Blood of the Chosen

Chapter 1

Gyre sat on a boulder and shaded his eyes, looking down the length of the little valley.

It was a beautiful day in a beautiful spot. Summer was shading into fall, putting a hint of chill in the air, but the afternoon sun was still warm. A shrunken stream wound snakelike between tufts of grass and stands of hardy mountain bushes. And of course there were the serried ranks of the Shattered Peaks, snowcapped mountains stretching off into blue infinity.

The problem is, it’s a beautiful spot that looks just like every other beautiful spot in the plaguing mountains.

“You think this is the right valley?” Kit said from behind him. “They all look the same to me.”

“Me too.” Gyre sighed. “We’re in the right area, but…”

“Well, we can always check the next one. And the one after that.” Kit’s voice was chipper. “I’m in no hurry. You’re the one who’s dying.”

Gyre frowned. “Who says I’m dying?”

“Just, you know, in general. Since you still have a fragile, aging human body.”

“Weren’t you the one who offered to give up half of eternity last night for a taste of my baked potato?”

“I’m trying,” Kit said in a tone of wounded dignity, “to practice positive thinking.”

Gyre lowered his hand and turned. Kit’s voice was coming from a construct, a spiderlike thing half a meter high with an oval central body and eight limbs that could function as either legs or manipulators. It was made of striated black muscle laid over a metal skeleton, the fibers stretching and pulsing as it moved. In the past week, Kit had become quite adept at controlling the thing, and Gyre even thought he could see some of her body language in the way it carried itself.

Kit wasn’t in the construct, of course. It was more like an appendage, along with hundreds of others, connected to the Core Analytica in the now-crippled Leviathan. Gyre had transferred Kit’s mind into the great construct while she lay dying, and now its swarm served as her surrogate bodies. There were three basic types: a roughly human-sized version for heavy work and an even larger variety for hauling cargo, in addition to this small scout.

“And the most positive thing I can think of is that I’ll get to watch everybody get old and die, while I don’t have to,” Kit went on. “It’s very comforting.”

“I think I read a fairy tale where that was considered a curse,” Gyre said.

“I don’t see why. I’m going to have such a good time outliving the shit out of all of you.”

“Fair enough. I suppose one takes one’s fun where one can find it.”

“Exactly.”

Gyre got to his feet, brushing dust off the tail of his coat. He patted his side, and the little construct swarmed up his leg and onto his back, tiny claws gripping. It settled on his shoulder, where he’d grown used its modest weight.

The boulder stood at the head of the valley, where the slopes grew too rocky to climb. Gyre was headed for a tall, flat section of cliff, which he desperately hoped looked familiar. A week or so previously, he’d emerged from the ghoul-built tunnels running under the mountains somewhere in this area, but finding the exact spot had proved to be more difficult than he’d hoped.

There. After a week, soft earth held no footprints, but a patch of bare rock showed a long, unnatural scrape. Naumoriel had come with them, in a cart-sized war-construct, and its traces were harder to obscure. This has to be it.

He hiked closer, legs straining at the slope, and ran his fingers along the wall of rock.

“Well?” Kit said from his shoulder.

“You said you could open it,” Gyre said.

“I said I think I can open it,” Kit said. “Assuming this is actually a door at all.”

“Try.”

“Just so we’re clear, if I do get it open, someone is going to notice.”

“I know.” He and Kit had learned the hard way that you couldn’t sneak into Refuge.

“Okay. Here goes.”

Nothing obvious happened. From what Kit had explained, ghoul constructs used invisible energy to talk to one another across short distances, and she could use this channel to convince some of them to do what she wanted. Gyre waited, holding his breath. The little construct on his shoulder shifted its weight.

“Is it—” he began.

“Quiet. This is tricky.” The construct gave a credible impression of the sound of Kit clicking her tongue. “There we go.”

A hole appeared in the side of the mountain, part of the rock face sliding aside to reveal a long, curved tunnel. Gyre let out his breath and closed his eyes for a moment. Finally.

“Good work.”

“Better get inside,” Kit said. “I don’t know how long it’ll stay open.”

Gyre strode forward. Patches of faintly glowing moss provided only a sliver of light—ghouls and their constructs could see in almost total darkness. Fortunately, Gyre could as well, through his silver eye. Provided I have a ghoul to charge me back up again. The energy bottle at his hip had barely a third of its power remaining.

The tunnel was perfectly smooth, bored by tireless, painstaking constructs, stretching back and away into the stone until it vanished around a curve. There was only one way to go, so Gyre started walking. Behind him, the door slid closed.

“So we made it,” Kit said in the silence that followed. “Now what?”

“Now we see if the ghouls are willing to talk to us.”

“And if they’re not?”

Gyre sighed. “Then we probably get cut to pieces by constructs.”

“Well. You do. I’ll have to find someone else to hang out with.”

“You’re getting good at this positive thinking, you know that?”

They heard the guard-constructs coming before they saw them, a heartbeat-fast slap of leathery feet on stone. A pair of the things came around the curve of the tunnel, sprinting as fast as a warbird at full gallop. Like Kit’s little spider, they were built of dark, pulsing muscle wrapped around a metal frame. These were soldier-constructs, roughly humanoid, bodies reinforced with steel plates. Bracers on their arms carried long, curved blades.

Gyre held up his hands, hoping they were smart enough to understand the gesture. He took a deep breath and shouted, “Please! I need to speak to Elariel!”

The things didn’t even slow down. Gyre swore and went for his sword.

At the same time, he concentrated and heard a click from the base of his skull. The world suddenly went slow, as though everything was underwater. Shadows fanned out ahead of the two constructs, fading from almost solid to wraithlike—projections of where the things would be a few moments from now, possibilities for how they could change course. Kit’s spider leapt from his shoulder, falling slowly with its legs spread wide.

At Gyre’s side, the energy bottle grew warm. I don’t have much time.

When Gyre himself moved, he felt normal, but he knew the dhaka energy running through his limbs drove him at tremendous speed. He sidestepped the first construct, bringing his sword up at an angle that let the thing’s momentum do most of the work. The ghoul blade sliced neatly through muscle and steel, taking the guard’s arm off below the shoulder. Gyre spun behind it, twisting into a downward chop that removed its other arm, then swung horizontally into the second construct, bisecting it at the waist. Black blood sprayed against the wall.

With another moment of concentration, Gyre disengaged his augmentations, and the world of shadows faded. Time abruptly resumed its normal course. Kit’s spider skittered aside, and the disarmed construct turned awkwardly, dark fluid dripping from its stumps. Its companion fell apart into two halves.

“Listen to me,” Gyre said. Someone has to be able to hear. Naumoriel had been able to find them as soon as they’d gotten close to Refuge, hadn’t he? “I need to speak to Elariel. I don’t want to threaten Refuge, I swear. I was with Naumoriel when he left.” The construct lurched forward, and Gyre jumped away. “Plague it, you gave me this sword! Can anyone hear me?”

More footsteps echoed down the tunnel. Sounds like at least half a dozen. I can’t fight them all. He felt the wall against his back and raised his blade again.

The disarmed thing in front of him abruptly stopped. Gyre once again held his breath, listening to the approaching footfalls grow louder.

“Gyre Silvereye.” A woman’s voice, with a heavy accent, issued incongruously from the construct. It wasn’t Elariel—this ghoul sounded older, and definitely less practiced with the human tongue. “You will come to Refuge for questioning at once. Surrender your weapons to the approaching guardians.”

“Understood,” Gyre said as five more soldier-constructs sprinted into view. He looked down at Kit’s spider. “See? I told you they’d let us in.”

“Oh yeah,” she said as the armored things surrounded them. “This just gets better and better.”

It took the better part of a day to walk to the ghoul city, although truth be told, by the time they got there Gyre had lost track of the hour completely. The constructs set an exhausting pace, but he was glad for their escort—the tunnels branched and twisted, and there was no chance he and Kit would have found their way alone. But the soldier-constructs never hesitated, and eventually they reached a massive pair of doors, which grudgingly pulled apart to admit them.

“So what are we telling them about me?” Kit said in Gyre’s ear as they followed the constructs in. “’Cause let me say up front if they want to come out and mess with my new brain, they can forget about it.”

“I’ll have to play it by ear,” Gyre said quietly. “What Naumoriel was doing was criminal, according to the ghouls, so they may not be happy about you.” He frowned. “You remember the rendezvous, if something goes wrong?”

Kit snorted. “I’m not sure I can forget things anymore. And anyway I’ve got a body there already.”

Gyre nodded. He was still getting used to the idea that Kit could be carrying on a conversation with him while simultaneously performing another task dozens of kilometers away. At least if the ghouls do take exception to her and take this body to bits, she’ll be fine. The same, of course, did not hold true for him.

Beyond the doors was a larger cavern. Much larger, bigger even than the dock at Leviathan’s Womb. Refuge, the last ghoul city, looked at first like a night sky full of dim, twinkling stars. Through Gyre’s silver eye, he could make out more of the shape of it—a vast cave, kilometers wide and hundreds of meters high, studded with enormous columns and rock formations. The stalactites and stalagmites couldn’t be natural, but they had been sculpted to have a rough, organic look, pillars of rock the size of tenement blocks hanging from the ceiling or thrusting up from the cavern floor. Those formations, Gyre knew from previous visits, were honeycombed with rooms and tunnels. Nearby, a small river cascaded out of an opening high in the cavern wall, splashing in a torrential waterfall into a broad pool.

It was a staggering sight, a testament to the power and skill of the ghoul engineers and dhakim. Gyre was almost certainly the only human to have seen it since the Elder War, four hundred years previously. As far as the world knew, the ghouls and the Chosen had wiped one another out—that Refuge had survived was a secret the remaining ghouls would do anything to protect.

There wasn’t much time to admire the view. His escort pointed the way, and they passed quickly through a series of arched doorways and spotless, faintly glowing tunnels. Though Refuge was a ghoul city, actual ghouls were few and far between, and it was constructs they passed in the halls. They came in all shapes and sizes, from tiny messengers smaller than Kit’s spider to great lumbering crabs carrying heavy burdens. Eventually Gyre’s escort halted and a closed door slid open. Gyre went inside, Kit still clinging to his shoulder.

“Gyre Silvereye.” It was the voice that had spoken to him through the soldier-construct. “Please sit.”

The room held only a couple of chairs, with the polished, extruded look of most ghoul furniture. One of them was occupied, so Gyre went to the other, giving a polite bow before he sat down.

The ghoul in the other chair acknowledged him with a bare nod. Like all her kind, she was humanoid but decidedly inhuman in appearance: taller than Gyre, slim enough to look rangy by human standards, and covered all over in dense brown-and-white fur. Her eyes were enormous, filling half her face with huge pupils and narrow whites, and she had long, expressive ears that twitched as she spoke. She wore no clothing, apart from a small metal coil threaded through the base of one ear. Gyre couldn’t say if it was decorative or arcana. When she smiled at him, her teeth were white and finely pointed.

“My name,” she said, with the careful diction of someone speaking a language they’d studied but not used much, “is Tyraves. I am the new Minister of the Exterior.”

“Gyre,” said Gyre. “But you knew that. Thank you for letting me back into the city.”

“It was judged that you may have important information,” Tyraves said. “If you are forthcoming with it, this will be easier for you.”

“I’m happy to tell you anything I can,” Gyre said. “But I would like to speak to Elariel.”

“Elariel”—Tyraves pronounced the name with distaste—“is currently standing trial for her part in the crimes of my… predecessor, Naumoriel.” Her sharp-toothed smile broadened. Gyre didn’t sense much humor in it, and her ears were flattened back against her skull. “Tell me of your association with them. Start from the beginning.”

“That may take some time.”