The Gospel According to Verdu (a Steampunk Novel) (The Brofman Series) (23 page)

“
He
is sitting right here,” Verdu said impatiently. “This contraption wouldn’t be necessary if there were a decent physician in all of this stinking empire.”

Nameer and the tinkerer ignored his ire and continued discussing the mechanized leg brace. Nameer pointed out to Verdu the artistry and attention to detail the various artisans had achieved in such a short time. In general, the councillor was pleased with the contraption.

Verdu, on the other hand, hated it. It looked like a watchmaker’s dream gone haywire, with stainless steel cogs, leather straps, and whirring motors. He suspected that he would not so much gain a useful leg in the apparatus as he was likely to lose a finger strapping it on. It pinched his skin. It weighed too much, and most of all it would draw far too much attention to him.

“Let’s have you up, then,” Nameer said conversationally.

Before he could fully object, the councillor was pulling the shiny brace off the edge of the divan where Verdu was resting, dragging Verdu’s bound body along with it. He had no choice but to move along with the brace in Nameer’s hands or fall on the floor.

“Go on, Your Highness. Give it a go,” Nameer encouraged. Verdu rolled his eyes and thought about how quickly Nameer had learned to niggle him. Over the course of two days, the observant Nameer had learned that the best way to motivate the prodigal prince was to annoy him, and the easiest way to get under his skin was to call him
Your Highness
. The appellation tweaked him just enough to stir him to action. That was the heart of Verdu’s sour mood: he was mostly afraid of the brace
actually
working—or at least working enough to get him at least partially mobile. If his motility were returned to him, he would have to seriously consider his future, and that was something he was not prepared to do.

Verdu had spent much of the previous night thinking. First there was the matter of how easily Nameer had seeded his mind with a small sprig of hope, a notion that had taken firm root. Verdu had been more than prepared to die for his holy cause. He reveled in it. Martyrdom seemed like a soft bed on a weary night and as natural as a sigh. But the temptation to soldier on, to have a tiny fighting chance to live, and perhaps even serve his cause in another way—to subvert the monster from within, long shot that it was—hushed the choir of calling angels and brought a moment of reason to his zealous mind. And therein lay the rub.

If he could stand, maybe he could walk, and if he could walk, then perhaps he could run.
If
he could run, would he run
away
from this blasted palace, or would he have what it took to race to the throne and fight for it? Nameer had dangled the gossamer thread of possibility before him, and all the dangers that came with it. Would he be made a puppet? Was he painting a bull’s-eye on his chest for his ambitious cousins to aim at? Could he betray his own blood and his belief in the possibility of a kinder and better Tugrulia? Could he do what was required to achieve the throne?—for surely blood would be spilled to place him there. Would he kill for this chance?

Standing was the first step, and from there the decisions would follow. His left leg stretched straight before him, braces in his boot keeping his toes pointing straight up. He leaned forward from the waist as best he could and gathered all his weight onto his healthy right leg. He pushed up to standing, and settled his weight over both legs. He lingered over the agony in his left leg, exploring it fully. The brace rubbed against his skin painfully, but the more powerful ache came from muscles long neglected and burning with true stretching after months of disuse. The lash of a whip held less pain. Sweat trickled down his forehead as he bit back a scream.

“It is too much, I think,” Nameer said. “Perhaps we need to make adjustments and try again tomorrow.” He directed his words to the tinkerer, who was hunched over and examining the brace and calibrating various springs and bolts. He nodded agreement but was waved away by Verdu.

“Give it a moment,” Verdu said through clenched teeth. He flexed his toes and rocked his hips from side to side, loosening his joints and feeling the play of the hinges along the brace. He needed to stretch the atrophied muscles in his leg.

“Give me your arm, Nameer,” he said, and grasped the councillor by the elbow. Slowly he bent his braced left leg. The motors kicked in and helped move the joint, and he sank toward the floor until the knee rested on the thick Tugrulian carpet. His right thigh was parallel to the floor. Slowly, testing the pressure his knee could take, he eased his weight to the left. He slid his right foot a little more to the front, and ever so slowly he shifted his body forward. Waves of pain rolled though his groin and down his thigh, but Verdu reveled in it. The burn down the back of his thigh stung like a thousand angry wasps, but it was like a shock to restart his heart. The reality of healing, of life itself, had been absent from him for a long time. Too long. His mind, occupied by the pain, cleared, and his thoughts began to sort themselves out. He moaned as he stretched his aching muscles and tendons again.

Dying for his cause had seemed like the thing to do until now, but nothing is ever as easy as that. Verdu gnashed his teeth and leaned again into a deep lunge onto his good leg and felt the burn again, this time searing from his ankle to the base of his pubic bone. By the gods, he was alive, and as long as he still had breath in his body, he would find a way to bring down the cruel empire to which he had been born—even if that meant usurping the Tugrulian throne.

Without a thought for his leg, and numb to the pain, Verdu stood and turned to Nameer, the glow of fervent resolve bright in his eyes.

“Let us get on with it, Councillor. All of Tugrulia is waiting.”

Finding Ahy-Me’s arms wrapped around him, and his around her, was not the most shocking thing to happen to Fenimore in the moments following his awakening in the cave; it was just the first jolt of several. He leaped away from her but never quite made it to his feet. He scrabbled backward, skittering like a sand crab until his back was against a hard boulder. In the dim light shed by the dying fire near where he had been sleeping, he could see Ahy-Me stretch and look up at him, but could not judge the expression on her face. He thought it might have been disappointment, or perhaps regret.

Before he could decide, or she could speak to him, a limp body fell on top of him. Lifeless or nearly so, the tangle of knees and elbows was too light and frail to harm Fenimore, but the unexpectedness of Pranav Erato spilling from the top of the rock onto him sent him scrambling away again, this time into a corner of the cave. He watched as Ahy-Me crawled over to the pile of twisted limbs that was Pranav Erato. She sighed and laid him flat, untangling his spindly legs and wiping a dried trickle of blood from one of his nostrils with the hem of her dress.

“Vell, at least du can help me vith heem.” Her accented language took a moment to register in Fenimore’s head, and he blinked as he rose to his feet.

“What happened to him?” he asked, helping Ahy-Me lift the unresponsive pranav back onto the thin pallet of rags on the flat rock.

Ahy-Me sighed as she examined Pranav Erato’s head. She pushed her thoughts toward her master.
Pranav? Can you hear me?
She could not hear his thoughts.

“He is not een at present,” she replied.

Fenimore’s eyebrows drew together in concentration. “He’s unconscious?”

“Dat is not ex-act-til-lee da right vord, Fen-ee-moor. If he vere dreaming, I vould know eet.” She pulled one eye open and looked hard into the pinhole of his pupil. She shook her head. “He has not come to be unvell, no. No bang to da heed or someting.”

She scratched her head and sat back on her heels. “Eet seems he ees fine, but . . . elsevhere.” Turning, she gave him a half smile. “Ve vait.”

Ahy-Me opened a tattered bag and pulled out several bundles, arranging them on a low rock next to the fire. “And ve eat.” She picked out several bits of moss bread and chewy mushrooms and started to eat. Fenimore did not move to where she sat. He felt strange, like he was still dreaming, and more than a little confused. He could not quite recall how it was that he’d ended up wrapped up with Ahy-Me on the blankets, and was more than a little uncomfortable with the idea of sitting down next to her and having a snack. Her expression seemed casual, as if nothing was particularly right or wrong. No come-hither stare or look of shame or even pleasure crossed her face. She just was Ahy-Me.

After a few more moments he shifted his weight, listened to his stomach, and approached the food. He concentrated his attention on selecting a few morsels and began to chew. The pair ate in silence, neither looking at the other for a time. Finally, with the supply of moss bread running out, Ahy-Me broke the silence.

“Vell, how du feeling?”

“I have to say, a little confused,” Fenimore replied. He scratched his head and reflected, “But I seem to be sound otherwise.”

“Confused. I vould guess dat vould be so,” she said with a nod of her head. “Eet ees good dat du are not so much da violent soldier dat you vere yesterday. Du are . . . how I say . . . relax-ed.”

He thought back over the last several days and could not recognize himself in his own actions. His recollections were murky, and it turned his stomach to remember the faces of the people he had met along the way. Some had looked away from him, the lesser members of a pack deferring to the alpha dog. Others, of stronger constitution, ignored the elephant in the room. One or two even shrank away in his presence, becoming small in hopes that the lion would find the morsel not worth the effort to take.

At the time, feelings of duty had filled his heart and a savor for blood had lingered on his lips. Now he buried his face in his hands, half hiding in shame but also trying to brush the stain of this alien otherness from his skin. He had not felt the sting of it then, the fear from others and the hollow self-loathing within him; he had been numb, devoid of reflection. Now he understood something that he should have grasped before: he had been the blackest of monsters, and he ached for Chenda. The misery of it hung off every part of him, heavy and slimy like rotting seaweed from which he could not shake himself free. How close had it come to pulling him into the inescapable abyss? Pretty damn close, he was sure. He could not understand what had pulled him back from the rim, but he guessed that his current respite from insanity was by no means permanent. The rats of his base and pulpy aggressor state were nibbling around the edges of his mind.

Through his hands, unwilling to emerge from his sheltered place, he asked, “What happened to me? And how did you fix it?”

“How should I know?” she said. “The pranav, he say du vere broken. He give some grasses and chalks into da fire for du, he talk, du hear him through eet. Du sleep. Du better now, I tink.”

“I think I am still broken, it’s just a different kind of enfeeblement today than it was yesterday.”

“Improvement, I tink. Now, at least, du know du is broken.” She laughed, the sound of it filled with mirth, sympathy, and understanding. “But ve are
all
a little bit broken.” Her worried eyes cut to Pranav Erato. “In many vays. Some more dan most.”

Ahy-Me leaned over and pried one of Fenimore’s hands from his face. He halfheartedly struggled against her touch, but in the end he grasped the offered hand, lacing his fingers with hers. He would not look at her, but he could feel the delicate lifeline she provided him, a light in the darkness, just enough to keep the rats at bay a little longer.

Pranav Erato drifted in the darkness, patient and expectant. They were here somewhere—he could feel it—so he would wait until their good time. He had not bothered the gods much in his tenure as pranav. He had mostly taken his first instructions from them so many years ago—far too many for him to have reasonably been expected to count accurately—and served his station in their name through bounty and hardship to the best of his abilities. On the rare occasion that he erred, the gods had gently guided him through a dream or a vision, and he would right the course for himself and his flock. However, the gods had been eerily silent since the investiture of the Pramuc. At first, he assumed their attention had turned to her, to observe and guide her, but after a time he began to doubt. His gods-given instinct told him that something was wrong. A mistake had been made, an error they were not willing to speak up about.

He had been putting off this journey into the realm of the gods for selfish reasons. There was always a lingering hangover from brushing against the minds of gods. No amount of painkillers had been enough in the weeks following his being named pranav. Each vision since then left a lingering nausea that made him curse his mother for ever birthing him, and the total lack of dreams for more than a year at a time was the price he paid for an overnight message from his masters.

No, being pranav was not a position for the weak of heart or stomach. He thought he would consider retiring if he could manage to get out of the calling with his life. He doubted it. Pranavs stopped being pranav on their funeral pyres. He had been at the job so long, so very long, he could not really remember what life was like before, but it certainly had to be less demanding on his body and soul.

He passed the time of his waiting in the void by thinking back on Fenimore and his severed attachment to Chenda. He had hoped to help Fenimore by tying an anchor to his soul. Ahy-Me, bless her heart, became a substitute. Fenimore’s assigned spirit traits, the epitome of the warrior-protector, the Pramuc’s Companion Soldier, needed a tether in order to balance his gifts and his humanity. It had not taken Pranav Erato long to figure out that without Chenda’s love and near-constant connection, Fenimore’s enhanced nature would consume him, change him into something more than a soldier and less than a man. The pranav was ashamed that he had used the first soul handy to substitute for her, a soul he himself loved like a daughter and knew to be unsuitable for the task. Ahy-Me was not a Companion, and she loved another. He should not have risked her happiness, and perhaps her soul, that way. If he had known how to weep in this bodiless place, he would have. All he could think was that he had made a grave error in using Ahy-Me for his needs.