Blightcross: A Novel (40 page)

“You just obeyed them? You killed these people without even knowing why?”

Rovan shrugged. “I was working for you, Till. I wanted what you had. I was playing the game. And it paid well, in the end.” He spread his arms and turned in a circle.

Sevari began to feel sick. Is that what they all thought? That he had come into power for something as banal as riches? This tower was for Blightcross, not himself. He lived there because the palace reminded him too much of the old ways, not because of some desire for extravagance.

“This was not what I had meant. I... I was being moved by the worldspirits, not by my own desires. I was moved by history!” He approached Alim. “And you—I thought we understood each other. I do not take betrayal lightly.”

Alim's dispassionate face did not change, and he stared through the window, watching the mechanical golem. “This is beyond history, Sevari. It is right. The shadows are total freedom and order. I can finally be everything I knew I was, thanks to them.”

“That's preposterous, Alim.”

“Call it what you want.” Alim gestured to the golem. “Our side is winning, thanks to your incredible innovation.”

The corridors hummed in a strange way, and Capra swore that if she ran into another of Helverliss' inventions, she'd just kill him right there. She didn't know where they would go, only that they had to move.
She
needed to move, to feel as though they had any chance of influencing a cosmic battle.

Helverliss, on the other hand, limped behind her. “What is it that you plan on doing? We need to find a way down, not up.”

“I have to find Rovan.”

Helverliss halted. “Rovan?”

“Do I stutter?”

“What do you want with him?”

She spun round, head askew in a frustrated manner, and said, “I owe it to a friend to rescue him. I need to get him out of here.”

As though she had cracked a joke, Helverliss grinned and hacked—she guessed this was a laugh slapped into an outcry of pain by his broken body. “Oh, I bet he's just a sweet little boy who is hiding away from all of the turmoil, waiting to be rescued. Haha.”

“What's gotten into you?” Stupid question. His instability had come long before any torture, she guessed.

“Rovan has taken over as the tyrant of Blightcross.”

Her mouth gaped. There had to be a mistake. Perhaps Helverliss had finally slipped into a madness beyond repair.

“Yes, I know, it sounds ridiculous but I assure you, Rovan's bravado must have made him the perfect figurehead for the shadows. They do require something of an anchor in our realm, you see.”

She watched his face; a face the consistency of tanned leather and tracked with dried blood and creased with tired lines. Something about him told her he was telling the truth.

But she resumed her sweep of the halls anyway, and Helverliss still trailed behind. For one thing, he still could be wrong about Rovan. Also, in the event that Rovan now sat as the shadow beings' leader, it changed nothing in the end. Vasi still wanted to save her brother, and she could find a way to excise the shadows if need be. All Capra need concern herself with was taking him out of the tower.

“Your friends are fighting the shadows? Or are you the only one left?”

“They're fighting.”

“You know it won't amount to anything. Deep down, I think you know.”

What a fatalistic, broken man. Capra shuddered to think of how short her life would have been were she as doom-obsessed as Helverliss.

“It bothers you because it's true. You know what's going on. You looked into my paintings, and I saw many things about you as a result. You are not half as confident as you appear. You are suffering from a kind of traumatic amnesia.”

She made longer, angrier strides. There had to be another way up...

“Just as you ignore me now, so you ignore this trauma, this radical split I sensed. I am linked with my paintings, you know. If I want, I can look into my work and see what it brought out of your unconscious.”

Nonsense, and she could only ignore it for the time being. There was a door set into the wall ahead. She nudged it slightly, peered inside: deep blue, cold, and immense. The stairwell.

Four guards stood near the door. It might be easy to take them down, but then again, she was already fatigued, and there would be dozens more on the way up, and they would always retain the advantage of higher ground.

She eased it shut. “I need another way up.” To her right, across from the stairwell entrance, stood an ornate set of brass doors and a panel of studs. “If only the damned elevators worked.”

“Very interesting, actually.”

Now she wanted to slap him. “Look, I know what I did, and yes, it was traumatic, but there's no way I buried any of it. I relive it every night. It would be a godsend to forget.”

“I am not speaking of anything recent. Of something that happened at an extremely young age. A death.”

She choked for a moment. Not now, not now... “Look, if you're going to intellectualize, you can start by telling me how to stop these shadows. They came from your stupid painting, so you ought to fix it.”

“It was a complicated ritual that took days to complete. I was in a trance. I had used a korganum derivative to aid me. I have almost no memory of those days, and I awoke from the feverish work to a completed canvas, swimming with the power of the shadows, yet contained and knowable by even the simplest mind.”

She shook her head. “Not good enough.” She tried to think of something Vasi might have said about it. Damn—if only she had paid more attention, she'd know what to ask. “Fire giants and shadow men. If the two were left alone, there would be nothing left. What was the real secret to binding and banishing them?”

“Ah. Simple. Humanity.”

“What?”

“Mankind was the compromise. Akhli, of course. I had thought this was obvious—that there must be a mediating presence where there are two opposites. Is that really what has been stumping you?” He made a disgusted face.

“No, no. Akhli made a sacrifice. The divine saw this and fixed it all. That's what the texts say.”

His tone turned mocking. “Well, you seem to know more about this than I. I will offer no more heretic theories.”

Hadn't Vasi said something about duality, when they had found the three circles carved into the ruins? She opened her mouth to mention this, to echo Vasi's sentiments that
two
was the magic number, not three, but there was still the matter of getting Rovan out of the tower. As though the ritual would help to quell her growing impatience, she pressed one of the studs next to the elevator. From the wall came no clunk, no rattle. And yet, she pressed the stud again and again.

“Do you see that hole on the right side of the panel?”

She brushed her finger across it. “Yes.”

“I believe it is the mechanism that disengages the building's engines from the elevator system. There should be a key for it.”

“How do you know this?”

“I attended a symposium where the inventor of the elevator gave a very long, boring speech about his projects. In the first few versions of this machine, many maintenance men died trying to fix the things when they sporadically began to move, until they finally figured out that they needed a way to fully disengage the machine from the engines during repairs.”

She found her miniature glow-torch and twisted on the light. It didn't look like any lock she had seen before. “I don't have time to figure this out.”

“Think hard, Capra. Penetrate the mechanism with your mind.”

“I really don't have time for this, Helverliss.” What an odd thing to say, even for him.

“Really, try it.”

So she did, and about all that happened was that she started to yawn. “Time to try my way.” With her knife, she began to dig around in the large slot. She felt many odd clicks through the handle, and tried to map out the lock in her mind, as she had done before.

Then something behind the wall slammed, and she jumped back, knife hanging out of the hole. “I think that's it.”

“See?”

“It wasn't my mind. It was my random jiggling with the knife.”

“Suit yourself.”

She left the knife there until the elevator came down, then gingerly pulled it free.

Their ride in the elegant cabin, full of sweeping, plant-like accents in brass and elaborate patterns in a dozen different types of wood veneers, ended a minute later with a loud bang. The cabin shook and seemed to waver for several seconds before coming to a compete stop.

“This should be the floor. Sevari's office is just below the clock face.”

And she could hear the ticking, the heartbeat of the tower, muffled and distant above their heads.

Ready to open the door, she brandished the knife, prepared for yet another unfair match. Would she end up fighting the shadows and the giants with that stupid little thing? The thought made her almost as depressed as Helverliss, but then again, the blade hadn't let her down yet.

After wrenching open the door, she peered into the hall. Deserted.

“Maybe you should stay here. You don't look in any shape to confront Sevari and the shadows.”

“You don't look fit for it either.”

“Just stay here. I'll come out with Rovan, and when I do, I need this thing ready to move to the ground floor. Got it? And start working on a way to stop this. You made this mess, now you're going to fix it.”

He nodded, and she headed down the hall without a damned clue as to what she was going to do.

The big iron doors bristled with rivets, and the rose emblem showed proudly on its face. It had to be Sevari's office, and Capra swore that she could sense the corruption spreading from it like a barrel of oil tipped into a pristine pond.

Ear to the door—nothing. Probably too thick. Bursting in through the front door probably wasn't the best idea, but without any alternatives, it seemed she was stuck with it.

The door's frame sported a similar panel to the elevator. She plunged the dagger into it, then jerked it out as she realized that on the other side of the door stood a petulant boy-shadow and a murderous tyrant.

Waiting would only prolong the nervous shock in her gut, and if she waited long enough, her heart might drum itself to death. So she held her breath, and stabbed at the lock, waiting for that strange meshing of gears inside.

And again, the little cams and switches inside tripped its connection to the building's engines, and the door began to crank open.

Sevari startled at the door's sudden movement. Only he possessed the key, and he patted his belt to ensure that it was still there. And it was.

“I didn't say anyone else could come in,” Rovan said. He stood and gestured to Alim. “You—take care of it.”

And when the door opened, there stood a woman in leather coveralls that sucked against her shape and displayed every curve of her body. Grease spots marked her face, and her hands were black with the same.

Sevari narrowed his eyes. “Where have I seen her before?”

Alim took out his cannon, and aimed it at the woman's head. “I gave you an opportunity to leave, Capra.”

So that's who it was—the Valoii deserter. The one with whom Helverliss had allied himself. She was smaller than Sevari had assumed. For some reason, he had pictured the Valoii women as tall, blocky amazons.

And what did she threaten them with? A little knife. It was almost comical.

“Alim, listen to me. You're not thinking straight.”

“You ruined my life, Capra. The shadows have given it meaning. You have just tried to make excuses.”

Rovan made a frustrated noise. “What does she want already?”

“Rovan?” she said. “Your sister sent me. Your sister, Vasi. Remember her?”

“Oh yeah, sister. How's she doing? I tried to find her. She would have been a better human adviser than Till.”

He took offence to this and raised his hand, but Rovan ignored him.

“So my sister has become a traitor, huh? Well, she always was weak, in the end. Her and her stupid
vihs.
Where is she? I'd like her to see what I've been able to do without a single fart's worth of her magic.”

Capra edged forward, apparently oblivious to the cannon. “She's worried about you.”

“Good for her. Why doesn't she just use her magic to check on me?”

“Rovan, she's down there, fighting against these shadow beings. If you really have been chosen as their leader, you have to call them off.”

Rovan hopped over the desk and shoved Alim out of his way. It reminded Sevari of an absurdist comedy theatre. The soldier standing there like a zombie, the only man in the room with any real physical power. The dullard boy making a mockery of his superiors but without irony, and himself, the dictator nobody would acknowledge.

But now he had in this room an ally; the same woman he had wanted imprisoned and made an example of, as a gesture of solidarity with Mizkov.

“My sister is free to join me. If she wants to throw her life away fighting my rule, I can't help that. I'm the brother of the family. She has to listen to me.”

“Once you're of age, Rovan. You aren't yet, and you need to listen to your sister.”

“Shut up, bitch. If my sister is anything like you, maybe I want her dead.”

Now Sevari could no longer stand at the side like a servant. He took Rovan by his shoulders and stared into his eyes with the intensity of a military reprimand. “Now you listen, Rovan. Don't ever say such things again. You will regret them later.”

Capra looked about as shocked as Rovan, and Alim simply gazed into nothingness.

“Get your hands off me, Till. It's not like you're one to talk about family values and all that tripe.”

“Everything I have done was because I did not know what I had until it was taken from me during the war. Go find your sister, make sure she is safe.”