Chapter XXII: Execution of Plans

I didn’t get to sleep for very long. Four hours, tops, if I had to make a guess. No matter how tired I was, there was no way I could sleep through the sound of screams. The sound jolted me awake, though it took several seconds to remember where I was or what the source of that sound could possibly be. For a moment I wondered if that was the Musician doing her work; but there was no violin playing, and even with my armor I should have been able to hear it. Something else was happening, and it was bad. 

The source of the sound was easy to trace, and the closer I got to it, the better I was able to realize what it was. They weren’t just screams: they were screams of grief, of pain, of sorrow that couldn’t be contained by anything less than a primordial wail. Within a minute, the cry was mixed with the sound of angry shouting, profanity, and in one case the sound of a gunshot. When the gun fired, I went from a cautious walk to an all-out sprint. 

The source of the sound was Ironseed’s compound. Even by the time I arrived, there was a huge crowd assembled outside. Most of them were ordinary people, Durkahn laborers and Bluerose servants, along with about a dozen rifle-bearing human soldiers in their blue uniforms. The source of the original sound was obvious. At the edge of the crowd were several women, still wearing their night-clothes, huddled together and weeping uncontrollably. They couldn’t even bear to look at the center of the crowd except in a few backward glances, and I didn’t blame them. 

I saw it instantly, even over the heads of the crowd. I could barely understand it, and I can still barely understand it, so my mind went utterly blank of emotion and processed the image in pure, rational terms, a list of what objects were present and where. There was a wooden stake, nine or ten feet tall and about as wide across as my hand, pounded into the ground and with a sharpened tip facing up into the sky. Blood coated the stake, and dripped down to the grass. The spike was going right through the center of Dr. Meredith Ironseed’s chest, and huge chunks of her flesh had been cut off, as if taking samples.

I’m almost certain that my heart stopped when I saw her, just from the way I saw stars in front of my eyes and how I felt as though I were choking. There’s a blank spot in my memory at least long enough for me to have sunk to my knees. I was faintly aware that I should have been crying, but I wasn’t. The sight of Ironseed’s corpse had propelled me entirely past emotion, and into a cold logic. 

It had happened last night; and then discovered in the morning by Ironseed’s lab assistants. The people I’d seen just before falling asleep… was this their doing? Or was that just another normal guard patrol? Either way, I could have stopped this, and I didn’t, because I was too busy jumping into something far beyond me again, and needing someone else to bail me out of it again. I was holding my breath, I realized, but although my lungs ached some part of me knew that I could keep doing that for as long as I wanted.

Eyes locked on the stake, I regained my footing, and prepared to push my way through the crowd. I had no idea what I was going to do when I reached the stake, but before I could try, I was startled out of my trance by a scream of pure, murderous rage. 

“You bastards!”

I spun around quickly enough that I nearly toppled over, and prepared for the worst. The Durkahn security forces had arrived, with Sarnai at the lead, and already a few of the Bluerose soldiers were taunting them with obscenities and taunts. The one who had screamed initially, the musclebound woman whom I’d interviewed the morning after the Musician’s first attack, had gone so far as to draw a pistol, though it wasn’t aimed at anyone yet. 

“What are you here for? To finish us off? To gloat over the kill?”

Sarnai looked confused until her gaze landed on the stake. Then her eyes went wide, and she thrust out an arm to stop the group. “We didn’t do this,” she said, at a low growl. 

“Like hell!” the soldier said, “If you didn’t, then who did?”

“What possible reason would they have to kill Ironseed?” I said, more of a mumble to myself than anything else, though it ended up being loud enough for everyone to hear anyway.

“I don’t know,” said the soldier, “but it’s their handiwork! She probably broke one of their laws without knowing, and before she could defend herself… on the spike for her!”

There were a few assenting voices, cries of “Animal!” and “That was a mistake!”

I moved closer to the soldier, until she was almost within arm’s reach. “That assumption is completely insane, and you know it. They want this treaty to happen just as much as we do, so why would they do something… like this?”

“I don’t know!” she hissed, “but clearly they must have had a reason. This is obvious Durkahn work.”

“What? She’s… it’s not that complicated,” I mumbled, though thinking about it made me want to pass out. 

“Everybody who hasn’t had a bad case of brain fever knows that the Durkahns impale criminals, to make an example of them,” she said.

That didn’t sound anything like what I’d heard of the Durkahns, but then again, I hadn’t heard much. I looked to Sarnai. “Is that true?”

Sarnai’s expression went dark. “A hundred years ago, maybe. But even then it was a punishment reserved for traitors and… worse people.”

“So you admit it!”

“Lena, wasn’t it?” Sarnai said. “Put the gun down, Lena.”

“I’m supposed to put the gun down?” she said, accompanied by a chorus of jeers. “My side is the one that just had someone executed,” she raised the pistol. “You put your guns down.”

At least half a dozen Durkahns raised their muskets to their shoulders, and within half a second, ten Bluerose soldiers had followed suit. I was getting sick and tired of this, so I lunged with as much power as I could muster, grabbing Lena by the wrist and slamming my other elbow into her face. She flinched, which was just what I needed to wrench the pistol from her hand and throw it to the ground. 

“If I have to take another fucking bullet for this factional nonsense, I’m going to fucking punch somebody,” I said under my breath.

Rook arrived with another half-dozen soldiers, soldiers who awkwardly reached for the triggers of their rifles when they saw the standoff in progress. “Drafter Yaran! What are you doing? All of you, lower your weapons immediately.”

“They executed Doctor Ironseed!” Lena said. “I was defending myself until Halflance’s bastard apprentice decided to get involved!”

“And she was right to do so,” said Rook.

Sarnai rolled her shoulders and glared down the length of her snout at Lena. “You have no evidence that I, or any of my kind, were responsible for this, besides centuries-old rumors. How do we know that we aren’t being framed? It’s no secret that some in the Bluerose camp hate our race.”

Immediately, half of the Durkahns responded with uproarious agreement, and a few more guns went to shoulders on both sides. The entire situation was about fifteen seconds from resolving into a gunfight, and with how close the two sides were to each other, dozens would end up dead.

I stepped into the center of the crowd again. I tried to start giving a speech, but my gaze accidentally landed on the stake again, which made me stagger. The green ring, the smell of antiseptic. “Don’t do this. Ironseed wouldn’t have wanted it.”

I don’t even know if anyone heard me, they were so focused on shouting accusations and insults at one another. A bunch of them had lowered their guns, not out of pacifism, but more out of a desire to instead throw rocks and clods of dirt at the opposite side. Anger had not yet outweighed self-preservation. 

“The first woman to fire will be whipped!” Rook shouted with a scowl. I could barely hear her over the crowd. 

“Lena, please, stop this!” I screamed, my voice almost cracking. I didn’t make for a very commanding presence. “The people who did this, did it because they knew it would make us fight each other, instead of them! You’re falling for a trap!”

A few people on both sides turned and looked to me, though others continued to focus their attention on the fight. “They? What’s this about?”

“Isn’t it obvious? Someone has been trying to sabotage the peace effort, almost from the very beginning. The animal attack, the fire in Zrimash, the mass hallucinations, and now this!”

Rook raised one eyebrow. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I have evidence, alright? These attacks have been targeted, targeted to kill the delegates during their negotiations, by someone who knew where they were. And last night…” It hadn’t hit me until I’d almost said it out loud, but the fact that Ironseed had died on the same night that the Musician attacked must not have been a coincidence.

“Whose side are you on?!” shouted one of the soldiers, off to my left. 

“She’s not human, whatever she is!” another called out. 

“What? What are you talking about?” I was still reeling from my own thoughts, and they weren’t giving me enough time to realize what was happening. 

“They have a point,” said Lena, back to a natural speaking voice. “That trick of yours, taking a bullet and not even slowing down… the ladies have been wondering if you’re really just a street rat like Halflance said.”

“I bet she’s a stonewose that Halflance taught how to talk and put a wig on!”

“I heard reikverratrs can heal like that! What if she’s a Cassandran spy?”

I stumbled backward, mouth agape, and one question reverberating through my head. What am I?

Sarnai and her group had also started talking amongst themselves, though they were mostly doing it in a language I didn’t understand. “Though I don’t personally support the theory… some of my people are beginning to wonder how it is that you always seem to be at the center of every attack and incident.”

“Tell those people that Emma doesn’t have the disposition to attempt an assassination,” said Rook. “Any accusation against her is nonsense, trust me.”

Lena turned on Rook in an instant. “Well, if she didn’t do it, then someone did! Someone who has a history of impaling people who rub them the wrong way!”

More stones and clods of dirt went into hands, and more insults and accusations were thrown across the space. Rook gave her section a piercing glare, and then set to work trying to pull the two groups apart, but she was already outnumbered, and more people were joining the brawl with each passing minute. I tried to gather my thoughts, but they had been scattered, by guilt and by self-doubt. What am I?

The answer, at least for that moment, was “useless.” The two crowds were already too close to a brawl for anything short of force to push them apart, considering how even Sarnai was unable to control her people. I looked back to Ironseed’s corpse, though not for long. Green ring, smell of antiseptic. Pale hand slipping off a gurney. Lorraine Leyrender’s murderous glare. 

I was furious at whoever had done this, and I was terrified that I wouldn’t be able to stop whatever they were planning next. I was overwhelmed, and exhausted, and unsure of myself, and worst of all I had failed. So I did what I always did when things got too much: I ran away. With an apologetic glance in Rook’s direction, I turned and broke into a sprint. Being an exhausted wreck didn’t slow me down one bit, and the wind pushed past my face as everything turned into a blur again. I left the treaty grounds behind. My training with Rook had paid off, so it was five, maybe six minutes before I even started feeling the soreness in my legs and the burning in my lungs; those were cleansing pains and I enjoyed the hell out of them. The hurt only pushed me to go faster.

By the time I had finally replaced all of my negative feelings with adrenaline and lactic acid buildup and felt ready to stop, Zrimash was over the horizon twice-over. I was completely alone. The only sounds around were the gentle rustling sounds of wind disturbing the vast fields of grass. No people, and not even any animals larger than a snake or a middling rodent. 

I have only the vaguest understanding of how long I spent out there. The sun went from just starting to peek out over the horizon, to well up into the sky, though with a long way to go before noon. For all I cared, it could have been a hundred years and it wouldn’t have been long enough. Somehow, I had held on to my sword through everything that had happened, and I found myself expressing my curiosity by impaling my hand a few more times, just to make sure nothing had changed. The wound healed shut every time. 

I wasn’t even thinking coherently, really; it wasn’t like I could find answers about how human I really was or how I could make up for my fault in Ironseed’s death by staring at grass and listening to wind. The same four or five ideas swirled around like a tornado, repeating themselves on loop until I finally ran out of concentration and lost myself to the wilderness. 

The Urcos plateau was beautiful, in a slightly desolate way. It was like sailing out into Lake Michigan until all you could see was water, except the waves were water instead of plant life and the schools of fish were replaced with scurrying creatures. I started musing to myself about what life must be like to the Durkahns, the people who had never known anything else but these endless plains of grass, only occasionally interrupted by hills and little rivers. It was all so flat and huge that you could see everything around for miles… which was how I noticed the camp off in the distance.

I was too tired to think critically, so I assumed that the camp must be Durkahns, and started aiming my meanderings in their direction. Only when I had gotten within a quarter of a mile or so did I realize something was off. The tents were a very different style than anything Durkahni: low and squat and made from skins instead of textile. They didn’t have falts with them like a nomadic Durkahni group would; only bessels.

Working on paranoia, I dropped low, my small size allowing me to essentially vanish into the tall grass. Now my interest had gone from casual curiosity into legitimate concern. Sometimes crouching and sometimes crawling, I inched my way closer to the mysterious camp. I was about fifty feet away when I noticed that there were a pair of guards facing my way, and I was about forty feet away when I finally got a good look at them. 

They were wearing military uniforms in a pale, olive green, and holding guns of a design I’d never seen before, either on Earth or on Selene. Instead of sabers, they carried iron-shod clubs at their hips. Their skin was milk-white and totally bereft of hair, which was what finally made me realize what they were. Accursed. Stonewose. Ghouls. And as I turned my attention away from the patrols and to the camp itself, I had to stop myself from gasping, because there were scores of them.

SaffronDragon

Oh shit. And the people back at the camp are too busy fighting each other to even know that this is coming... This is about to get interesting. And if you want to see the next few chapters worth of "interesting", you can click the link below and join my Patreon. For only $3 a month you can see the next few chapters of the book as I finish writing them, as well as join my patron-only discord server. You can also, at higher tiers, read a collection of exclusive short stories, including two Selene prequels as well as a few... spicier works of mine. But if you don't, that's fine, I'll see you in two weeks for Chapter XXIII: Talk.