Child of Sorrows Read online

  Barnas glanced behind himself. No convicts appeared to have noticed this strange event, no one was making another ill-advised attempt to break out.

  As if there's anywhere to run to. Surrounded by leagues of nothing but ash and glass.

  He turned back to the trio. The old man hadn't answered Ikaia. The big man pursed his lips and his normally walnut complexion tinted crimson. "Answer me, old man. Where did you get that outfit? Because if you're an Imperial general, I'm the First of Gods."

  The old man nodded gravely, as though Ikaiah had just said something deep and important. Then he leaned toward one of his companions.

  The girl beside him was just as strange as he was. She looked to be about twelve, dressed in the thick fur coat of the northern lands of Strength – ridiculous-looking anywhere but those lands, but especially so in the sweltering heat of Fear. She held something in her hands, a small puff of fur that Barnas didn't even realize was alive until he saw it move.

  "What in the name of the Gods is – is she holding a woolly?" said Ikaia.

  "I think so," said Barnas. "Ikaia, what's going on?"

  "I don't know, but I'm starting to get a bad feeling."

  Barnas nodded. Something cold had started to coil around his guts, to slip up his spine.

  Apparently the bowmen felt the same. "DO. NOT. MOVE."

  The old man ignored the command. He leaned to the other side, to the third member of the party. It was a young man, perhaps barely into his twenties, but so big he could have picked up Ikaia by the scruff of the neck, shaken him like a puppy, and tossed him away. Barnas suspected the only reason he hadn't been shot on first sight was his expression: it was one of vacuous joy. From his complexion and his size, Barnas guessed this man, like Ikaia, had been born in Fear. From the look on his face, Barnas guessed the big man had been born – as so many in this land were – with a disease of the brain that kept him locked in the mind of a child.

  The old man finished whispering to the big man, who laughed like a toddler and clapped.

  "This is your last warning!" shouted the bowmen from the tower.

  The old man ignored him. He stared straight at Barnas. "You look young, boy. How long have you been in the Army?"

  Barnas gulped. He looked at Ikaia, who shook his head and shrugged, clearly just as unsure as he was about how to go about responding to the question.

  "Uh… three months, sir."

  "I thought as much. You haven't grown enough to be part of the problem yet." The old man waved. "You may leave."

  Barnas cocked his head. "What? What – I mean… what?" The old man might as well have been speaking the language of the Old Ones for all the sense he was making.

  The old man's eyes narrowed – or at least, the wrinkles around where his eyes should be deepened slightly, which Barnas assumed meant his eyes were narrowing. "Are you slow, boy? Get out of here!"

  "Where do I – why should I leave?"

  "So we don't kill you."

  Ikaia, for once, didn't laugh. He appeared just as stunned by the statement as Barnas was.

  Laughter came from the guard tower, though. Gruff laughter that made it clear all five men in that hot box of stone and iron thought this an amusing – and probably welcome – break in their usually dull routine of killing convicts.

  The old man ignored them. Nor did he seem to notice the other wall guards who were beginning to converge on this section as, one by one, they noticed something new.

  New was rarely good in this place.

  "Well?" he said. "Are you going to leave?"

  Leave, said a voice in Barnas' head. You hate it here. You've always hated it here, so run! Get away!

  Run!

  But a saner part answered: And where would you go? And how long before the guards butchered these three, hunted you down, and then butchered you, too, as a deserter?

  He shook his head. "I am a solder in the Imperial Army. I am a servant to the Empire. I will not leave."

  Ikaia put a proud hand on his shoulder. "Well sai –"

  The big man's voice cut out. Barnas frowned – it wasn't like his friend to stop talking for any reason, let alone in the middle of a sentence. He saw his friend's hand, fingers still clenched tightly on his shoulder.

  But the hand was attached to an arm that ended at the elbow.

  And the rest of Ikaia was just… gone. There was only a thin cloud of blood to mark the place where his friend had been only a moment before.

  Someone screamed – Barnas thought it might have been him – and then he heard the distinctive thwap of bowstrings being released, the shhhhk of arrows passing overhead.

  He looked at the threesome, and no longer cared how harmless they looked, because clearly they were not harmless, clearly they were dangerous, they had just killed his friend and the only thing he could say about them was that he wanted them to die.

  Time seemed to both speed up and slow down. It reminded Barnas of his first day on the wall, the first time a lunatic had run at him, spittle flying, teeth gnashing. The fear. The certainty he was going to die. The relief when he didn't.

  Because Ikaia saved me.

  He turned. Followed the arrows' flight.

  Saw.

  The first arrow sped to the girl. She didn't shrink from it. Didn't flee. Instead, she threw the woolly at it. The thing, a foot-long ball of fur, the kind of thing mothers gave to infants to sleep with and keep them company at night, flee into the air…

  … and grew.

  In the space of the few feet between the girl's hands and when it met the arrow, the woolly went from a foot long to something that towered over the girl: probably ten feet tall, and broad in proportion. Its four legs became many-knuckled things that gave it a strangely arachnid appearance, and its snout split to accommodate a suddenly too-wide mouth.

  The arrow sped toward it, and it didn't move away. It simply swallowed the arrow mid-flight, and seemed no worse the wear for it.

  The monster was connected to little girl's wrist by some kind of leash that ran from her wrist to its neck. The leash pulsed with a sickly yellow light, something unhealthy and unwholesome, and as he watched the girl seemed to… fade. She drooped, like wax from a candle that has burned too long. Then she fell forward, and seemed to merge with the leash and through it with the thing that had once been a woolly.

  The monster grew still more as it merged with the girl. Its teeth grew even longer and sharper, and it bellowed a terrible shriek that seemed to shake the ash from the air. Then it leaped the fifty feet between it and the guard tower. It snapped another arrow out of the air mid-leap, then slammed into the side of the tower, driving huge talons deep into the stone and climbing up the side.

  The next of the arrows hit the simpleton. This one found its mark, as did the next one. The first hit the big man in the shoulder, the next one took him in the neck. He shivered, but was strong: he didn't fall. Instead, he stood there and writhed, his features a study in agony.

  If it weren't for the fact that he had just seen his friend utterly destroyed, Barnas would have felt bad for him.

  A final arrow made its slow-fast way toward the old man. Barnas felt a smile split his face, for surely the old man was the person behind the evil that had come to the wall this day.

  The old man waited…

  … waited…

  … the simpleton kept twitching, shivering, shaking, kept not falling…

  … the huge monster that had once been a gentle pet made its way up the tower, tore one of the narrow arrow slits wide open, and shoved its head inside to a choir of screams….

  … and the old man waited…

  … waited…

  … and then dodged.

  Barnas blinked, unsure what he had just seen.

  Could the old man be a Greater Gift? Could he be one of those types who jumped from place to place or who made himself as smoke?

  No. The old man had moved. And not just him, but the chair he was on. It had all shifted.

  "Ho
w…?"

  The screams above Barnas worsened. Then grew silent. The guards that had come from other parts of the wall screamed battle cries. Some drew short bows or crossbows. The woolly/girl/thing dropped among them.

  The simpleton stopped shaking. And his eyes were suddenly gone.

  Barnas coughed. Not a cough of illness or the cough he made a thousand times a day as he tried to get the ash out of his lungs. This was a sound of pure, perfect panic. It felt like part of his soul shriveling inside him. The choked sound he had just made was all he could muster in the face of what he saw.

  The big man's empty-seeming eyes had disappeared. But not as though he had been tortured, not like they had been burned away with hot spikes or cut away with knives. They seemed instead to have receded into a dark nothing. As though a part of the night sky had found its way to the man's skull and cast a dark spell that extinguished any light around it.

  And, along with the man's eyes, any sense of a feeble mind seemed to have disappeared. He ran at the wall.

  Except for places – like here – where the wall had fallen into disrepair, the insides of the wall were smooth, hard to scale.

  But the outsides were another matter. It was only the work of a moment for the man to climb the wall. To flip himself over the edge. To land in the midst of half a dozen wall guards.

  And to kill them all.

  He moved so fast he was a blur, a streak followed by swaths of crimson as he spilled the blood of the six guards. They didn't even get to attempt a defense, let alone a counter-attack. They simply fell.

  The man didn't use a weapon. Just his hands. His feet. His nails.

  His teeth.

  The berserker turned toward Barnas – just an instant. He saw the other man's shirt had ripped in the climb up the wall. Saw that in his chest, something glowed with that same yellow light as the leash that had merged the girl and the woolly. It looked like a gem, bigger than Barnas' fist, somehow embedded in the other man's very flesh, and carved in the symbol of a Bishop of Faith:

  Then the man spun away. Returned to his killing.

  Barnas saw it all. Saw the berserker turn to the next group of guards. Saw the creature that should have been a pet begin to murder more of his friends. But mostly he saw the old man. The man who shouldn't have been able to navigate the rough terrain of Fear at all, let alone dodge an arrow.

  The old man in a chair.

  But, Barnas now saw, that was wrong. Wrong, and when he saw why it was wrong, he understood all.

  The old man wasn't in a chair.

  Not just a chair.

  The contraption's wheels spun, and Barnas heard gears clicking and clacking. The chair shifted, and suddenly the old man was no longer sitting, but standing, his legs locked into position by the frame of the chair. The metal frame telescoped upward, locking into place along the old man's spine and arms, then splitting into extensions that enclosed his hand in heavy, thick gauntlets.

  The old man's knees bent. He jumped, dodging the arrow that had been fired at him and flying high into the air in one motion.

  A moment later he landed in front of Barnas.

  Barnas fell back, as much from the tremors the old man's landing had caused as from the shock and terror of what was happening.

  To either side of him, the screams were petering out as the guards on this section of the wall were destroyed by two monsters – the once-gentle human, and the once-pet of a child.

  He heard rustling behind him. Knew without looking that the convicts in this part of the city had finally noticed what was happening. That they were going to attempt an escape. And this time, they might actually succeed.

  "You can't do this. If we're not here to stop them, they'll get out."

  The old man nodded. The strange machine around him kept shifting, binding him up in armor unlike any Barnas had ever seen. He pointed a gauntleted fist, and now Barnas understood what had happened to Ikaia: there was a click, and a slim tube appeared on the old man's metal-clad arm. Another click, and what looked like a line of light – too bright to look upon directly – streaked out of the tube. It hit a part of the wall.

  A huge section of the wall simply disappeared, the same way Ikaia had. A perfect circle of mortar and stone turned to nothing but dust that joined with the ash in the air for a moment before settling quietly to the ground below.

  The convicts roared. They streamed toward the hole.

  "Don't! You can't! They're mad! They'll kill anyone they find!"

  The old man nodded again. The suit almost finished its change, becoming a complete suit of armor that covered him from neck to toe. And as Barnas watched, it began extending over his head as well, creating a helmet.

  The helmet bore that same symbol of Faith, etched in glowing yellow figures on his helm, just above the small slit that allowed Barnas to see the old man's calm, frightening eyes.

  "They'll kill everyone," Barnas whispered again. It was all he could think to do.

  "They may well kill many," the old man agreed. "And that would be regrettable." He pointed his arm, and another line of light shot out and destroyed more of the wall. Barnas' eyes darted about, though he wasn't really sure what he was looking for. An escape route? A way to stop the madness he was witnessing?

  He saw the woolly/girl/monster, ambling almost idly down the wall on one side. It was killing guards, stopping occasionally to climb up a guard tower and destroy everyone inside.

  On the other side of the wall it was much the same, except the fiend had only two legs, and two fewer eyes.

  "You can't escape this," said the old man

  Barnas spat at the old man's face. It wasn't a calculated move; even as he did it, he was so afraid he felt like he might start crying. It didn't even accomplish anything: he just spat on the helmet, not managing to get anything on the thin slice of skin that was still open to view.

  But the old man bowed slightly as he wiped the spittle from his helmet. "You have honor," he said. "It is too bad that you serve such a dishonorable master, and for such a dishonorable cause." He pointed that strange, terrible, terrifying tube at Barnas.

  A strip of something that looked like glass, only opaque, impossible to see through, slammed down over the old man's eyes, and now Barnas stared at something more machine than man. It whirred and clicked with the sound of hidden gears, hissed with a sound like steam escaping a kettle.

  "Too bad, indeed," the old man said again. With his visor shut, his voice came out strange. It no longer sounded human, but was instead deeper and grating. It sounded like gears turning, like pistons driving, like a thousand other things and none of them human in the least.

  "Don't do this, " whispered Barnas.

  The machine made a sound that Barnas didn't understand for a moment, then realized was a sound of disgust filtered by whatever evil magic drove the contraption. "Now you beg."

  "Not for myself. For these people. For the prisoners. For the people inside these walls and for the people beyond. For Fear." He swallowed, then whispered, "It will tear itself apart."

  Silence, then the machine-man whispered, "Yes."

  There was a click. The tube on the thing's arm glowed yellow.

  And that yellow was the last thing Barnas saw.

  2

  The officer yanked the girl out of her bed. Her father was dead, and her mother no match for the big man's skill and the palpable air of danger he carried with him. He pointed the sword he held, and the tip quivered. Not with fear, but with rage and with uglier things, things he clearly intended to visit on the girl he had pulled from the darkness of her bed into the greater darkness of his grasp.

  The mother cowered, whispering, "You can't. The Emperor rescinded the law. You can't take our children, can't do what you wish to them anymore."

  The officer's only answer was a growl. Again, the growl bespoke rage, need. The need to become what he had been, to re-conquer the conquered.

  "To the Netherworlds with the Emperor," he snarled. Then turned, hauling th
e girl toward the front door.

  The mother screamed. Heedless of the danger, she ran at the man, her hands outstretched, fingers curved into hooks – though it could not be told whether those hooks were meant to rend the man who was trying to steal her daughter, or simply to steal her back.

  The man almost smiled. His uniform was dirty, hardly the parade-ground look that most of the officers around the capital preferred to sport. He had the look of a man grown desperate – not for food, but for the deeper sustenance that some men crave: the knowledge that they may take what they will, and do what they wish.

  The man's smile disappeared as soon as the woman came close enough. Then his sword flashed out, cleaving the air itself in a slash that would end with the woman's head bouncing off the rough dirt floor.

  Something flared. A brightness, a flame brighter than any torch.

  Sword's katana – light embodied, fire contained within her magic – sliced through the officer's blade, turning a weapon into nothing more than a hilt with an inch of metal sticking out of it.

  Even that metal was useless, bouncing off the floor as it was – released from a grasp that was no longer there.

  The officer stared at the stump of his wrist, the hand that had held the sword now curled in a dark corner of the small house. Holding nothing, and never to hold anything again.

  Sword stared at the man as he stared at the cauterized stump, then continued staring as he began to scream. She nodded at the woman, who rushed forward on hands and knees, grabbed her daughter, and then shrank away from the terrible man who had threatened them and the even more terrible young woman who had saved them.

  Sword waited for the man's screams to slow, then when they didn't she placed the tip of her fiery blade close enough to his face that the skin of his cheek began to sizzle.

  "Quiet," she said through gritted teeth. "Quiet or by the Gods I'll cut you away piece by piece, starting with your tongue."

  Something of that must have penetrated, because the man's screams became whistling, panicked whimpers. "What," he managed, tears rolling down his cheeks, "what are you going to –?"