He didn’t feel particularly confident—but the Dark Self was. And, he supposed, she was probably right because of it.
“You’ve had combat experience,” he said.
“Served under Saydhi during the Broken Cliffs campaign. Heard you offed her.”
“I did.”
“Permanently? Gone for good?”
“Yes.”
“That’s not supposed to be possible,” Lux said, still looking at the maps.
“It is now,” Siris said. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? I killed her, and you realized that they could be fought.”
She eyed him. “Know too much,” she said under her breath. “Yeah, definitely one of them.”
And, startled, he realized that he did know too much about her. Not this woman specifically, but her type of person. He had lived for a long, long time. Buried deeply within him was an instinctive understanding of someone like Lux. She’d always fought for Saydhi loyally, counting herself lucky at least to not be one of the poor sods who had to work the fields.
That had built in Lux a certain guilt, perhaps even a resentment. She was happy to not have a worse life, but felt that she profited from the sacrifice of so many others. When Saydhi had fallen, it had come to Lux like a moment of revelation and light. The Deathless could actually die. They weren’t gods.
Siris would bet she had resigned her post that very day.
“What kind of training do your soldiers have?” Siris asked.
“As much as I could give them in six months,” Lux said. “We have done a few raids on the God King’s thugs, killing everyone involved and leaving signs to make it look like wild daerils were behind the attacks. He sent troops and wiped out the nearest batch of those, though, so if we try it again we’ll need a different cover.”
She hesitated.
“That was just training,” she continued. “A skirmish, not a full fight. I worried that anything more would reveal us.” She looked at him. “This is not a rebellion, Deathless.”
“It’s not?”
“No. It’s a desperate group of fools who need something to believe in. If you want a real rebellion, you’re going to need a real army.”
“No,” Siris said. “You’re wrong.”
She cocked an eyebrow at him.
“To have a real rebellion, General,” he said, meeting her gaze, “we don’t need an army. We just need to convince everyone that we have one.”
“A lie.”
“Isa tells me that there is a rising air of malcontent,” Siris said. “We need the people out there—the townsfolk telling stories about oppression, the cobblers who are tired of taxation, the farmers who are starving—to believe that fighting back has even the smallest chance of working. Then you’ll see a rebellion. Do you have any intelligence on the enemy?”
“Some,” she said. “I brought what I could with me when I abandoned my post—some stronghold layouts, troop numbers, things like that. A few of the people who joined us also worked for the Deathless, and they brought information too. That, mixed with what we’ve stolen in our raids, gave us something to work from. It’s random and spotty, though.”
“Bring it to me,” Siris said. “I want everything you have.”
CHAPTER
EIGHT
RAIDRIAR DISPATCHED the golem—last in a series of combatants—with reluctance. He had been hoping to recover some of these to serve him. Who knew what resources he would be able to find once free of this place?
But it was no use. The golem had only the most basic of deadminds, and Raidriar could not reason with it. It collapsed, shaking the ground with an awful crunch.
I need to be faster, Raidriar thought, moving deeper into the catacombs beneath the temple that housed his rebirthing chamber. The Worker could be sending more resources. Each moment spent fighting was a costly delay.
He had finally reached the dungeons. Raidriar pushed through the doors, sliding his swords into sheaths at his sides as he did so. He’d stolen these off a particularly well-equipped daeril—one he’d been fond of, unfortunately. Despite his initial pleasure at the contest, this business of fighting through the place had left him depressed. He was like a master huntsman being forced to put down his own loyal hounds.
He counted out three cells in the dungeon, each of which was fitted with a thick, windowless door. Breaking down such a door was beyond him, even with his fit body; instead, he took off his ring. It was a simple loop—the type that fascinated his daerils. They carried his old castoffs and failed experiments with great pride. He looked at the small display on the inside of this one. Seven years and three months. Had he really needed that much healing? That would push this brand-new body to its mid-twenties already.
Normally, he wouldn’t care. He had bodies to spare, and this one—like his others—had been modified to restrict hair and nail growth so that healing would not leave him with an unsightly mangle of a beard.
Yet he didn’t know how many bodies he would have access to in the near future. He might need to keep this one fit, rather than running it ragged, healing it to the point that it grew to middle age in the course of an afternoon.
I will have to be more careful with healing, he thought. His body’s Deathless nature would heal him slowly on its own. Unfortunately, when surrounded by enemies and lacking his armor, he had often needed the ring for a quick burst of restoration.
He shook his head, tucking away his ring in a pouch he had tied at his waist. He then fished out his others. One teleportation ring. That could be useful; it separated into two different loops, and when one was activated, it would teleport the smaller ring to the larger. You could use it to summon a weapon in a moment of need, for example. Unfortunately, the process did not work on living flesh.
He tucked that one away and inspected the third. Constructed of black metal, it looked like iron fresh from the forge. He held it cautiously. They knew so little of the element they called Incarnate Dark. Even the Worker had always seemed wary of it, though he—and his scientists—spoke of it in their usual scholarly way, explaining its import in the universe and its influence on the movement of celestial bodies.
To Raidriar, Incarnate Dark was just another tool. A dangerous tool—in other words, the best kind.
He slid on the ring and summoned from it a small shield of force that fit his palm and fingers like an invisible glove. He felt only a faint tingling. An anticipation of energy to come.
He allowed a tiny amount of that energy to seep through, a fraction of a drop of Darkness Incarnate. His shielded skin reflected the energy—or the not-energy—outward. Raidriar pressed his hand against the wooden door.
The door crumpled.
The darkness pulled everything toward it, ripping the door to its fundamental pieces, sucking them inward. Wood cracked and popped, as if an invisible hand squeezed the sides in with an awful strength. In seconds, the Incarnate Dark had been expended, leaving the door in shambles, the greater portion of it simply . . . gone. It had been sucked through the tiny portal in his ring that was connected—like all of the rings—to a distant power.
The cell now open, Raidriar stepped inside.
DEVIATION
THE SIXTH
URIEL ENTERED his house, laughing to himself. The storm would probably cover his entrance, wouldn’t it? Perhaps he should be more quiet.
He laughed anyway. Of course. He moved up the stairs, leaving wet steps. He pushed open the door to the bedroom. Mary screamed, reaching for blankets. Adram scrambled out of the bed in shock, falling to the floor.
Uriel took off his jacket, shaking the rain free. “You know, this makes sense,” he said, chuckling. “The world makes sense for once. I could actually have guessed this would happen!”
Adram—a look of sheer panic on his face—barreled out of the room, carrying his trousers. Mary was weeping. Why should she cry? She hadn’t been hurt.
Uriel sat down on the bed. “I stayed late too many times, I see. That’s a number. I can a
dd that in a column and see what it creates. If it had been another person in the office talking about his wife, I probably would have noticed immediately what was happening.” He looked toward her. “But it wasn’t another man’s wife. It was you. The flaw was never in the numbers. It’s in me. I can’t see them when you are involved.”
“Uriel . . .” she said, reaching a trembling hand toward him. Below, Adram’s monster of a car roared to life.
“Now, now, don’t worry about me. I don’t have emotions, you see. Adram explained it all. I . . . I don’t . . .” That wetness on his cheeks. Rainwater, obviously. He took a deep breath. “Jori?”