R Z Held - [BCS299 S02] Read online

  Her thoughts paralleled those of the Game, it seemed—much as the idea of such a thing made her sick—and the Game set the point of one blade against the shield and pushed. Slow and steady, as if it would slip in like a table knife into jelly. The red light whined and spattered no less violently around the attempted penetration. The aching hum only deepened when the Game attempted a sawing motion. Dianthus held her fingers before her, arm unshaking.

  Another shift back. The Game considered Dianthus. “Grandmother,” it begged, tears starting in its eyes as the Game bent Althea’s body into a tight semblance of fear. “Please, help me.”

  “Defense is boring. Love, the Game,” Naomi murmured to herself. A nervous giggle twisted free around the last words. How could Dianthus bear it?

  “You’re already dead, love.” Perhaps the words were a reminder for herself, as Dianthus finally moved. Out came the small knife once more, to draw a deeper line on her opposite arm. With her off hand, she gathered fingertips of blood; with the other, she reached to the small of her back, clearly to a weapon of her own.

  Such a strange weapon it was, when she drew it, not a blade of any kind. Like the pre-magic artifact, a gun. One of the most ancient ghosts held one as his symbol, a black, angular, hand-filling shape that purportedly threw tiny explosions like a mage who never tired. She’d coaxed him into showing it to her once. In contrast, this gun was patinaed metal and wood, levers and channels illuminating rather than hiding its workings.

  Dianthus slashed her off-hand down, opening two parallel paths in the shield. A gap, Naomi realized. A gap needed to be opened, for the shield would hold in what the gun threw as much as it held out what the Game did. The Game slashed one dagger squarely through the gap toward Dianthus’s neck, as fast as the opening could be perceived. Dianthus stumbled back to avoid the cut, wrong-footed for the first time. Her shield sealed beneath the second dagger, leaving her protected but contained.

  Stalemate.

  “Grandmother. How can you—?” Althea’s voice, wielded by the Game, broke across the words. Dianthus’s next breath came as a sob, the first crack in her calm, but Naomi couldn’t imagine it the last.

  Imagine, record, guide, lead, nudge—what could Naomi actually do? Frustration boiled up in her, filling her with a visceral impulse to violence, as if she could attack the Game with her fists, scream at it. Another loss, another death. Death after death, century after century.

  But Dianthus wasn’t yet dead. Naomi still had time. Didn’t she know the rules upside down and backwards? Nothing said the friend could not help, if only she could determine how—

  The idea hit her with a violence of its own. The Game had given Althea a physical presence, then borrowed it because the Game had none of its own; Naomi had no physical presence either.

  Could Naomi possess Althea, wrest control of her from the Game? It was not against the rules, but there were no rules against sheer impossibilities; there was no rule against casting herself back in time, to whisper a warning in the ear of her younger self. That had not happened for all her wishing. She had never seen any ghost accomplish a possession either, but so few had had the opportunity to try. After the choice and until death was certain for a player, only the friend and foe could do more than observe from beyond the trees.

  Well, Naomi was friend, and she would try.

  Naomi threw herself at Althea. Perhaps, had the Game not already been there, it would have been simple. But instead she found only the feeling of glancing off, some intricate angle of alignment incorrect. She had no time to consider new methods, so she threw herself at Althea again and again, at Althea, at, until at became into and she was there.

  She couldn’t quite—she couldn’t find what she should hold, or how she should be, to move a body after so long without one of her own. But the Game’s next slash, one of a steady stream to keep the shield up, slowed. Naomi wrestled against the sensation of movement. She couldn’t drop the blades, but she could pull, pull with everything in her mind against Althea’s arms rising from her sides.

  And what was the sensation of the struggle for Althea? When they’d spoken as ghosts, Althea had seemed strong in her sense of self, likely able to hold together against the violation inherent in the Game’s control of her—though that would change with time, if Naomi was any guide—but how much worse must this internal battle be, as she was buffeted between two violations?

  Then again, Althea couldn’t wish to kill her grandmother, so Naomi was aiding her, fighting on her side. Naomi saw no choice but to hold fast to that thought with everything she had as she grappled with the Game, movement against non-movement.

  Naomi couldn’t speak, couldn’t conceive of achieving something so complex, but Dianthus must have seen the opportunity even if she didn’t understand the mechanism behind it. She snapped her free hand down, the gap appeared, and the gun came up. From within Althea’s physical presence, Naomi felt the way the Game widened her eyes, looking straight at Dianthus.

  The gun was so loud, Naomi hadn’t imagined that. As though in being made tiny, the explosion spell it mimicked had only grown more concentrated until it was a physical blow to the ears as well. The Game flinched to the side, then straightened, and Naomi felt it smile slowly with Althea’s lips. Nowhere could Naomi find pain once the sound ebbed.

  Dianthus had missed.

  Who could blame her, looking on the face of her terrified grandchild? And she did fire again, both hands to the gun now, aimed straight. Pain smashed into the two of them, Naomi and the Game, in their struggle. Naomi reeled away, right out of Althea’s physical presence with the shock of it. Her shoulder. One of Althea’s arms dangled useless now, blade thudding to the grass.

  But the Game had a second blade, a gap remained low in the shield, and Naomi opposed the movement no longer. The Game stabbed, through the gap, and the dagger sank deep into Dianthus’s gut. She choked, a wet sound, and the shield disappeared, allowing the Game to angle the blade, drag it toward one hip before ripping it free. That the wound would eventually be fatal was clear enough, but the Game eased back only fractionally, considering. Perhaps it was weighing the stretching anguish of a slow bleeding out against a quick flash of terror in seeing a final blow fall. Dianthus would certainly never give it the delectable despair of suicide.

  “Naomi, I need time—” Dianthus coughed, spattering her lips with blood. Her hands were pressed instead to her wound, as if she could gather up the blood and hold it close. Could she possibly be so powerful a blood mage that she could heal such a wound?

  Naomi pushed into Althea at once, but the Game was ready for her this time, its opposition of her every movement making her effort feel like an attempt to shift a mountain by pushing with her hands. And the more she struggled, the more she imagined what she’d feel in Althea’s place as the object of such a clash, and the empathy twisted her up.

  And wasn’t that an iterative feast of anguish fit for the Game to gorge itself on, perhaps distracting it from a final blow? The pain she might be causing Althea, the pain the guilt caused her, the second guilt that the first guilt engendered, because she rated her emotions anywhere near as important as Althea’s, and...

  The Game tipped Althea’s head up, eyes closed. Savoring? Naomi was dead; she could not seek death, but what was that seeking but a longing for an end to all other suffering emotion? That, she had.

  A breath, standing that way, and the Game stepped definitively back, leaving Naomi to fall, as her separate ghost presence alone, to her knees beside where Dianthus had crumpled. Naomi had indeed granted time, but it seemed that time alone had not been enough, because Dianthus was still dying. The Game had signaled the end, and the translucent streaks of color marking other ghosts seeped back into the grove. They held well back, for now, out of politeness or disinterest.

  Naomi gentled her voice to the tone she used with all those she offered company to as they faded into ghosts. “You’ll be able to speak to your granddaughter soon. It’s not so bad...”


  Dianthus’s hacking laugh brought up a gobbet of blood that oozed downward from where it landed at the corner of her mouth. “Now you’re lying. Is that allowed?”

  “Ghosts may speak to ghosts as they like.” And only a little more seeping blood separated Dianthus from being one of those herself.

  A deep breath, careful but smooth. “Listen, girl. My teacher, and her teacher before her, they always said there comes a time when dying is easy. Then living is what’s hard. Having to hold fast to the pain when you know you can let go.”

  It wasn’t blood Dianthus was attempting to hold back at her wound, Naomi realized. It was magic, and she was succeeding in holding it. The blood flowed out, mundane, and the magic gathered in her hands. One last spell, with the power of a life behind it. Dianthus had needed only a little time to craft it properly.

  Naomi twisted to look at Althea’s young face, rendered impassive by the Game. She finally saw the shape of Dianthus’s long view, and true awe gripped her. Many were the legends that turned on blood mages’ final spells, a death to resurrect a life, but those were legends. Myths. Naomi had spoken to real blood mages, knew the truth: rare indeed was the blood mage powerful enough to have not only the strength for a resurrection spell, but strength to spare to remain lucid to cast it.

  Had Dianthus always intended this sacrifice, from the moment she arrived, or had she crafted the solution as she stood calmly speaking to Naomi? Naomi could hardly conceive of the will needed to accomplish either. “Your granddaughter is strong as well. I’m sure she won’t give in.”

  “Oh, Naomi.” Dianthus hacked one last laugh. “I love her more than life, but no, she isn’t. Not the kind of strength needed here. Besides, she didn’t gain her prize.” She reached up, pressed blood-smeared hands into Naomi’s throat, thumbs crossed over each other. “I charge you with my lifeblood, Naomi. Find a mage, tell them every truth you’ve ever learned, and bring them back to win, defeat the Game for good, and lay us all to rest.”

  And the magic wrenched Naomi away from every one of the perceptions she had left as a ghost.

  Survive your foe, gain your prize, leave this place, that is how you win; fail in these, and you belong to the Game.

  Living wasn’t pain, it was drowning. Drowning in the physicality of emotion. As a ghost, Naomi had had emotions, of course. But now they were in her body, shaking and clenching and aching. She couldn’t quite remember how to run—she could barely remember how to breathe!—but she stumbled for a gap that had appeared between two trees. Now the long hall of them was a ring. Half a dozen steps and she was beyond it, free of the Game’s territory. Younger, smaller trees showed through fog at comparative random, and Naomi stumbled on, unable to choose a better direction than away. Away from the Game.

  Maybe the difficulty breathing was only because of the emotions. Naomi found she was sobbing, without having noticed when she started. Too much. Too much to handle, and she wanted to fall to her knees until her chest stopped sawing, and she didn’t dare, and she hated herself for being so weak. She was failing Dianthus and she was failing herself, and maybe anger at herself would give her back some kind of self-control. But no, anger and self-hatred mixed with her fear that failure was all she would ever manage, and she was left only with despair. She was worthless. Why had Dianthus trusted her?

  This was the pain Dianthus had meant; she understood that now. How could she make the sensations stop? What if they never stopped? What if her death had forever taken away her ability to cope with any of this? What if she hurt forever?

  She didn’t want to hurt forever. She’d do whatever she had to, to make the pain end. It would be easy. She could just stop moving and let go. Lie down and release her grip on the life Dianthus had given her.

  She wished, fiercely, with every part of her being—now that it had such an alien weight—for a release from the pain, for an ending.

  That thought was an echo, she realized. Her thought, but not quite hers any more. That was how the Game had warped her. It had taken its own ornate turns of phrase and made them her thoughts.

  Making the pain end, that was dying, and then the Game would still have won. How could she give the Game that satisfaction?

  But she was so weak and worthless, how could she do otherwise?

  She glimpsed two figures, through the mist. Yes! She could tell them how to defeat the Game, and then she could die. Naomi forced herself the last few steps and slammed to her knees in front of the two people. A man and a woman, both with skin the same shade of brown as Dianthus’s and Althea’s. “Listen! This is important! To win the Game, pick a small goal and a foe whose weaknesses are your strengths. Ignore the friend.”

  The man pulled a small knife from his pocket, flicked it open and ready as he growled something angry.

  Angry, and incomprehensible. She’d understood Dianthus—but ghosts were beyond language. Naomi had been dead a long time, and the language she’d known must have drifted.

  She was going to fail in this too. She slumped to hands and knees, curled up over the despair that was growing too large to fit in her body.

  The worst part was that every few words, Naomi could almost understand the man and woman as they argued. She could have sworn the woman said “mother” when she spoke calmingly to her companion, and the man said “mother” in his growled reply. Althea’s father and aunt they must be, then, because blood magic passed strongly through the maternal line and Althea hadn’t had any. They’d be wondering why this sobbing stranger had stumbled out in place of their niece or daughter.

  It wasn’t fair. Why couldn’t she be stronger? Naomi pressed back up to her knees again, held a clenched hand against her throat as she shouted at them. “Dianthus! Althea! Listen to me, so I can let myself die!”

  The woman repeated the names in shock, followed by a torrent of words. Naomi tried to listen, there on her knees in the woods, shaking all over. She was cold, out here in the mist, moisture from the ground wicking through the knees of her pants, and there was a sharp little rock jabbing into her right shin. She hated that rock with a sudden, absurd intensity. One tiny annoyance on top of the emotion that was swallowing her whole, and she couldn’t even ignore it.

  And what about the Game? Oh, she loathed the Game, with her whole soul and body both. It had killed her, and controlled her, and warped her, and it had made her want to kill herself and she wasn’t—

  She wasn’t going to let it win.

  Dianthus had seen sufficient strength in her, and if Naomi couldn’t trust in herself, she should trust in the opinion of the woman who’d been clever enough to outwit the Game after centuries of players. She wouldn’t let Dianthus down.

  That thought gave her something to hold onto, while another realization formed. All this was more than duty to Dianthus; it was her goal, her prize. When she’d told the Game she wanted knowledge as a prize, she’d meant to do something with it. Warn people off, grant grieving relatives closure. Now she knew she’d been dreaming too small—Dianthus had shown her a better goal: the ghosts’ freedom, the Game’s total destruction.

  She reached out to the woman. “You have to take me with you. So I can learn the right words to tell you how to win the game and free the ghosts.”

  The man seemed ready to slap Naomi’s hand away, but the woman frowned him down, knelt, and put her hand on Naomi’s shoulder. Everything in Naomi expected the touch to fall right through, but it didn’t. Instead, the woman drew Naomi gently in. She had a kind face behind the mist, already growing into her mother’s gravity.

  “Ghosts?” The woman managed something close to Naomi’s pronunciation. The vocabulary of magic must be older. As she spoke, Naomi recognized “blood magic” and “anchor.” The woman meant to anchor her?

  She pulled Naomi against her chest, back of her head against the woman’s arm. She flicked out her own knife, a highly polished blade hinged to an intricately carved handle. The metal reflected a flash of Naomi’s cheek and hair, and she grabbed for the tip to an
gle it properly. Her mind was warped, but did she look like herself? Did she remember what that self had looked like? The man hissed but seemed to realize that with her current grip, Naomi would cut her own fingers before she could turn the knife on anyone else. And he didn’t know, though Naomi did, that had she still wanted to let go, she would have no need of the knife to help her die.

  In the reflection, her eyes were clouded white. A corpse’s eyes. No wonder the man had not been eager to trust her.

  The woman tugged the knife away and pricked the pad of her thumb. She smeared a curve of blood across Naomi’s forehead. Naomi’s sensation of drowning didn’t lessen, but the feeling that she could die with a simple act of will did, and her vision burst with startling, crystal-sharp colors.

  The man’s face showed grief now, the shell of anger cracking. He spoke his daughter’s name, several times.

  “I’ll help you free Althea, with the rest of the ghosts.” Naomi put everything she had into trying to make him understand that she wouldn’t give up, would never let the Game win.

  The woman spoke sternly, meaning clear: there would be time enough for that later. She tightened her arms into an embrace, the first Naomi had felt in centuries.

  © Copyright 2020 R.Z. Held