Confluence (Godbreaker Book 3) Page 26

  That was, after all, humanity’s one and only contribution to this story: Their insatiable instinct for war. Primus may have been a being of peace, but his sons were half-human. All of the powers, with none of the restraint. All the capability for destruction, with none of the compassion.

  To the All-Kind, they were simply rabid dogs.

  And yet, rather than put them down, they chose instead to keep them in a place that might as well have been hell. A place where nothing else was. A place of unending disassociation with reality, cut off from anything but their own consciousness.

  Punishment, yes…but also an experiment.

  For what if the All-Kind needed a race like them in the future? They themselves did not fight wars—no, they loved their peace too much to get their hands dirty. So they would simply bottle up the Nine, and leave their lesser progeny to rule over the sad, crushed race of humans scattered about the battle-scarred planet.

  Alone for five hundred years. Cut off from anything but their own tumbling thoughts.

  And they hated. Oh, how they hated.

  They hated Paladin Primus for his weakness, for his love of the humans.

  They hated the All-Kind for their prideful judgement, for their cold dismissal.

  But mostly, they hated humanity.

  Grasping. Conniving. Self-serving. War, when they knew they could win. Plaintive bleating for mercy when they knew they could not. They would kill each other by the millions without blinking an eye, but if someone did it to them, they wept at the injustice. Humans were petty, short-sighted, hypocritical creatures, and their penchant for killing each other was only made easier by the frailty of their bodies.

  A better version of them had been born in the Nine sons of Primus. A more evolved version. Why then should the obsolete version be allowed to remain? The Nine sons of Primus, and their sons and grandsons, were the perfection of a warrior race.

  And yet, for five hundred years they had endured an unimaginable punishment. All because they had tried to sweep up the useless refuse of this planet. All because of humans.

  Oh, how they hated…

  ***

  Oddly enough, Senex’s first thought upon coming back to himself was, That wasn’t as bad as I thought—

  Which lasted about as long as it took for his hundred-year-old eyes to swim back into focus. And then the pain hit. A blast of it, straight from the temple that Halan had touched, coursing down his spine, as though the fluid within it had turned to molten metal.

  The pain was so sudden and savage that Senex wasn’t even able to cry out—a fact that he would later be thankful for. Because Halan was still kneeling there, his feral green gaze watching the old paladin as though waiting for any sign of weakness. That weakness that he—they—hated so much.

  Senex opened his mouth to cry out, but the breath had been taken from him, and he suddenly knew that if he did, he would die. He snapped his teeth together, hard. The clear, poignant pain of his own teeth clacking was a welcome distraction from the fire in his spine, now spreading out to every particle of his body.

  But, as it spread, it left behind a coldness so filled with relief, that it gave Senex the strength to stay silent, to stay standing, to keep his eyes fixed upon Halan, and to neither blink, nor let a grimace cross his face. The pain would not last. It was already dissipating.

  Halan tilted his massive head to one side. Green eyes narrowing. Then that nasty smirk again. “It is pleasant for me to see that not all of our progeny have devolved into weakness.”

  Fire, racing down his arms and legs, into his hands and feet.

  Almost over.

  Halan stood, which seemed to take an oddly long time, or perhaps time was simply crawling, as it did when pain was thrashing the body. “So,” the son of Primus said. “You saw.”

  Senex managed a nod. And a breath, which he was grateful for. His aging body hadn’t completely failed him just yet, even if stairs had become his enemy.

  Remember what you’re here for.

  “Yes,” Senex said. “I saw. And I understand now, why you wish to let the Guardians destroy the humans.”

  Halan made an expression with his craggy, armored face that Senex could only interpret as dismissive. Bored, perhaps. “They have plagued this planet for long enough. Extinction comes to all species that fail to adapt properly in the face of change. We are that change. And they cannot overcome us. They have no right to this planet. It belongs to us now.”

  Senex watched the being in front of him as the fire tingled and throbbed in his fingertips and toes, careful to keep his expression neutral. He did not want to overplay his hand. He did not want to appear too eager to save humanity, especially after truly coming to understand the depth of the Nine’s hatred towards them.

  It would be far easier to kill himself in the next moments, than it would be to save the humans. All it would take would be a single misplaced word. A wrong expression. Anything, really.

  You would think that watching hundreds of un-Gifted be thrown into the sea to die would have driven home the point to him of how quickly these beings were willing to dispose of life they deemed unworthy. And yet it had taken the vision—a direct piping of Halan’s seething consciousness into his brain—to really make him understand how close to dying he was.

  How close to dying he was every time he came here.

  “And yet,” Halan continued, motionless but for his mouth. “You have come to plead mercy for them again.”

  As the last tingling of fire left Senex, his body suddenly erupted in a panic. Cold and greasy dread that far outranked any fear he’d ever felt in his life. For all the other fears had been hypothetical. And this one was certain.

  He’s about to kill you.

  “No,” Senex said, as calmly as he was able, as though he did not feel at that precise moment the wateriness of his own bowels, threatening to soil his robes in the face of imminent annihilation. “Your judgement in this matter is supreme, Halan. And the judgement of your brothers. I trust in it. And even if I had the power to change it, I would not.”

  Silence stretched. Brittle. Threatening to shatter, like a strand of blown glass, rapidly cooling.

  “If you have more you wish to say,” Halan finally broke the silence, his voice relatively quiet, but teeming with poorly-bridled violence. Death waiting to pounce. Destruction edging towards release. “Then be courageous and say it. Or are you so frightened of us? Your very fathers?”

  It was strange hearing those words, and knowing them to be true, and yet looking up at something so alien that you felt it could not possibly be related to you. Not even the same species, let alone your forefather. But they were.

  Or, at least, Batu was.

  Senex shook his head, letting out a sigh, as though he were just as relaxed as could be. “Fear is not what holds me back,” he lied. “It is only simple confusion. Seeing what I saw…”

  He had made a whole speech in his head, but that had been disintegrated the second Halan had given him the vision. If he had said what he’d planned to say, having not understood what he now grasped, he was certain that he would have been killed. So he had to shift tactics.

  Senex shook his head again, as though dismissing a thought he had just had. “I understand. Your decision to let the humans go extinct is final. And it is merciful in a way that I cannot comprehend ever extending to my enemies.”

  Chak, the youngest, exploded out of his self-made throne so suddenly that it shook the entire building, and it was only with every ounce of self-mastery Senex possessed that he did not shrink back, but rather looked at Chak as though curious at the outburst.

  “Merciful?” Chak demanded, voice booming, even if it did carry with it a flavor of youthful impertinence. “You think that our desire to let them be crushed by the mechanical demons of the All-Kind is merciful?”

  Their attention on him felt physical. Like a blanket of steel spikes.

  “Pardon me,” Senex replied, his heart thrashing to the point of pain. “Th
ey call you Chak the Youngest, but you have still lived many more centuries than I. You may have a perspective on these matters that is beyond me. But from my experience, if an enemy were to cause me to be unjustly imprisoned in a hellish existence of nothingness for five hundred years…” Senex smiled bitterly. “I would not allow them to die so quick a death. To me, it seems an almost incomprehensible mercy. But perhaps I do no not understand your strategies. Far be it from me to question anything.”

  It was surreal to watch a massive, seemingly-all-powerful being bluster, but bluster Chak did. At least until he was silenced by a motion of Halan’s hand—a speedy swipe that caused the air in the room to gust like a storm wind.

  “Let Batu’s descendant speak,” Halan rumbled. “He may be as sly as his ancestor.” Halan glared dangerously at Senex. “But to what end?”

  Batu leaned forward in a strangely familiar manner. Hunched, intrigued, elbows on knees. Head inclined to one side. Up until now, all of the Nine had seemed so regal. So god-like. But perhaps this was a subject that pierced their façade.

  “And you, Senex of my house?” Batu said. “What would you do with an enemy that unjustly imprisoned you for five hundred years?”

  Senex lifted his eyebrows, as though such a thing was obvious. “I would enslave them for a thousand.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  MEN AND DOGS

  Everything about being stuck on Hauten’s buggy again was some strange amalgamation of a nightmare and a homecoming.

  On the one hand, nothing had changed. Perry had spent three years in Hauten’s buggy. The buggy had changed, but the occupants mostly hadn’t. And sitting there against the rollbar, jostling about as it hurtled across the dawn-gray wastelands, Perry felt that weird familiarity with his surroundings that almost seemed…comfortable.

  On the other hand, everything had changed. Sure, he was still Perry, and Hauten was still Hauten, and his crew was still the same old people Perry had met when he’d fallen in with them after deserting from Hell’s Hollow. But Perry had encountered so much change in the last months, that finding himself stuck on this damned buggy again was as surreally nightmarish as if he’d woken up and found himself back in Hell’s Hollow.

  And that made him feel a little queasy.

  It was the intense interest of Monty, Bigs, and Chester, of all things, that helped to center Perry firmly in his current reality. Because they’d never looked at him like that before.

  As though he could spit fire and shit lightning bolts.

  Finally, as the sun cast its first rays over a distant line of craggy hills, Perry could stand the silent attention no longer.

  He’d been trying to stare out at the passing landscape, but he felt their eyeballs boring into the back of his head. Heard their murmurs over the trundling of the tires and shocks.

  He snapped his head to them, frowning. “Y’all have been staring at me for five hours straight. I figure you either wanna fuck me or fight me, so which one is it?”

  Bigs and Chester immediately averted their eyes. Monty was the only one with the balls to narrow his with a brand of suspicious wonderment.

  “You always did have a pretty mouth,” Monty growled with something in the neighborhood of a smirk, his eyebrows going up with challenge.

  “And you were always uncomfortable around women,” Perry snapped back. “So I guess it all adds up.”

  Monty just rolled his eyes. “Guess you had to give up your sense of humor to get all your fancy new powers.”

  Chester, summoning the testicular fortitude to re-enter the fray, spoke over his shoulder without meeting Perry’s eyes. “Oh, come on, Monty. Perry never had a sense of humor to begin with.”

  Odd how that stung. “Fuck you guys. We had some laughs. Didn’t we?”

  Monty looked briefly disgusted. “Shit, Perry, you had too much of a chip on your shoulder to laugh at yourself.”

  Ouch. The hits just kept coming.

  Perry grimaced, glancing out at the wastelands again. “Alright. Fine. Maybe I was…a little sour.”

  “And defensive,” Chester added.

  “And prickly,” Bigs put in.

  “And obviously nothing’s changed,” Monty grunted.

  Perry looked skyward with a sigh. He might’ve bothered to argue with them…if they were wrong. But they weren’t. He had been all of those things. Still was, deep down, even if he’d managed to overcome it. You never really change who you are. You just learn how to make yourself more palatable. Like a tough piece of meat that needs to be beaten, poked, marinaded, and cut thinly just to be chewed and swallowed.

  He couldn’t deny it, and he didn’t bother. Sure, maybe he had his reasons for being that way, but trying to articulate them would only prove their point. So he simply pasted on a grim smile, and nodded to the back of the seat ahead of him, where Jax had his boots off and was trying to shave a corn from his big toe. It looked like quite a difficult process, with all the bumping around the buggy was doing. Occasionally the stink of his feet would spear through the wind and hit Perry in the nose.

  Remaining focused on the grizzly corn, Jax nodded his white-haired head at Monty, Bigs, and Chester. “Perry has always been one prickly little bitch, that’s for sure and for certain.” He waved the knife at the other three. “But if you were five-foot-nothing and were forced into a legionnaire’s academy to have your shit kicked in by all them big boys on a daily basis, I wonder if any of you’d be any different.”

  The others showed a tiny sliver of shame in the fact that they didn’t argue with that assertion.

  Perry, however, frowned at Jax. “I never told you guys about that.”

  They hit a hard bump and Jax made a tiny cut on the side of his foot, cursing violently as blood welled up. “Godsdamned new boots. Wish old boots would just last forever so you didn’t have to break in new ones.” He tamped a thumb down over the cut and leaned back, finally looking at Perry. “Teran told us. When she was trying to convince us to go rescue you from gettin’ noosed.”

  “Oh.” Perry waited to feel old sensations of defensiveness, but they didn’t come.

  Chester leaned forward, his face less prodding and more curious now. “You always have these…powers or whatever?”

  Perry pursed his lips, wondering how best to answer that. It wasn’t exactly a yes or no question, but then again, anything more than yes or no could get a little complicated. “Yeah. I guess.”

  Chester squinted one eye, as though confused. “Then why didn’t you fuck up them boys in the academy that were beatin’ the snot out of you? You sure enough liked to fight in bars, as I recall.”

  “Well…” Perry thought about dipping into the red, the flow of Confluence before he’d ever even known what Confluence was. How it carried him on a river of violence. Sometimes to victory. More often to getting his shit kicked in.

  Except for Tiller. Perry’d definitely won that one.

  “I didn’t know I had it back then,” Perry concluded. “And I couldn’t have done anything with it, even if I knew. I have to have the god-tech to be able to do anything with it.” He shook his head. “Don’t ask me how it works. I don’t know.”

  “Do the demigods have to have the god-tech too?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you’re basically like a demigod.”

  “No. I’m five-foot-nothing and my training is minimal.”

  “But you’re like a half-god.”

  Perry smirked. “Quarter-god, actually.”

  Bigs looked at Perry, his expression returning to that guarded wonder he’d had earlier. “And you killed one of those fuckers?”

  Perry found himself frowning, thinking about Mala and Lux. “Well, it was joint effort between me and Stuber. But you know, they’re not all assholes.”

  Bigs appeared incredulous.

  Perry cleared his throat. “Actually, you’re going to meet a couple of them that are on our side.”

  Bigs looked shellshocked. “Crazy times. Pretty sure this is the
end of the world.”

  Perry shrugged. “I think the world has ended a couple times before. This is just the one we’re around for.”

  Chester, looking all stern and hard, planted his hands on his knees and thrust himself out of his hunch. “Perry, I’m only gonna say this one time, so pay attention.”

  Perry eyed him, expecting some new form of machismo.

  “Thanks for getting us out of Junction City.” Chester made a face like the words had come away with some skin. He coughed and looked away. “Fucking Shortstack.”

  ***

  Stuber gazed down into the mildly depressing stink of boiling rags and gave them another desultory stir. He felt his rifle shifting where it was slung onto his back as he worked. Like it was reminding him that it was there.

  Hey, Stuber, remember me? We used to have good times.

  “It’s only been a day, Rifle,” Stuber murmured into the steam. “Now leave me be.”

  The kid—what was his name again?—gathering up the already-boiled-and-dried rags from a hanging line, glanced at Stuber but didn’t dare hold eye contact. He seemed a tad skittish.

  If Stuber had learned one thing about men during his many years in the legions surrounded by them, it was that men could be a tad bitchy when they weren’t doing the thing they were good at. Stuber was no exception.

  Much like dogs that are bred to do certain work, if you don’t let them do the work, they wind up getting snippy, grumbling and barking at everything, and ripping apart whatever nice things you own in random flurries of destructive frustration.

  For so long, Stuber had pined to return to the arms of his lovely wife. Now that he was back, all he could think about was all the other things he would prefer to be doing with himself. He was built for war. Not stirring godsdamned rags in a pot and changing bandages for whiny peons.

  “It’s work that needs to be done,” he reprimanded himself, but without much conviction.

  The kid glanced at him again, and picked up the pace gathering the fresh rags.