance of whichever specter awaited them over the top of the dune. And, if this pattern held true, it would be a single occupied girder followed by another empty set of six.

Let’s just hope that whatever circularly-obsessed madman has created this pattern is willing to stop at the 40th decimal place. I’ve got a few nines on the road to 50 . . .

“You’re . . . smiling?”

Sera had come up beside him while he was lost in thought, and her face held an expression halfway between amused and worried.

Enoch blinked his eyes and blushed.
Was I really smiling about pi?

Sera walked around to face Enoch, placing her hands on his shoulders. The amusement was now entirely replaced by concern.

“Enoch?”

“Oh, it’s nothing, I . . . I just found this pattern in the specters and—” He looked down at his feet, unsure of how to describe this. He shrugged and ran a hand through his hair—releasing a surprising cascade of sand that seemed to be timed perfectly with an errant gust of wind. Sera took a step back, sputtering, wings spread in alarm. It was too much for Enoch—he started laughing.

Sera blinked the sand out of her eyes. Enoch tried to cover his mouth, but after a moment she joined in laughing. Enoch imagined that it was the first time that such sounds had echoed off these gray dunes in centuries.

The laughing angel brushed a tear from her eye, and Enoch had a worried thought about water conservation. This only generated further paroxysms of laughter that left him winded.

Sera finished before him and tried to pull a serious face. “Ok, ok. If we’re done laughing, it might be smart to put our minds towards surviving this trek through the desert.”

Enoch tried to stifle the last few giggles that bubbled up from his chest.

“I’m sorry,” he gasped, the words trailing up as he fought to gain control of himself. “I . . . I just . . . it just feels so good to laugh.”

She nodded.

“Of course it does. Things have been pretty grim for a while—it’s nice to remember that we are still kids.” She brushed some of the sand off of his vest. “I mean, it’s nice to remember that
you’re
still a kid.”

He smiled, noticing that this conversation was the first one in a while that he’d had with Sera where he didn’t feel awkward.
Maybe we are really starting to become friends now. Maybe I don’t have to worry about whether or not she likes me.

Sera, as though guessing his thoughts, smiled and shrugged, stretching her one functional wing to its full extent. Enoch found the gesture to be incredibly charming and expressive. Not wanting to ruin the moment, he tightened his lips into a pragmatic line and turned to survey the road ahead.

“As I was saying before you started acting
childish
, there is a pattern at work here. Whoever is responsible for placing the specters here is doing so in a numbered sequence, a mathematical constant that represents the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.”

He looked up to see Sera rolling her eyes.

“Are you really trying to explain simple geometry to an angel? To someone who has been tailored with an innate sense of shape, distance, and perspective?”

Enoch was blushing. Luckily, Sera took pity on him.

“But no, I didn’t catch the pattern.”

Not sure what to think about that, he decided to plow on ahead.

“It means that whatever mind is behind this corpse path is one familiar with numbers. With patterns. It’s a mind I can figure out—maybe a mind I can defeat.”

“Well,” said Sera, “you may have some idea of how the mind works, but you have no idea what kind of fangs, claws, and muscle lays at its command.” She pointed up the road. “We should probably get moving and trust that
our
fangs, claws, and muscle get back from their hunting trip before we find out.”

Enoch nodded and started taking down the tent. Mesha hissed and tumbled out of the collapsed canvas, furious to have her morning nap interrupted. Enoch just smiled and lifted her onto his shoulder, immediately regretting the decision as she shared her opinion of him with slowly retracting claws. Satisfied at his wincing and sharp intake of breath, she gave a short sigh and curled around his neck like a furry scarf.

“At least we’ve got our backup claws with us until then.”

*  *  *  *

The numbers proved to be true. The pattern continued in sequence, and the happy sense of discovery began to be replaced with a feeling of foreboding. It is one thing to deal with cold numbers—another thing entirely when the numbers are raving souls hung in the desert sun by some mad design. Enoch and Sera’s cheer soon dwindled and evaporated with the heat. G’Nor did not return. The water disappeared quickly.

And then they found Rictus.

He was at the tail end of the line of nine completing the 50th place of the sequence. Enoch had stopped looking too closely at the specters since it made his task more difficult—especially when dealing with the quiet ones. Rictus was quiet. It wasn’t Sera’s hand on his shoulder that caused him to look up; it was her sharp intake of breath.

“What . . . is this one
doing
?”

Rictus had his bare face lifted to the sun, arms spread and legs hanging limp and motionless. The specter’s toothy mouth was open, his back arched, and he appeared to be frozen in the final gasp of a lightning strike victim.

At first Enoch feared that he might have already pushed the specter, his mind dazed from the sun, thirst, and a morning of killing the dead. He stumbled towards the base of the pillar and banged the side of his fist against the hot metal. “Rictus, no.”

Sera gasped. “Enoch? Is this . . . ?”

But then Rictus’s right arm windmilled around in an arc and rested against the spike protruding from the center of his chest. Sera let out a cry of surprise.

Enoch looked up. “Rictus?”

The specter’s fingers were moving now. They were sliding through an odd sequence of straight and curled gestures, rhythmically—a rhythm that his head began to nod to as well.

Enoch took a step back. Still nodding his head, Rictus opened his eyes and windmilled his arm around again.

“Ok, that was the longest air guitar solo of my life. Little help, Shepherd Boy?”

*  *  *  *

The hole in Rictus’s chest had already begun to close by the time Enoch and Sera got him to his feet, the nanites from his LifeBeat working furiously to fix the previously irreparable damage with an intensity that turned the visible metal cables running through his ribcage bright red with expended heat. Enoch tried to fill Rictus in on all that had transpired since that horrible battle under Babel, his time with the King, and the discovery of G’Nor and Sera. They wept over the loss of Cal and were silent for a long while after Enoch had finished.

Sera was silent during the reunion, kindly recognizing that the two friends needed time to unwind their grief and sudden, unexpected joy at finding each other again. Kindness aside, Enoch noticed that she kept staring at Rictus’ wound, seemingly fascinated by the odd motion of rippling, steaming flesh that writhed across the specter’s chest.

Rictus finally noticed the angel’s focus on the puckering wound as well and pointed at Enoch with a frown.

“Your new friend here should know that it’s not polite to stare at a gentleman’s sucking chest wound.”

Sera blushed and looked away.

Rictus chuckled and held up his hand to the angel. “Enoch will tell you that my sense of shame rotted away years ago, miss. Not too long after I lost my ears, if memory serves.”

She bit her lip and shook his hand with an apologetic nod. Enoch thought it was brave of her to shake hands with one of the raving ghouls they had just spent long hours destroying.

“You’ve never seen nanotech biomolding at work?” said Rictus. “I assumed the angels would know about this sort of thing. Your kin should have pretty extensive records of it all—should be the few remaining folk around who couldn’t be surprised by remnant tech.”

Sera frowned. “Most of our archives were destroyed when Koatul cut down the Spires. We’ve been trying to recover what we can ever since, but . . .” She fluttered her hands in frustration. “There is not much left that has not already been destroyed or corrupted. Any recovered disks must be blessed through a dozen cleansing ceremonies, and our Windroost only has one aging librarian.

“But no, I haven’t seen nanotech like this. Your kind have grown scarce since years before I was born. That’s what the elders say.”

Rictus looked beyond Sera, nodded towards the path of now-quiet pillars that disappeared into the distance. “I had always assumed that it was just the expired warranties, well, that and the gradual descent into suicidal madness. But when I saw what has been done here, how many of us have been hung out to dry here . . .” He turned to Enoch, teeth gritted.

Mesha tightened her grip around his neck, sensing Rictus’s anger.

“I think I’ve found my purpose, etherwalker. I know what you have been doing along this path, and I know it was a mercy. There is no
saving
my kind. But I can return a little vengeance on those who have caused this anguish.”

Enoch heard something new in his friend’s voice.
Resolve?

“Who, Rictus? Who put you up here?”

“The Swampmen?” said Sera, frowning.

Rictus chuckled. “Oh no. Those soggy zealots couldn’t hold me captive for long—their poisons are less than effective against my nano.” He pinched the parchment skin on his cheek.

“They ambushed me during a particularly moving ballad, which is unforgivable. It cost them four nets, seven arms, and a pair of lives before depositing me on the sand.”

He paused to adjust his leather jacket, clucking his tongue as he emptied sand from the pockets. Enoch knew that Rictus was just drawing the tale out and rolled his eyes.

Sera raised an eyebrow. “So how did you—”

“Lose my guitar?” Rictus interrupted, frowning. “Swampmen took it. Dropped it in the damn swamp. That’s when I stopped lopping off arms and started
really
hurting them. They were able to get enough lassos around me to take my sword, too.”