muktakhora: a person who does a lot of things at someone else's expense.
Movement in the shadows. Her boots incongruous. Loud. So much louder than they should have been. A strange kind of alarm, screaming get me find me here I am. Crunching bracken underfoot. A few feet ahead, Czarnecki, silent. Onwards. Onwards.
Hands red. Face pale. They hadn't eaten in what felt like days. Had it been days? Could it have been days? It had not been night. It was not fully day either. Veins gnawing at bones, stomach growling low, skin crawling with hunger and the sense of being watched. The sky darkened to the west, darkened but did not go dark. Onwards. Wasn't this the wrong direction?
Towards the sea.
Movement in the shadows again. A headless soldier, marching onwards. Swathed in green. Mossy green. Ghjuvan's green. What had been green, what had become red. Everything here was green: brambles and brush on either side, bracken beneath branches overhead.
No visible sky. Just trees pressing close.
No sky.
A strange, grassy cage.
With eyes on all sides.
Czarnecki was silent. All attempts to needle him, to rouse a response, fell flat. Would have been easier if he'd just taken a swing. Could have beaten the shit out of him then. Could have exorcised the oppressive feeling hanging over, an odd gallows. Could have forced him to acknowledge her. Compelled it.
Nerezza Astaroth didn't like to be ignored.
Bristling. Czarnecki approaching the headless walking thing. Searching it for some hint of personhood, of history. No dog tags. Nothing glimmered. No trace of identity. Lost to the forest. Just a body. An empty, hollow thing. Just a corpse. Meat.
Between his fingers, the Hierophant's notes hung. Covered in those long, aimless lines. He divined their paths thus; no say for the Wheel. Might as well have been absent. Might as well have left Zoran to it.
The Wheel had saved him, dammit!
Not just herself. Them both. What had he thought? The druj would have killed them both. Without… without… without decisive action. Pragmatism. Common sense.
The woods surged around them.
Hadn't she done them both a favour?
Overhead, the leaves parted. A druj was leaning in. Leering. Leaning in. Staring. As though to inspect them. Like Commandant, peering over-shoulder at their homework. Garbed in red robes – humanoid in that sense. In that sense alone.
A face like bleached wood. Shaped like secateurs. Slashes that might have been eyes. No light. Might have mistaken it for a tree. If it wasn't so pale. If it wasn't wreathed in red. If it wasn't silent. Trees creaked; wind whistled through leaves.
The druj was totally, utterly quiet.
The two enormous blades that made up its head parted; a pale grey mist drifted from its maw, from the dark place within it. Curling downwards. That strange grey smoke caressed the trunks of the trees around them. It kissed the ground, floating towards them.
It was pale. Crystalline. And perfect.
For a moment, the temptation to drown in it was overwhelming. To suffocate therein. To succumb.
From the look in his eyes – oh, yes, Czarnecki felt the same.
He said – whispered – shouted – "run."
So run they did.
They were not quite fast enough.
The mist swallowed them.
It had been years. So many years. How long since they were all together like this? A decade. At least. Maybe more. Ivanna had a few grey hairs, hastened by the stress etched onto her pallid face; Mateo had a brass ring glinting at his finger, where a gold one should have rested; Bernard's shoulders had broadened. How?
Only a few years ago, he had been a baby.
Only a few years ago, she had debated the merits of picking up a pillow and holding it over his face until he stopped kicking.
One less mouth.
One fewer Astaroth in the world.
Jurian would never have permitted it. She wouldn't have been strong enough to kill him as well. Not without the element of surprise. So she had left it, and wondered why she hadn't killed Jurian when he was still small enough to be easily taken. Letting him live past adolescence – ah, that had been the mistake. She did not often consider herself a person who made mistakes.
It was an odd, frozen moment. A moment longer and – it was obvious. She was living nothing, experiencing nothing. Only reliving, re-experiencing. The last day of rest. Her last visit home. Three months before graduation. She had still expected to graduate. She had still expected a high ranking. Hadn't she worked for it? No. Hadn't she fought for it? No. She had clawed her way onto the Programme, and clawed her way through, and over, and past. Eifion could tell you that. Ragnar could tell you that. Ghjuvan could tell you that.
No.
The fog curled about Hal's shoulders. Jurian said, "and if you don't qualify?"
She had snapped at him. There could be no doubt. She had no doubt. She was ranked ninth – ninth out of twelve. Out of her own laziness. Her own carelessness. She could climb six places overnight if she wished. There was no doubt. No if.
Jurian, to his credit, had not flinched. Only stared at her. Stubbornly. She may not have loved him, but she usually liked having him around. Today was not one of those times. If? No.
Rion – the man who called himself their father – had said, "will the money stop once you're out of training?"
And Demetria had said, "what kind of pension is there, if you fail initiation?"
She had bristled. The scar over her throat had ached. Everyone pitied Szymańska her origins; everyone sympathised with the destroyed families of Gehörtnicht and Zorrico and Schovajsa. No. The Astaroths had been whole but rotten, broken inside, corrupted to its centre with a tumorous canker. Assembled, all of them, here. Here and judging her, and finding her lacking, recognising the emptiness within her, seeing her for what she was.
And Esteban had sat there, near the door, and watched her with those awful dark eyes and recognised her the same. "No," he said again, as he had said over and again, no no no, and she thought, I never met you, you died before I got the chance, you are only the imagined memory of a man, and Esteban Jímenez, the dead Wheel, said, "whatever gods there are, they must have bored themselves with you," and she found that
that she couldn't breathe; she found that instead of air, she drew in water; she found that she had no sense of up, only a sense of down driven by the hand at the back of her neck, forcing her head beneath the surface.
A reprieve. A surge towards the sky. The surface was broken. Drew in air like it was something rationed. Regretted it promptly – when the air in her throat met the water in her lungs. Bent double. Vomited.
Czarnecki. "You're alive."
Coughed out between awful, hacking, heaves. "Despite your best efforts."
"I saved your life."
"Not even you believe that."
"Be grateful." He had never sounded like this before. There was a horrible, tinny quality to his voice. "I could have left you."
A silent understanding: you would have deserved it.
Blanched. Choked. Staggered through the water. Back to the rocky edge. What amounted to a beach. Vomited again. It came up salty. Saltwater. Were they by the ocean?
Had they found the sea?
Czarnecki was staring – staring out at the water. Could he see Irij? Could he see home? Or had the mists drawn in again? They were close. So close. Perhaps their boat was nearby. For a fleeting, flitting, flashing moment, it was there: overpower Czarnecki while his back was turned. Seize the vessel. Return to Irij. There was no need to stay there. Not now. Not with the curse. Not with the Wheel. Any direction, every direction, lay open to her. Survive. Thrive. In what little time was left, could be left, to a xrafstar…
If there was some guarantee of avoiding the druj that patrolled the channel… there was no need to even think twice. Fuck the mission. Fuck the Radiance. Fuck the Warriors. They could rot.
Czarnecki was already walking away. The water nearest the beach roiled with the promise of something monstrous within. Churned and thrashed. Flinched back. "Czarnecki!"
He did not turn. "We're close."
Close? That couldn't be. Mielikki had died on their second, third, day. According to Angelo. A long march from the sea. How…?
"Very close."
Behind: a figure moved through the fog. Broken. Limping. Another strange, shuffling, dead soldier? A druj?
Ahead: the angular shape of an abandoned boat jutting from the sands. Its bow pointed towards the mists. Towards Irij. Towards a world empty of druj and tagma and Warriors and war.
Just in front of her: Czarnecki, his shoulders furrowed against the wind, determination in every line of his body. He wanted to get home. As soon as he could.
Well. Not home. Back to Illéa. Back to the others. Back to her.
And back to the mission, the war, the Warriors.
Turning over her knife in her hand, Nez shadowed him closely.