When he was very little, "The gods favor you," Val's mother liked to say. Since the day in the farmhouse, the day he met the alien, he'd thought of her a little less, Salmey Vasold, the golden queen of Petronille. Why had the catastrophe that followed her death diminished? Would it break her heart if she knew it? In a moment of alarm Val realized he felt Celesta's accident more sharply, like something only a little while gone, a missed miracle that almost was. Maybe it was the day, what was ahead for him, for the others. Maybe it was knowing that a bomb somewhere menaced the priestess in Amorium. Today recalling the violence his mother's murder had excavated in his soul made him tired, the way sad songs made him tired. And Maria. He thought of Maria, who would get no justice. And whom, when lives stood to be saved or dismissed, no one believed.
As he was led by his brother Gabriel away down the passage, he looked back at the Kinder team, looked at Siris especially, though blankly, meeting her returning gaze through the bright tumble of her hair. He would have liked to talk at length with her for no reason other than to hear her voices converge, the inner and the other, a melody that rang gently inside him. It's all nothing, now. Another insignificant light in the storm, like his Maria's. As for Siris, a bad wind was going to snuff her light too, as bad winds usually did.
Regrettably, there was nothing to say to any of the Kinder team.
Sorry seemed inept.
* * *
In the lift, Gabriel said, "Enough of this crap. Do what you're told."
"Else the world ends," Val, plaintive, supposed.
"You may believe it."
"No, it ends anyway," Val said, tangentially. "Pitted and softened like punctured fruit."
Gabriel, annoyed, hissed between his teeth. "You're such a ..." The rest trailed in exasperation.
The lift took them from the holding area, descended with them into the stone and silence. Val declined to register the depth. He had eaten and was consequently at an edge. Gabriel's mind lapped toward his power, unbidden. The power in turn soaked the currents and countercurrents of Gabriel's inner life like a sponge. A lot to see, to learn, but nothing was there about a doomsday this or that, a weapon that made the stronghold reasonable or necessary. When would Sir tell Gabriel? After it was done, most likely. The sons of Burgolt were used to adjusting to violence, to the vagaries of ill temper and deconstruction. The world will be on fire, Val thought as they fell through the ground.
The elevator opened on a receiving room, very large, with hard lacquered floors and walls of icy marble. In this new place, muted by shadow, there were candles on kalonice tables to soak up the tinge of rot. A bed chamber lay beyond a heavy door. The door was guarded by a Petronille enforcer in a suit. Perhaps the former, brighter apartment, the one with the throne room, had been a meeting place for visitors. This suite was more like the den of a bear, forbidden and forboding, a place that was only Sir's, for when his sickness took away his vigor.
Adam and Marcus stood framed by the frozen marble of an empty wall, staring.
Arnulf sat with legs crossed on a leather sofa. His coat had been discarded. Stubble showed on his chin. He did not look well.
With an anxious glance at Gabriel, "Well, what's he decided?" Arnulf bit off. For Arnulf, there existed the possibility Val would refuse.
Not so, in the minds of the others.
Therefore, Gabriel said, "He's doing it."
A hearty exhalation, Arnulf thinking Val had made some sort of gesture to convince Gabriel. The others, too, showed no doubt. Val's assistance followed the natural order, life for life. Though the brothers deceived merrily and often, Val did not.
Adam stepped away from the wall. "I'll take him in."
Marcus said, "Me too."
No one balked. Adam represented the will and wisdom of their conclave. Marcus had his peculiar passions. Val was the demian who had managed to heal the children of strangers.
A perfect trio.
Gabriel and Arnulf chuckled to themselves. Gabriel strolled to the bar, selected a decanter, hardly noticed the guard admitting his brothers into Sir's sick room.
There was an immense bed, a bed like a massive, polished yacht amid a sea of brittle darkness. A lamp floated on a tidy night table near the headboard, faint and insufficient. Sir lay folded inside blankets and linen, asleep and dreaming the dreams of the fearful. A slim man in a rumpled suit hovered, a physician. Adam ordered the physician out, and when the footsteps retreated sealed the door firmly.
Val observed this. He saw, too, Marcus taking a chair by the wall, settling his elbows on his knees, expectant. Adam went away into what was, for Adam, abstract darkness. Val of course saw everything. Saw too much.
His father's jowls, slick with sweat. His father's eyes swimming behind squeezed eyelids as though searching, seaching. For meaning, that was what Sir hunted, like any man facing death. Is this all? Val closed with the bed and stood a moment with his hands clasped. Then he selected a chair, positioned it by lifting it soundlessly and setting it down the same way. He sat in it, and stretched a hand slowly, deliberately toward a rough curl of hair floating on his father's head. His father issued forth gasps moist with phlegm as Val stroked his temple.
"It is what it is," Val said quietly to the restless man. He took his hand away, his fingertips oily. "Can you feel me here?"
His father's eyes had stopped swimming. The rough mouth gaped, sucked at the stinking air, and shut resolutely in a frown. The tip of a yellow tongue protruded, to make the vocal chords work.
With eyes closed, "I feel you," the old man rasped.
"So tell me," whispered Val. It was the kind of whisper men make in a temple, leaning forward, no breath to speak of. "Tell me, when did you stop believing in the gods? And don't say that you never believed because I know that you did."
Burgolt's disease had begun as a chemical disorder treatable by various therapies, none of which did much for the old patriarch's vigor. It had turned out, though, the disorder was caused by a malformation, an invasion, so to speak, of malignancy. Cells that had become weapons aimed at the liver, blood, and brain. This, also, had been treatable but for timing and the old man's access to proper diagnostics. Once the true malady was identified a wearying but dynamic treatment protocol began. This ended with a dire prognosis, after which Burgolt sought unorthodox sources, even alchemy. Some of the experimental stuff increased his stamina, provided a boost, and some of it laid him out. No doubt about it, the departure from ordinary protocols prolonged his life. In the end, he'd had to look to the gods, and to the Lady. Until that, too, failed him.
"Screw the gods," Sir cackled from deep within his breast. "I don't need them. I have you."
And Val saw where the road had forked for the old man, the place at which belief in himself had erased faith in the old religion. It had not happened long ago. Only recently, when Sir realized he'd fathered a demian. Because the Lady had not healed him. Would not.
"What of your sins?" Val, leaning now so close that his lips nearly grazed his father's ear, stared without expression at the dim lamp. It was a practical lamp, a slender tube in a glass enclosure, what one might find in a hospital room. "Haven't you respect for them?"
"Respect," grumbled Sir, "for what?"
"Respect for your sins."
This caused Burgolt to plunge into the cauldron of his brain, a flicker of awareness hastily snuffed by surging darkness, a rumble of rage and need.
Val flinched backward, stung by it. Such madness was likely catching, the way certain ailments were. The human soul, slipping the yoke of consciousness and conscience, would look as Burgolt's did, a wreckage that refused to sink into the morass of its own rot. No, it motored on and on, tearing through whatever caught its fancy, the lives of beautiful women, its sons, the skin of civilization itself. What matter if it all fell apart? The rendering of others had become incuriously satisfying, like picking at a wound.
This is why I was born, thought Val, and this is why I will die.
Another, unseen, momentarily and vitally present, at least for Val, answered, "I think that you are right."
To which Val said, calmly, as that which had come unwitnessed except by him through stone and iron suddenly went away: "Our time is over."
Burgolt heard him. Dragged open his eyelids, even tried to blink.
Val paused to clear his vision. He turned to seek the discarnate entity that had passed by him, that had not, it seemed, chosen to linger. It's message, however, was certain, and for the second time in a short measure of days he shed tears. This time his throat clogged with them, and his chest shook. It was all over quickly, a lapse caught by Adam and Marcus, to be sure, but mistaken for pity, and shame.
Leaning again to his father ear, Val said levelly and with something resembling joy, "They stopped it. They stopped you. The Lady is saved, and you, you are free to be free." With a tip of his finger, Val investigated the splash of scalding liquid on his upper lip. He straightened, looked unspeaking into the fixed and sightless eyes of his father, and got up.
Marcus, too. He was anxious for news. "It's done? Is he on the mend?"
A statue wakened by magic, Adam startled. Came fluidly to the other side of the massive bed, no hesitation. He looked down, and then looked away from the body at Val.
"I wouldn't have taken that bet, little brother, not for anything."
"I know." Val tried to keep his breathing even, used the back of his hand to blot the blood streaming over his lips.
Marcus appeared at Val's side. There was a hiatus, nothing long or dramatic. He became rather calm, actually, producing a handkerchief and offering it to Val.
Val, next to him, thanked Marcus without rancor, as though he too was coming to terms. As he wiped at the blood, "It needed to be done," he said.
Adam held Val's stare, digging, slipping downward like a spider on his web.
Marcus murmured. "Did he suffer?"
"No." Val lowered his hands, dropped the bloody handkerchief beside the lamp on the night table.
Hands slipping into his pockets, "Too bad," Marcus supposed. He turned slightly so that his shoulder was to Adam. His glance flinched upward. "You're Sir now."
"Am I?" Adam nodded and continued staring across the body in the bed. "Say what it is you think I need to hear, Val. You've got it on the tip of your tongue. You might as well spit it out."
"About the weapon, you mean."
"Which weapon?"
"The Holland-Tchey weapon."
"We haven't got it, not yet."
Not yet.
Val paused. "Holbek has it, and they tried to use it."
"Incorrect. It's being tracked as we speak." Adam was Holbek now. "Maybe by next winter we'll have smoked it out."
"But it can't be used," Marcus interjected. He looked away from them at the door, looked like he needed a chest full of fresh air but was unready to confront what waited in the next chamber. "You both say it casually, the Holland-Tchey weapon. It's a device that can't be survived."
Val was nodding, the taste of iron in his mouth. "Yes, that's what I hear. Sir had it. Paid people to put together a trigger and detonator. He sent it to go off in Amorium."
Adam and Marcus, now quiet. Marcus wondering if Val had gone soft in his head. Adam, starting to believe Val.
"Well," sighed Adam, roughly, "how do you want this to go, Val? Any way it's cut I have to put you on display."
"Sparing the others would be a nice touch."
"Give me a reason."
"I made you patriarch."
"Give me a better reason."
"This base is known to ITAN. You're less than an hour from a raid."
A flash of genuine surprise. "What a shabby deal, little brother. I've taught you nothing about the give and the get, have I?" He started away, leaving Val standing there with Marcus. "But if you think those lives up there are worth missing the chance to take us with you ... Let's just say that's another bet I would not have taken."
The light from the other room slashed through the deathbed darkness as Adam snatched open the door.
And Marcus said, "I'd give you a gun or see to you myself except I haven't one." This was intended as kindness. Val took it as such, and he and Marcus watched a bit without saying anything while Adam, in the next room, filled in Arnulf and Gabriel.
"Can you kill the rest of us," Marcus wondered, suddenly, "the way you killed Sir, just by thinking about it?"
Val contemplated the torn capillaries in his nostrils. He was stronger since the execution, but remembered in his hospital days he'd held himself to healing a single child a day.
"One more of you," he answered. "Maybe. Not all of you."
Arnulf and Gabriel, however, did not know that and were making something that looked like haste for the outer door. Their newly discovered wariness gave Val a moment's satisfaction.
The Petronille guard had stayed. Adam turned to look at his younger brothers still in the dark room. "Marcus, we're going. Let's move."
Aware that it was coming, Val parted his arms to receive his brother's embrace. "It's good-bye forever this time," brooded the older man.
Val opened his mouth to remind Marcus of the tenet about forever, decided against it, and said, "They are innocent."
Marcus nodded, though it was plain to Val he had no understanding of what or whom Val meant.
It was at that moment the outer room filled with men, enforcers, hired men, over ten of them. Marcus, discovering his urgency to be elsewhere, disappeared among them.
Adam stayed put. It was for Val to move forward, which he did. Not necessarily slowly but he didn't hurry either.
The candles in the receiving chamber shivered and strained. Val supposed he'd done that.
Adam held a gun, a pistol that had belonged to Sir, polished and engraved. It was not the gun Val feared, but the slender metal pipe Adam clenched in his left hand.
Val supposed, "You're taking me with you."
"How could I not?"
The pipe would go somewhere inside Val's body, probably through his heart, maintaining a fatal wound from which Val could not heal until Adam wished for him to heal.
"I wouldn't," Val said.
"Shut up," Adam replied. He pointed the pistol and fired.
Val lifted up on his toes. The gilding sank inward in a whirlwind, driving downward. Curiously, the light and his sight did not go out. In fact, both remained the same. Likewise, the room and the people in it. There was a body at Val's feet. That, he supposed, was different. It lay on its side, put down by a bullet in the head. Adam, sidling forward, knelt casually. Into the breast of the corpse Adam drove the metallic pipe. The pipe struck bone. Adam shifted the tip, laid on muscle. The pipe caught the silent heart and pierced it.
This Val witnessed with only mild distress. The body, his body, possessed still its alien transmitter.
-- Next Chapter
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