[ bridge over the river farquhar ]
Nicodeme Lazslo Cage was a man of impeccable character, an untarnished moral sense and the even temperament well suited to a young man of his station. It was just unfortunate that he had decided to leave that station for what his distinguished father deemed "a fanciful journey of youthful folly that he will either leave off of and return to his rightful place or die a quite horrible death in one of the nastier places we were never meant to go." That was perhaps the worst part of the entire situation, as far as he was concerned. He absolutely hated it when his father was right and he was wrong.
He greatly doubted that old man Cage had ever heard of Gilead, on the icy shores of the Northern Sea on the world Carrion, but it fit the man’s definition of a nasty place not fit for a gentleman of stature as if it had been formed by the Creator’s own hands to fulfill just that purpose. It was cold as the fires of the darkest circle of hell, the deepest corner reserved for those who betray their friends, and could hardly have been further from civilization if a wall had been built from the base of this damned ground to the peak of the dreary white sky above.
The author of the macabre scene was Captain Ambrose Bierce, who Nico regarded with heavily lidded eyes. Bierce stood on the western bank of the River Farquhar with his men on all sides, their low-tech rifles trained as one on his heart and head. To a man they stood upon an artillery embrasure overlooking the Farquhar Bridge where Nico had been left. He knew that if he moved, he would be riddled with bullets as deadly as any Celpo weapons even in their crudeness. His only hope lay with a young woman who stood at Captain Bierce’s shoulder.
A cold wind blew up the river from the upcountry, and Nico shivered involuntarily. He closed his eyes tightly and looked down at his coal black boots. The slate gray uniform he and Isobella d’Fenwyr had both adopted on this mission provided little protection against the cold, and he briefly wished he either had a greatcoat like Captain Bierce or better yet one of the Celpo cold weather getups. But if Isobella didn’t do anything soon, all the cold in the world wouldn’t matter one whit.
If his partner didn’t do something soon, he would be dead.
He shuddered and looked away from her ice-cold features and to the dull blue sky, and he wasn’t sure which froze his blood more. High above he could see the tiny black dots that at first would appear to be a cloud of locusts before resolving into the clear profiles of Roanese Jackscrews.
The heavily armed paratroopers always fell fast and accurately from low Carrion orbit, descending on their chosen targets with viper-like deadly precision. With the orbital platforms, it was widely known that Emperor Bichass had invaded and taken three neighboring countries in the past two months. And that was why Nico found himself trussed up standing on this lonely bridge, a noose hanging around his neck and tied to the guardrail.
He and Isobel had infiltrated the Gilead Republican Army on a mission from Delta Section, a newly formed division of the Celpo. And, while out searching for a missing manuscript written by someone named Omnibus, Nico had been caught leaving this bridge – red handed, as far as Captain Bierce was concerned. The bridge had been rigged to explode, and if it had done so the defense of the country against the swarming Jackscrews would have been severely hampered.
Nico chanced another glance up at the artillery embrasure, where large ten-inch guns were beginning to blaze in a futile attempt to take down the far-too-quick Jackscrews. Standing three men away from his partner was a face he recognized only from aerial intelligence photographs, though he doubted he could be wrong about the stunningly beautiful woman’s identity. A few strands of her translucent red hair poked out of her gray military cap, and she seemed to straighten a bit when she realized he was looking at her.
Aleksandria Sutton was a suspected member of the mysterious Marathon Apparatus, which was an intelligence organization that had recently become a very annoying thorn in the side of the Celpo. Nicodeme and Isobella has been briefed that she might be operating in Gilead before being dispatched, but Nico had neither seen nor heard any trace of her until she appeared on the artillery embrasure with Bierce and his men. She obviously moved silently and with a precision as deadly as the quickly descending Jackscrews.
He wondered if Isobel knew the woman was standing there. Whether she did or not, Nico had very little doubt in his mind as to whom had actually planted the explosives and then pointed the finger at him.
"Private Caveat," Bierce said, using Cage’s assumed name. They thought he was a traitor – they had no idea he was a Celpo agent and a spy from a far-flung nation. "You stand accused of high treason against the Republic of Gilead, in your cravenly attempts to hand over every free man, woman and child in these snowy lands to the Roanese dogs. How say you?"
Nico blinked. He hadn’t thought Isobel would let the tableau play out this long. How much longer would she wait to act? This was their first mission together – Nico’s first mission, period – but Isobella d’Fenwyr was near legendary in the Celpo, and he had seen vids of her in action. She could probably have taken out every man in that embrasure, even with Sutton standing right there, and not even broken a sweat. But still, she stood stock-still.
"Go thou toward home; where I will never come," Nico said quietly, shaking his head. "Whilst I can shake my sword or hear the drum."
On the artillery embrasure, Captain Bierce blinked. "Treasonous beast," the man said, shaking while his deep, booming voice grew louder and louder. "You mock me with your last words?"
"All’s well that ends well," Nico said, looking not at Bierce but at Isobel. He searched her eyes, but they remained cold. He blinked. She still wasn’t moving.
"Hang the traitor!" Bierce shouted. "Dangle him from this bridge for all men to see, for all men to know that to betray this nation is to die!"
Nicodeme sucked in a sharp breath as his own heartbeat became deafening in his own ears and the violent rushing of the whitewater far below became his entire world. He barely heard the lone soldier who had stood with him on the bridge walked up behind him, and flinched when the man’s rough hands grabbed the back of his thin, gray tunic.
"Isobella…" he whispered, as the soldier shoved him forwards. He tried to look up again, but his partner’s name became his final word as the soldier shoved him over the guardrail and he did a very ungraceful swan dive off the bridge. At first he felt like he would fall forever, but then the burning pain of the noose biting in took hold. He struggled for breath and kicked his feet violently, managing to twist his bound hands from behind him to in front of him. In the back of his mind, where his thoughts were racing at a violent full-tilt, he realized his neck hadn’t snapped on impact.
He then began scraping desperately at his neck with his bound hands, digging his fingers into the skin in a frantic attempt to free his airway. His vision faded out, sight replaced by a dull silver field. The music of the rushing river and his own rapidly increasing heartbeat were all he could hear.
Where was Isobel? Why hadn’t she saved him?
He felt the life draining out of him, when the sluggish words of Captain Bierce reached his ears as if through all the distance of space and time. It was like he was hearing through another man’s ears, hanging from another man’s neck.
"The traitorous bastard isn’t dead," Bierce shouted. "Shoot the monster! Fire at will! Kill him now!"
A dozen shots rang out as one with all the thunder and fury of the gods.
Nico shuddered.
He greatly doubted that old man Cage had ever heard of Gilead, on the icy shores of the Northern Sea on the world Carrion, but it fit the man’s definition of a nasty place not fit for a gentleman of stature as if it had been formed by the Creator’s own hands to fulfill just that purpose. It was cold as the fires of the darkest circle of hell, the deepest corner reserved for those who betray their friends, and could hardly have been further from civilization if a wall had been built from the base of this damned ground to the peak of the dreary white sky above.
The author of the macabre scene was Captain Ambrose Bierce, who Nico regarded with heavily lidded eyes. Bierce stood on the western bank of the River Farquhar with his men on all sides, their low-tech rifles trained as one on his heart and head. To a man they stood upon an artillery embrasure overlooking the Farquhar Bridge where Nico had been left. He knew that if he moved, he would be riddled with bullets as deadly as any Celpo weapons even in their crudeness. His only hope lay with a young woman who stood at Captain Bierce’s shoulder.
A cold wind blew up the river from the upcountry, and Nico shivered involuntarily. He closed his eyes tightly and looked down at his coal black boots. The slate gray uniform he and Isobella d’Fenwyr had both adopted on this mission provided little protection against the cold, and he briefly wished he either had a greatcoat like Captain Bierce or better yet one of the Celpo cold weather getups. But if Isobella didn’t do anything soon, all the cold in the world wouldn’t matter one whit.
If his partner didn’t do something soon, he would be dead.
He shuddered and looked away from her ice-cold features and to the dull blue sky, and he wasn’t sure which froze his blood more. High above he could see the tiny black dots that at first would appear to be a cloud of locusts before resolving into the clear profiles of Roanese Jackscrews.
The heavily armed paratroopers always fell fast and accurately from low Carrion orbit, descending on their chosen targets with viper-like deadly precision. With the orbital platforms, it was widely known that Emperor Bichass had invaded and taken three neighboring countries in the past two months. And that was why Nico found himself trussed up standing on this lonely bridge, a noose hanging around his neck and tied to the guardrail.
He and Isobel had infiltrated the Gilead Republican Army on a mission from Delta Section, a newly formed division of the Celpo. And, while out searching for a missing manuscript written by someone named Omnibus, Nico had been caught leaving this bridge – red handed, as far as Captain Bierce was concerned. The bridge had been rigged to explode, and if it had done so the defense of the country against the swarming Jackscrews would have been severely hampered.
Nico chanced another glance up at the artillery embrasure, where large ten-inch guns were beginning to blaze in a futile attempt to take down the far-too-quick Jackscrews. Standing three men away from his partner was a face he recognized only from aerial intelligence photographs, though he doubted he could be wrong about the stunningly beautiful woman’s identity. A few strands of her translucent red hair poked out of her gray military cap, and she seemed to straighten a bit when she realized he was looking at her.
Aleksandria Sutton was a suspected member of the mysterious Marathon Apparatus, which was an intelligence organization that had recently become a very annoying thorn in the side of the Celpo. Nicodeme and Isobella has been briefed that she might be operating in Gilead before being dispatched, but Nico had neither seen nor heard any trace of her until she appeared on the artillery embrasure with Bierce and his men. She obviously moved silently and with a precision as deadly as the quickly descending Jackscrews.
He wondered if Isobel knew the woman was standing there. Whether she did or not, Nico had very little doubt in his mind as to whom had actually planted the explosives and then pointed the finger at him.
"Private Caveat," Bierce said, using Cage’s assumed name. They thought he was a traitor – they had no idea he was a Celpo agent and a spy from a far-flung nation. "You stand accused of high treason against the Republic of Gilead, in your cravenly attempts to hand over every free man, woman and child in these snowy lands to the Roanese dogs. How say you?"
Nico blinked. He hadn’t thought Isobel would let the tableau play out this long. How much longer would she wait to act? This was their first mission together – Nico’s first mission, period – but Isobella d’Fenwyr was near legendary in the Celpo, and he had seen vids of her in action. She could probably have taken out every man in that embrasure, even with Sutton standing right there, and not even broken a sweat. But still, she stood stock-still.
"Go thou toward home; where I will never come," Nico said quietly, shaking his head. "Whilst I can shake my sword or hear the drum."
On the artillery embrasure, Captain Bierce blinked. "Treasonous beast," the man said, shaking while his deep, booming voice grew louder and louder. "You mock me with your last words?"
"All’s well that ends well," Nico said, looking not at Bierce but at Isobel. He searched her eyes, but they remained cold. He blinked. She still wasn’t moving.
"Hang the traitor!" Bierce shouted. "Dangle him from this bridge for all men to see, for all men to know that to betray this nation is to die!"
Nicodeme sucked in a sharp breath as his own heartbeat became deafening in his own ears and the violent rushing of the whitewater far below became his entire world. He barely heard the lone soldier who had stood with him on the bridge walked up behind him, and flinched when the man’s rough hands grabbed the back of his thin, gray tunic.
"Isobella…" he whispered, as the soldier shoved him forwards. He tried to look up again, but his partner’s name became his final word as the soldier shoved him over the guardrail and he did a very ungraceful swan dive off the bridge. At first he felt like he would fall forever, but then the burning pain of the noose biting in took hold. He struggled for breath and kicked his feet violently, managing to twist his bound hands from behind him to in front of him. In the back of his mind, where his thoughts were racing at a violent full-tilt, he realized his neck hadn’t snapped on impact.
He then began scraping desperately at his neck with his bound hands, digging his fingers into the skin in a frantic attempt to free his airway. His vision faded out, sight replaced by a dull silver field. The music of the rushing river and his own rapidly increasing heartbeat were all he could hear.
Where was Isobel? Why hadn’t she saved him?
He felt the life draining out of him, when the sluggish words of Captain Bierce reached his ears as if through all the distance of space and time. It was like he was hearing through another man’s ears, hanging from another man’s neck.
"The traitorous bastard isn’t dead," Bierce shouted. "Shoot the monster! Fire at will! Kill him now!"
A dozen shots rang out as one with all the thunder and fury of the gods.
Nico shuddered.
Pt.2 – the way it could have been
A rain of bullets surrounded him, and he barely noticed their passing. He thought that briefly he saw a shape charging down from the artillery embrasure, but his vision was so far gone it was more likely a ghost. But then the ghost slammed into him and a voice whispered in his ear.
"Shake that sword, Cage. We’re going home."
A bullet struck the noose rope, and Nico was suddenly falling through the air with Isobel tightly wrapped around him. She whispered something else in his ear as they fell, something about staying under the water. But all too soon the icy water rushed up to meet them and they were torn apart by the rapids. He found that while they fell Isobel had cut the rope that bound his hands and feet, and he reached up to loosen the noose that was still tight around his neck, and touched the sore line there.
He had little enough time to worry about that though, as bullets started to rain down into the water. Some of them passed near enough to scare him, but the spray was so random that he knew none of the shots were aimed. And even if they had been, light deflects in water making it incredibly difficult to hit a small, fast moving shape from a distance.
The clear water was filled with the bubbles of bullets hitting the water and being rapidly slowed down, their trajectories changing and then slowly drifting down to the riverbed. He blinked against the rapidly moving water, and saw Isobel moving slowly upstream. He resolved to follow, but fighting the current was more than his oxygen deprived, nearly strangled body could handle. She slowly widened the gap between them, and as he realized the bullets were no longer coming he decided to come up for air.
He brought his head as little above water as he could, and then dove back underwater. The soldiers were nowhere in sight, so he figured they must have headed downriver, thinking him too weak to fight the current.
Something grabbed his shoulder and he started to struggle, but after a frantic moment he recognized Isobel through the light-bending water. She took his shoulder in hand and began to swim upriver again. He tried to break away under his own power, but lost consciousness.
When he woke back up he was laying on the bank of the river some distance upriver, in the foothills of the low-slung mountains they had come here for. He spat out some water that had been lodged in his throat, and weakly propped himself up on his elbows.
Isobel was standing on the bank of the river, the thin, gray cotton of her GRA uniform clinging tightly to her. Her dark hair was also still soaked, and laying flat down her back. In the cold, bright winter sunlight, set against the wide river and the majestic rolling mountains, she looked like an angel. His guardian angel.
He tried to speak, but coughed up more water.
At the sound, Isobel turned around. "You almost bought it back there," she said.
"You’re bleeding," Nico rasped. He touched his throat at the rough sound of his own voice, and shook his head. The lingering effects of being lynched are many and sundry.
Isobel touched her temple absently, where Nicodeme had indicated. Her hand came away with the tips of her fingers stained crimson. "I must have been scraped by a rock in the river somewhere," she said, coming up to him and crouching down. Up close, he could see the concern in the young woman’s dark brown eyes and the goosebumps forming on her fine, porcelain skin.
He could tell that she was quite definitely as cold as he was, if not colder.
"Are you okay to move?" she asked.
He nodded. "I could use a hand up though."
He held up a hand and she grabbed it in both of hers, leveraging back and yanking him up to his feet. She was surprisingly strong, but he had heard as much. It almost seemed like she would have to grab him to keep him from falling back over, but he managed to steady himself and stare back up at the clear, cold sky.
The Jackscrews were still descending in droves. He almost felt empathy for the poor, technologically-backwards people of this country. They would be overran for sure within a few weeks. But on the pragmatic side, he knew that the Jacks would keep the Gilead military somewhat busy while he and Is tromped around in the mountains. And anyway, he wasn’t so sure he would be letting go of the whole trying to hang him thing anytime soon either.
"Mission protocol," he said.
"Recon the mountains and then proceed up Blueth Pass," Isobel answered, running down the basics of the mission they had both been briefed on in Tasnicaport, what seemed like a lifetime ago. "Satellite imagining indicates that roughly one and a half years ago an unregistered expedition broke off the pass somewhere around here," she said, pulling out a small boxy device that tech had cobbled together for her. A holographic map appeared above it, and she indicated an area marked in red. "Intel indicates the mission objective is at these coordinates."
Nicodeme nodded. "Recon complete," he said, rubbing his neck. Already a welt was forming, and he doubted it would be gone any time soon. "So that part’s done. Shall we?" He offered his arm to Isobel gallantly, but she merely glanced at it before sticking the little box back into her pocket and starting towards a road that looked to lead up the pass.
"Whose idea was it not to bring cold weather gear?" she asked.
"I don’t know," Nico said, admiring Isobel’s sauntering walk from behind. "But shame on him."
A rain of bullets surrounded him, and he barely noticed their passing. He thought that briefly he saw a shape charging down from the artillery embrasure, but his vision was so far gone it was more likely a ghost. But then the ghost slammed into him and a voice whispered in his ear.
"Shake that sword, Cage. We’re going home."
A bullet struck the noose rope, and Nico was suddenly falling through the air with Isobel tightly wrapped around him. She whispered something else in his ear as they fell, something about staying under the water. But all too soon the icy water rushed up to meet them and they were torn apart by the rapids. He found that while they fell Isobel had cut the rope that bound his hands and feet, and he reached up to loosen the noose that was still tight around his neck, and touched the sore line there.
He had little enough time to worry about that though, as bullets started to rain down into the water. Some of them passed near enough to scare him, but the spray was so random that he knew none of the shots were aimed. And even if they had been, light deflects in water making it incredibly difficult to hit a small, fast moving shape from a distance.
The clear water was filled with the bubbles of bullets hitting the water and being rapidly slowed down, their trajectories changing and then slowly drifting down to the riverbed. He blinked against the rapidly moving water, and saw Isobel moving slowly upstream. He resolved to follow, but fighting the current was more than his oxygen deprived, nearly strangled body could handle. She slowly widened the gap between them, and as he realized the bullets were no longer coming he decided to come up for air.
He brought his head as little above water as he could, and then dove back underwater. The soldiers were nowhere in sight, so he figured they must have headed downriver, thinking him too weak to fight the current.
Something grabbed his shoulder and he started to struggle, but after a frantic moment he recognized Isobel through the light-bending water. She took his shoulder in hand and began to swim upriver again. He tried to break away under his own power, but lost consciousness.
When he woke back up he was laying on the bank of the river some distance upriver, in the foothills of the low-slung mountains they had come here for. He spat out some water that had been lodged in his throat, and weakly propped himself up on his elbows.
Isobel was standing on the bank of the river, the thin, gray cotton of her GRA uniform clinging tightly to her. Her dark hair was also still soaked, and laying flat down her back. In the cold, bright winter sunlight, set against the wide river and the majestic rolling mountains, she looked like an angel. His guardian angel.
He tried to speak, but coughed up more water.
At the sound, Isobel turned around. "You almost bought it back there," she said.
"You’re bleeding," Nico rasped. He touched his throat at the rough sound of his own voice, and shook his head. The lingering effects of being lynched are many and sundry.
Isobel touched her temple absently, where Nicodeme had indicated. Her hand came away with the tips of her fingers stained crimson. "I must have been scraped by a rock in the river somewhere," she said, coming up to him and crouching down. Up close, he could see the concern in the young woman’s dark brown eyes and the goosebumps forming on her fine, porcelain skin.
He could tell that she was quite definitely as cold as he was, if not colder.
"Are you okay to move?" she asked.
He nodded. "I could use a hand up though."
He held up a hand and she grabbed it in both of hers, leveraging back and yanking him up to his feet. She was surprisingly strong, but he had heard as much. It almost seemed like she would have to grab him to keep him from falling back over, but he managed to steady himself and stare back up at the clear, cold sky.
The Jackscrews were still descending in droves. He almost felt empathy for the poor, technologically-backwards people of this country. They would be overran for sure within a few weeks. But on the pragmatic side, he knew that the Jacks would keep the Gilead military somewhat busy while he and Is tromped around in the mountains. And anyway, he wasn’t so sure he would be letting go of the whole trying to hang him thing anytime soon either.
"Mission protocol," he said.
"Recon the mountains and then proceed up Blueth Pass," Isobel answered, running down the basics of the mission they had both been briefed on in Tasnicaport, what seemed like a lifetime ago. "Satellite imagining indicates that roughly one and a half years ago an unregistered expedition broke off the pass somewhere around here," she said, pulling out a small boxy device that tech had cobbled together for her. A holographic map appeared above it, and she indicated an area marked in red. "Intel indicates the mission objective is at these coordinates."
Nicodeme nodded. "Recon complete," he said, rubbing his neck. Already a welt was forming, and he doubted it would be gone any time soon. "So that part’s done. Shall we?" He offered his arm to Isobel gallantly, but she merely glanced at it before sticking the little box back into her pocket and starting towards a road that looked to lead up the pass.
"Whose idea was it not to bring cold weather gear?" she asked.
"I don’t know," Nico said, admiring Isobel’s sauntering walk from behind. "But shame on him."
white field
From somewhere near the middle of the pass, Isobel had demanded they scale the mountain. Without gear and in still-wet, thin, cotton uniforms, it had been a task, but once out of the pass Nico was absolutely awestruck. They weren’t anywhere near the peak, but up high enough anyway to have the whole landscape spread out before them in an overwhelming territorial panorama. Frozen fields and snow-dusted forests covered the landscape, and the River Farquhar wove through it all like an icy blue serpent of legend.
The heat generated by the climb had dried Nico’s uniform somewhat, but the cold sweat the exertion brought with it was just as unpleasant if not more so. When he was able to tear himself away from the vista, he wiped the back of his hand across his brow and looked for Is.
Climbing out of the pass hadn’t even broken the young woman’s stride. She was as picturesque as she’d been sitting around the conference table at Tasnicaport before leaving on the mission, and the unconcerned determination painted on her pretty features belied the fact that she’d taken a dunk in an icy river and climbed a mountain all in the span of a few hours.
"What’s this peacemaker we’re looking for, anyway?" he asked, crossing his arms and looking around pensively. Ostentatiously, he did it to look cool. Really though, he was incredibly cold and thought that hugging himself would do something to keep in the warmth. Somehow, it didn’t.
Isobel, on the other hand, looked as comfortable she were walking across her living room and had the thermostat cranked up to a balmy seventy degrees.
The actual temperature was somewhat less than that. Nico wondered if his lips were actually turning blue, or if he was just being a hypochondriac.
Isobel shook her head absently as she walked back and forth, looking at the ground. "Don’t know, don’t care," she said. "Macon wants it though, and if Macon thinks we need it then we need it." She looked up at him and actually smiled for a moment. It lit up her face like a pinball machine, Nico thought. "We’re just grunts, you and me. Halcyon knows I’m glad I’m not the one running Delta Section. Espionage I can handle. Paperwork though?" She made a face and stuck her tongue out.
Nico couldn’t help laughing at the sight, despite the current situation.
"Halcyon," he said after a moment, rolling the word around on his tongue. "Isn’t that the… goddess of life or something, from around these parts? You’re from Blaenau Gwent, aren’t you?"
Isobel shrugged and started combing the ground with her eyes again. "Can’t say I really want to talk about it," she said. "My personnel file is sealed for a reason."
"Oh yeah?" Nico said. "How come?"
"Because the last little puke tried bothering me about what he read in there got fed the wrong end of a hellfire pistol," the raven haired Celpo agent said. "If you get my drift."
"Drift gotten," Nico confirmed, glancing from side to side nervously. Isobel was his partner, but he really knew nothing whatsoever about her. He had just been dispatched to Delta Section, and then assigned to this mission with her. And now he was high on a mountain somewhere in the back of the beyond, and she had just informed him in so many words that she killed the last man to pry into her past.
"Got it!" she squealed quite suddenly, delight dancing in her tone. "Get over here, Cage. This has to be the fissure we’re looking for."
With a deep sense of abiding dread, Nico sidled over to Isobel’s shoulder and glanced down towards the fissure she had found. More like a chasm, he thought, and lined with cold, blue ice all the way down. He stole a quick look out the corner of his eye at his partner, and wondered how he had ever been afraid of her. He was a good foot and a half taller than the girl, and she looked like a wet noodle was probably stronger than her.
But then he remembered that look in her eyes he had seen while he was hanging from the Farquhar River Bridge, that cold look that could have frozen the sun in the sky and pulled the stars screaming down to the earth. And he took a surreptitious step backwards from the fissure.
She noticed and laughed at him. "You’re not going down there, Cage," she said. "Don’t worry, kid. I’m the one with the field experience, I’m the one who gets the tough jobs."
He offered her a deadpan look. "And being lynched isn’t dangerous?"
She was down on one knee, going through a pack that had been strapped around her waist and resting on one hip, and she glanced up at him with the same deadpan. "No, it was stupid," she said. "You made me blow cover, you stupid shit."
"And thank the Creator you did," he said, rubbing his neck.
Isobel pulled a thin rope from the pack and stood, smiling. "Well, I couldn’t pass up a chance to dunk you in the river, could I? You’ve got a cute little ass when your pants are all soaked and clingy after a little swim, you know."
She crossed to the other side of the fissure while he stood rooted in place, jaw working, trying to recover enough to speak. She was making fun of him, of course. He knew that objectively, and it made no sense in the context of the delicacy of their mission, but that didn’t change the fact that he had a nasty tendency to turn into a gibbering fool around a pretty girl.
And suddenly he was noticing exactly how pretty a girl Isobella d’Fenwyr was.
"This is another place full field gear would come in handy," she said, tying a hitch in the rope and then piling the majority of it down in wide loops on the frozen ground. "Okay, you’re going to have to brace yourself and hang onto this while I rappel down the fissure. You’ll be able to use the hitch to feed me more line, if I need it. There just isn’t anywhere to tie off to. But you shouldn’t have any trouble holding up little old me, right?"
Nico shrugged. "And you expect to find Macon’s peace whozit down there?"
"I expect to find what I find. If I don’t go, we’ll never know, right?" He handed him the hitch and smiled. "Brace yourself, kid. The first one’s a real jolt." And she jumped backwards into the fissure. Nicodeme stumbled away from the fissure in surprise when she did so, trying to gain an adequate footing. When she came to a stop and the slack came out of the rope, it was a strain to not slide forwards and into the gaping fissure himself.
"Make this quick," he grunted, taking a laborious step backwards before Isobel could make her next rappel. "Macon would hand me my junk in a jar if I get you splattered all over the bottom of some fissure in the back of the beyond."
"No fun in hurrying," Isobel sang back, her words echoing out of the fissure. "You’ve got the stop and smell the roses sometimes, Cage. Can’t always let life pass you by like you’re standing still. Otherwise what’s the point of even having been here?"
Nico started to reply, but a thunderclap interrupted him. Then there was a wet slap, followed by a small caliber bullet flying out the front of his shoulder. He watched it with detached curiosity for about a tenth, and then the pain registered. At that point he was pitched forward and released the rope as his hands spasmed open.
The hitch Isobel had tied around his ankle caught a moment later, but not before throwing Isobel into a momentary freefall. Then, without a solid footing and only holding onto the rope by virtue of it being tied around his ankle, he started being pulled towards the fissure.
"Hey, watch what you’re doing up there numb nuts!" Isobel yelled. "Hey! Hey! Quit sliding me! This rock is hard you stupid shit!"
Nico scrambled to a sitting position and grabbed onto the rope with both hands. He nearly blacked out when a very hard boot clocked him on the back of the head and his vision exploded in a white cacophony of stars, but he sucked it up and crawled away.
"Sorry cowgirl," came the honeyed tones of an upsettingly familiar woman, whose identity Nico confirmed when he scrambled to his feet and turned around. "Your boy’s a little busy up here."
"What?" Isobel yelled. "Who the hell is that? Cage, I need some more rope. I’m not to the bottom yet. Quit fucking around up there."
"I’m a little busy," Nico muttered, shaking his head clear.
"Doing what?" Isobel snapped. "This is important."
"So’s being shot," Nico said, rubbing his shoulder with his free hand. It came away wet, the fingers soaked with blood. "Aleks Sutton?" he asked.
The pretty redhead nodded, pushing back the hood of her thick, white parka. She obviously didn’t work for Delta Section, judging from the fact that she actually had cold weather gear. "Pleasure’s all yours, I’m sure," she said, advancing on him with her Scandian needle gun at the ready. "Now, what could a hung young man like yourself be fishing for in these here mountains? What indeed." She paused, as if thoughtful. "Could it be a mysterious item of local legend and myth?"
Nico backed away strategically, as she spoke. His eyes didn’t leave her weapon; his shoulder wouldn’t let him forget it. "You’re not getting it," he said.
Sutton laughed. It was a warm sound, at odds with both her surroundings and the expression of intense anger she wore. "The Marathon Apparatus will have that little miracle machine if I have to kill every last little Celpo agent on this damned rock to get it," she said. "You and your little girlfriend-on-a-rope won’t even make me bat an eye."
"I’m not his girlfriend, you low rent knockoff!" Isobel yelled.
"I’m tired of listening to your whore," Sutton said. With a movement faster than Nico could react to, she shot the rope, splitting it neatly in two. A muffled thumping sound, and then a much louder thud followed the ringing shot. "Oh, mercy me. What have I done?"
"You stupid bitch!" Nico yelled, leaping for Sutton. She fired at him, but his inertia threw the shot wide and he knocked her onto the icy rocks. He struggled to pin her, but she rolled out from under him like a greased up pig. Then while he was still on the ground and struggling to bring himself around, she kicked violently at his shoulder, where the blood stained his light gray tunic.
The pain laid him out flat, and the Apparatus agent proceeded to straddle him and punch him in the face three times before he could catch her wrist and pitch her off of him. She flew several yards before rolling back up into a crouched position that looked like something out of the martial arts movies Nico liked to watch so much.
For his part, he had taken the basic self-defense courses taught by the Celpo. This was the first time he’d ever put them to practical use though, and he was finding them severely lacking against someone who actually knew what they were doing. Even a female someone.
"If you hurt her, I’ll take you apart with my bare hands," he vowed. "If she’s dead, I fucking promise you, you’ll long for death."
"Emotional attachments make you weak," Sutton snapped, launching a violent roundhouse kick at him that he barely managed to dodge. The flurry of punches she followed it up with nearly all hit their marks though, and he tried to go on the offensive again with disastrous results. She turned his punch back on him and sent him hurtling to the ground.
He picked himself up, rubbing his sore and bleeding knuckles. "Emotional attachments make us human," he argued. "If you don’t have anyone you’re close to, anything you care about, you’re no better than an animal."
"Humanity is highly overrated," Sutton responded, kicking him in the chest and sending him to the ground again. "Tell me about humanity when your family is killed right before you in the name of Empire and nothing else. Tell me about it then, Celpo."
Sutton squealed suddenly and pitched over on him. He instinctively threw her off and scrambled to his feet, ready to face whatever new threat had knocked his newest enemy off her feet. He sighed when he saw Isobel standing there, her boot print in Sutton’s back and a smile on her face.
"I’ll tell you a story, Apparatus," the young woman said, spitting the word out like a boxer spitting blood and teeth. "It goes a little like this: you framed my partner and almost got him killed, and you got me dropped down an icy hole. Then I climbed out of the hole and kicked your sorry ass like the two-bit-whore you are. And that’s pretty much the end. Want me to tell another one?"
The Apparatus agent drew herself into a crouch, scowling darkly at Nico and Isobel. Her hand twitched over a holster, but Nico shook his finger. "Ah, ah, ah," he admonished. "I wouldn’t do that if I were you." He held a small white pistol in his own hand, and had it trained on the enemy agent. "Balefire makes for one hell of a bad hair day."
"This isn’t over," Sutton snarled, backing away from them. "You blindsided me this time, but next time I’ll take you both down hard. Count on it.." She brought up her wrist and shouted into it. "Extraction!"
Instantly a dark rope fell from the sky, and Nico looked up. A silent black helicopter had descended from the seemingly empty sky without any warning whatsoever. Sutton leapt at the rope, and the helicopter sped away. Nico held the hellfire pistol up, attempting to draw a bead.
Isobel forced his arm down and shook her head. "I don’t think so," she said.
"Why?" Nico demanded. "She almost got us both killed. She’d take the shot if the situation was reversed."
Isobel smiled and tapped the icy black box she’d retrieved from the depths on her thigh. "Yeah," she said. "But you’re not that good of a shot, kid. You’d erase half the mountain before you ever came close. Just save it for next time, and face it. You let her get away."
Nico holstered his pistol and squinted into the cold, blue sky. The helicopter was already gone, like it had never even been there in the first place. "Oh," he said. "Shit."
From somewhere near the middle of the pass, Isobel had demanded they scale the mountain. Without gear and in still-wet, thin, cotton uniforms, it had been a task, but once out of the pass Nico was absolutely awestruck. They weren’t anywhere near the peak, but up high enough anyway to have the whole landscape spread out before them in an overwhelming territorial panorama. Frozen fields and snow-dusted forests covered the landscape, and the River Farquhar wove through it all like an icy blue serpent of legend.
The heat generated by the climb had dried Nico’s uniform somewhat, but the cold sweat the exertion brought with it was just as unpleasant if not more so. When he was able to tear himself away from the vista, he wiped the back of his hand across his brow and looked for Is.
Climbing out of the pass hadn’t even broken the young woman’s stride. She was as picturesque as she’d been sitting around the conference table at Tasnicaport before leaving on the mission, and the unconcerned determination painted on her pretty features belied the fact that she’d taken a dunk in an icy river and climbed a mountain all in the span of a few hours.
"What’s this peacemaker we’re looking for, anyway?" he asked, crossing his arms and looking around pensively. Ostentatiously, he did it to look cool. Really though, he was incredibly cold and thought that hugging himself would do something to keep in the warmth. Somehow, it didn’t.
Isobel, on the other hand, looked as comfortable she were walking across her living room and had the thermostat cranked up to a balmy seventy degrees.
The actual temperature was somewhat less than that. Nico wondered if his lips were actually turning blue, or if he was just being a hypochondriac.
Isobel shook her head absently as she walked back and forth, looking at the ground. "Don’t know, don’t care," she said. "Macon wants it though, and if Macon thinks we need it then we need it." She looked up at him and actually smiled for a moment. It lit up her face like a pinball machine, Nico thought. "We’re just grunts, you and me. Halcyon knows I’m glad I’m not the one running Delta Section. Espionage I can handle. Paperwork though?" She made a face and stuck her tongue out.
Nico couldn’t help laughing at the sight, despite the current situation.
"Halcyon," he said after a moment, rolling the word around on his tongue. "Isn’t that the… goddess of life or something, from around these parts? You’re from Blaenau Gwent, aren’t you?"
Isobel shrugged and started combing the ground with her eyes again. "Can’t say I really want to talk about it," she said. "My personnel file is sealed for a reason."
"Oh yeah?" Nico said. "How come?"
"Because the last little puke tried bothering me about what he read in there got fed the wrong end of a hellfire pistol," the raven haired Celpo agent said. "If you get my drift."
"Drift gotten," Nico confirmed, glancing from side to side nervously. Isobel was his partner, but he really knew nothing whatsoever about her. He had just been dispatched to Delta Section, and then assigned to this mission with her. And now he was high on a mountain somewhere in the back of the beyond, and she had just informed him in so many words that she killed the last man to pry into her past.
"Got it!" she squealed quite suddenly, delight dancing in her tone. "Get over here, Cage. This has to be the fissure we’re looking for."
With a deep sense of abiding dread, Nico sidled over to Isobel’s shoulder and glanced down towards the fissure she had found. More like a chasm, he thought, and lined with cold, blue ice all the way down. He stole a quick look out the corner of his eye at his partner, and wondered how he had ever been afraid of her. He was a good foot and a half taller than the girl, and she looked like a wet noodle was probably stronger than her.
But then he remembered that look in her eyes he had seen while he was hanging from the Farquhar River Bridge, that cold look that could have frozen the sun in the sky and pulled the stars screaming down to the earth. And he took a surreptitious step backwards from the fissure.
She noticed and laughed at him. "You’re not going down there, Cage," she said. "Don’t worry, kid. I’m the one with the field experience, I’m the one who gets the tough jobs."
He offered her a deadpan look. "And being lynched isn’t dangerous?"
She was down on one knee, going through a pack that had been strapped around her waist and resting on one hip, and she glanced up at him with the same deadpan. "No, it was stupid," she said. "You made me blow cover, you stupid shit."
"And thank the Creator you did," he said, rubbing his neck.
Isobel pulled a thin rope from the pack and stood, smiling. "Well, I couldn’t pass up a chance to dunk you in the river, could I? You’ve got a cute little ass when your pants are all soaked and clingy after a little swim, you know."
She crossed to the other side of the fissure while he stood rooted in place, jaw working, trying to recover enough to speak. She was making fun of him, of course. He knew that objectively, and it made no sense in the context of the delicacy of their mission, but that didn’t change the fact that he had a nasty tendency to turn into a gibbering fool around a pretty girl.
And suddenly he was noticing exactly how pretty a girl Isobella d’Fenwyr was.
"This is another place full field gear would come in handy," she said, tying a hitch in the rope and then piling the majority of it down in wide loops on the frozen ground. "Okay, you’re going to have to brace yourself and hang onto this while I rappel down the fissure. You’ll be able to use the hitch to feed me more line, if I need it. There just isn’t anywhere to tie off to. But you shouldn’t have any trouble holding up little old me, right?"
Nico shrugged. "And you expect to find Macon’s peace whozit down there?"
"I expect to find what I find. If I don’t go, we’ll never know, right?" He handed him the hitch and smiled. "Brace yourself, kid. The first one’s a real jolt." And she jumped backwards into the fissure. Nicodeme stumbled away from the fissure in surprise when she did so, trying to gain an adequate footing. When she came to a stop and the slack came out of the rope, it was a strain to not slide forwards and into the gaping fissure himself.
"Make this quick," he grunted, taking a laborious step backwards before Isobel could make her next rappel. "Macon would hand me my junk in a jar if I get you splattered all over the bottom of some fissure in the back of the beyond."
"No fun in hurrying," Isobel sang back, her words echoing out of the fissure. "You’ve got the stop and smell the roses sometimes, Cage. Can’t always let life pass you by like you’re standing still. Otherwise what’s the point of even having been here?"
Nico started to reply, but a thunderclap interrupted him. Then there was a wet slap, followed by a small caliber bullet flying out the front of his shoulder. He watched it with detached curiosity for about a tenth, and then the pain registered. At that point he was pitched forward and released the rope as his hands spasmed open.
The hitch Isobel had tied around his ankle caught a moment later, but not before throwing Isobel into a momentary freefall. Then, without a solid footing and only holding onto the rope by virtue of it being tied around his ankle, he started being pulled towards the fissure.
"Hey, watch what you’re doing up there numb nuts!" Isobel yelled. "Hey! Hey! Quit sliding me! This rock is hard you stupid shit!"
Nico scrambled to a sitting position and grabbed onto the rope with both hands. He nearly blacked out when a very hard boot clocked him on the back of the head and his vision exploded in a white cacophony of stars, but he sucked it up and crawled away.
"Sorry cowgirl," came the honeyed tones of an upsettingly familiar woman, whose identity Nico confirmed when he scrambled to his feet and turned around. "Your boy’s a little busy up here."
"What?" Isobel yelled. "Who the hell is that? Cage, I need some more rope. I’m not to the bottom yet. Quit fucking around up there."
"I’m a little busy," Nico muttered, shaking his head clear.
"Doing what?" Isobel snapped. "This is important."
"So’s being shot," Nico said, rubbing his shoulder with his free hand. It came away wet, the fingers soaked with blood. "Aleks Sutton?" he asked.
The pretty redhead nodded, pushing back the hood of her thick, white parka. She obviously didn’t work for Delta Section, judging from the fact that she actually had cold weather gear. "Pleasure’s all yours, I’m sure," she said, advancing on him with her Scandian needle gun at the ready. "Now, what could a hung young man like yourself be fishing for in these here mountains? What indeed." She paused, as if thoughtful. "Could it be a mysterious item of local legend and myth?"
Nico backed away strategically, as she spoke. His eyes didn’t leave her weapon; his shoulder wouldn’t let him forget it. "You’re not getting it," he said.
Sutton laughed. It was a warm sound, at odds with both her surroundings and the expression of intense anger she wore. "The Marathon Apparatus will have that little miracle machine if I have to kill every last little Celpo agent on this damned rock to get it," she said. "You and your little girlfriend-on-a-rope won’t even make me bat an eye."
"I’m not his girlfriend, you low rent knockoff!" Isobel yelled.
"I’m tired of listening to your whore," Sutton said. With a movement faster than Nico could react to, she shot the rope, splitting it neatly in two. A muffled thumping sound, and then a much louder thud followed the ringing shot. "Oh, mercy me. What have I done?"
"You stupid bitch!" Nico yelled, leaping for Sutton. She fired at him, but his inertia threw the shot wide and he knocked her onto the icy rocks. He struggled to pin her, but she rolled out from under him like a greased up pig. Then while he was still on the ground and struggling to bring himself around, she kicked violently at his shoulder, where the blood stained his light gray tunic.
The pain laid him out flat, and the Apparatus agent proceeded to straddle him and punch him in the face three times before he could catch her wrist and pitch her off of him. She flew several yards before rolling back up into a crouched position that looked like something out of the martial arts movies Nico liked to watch so much.
For his part, he had taken the basic self-defense courses taught by the Celpo. This was the first time he’d ever put them to practical use though, and he was finding them severely lacking against someone who actually knew what they were doing. Even a female someone.
"If you hurt her, I’ll take you apart with my bare hands," he vowed. "If she’s dead, I fucking promise you, you’ll long for death."
"Emotional attachments make you weak," Sutton snapped, launching a violent roundhouse kick at him that he barely managed to dodge. The flurry of punches she followed it up with nearly all hit their marks though, and he tried to go on the offensive again with disastrous results. She turned his punch back on him and sent him hurtling to the ground.
He picked himself up, rubbing his sore and bleeding knuckles. "Emotional attachments make us human," he argued. "If you don’t have anyone you’re close to, anything you care about, you’re no better than an animal."
"Humanity is highly overrated," Sutton responded, kicking him in the chest and sending him to the ground again. "Tell me about humanity when your family is killed right before you in the name of Empire and nothing else. Tell me about it then, Celpo."
Sutton squealed suddenly and pitched over on him. He instinctively threw her off and scrambled to his feet, ready to face whatever new threat had knocked his newest enemy off her feet. He sighed when he saw Isobel standing there, her boot print in Sutton’s back and a smile on her face.
"I’ll tell you a story, Apparatus," the young woman said, spitting the word out like a boxer spitting blood and teeth. "It goes a little like this: you framed my partner and almost got him killed, and you got me dropped down an icy hole. Then I climbed out of the hole and kicked your sorry ass like the two-bit-whore you are. And that’s pretty much the end. Want me to tell another one?"
The Apparatus agent drew herself into a crouch, scowling darkly at Nico and Isobel. Her hand twitched over a holster, but Nico shook his finger. "Ah, ah, ah," he admonished. "I wouldn’t do that if I were you." He held a small white pistol in his own hand, and had it trained on the enemy agent. "Balefire makes for one hell of a bad hair day."
"This isn’t over," Sutton snarled, backing away from them. "You blindsided me this time, but next time I’ll take you both down hard. Count on it.." She brought up her wrist and shouted into it. "Extraction!"
Instantly a dark rope fell from the sky, and Nico looked up. A silent black helicopter had descended from the seemingly empty sky without any warning whatsoever. Sutton leapt at the rope, and the helicopter sped away. Nico held the hellfire pistol up, attempting to draw a bead.
Isobel forced his arm down and shook her head. "I don’t think so," she said.
"Why?" Nico demanded. "She almost got us both killed. She’d take the shot if the situation was reversed."
Isobel smiled and tapped the icy black box she’d retrieved from the depths on her thigh. "Yeah," she said. "But you’re not that good of a shot, kid. You’d erase half the mountain before you ever came close. Just save it for next time, and face it. You let her get away."
Nico holstered his pistol and squinted into the cold, blue sky. The helicopter was already gone, like it had never even been there in the first place. "Oh," he said. "Shit."
The snow was thick underfoot and Nicodeme thought he would probably be suffocated by the new snowfall, before long. He rubbed the welt on his neck, which seemed to be growing larger, and squinted into the heavy curtain of white. He could just barely make out Isobel’s bobbing form several meters ahead. She seemed an indomitable wellspring of energy while he felt sapped to his core.
He walked despite the fact that his feet felt like they were strapped with fifty pound lead weights because he had to. He had to fight as long as there were battles to be joined, and he couldn’t go home as long as there was a path to be marched.
It was getting dark out, and he had to blink to keep his eyes free of the pelting snow. Sometimes he thought he could make out the horizon in the distance, or maybe some lights from the town he and Isobel were headed to. But it could well have just been his mind playing tricks on him. He rubbed his neck and sucked in a labored breath. Over the last several hours the pain in his neck had only grown worse, and now it was beginning to get a little difficult to breath.
He thought about Tasnicaport and his father’s home there, and he thought about his job with the Celpo – the job his father had fought him tooth and nail against taking – and he thought about Isoble, who was carrying the peacemaker and leading the charge through the snow. He wondered if they would ever reach the town, or if in the spring they would be found, huddled together for warmth in the snowmelt. Intellectually he didn’t care if he ever saw his father’s estate again, but it was a far cry from thinking that intellectually and being faced with the very real prospect of it coming true.
He couldn’t go home though. There was no home to go to, not anymore. Not so long as he was a Celpo, not so long as he had his marching orders.
He took one more step towards Isobel, reaching out through the wall of white and starting to say her name. The first syllable was as far as he got though.
Then he ate snow.
Isobel stood over him, and her lips were blue. She was saying something that he couldn’t make out, and the wind was really whipping her long, auburn hair around her face. He reached out towards her, but she seemed impossibly far away, like the sun. Then she touched his hand and pushed it down to his chest, and he smiled.
He tried to smile.
The fact that his lips were frozen halfway between a grimace and a frown made it difficult, and he eventually stopped trying. He tried to blink, but his eyelids were frozen open. He thought the snow should probably be irritating his eyes, but it wasn’t. He was somewhat foggy anyway, and wasn’t completely sure he wasn’t missing some time in between falling and Isobel finding him.
And then the light started to come from Isobel’s hand.
"You’re glowing," he whispered, his tongue cold and sluggish.
"Be quiet, stupid," Isobel responded. She said something else, but he couldn’t hear it. His ears were too full of the light, which had taken on a tangible, thick quality. He’d read about synesthesia in books – his father had always paid for the best private schools, the best private tutors, and they were very big on transcendental concepts and useless ideas – but he wasn’t ready for any kind of a melding of his senses to actually happen. It punched his already threadbare mind straight in the face, and he was convinced he had started to bleed from his eyes.
The snow continued to pound through the light, and he closed his eyes to staunch the flow of blood, which had melted the ice crystals.
He touched the tender welt that circled his neck, which was starting to throb. Even while the light that was pouring from Isobel’s hand stole the cold from his bones, the pain of his lynch-wound became even more painful.
He opened his eyes, and the snow was red and fell from a red sky. Isobel was still over him, but she was no longer the angel he remembered, and her hair was blowing in a fiery wreath around her head while she smiled maniacally down at him. When she saw that his eyes were open she bent over, holding a closed fist in front of his face. From between the fingers burst a horrible, untoward light. And the light that spilled from those tiny cracks was the light that melted snow and brought blood, the light of the charnel pits of hell.
And then she opened her fist, and she showed him what she held in her palm.
INSERT INTO Posts VALUES (293,'Pathos, Logos, Ethos Pt.5 – [ iso belle ]',9,'2002-11-08',3,'He walked despite the fact that his feet felt like they were strapped with fifty pound lead weights because he had to. He had to fight as long as there were battles to be joined, and he couldn’t go home as long as there was a path to be marched.
It was getting dark out, and he had to blink to keep his eyes free of the pelting snow. Sometimes he thought he could make out the horizon in the distance, or maybe some lights from the town he and Isobel were headed to. But it could well have just been his mind playing tricks on him. He rubbed his neck and sucked in a labored breath. Over the last several hours the pain in his neck had only grown worse, and now it was beginning to get a little difficult to breath.
He thought about Tasnicaport and his father’s home there, and he thought about his job with the Celpo – the job his father had fought him tooth and nail against taking – and he thought about Isoble, who was carrying the peacemaker and leading the charge through the snow. He wondered if they would ever reach the town, or if in the spring they would be found, huddled together for warmth in the snowmelt. Intellectually he didn’t care if he ever saw his father’s estate again, but it was a far cry from thinking that intellectually and being faced with the very real prospect of it coming true.
He couldn’t go home though. There was no home to go to, not anymore. Not so long as he was a Celpo, not so long as he had his marching orders.
He took one more step towards Isobel, reaching out through the wall of white and starting to say her name. The first syllable was as far as he got though.
Then he ate snow.
Isobel stood over him, and her lips were blue. She was saying something that he couldn’t make out, and the wind was really whipping her long, auburn hair around her face. He reached out towards her, but she seemed impossibly far away, like the sun. Then she touched his hand and pushed it down to his chest, and he smiled.
He tried to smile.
The fact that his lips were frozen halfway between a grimace and a frown made it difficult, and he eventually stopped trying. He tried to blink, but his eyelids were frozen open. He thought the snow should probably be irritating his eyes, but it wasn’t. He was somewhat foggy anyway, and wasn’t completely sure he wasn’t missing some time in between falling and Isobel finding him.
And then the light started to come from Isobel’s hand.
"You’re glowing," he whispered, his tongue cold and sluggish.
"Be quiet, stupid," Isobel responded. She said something else, but he couldn’t hear it. His ears were too full of the light, which had taken on a tangible, thick quality. He’d read about synesthesia in books – his father had always paid for the best private schools, the best private tutors, and they were very big on transcendental concepts and useless ideas – but he wasn’t ready for any kind of a melding of his senses to actually happen. It punched his already threadbare mind straight in the face, and he was convinced he had started to bleed from his eyes.
The snow continued to pound through the light, and he closed his eyes to staunch the flow of blood, which had melted the ice crystals.
He touched the tender welt that circled his neck, which was starting to throb. Even while the light that was pouring from Isobel’s hand stole the cold from his bones, the pain of his lynch-wound became even more painful.
He opened his eyes, and the snow was red and fell from a red sky. Isobel was still over him, but she was no longer the angel he remembered, and her hair was blowing in a fiery wreath around her head while she smiled maniacally down at him. When she saw that his eyes were open she bent over, holding a closed fist in front of his face. From between the fingers burst a horrible, untoward light. And the light that spilled from those tiny cracks was the light that melted snow and brought blood, the light of the charnel pits of hell.
And then she opened her fist, and she showed him what she held in her palm.
"Drink this. You’re burning up."
Nico blinked. He was covered in several heavy blankets made of a rough-spun cotton that felt like they also had boar’s hair woven in, just for extra discomfort. And Isobel was right – he was burning up. But when he shifted the blankets just a little bit and the air of the room touched his skin, it was like the icy hand of death had reached down the back of his shirt.
He tried to shift a little to look around the room, but couldn’t see much. His vision was incredibly blurry, like it had been before he got the laser procedure done on his eyes a few years back. He could tell that they were in the common room of some kind of inn though, and he sneezed when he smelled the stein Is had pushed under his nose.
"Strong," he muttered.
"No shit it’s strong," the Celpo agent snapped. "Now drink it before it go get a funnel and pour it in you. We can’t stay here long, Nico. The longer we’re in any one place the more chance we have of being caught."
"Caught by who?" Nico asked, somehow managing to take a sip of the mulled wine without exposing any part of his skin. He could feel the warmth rushing through him from his fingers to his toes and all points in between, but he still felt like death, even if it was death warmed over.
"Nico’s brain has gone bye-bye," Isobel hissed, ducking down low and pushing Nicodeme’s head down in a similar fashion. Nico blinked as some of the mulled wine spilled out and onto his face. He started to protest, but Isobel clamped her hand over his mouth. A few minutes ago he would have let that pass without question, but the wine had put a little bit of fire back in his soul, or at least stoked the coals that remained.
"What in the name of the Creator do you think you’re doing?" he demanded, quietly.
"You’re too conspicuous with all those one," she answered, pulling the blankets off of him. "You’ve got some kind of fever, but all the heat was leeched out of you anyway, and you needed them to keep the heat in. It’s time we were going now, though."
He started to fight her, but then slumped back in his seat and took another slug off of the wine. She stood and started to take off the last of the blankets – more of a scarf, really – but tied it around his neck to hide the now-blackened welt instead. She then grabbed him by the back of his shirt and pulled him out of his seat.
"We’re going," she announced.
The wine spilled out on Nico’s boots when Isobel yanked him backwards by his wrist, but he chose to drop the stein and follow quickly after her instead of arguing about it. About one thought in ten was clear or cogent enough to be considered normal, and most of them were either about how he should listen to Isobel or about how he should just flat out run for the hills.
He’d just come from the hills though, and that wasn’t a place he was too eager to be returning to. Sooner return home with sword in hand and the fight not fought.
Outside of the tavern, he grabbed Isobel’s shoulders and slammed her up against the building, causing several wood shakes to fall off. She struggled, but he was stronger even in his weakened state. "You were an angel," he whispered, suddenly afraid of his own voice and the insanity there. Part of that fear came from how closely the insanity in his voice mirrored the muddied thoughts careening through his cold-soaked head. The rest came from the uncertainty.
"I’m just a girl," Isobel said. "Let me go, damn it."
"But you weren’t an angel anymore," Nico continued. "You were a devil. What did you do to me? What did you do to me!"
Isobel squirmed more, but she couldn’t break free. "I’m just a girl, you fruit loop," she snapped. "Now let’s get the hell off this street before somebody sees us!"
Nico scowled and span her into the alley that the tavern bordered on. She stumbled on the snow-slicked cobblestones and fell to her knees, but he didn’t move to help her. Something had taken over, and all the feelings he’d had for her such a short time ago were gone. Confusion had taken over, and confusion matched with anger and this sudden burst of strength was a demon he’d have just as soon left untapped.
"What did you do?" he seethed.
Isobel crouched at the back of the narrow alley on her hands and knees, her long, auburn hair trailing in the snow. Somehow she’d come across a heavy parka, and Nico noticed in passing that he was wearing a similar one. She didn’t speak though, not at first. Instead she held up her left hand, and he blanched.
In Isobel’s hand was a small, ice-blue something, about the size and shape of a flattened egg. It looked strong, like it was made of metal, but light like plastic. It also looked very, very warm in the cold environs in which he and Is were surrounded. Steam rose off it and trailed up in thin, smoky wisps.
"What is that?" he demanded.
"It’s what Aleksandria Sutton would have killed us both for, and it’s what saved your life in the snow," Isobel answered. She looked up, and there was an ire in her eyes that put the fear of Halcyon – or Roan, or whomever – in Nico. "It’s what Macon Phelps sent us here for. What it does, we don’t know. And what we do know, you aren’t cleared for." She smiled darkly and sat on her haunches, cradling the small, blue egg in her hands. "You’re not cleared to know it, but you deserve to. I think it’s fucking you up."
Nico took a shambling step into the alley, inclining his head like a curious puppy. All of his thoughts were coming together in a jumbled mess now, memories from his childhood wearing through into the present and hopes for the future becoming confused with achievements long since gone. Was this the cause of his mental defect?
"What is it?"
Isobel smiled, and Nico crouched down beside her. She waved him in closer, and he leaned in closer. "I know why Agent Zeta was brought into Delta Section," she said.
Nico frowned. "I don’t know anything," he muttered. "I swear. I’ve only talked to him and Macon one time, and they seriously creeped me out. They just told me to keep an eye on you because…"
"Shut the hell up already, okay?" Isobel demanded. "Zeta is a traitor-killer. He’s a Celpo hunter, and he’s after me. The top brass has reason to believe that I lied on a report I filed about a year ago, and good reason too. Because I did."
Nico sucked in a tight breath. "You lied to the Celpo?" he asked, amazed. "Bad idea."
Isobel shrugged. "I thought I was invincible," she said. "For one, brief moment, I had all the knowledge that exists stuck in my head. For just the slightest instant I was every woman, literally. It started to fade quickly, and I remember more about some things than others. But one thing I remember is this." She held up the ice-blue egg. "And that’s why Macon even knows about it."
"The peacemaker," Nico whispered.
Isobel nodded. "There’s a man named Omnibus, and he invents things. He’d already been kicked out of most of the schools in the web by the time he was twelve, most of the universities in the web before he ever had to shave. And it was the same story every time. He’d get into fights, sometimes very violent fights, when his theories were questioned. And they were questioned constantly, mostly because they were completely off the wall."
"How do you know this?" Nico asked. He reached out for the peacemaker, but Isobel pulled it away. Just touching it sent peals of shivering light through his body, and he suffered from a strange sense of déjà vu. He touched the welt that circled his neck, and blinked.
"I don’t know it," Isobel answered. "It’s one of the things I remember, and another one of the things I remember is that this thing is impossible."
"Howcome?" Nico frowned and reached out towards the little machine again, but Isobel was too quick for him. He desperately wanted to feel that unpleasant synesthesia again though, even if it meant the sky turning red and Isobel shedding her angelic façade.
"It operates beyond unity," the girl answered, simply. "Every scientist and thaumaturgist ever has either shown that matter, energy and mana can’t be created but just change forms, or at least lived and died by that tenet as if it were immortal law. There have been crackpots who challenged it, but that’s all they were. Until Omnibus."
"Holy shit," Nico muttered.
"Unholy shit," Isobel corrected. "Inside the peacemaker are three aspects that he called the Logos, Pathos and Ethos. They create energy, mana and matter, they channel it, and they unify it. We managed to find a manuscript of Omnibus’ that contained schematics and formulas, but nobody in D-sec could make heads or tails of it. And between you and me, I’m thinking this is probably another one of Omnibus’ brain children that nobody but he will ever really understand or be able to make."
"Pathos, Logos and Ethos," Nico repeated. "Zero-point energy, huh? What’s it do, though? Is it a weapon, or what?"
"What doesn’t it do?" Isobel asked with a smirk. "That’s why we have to keep it out of enemy hands. If something like this exists and the Celpo doesn’t have it, I’ll tell you one thing. Praxer fucking Riose isn’t going to be very happy. And I doubt Macon Phelps would be exactly dancing with joy either."
"Shame for you," came the honeyed tones of Aleks Sutton. Nico was starting to really hate that voice, and he slowly turned his head to the mouth of the alley where the diminutive woman stood. The hood of her parka was thrown off, and her bright red hair was backlit in a translucent red halo. She looked like the devil that Nico had imagined in the snow, only this monster was real. "It’s not really my concern whether your boss is pissed off though. And I’m pretty sure my boss could kick your boss’ ass anyway."
"Sutton," Isobel hissed. "I thought I convinced you to turn tail and run once already today. What’s the matter, Sutton, back for more? Didn’t get enough last time?"
"The peacemaker was in Gilead," Sutton said, advancing into the alley. "And that makes it the property of the Marathon Apparatus. So you can either hand it over easy like, or I can take it from you the hard way." The girl smiled sweetly. "But might I ask that you please choose the hard way? I like that way ever so much more."
"Go back to the sandbox, little girl," Isobel said, holding up the peacemaker towards Sutton. "You’re outgunned and outclassed, so just drop your vendetta and go home. The drums of war are silent, for you."
A beam of light lanced out from the peacemaker, and Isobel nearly fell over backwards, a look of surprise plastered on her face. But when the beam struck Sutton, the image shattered like glass. It was too late for Isobel to correct for the ruse by the time she realized it was one, and the enemy agent was on her like red haired lightning.
"Nico!" Isobel shouted, chucking the peacemaker at him. "Catch it!"
Nicodeme yelped in surprise and then leapt in the air, catching the little device right before it could land in the snow. He followed it there though, and plowed into the snow and then into the wall behind it. When he came up he shook his head to clear it, but before it could clear, Sutton punched him in the eye.
He brought his hands up instinctively to protect himself, and dropped the peacemaker in the process. Sutton was ready for it and had caught the little device and then ran out of the alley before Nico could even open his eyes again.
"What just happened?" he asked, one hand covering his eye and the other rubbing his neck.
"You just fucked up is what happened," Isobel snapped. "Now run!"
Nico blinked. He was covered in several heavy blankets made of a rough-spun cotton that felt like they also had boar’s hair woven in, just for extra discomfort. And Isobel was right – he was burning up. But when he shifted the blankets just a little bit and the air of the room touched his skin, it was like the icy hand of death had reached down the back of his shirt.
He tried to shift a little to look around the room, but couldn’t see much. His vision was incredibly blurry, like it had been before he got the laser procedure done on his eyes a few years back. He could tell that they were in the common room of some kind of inn though, and he sneezed when he smelled the stein Is had pushed under his nose.
"Strong," he muttered.
"No shit it’s strong," the Celpo agent snapped. "Now drink it before it go get a funnel and pour it in you. We can’t stay here long, Nico. The longer we’re in any one place the more chance we have of being caught."
"Caught by who?" Nico asked, somehow managing to take a sip of the mulled wine without exposing any part of his skin. He could feel the warmth rushing through him from his fingers to his toes and all points in between, but he still felt like death, even if it was death warmed over.
"Nico’s brain has gone bye-bye," Isobel hissed, ducking down low and pushing Nicodeme’s head down in a similar fashion. Nico blinked as some of the mulled wine spilled out and onto his face. He started to protest, but Isobel clamped her hand over his mouth. A few minutes ago he would have let that pass without question, but the wine had put a little bit of fire back in his soul, or at least stoked the coals that remained.
"What in the name of the Creator do you think you’re doing?" he demanded, quietly.
"You’re too conspicuous with all those one," she answered, pulling the blankets off of him. "You’ve got some kind of fever, but all the heat was leeched out of you anyway, and you needed them to keep the heat in. It’s time we were going now, though."
He started to fight her, but then slumped back in his seat and took another slug off of the wine. She stood and started to take off the last of the blankets – more of a scarf, really – but tied it around his neck to hide the now-blackened welt instead. She then grabbed him by the back of his shirt and pulled him out of his seat.
"We’re going," she announced.
The wine spilled out on Nico’s boots when Isobel yanked him backwards by his wrist, but he chose to drop the stein and follow quickly after her instead of arguing about it. About one thought in ten was clear or cogent enough to be considered normal, and most of them were either about how he should listen to Isobel or about how he should just flat out run for the hills.
He’d just come from the hills though, and that wasn’t a place he was too eager to be returning to. Sooner return home with sword in hand and the fight not fought.
Outside of the tavern, he grabbed Isobel’s shoulders and slammed her up against the building, causing several wood shakes to fall off. She struggled, but he was stronger even in his weakened state. "You were an angel," he whispered, suddenly afraid of his own voice and the insanity there. Part of that fear came from how closely the insanity in his voice mirrored the muddied thoughts careening through his cold-soaked head. The rest came from the uncertainty.
"I’m just a girl," Isobel said. "Let me go, damn it."
"But you weren’t an angel anymore," Nico continued. "You were a devil. What did you do to me? What did you do to me!"
Isobel squirmed more, but she couldn’t break free. "I’m just a girl, you fruit loop," she snapped. "Now let’s get the hell off this street before somebody sees us!"
Nico scowled and span her into the alley that the tavern bordered on. She stumbled on the snow-slicked cobblestones and fell to her knees, but he didn’t move to help her. Something had taken over, and all the feelings he’d had for her such a short time ago were gone. Confusion had taken over, and confusion matched with anger and this sudden burst of strength was a demon he’d have just as soon left untapped.
"What did you do?" he seethed.
Isobel crouched at the back of the narrow alley on her hands and knees, her long, auburn hair trailing in the snow. Somehow she’d come across a heavy parka, and Nico noticed in passing that he was wearing a similar one. She didn’t speak though, not at first. Instead she held up her left hand, and he blanched.
In Isobel’s hand was a small, ice-blue something, about the size and shape of a flattened egg. It looked strong, like it was made of metal, but light like plastic. It also looked very, very warm in the cold environs in which he and Is were surrounded. Steam rose off it and trailed up in thin, smoky wisps.
"What is that?" he demanded.
"It’s what Aleksandria Sutton would have killed us both for, and it’s what saved your life in the snow," Isobel answered. She looked up, and there was an ire in her eyes that put the fear of Halcyon – or Roan, or whomever – in Nico. "It’s what Macon Phelps sent us here for. What it does, we don’t know. And what we do know, you aren’t cleared for." She smiled darkly and sat on her haunches, cradling the small, blue egg in her hands. "You’re not cleared to know it, but you deserve to. I think it’s fucking you up."
Nico took a shambling step into the alley, inclining his head like a curious puppy. All of his thoughts were coming together in a jumbled mess now, memories from his childhood wearing through into the present and hopes for the future becoming confused with achievements long since gone. Was this the cause of his mental defect?
"What is it?"
Isobel smiled, and Nico crouched down beside her. She waved him in closer, and he leaned in closer. "I know why Agent Zeta was brought into Delta Section," she said.
Nico frowned. "I don’t know anything," he muttered. "I swear. I’ve only talked to him and Macon one time, and they seriously creeped me out. They just told me to keep an eye on you because…"
"Shut the hell up already, okay?" Isobel demanded. "Zeta is a traitor-killer. He’s a Celpo hunter, and he’s after me. The top brass has reason to believe that I lied on a report I filed about a year ago, and good reason too. Because I did."
Nico sucked in a tight breath. "You lied to the Celpo?" he asked, amazed. "Bad idea."
Isobel shrugged. "I thought I was invincible," she said. "For one, brief moment, I had all the knowledge that exists stuck in my head. For just the slightest instant I was every woman, literally. It started to fade quickly, and I remember more about some things than others. But one thing I remember is this." She held up the ice-blue egg. "And that’s why Macon even knows about it."
"The peacemaker," Nico whispered.
Isobel nodded. "There’s a man named Omnibus, and he invents things. He’d already been kicked out of most of the schools in the web by the time he was twelve, most of the universities in the web before he ever had to shave. And it was the same story every time. He’d get into fights, sometimes very violent fights, when his theories were questioned. And they were questioned constantly, mostly because they were completely off the wall."
"How do you know this?" Nico asked. He reached out for the peacemaker, but Isobel pulled it away. Just touching it sent peals of shivering light through his body, and he suffered from a strange sense of déjà vu. He touched the welt that circled his neck, and blinked.
"I don’t know it," Isobel answered. "It’s one of the things I remember, and another one of the things I remember is that this thing is impossible."
"Howcome?" Nico frowned and reached out towards the little machine again, but Isobel was too quick for him. He desperately wanted to feel that unpleasant synesthesia again though, even if it meant the sky turning red and Isobel shedding her angelic façade.
"It operates beyond unity," the girl answered, simply. "Every scientist and thaumaturgist ever has either shown that matter, energy and mana can’t be created but just change forms, or at least lived and died by that tenet as if it were immortal law. There have been crackpots who challenged it, but that’s all they were. Until Omnibus."
"Holy shit," Nico muttered.
"Unholy shit," Isobel corrected. "Inside the peacemaker are three aspects that he called the Logos, Pathos and Ethos. They create energy, mana and matter, they channel it, and they unify it. We managed to find a manuscript of Omnibus’ that contained schematics and formulas, but nobody in D-sec could make heads or tails of it. And between you and me, I’m thinking this is probably another one of Omnibus’ brain children that nobody but he will ever really understand or be able to make."
"Pathos, Logos and Ethos," Nico repeated. "Zero-point energy, huh? What’s it do, though? Is it a weapon, or what?"
"What doesn’t it do?" Isobel asked with a smirk. "That’s why we have to keep it out of enemy hands. If something like this exists and the Celpo doesn’t have it, I’ll tell you one thing. Praxer fucking Riose isn’t going to be very happy. And I doubt Macon Phelps would be exactly dancing with joy either."
"Shame for you," came the honeyed tones of Aleks Sutton. Nico was starting to really hate that voice, and he slowly turned his head to the mouth of the alley where the diminutive woman stood. The hood of her parka was thrown off, and her bright red hair was backlit in a translucent red halo. She looked like the devil that Nico had imagined in the snow, only this monster was real. "It’s not really my concern whether your boss is pissed off though. And I’m pretty sure my boss could kick your boss’ ass anyway."
"Sutton," Isobel hissed. "I thought I convinced you to turn tail and run once already today. What’s the matter, Sutton, back for more? Didn’t get enough last time?"
"The peacemaker was in Gilead," Sutton said, advancing into the alley. "And that makes it the property of the Marathon Apparatus. So you can either hand it over easy like, or I can take it from you the hard way." The girl smiled sweetly. "But might I ask that you please choose the hard way? I like that way ever so much more."
"Go back to the sandbox, little girl," Isobel said, holding up the peacemaker towards Sutton. "You’re outgunned and outclassed, so just drop your vendetta and go home. The drums of war are silent, for you."
A beam of light lanced out from the peacemaker, and Isobel nearly fell over backwards, a look of surprise plastered on her face. But when the beam struck Sutton, the image shattered like glass. It was too late for Isobel to correct for the ruse by the time she realized it was one, and the enemy agent was on her like red haired lightning.
"Nico!" Isobel shouted, chucking the peacemaker at him. "Catch it!"
Nicodeme yelped in surprise and then leapt in the air, catching the little device right before it could land in the snow. He followed it there though, and plowed into the snow and then into the wall behind it. When he came up he shook his head to clear it, but before it could clear, Sutton punched him in the eye.
He brought his hands up instinctively to protect himself, and dropped the peacemaker in the process. Sutton was ready for it and had caught the little device and then ran out of the alley before Nico could even open his eyes again.
"What just happened?" he asked, one hand covering his eye and the other rubbing his neck.
"You just fucked up is what happened," Isobel snapped. "Now run!"
There was a war in Gilead, and the winter had swallowed it. Both sides had lined up in the icy cold while the white beast devoured them by turns. They still pounded against each other with whatever brute force they could muster, but neither could consistently gain or hold ground. The ground forces imported by the Roanese Empire had a technological advantage, but the Gilead Republican Army had a numbers advantage.
The only deciding factor was the Jackscrews, and even they could only do so much in limited numbers. And so the sides sat through the long nights, staring at each other across battle lines, across ravines and rivers, waiting for the weather to warm up and the conditions to improve.
As he ran through the pounding snow towards the front, Nicodeme Cage could only wonder when his conditions were going to improve. He had started the night feeling like a chocobo had kicked him in the head, and things had only gotten worse. Isobel was back to being his guardian angel and guiding light, but there was always that half-hallucinatory memory of her demon-side threatening to break through. But above all, his though processes were speeding up while at the same time making less and less sense. He forgot where he was running to, and thought he was running home.
But he didn’t want to go home. He couldn’t go home. There was no home to go home to, and never would be again. He could hear the drums beating out their war song in his mind, the beat flowing through his veins with the blood. It was his being, suffused wholly and completely overtaken.
But if he was running home, Isobel wouldn’t have been there. So it was still a Celpo mission, and this was Gilead, not the Upperlands. He wondered where they were going though, and in such a hurry. They had been in an LCV for a little while, and that had gone a lot faster than he could run. But Isobel had made him get out.
The snow was melting around him, and it took him a little while to realize they were being shelled. The kinetic energy of the shells striking the snow and the hard rocky ground beneath was melting the snow, melting the world. It was all a little fuzzy, and again he was reminded of the way the world had looked a few years earlier before he’d had the laser surgery to correct his vision. The colors were a little off, some things too bright and raucous, others dull and muted. And the edges were blurred. Even Isobel was unclear.
"We shouldn’t be running through no-mans-land," he informed Isobel. She ignored him though, so he pressed it further. "This is where there are mines," he said. "And constant shelling. We should probably go home now."
Isobel stopped suddenly in her tracks and wheeled on him. "You can’t go home!" she shouted. She grabbed his shoulders and started shaking him, and suddenly there was an excruciating pain in his left leg. He looked down, and blood stained his pant leg where there had been no blood before. "Don’t you hear it?" she asked.
"I hear the drums," he said. "But I don’t remember how to use my sword, Is. I think I lost it in the snow. You have to help me."
"Fuck that," Isobel snapped, and she started walking away. He stood there in the middle of the rain of falling projectiles, dumbly watching her go. And then he started walking slowly after. "You can help yourself, Nico," she said, waving him off. "You already got the peacemaker stolen, what more damage do you want to do."
"I don’t want to do any damage!" Nico yelled. "I want to…"
The sky above exploded in a striated mélange of fiery plumes. Nico broke off and looked up, his jaw having dropped open in mid word. One of the Jackscrew heavy anti-grav sleds was hovering up above no-mans-land, the shells cresting just below it. And standing on the sled was Aleks Sutton.
"What the shit is she doing?" Nico asked.
"See what you’ve done?" Isobel demanded. "The sky is on fucking fire, Nico! Sutton has the Roan-damned peacemaker and the fucking sky is on fire! What’re you gonna do about it?"
Nico shuddered. The edges of his vision were blurring, and he could barely even see Sutton anymore when he looked up at her. When he moved it felt like he was stuck in thick molasses, and the dead, bony hands of fallen soldiers grabbed at his ankles from the frozen ground. He didn’t know what he was going to do about it, because he wasn’t going to do anything about it.
Sutton held up the peacemaker, and the small blue device cast her in a light contrasted against the red, striated sky. The clouds that filled the firmament swirled over her, and she screamed.
"Enough people have died!" she shouted. "And Empire has spread enough over this continent. Cease fire, or I will cease fire for you!"
Somehow, the words were carried across the battlefield from one side to the other. And somehow, nobody cared. A shell fired from the Roan line nearly struck the gravsled at the top of the path, and then careened down to explode not ten yards from Isobel and Nico. Sutton screamed again, and light began pouring like a river from the peacemaker.
"Make peace with your demons or I will see them devour you!" the girl screamed. "Make peace with your demons or you will stand with them in the deepest pit of hell!"
The light suffused the battlefield, and Nicodeme witnessed the most bizarre thing he had seen in his entire life. Weapons were fired on both sides, but when they entered the light they were taken up and together, gathered within the field of zero-point energy created by the peacemaker and carried beyond unity. The base materials they were made of were melted and remade, and then splashed upwards in a liquid plume against the demonic sky.
For a moment, a massive gray dove flew over Sutton.
And then it was gone.
"What was that?" He asked Isobel.
She didn’t answer though, and when he looked over to her she was stricken, her normally pale face devoid of all color. He frowned, and she pointed at him. "Your neck," she whispered. "Your shirt…"
Nico looked down, and there were several blooms of blood spread across his chest. Now that he saw them, he found that he could feel them as well. It felt like he’d been shot with a hundred invisible bullets, and it didn’t end there. It felt like his head was about to break clean off, and his chest heaved and moaned as he tried to draw enough breath. His vision grew seriously fuzzy, and he stumbled when he moved towards Isobel.
"What’s happening to me?" he asked.
Isobel shuddered and fell over, and then the gravsled fell out of the sky. Sutton stood for a moment, but she couldn’t remain standing either. Nico bent over and picked up the peacemaker, but it was cold in his hand.
Slowly, he turned around.
And was faced with the River Farquhar.
The only deciding factor was the Jackscrews, and even they could only do so much in limited numbers. And so the sides sat through the long nights, staring at each other across battle lines, across ravines and rivers, waiting for the weather to warm up and the conditions to improve.
As he ran through the pounding snow towards the front, Nicodeme Cage could only wonder when his conditions were going to improve. He had started the night feeling like a chocobo had kicked him in the head, and things had only gotten worse. Isobel was back to being his guardian angel and guiding light, but there was always that half-hallucinatory memory of her demon-side threatening to break through. But above all, his though processes were speeding up while at the same time making less and less sense. He forgot where he was running to, and thought he was running home.
But he didn’t want to go home. He couldn’t go home. There was no home to go home to, and never would be again. He could hear the drums beating out their war song in his mind, the beat flowing through his veins with the blood. It was his being, suffused wholly and completely overtaken.
But if he was running home, Isobel wouldn’t have been there. So it was still a Celpo mission, and this was Gilead, not the Upperlands. He wondered where they were going though, and in such a hurry. They had been in an LCV for a little while, and that had gone a lot faster than he could run. But Isobel had made him get out.
The snow was melting around him, and it took him a little while to realize they were being shelled. The kinetic energy of the shells striking the snow and the hard rocky ground beneath was melting the snow, melting the world. It was all a little fuzzy, and again he was reminded of the way the world had looked a few years earlier before he’d had the laser surgery to correct his vision. The colors were a little off, some things too bright and raucous, others dull and muted. And the edges were blurred. Even Isobel was unclear.
"We shouldn’t be running through no-mans-land," he informed Isobel. She ignored him though, so he pressed it further. "This is where there are mines," he said. "And constant shelling. We should probably go home now."
Isobel stopped suddenly in her tracks and wheeled on him. "You can’t go home!" she shouted. She grabbed his shoulders and started shaking him, and suddenly there was an excruciating pain in his left leg. He looked down, and blood stained his pant leg where there had been no blood before. "Don’t you hear it?" she asked.
"I hear the drums," he said. "But I don’t remember how to use my sword, Is. I think I lost it in the snow. You have to help me."
"Fuck that," Isobel snapped, and she started walking away. He stood there in the middle of the rain of falling projectiles, dumbly watching her go. And then he started walking slowly after. "You can help yourself, Nico," she said, waving him off. "You already got the peacemaker stolen, what more damage do you want to do."
"I don’t want to do any damage!" Nico yelled. "I want to…"
The sky above exploded in a striated mélange of fiery plumes. Nico broke off and looked up, his jaw having dropped open in mid word. One of the Jackscrew heavy anti-grav sleds was hovering up above no-mans-land, the shells cresting just below it. And standing on the sled was Aleks Sutton.
"What the shit is she doing?" Nico asked.
"See what you’ve done?" Isobel demanded. "The sky is on fucking fire, Nico! Sutton has the Roan-damned peacemaker and the fucking sky is on fire! What’re you gonna do about it?"
Nico shuddered. The edges of his vision were blurring, and he could barely even see Sutton anymore when he looked up at her. When he moved it felt like he was stuck in thick molasses, and the dead, bony hands of fallen soldiers grabbed at his ankles from the frozen ground. He didn’t know what he was going to do about it, because he wasn’t going to do anything about it.
Sutton held up the peacemaker, and the small blue device cast her in a light contrasted against the red, striated sky. The clouds that filled the firmament swirled over her, and she screamed.
"Enough people have died!" she shouted. "And Empire has spread enough over this continent. Cease fire, or I will cease fire for you!"
Somehow, the words were carried across the battlefield from one side to the other. And somehow, nobody cared. A shell fired from the Roan line nearly struck the gravsled at the top of the path, and then careened down to explode not ten yards from Isobel and Nico. Sutton screamed again, and light began pouring like a river from the peacemaker.
"Make peace with your demons or I will see them devour you!" the girl screamed. "Make peace with your demons or you will stand with them in the deepest pit of hell!"
The light suffused the battlefield, and Nicodeme witnessed the most bizarre thing he had seen in his entire life. Weapons were fired on both sides, but when they entered the light they were taken up and together, gathered within the field of zero-point energy created by the peacemaker and carried beyond unity. The base materials they were made of were melted and remade, and then splashed upwards in a liquid plume against the demonic sky.
For a moment, a massive gray dove flew over Sutton.
And then it was gone.
"What was that?" He asked Isobel.
She didn’t answer though, and when he looked over to her she was stricken, her normally pale face devoid of all color. He frowned, and she pointed at him. "Your neck," she whispered. "Your shirt…"
Nico looked down, and there were several blooms of blood spread across his chest. Now that he saw them, he found that he could feel them as well. It felt like he’d been shot with a hundred invisible bullets, and it didn’t end there. It felt like his head was about to break clean off, and his chest heaved and moaned as he tried to draw enough breath. His vision grew seriously fuzzy, and he stumbled when he moved towards Isobel.
"What’s happening to me?" he asked.
Isobel shuddered and fell over, and then the gravsled fell out of the sky. Sutton stood for a moment, but she couldn’t remain standing either. Nico bent over and picked up the peacemaker, but it was cold in his hand.
Slowly, he turned around.
And was faced with the River Farquhar.
The river was wide and strong and deep, and the bridge that spanned it was a powerful beast of concrete and steel. But it shouldn’t have been here – it should have been several miles away. He had crossed the mountains and come across the plain, but here it was.
Nicodeme Cage stepped past the bodies of Isobella d’Fenwyr and Aleksandria Sutton and stepped onto the bridge. His feet were heavy like lead, but the bony hands of the dead soldiers were gone. He wondered if his home lay on the other side of the bridge. Somehow, he thought it might. If the river could appear from out of nowhere, couldn’t Tasnicaport be on the other side?
He made his way slowly to the middle of the bridge, each step harder than the last. Each breath harder than the last. His vision grew darker and lighter with each heartbeat, but each time it pulsed it grew a little darker. He was losing his sight, and soon he was encased in a world of twilight and shade, cold beyond reason, and the only sound was the rushing of the river below.
And the beating of his heart.
And the music of the drum in his ears.
He paused at midspan, wondering if he would be able to start walking again. He wanted to reach the other side, but something stopped him. Curiosity, fear, loathing and dread. He held the Pathos, Logos and Ethos in his hand but they were silent, they were not willing to persuade a few more feet out of his tired soul, and he sat down on the guardrail, teetering slowly back and forth.
He put his hands down on either side, and his left hand felt the roughness of a rope, and when he looked down his heart stopped.
Nicodeme Lazslo Cage’s body hung limply from the guardrail of the bridge over the River Farquhar, twisting slightly in the cold wind that blew down the river from the upcountry. It was riddled with bullets and the neck was bloody from having been scraped at in the frantic violence of a man’s last moments. The body twitched a few more times, and it was still.
In the artillery embrasure overlooking the bridge, Isobella d’Fenwyr looked on with cold eyes. She hadn’t blinked once the entire time, but now allowed herself to slowly close her eyes and then open them again. The one thing that she had learned as a Celpo is that you never blow cover. You never, ever blow your cover.
Captain Ambrose Bierce turned towards her and she nearly jumped with surprise, but managed to retain her stock stillness as the large man walked past her and clapped a hand on the shoulder of a slightly built woman a few meters distant.
"Excellent job, Lieutenant Sutton," Bierce said, smiling broadly. "Your father would be very proud indeed."
Isobel blinked, despite herself. She hadn’t realized it before, but the woman Bierce was congratulating was, indeed, Aleksandria Sutton. The woman had been a very annoying rival over the past several months, and it seemed as if Bierce knew her – and not by an alias, but by her true name. Not only that, but he spoke as if he knew the woman’s father.
"Sir," Isobel said, clearing her throat. "Should we remove the body?"
Bierce grunted. "No, soldier," he said, roughly. "Let him remain there for the carrion eaters as a symbol of what happens when you betray Gilead. There is a division of Jacks descending on Fontaine at this moment, and we have wasted too much time on this execution. If we don’t reach the city before those Roanese bastards do, they’re good as dead." He sighed and turned away from both Sutton and Isobel to address the rest of the troops in the embrasure.
"Assemble, troop. Forward, harch!"
Isobel glanced back down to the bridge and to her now dead partner, the first partner she had ever lost in the line of duty. This was why she liked working alone. This was why she hated having the responsibility of others to look after. This would bother her for some time, she though.
"Know him well?" came the honey-smooth voice of Aleksandria Sutton, who had remained in the embrasure while the rest of the troop left. Isobel turned sharply around, ready for an attack. But none came, and Sutton didn’t seem to be holding any weapons.
"I just met him," Isobel said. "This was our first mission."
Sutton shrugged. "More the pity," she said. "I would have rather you suffered just now like I’ve been suffering ever since these bastards invaded my home."
Isobel frowned, her thin, dark eyebrows drawing nearer together in an angry arch. "You set him up, didn’t you?"
"Don’t fuck with Gilead," the other woman said, lightly. She took off her military cap and shook free her shoulder length, silky red hair. "And I’d stay away from the Marathon Apparatus too, if I were you." She inclined her head towards the bridge and the limp body that had once been Nicodeme Cage. "Otherwise you might end up like your friend there."
"I don’t respond well to threats," Isobel warned.
Sutton smiled. "I think we’ll get along just horribly, then," she said. "Because every step you take, I’m going to be dogging you. Every move you make, I’ll have made first. And every partner you get assigned, I’ll take down. And if you even think you’re getting the peacemaker, you’re sorely mistaken."
"We’ll see," Isobel said. "But in the meantime, I think you’d better leave before I cut your head off your shoulders and throw it into the river."
"Fair enough," Sutton said, nodding. She gave Isobel a mocking little salute and then walked out of the embrasure. "Until next time, cowgirl. Take care of yourself."
Isobel scowled at the departing woman’s back, and then climbed out of the embrasure and down to the edge of the precipice that marked the edge of the river basin. She walked out onto the bridge after she was certain there was nobody around to see.
"Sorry, Nico," she whispered as she cut the man free and slung his corpse over her shoulder. It was evidence of her being there, like it or not. And she couldn’t afford to leave such messy loose ends lying about, especially not with the likes of Aleksandria Sutton running around. "Doesn’t look like you’ll be shaking your sword or hearing any drums anymore. But don’t worry, I’ll see you get home."
She looked around again, and slowly walked off the bridge and through the snow.
Alone it would be more difficult, but there was still a mission to be accomplished, and she could hardly return to Delta Section empty handed. Or carrying a corpse of one of their newest agents and with nothing to show for it, for that matter.
Macon would have her head for that.
She blinked as the snow began to fall in heavy sheets, and would have killed for a cup of coffee. But in the end she would have to settle for a long walk in the snow with only a corpse for company.
"Go thou toward home," she whispered, "where I will never come. While I can shake my sword or hear the drum." She wondered where Nico had gotten that from, what he had meant by saying it as his last words. She would never know, though. Just like she would never know him.
More the pity.
In the artillery embrasure overlooking the bridge, Isobella d’Fenwyr looked on with cold eyes. She hadn’t blinked once the entire time, but now allowed herself to slowly close her eyes and then open them again. The one thing that she had learned as a Celpo is that you never blow cover. You never, ever blow your cover.
Captain Ambrose Bierce turned towards her and she nearly jumped with surprise, but managed to retain her stock stillness as the large man walked past her and clapped a hand on the shoulder of a slightly built woman a few meters distant.
"Excellent job, Lieutenant Sutton," Bierce said, smiling broadly. "Your father would be very proud indeed."
Isobel blinked, despite herself. She hadn’t realized it before, but the woman Bierce was congratulating was, indeed, Aleksandria Sutton. The woman had been a very annoying rival over the past several months, and it seemed as if Bierce knew her – and not by an alias, but by her true name. Not only that, but he spoke as if he knew the woman’s father.
"Sir," Isobel said, clearing her throat. "Should we remove the body?"
Bierce grunted. "No, soldier," he said, roughly. "Let him remain there for the carrion eaters as a symbol of what happens when you betray Gilead. There is a division of Jacks descending on Fontaine at this moment, and we have wasted too much time on this execution. If we don’t reach the city before those Roanese bastards do, they’re good as dead." He sighed and turned away from both Sutton and Isobel to address the rest of the troops in the embrasure.
"Assemble, troop. Forward, harch!"
Isobel glanced back down to the bridge and to her now dead partner, the first partner she had ever lost in the line of duty. This was why she liked working alone. This was why she hated having the responsibility of others to look after. This would bother her for some time, she though.
"Know him well?" came the honey-smooth voice of Aleksandria Sutton, who had remained in the embrasure while the rest of the troop left. Isobel turned sharply around, ready for an attack. But none came, and Sutton didn’t seem to be holding any weapons.
"I just met him," Isobel said. "This was our first mission."
Sutton shrugged. "More the pity," she said. "I would have rather you suffered just now like I’ve been suffering ever since these bastards invaded my home."
Isobel frowned, her thin, dark eyebrows drawing nearer together in an angry arch. "You set him up, didn’t you?"
"Don’t fuck with Gilead," the other woman said, lightly. She took off her military cap and shook free her shoulder length, silky red hair. "And I’d stay away from the Marathon Apparatus too, if I were you." She inclined her head towards the bridge and the limp body that had once been Nicodeme Cage. "Otherwise you might end up like your friend there."
"I don’t respond well to threats," Isobel warned.
Sutton smiled. "I think we’ll get along just horribly, then," she said. "Because every step you take, I’m going to be dogging you. Every move you make, I’ll have made first. And every partner you get assigned, I’ll take down. And if you even think you’re getting the peacemaker, you’re sorely mistaken."
"We’ll see," Isobel said. "But in the meantime, I think you’d better leave before I cut your head off your shoulders and throw it into the river."
"Fair enough," Sutton said, nodding. She gave Isobel a mocking little salute and then walked out of the embrasure. "Until next time, cowgirl. Take care of yourself."
Isobel scowled at the departing woman’s back, and then climbed out of the embrasure and down to the edge of the precipice that marked the edge of the river basin. She walked out onto the bridge after she was certain there was nobody around to see.
"Sorry, Nico," she whispered as she cut the man free and slung his corpse over her shoulder. It was evidence of her being there, like it or not. And she couldn’t afford to leave such messy loose ends lying about, especially not with the likes of Aleksandria Sutton running around. "Doesn’t look like you’ll be shaking your sword or hearing any drums anymore. But don’t worry, I’ll see you get home."
She looked around again, and slowly walked off the bridge and through the snow.
Alone it would be more difficult, but there was still a mission to be accomplished, and she could hardly return to Delta Section empty handed. Or carrying a corpse of one of their newest agents and with nothing to show for it, for that matter.
Macon would have her head for that.
She blinked as the snow began to fall in heavy sheets, and would have killed for a cup of coffee. But in the end she would have to settle for a long walk in the snow with only a corpse for company.
"Go thou toward home," she whispered, "where I will never come. While I can shake my sword or hear the drum." She wondered where Nico had gotten that from, what he had meant by saying it as his last words. She would never know, though. Just like she would never know him.
More the pity.