The Blood Solution (Approaching Infinity Book 3) (17 page)

Jav’s face contorted into a sneer, the hint of truth in Kohanic’s words honing his anger to a fine point. “How is it these days that people who don’t even know me know
more
about me than
I
do?”

Kohanic stared at him indifferently and made a final adjustment to the apparatus before him. The spectral machine flashed, sending out an expanding ripple of glitter light that passed through Jav and Raus and beyond, racing across the plain.

Jav watched the ripple’s frontier continue on in every direction and knew that it wouldn’t stop, but it was his anger at Kohanic’s secret knowledge that motivated him now; the machine and its light had done nothing and could be ignored.

On lifeless Zahl, Icsain was content—at least until the sun came up. Before the rising of the sun each day, he would walk long and far, and there may have been some magic in his stride since he was able to keep the light at his back, the sun never quite breaking from the horizon behind him. At the end of his daily trek, once he’d finally outdistanced the sun, he would find a place to sit. From this temporary throne, he would watch the wind draw its pictures, conduct its symphonies, and he would try to find satisfaction reliving his past life in his perfect memories. But his memory
was
perfect and he had little capacity for imagination, which meant that, for years uncounted, he’d starved for something new.

Icsain was bored, bored, bored. And angry. Only occasionally, though. More and more frequently, to be sure, but he could still reign in his temper. Railing would bring him nothing, and nothing was something he already had in abundance. In excess, really.

When he did get angry, though, he found that, in going back through those perfect memories, he separated himself from the humanity in which he’d once tried so hard to lose himself. Events would not unfold differently, but his opinions of the players had changed. Genuine acts of kindness no longer made any sense to him. He thought he used to understand kindness, but that was when there were people still left on Zahl. Now logic won out as the only acceptable criteria for determining value. He was, after all, a creature a logic. His memory was infallible. His ability to process probable outcomes had been called divination—magic—much to his amusement. Back then he could laugh right along with them and understand why, but now the concept seemed alien to him, a defect even, symptomatic of an inferior mind. Trivialities were wasteful and distracting, unnecessary. He thought the same of anger, of course, but anger came unbidden, and seemed a welcome friend at times. Certainly, in ages past, it had served him as source of motivation and resolve.

He needed a change. There were scenarios he had run through which would amount to a kind of salvation, but all of them depended on variables not local to Zahl, which in turn reduced their probability of coming to pass.

There was another solution. He could allow the sun, which had not always acted as poison, to catch up with him and simply suffer its withering rays until his immaculate body of polished wood turned to dust. Joining the countless whorls that capered across the surface of Zahl had a kind of sick appeal, like the punchline of a cosmic joke, which he could still appreciate intellectually.

It had taken centuries, but he had become known all over Zahl, and by that time the population had reached its exponential peak. Everyone knew of him. Governments sought him out for his wisdom, which he offered freely. He was unflinchingly honest, though, and he soon confirmed, without any room for doubt, another human failure: the inability to accept an unwanted truth.

He often wondered if his own presence had facilitated the ultimate decline of all life on Zahl, but he couldn’t clearly determine or distinguish probabilities where he himself was a key—or perhaps
the
key—variable. It didn’t matter, either. He learned quickly to tell enough truth to earn acceptance in various circles, but eventually, he couldn’t escape blame for whatever affliction happened to come along, whether it was war, or blight, or sudden and catastrophic climatic change. Though he never sought more than to belong, he became the scapegoat for any and all crises. In the end, he outlived the civilization and a part of him—a part of him which he could not and would not acknowledge consciously—took great satisfaction in that. He was, after all, superior to any life housed in mere flesh.

That unconscious pinprick high would come and go with the knowledge that his superiority to all life he had ever known meant nothing as long as he was trapped on a dead planet with no one left to outshine.

Jav attempted to move forward, to rush Kohanic again, this time finishing the Sarsan, but something held him fast. He felt like he was sealed in an invisible die mold, so perfect was his confinement. He struggled against the hold, but had the intuition that a percentage of his own strength was being used against him. Kohanic started towards Jav now, unsheathing the thick, square-tipped blade from where it hung at his hip, but Jav hardly noticed. He pushed against his prison, testing its strength with what was left to him, and finding that insufficient, he incorporated AI. In seeking a reference point to anchor the calculation, Jav saw Kohanic raise the square sword and bring it down. Frustration escalated to rage. Rage became power. In an explosive burst, Jav yanked his arms up, crossing them above his head to meet the bite of Kohanic’s blade. Pain, sharp and deep and localized in his forearms was swallowed by the ravening electric current that coursed through his body, threatening to burst out through his vibrating eyeballs.

Jav leapt back from Kohanic, suddenly aware that he was free of whatever had been restraining him, that his arms were wet with his own blood, steaming in the freezing air, but mostly he was aware of the cold itself and how the Kaiser Bones were absent, no longer covering him in their various protections. He searched the place in his mind where he kept them always at the ready, but they either weren’t there or they weren’t responding. His link to the skeletons was gone. Nor could he sense bone anywhere, buried under the ground or within flesh living or dead. There was no question: the Kaiser Bones were gone.

Jav’s confusion and the resulting preoccupation brought back his rage. His eyes still tickling, he quickly eyed the Sarsans around him. Kohanic was coming for him again, but the remaining Bright Ones contented themselves with Raus for the time being.

From their inaction, and though they yet stood upright, Jav was pretty sure that the corpses were not obeying Raus’s commands. Isn’t that want Kohanic had said? That the oath was now physical, that brothers would not fight brothers, not even after death? It didn’t seem to stop Raus or the Bright Ones from fighting each other, however. Founders’ privilege, Jav guessed. All right, he thought, if I have no army,
I’ll
be the army.

Jav sprung at Kohanic, his passage through the snow-decorated air fanning small ember lights all over his tattered and smoldering leather jacket, and landed his foot upon the giant’s right knee, turning and splintering it. Kohanic spun, unable to support his own weight, but Jav caught him, left hand sinking fingers of steel into Kohanic’s right shoulder, right hand likewise finding purchase amongst Kohanic’s ribs. Jav exerted mightily, incorporating AI, and tore Kohanic into two uneven halves. Blood, now thick and stale, erupted in sticky globs as Kohanic’s entrails slid quietly out his middle and down his broken leg. Jav sent Kohanic’s already-loosened head flying with a back-handed claw, then kicked the destroyed body away from him.

“
Is that the justice you wanted
?” Jav shouted at the inert body. “
I’ve got more
.
Why don’t you get up and tell me again how this isn’t going to go the way we expected
?
Because in the end, this
is
what I expected: you and the lot of you dead
.”

The look on Raus’s face plainly showed his shock, but he had no time to dwell on the monster Jav Holson had become. He was surrounded now, and regardless of the method, he hoped Jav would prove as unstoppable as he now appeared—for both their sakes. Lightning rained down around Raus, electrocuting groups of ten and twenty at a time, but though he made new corpses, they only remained
potential
soldiers in his army—he could control none of them. Nor did they attempt to assail him—yet, anyway—for which he was grateful.

Jav’s rage had begun a red spiral, somehow independent of him. He tore through bodies, through meat and bone, with claw hand techniques he’d never used on flesh and blood opponents before. It occurred to him then that though his body and his fingers were well-conditioned to execute these techniques, it
was
his first time using them consciously, that he had in the past, in spite of the power he could put behind them, opted for techniques that were more humane and less bloody. He shrugged off the thought and proceeded, tearing through Sarsans who, at least for a time, stood idle like the sheep to which they’d been compared, doing nothing but screaming out horribly and pitifully as they died. Those screams touched a part of him, down deep and inaccessible now, arousing the bud of compassion, but more than that, their inaction and their cries incensed him and drove him to further fury. Who would save them if not they themselves?

Some of the languid Sarsans were beginning to move now, pulling knives and small axes from beneath cloaks and furs. Some raised their hands in a way that suggested familiarity with the wrestling style Raus used or one that was similar. That was better, Jav thought. More sporting, at least.

Though he could not make use of his corpse soldiers, Raus still had the physical power afforded him by the Resurrection Bolts. Those who approached him he slapped away with hands big even by Sarsan standards while he was Dark, and which easily shattered bone. Skulls crumpled between his splayed fingers, and the snow around him was soon melting under the wash of steaming blood, littered with red-black bits of wet gristle, glossy white chips of bone, and hunks of soft, gray tissue. The Bright Ones fared no better against him. The electricity delivered by their swords was completely ineffective on Raus, though the blades themselves, when they struck true, were not. Raus had several cuts, all of which had started out as deep gashes, but these healed as the minutes passed. He had taken one of the blades and shattered it with the flat of his hand, had flung another away with such force that it had lodged with a distant clang into steel, midway up the length of the
Bright Sarsastra
. One of the female Bright Ones had so vexed him that he had wrapped his arms about her head and snapped it from her shoulders.

Jav was some distance from Raus now, his fighting and the rhythm of the crowd taking him further and further away. He was acutely aware of their separation, but he didn’t care. Nor did he think it a strategy of the Sarsans. It didn’t matter, either. Jav knew that he would be exhausted before they could kill
all
the Sarsans, and wasn’t even sure that he and Raus
could
kill all of them under the current circumstances, but his rage was like a hunger that refused to allow him any action that didn’t lead directly to satiation, even if satiation led to self-destruction.

None of the wrestlers were a threat, but the blades were coming for him in profusion now, one after another and often two or three at a time. Jav’s jacket had offered meager protection from them at first, but now it was so cut up that it was falling away in still-smoking pieces. He gathered it up and ripped it from him, casting it away, oblivious in his fervor to the cold. He grabbed the wrist of a lunging knife wielder and raked the supporting shoulder with his other hand, fingers clawed, shredding it and removing the arm. But as he did that, another blade sliced across the small of his back. His body reacted, reflexes honed and anticipating. He pivoted, his fingers closing around the hand that held the knife and raising the point up through the man’s own neck, through the crook of chin and throat so that the blade was visible in the man’s wide-open mouth. Jav responded to another, diverting the course of a whistling axe head into that man’s chest, snapping the bones of his arm in the process. Jav front-kicked him away, turning with a vicious sweeping claw that cleared the face and hollowed the head of another standing near, awaiting his chance.

Jav caught sight once again of the machine Kohanic had used to seal away his and Raus’s armies. He would have little trouble fighting his way back to it and was unconcerned about any defense the Sarsans might mount, but it seemed too easy, too obvious a target. Jav couldn’t imagine that Kohanic would be so careless as to keep the machine in plain sight if there was any danger of canceling its effects. Still, it was a chance he couldn’t ignore. If he could free their armies to fight on their behalf, even in reduced numbers, the outcome of this conflict would be assured.

He made it, as expected, with little effort. Everyone in his path tried to kill him, but no one showed any particular interest in protecting what he sought. Jav stood below the pylon with its overlapping torso shapes. He took a deep breath and scissored his hands, raking his fingers across the machine in an effort to cut it in half, but his hands passed right through it. He pursed his lips and scrutinized the phantom contraption before him, realizing that it was out of synch with physical space. Using AI might enable him to reach it, but the concentration required would be impossible to accomplish without simply stopping and focusing on nothing else. The Sarsans would tear him apart if he stopped moving. He tried regardless, pushing as close to infinity as he dared, once then a second time, but it wasn’t enough and he suffered for it, so that he had no choice but to abandon his attempts on the machine.

The Sarsans came and came, leaving marks as they did: little cuts, long cuts, stabs that couldn’t quite penetrate Jav’s muscles conditioned for 25 standard gravities. None of them had the strength of the Bright Ones, but it didn’t matter. After fighting for nearly an hour and leaving himself open in his assault on the machine, he was almost exhausted from exertion and blood loss, and he was going numb with the cold. Eventually he would fall, but he would see that he left such a pile of bodies in his wake as to make men and gods tremble.