The Wheel of Osheim

TWENTY-SEVEN

“Go away, damn you, and tell Ballessa I want kippers for breakfast.” I screwed my eyes tight against the daylight. “And draw those damned curtains!”

“Time to get up, your majesty.” The maid sounded sarcastic rather than respectful.

I tried to snuggle down into the bedclothes and found them wet and cold. “What the hell?” I opened my eyes, blinking against a bright light close to my face. All of me hurt. At least it had stopped raining.

“How are you feeling?” Kara, squatting at my side wet-haired and smeared with mud. She held the orichalcum up between us.

“I’m dying.” With one hand I wobbled my jaw. “I think I broke my everything.”

“He’s fine,” she called over her shoulder.

Snorri loomed out of the night and offered a hand to haul me to my feet. Hennan appeared from nowhere, more mud than boy, and got under my other arm to help me up as Snorri pulled.

I drew a deep breath and regretted it. “Smells like a funeral in a latrine.”

“That’s just you.” Snorri clapped an arm around my shoulders and steered me toward the stinking ruins of the unborn. Long feathers littered the rutted ground, the light dying from them as I watched.

“Baraqel?” I asked.

Snorri shook his head. “They destroyed each other.”

The box of ghosts lay bedded in the mud nearby, its glow drawing my eye. I gestured toward it. “Get that, Hennan.” As he ran for it I added, “Don’t let it touch your skin.”

He returned, holding it gingerly, his sleeves over his hands. I shrugged Snorri’s arm off and stepped forward to take the box. Before it could summon some ancient relative I called into it, “Baraqel!”

At once that same fuzzy light lit in the box’s depths and as I held it away from me a Builder ghost sprang into being above the opening. I could see something of Baraqel in the man before me, the same blade of a nose, the eyes somewhat hollow above prominent cheekbones, the broad expanse of forehead, but it was the way this ghost burned with many times the light of any seen before convinced me this was Baraqel.

“Entanglement detected.” The voice of the box. “Bareth Kell.”

The ghost met my eyes and spoke with its own voice. “Call me, Barry.”

“I-” The things always unnerved me. “Are you dead?”

“I’m just a library entry, Jalan. Bareth Kell died many centuries ago in the third war.”

“But I know you. You’re Baraqel.”

The ghost shone brighter still. I shielded my eyes. “When the world burned I was one of the few who could leave their flesh and pattern myself onto the energy flux. I became a wraith, a spirit if you like. The Barry who lived in the meat where my mind was born . . . he burned. It was a sad time.”

“Baraqel? This is you, isn’t it?” I tilted the box and the ghost tilted with it. There was more to this ghost than some “library entry”-he felt alive, charged with energy and personality. I saw it as he leaned with the box, a peevish frown, something judgmental in the way he pursed his lips. “It is you!”

Baraqel gave a nod and a grudging smile. “It’s me. Or at least an echo of me resonating in this device. I won’t last long. Where’s the heathen? Bring him forward.”

Snorri stepped into the light. “Baraqel. You fought well.”

“You saved us.” I frowned at the angel, now just the ghost of a man who died a millennium ago, a man in his fifties, slightly balding. You wouldn’t remark him on the street-yet somehow he had through force of will set his stamp on the universe so deeply that it had carried his spirit all these years since his flesh had burned to cinders. “How . . . how did you get from this-” I tilted him back. Put a tunic on him and he could be a servant at the palace. “To that?” I nodded toward the unborn’s remains and the great smoking wounds that Baraqel’s sword had left in its flesh.

Baraqel grinned, waving a hand past his head in self-deprecation. “At the start it was as if we were gods, those of us who escaped into the . . . the elements you might call them . . . We ranged so far. This world is like one leaf and we had access to the tree. Years slipped by unnoticed. It was subtle at first. Men returned, just a few survivors emerging from bunkers after generations or spreading from the depths of places so remote they had suffered no direct damage. They drew us back. We thought it was our idea-that we’d come to watch humanity rise again, to guide it. But the truth was that their expectations reeled us in; and then their stories shaped us, degree by degree, so slowly we didn’t notice it happening or understand the process, and we became the stories they told about us.”

As Baraqel spoke the light from his data-ghost faded. “I’ve lived too long. So many years, so many regrets.” He grew dim. “I used to love to watch the sunrise. Before the change. Before the world stopped being so simple. I used to wake up just to watch it rise over the Pyrenees.” His voice grew soft, blurred around the words. “I didn’t watch the sun rise that last day. I had wanted to . . . I regret that. Perhaps . . . more than the rest of it.” He paused, more pale now than the ghosts the box normally produced. The box faded with him, its glow dying beneath my fingers. “I think sometimes that when the bomb vaporized me the real Barry Kell died that day, and all I am is an echo, a variation in the light.” He looked up at me, wraith-like, faint lines suggesting the man. “And what . . . you see here is just an echo of that echo, rattling about in a box of tricks, old Baraqel . . . the angel superimposed on a simple AI to speak his last words.”

“Thank you,” Snorri said beside me. “It was an honour to fight beside you, Baraqel, an honour to hold back the night.”

“I can see it.” Words so faint now you might think them imagined.

“What can you see, Baraqel?” I’d mocked him, I’d thought him a pain in my royal arse when we were bound, but now my throat tightened around the words and I had to grit my teeth to speak them unbroken.

“The sunrise . . . can’t . . . can’t you . . . see it?”

“I can see it,” Snorri said.

“It’s . . . beautiful.”

“Yes.”

The box was dark in my hands. Silent.

• • •

It’s a strange thing to watch the death of a spirit that has shared your mind. Neither Snorri nor I spoke as we walked back to the road.

Stranger still to discover he was once a man with hopes and dreams like yours and all the foolishness that men carry around with them. I thought about what Baraqel had said in those final minutes-about how he had escaped the flesh and felt like a god, his potential without limit, only to find himself drawn into the stories people told about him, constrained by their expectations and finally fashioned by those tales, shaped into something new.

“I feel sorry for him,” I said as I crossed the ditch and turned back to see the others kicking their way through the remnants of the hedge. “Never getting to be his own man . . . or spirit . . . or whatever.”

Kara looked up at me as she passed, a faint smile on her lips. “You think you’re so different, Prince Jalan?”

I frowned at that, about to contradict her, but the witch had the right of it. People’s expectations drew me north, against every instinct I owned, a bond every bit as tight as the Sister’s magic. The word “prince,” the name “Kendeth,” the story of the Aral Pass, all of them snares I’d been caught up in. Certainly I’d tried to use them, escape them, twist them . . . but as I twisted I’d turned into something new. Just like Baraqel. Just as unsuspecting.

The surviving horses proved easy to round up. Perhaps they were as scared of being alone out in the wilds as I was, but all three came nosing back onto the road not long after we assembled there. We rode on along the dark road, just to put distance between us and the unborn’s remains. None of us liked the idea of sleeping with it lying out there, unseen but close.

“Come on.” I hauled Hennan up behind me on Murder, noting quite how much heavier the lad had grown. I nudged the stallion into a walk, pulling him away from Kara’s mount. “Easy. And no biting or I’m changing your name to Deserter.”

A couple of minutes later we reached the ruin of the cardinal’s procession. The road lay like the floor of a charnel house, spare pieces of men that the unborn hadn’t the time to incorporate decorated a hundred yard stretch of the cobbles. Snorri closed his fist about the orichalcum and hid the worse of it from us.

“Wait.” I drew up as we reached the shattered remains of Cardinal Gertrude’s sedan. “I need a moment.” I swung out of the saddle and remembered how all of me hurt. Careful placement of each foot brought me to the wreckage without stepping in anything that used to be a person. I turned over several of the larger pieces, picking up a number of splinters before finding what I was looking for. I wiped the corpse blood from my hands and hauled the cardinal’s luggage over to the others.

“You’re still hoping to find the seal?” Kara asked.

“It was the bait. The prince would have kept it to use again if this ruse failed. But he wouldn’t have wanted it on him or any of his dead.”

“He killed them all just to trap you?” Hennan asked, looking awkward perched on Murder’s flanks.

“Probably enjoyed doing it. Good cover too for heading north, stand the dead men back up and walk the high road. Who’s going to stop a cardinal? And the unborn know I need something like . . . this!” I pulled out the seal from a tight-bundled bag of purple vestments. “If I’m hoping to survive an encounter with my sister.” I turned it over in my hand, a cubic inch of silver ornately wrought on four sides, formed into a ring on the fifth and carved into a seal on the sixth and opposite side. Stamped into a blob of cooling wax such a seal could authorize the burning of a heretic, found a monastery, or recommend a sinner for sainthood. I tried it on each finger, managing to work it past the knuckle of the ring finger on my left hand. Fortunately Cardinal Gertrude had been a woman of some girth and pudgy digits. “And of course the cherry on the top of this little plan was that the threat of a Papal Inquisitor, with their famously low view of heathens, was likely to mean I presented myself alone.”

I stood, discarding the bag, having found no other symbols of the cardinal’s office. I might have looted the golden crucifixes if I’d been alone, or perhaps even before an audience of non-believers, but heading toward Osheim didn’t seem like a good time to rile the Almighty.

“This fine fellow saved me.” I slapped Murder’s neck. “Well, and you Snorri, and Baraqel.”

Kara coughed into her hand.

“And Kara. Hennan too probably. And the other horses.” I stared at her to see if she was satisfied. “Anyway. If Murder hadn’t been quite so good at running away the hero of the Aral Pass may have met a sticky end right here.”