Grudgebearer (16 page)

“Your daughter?” Coal loomed close, his snout within a handspan of Kholster's nose. “The one who killed Parl?”

Kholster nodded. “Who else?”

“You have plans for her.”

“I have plans for all Aern, but yes, I have plans for her. One day, she will lead in my place.”

“When you die?”

Kholster laughed. “I'm Armored. How would I die? I can't imagine a set of circumstances where surrendering my spirit and knowledge to the army would be more useful to them than my presence would be.”

“I can.” Coal snorted derisively, hunkering down lower in the magma once more. “But, putting aside your failure of imagination, what would be your intent? Retire? Grow old on a mountainside with some Dwarf?”

“I . . . just know, that I have kholstered them too long. My name is a verb, for Torgrimm's sake. They don't even say ‘lead' anymore. I will always be there to advise them, to fight at their side, but . . .”

“They need a leader who will make wiser oaths?”

“Yes.”

“I agree.” The dragon yawned, gargling molten rock as it seeped into his maw. “What about your other problem?”

“What other problem?”

“You don't hate the Eldrennai anymore.” The dragon belched flame, and a fist-sized chunk of cooling rock flew past Kholster's head. “You won't win if your heart isn't in it. Old friend, yours isn't.”

“I have thirteen years to rekindle that hate,” Kholster said softly, his voice almost lost amid the geological turmoil of the dragon's lair, “and no shortage of memories to share.”

“Memories,” the dragon's eye lit from within, the glow ebbing from drooping lids. “But which ones will you—”

“I'll start at the beginning.” Kholster looked away.

“And winning is worth that?”

“I made an oath and my people are bound by it.” Kholster locked eyes with the dragon. “We will not be Foresworn.”

CHAPTER 15

ALL KNOW

Aldo frowned. The diminutive god paced the confines of his modest study, creature comforts falling away with his shifting attention. Lack of focus banished the room's furnishings one by one. Plushly upholstered chairs, the polished oaken desk, even the rows of books and scrolls and the shelves upon which they sat evaporated, reducing the room to a carpeted cube of stone.

“What is he doing?” Aldo's frown deepened. Unlike the other gods, Aldo's moment-to-moment appearance bore very little resemblance to his statues at Castleguard and Oot. He did pause and resume the old form long enough for the “Changing of the Gods” as the humans called the cosmic synching that took place at midnight and noon. It was worth the effort to ensure that his statues reflected the image he chose to show the world.

In person, in private, he was not the lofty scion of Eldrennai appearance, with flowing robes and eyes of light, though there was a resemblance. Over the eons, his features had drifted with his interests. His facial features were still reminiscent of an Eldrennai, the slight point to the ears and refined features but molded onto a form more in keeping with a gnomish height while possessing a human's lithe musculature. Most different from his sculptured appearances were the eyes.

On his statues, the eyes of Aldo glowed with the light of knowledge. In truth, his eyes had grown hollow and cavernous, the ocular orbits distended and outsized from accommodating many different lenses and crystals. Aldo had once known everything. He remembered that serenity and craved it, though he doubted it would ever again be his. Over time, as the world grew and its inhabitants multiplied beyond the scope of his attention span, the completeness of his knowledge had become overstretched.

“Show me,” Aldo hissed. From within the folds of his robes, a swarm of lenses, crystalline orbs, mirrors, and reflective surfaces erupted, displaying a writhing mass of diverse images. The lenses varied in size and shape (some concave, others convex, a few even more like prisms than proper lenses) and even in substance, casting and absorbing myriad spectra of light and darkness upon the loose-fitting silk robes he wore. While he did not know everything in the way he had when the world of Barrone was young, he saw most things, and he could know anything if he knew that he needed to know it. What had once been instantaneous now took time, but he consoled himself that it did not take long. Seconds, really.

“Show me all of them!” Lenses focused in on scenes of multiple Aern. Aldo calmed. “Good.”

As Aldo watched, each Aern across Barrone paused, head tilted like a dog pondering the unknown. Each jade iris pulsed with light, once, twice, then faded as it suffused their amber pupils with a faint yet unmistakable glow. Irises expanded, banishing the blacks of each eye, leaving the amber pupils large and dilated. All with two words, not from the lips, but from the mind of Kholster: All Recall.

Aldo drew a small wooden case from within the folds of his robe, snapping it open hastily, spilling multiple sets of eyes upon the carpet, but not the eyes he sought. They were heavier than the others. The god of knowledge seized two eyes of obsidian, amber, and jade and shoved them into his empty sockets just in time to hear the second syllable of “recall” as Kholster's voice filled the god's mind as well.

He breathed a sigh of relief, then cursed as a massive steel door appeared in the wall of his study and burst open.

“I'm bored,” announced the large bald intruder, a massively muscled god wearing impossibly ornate plate armor and an expression of irritation so great that it nearly matched Aldo's own.

“Not now, Dienox.”

“But there's nothing to do. Even the Hulsites aren't killing anybody interesting.”

Aldo's frown stretched beyond the natural confines of his face, but he gestured for one of his multitudinous lenses to grow in size, becoming a floor-length mirror displaying scenes Aldo hoped the lumbering god of conflict would find amusing.

“What are we watching?” Dienox smiled, adjusting his armor.

Aldo didn't see how, in an actual battle, that armor could serve any purpose other than to help the tip of a blade or the point of a warpick slide home and bite through, but he held his tongue. What was the likelihood the war god (technically, he reminded himself, the deity of Conflict AND Resolution) would actually ever fight a battle himself? He had to bite back a giggle at that last thought. Oh, if Dienox only knew . . .

“The Aern are living a memory. A rare one. One of Kholster's, an All Recall. You may remain if you are silent.”

“So it's going to be war then?” Dienox punched his fist into his palm. “I love it when the Aern wage war!”

Aldo knew Dienox would be less than pleased if he knew the mostly likely outcome of this particular deployment, but he kept that thought, like most of his thoughts, firmly to himself.

As the gods looked on, the entire race waited, minds occupied, bodies ready to take over if danger threatened. Each reflective surface depicted a different Aern. Aldo tried to keep the most interesting few rotating across Dienox's mirror.

In the Guild Cities of Barrony, Draekar, one of the Token Hundred stationed in the city was stabbed as the thief he fought mistook the pause for a rare and miraculous opening for attack. Dienox chuckled when the thief drew back neither the blade nor the hand. Around him, the crowd scattered to stay clear of the feasting Aern, lost to the Arvash'ae, and his mewling prey.

Elsewhere, Jharlin, a Bone Finder seeking an unaccounted-for femur of Hollis by Vander out of Jyan lost during a scouting mission on the coast of Gastony, crawled lower and faster than usual. The target she sought was too close to allow her to pause during the memory Kholster had chosen to share. Her body did not stop. All thoughts of grappling hooks and stealth fell away. As the bone thief rode his horse toward the city gates of the small coastal town in which he had hidden. Jharlin leapt, canines bared.

Dienox's laughter rang out again as a horse bolted riderless in the night and Jharlin claimed both the lost bone metal and a well-earned meal.

“Aldo, what—?” Torgrimm asked, materializing between the other two gods, only to find himself silenced by a gentle hushing sound as Aldo placed a single finger to his lips.

“Just watch,” the god of knowledge explained, pointing to the mirror display.

Deep in Khalvad, with its curving towers and desert sand, Vh'ghar was caught by the mental sharing while in the midst of an argument with his human wife. The woman's cheeks flushed red, her eyes flashed with anger. The resounding slap she'd begun before her husband's eyes began to glow hung like a death sentence in the air, one for which a stay of execution seemed impossible to expect.

“You never loved me,” she'd screamed. The truth of his love lay in the reaction of his body. His cheek still stinging from a blow that would have resulted in instant death to any other assailant, Vh'ghar dropped to all fours in a protective stance, reading his wife's anxiety as the result of some threat external to the two of them. With his mind trapped in memory, rather than arvashing the one who'd struck him, his only instinct was to keep her safe.

Of the three gods, only Torgrimm smiled.

Other Aern, those who could pause in safety, ceased their work and stood at attention as their minds accepted their Kholster's memory.

*

Rae'en had been asleep in her berth, but her eyes as well as those of her Overwatches snapped awake at the first touch of Kholster's voice.

Has he ever shared this with you?
M'jynn asked.

I don't think he's ever shared it with anyone.

“To remember why we hate the Eldrennai,” Kholster's voice filled all of their minds, “we should start at the beginning. The souls of the Aern do not leave the world of Barrone. Our dead flow back into the group, sharing knowledge and power. The death of the one strengthens the whole. It is the way of things. How things are, from the newborn to the Elevens, to the Armored, even unto the One Hundred. An Aern who dies an Aern, oaths kept, remains with the Aern, the souls of millions upon millions, their essence focused, honed, concentrated in a few hundred thousand, not haunting their ancestors, for the consciousness is not maintained, but enriches us all.”

*

“Why does magic have no power over the Aern?” Dienox asked Aldo.

“Oh, do shut up, Dienox,” Aldo chastised. “Simply put, their souls are too strong, too connected, too vast. It is this connection that allows an Overwatch to relay data to the troops he or she supports and to the kholster they serve.”

“I wish we could connect a few Eldrennai that way,” Dienox grumbled. “One of my champion's lances. Think of the maneuvers her Sidearms could manage.”

“It is a connection,” Torgrimm put in, “Kholster could use to control them all, to slave all Aern to his will. They have free will not because Uled intended it, but because Kholster, in his very core, insists they should. He will lead, but he will not enslave.”

“I've always known there was something wrong with him,” Dienox snorted.

*

Rae'en started at the sight of Uled as Kholster had first seen him, not with physical eyes but with eyes of spirit. To spiritual senses his presence was discordant, a symphony of light and darkness, brilliance and madness. She felt Kholster's shock as if it were her own. His first glimmer of awareness had been to see into the soul of evil brilliance and to hope it would be nice to him.

And then the Life Forge. Rae'en screamed as Uled shaped her essence. Pain and confusion become the whole of her comprehended existence as etheric hooks were worked into her being, the spiritual shackles that would bind her by oaths she had not sworn to follow the commands of her creator and his king.

This
, Kholster's words filled her mind,
is what it feels like to have one's soul enslaved by Uled.

The soul is not meant to experience pain, Rae'en knew it even as she continued to writhe in agony, as the edges of her being twisted into whorls and angles to match the body Uled meant her to occupy. Time flowed without true reference in an endless, yet somehow simultaneous march of days.

One moment Rae'en lay on the Life Forge, and the next she watched from a soul crystal at the edge of Uled's workshop as the being with the kind face and cruel soul worked day and night on the Life Forge, putting the finishing touches on a body she recognized as Kholster's. After a time, it lay naked and complete across an enameled table in the center of the room—a hybrid figure of meticulously carved stone and metal, its eyes a jeweler's masterpiece of jade, amber, and obsidian. As Uled worked, she saw spirits and elementals trying to slip into the body, but they could not gain entrance: The body, a lock, her—no . . . 
Kholster's
spirit—its only key.

As she focused on the physical, watching the body that would be hers . . . his . . . take shape, the rest of the physical world came into increasing focus as well. She learned to see Uled and his apprentices as corporeal entities, though their physical forms still blurred in comparison to their souls. As a spirit, Rae'en was far more aware of innerselves and living things. She still did not understand the words they spoke, but she had begun to read their actions. She knew when Uled planned to work on her soul again and when he intended to work on the body . . . she could predict the times when Uled would fly into a rage and hurl shouts and spells at his apprentices or sit motionless staring into nothingness.