84
THE CATACLYSM
Nightingale began the telling, but Scarab took it over. The older woman was being too gentle, trying to downplay the horror of a story that was the essence of horror—as though she feared the warrior before her wouldn’t be able to bear it.
He bore it. He paled. His jaw clenched so tight that Scarab could hear the creak of bone, but he bore it.
She told him of the hubris of magi who had believed they could lay claim to the entire Continuum, and she told of the Faerers, and how the Stelians alone had opposed their journey. She told of the puncturing of the veils, how the chosen twelve had been taught to pierce the very fabric of existence, a substance so far beyond their ken that they might have been carrion birds pecking at the eyes of god.
And she told him what they had found on the far side of one far distant veil. And unleashed.
Nithilam, they named them, because the beasts had no language to name themselves, only hunger. Nithilam was the ancient word for mayhem, and that is what they were.
There was no describing them. No one living had ever seen them, but Scarab felt their presence, less here than at home, but even now. They were always there. They never stopped being there. Pressing, leeching, gnawing.
Being Stelian meant going to sleep every night in a house where monsters ravened on the roof, trying to force their way in. But the roof was the sky. The veil, really, but it aligned with the sky, in the Far Isles where everything was either sea or sky, and so they spoke of it this simply: the sky bleeds, the sky blooms. It sickens, it weakens, it fails. But it was the veil, made up of incalculable energies—sirithar—that the Stelians nurtured, guarded, and fed, every second of every day, with their own vitality.
Such was their duty. It was how they held the portal closed when the Faerers themselves had failed, and it was why their lives were shorter than those of their dissolute cousins to the north, who gave nothing, but only took from this world they had come to for sanctuary and then claimed by force.
Stelians bled energy to the veil that fools had damaged, to hold it against the mindless, battering force of the nithilam. The monsters. But they were greater than monsters, so vast and destructive that, to Scarab, only one word would do:
Gods.
Why else did such a word exist, if not to express an unseen immensity like this? As for the “godstars,” so long worshiped by her kind, to Scarab they were no more use than a bedtime story. What good were bright gods who only watched from afar while dark gods strove every moment to devour you?
She imagined the nithilam as immense black rooting things, and their great mouths—pulsing, cartilaginous suckers—fixed to the veil like glower eels to the flesh of a sea serpent washed up on a beach, pale belly to the sun, dire and dying while its parasites still pulsed. Still sucked. Frenzied at the end to drain every mortal drop.
She didn’t tell Akiva that. It was her own nightmare, what she saw when she closed her eyes in the darkness and felt the writhe of them against the veil. She only told him what the myth said, for in the myth was truth: There was darkness, and monsters vast as worlds swam in it.
And when she told him of Meliz, she saw the understanding sweep through him, and then the loss. It was an echo of what she’d seen a short time before, when Nightingale sent to him of Festival. Perhaps the older woman had meant to be kind. Or perhaps she was made blind by the grief of her own loss. It had surprised Scarab to be the one who saw what it did to Akiva, to have his mother given to him in a sending—his first sending, and his mind would be scrambling to distance it from reality—and then taken away again so abruptly.
And now Meliz. Meliz, crown of the Continuum, garden of the great All. The home world of the seraphim, and all the grace of its hundred thousand years of civilization. She watched Akiva’s face as she simultaneously gave him the undreamable depths of his own history, the greatness of his ancestry, the glory of the seraphim of the First Age, and took it away. Meliz, first and last. Meliz, lost.
She reminded herself of what he was, and hardened herself to the waves of loss and sorrow working through him, each one seeming to rob something vital from him, leaving him… less than she had found him.
Was that what she wished? To diminish him? What did she want with him? She wasn’t entirely sure. She had hunted him to kill him, but the answer, she knew now, was not that simple.
After the battle in the Adelphas, when she had scythed at life threads of attacking soldiers, gathering them for the beginning of her yoraya—that mystical weapon of her ancestors—the thought had settled in her that his thread would be its glory. His life to string her harp. His power, under her control.
And maybe that was the answer. Perhaps it had been the end that Festival’s ananke had impelled her toward all along.
Scarab could wish her own ananke to be clearer on the matter.
On one matter, it was very clear. The nithilam were her fate.
And she was theirs.
She was always aware of them, but it was when she lay down to sleep, and darkness arched above her, that she felt herself to be facing them across an expanse. Across a barrier, yes, but there had always been—even before there was any sane hope to support it—a… premonition of challenge. Of locking into place, might against might, and no more barrier. She their enemy, as they were hers.
She their nightmare, as they were hers.
Scarab, scourge of the monster gods. Claimant to all the eaten worlds.
There still wasn’t any sane hope. Scarab saw that Nightingale sensed what was growing in her—not only the yoraya begun, but its purpose—and how she shrank from it in horror. And who wouldn’t?
The Stelians had built their life in this new era on the belief that the Cataclysm could not be defeated, but only held back. So they held it. They held it and died too young and without glory. Accepted a duty their forebears would have despised. Cowering and bleeding out their vitality, no thought given to meeting the enemy in battle because the enemy were world-devourers, and Stelians were no longer even warriors.
And because what they risked, if they failed, was… all that remained. All that remained. Eretz was the cork to a deluge of darkness that would meet no end. If the Stelians failed, every other world would fall.
None of this did she say to Akiva. By now she had told him everything but his own part in this story. It should have been easy for her to finish. Look what he has done. But her voice hid from her. Incongruously, faced with the bleakness she had caused in him, she flashed back to the way he’d smiled—at her but not at her—and she remembered the radiance that was in him then, and the joy, and how it had made her reel with discovery, like a novice introduced to the lexica, sensing, for the first time, an entire glittering, secret language. She’d seen it again in the bath cavern where he’d waited for… for what she had called, to Nightingale, “his appointment,” not wanting to use the real word for what it was. For what the lovely, blue-haired alien stoked in him, and the radiance that was born of it.
Akiva was in love.
It was a pity, but it wasn’t her problem. Next to the nithilam, it was as a footprint in ash, as fleeting, and as easily brushed away.
Her pause grew too long, and Nightingale, with great grace, tried to take the tale from her like a skein of yarn, to spin this final piece so that she would not have to.
Scarab shook her head and found her voice, and told Akiva the rest herself.
And she felt it in her chest, when he fell to his knees. She thought of Festival, whom she had never known, called to an ugly fate half a world away: to give up her own sanctity to a tyrant king for the sake of bringing this man into being: Akiva of the Misbegotten, who, for some ineffable reason, was powerful beyond all others.
Well, and it was Scarab’s own ugly fate to fell him to his knees, but she thought that Festival would have understood. Ananke digs grooves so deep you can either follow it or live your life trying to scale the sides and escape. Scarab was not going to try to escape. Always, she had been growing toward this, ever since she heard of a harp strung with taken lives, and before that still, to the earliest moment when energies joined in the making of her. Her path lay before her, and Akiva was entangled in it.
She had come on this journey to hunt and kill a magus.
She would return from it armed to hunt and kill gods.
Once upon a time, there was only darkness, and there were monsters vast as worlds who swam in it. They loved the darkness because it concealed their hideousness. Whenever some other creature contrived to make light, they would extinguish it. When stars were born, they swallowed them, and it seemed that darkness would be eternal.
But a race of bright warriors heard of them and traveled from their far world to do battle with them. The war was long, light against dark, and many of the warriors were slain. In the end, when they vanquished the monsters, there were a hundred left alive, and these hundred were the godstars, who brought light to the universe.
Akiva tried to remember the first time he’d heard the myth. World-devouring monsters who swam in darkness. Enemies of light, swallowers of stars. Had it been from his mother? He couldn’t remember. Five years only he’d had her, and so many years since to blot them out. It could have come from the training camp, propaganda to build their hatred of chimaera, because that was how the tale had been twisted in the Empire: into an origin myth so ugly it was silly.
He’d told it to Madrigal their first night together, as they lay atop their clothes on a bank of shrive moss, heavy and lazy with pleasure. They’d laughed at it. “Ugly Uncle Zamzumin, who made me out of a shadow,” she had said. Absurd.
Or not. Scarab called them by another name than the one Akiva knew, but it made its own sense. As sirithar had come to mean, in the Empire, the state of calm in which the godstars work through the swordsman, nithilam had been its opposite: the godless, thick-of-battle frenzy to kill instead of die. These names had once meant something about the nature of their world. Somehow, the truth had been lost.
Now Akiva learned that the monsters were real.
That every second of every day they battered at the veil of the world.
That the people who were half his blood lived their lives in devotion to shoring up that veil with their own life force.
And that he… he… had nearly torn it wide open.
He was on his knees. He was only dimly aware of getting there. What the Faerers had done was only half a cataclysm. In his ignorance, he had almost finished it.
—Not just ignorance, sent Nightingale, to his mind. She settled to her own knees before him, while Scarab stood where she was, unmoved. Ignorance and power. They’re a poor combination. Power is as mysterious as the veils themselves. Yours more than anyone’s. We can’t take it from you except by killing you, and we don’t wish to do that. Nor can we leave you, and hope that you’ll contain it on your own.
And Akiva understood his choice that wasn’t a choice. “What do you want from me?” he asked, hoarse, though he already knew.
“Come with us,” said Nightingale, aloud. Her voice was soft and sad, but Akiva looked over her shoulder at Scarab, and saw no sadness in her and no mercy. His grandmother added, so softly, “Come home.”
Home. It felt like a betrayal even hearing the word, all the more so as he was looking at Scarab when he did. Home was what he would make with Karou. Home was Karou. Akiva felt his future unraveling in his hands. He thought of the blanket that did not yet exist, the symbol of his simplest and deepest hope: a place to love and dream. Would they have to rip it in two, he and Karou, and carry their ragged halves with them where their fates were determined to lead them? “I can’t,” he said, desperate, not thinking what it meant, or that it might be construed as his choice.
Nightingale just looked at him, a twitch of disappointment at the corners of her mouth. As for Scarab, her face gave away nothing, and yet she made the nature of his choice very clear to him, in case he misunderstood. Twice before, he had been overcome by this sudden, intense awareness of his own life. This was the third time, and with it came a sending, cruder than Nightingale’s, unmistakably Scarab’s, and it wasn’t cruel, only pitiless, and he understood that there was no space for pity, not for her. She was queen of a people enslaved by a burden so great that the entirety of the Continuum depended on them. She couldn’t waver, ever, and didn’t. This was strength, not cruelty. Her sending was an image: a shining filament held between two fingers, and the understanding, with it, that the filament was Akiva’s life, and the fingers were her own, and that she could end him as easily as snapping.
And would.
But he sensed something else in the sending, and it surprised him. It would be safer for everyone, and easier for her, to kill him now. And not only easier, not only safer. There was something he couldn’t quite grasp, there in the image of that shining filament. A harp string. Scarab and Nightingale had argued about it earlier, and Akiva sensed that the queen stood somehow to gain by killing him.
But she didn’t want to.
“Well?” she asked.
And it was an easy choice. Life, first. You have to be alive, after all, in order to figure out everything else.
“All right,” Akiva said. “I’ll come with you.”
And of course, because Ellai walked here—phantom goddess who had stabbed the sun, and who betrayed more lovers than she ever helped—Karou stepped into the cavern at just that moment, and heard him.