1-8
Sara couldn’t help herself; she laughed. “That explains why you were so eager to come to my aid.”
“I would have come to your aid whether you were a bandit or not,” Gilead said, folding his arms across his chest. “But I will expect you to make recompense.”
“Sure, whatever. You’ve probably just saved me from a whole lot of trouble.” Sara tried to move herself, wincing and swearing in Arabic as the motion put pressure on her ankle. “I’m going to need you to help me again, though.”
“Verily; what do you require?”
“Grab that butcher’s knife, the one that chops well,” Sara said.
Gilead did so. While he did, Sara laboriously shifted her intact leg out of the way, leaving just the leg with the injured ankle sticking out.
“Right. When I say so, I’ll need you to cut off my leg at the shin.”
“I beg pardon?”
Sara groaned. “Just do as I say, there’s magic bullshit involved! But don’t do it early or else I’ll lose the leg for real.”
Gilead hesitated for a moment, but it was not long at all before he chose to listen to her. It would not be the strangest instruction that a woman had ever given him, and most of the time following those turned out well. He cocked back the cleaver, ready to strike at a moment’s notice, and gave Sara a careful nod. She nodded right back, then shut her eyes.
“First Pretense: Watch the World Burn.”
Sara clenched tightly, as from her heart and radiating out across her whole body came an unsettling transformation. Like tendrils slipping through water, her flesh and clothing alike were transformed into braided strands of a homogenous yellow substance, shaped and worked into the form of a human being. Albeit a human being with many of the features reduced: Sara had no hair, no mouth, only vague suggestions of a mouth or nose, and fused toes.
Her complete lack of a mouth did not stop her from speaking, however. “Now! Cut it now!”
Gilead sliced down with the cleaver, and with one swoop severed Sara’s foot. Her body was not made of flesh, and there were no bones in her limbs. From one side the other she was made of a firm, doughy substance.
“Alright,” Sara continued. “You have a strong throwing arm, yeah? Take the severed piece and throw it straight up in the air, as high as you can.”
Gilead raised an eyebrow at the instruction, but did so anyway. There was something inherently unsettling about holding a thing, a human foot, which should have been warm and bleeding, but was not, and Gilead shivered when he first felt how cold and lifeless it was. But he did as asked, hurling it directly upward: it reached the apex at twenty or twenty-five meters, at which point Sara activated her power. The limb detonated, the explosion directed upwards but nonetheless creating enough of a shockwave that Gilead’s ears rang and several higher windows shattered.
Sara, meanwhile, calmly looked down at her leg as the severed portion rapidly regrew. She turned her foot a little, confirming that all was well, and then flickered back and forth, like the double-vision in the eyes of a drunkard. Just like that, she was back to her normal form, swearing up a storm in Arabic.
“That always hurts,” she said to nobody in particular, “but it’s easier to pretend otherwise when you have no mouth and your whole body is shaped out of Composition B.”
“It is unbecoming of a maiden to dirty her mouth with profanity,” Gilead said, examining the holes in his jacket.
“What? You speak Arabic?”
“I know many tongues. Several of the Knights of the Round Table are of Saracen stock. Why should I not know their language, just as I know the language of the Frank and the Irishman?”
Sara giggled, a laugh of pure stress. “You really are a knight in shining armor, Gilead du Carbennic.”
“I was also a king in the holy land, though for only a year. Even if I had no wist of the language already, I’d very well have had to have learned it to rule.”
“Excuse me?” Sara said as she rose to her feet.
“It is rather of a long story. Where is your daughter?”
“Firstly, she’s my sister, not my daughter. Secondly, I don’t know. When all this started, I told her to hide. She’s probably close by, but she won’t come out unless I can actually find her.”
“Let us both search, then, and if I find her I shall call for you.”
Zahra, as it turned out, had jammed herself behind a dumpster not far from where the fight had started, as Sara explained to Gilead while they looked. Once they were reunited, Sara and Zahra went back to the street where Rutter had been defeated. He was still dead, the vermillion orb floating above his body. To Gilead’s concern, Sara led her sister down into the pit.
Once they were there, Sara pushed Zahra forward with an encouraging nod, and Zahra reached into the liquid orb. Upon contact with her, it suddenly moved, the liquid flowing in narrow tendrils, some of which sank into the skin of her wrists, or coiled around her arms to vanish into her sleeves, while others poured into her mouth, which worked visibly to swallow. It should not have been possible, on a purely physical level, for such a small girl to absorb so much liquid; and yet it all vanished within her as easily as if it were a cup of fresh spring water.
“What in God’s name just happened?!” Gilead shouted down from the rim of the sinkhole.
“God had nothing to do with it!” Sara shouted back.
While they were climbing back onto street level, Gilead did notice something odd. Zahra had been sickly and weak ever since Sara had found her, and there were times as they descended that the older woman had to lift her physically in order to make the journey. As they ascended, though, some of Zahra’s strength had returned to her, as she was able to clamber up a few of the sharper drops with no assistance at all from Sara.
The two of them dusted themselves off at the top. “Let’s get away from here,” said Sara. “I’m surprised the police aren’t swarming around here already. Do you want lunch?”
“I could find it in myself to eat,” Gilead replied. “And the dining table would make for a good place to discuss the debt you owe me.”
Sara grinned nervously. “A debt which is likely about to increase. I have no money.”
Seeing as money was a concern, the three of them ended up at a river-side chippy, sitting on wrought iron and rubbing grease all over their clothes. Gilead had never tried any of this food before, particularly not the chips, and so for the first few minutes after sitting down was totally entranced. Only once he’d had his fill could he get to the business at hand.
“If you needed food, you could have asked,” he told Sara, picking at the bottom of the basket.
“Forgive me for assuming the worst of people. It wasn’t like I’d have been able to take no for an answer.”
“Because of your sister’s illness?”
Sara hadn’t told him anything about an illness, but just being around the girl for a sustained period of time allowed him to make an educated guess.
“Her Pretension is killing her, bit by bit. If she’d had to go the last couple of days without food… I don’t know”
Such was always the difficulty with bandits, especially of the food-stealing sort. Would Gilead really have been able to do any different? If there was something he could have stolen to save Dindrane’s life, would he not have stolen it?
But Gilead needed to change the subject. “Pretension. That is the name of the magic that you use?”
Sara raised an eyebrow, then remembered. “You’re a new Lazarius, right. Yes, it’s… O God, how do I explain it?”
“I’m the sun!” Zahra said cheerfully.
“I beg your pardon, young lady?”
Sara chuckled. “That’s one way to put it. Pretenders are… we embody concepts, you see. And we can tap into the concepts we embody to work miracles. Her concept is… the sun. Mine is bombs, or the image of the bomb-maker, or something like that, it’s all very esoteric.”
Gilead nodded along, even as he stared blindly at his arms folded on the table. This was the best opportunity he’d had so far—that he might ever have—to learn the meaning behind Dindrane’s message.
“I have diverse questions, and yet nist where even to start. How is it…” he jerked his head in the direction of the young one.
Sara shrugged. “Too much power in too small a frame, I suppose. But refined edgeblood makes her feel better, so we wander from place to place looking for more of it.”
“Refined edgeblood is…?”
“The stuff that dripped out of Rutter’s body, yes. It’s sort of a… physical manifestation of our power. There’s a few different places to get it, but the quickest way is killing other Pretenders. That’s actually why we ran out of food to begin with; another Pretender, this… cowboy. He was hunting us down, trying to kill us for our edgeblood in order to make himself stronger. We had only just managed to shake him when we ran into you.”
Gilead scowled with genuine disgust. “To murder a child for the sake of… what, greater power?”
“Greater power, yes.”
“And this is common behavior for Pretenders?”
“Not all, but many,” Sara said.
“Certes, now I wit why Gibson had such a negative impression of your kind. Is that really all your power is meant for?”
“No, no, no. Some of us work for powerful people, some of us just try to keep living our lives, and others…”
Sara trailed off, gazing out onto the river. Gilead waited for her to finish the thought, only to realize that she had no intention of it. But here he had the upper hand: he knew more than she thought he did. He leaned back in his seat, gazing skyward as if in deep thought.
“Was not there another part to all this? An old man in a tower?”
Sure enough, Sara snapped to rigid attention. “How do you know about that?”
Gilead shrugged.
“Ugh. Yes, there’s also the Old Man in the Tower. He’s…he’s the one who created Scrapyard, as far as anyone can tell. Like a fantasy sorcerer writ large. He doesn’t do much of anything though, just lives in his tower where Halmahera butts up against the Qinglong mountains.”
“Pretenders are supposed to destroy him,” Zahra said. “It’s what we’re made for.”
“That’s not true, Zahra,” Sara snapped. “People just say that. It’s a myth, used by the worst of us to excuse their grand quests for power. They say that it’s all to become strong enough to defeat the Old Man and send us all back home but that’s not… that’s like putting us back in Eden, it can’t be done.”
The bloated tick, let fed for too long. Seek power, seek pretension, take the Throne. That, then, was the mission which Dindrane had set Gilead on at the moment of his awakening. But with Sara’s doubtfulness, probably better to leave that thought be.
“You know what, that’s enough questions for me. I have a question for you. When we first met, you called yourself Gilead du Ceincture. But a few minutes ago, you were Gilead du Carbennic and all the other things. Why the change?”
“Caution,” said Gilead. “I find myself in a place most foreign to me. I nist who might have ado with the scions of my home in Carbennic. Is it not wise, then, to assume a false title?”
“Oh, but because you’re a knight, you cannot lie to someone who you’re about to have a fight with.”
“Certes.”
Sara frowned. “Certes?”
Oh, of course. All language had gone mad over the intervening fourteen centuries. “It means… sooth. The truth. You are correct.”
For another short while, silence prevailed over the table. Gilead swallowed the last scraps of his meal, and Sara encouraged her sister to eat for her own strength. Eventually, there was nothing else to do but leave. Sara was uncertain, though.
“So… are you going to let us go? Or, what, do we have to apologize to Gibson and say fifty Hail Marys apiece?”
“Nay and nay. In sooth, I have already given Gibson a handsome sum as thanks for his aid, more than enough to replace that which was stolen. But I propose a compact betwixt the two of us, that all ado might be settled.”
It took Sara a few seconds to piece together what he meant. “A compact? What are the terms?”
“Let us wend together. I shall have watch over you and prevent you from mischief-making; but so too shall I ensure your protection, for Zahra’s plight fills me with great dole and a lust to see her un-harmed.”
After many rounds of back-and-forth, including an extended misunderstanding as to the word “lust”, whose meaning had apparently undergone a substantial narrowing since Gilead’s time, Sara at last understood the terms. She pondered them for a moment.
“Where do you plan to go? We need to leave Carlisle, sooner rather than later, seeing as the authorities are probably upset about what we just did.”
“Good! I list for just such a thing. I wish to go to Carbennic.”
“Carbennic? The place where you’re from?”
“Aye. ’Tis within the bounds of Scrapyard, and I list to know what has come of it. And… there is another aspect. Have you any encounter with the black knight, who rides with an escort of the dead?”
“He nearly killed us,” Sara said, her scowling expression covering up a genuine fear.
“Did you see the symbol he bore on his breast?”
Gilead had seen it. He and Gibson had spent only one night out in the wilds, huddling together around their flame, Gibson clutching his shotgun as he waited for some foe to come. The black knight and his followers had ridden right past them, close enough to be seen in fine detail under the illumination of Scrapyard’s sky-runes. When Gilead had realized what was embroidered on the black knight’s chest, his heart had skipped a beat.
“It was… a spear. Or a lance,” Sara said at length.
“Indeed it was,” Gilead said, his voice softening. “That symbol is my symbol as well: it is the coat of arms of Listenois, the country which is ruled over by Carbennic.”
“The black knight is a relative of yours?”
“I wit it not!” said Gilead. “And that is the very reason I wend there.”
“You do realize that it’s a ruin by now, yes? You won’t find your family waiting for you there.”
Gilead folded his arms underneath his chest. “Will you compact with me? Or shall I have to find another means for your penance?”
Sara agonized over the question, that much was clear. Gilead put up as firm a face as he could; but the fact of the matter was that he had little idea of what else to do. What was for sure is that he would not dare hurt her, not when she was the only one Zahra had. No matter what else was said, he needed her help.
“You swear you’ll fight for us if we come under attack? Even if it means putting yourself in danger?”
“Of course I swear it. I am a knight! What else is my purpose, if not to defend ladies?”
“Is he good at fighting?” Zahra asked in Arabic.
“Yes,” Sara replied in the same tongue. “Extremely good. That’s what makes the offer so tempting. Having a bodyguard would be damned useful.”
Once again, she had forgotten that Gilead spoke the language. This time, he kept his mouth shut about it.
She leaned forward, shoving out her hand. “Very well. Let’s have that compact. Not like I had that much of a plan anyways.”
“What are you doing with your hand?” Gilead asked.