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CHAPTER TWENTY

In Which Darkness Proves an Ally

On the other side of Tillspar, the highway is less icy but in generally poorer condition. As the road snakes down the eastern slope of the Sawtooth Mountains there are shelves and valleys with highways of their own—opportunities to turn north or south—but the riders follow the Junction Highway east and down. The air gets warmer, thicker, easier to breathe, and Bruno’s ears pop again and again as the pressure upon them slowly increases.

But every kilometer of road seems to be in greater disrepair than the one before it. As the treaders pass through East Black Forest, potholes give way to craters. And as the solar trees thin out to a simple pine forest, the craters become larger and more frequent. Ironically, just as the road is beginning to straighten and level out, it becomes impossible to follow anything like a straight-line course along it. A treader must needs zigzag between the holes at half speed.

“I’m surprised there’s any pavement here at all,” Radmer says when Bruno remarks on it.

“Nobody looks after this road,” Natan agrees. “It don’t go anywhere.”

At that Radmer muses, “It used to go straight to Crossroads, near the triple point where Imbria and Nubia and Viense come together. It was bigger than Timoch, which back then was a sheep-and-cow town. Manassa was the largest city in the hemisphere, a center of commerce easily rivaling Tosen and Bolo on the south coast. Keep in mind, there were a lot more people then.”

“I remember the Iridium Days well,” Bruno tells him, “if not happily. Lune was the rotting corpse of our Queendom; I couldn’t love it. Couldn’t bear it. I fled because my soul had died and my body refused to follow. But I do remember Manassa. The towers of wellglass all strung together with bridges, and every morning a silence field enforcing ten minutes of meditation . . . When I left they were in a blue period, with every surface glowing in the sun like crystalline bits of sky.”

“Well,” says Radmer, “after the Shattering, Manassa was gone and the Junction Highway led straight into permanent storm, and you had to take the long way around to get to Crossroads. The little towns along the way continued for quite some time afterwards, but one by one they sort of dried up and blew away. This road is two thousand years old, and it’s been, I’ll guess, almost three hundred years since it saw any attention. So like I say, the surprising thing is that there’s any road left.”

Bruno snorts at that. “When I was a boy we were still using Roman roads, older than this one and in far better condition.”

“The Catalan weather was kinder,” Radmer says. “For what it’s worth, there are diamond highways here on Lune that will last until the end of time. This pavement was a high-end temporary, never meant to last so long.”

Ahead of them, finally, the sky above another mountain range has begun to show signs of impending dawn. Even on Lune, the night cannot last forever. And the extra light is welcome, because the riders have finally abandoned the idea of avoiding the rough spots, and are now riding straight through them in a clattering mass. At first the clever six-wheeled suspension of the treaders is adequate to the task, but as the ruts deepen and their shapes become more complex, the wheels begin to exceed their vertical travel limits.

Soon, the heaving bodies of the treaders are pummeling their riders’ legs, and headlight beams are waving up and down so madly that the road might as well be illuminated by strobe lights. Progress slows yet again. They’re still going faster than they would on foot, but that margin is shrinking. Still, Bruno finds he can minimize the beating by crouching in his stirrups—essentially using his legs and back as an extension of the vehicle’s suspension system. And once that principle is established, there’s no reason not to straighten out his back, to stand tall for a better view, to gun the throttle and dance with the bumps.

To his surprise, he’s having a good time, and not feeling guilty about it. Not all the problems of this world are his fault, after all, and this ride is in the service of a noble cause, from which he may very well not return. And that, in truth, may be part of why he’s feeling good; the possibility of death hangs all around him. He nearly died back there in the pass; for Parma and that unlucky rider there was no “nearly” about it.

Bruno has been without useful work for so long that he hasn’t even bothered to count out the span. Thousands of years, certainly. But here he is again, doing something. And his time on this world, on any world, may at last be nearly over—his sins all called to account—so what’s the point in holding back? There’s nothing to keep him from riding to the limits of his ability, and even slightly beyond.

Eventually, he finds himself leading the pack, the wind whipping his hair out behind his helmet as the countryside slowly brightens ahead of him. He doesn’t notice that he’s left his escort behind, or else he notices but manages not to formulate any sort of conscious plan to correct it. But Captain Bordi’s voice calls ahead angrily, “Ako’i, back! Fall back! We’re supposed to be protecting you, damn it! Slow down!”

And when he does so, dropping back among the Dolceti, Bordi glares sternly at Natan and Zuq, telling them, “Stay within arm’s reach of him. Let nothing happen. You boys have taken the berry, taken the vow. You’re expendable; he isn’t.”

“Yes, sir!” the two of them call out ruefully, then cast baleful glares at Bruno.

But when Zuq finally speaks, all he says is, “Where in the hell did you learn to ride like that? You’ve never been on a treader, you said.”

And Bruno’s only answer is a muttered “Beginner’s luck.” Because there’s no point explaining to this boy that he’s ridden a scooter, ridden a car, ridden a skimmer and a broomstick and a horse. Not to mention a grappleship. He’s tried his hand at more different vehicles than Zuq will ever see or imagine; one more doesn’t tax him in the least. And he was never exactly a motor fanatic; he’s simply lived a long time.

Too, there’s the matter of being comfortable in one’s own skin. Bruno knows exactly what his body is and isn’t capable of. If he falls, he knows roughly what injuries he can survive. And he’s far more afraid of embarrassing himself than he is of getting killed, so he will drive this instrument, his body, exactly as he pleases. Indeed, for all their courage and reflexes the Dolceti are indifferent riders, and their pace begins to seem unnaturally slow.

Still, he grits his teeth and perseveres, and hour upon hour the Sawtooth Mountains shrink behind them, while the equally jagged Blood Mountains draw nearer up ahead. They pass a lake, which Natan calls The Lake of the Maidens. They pass a grove of peach pie trees, and another of peach cobblers. They pass five flocks of sheep, and once a shepherd looking down on them from a hilltop, the traditional crook-ended glowstaff in his hands.

Says Zuq, “The shepherds here have magic bottles, in which the milk never sours. Or so the story goes.”

And Bruno answers, “I believe it. Those bottles were common, once.”

“Really? And were there trolls in the hills back then, and mermaids in the sea?”

“There were. And stranger things.”

“‘For the insult, the trolls carried off Gyrelda, and made hard sport of her until Gyraldo stormed their bunker and won her freedom, and gave her a hundred paper dollars for her dowry.’ Is that true?”

Against the wind, Bruno laughs. “Perhaps. There were paper dollars then, inscribed with their value in gold. But the trolls I remember were all fine gentlemen.”

“Amazing. And did the animals really speak in human voices?”

“Ah. That’s probably not true, or at least I’ve no such recollection. But anything’s possible, eh?”

“Used to be,” says Zuq, agreeably. “Would you go back there if you could?”

“To the Iridium? Or the Queendom?”

“I dunno. You tell me.”

Bruno, his hair whipping in the breeze, grins over at the young Dolceti without humor. “My boy, I fear I’d go back to the Queendom if it cost the lives of millions. That’s precisely what we’re up against here: that yearning.”

As the morning slowly inches its way toward sunrise, Bruno can see that there’s something going on with the air behind the Blood Mountains’ forbidding peaks. Some sort of haze, some sort of cloud bank, darker than a mere rainstorm. In the flash of a lightning bolt he even fancies he can see dust and debris spinning around in there, in great, slow arcs and whorls.

“The Stormlands?” Bruno asks.

But Natan and Zuq can only shrug. “Maybe. We never seen it before, sir.”

Finally, the Dolceti out in front have lost track of the road altogether, and are bouncing through one dry wash after another. The wind, too, has taken on a foreboding character, slamming down from above without warning, the downdrafts bursting like town-sized water balloons. And the land has begun to slope upward again. Soon they’re riding up between hills, and then cliffs. Their progress slows yet again, and finally it’s Radmer, not Bordi, who calls a halt.

“Believe it or not, we’re early. I can see the gaps in these hills, but I can’t tell which one is our pass. I don’t think we’ll make any progress here until sunrise.”

“Four-hour halt,” Bordi calls out then, for sunrise is still five hours away. “Everybody eat and sleep.”

But Bruno is too keyed up to do either, and finds himself in a sort of mutual interrogation against Natan and Bordi, who are suddenly curious about his history, there beside a crackling firepit, with Radmer and a dozen Dolceti slumbering nearby.

“You’re a soldier,” they accuse.

Bruno laughs. “I? Taking orders? Marching in straight lines? I was a sort of knight at one point, but that’s a very different thing. Even at the worst of it, there wasn’t much fighting, and still less discipline.”

“A knight for whom?” Bordi presses. “Tara and Toji? Did you stand guard over this world while Radmer and his men crushed it?”

“Er, we’ll, in a manner of speaking.”

“It’s hard to credit,” Natan says, “him being strong enough to carve a whole world. I’ve seen a lot of it; it’s a big place. So why does he need us if he’s such a power? Why can’t he just carve Astaroth right off the globe, and the Glimmer King with it?”

“Hmm. That’s a hard question to answer, lad. I suppose, when you get right down to it, we were only as powerful as our tools. These were exceedingly complex, and when too many of them broke down all at once, we were hard-pressed to repair them. Until that time we’d always seen civilization as an upward climb; it didn’t occur to us there was a down as well. Just as difficult and treacherous, but every step carried us farther from the stars, not closer.”

“Like the air foil,” Bordi suggests, drawing one and examining it. “They’re not making these anymore.”

“Indeed, yes. It’s a more wondrous thing than you probably suspect. But to build another one would take centuries. Whole nations would need to be conscripted, their entire economic surplus diverted, just to build the components of the tools which make this thing possible.”

“Maybe that’s what the Glimmer King is all about,” Natan says. “There’s all this work going on in the world, right? But it’s purposeless. Just shoes and plowshares, lightbulbs and treaders. Some little luxuries on the side. So a fellow comes along who thinks like you, right? But he’s not so agreeable. He sees all this capacity and he wants it, not for shoes and hats but for himself. There’s specific things he plans on building, but first he’s got to own those nations.”

“He means well,” Bruno says without thinking. “In his mind, he’s doing what’s necessary to achieve a kind of . . . paradise.”

Bordi turns and looks at him hard. “You said you didn’t know him.”

“I’ve seen his type,” Bruno answers.

“So you told the Furies. And would we like this paradise of his? Would we be happy there?”

“I, uh . . . I doubt it. Someone would be happy, but certainly not everyone. And even if you bought into the vision somehow, I suspect you’d balk at the cost of getting there. Notably, he isn’t offering you the choice.”

“No. He isn’t. So what’s he got in mind?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Bruno answers honestly. “We had a guy once who wanted to collapse the sun, as a means of opening a window into the future. Even ignoring the enormous loss of life, there was no particular evidence that seeing the future—the end of the future, specifically—would be in any way helpful. Might be a bad thing, who knows? But he didn’t offer a choice, either. These madmen never do.”

“Dulcet berries!” Zuq shouts, from a dozen meters away. “I’ve found dulcet berries. Two whole bushes of them!”

“Get some sleep,” Bordi tells him wearily.

“Never could sleep in the dawn hours,” Zuq answers. “Even when I’m tired, which right now I’m not. Can we do some blindsight, Captain?”

Bordi sighs. “It takes more than berries, boy. It takes courage. Takes equipment. Takes a cocktail of other drugs to get the training burned in properly.”

“But we have all that, sir.”

“Not all of it, no. Sit down and have a meal, why don’t you?”

But Zuq is not so easily deflected. “Never could eat in the dawning, either. Not till sunup, when my stomach comes alive. And sir, we don’t want to be lax on our training. Not at a time like this.”

Natan turns to Bordi. “You’ve got to admire his spunk. Most guys his age do the bare minimum, sweating it beforehand and moaning afterwards. If you could join the Dolceti without actually taking the berry, I swear, there’s a lot of people would do it.”

“So,” Bordi says, “in admiration of his fortitude, you’re volunteering to conduct?”

Natan thinks for a moment, then shrugs. “I don’t sleep in the dawning much, either.”

And Bruno, as curious as ever, chimes in with, “May I participate, Captain? I’ve heard a great deal about this ‘blindsight training,’ and it would be nice to know what’s involved. Firsthand, I mean.”

“I’ll save you the trouble,” Bordi says, unamused. “It’s pain and it’s terror. After their first experience, only one in a hundred ever go back for a second. It’s that bad. You can’t see, and you feel like you can’t breathe.”

“But you can,” Bruno says. “It’s physically safe.”

“Well. Yes, but—”

“The berries aren’t toxic? It won’t injure me to take them?”

“No, but—”

“Captain, I’ve been in some very tight corners in my time. I’m old enough to know my limits, and although you’ve seen me driving recklessly, I promise you I’ll not endanger myself again, so close to the target of our mission. I’ll do my duty, yes? But I would like to take this training. Indeed, it may help save my life when the moment of truth arrives.”

And to that Bordi has no response. But Bruno fancies he can see the man rethinking his opinions about this ancient beggar, Ako’i.


Says Natan, “The idea here is to bypass the conscious parts of your brain. There’s enough intelligence in the limbic to conduct a fight, and it’s fast, so that’s where we’re going this morning. Deep inside. And in the brain stem there’s more than just reflexes. It’s your bird brain, and it’s capable of behavior as complex as any bird, and as fast. That’s where your vision is going: to the birds. Take five berries—five, mind you!—and chew them thoroughly. When you got a good paste in your mouth, swallow it down.”

The berries are smaller than Bruno’s pinkie nail, and the same bright yellow as the Dolceti’s traveling cloaks, but other than that they look like blackberries, or little bunches of grapes. Their taste is overpoweringly sweet, so much so that like the drug, it’s probably a defense mechanism to keep animals from wanting to eat them. Their texture is surprisingly dry and leathery. The paste they form in Bruno’s mouth is like syrup cut with vinegar: dense and sticky, sweetly acrid and vaguely corrosive.

“How often have you done this?” Bruno asks Zuq when he’s choked them down per instruction.

“This’ll be my tenth time. It takes five before the Order will even admit you, and two more harder ones before they’ll give you rank and let you out on assignment. Dolceti are usually older than I am, because most of them can’t handle the berry more than a couple of times a year. Me, I’ve been trying to go every month.”

“So you’re tougher even than the average Dolceti?”

“Aw, it’s not my place to say that. But I’m definitely tougher than when I started.”

“Cut the chatter,” Natan instructs. “Take the yellow pill, and wash it down with a bit of water.”

The yellow pill is tasteless and perfectly spherical. Also very small, but its texture is gritty enough that it doesn’t go down easily.

“Now the white.”

Another sphere, larger and smoother.

“You’ll begin to lose your eyesight in about two minutes. After that, the fear will set in, and Ako’i, I want you to promise not to run off on me when it does. If you can’t handle it—and there’s no shame in it; most people can’t—then just curl up on the ground and we’ll look after you. Believe it or not, you’ll still get something out of the experience.

“The idea is to turn on your amygdala, your fear. We’ll create a behavior loop that bypasses the frontal lobe. Fear’s a tool; the more threatened your limbic feels, the more your behavior follows a preset routine, like a dance step. We’re just giving it a better routine than to run around screaming, see? A higher class of irrationality. There’s a time for being rational, but it’s not when a bullet’s flying at your head.”

“You people can dodge bullets?” Bruno asks, already feeling short of breath.

“That’s what blindsight training is,” Zuq answers, sounding surprised. “Didn’t you know? Sticks, rocks, arrows . . . The training bullets are a special round, oversized and not that fast, but yeah, they’ll be flying right at you. You’ll swat them aside or suffer the consequences.”

This idea fills Bruno with a gnawing dread, or perhaps the drugs are doing that, but either way he finds himself wishing, suddenly and fervently, that he had never pressed Bordi to allow this. What was he thinking? Even if these bullets can’t kill him—and it’s likely that they can’t, at least by ones and twos—he could be maimed. It might be weeks before he grows back all his missing parts!

“What does the blindness do?” he asks, for in spite of everything his curiosity is unimpaired.

“It isn’t blindness,” says Natan, “it’s blindsight. The berries are shutting down your visual cortex, but your optic nerve continues on down to the brain stem. Your inner bird can see just fine, and it’s his reflexes we want. He’s the one we’re training; the conscious ‘you’ is just a passenger.”

“A blind passenger. A terrified passenger.”

“Right. Mentally tied up, to keep you out of the bird’s way.”

Bruno’s vision is turning gray and fuzzy around the edges, which terrifies him. What if something goes wrong? What if it never comes back? To be immorbid and blind . . .

“People experience the training differently,” says Natan. “Some feel divided, like there are several distinct . . . things, entities, living inside their skulls. Some people just remember it as a panic. A blind panic, literally, where they can’t control theirselves. Some remember the whole thing as a set of conscious choices, even when they know it isn’t so. Some remember nothing at all, like their frontal lobe just goes to sleep.”

“Which am I?” Bruno asks, inanely, for how could Natan possibly know that?

Then, with alarming swiftness, his vision shrinks to a tunnel, then a drinking straw. He sees a burst of swirling patterns: lace, spirals, Cartesian grids mapped onto heaving topological surfaces. His life is far too long to flash before his eyes in a moment, but he gets pieces of it: a month of mathematical insights in a Girona tower, a decade as philander in Tamra’s court, an hour in battle armor under the red-hot surface of Mercury. Then nothing at all.

Nothing at all.

Bruno de Towaji, the one-time King of Sol, is blind.

“So fast! I wasn’t . . . ready . . .”

“I’m here with you,” Zuq says, from very nearby.

“Ah!” Bruno replies, fighting not to run. “Ah, God! Can you see anything?”

“No.”

“Try and relax,” says Natan, in a voice much calmer than Zuq’s. “Fear is a tool. Just a state of your brain, which we happen to find convenient. It’s nothing to do with you, the person. Just ride it.”

“In a moment . . . of weakness,” Bruno tries. “I’ve never . . . Rarely has such a moment of weakness been . . . I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I can’t . . . compose—”

“Enough talk, old man. Defend yourself!”

Bruno swats Natan’s hand aside. “Leave me. Alone.” He swats again, and again. Natan is trying to slap him! “Stop it. Stop! Leave me alone!”

And suddenly Bruno realizes what he’s doing: blocking slaps he cannot see. His arms aren’t moving of their own volition—he’s doing it himself, or feels that he is—but the sense, the feeling, the certainty that drives them . . . How does he know? How does he sense the blow coming?

Block. Block. Block block.

“Good,” Natan says. “Take hold of this.”

Bruno reaches out and accepts a wooden staff from Natan. There’s no fumbling in the motion, no guesswork. He even knows the shape before he has it in his hands. He’s aware, dimly, of movement all around him, the jiggling fire, the men rolling over in their sleep, the wind gusting straight down. But he cannot see them. This “blindsight” it isn’t like seeing at all. It isn’t like feeling or hearing. He simply knows.

How terrifying.

“Defend!” Natan commands, and Bruno is raising his staff. Crack! Crack! He blocks a pair of telegraphed blows, and then a shorter, swifter one delivered like a punch. CRACK!

“Attack!” says Natan, and Bruno is too afraid to disobey. Pulling left to avoid Zuq’s fragile human skull, he whirls the staff around and Strikes! Strikes! Strikes!

“Good,” says Natan, falling back to deliver fresh blows of his own.

“What about me?” Zuq asks, from a position Bruno doesn’t have to guess at. “This was supposed to be my—”

“Silence, maggot!” commands Natan. Bruno senses him whirling past in a blur of flesh and wood. Crack! Cracrack! The two of them come together and then separate, come together again.

“Ako’i! Attack! Both of you maggots, come, hit me. As hard as you can!”

Bruno does as he’s bid, and amazingly enough manages not to injure himself or Zuq in the process.

Still curious even in the face of this terrifying blindness, he asks, “Is this right? Is this the training?”

To which Natan just laughs. “Old man, this is the stretching exercise. The training doesn’t start for another fifteen minutes, when your drugs is more than a whisper in the blood. Now shut your hole and fight like a Dolcet Barney.”

“Ah,” Bruno gasps, and blocks a string of five blows.


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