Spear of Destiny by James Baldwin (little bear else holmelund minarik .TXT) 📕

“No,” Vash admitted. “I do not.”

Karalti clicked and snapped her teeth, ruffling her shoulders with nervous tension.

“I think that this entity possesses people and picks a target on which to project itself.” Vash clumped over to the ruins of the Mother’s Tent. There were five rusted bedframes within the round hoop that was all that was left of the yurt. Only one of them still had a corpse: the skeleton of a tall, thin girl, her hair fluttering in the wind. Tsunda, still bound to her bed with fraying ropes.

“What do you mean?” Karalti went over to him, and tentatively reached out to hug him around the shoulders.

“I mean that this entity loathes itself so intensely that denies its own existence. It can possess minds and souls, but when it gains self-awareness, its own existence is so horrific that it projects itself onto another person,” Vash said bitterly. “It infected Tsunda, so it projected itself onto the person she hated the most: Saaba, her competition for our mother’s love. Now it possesses Ororgael, and he projects its loathsome existence upon his nemesis. You, Dragozin.”

“That... actually makes a whole lot of sense.” I clenched my jaws, rocking my teeth together until the muscles of my jaws bunched. “But what is it? A Drachan? A virus in the system? Both? Ororgael said it’s a sickness plaguing OUROS.”

“Explain to me what ‘Yourose’ is.” He pronounced it like foreign name.

I sighed. How the hell was I supposed to tell Vash about OUROS? How the hell was I going to tell Karalti about OUROS? I glanced at her. “It’s... it’s hard to explain. It’ll take a while. I’d rather not do it here.”

Vash turned back to look out across the field of the dead. “Yes. We must take care of these people and creatures. And after we have burned them, we will withdraw to a place that is not cursed, and we will make a camp. I insist on an explanation, Dragozin. My sister was mad, violently mad, but she could not have done this. No ghost, no matter how hungry, could have done this. These people walked and rode here to their doom, sucked dry of their life, perhaps even their souls. A sixteen-year old girl is not capable of this… annihilation. This is the work of a demon. One from your world, Hector.”

“There are no demons on Earth. There’s no magic, either.” I thought back to the alien voice speaking through my HUD, and shivered. “But Squalor can’t be a person. As far as I know, everyone on Earth are either living in sealed arcologies, or they’re dead from HEX. Archemi’s the ‘real world’ now, as far as I’m concerned.”

“No. Archemi is an illusion.” Vash walked over to one of the mummified Tuun: the body of a young man, shrunken and stiff. His warrior braid clung to his skull, flapping with tatters of red cloth. “A complex, comprehensive, monumental illusion. A fiction comprised of bits and pieces of your world. Cultures, languages, all of it. Karalti, Istvan, myself... all of us were created by Earth’s humans in the course of some kind of game. My childhood memories, the people I cared about, all of it are part of this ‘system’. You do not have to affirm to me this is the truth of our world. I know I am correct.”

I shot Karalti a guilty glance. She was better able to cope with this than someone like Soma or Istvan, but she was forlorn and confused, trying to make sense of what Vash was saying.

“You’re kind of right, and kind of not,” I said. “Look: Let’s take care of the dead, set up a camp, and hash this out over some food and a pipe. I’ll do my best to explain.”

“Yes. You will.” Vash reached out to carefully remove an earring from Temu’s body. “There are so many that we will have to give them mass rites. It is not enough for what they have suffered, but it will have to do. We will make piles, four or five of them. There is no chance of any animal coming to consume these cursed dead. We will have to burn them.”

“I’ll help.” Karalti’s voice was unusually subdued.

I cast another look around the graveyard. The ground was so flat and the air so clear that my enhanced eyes could see from the center of the camp to the edges. Each concentric ring of victims was fresher than the last. Kun Jorgo was among the latest to perish: he was frozen at the ruins of his forge, his mouth open, his skin starting to tan in the wind. The boy who’d worked with him was a ball of ragged clothing beside the furnace, smaller than the mummified dogs that lay scattered on the barren, stony ground.

“Okay.” I sighed, rubbing a hand over my forehead. “I have no idea where to start.”

Vash gazed contemplatively at his old lover’s remains, gently freed the stiff corpse from the frost that bound him and took him into his arms. “We start from the inside and work our way out. Just like any other problem.”

Chapter 54

It took us two nights to clear the dead.

There was no way to give the dead of Tastalgan Plateau a proper funeral. It was customary for Tuun to mourn and keep vigil for three days, then hold a feast in honor of the dead. While the sky burial was taking place, the person’s family and friends ate and drank themselves in a coma until the monks declared the ritual was finished. After the body had been picked clean, the bones of the dead were returned to their loved ones. Some of the more useful pieces would be alchemically tempered and used for crafting special tools. This was way less morbid than it sounded. Most Tuun knew what they wanted to ‘be’, in terms of