Infinity Blade: Redemption (6 page)

There were hundreds of people here. All coming to see Siris, calling that “he” had arrived.

“You started a rebellion?” Siris asked, looking to Isa. “In my name?”

“Yeah.”

“
You
started a rebellion!”

“All right, yes, you don’t have to rub it in.” She grimaced. “Against my better judgment, I took charge. Somebody had to. The idiots were getting themselves strung up, making a ruckus but accomplishing nothing. They needed focus, someone to bring together the malcontents from all the villages, organize them. I figured since I was the fool who started those stories, I should be the one to keep the rebels from getting themselves killed.”

She looked at the oncoming crowd. “Honestly, they don’t have much in the way of wit.” She hesitated. “Heart though . . . they’ve got a whole lot of that, Siris. That they do.”

Siris felt a sense of grimness as he watched the people approach, looking at him with awe, hesitance, expectation. Why should this adoration bother him? He’d been raised as the Sacrifice. He was accustomed to notoriety.

Except . . .

The Dark Self—
it
knew what to do with followers.

Siris had never been trained for leadership. He was a solitary warrior, a Sacrifice sent to fight and to die. The only part of him that knew anything about leading others was that buried part, those instincts he didn’t fully understand.

It responded to the devotion these rebels showed him.

“Well done,” he said to Isa, then smiled proudly at those who had come. “Well done.”

THE RAIN
had grown worse by the time Uriel reached his car. It pounded him as he worked to get the door open, briefcase in one hand, umbrella in the other. He climbed in, the car starting on its own. The two-seater vehicle was intended primarily for commuting.
Practical.
The numbers made sense.

Adram didn’t drive a practical car. He drove a car that growled when you started it. He bragged about it frequently, talking about how he worked on it himself, tweaking the engine. It didn’t even drive itself—it was old, and considered a classic. That made it exempt from the legislation requiring all cars to have a self-driving mode in case of emergency.

Uriel’s car didn’t growl as it started. It hummed pleasantly, and Beethoven—“Romance for Violin and Orchestra”—started playing as Uriel shook the umbrella and pulled it into the car.

“Hello,” the vehicle said in its sterile voice. “Road conditions are reported dangerous. It is strongly recommended that you engage self-driving mode.”

“Like I’ve ever used anything else,” Uriel said. How could he work on the way home if he had to pay attention to driving? He’d purposely bought a car where you had to fold out the steering wheel if you wanted to drive yourself. He tapped on the display, telling it to drive him home, and then blanked the windshield, which tried to show him news stories. Mary’s work again.

Uriel settled back for the drive as the car pulled out of the parking lot—his was one of the last there, other than Mr. Galath’s limo—and took him through the rain to the freeway. He opened his briefcase and tapped idly on the display inside, retrieving some company health insurance reviews he’d been going over. But found himself too distracted to work.

Mary probably won’t even be there when I arrive,
he thought.
In this weather, she’ll have gone to get Jori so he doesn’t have to ride his bike home.

A surprise, perhaps? Maybe he could pick up dinner. She often got Thai for him, even though she didn’t like it much. Had she put in the order already? He looked up some places, trying to find which had the best deal, until his car pulled through the splattering rain up to his house. It stopped at the curb.

The curb?

Uriel looked up, frowning. Why was there a car parked in his place on the driveway? A bright red car, bulletlike, old-fashioned and dangerous . . .

Adram’s car.

SIRIS BECAME
a leader.

It happened just like that. He gave his Dark Self a little freedom, and it transformed him.

When Isa introduced him to the troops, he knew to nod and commend them on their bravery. He knew to ask the captains if their men were being properly fed, if they needed new boots. He knew to bolster the men with compliments, rather than pointing out that they looked half-trained, that a third of their number saluted with the wrong hand, and that their uniforms didn’t match.

Isa, at his side, relaxed noticeably. “You’re good with them, Whiskers,” she whispered. “A regular dominatrix.”

He raised an eyebrow at her. “Where did you get that word?”

“I read it.”

“What kinds of books have you been reading?”

“Whatever I could find! Not enough people read out here—most of them are illiterate. It’s not easy to find books. I read it, and assumed it meant dominating, commanding . . . like a leader, right? No?”

He smiled. “Not really.”

“Stupid language.” She dug out her notebook and made a notation.

Once the inspection was done, they followed the captains to the rebellion’s version of a command center—a log cabin with maps on the inside walls.

As they entered, one of the men asked Isa where to find the latest scout reports, and she just shrugged. “Why are you asking me?” she said. “Talk to the scouts, dimwit.”

Siris smothered a smile. She was hardly a natural leader—while she was clever, she did
not
know how to deal with people. Not without insulting them a few times, at least.

The commander of Isa’s “troops” was a weathered, white-haired woman named Lux. Those scars on her face, and the way she scowled perpetually, made her seem part daeril. She hadn’t come to meet him with the others; instead, she looked him up and down as they entered the command center, then snorted.

“Hell take me,” she said. “You really
are
one of them.”

“You can tell by looking?” Siris said.

“You all look like teenagers,” Lux said. “Pampered teenagers with the baby fat still on you.” She turned toward the maps on one of the walls. “Eyes are wrong, though.”

Curious. She had seen Deathless without their helms or masks on, then? Siris filed away the information. “Too old?” he asked, stepping up beside Lux. Isa joined them.

“Yeah, you know too much. But the greater part is because you’re just too damn confident. I’ve never met a boy your apparent age who is so sure of himself. Arrogant, yes. Confident, no.”

He didn’t feel particularly confident—but the Dark Self was. And, he supposed, she was probably right because of it.

“You’ve had combat experience,” he said.

“Served under Saydhi during the Broken Cliffs campaign. Heard you offed her.”

“I did.”

“Permanently? Gone for good?”

“Yes.”

“That’s not supposed to be possible,” Lux said, still looking at the maps.

“It is now,” Siris said. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? I killed her, and you realized that they
could
be fought.”

She eyed him. “Know too much,” she said under her breath. “Yeah, definitely one of them.”

And, startled, he realized that he
did
know too much about her. Not this woman specifically, but her type of person. He had lived for a long, long time. Buried deeply within him was an instinctive understanding of someone like Lux. She’d always fought for Saydhi loyally, counting herself lucky at least to not be one of the poor sods who had to work the fields.

That had built in Lux a certain guilt, perhaps even a resentment. She was happy to not have a worse life, but felt that she profited from the sacrifice of so many others. When Saydhi had fallen, it had come to Lux like a moment of revelation and light. The Deathless could actually die. They
weren’t
gods.

Siris would bet she had resigned her post that very day.

“What kind of training do your soldiers have?” Siris asked.

“As much as I could give them in six months,” Lux said. “We have done a few raids on the God King’s thugs, killing everyone involved and leaving signs to make it look like wild daerils were behind the attacks. He sent troops and wiped out the nearest batch of those, though, so if we try it again we’ll need a different cover.”

She hesitated.

“That was just training,” she continued. “A skirmish, not a full fight. I worried that anything more would reveal us.” She looked at him. “This is not a rebellion, Deathless.”

“It’s not?”

“No. It’s a desperate group of fools who need something to believe in. If you want a real rebellion, you’re going to need a real army.”

“No,” Siris said. “You’re wrong.”

She cocked an eyebrow at him.

“To have a real rebellion, General,” he said, meeting her gaze, “we don’t need an army. We just need to convince everyone that we have one.”

“A lie.”

“Isa tells me that there is a rising air of malcontent,” Siris said. “We need the people out there—the townsfolk telling stories about oppression, the cobblers who are tired of taxation, the farmers who are starving—to believe that fighting back has even the smallest chance of working. Then you’ll see a rebellion. Do you have any intelligence on the enemy?”

“Some,” she said. “I brought what I could with me when I abandoned my post—some stronghold layouts, troop numbers, things like that. A few of the people who joined us also worked for the Deathless, and they brought information too. That, mixed with what we’ve stolen in our raids, gave us something to work from. It’s random and spotty, though.”

“Bring it to me,” Siris said. “I want everything you have.”

RAIDRIAR DISPATCHED
the golem—last in a series of combatants—with reluctance. He had been hoping to recover some of these to serve him. Who knew what resources he would be able to find once free of this place?

But it was no use. The golem had only the most basic of deadminds, and Raidriar could not reason with it. It collapsed, shaking the ground with an awful
crunch
.

I need to be faster,
Raidriar thought, moving deeper into the catacombs beneath the temple that housed his rebirthing chamber. The Worker could be sending more resources. Each moment spent fighting was a costly delay.

He had finally reached the dungeons. Raidriar pushed through the doors, sliding his swords into sheaths at his sides as he did so. He’d stolen these off a particularly well-equipped daeril—one he’d been fond of, unfortunately. Despite his initial pleasure at the contest, this business of fighting through the place had left him depressed. He was like a master huntsman being forced to put down his own loyal hounds.

He counted out three cells in the dungeon, each of which was fitted with a thick, windowless door. Breaking down such a door was beyond him, even with his fit body; instead, he took off his ring. It was a simple loop—the type that fascinated his daerils. They carried his old castoffs and failed experiments with great pride. He looked at the small display on the inside of this one. Seven years and three months. Had he really needed
that
much healing? That would push this brand-new body to its mid-twenties already.

Normally, he wouldn’t care. He had bodies to spare, and this one—like his others—had been modified to restrict hair and nail growth so that healing would not leave him with an unsightly mangle of a beard.

Yet he didn’t know how many bodies he would have access to in the near future. He might need to keep this one fit, rather than running it ragged, healing it to the point that it grew to middle age in the course of an afternoon.

I will have to be more careful with healing,
he thought. His body’s Deathless nature would heal him slowly on its own. Unfortunately, when surrounded by enemies and lacking his armor, he had often needed the ring for a quick burst of restoration.

He shook his head, tucking away his ring in a pouch he had tied at his waist. He then fished out his others. One teleportation ring. That could be useful; it separated into two different loops, and when one was activated, it would teleport the smaller ring to the larger. You could use it to summon a weapon in a moment of need, for example. Unfortunately, the process did not work on living flesh.

He tucked that one away and inspected the third. Constructed of black metal, it looked like iron fresh from the forge. He held it cautiously. They knew so little of the element they called Incarnate Dark. Even the Worker had always seemed wary of it, though he—and his scientists—spoke of it in their usual scholarly way, explaining its import in the universe and its influence on the movement of celestial bodies.

To Raidriar, Incarnate Dark was just another tool. A dangerous tool—in other words, the best kind.

He slid on the ring and summoned from it a small shield of force that fit his palm and fingers like an invisible glove. He felt only a faint tingling. An anticipation of energy to come.

He allowed a tiny amount of that energy to seep through, a fraction of a drop of Darkness Incarnate. His shielded skin reflected the energy—or the
not
-energy—outward. Raidriar pressed his hand against the wooden door.

The door crumpled.

The darkness pulled everything toward it, ripping the door to its fundamental pieces, sucking them inward. Wood cracked and popped, as if an invisible hand squeezed the sides in with an awful strength. In seconds, the Incarnate Dark had been expended, leaving the door in shambles, the greater portion of it simply . . . gone. It had been sucked through the tiny portal in his ring that was connected—like all of the rings—to a distant power.

The cell now open, Raidriar stepped inside.

URIEL ENTERED
his house, laughing to himself. The storm would probably cover his entrance, wouldn’t it? Perhaps he should be more quiet.

He laughed anyway. Of
course
. He moved up the stairs, leaving wet steps. He pushed open the door to the bedroom. Mary screamed, reaching for blankets. Adram scrambled out of the bed in shock, falling to the floor.