CHAPTER 55
Sirus
He returned to his body to find his left hand clamped between the jaws of a juvenile White. He barely felt it, having lost so much blood that sensation was now just a distant thing. His hand gave an involuntary twitch as the juvenile bit down, causing it to open its jaws and hop back with an annoyed hiss. An answering squawk from the right caused Sirus to turn his head, finding the other juvenile regarding him with its head cocked, yellow eyes blinking in apparent curiosity.
“Wondering why I’m still here,” he said in a guttural whisper. “So am I.”
The juvenile on the right seemed to take this as some sort of challenge, flaring its wings and lowering itself to pounce, mouth opening wide. There was a sharp percussive crack and the juvenile was instantly transformed into two separate pieces. The upper half spun away from the lower, turning end over end in a bloody cart-wheel. It landed a few feet away from its twitching lower half, jaws snapping in a reflex.
The juvenile on Sirus’s left leapt, wings blurring and flame jetting from its mouth, only to be swiftly blasted out of view. Sirus was curiously unsurprised by the face that looked down on him once his rescuer came into view, a face tense with hate and intent on murder.
“I . . .” Sirus began, finding the words choked by blood. He coughed, trying to clear it but Tekela didn’t seem interested in any statement he might make.
“Shut up,” she said, shouldering the carbine she carried and reaching down to pull a bone-handle knife from a sheath on her calf.
“I have . . .” he tried again, blood gouting from his mouth.
“Shut up, Sirus!” She stepped closer and crouched, putting the knife blade to his neck. He saw that she was crying and was pained to have grieved her so.
“I have something to do,” he said, throat finally clear of blood although he could feel more rushing in. He met her damp eyes, hoping she saw some vestige of who he had once been in the monstrous visage she beheld. He managed to raise his right hand, fingers open and palm extended. “Please . . . it’s very important.”
Tekela let out a sob as her gaze tracked from his face to the blood welling from the hole in his chest. “You killed Jermayah,” she said, taking a hard ragged breath. “You killed all those people.”
“Yes,” he replied, his words punctuated by sharp, rasping breaths, each one he knew bringing him closer to death. “And . . . I have done . . . far worse. Soon . . . I’ll die . . . for what I’ve done. You can kill . . . me, if you wish. But first . . . there is something . . . I have to do. For you . . . for everyone.”
Tekela closed her eyes tight, another sob escaping her as she withdrew the blade from his neck. “What?” she said, head sagging and voice laden with defeat. “What is it you have to do, Sirus?”
“Remember . . .” He extended his hand to her again. “Will you . . . help me?”
She stared at his hand, baffled and appalled in equal measure. “How?”
“I need . . . to remember . . . what it was . . . to be free.”
His vision grew suddenly darker, Tekela’s face becoming a vague shadow, as if veiled by a curtain of black lace. He felt her take his hand, the first time she had ever done so. It was smooth against his callused, scaled palm, small but also strong, hardly the hand of a girl. He forced himself to focus on her face, piercing the veil that covered it just for an instant, but it was enough. Once he had thought her a doll, something so beautiful as to be not quite real. Now she had a small bloody scar on her chin and another tracing across her brow into her tousled and unkempt hair. Her eyes were red with tears and dark with fatigue, lips pale and drawn back from her teeth in anguish. She was so very real and he knew she had never been a doll at all. He looked upon a face that possessed only an echo of the girl she had been, a face transforming into the woman she would be.
Sirus closed his eyes, drawing his mind back into himself. The bright shining crystal was waiting, a gift from the Contractor Catheline had imprisoned in her mind. It shone brighter as his purpose found a connection with the memories it held, blossoming out, filling him with its gift. The memory it revealed was strange, but filled with enough visual clues for his archaeologist’s mind to divine that he was seeing a moment from the past, a moment which contained a vital piece of information. He watched the memory play out, and summoned Tekela’s face once more, let it lead him to the moment he had first seen her. It had been some tedious ball his father forced him to attend, trussed into a suit that didn’t really fit him, scratching his collar as he concealed himself in the quietest corner of the room.
When he saw her it was like everything else went away, fading into a mist with her at the centre, so bright, so utterly captivating. She moved with a peerless grace across the ball-room, gliding into a curtsy as Burgrave Artonin presented her to the Governor General. Her smile was a thing of wonder and her necklace glittered in the glow of the chandelier as she gave a delighted laugh at the governor’s witticism.
But it hadn’t been like that. Her smile had in fact been nervous and forced, often veering into a scowl as she scanned the other ladies present with badly concealed disdain. When she danced it was a clumsy, inelegant spectacle that drew titters from the other guests. Also her necklace, Sirus saw now, hadn’t glittered very much at all. The jewels were glass set into a brass chain. Sirus discovered later that her father had sold much of her mother’s jewellery to fund his expeditions to the Interior.
He had thought that the many humiliations he endured over the following months had been inevitable, that his helpless pursuit of her had been beyond his control given how completely she had captured his heart that night. He was her slave, after all. Except he wasn’t. He was a foolish youth who had convinced himself he was in love with a beautiful but, on occasion, deeply unpleasant girl. He had made a choice, because a free mind can do such things and in time he had learned what it was to have no freedom at all, not in mind or body.
Until now Sirus had been shutting out the other Spoiled, the babble of their minds in the midst of battle a low, ugly murmur at the edge of his consciousness. Now he let them in, all of them, and shared the gift of long-dead drakes.
At first it was like pouring cold water on white-hot coals. Thousands of Spoiled minds snatched from the fury and chaos of battle roiled in confusion as the gift spread through the multitude. Some slipped instantly into madness, their minds breaking at the sudden intrusion of a sensation they had never suspected might return. Others fought it, raging against the separation from the all-powerful consciousness of their White god. But most welcomed it, joy filling them as the invisible shackles fell away. As the gift leapt from mind to mind like a fire let loose in a dry forest, Sirus felt more and more souls blink out of existence.
They’re dying, he realised, pausing to look through the eyes of a Spoiled, seeing those around him standing still, faces drawn in wonder or shock as bullets and cannon flayed them from above. I’m killing them. The thought was accompanied by panic that came from an awareness of how little time he had left.
Sirus flitted from mind to mind, searching the now-silent and immobile army for a soul that might save them, finding it close to the Redoubt gates. He found Forest Spear lying only seconds from death as his life seeped out from the many bullet-holes in his chest, his mind filled with memories of his days hunting through the jungle with his brother warriors. Sirus touched minds with him, feeling a pulse of gratitude before the darkness fell. He moved on, finding Veilmist under a mound of dead and dying Spoiled. There were hundreds of them, all seemingly cut down in an instant, by what means Sirus couldn’t know. Veilmist had survived the calamity but the weight of so many corpses would soon crush the air from her lungs.
Help her! Sirus commanded. The Spoiled were slow to respond, some stumbling in confusion, others taking advantage of their new-found liberty to rejoice in the novelty of refusal. Please, he added. You know me. I want you to live. All of you.
He felt a pulse of recognition run through them, shot through with a sense of trust and empathy. He had been a slave like them, and now they felt his desperate desire to preserve their lives. Several hundred Spoiled surged towards the gates, braving the continuing fire from the walls above to drag Veilmist from beneath the mound of corpses.
Get them away from the walls, Sirus told her. He found the Islander’s mind warm with welcome and a seemingly endless well of gratitude.
Where are you? she asked. We will come to you.
It doesn’t matter. Just . . . Sirus felt a growing chill creep over the fringes of his awareness, the combined vision of so many eyes rapidly eroding, shrinking to just a few images, one of which brought a fierce urgent need to cling on to life.
The White!
He could see it, mighty wings spread wide as it came to earth on the plain, the slim figure of Catheline slipping from its back. Lying near by was the body of a large Black drake.
It’s there! he told them, putting every ounce of will and strength he could in the thought, the last command he would ever give to this army. Kill it!
The Spoiled left him then, the tumult of rage and blood-lust fading away. He blinked and found himself looking up into Tekela’s eyes once more. He raised a hand, pressing it to her cheek and took joy in the affection he saw in her face, a face he found himself content to take with him into the dark.