Chapter 45: Verdirgris

It's strange, but I've only been two days away from my pen and have already forgotten the room I last wrote in. I stand now on bare rock. This place is an anomaly. It is partly built within the mountain, as if it were a hall of gnomes. My suspicion is that it was a Weshelter of sorts, and the deep mines beneath were repurposed as homes during a tumultuous time. I've had flashes in dreams of houses unlike those I know, and of faces very unlike the ones surrounding me; eyes like tuppence embedded in symmetrical skulls, but glossy, glassed even, blind in the night I know. I can't begin to explain the sky to you as I see it in those glimpses. It's like nothing we've ever seen, colors that many may never know. What I can say is that it seems to be somehow a creation made of my body, my skin having been splayed out in puffs of mist that puncture the glow of my eyes, which are there eternal and encompass all things beyond the world.

The sky is beautiful now, but in a manageable way, meaning it looks sad. Flickers of every color dance in the distance, while that ever present golden light keeps growing in diameter, piercing new holes in the cloudwall each day. There is still a great deal of darkness above me, but I no longer see the sky I've known since childhood. I am convinced that Tarthas is no more. What saddens me is that I have no wish to see the world beyond. Let me die with my prison home. I was made to end this, and end this I have. I see no purpose to serve in the time to come.

Perhaps I might find some satisfaction in exploring the heights of Clarion. This strange city, or fortress, or country (it seems the appropriate size for each), begs to be seen. It shows me tattered curtains and layers of dust, but I've come to see past those layers to the past glory of these rooms. The galas and audiences, the mustering of knights and their retainers, the calling out across the distant seas from the beacons on the high spurs of the mountain. I see the hordes of people gathering within its curtain wall after the sin that precipitated our descent, and I see the road I walked to come here, leading through the space within space carved out for me to return by. The sea was cold, and the abzu made my way home. They alone have offered me reward for my toil.

Tomorrow Gives Her Hope wanted to help me find some sort of peace, and in a sense I did. We rode through the night, pushing our mounts to their limits to catch up with Goth. I found myself sitting around a fire while our leaders talked, and this time Tomorrow Gives Her Hope looked at me through a mother's eyes.

"I want my grandsons to fight like you." The flames were perfectly reflected in her saurian eyes.

"And how do I fight?". I looked past the campfires to Turk and Abdiel when I asked that. I dislike platitudes, and have proven incapable of allowing them out of politeness, even when one of my lives depended on it. Tomorrow Gives Her Hope had yet to see me fight, and an empty complement would not comfort my clearly agitated state. I never did come to any conclusions on the matter, but I had felt a gradually increasing anxiety after killing the good doctor.

"You don't look back," Tomorrow Gives Her Hope said. It was not a platitude, and a twinge of guilt then added itself to my anxiousness. "Tell me about your girl."

The question surprised me. "What do you want to know?".

"Why you loved her."

I still do. I worried I might cry if I answered the question, so I hesitated. Then, after a deep breath, ventured an answer.

"When I saw her, she was being hurt, preyed upon. A targ was branding her, you see. After I killed the targ, she put herself together and carried on. She had a wounded quality to her, but in time I began to see that her pain was not new. All around us were people trying to blind themselves to the affliction we all face. They worked at their trades, formed facsimiles of friendship, made jokes, feigned laughter, played at politics. I saw Haven as a man or woman who is urgently sick, and rather than rest, they go on doing the things they once loved. But not bravely, as one whose illness is inescapable, but carries on out of defiance. Rather, they acted out of ignorance, willful ignorance, which is deplorable, because such behaviour hastens one's end rather than delaying it. If that is one's goal, they should do it with a blade, not a blindfold."

"But not your girl."

"No. Eris lived her life with her eyes open. I was blind, but she could see."

"But you see now."

Tomorrow Gives Her Hope was kind, so I merely offered a smile, all the while reeling from the thought that my eyes had been open for longer than I could ever guess, but I was ignorant of the nature of what I saw.

"What was your husband like?"

She laughed, then shook her head and wiped away a tear. I was surprised to see that tarrasquin cried as we do. As we do. We. Who is we? The Batch? Am I not a true human?

"Oh my mate, my Oaken Branches Tall, we was so good. But you know, he was kinda small."

"Really?". I was genuinely amused. Tomorrow Gives Her Hope was so long and lithe and powerful, like a serpent with strong human limbs.

"Ya, really. He was small. I mean, my size almost, so ya, he small for man. But he so good. Instrument, cooking, with the kids, talking to elder, talking to leader. He know everything, and if he don't, he find out. He would think so fast, and when we did what he said, we did okay. Sometimes I didn't like it, how smart he was. Heh. He knew, and he teased me all the time."

I didn't realize it was happening, but I became aware after the fact I was smiling so broadly that the corners of my mouth were nearing the corners of my eyes. "Where are you from?" I asked her, wondering about her accent and vocabulary. The tarrasquin I'd known had been more eloquent. Or at least more fluent in anglo. She had a tribal, almost pidgin quality to her words.

"Ground zero!" She announced it proudly. "Goth had to come and find me. He heard of us, and that we never left, and he came and we listened to him, and so we came to your big islands."

"I'm from the continent, originally."

"Of course you are, Boy of the Batch."

Others were beginning to make their way to their tents, and a wind had kicked up a sheet of cold dust. I shivered, then shifted closer to the fire. There was a sound somewhere like a scream, or perhaps I dreamt it. I thought of the great arks that had tried too late to pierce the veil and find a new home. Oscar and Dolores, people who gave their lives for mine, had come from one of the downed arks. I wondered if the tarrasquin had tried to leave in their own, and settled where it crashed, or if they had come to us in long ages past on another, more venerable vessel, and stayed for as long as they could at their landing site. When I asked Tomorrow Gives Her Hope, she told me ground zero was a great egg from which all tarrasquin hatched, very long ago. When I was a boy, I would have opened my blue eyes wide, and thought I'd learned something important to be remembered. I asked her what her homeland was like, and it sounded as horrible as anywhere else. Still, I could hear in her voice that she was fond of it.

"Was it overrun by Devils?"

She shook her head and flicked her tongue. "Poison. In the air and water."

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I nodded. I was curious how Oaken Branches Tall died, but I noticed that she had not asked me how Eris had, so I let the matter go. I pitched my tent near the mare I rode back. I never knew what happened to the courser Turk gave me. She'd probably been cannibalized by the good doctor's stablehands. This old girl was a stout little garron. She sat low to the ground, and I worried my long legs might catch during a slow gate, but she was hardy and thickly barded, and much quieter than any mount I'd ridden before. I'd thought to set up near Tomorrow Gives Her Hope and the others, but for some reason I wanted to be as alone as I could, and later I would learn why, as I sobbed as quietly as I could to memories of my sweet wife. The morning saw me fresh and ready for battle, though that was still a ways out. But I felt some of my grief had passed on, and when I was greeted at breakfast I did not lie when I smiled.

I became acquainted with other soldiers in the camp as we went about our work. This largely revolved around taking inventory of weapons and equipment, and running combat drills that made little sense to me at the time.

"This way ser," said Astus, a furtive little lucien boy who looked to be clad in a string of soiled rags. He led me, bundle of weapons in hand, to the mouth of a narrow tunnel at the base of a massive tree. The shadow cast by that tree's tremendous cap spread like a tarpaulin over half the camp, and to its trunk were lashed a cascade of lightless lenses cased in aluminum. The heat from those lenses did more than warm us, as they worked in tandem with rods as flat and long as spadones, strung between the lenses on wires that hummed warnings to virulent swarms that would otherwise have absorbed us in noshing sleeves. Inside the great hollow tree the pathways wound quickly downward, and if not for my phosphorus guide, I would have surely fallen off one of the many bridges of petrified hyphae that spiraled into the ground.

Lights glowed in the dark. Not living like Astus, or my fallen friend Caduceus, but dead lights; bones responding to memory. Some of them were no larger than a child's eye, but others were so large I saw myself falling into them. We rested on a platform of hyphae that splayed out like capillaries around the wall of the tree's girthy stalk. I took some of Astus's bundle when we were again on our way.

"Thank you, ser" he said. "They always give me more than I can carry, because they know I'll get it down somehow. Goth punishes me when I accept help. Or, well, he did, when he used to catch me. That's how I learned who I could trust. Turk says it's results that matter. Goth says there might come a time when I've only got me, and will have to carry my load alone without tricks, and that by playing tricks or getting some vili... no offense, ser, some thoughtful person to help, I'm setting myself up to fail when I'm truly on my own. And then he says that it's easy to find yourself truly alone in Tarthas. But then Turk says that if I'm truly alone, I won't be carrying any more than I need, so I'd best keep learning tricks."

"Nothing wrong with tricks," I said, looking at the deathly lights. They shone, but emitted no shimmer or glow beyond their rind, which was dry and fleshy to the touch. I thought of a tyfloch whose rotten arm had broken off in my hand after he died. "Do the tyflochs come down here?".

"No. Just the mean one. They don't like it underground, they say."

"Just Abdiel."

"Who?"

"He's that mean tyfloch you mentioned."

Astus nodded thoughtfully.

We came to the floor of the hollow where the targets were being set on their paths. Astus and I put our load down near one of the portable lampstands and dispersed the weapons. They were all ranged; arbalests, windlasses, a gastraphetes, and a dozen or so antiquated bows. I opened a crate and helped divvy out ammunition, giving the bolts to the arbalestiers, thumpers the gunner, and quarrels to the marksmen. The bows were for green recruits picked up along the way, and we left them to acquire their arrows on their own. I was not much of a shot, so I took a compact arbalest designed for quiet shooting, hoping my outliers would go mostly unnoticed. Last down the hollow was our drill sergeant, a big man named Goro.

I've never been accustomed to the antagarthan form. Their three blank eyes, four claw-nailed arms, long sagittal crests and singular horns will forever be unsettling to me. Most of all their arms, and the bizarre way their lower pair of shoulders notch into their torso and tie into their oversized pectorals. They are typically musclebound, but Goro was especially so. He favored the gastraphetes, unsurprisingly, but showed matchless prowess with each weapon as he instructed us. He saw every one of my errant shots, and gave me a few easy directions that helped me tighten my grouping immensely.

"What's your melee?" He asked me when we broke for lunch.

"Spear," I said. "Ideally," I added, "but I'll strike a foe with anything."

Goro nodded. "Your wits then. Well, how about you use them down here?"

"Sergeant?" I was confused, and a little worried. Goro seemed a stoic among stoics, though his scars looked to be all from combat, and not a one self inflicted. He seemed to catch that I was inspecting his hide for the telltale marks, and it made him uncomfortable.

He reached over the trestle table the recruits had set up and took my arbalest, removed the bolt cartridge, and propped it on the ground against his bench. All the while, his lower arms kept slicing his portabella steak. "You're tall for a human, or... well, you know. Long arms, wide shoulders, steady poise. It's a windlass for you."

"I'm no marksman...'' My words were cut short by a look in his eyes that promised he could make a governess out of a quintain, and I graciously accepted a well used Iwitar Ninety-nine when we resumed our drill. I pondered over a number of things then, including our subterranean locale and the high trajectory of our targets, and Goro's selection of a bullpup weapon when I was called out on account of my wingspan. I shrugged off my confusion and did my best to hit the targets as they scurried up the wall of the hollow, knocking a small one off with one hit. It was very high, and made a tap like a mason's hammer when it landed. It quivered mournfully while its legs curled in on themselves, and I felt a strange sense of remorse. We carried on til late in the night, foregoing dinner and turning in hungry. I was near sleep when it occurred to me that the soft glow beyond the fabric of my tent was no dream fragment, or a beacon on the horizon, but my little guide, Astus.

I opened the flap to my bivouac and he slid in, doing his best to keep to the wall of the tent.

"I have no blanket to spare."

"I've got my robe," he said.

He fell asleep quick and made barely a sound, save for a soft, timely whistle as he breathed, and I found my dreams eerily calm. The morning reveille came far too soon, and before breakfast we were again marching down the hollow and handing out weapons. I chose the same Iwitar given to me by Goro, but this time he wanted me on one of the gastraphetes. He himself was weilding a Zanbato, the windlass designed to shoot a destrier out from under its rider, or to blast the shoes off a devil's rhyno. His lower arms clasped the bipod and heat shield while his uppers aimed and fired. There were holes in the hollow where he shot, and little of his targets remained. A few fragments of one landed near my feet, including a large eye that shifted its dimming facets til they matched with mine.

That night I used my dark adaptation to find my way up. Astus was a paper lantern in my spectral shift. He sang as he danced up the hollow, his feet a tapping pair of crotals. The dull, membranous lights on the walls heaved like a sleeper's lungs.

I'm writing from a different room now; a dismally small bedchamber adjoining what may have been a linen closet. There are nylon straps fixed to the bed frame, and a small counter laden with trays of rusted tools. I assume this chamber was used by an in-house surgeon, though I can't imagine patients being treated effectively in such a cramped space. Still, there are plenty of innocuous rooms close by; a long, drafty hallway with a bay of tall windows, a servants's quarters and a state room, a compact library with a short rolling ladder, and a once well stocked larder, so I find it unlikely this room was used for torture. There is one small lamp, hanging from the ceiling by a rusted chain, with a stream of light weeping out so tiredly it serves only to elucidate motes of dust. The room seems a sigh frozen in time, and as I watch the canopy over the bed sway in the breath of a lone rattling vent, prettily dead with its filigree border gone to rot, I imagine that very few people must have seen inside these bare stone walls, and I find it a fitting place for me. I may stay here a while.

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