APOLLONIUS, SEVRO, AND I cut our way through the fortress guards. It seems most of the manpower was sent to fight beyond the walls, likely to stop Apollonius’s force from ever making landfall. Those who remain offer thin resistance to our combined violence. After shattering a trio of Gold bodyguards near the gravLifts, we divide to search more efficiently for the Ash Lord. Sevro and I stick together, while Apollonius sets off on his own.
The search does not take long.
“This has to be it,” Sevro says outside a set of double doors gilded with gold.
“There will be Stained inside,” I say. “We should wait for Apollonius.”
“You need him to wipe your ass too?” Sevro asks. He kicks open the doors. “Time for your bill, Ass Lord.”
The room is quiet.
Despite the decadent floral moldings and whitewashed walls, the room is cavernous and sparse but for a large four-post bed that looks out an open balcony window to the sea. A pulseShield ripples faintly outside the windowsill. Around the bed squat a legion of hulking, polymelian forms. At first I think they are knights, but as a column of light from the outer suite illuminates the gray metal, I realize that they are not men at all, but medical machines. Small displays glow with life readings.
An old Pink in a nightgown and two Brown servants holding fire pokers guard the foot of the bed, shielding its inhabitant from us. The Browns charge, screaming at the top of their lungs. We take them down, trying not to kill them with our metal-covered fists. The Pink at the bed is wailing. “No,” she screams. “Stay away from him!”
I pull her from in front of the bed as Sevro approaches it warily. She slashes at me with her nails, breaking them against my armor. “Monsters!” Her spit sprays my face. “You monsters.” Sevro punches her in the back of the head. I catch her as she drops to the floor.
A deathly stench fills the room. Sevro stands at the base of the bed, his hand pulling back the silk curtains. His face is pale. “Darrow…” He jerks the silk curtains off the frame so I can see.
On the bed, lying in a nest of blankets, are the remnants of a giant. When I met the Ash Lord as a lancer to Augustus, he stood over seven feet in height and weighed as much as a Telemanus. At that time he was edging past a hundred. But he was still stately and spry despite his girth. That vigor he retained throughout our many bouts in the early stages of the war. And though his face has spoken on Core broadcasts over the last years, I see now that it was a ruse, and why he hides here in his seaswept citadel.
Barely a third of the man remains.
What does is emaciated and skeletal. His arms have shrunken in on themselves, the muscle withered away. The skin, once dark as onyx, is now loose and scabrous with yellow flakes, oozing pus into white bandages. His once-bright eyes are sunken into his head, which is bald, the skin tight and dry like a thin layer of scale over his titanic skull. Wires and fluid lines connect to the machines that guard his bed, cycling his blood and removing his waste. It’s as if he has been devoured from inside.
“I wondered who knocked,” he murmurs. His eyes—stained with a rotten yellow infection—watch me without malice. A hologram floats beside his bedside, showing us the battle outside. “I thought it the Saud, finally come to reclaim their planet. But now I see it ends as it should, with wolves.” The simple words brook no anger. The voice alone remembers the man. It is drum-deep, defiant and proud, even trapped as it is in his wasted body, like summer thunder captured in a tattered paper lantern.
For ten years we’ve been adversaries. Have danced across the worlds in a never-ending duel. Each move countered by the other, then re-countered in one giant game on many boards—first the metal jungle of Luna, the plains and seas of Earth and Mars, then the Core orbits, till finally the sand belt of Mercury, where I took the planet and he broke my army. Now all those vast theaters and the millions of men shrink down to this moment, to this small room on this far-flung isle, and none of it makes any bloodydamn sense.
“Am I not as you expected?” he asks with a smile.
“Let’s just cut his head off,” Sevro says.
“Not yet.”
“What are we waiting for? This piece of shit needs to meet the worms.”
“Not yet!” I snap. Sevro paces around the bed in agitation.
“You are precisely what I expected,” the Ash Lord says. “The destroyer of a civilization too often resembles its founders.” He wets his mouth from a water feeding tube and follows that up with a grotesque clearing of his throat. “I must apologize, Darrow. For not seeing you sooner—when you were just a boy who broke his Institute. Had I opened my eyes and noticed you, what a world we would still have. But I see you now. Yes. And you are immense.”
It’s admiration in his voice. It’s familiarity. How few people left breathing could understand this man? How many men know what it is like to give a command that kills millions? I swallow, my hatred for him quieted by the wretched thing he’s become, and my fear at heading down the same broken road.
This is not how I pictured our final confrontation.
“What happened to you?” I ask. “How long have you been like this?”
The Ash Lord ignores the question and searches my face. “I see you kept our scar. And our eyes. Then what of the Red remains?”
“Enough.”
“Ah,” he says quietly. “I suppose that is what every man must tell himself in war.” His voice rasps and he sucks again on the water tube. “That there will be an end, and when it is done, enough of himself will remain. Enough to be a father. A brother. A lover. But we know it isn’t true. Don’t we, Darrow? War eats the victors last.”
His words make a heaviness settle on me. I wish I could say I was different than him. That I will survive this war. But I know day by day the boy inside is dying. The spirit that ran through the halls of Lykos, that curled with Eo in bed, he began to die the day he watched his father dangle from a noose and did not cry.
“It’s a price I’m willing to pay to be done with you,” I say.
“That is part of your Red genetic character. Your yearning, your need to sacrifice. Brave pioneer. Toil, dig, die for the good of humanity. To make Mars green. We designed you to be the perfect slave. And that’s what you are, Darrow. A slave with many masters. Change your eyes. Take our scar. Break our reign. It won’t change what you are at your core. A slave.”
Bombs rumble outside. Sevro spits at the corner, nearing the end of his patience.
“Lorn once said you were his greatest friend,” I say. “That you were once a man to be admired. Before Rhea. Before you crowned yourself with ash.”
“Rhea was a rational transaction. Sixty million lives to keep order for eighteen billion.” His shrunken lips curl. “What do you think Lorn would have done if he saw what you were? Do you really think he would have spared you?”
“No, I think he would have cut my heart out,” I say. He could walk away from his Society, but he would never let it fall. I hear a sound at the door. Apollonius enters, alone. The Ash Lord’s eyes darken with hate. But in seeing the state of his nemesis, Apollonius does not look as dismayed as he should.
“Ah, I see the Ash Lord has become most literal indeed.”
Apollonius sits on the edge of the bed and pulls back the sheets to see the cadaverous legs of the old warlord. He makes a clucking sound with his tongue and prods the flaking skin at the thigh, peeling off a small strip of the scale and grinding it between the metal fingers of his gauntlets till a fine powder sprinkles the bed. “Did the bite hurt?”
“So it was you,” the Ash Lord murmurs. “Atalantia did not believe me.”
“Even from the deep, I have teeth,” Apollonius says. “I served nobly. Without deceit or graft. But you betrayed me to steal from me. You turned my blood against me. That, my goodman, was a dire mistake.”
I feel a reptilian fear slipping into me. I back away from Apollonius. Sevro points his pulseFist at him. “You knew he was like this and you did not tell me?” I say.
“You son of a bitch,” Sevro hisses.
Apollonius smiles. “The warden did not just buy me tomatoes and whores.”
“You’re dead, shithead.” But Sevro doesn’t fire.
“I did not know it worked,” Apollonius says innocently. “But I am delighted by the results.”
The Ash Lord tries to spit at him, but the feeble saliva catches on his own chin. “Is revenge worth sounding the death knell of your race, spoiled cur?”
“My race?” Apollonius stands. “No, no, my lord, I am a race unto myself.”
“How long ago?” I ask, grabbing Apollonius by the throat. “How long ago did you do this?”
“Three years,” he says, not liking my hands on him. “Are we not allies any longer?” He steps back measuredly, touching his throat. At the news, Sevro looks light-headed.
Three years. Three years like this…He can’t have led his men or fleets on Mercury from here. The time delay would make battle command impossible. But how then did they resist me for so long? Who commanded them? Who is responsible for their new tactics? Who was really behind the holos of him on his bridge when we spoke those half dozen times?
“Yes,” the Ash Lord rasps, as if he can hear my thoughts. “Do you feel the dread yet, slave? Knowing you came all this way, fractured your Republic, your family! Made a pact with this devil to kill a sick old man at the end of his days?”
I fight the urge to scream. I feel like I’m falling. What a waste. What an unbelievable waste.
“Who was it?” I ask.
The Ash Lord looks at Apollonius. “Who else? The only daughter you have left me.”
“Atalantia…” I whisper.
“My last Fury.” He smiles with pride. “You destroyed her home. You murdered her sisters. Now you come to take her father. She was a frivolous girl. She would have lived in peace, Darrow, but you have brought her nothing but war.” He mocks me.
“All of this for nothing,” Sevro murmurs to himself. “We killed Wulfgar for nothing. We came all this way. Darrow…”
I don’t know what to say.
“Where is Atalantia now?” Apollonius asks.
“Far from here,” the Ash Lord says. “The peace talks were her idea. She expected you to dissolve the Senate. Take the reins. But you left. You should have gone to your fleet, Darrow.”
There were too few ships in orbit. I assumed most were on the far side of the planet. But now I know what he means. “Impossible,” I say. “They would have been detected.”
He smiles. “Ten years ago, you came upon Luna from the fog of war. She will fall upon your fleet over Mercury. It is at half strength because of your…tantrum in your Senate. It will burn. And your fabled army on the surface will burn.”
Something inside me knows that he is right, because it would be too fine a world for this to end with him, today. If Atalantia has led his forces, if they are en route to destroy the Republic forces, then the war is not ending. It is beginning again. Around and around it goes. I do not know if the Republic can last another blow. It is my fault. I never should have launched the Iron Rain; but for hubris, for so many reasons, I let the Rain fall, and it has not stopped since. I shattered my family, killed Wulfgar, came here all for nothing.
The Ash Lord watches me realize this with little satisfaction. There is no joy in his final moments. No cruel relish. Just a great exhaustion.
“Orion and Virginia have to know that Atalantia is coming,” I say, numbly. “We have to go.”
“Do you think I would tell you this if you could hope to influence it?”
“Darrow, we have to let them know…” Sevro says.
“You came all the way here,” the Ash Lord continues. “Across the great ink, thinking you could kill me and return home to your family. But now there is nothing to return to. No Republic. No family…”
“No family…” I echo.
Sevro takes a step forward. “Say that again?”
“You left your children behind. Didn’t you?”
Sevro lurches forward and grabs him by the neck. “What the hell are you talking about?”
The Ash Lord smiles at him, their faces inches apart. “You are like me, in the end. I spent my children for my war. And now, so have you.”
Sevro’s grip goes slack.
“Your daughter.” He looks at me. “And your son. They have been taken.”
No.
My fingers curl around the wood post of this rotted man’s bed and I feel the shifting of something inside me. The whisper of formless dread that attends when I wake from a horrible nightmare and for a moment forget my human delusions and see the world for as cold a place as it really is. Dark, hollow wind channels through my heart and I know I have lost. I left my boy behind.
“You’re lying,” Sevro whispers.
We’re each in our little worlds of dread, each sinking into the darkness, each unable to grasp, to believe that he is telling the truth. This is the spite of a dying man. That is all it can be. That is all I can accept.
“You’re lying,” Sevro says again. His face is milk pale.
But he’s not. There is too much satisfaction in him.
“Was it you?” I whisper.
“If only. It was one of yours.”
“Who?”
The Ash Lord watches me and then turns his large head to look away from me out to the bright sea, where his spirit has already fled. “Lorn was right,” he says in a rough whisper. “The bill comes at the end.”
“Who took my son?” I shout. “Who?”
With an animal scream, Sevro launches himself past me and slams his fist into the Ash Lord’s face. Again and again till blood coats Sevro’s hands to his wrists and the Ash Lord’s lips are mangled. I pull at Sevro. He hits me right in the jaw. I hold on, sagging against him as he hyperventilates. He shoves me off, wheeling back to the Ash Lord with his razor drawn.
“We need him alive,” I shout. “We need to know more.”
There’s a soft pop and I look back to the Ash Lord to see foam bubbling from his mouth. He spits a false tooth onto the sheets. Apollonius picks it up and brings it to his nose. “Poison.”
“Who stole my child?” I say, gripping him. “Tell me.”
He smiles, baring his rotting gums.
“He won’t talk,” Apollonius says.
Sevro grunts. “Doesn’t mean he gets to go easy.”
“I agree with the halfbreed,” Apollonius says. He grabs something from atop one of the medical machines. A bottle of antibacterial spray the nurses must have used on the equipment. He takes one of the candles from beside the bed.
“No…” The Ash Lord’s eyes are wide with fear, his words slurred from the poison.
“Apollonius…” I move toward him. Sevro shoves me back.
“Burn the bastard,” he sneers.
But Apollonius looks to me. “Reaper?”
The sorrow in me is fathomless.
I killed Wulfgar.
I broke my family.
I lost my son.
For this rotted slaver.
“Burn him.”
“No!” The Ash Lord tries to rise from his bed. “Stop!”
“Ashes to ashes…” Apollonius turns the canister so it points at the Ash Lord. “Dust to dust.” He depresses the canister’s release button. Antibacterial residue hisses out onto the Ash Lord, coating him in chemical sheen. Then Apollonius tosses the candle onto the bed. Blue fire explodes as the candle flame catches the alcohol.
The Ash Lord screams. Fire races over the dry husk of his skin. He flails against the inferno like a thrashing mantis, his skin contracting and boiling and swelling and blackening as the air of the room fills with acrid smoke. The plastic tubes connected to his gut and arms snap taut and jerk the medical machines toward the bed.
Apollonius stands back from the horror in delighted satisfaction. The inferno dances in his eyes, and casts maniacal shadows over his high cheekbones. Beside Sevro, I feel no satisfaction, only a gaping loneliness. All the friends and family tattered and torn by my war, my choices.
Anguish saws at me inside with crueler teeth than these flames.
And as the Ash Lord breathes his last, I turn from the murder, as lost as I was when I walked the scaffold seventeen years ago and felt the rope around my neck. All I wanted to be then was a father. And now my son is lost.