The Blood Solution (Approaching Infinity Book 3) (6 page)

“Ban was 15 when I killed Milla, and afterwards only he understood. Milla had been our personal attendant for five years. Besides Ban, several years my junior, she was and is the only person I’ve ever really been close to. To me, the resulting relationship was natural. And I was young, passionate for her flesh, her companionship, and for her affection. She was like a real mother to Ban. She showed him love and kindness and by all rights he should have hated me for what I’d done—at least as much as I hated myself. But he knew why I’d done it. Not because I agreed with father, but because one didn’t say no to the old man. Ban didn’t blame me for killing Milla, or for killing father when I did. Mother tried to stop me and shared my father’s fate.”

“How did it happen?” Jav said.

“Oh, I didn’t start out intending to kill either one of them. Father and I had taken to arguing more and more. Even with the passage of weeks and months, I grew ever bolder, fed by hate and youth’s disdain for the established rules and norms. I would challenge those rules and norms. I would challenge my father.

“I set about gathering support, both inside the Tower and out. I don’t know how much they actually trusted me, but they had had enough of my father.

“I remember the day I told my father that he would be stepping down as king. He laughed at me. Long and hard, he laughed. And when he was finished, he asked me how the people could ever follow someone who killed a girl he professed to love, even if she was a low class whore. He started laughing anew when he saw my face. I couldn’t believe it. He’d made me do it, for the family name he’d said, and now he was using it against me.

“As he laughed, I approached him. He simply pointed and continued with his laughter. Until I wrapped my arms around his neck. My father had taught me every hold and every technique I knew, but I had grown much bigger than he had ever been and he had grown old and somewhat frail with his years. He laughed a few moments more before he realized the prison his head was in. He shouted for me to stop. He insulted me. He told me how much of a disappointment I was. Until I started to squeeze. He said no more then, simply fought to free himself, spilling no more filth from his mouth than his own spit. My mother came in then. What a sight it must have been: my father gagging, struggling against my closing arms. Very calmly, I told her to leave. She went crazy then.”

Raus sighed.

“The rest isn’t very pretty and doesn’t bear illustrating,” he said. “But they were dead after that. What followed was chaos. Those loyal to my father fought in his name. The Tower was painted with blood by morning, and in the end, those who’d sworn to fight for me turned on me. It seemed that
no
Kaplers were better than one. I told you that my father was the last king. How could I claim such a title after all that had happened? I didn’t care so much at that point about titles or my own life, really, but when they threatened to kill Ban, defenseless in this tank, to make sure we were all gone,
I
went a little crazy.

“From then on the Tower has been home to only the two of us. There have been temporary boarders over the years, but fate has always seen fit to remove them in one way or another. I have waited a very long time for you and your Empire, Jav.

“I’ve never told anyone this story, either. Maybe because I’ve never had someone I considered to be a peer, maybe because I’m ashamed. I don’t really know why I’m telling
you
, except to answer your question. It’s all for Ban.”

Jav had gone out looking three times in the last three days. He’d checked and rechecked the area where he’d first seen her, expanding his search in either direction of the perimeter each time, but he’d found nothing, no hint of a familiar face or recognizable curl of hair. He went out again anyway and would continue to do so, at least until the Vine came and his regular duties resumed. Duties aside, the Vine would bring its poisons, which would first reduce then eliminate any chance of ever finding her.

He was beginning to think that it had all been his imagination, that there were no such things as soul echoes, and that he was a fool for taking the time to look, even with Raus’s solemn and genuine support. He shrugged mentally. He missed Mai so much, and it was her face that he saw in his mind when he tried to recall the Sarsan girl. He wondered, though, if he’d perhaps stepped onto the slippery slope of the insane. He might be just in time for early-onset paraphrenia. The symptoms were right, except for his doubt—

Wait.
Paraphrenia
?
Symptoms
? How did he know that word—that condition or any of its accompanying symptoms?

Jav stopped and stood among the people in their rags and their antique armor, some turning with a start when face to face with the Kaiser Bones, most closing their eyes, trying not to see him or pretending that he really wasn’t there; he stood among the campfires and the tents and the hovels, the rusted swords, spears, and other weapons arrayed in racks and ready for use. He looked down at his hands, his bone-joint fingers doubling in his vision. Suddenly they seemed far away, like they weren’t his fingers at all. Everything was distant now and edging farther away. Fever heat washed over him wetly within the Kaiser Bones, and his legs started to shake under his own weight. All around him boomed and thrummed with the deafening drumbeats of his heart as his head grew lighter and lighter. His vision thinned, leaving gaps, a precipice forest that threatened to swallow him in all directions.

Who am I
? he thought thunderously, hoping to halt the sensation and meaning to voice the words, but finding himself unable to.

A towering shadow loomed over him, imposing and insistent. He looked up with reflexes as fast as molasses, with failing eyes that might not see. But they did see. They saw with a clarity that Jav himself could not manage. He saw her face, her soft brown hair framing her perfect white skin, cheeks always flushed, blue eyes always smiling when they beheld him.

“Jennifer,” Jav whispered. He was certain of the name, but none of the other necessary associations. In the vast, empty hall of his mind, something shattered like glass and all went white.

Jav awoke flat on his back, looking up at a dark sky—how much time had passed?—and the darker silhouettes of several Sarsans staring down at him. He sat up and noted a number of blunted or broken weapons littering the ground: they hadn’t ignored the opportunity to try to kill him while he was unconscious. It didn’t matter. While Dark, he was in no danger from them.

He put a hand to his pounding head and said to anyone who might respond, “The girl.”

One of the men turned, snapped his fingers twice, and called, “Bring Anis.”

A group of three men with a beautifully proportioned girl huddled in their midst came forward, pushing their way through the crowd that surrounded Jav. Jav saw how they clutched at her arms, at once coveting her as a potential weapon against him and fearing her as anathema.

Jav stood, brushed himself off, and pushed with the flat of his hand a man who didn’t move to give him room. It was a casual gesture, but the man, almost twice Jav’s size, went down instantly, sprawling clumsily.

Jav stared at the girl. Her face was still hidden by harsh shadows, until she looked full upon him, her features seeming to surface from a black pool. He tried to focus on her eyes, her cheeks, her mouth, her hair, but they were all shifting colors on a kaleidoscope palette. He saw many things. He saw the brown hair and blue eyes of the woman he’d known in another life as Jennifer, and with the uttering of her name in his mind came a stab of pain, like a thick needle under a driving weight. Her features changed, as he continued to stare, like sand being shaped and molded by the receding tide, her skin tone darkening, her eyes brown, her hair a light cascade of black waves. This impression was stronger and felt real, but as he spoke Mai’s name, not quite daring to hope, the pain came again, sharp and severe, blurring his vision before bringing it into raw, razor-etched focus which left no more room for doubt.

Jav let out a long, ragged, and purely symbolic breath to calm himself. Now he could see the girl—really see her—and though she was not unattractive, she looked neither like his memory of Jennifer nor again like Mai. But something in her face, something about her recalled them both.

“You’re called Anis,” Jav said to her.

She nodded demurely.

“Leave us,” he said to everyone else.

When no one moved, Jav turned to the man who had called for Anis. “What is your name?”

Before he could even consider his reply, Jav was on him, pulling his face down with one hand firmly wrapped around his throat. The man swallowed hard through Jav’s grip and said in a sputter, “Jamus.”

“Jamus, unless you’d like to see this wretched soil fertilized with the blood, meat, and bone of everyone I can get my hands on in the next two minutes, I suggest you take it upon yourself to make sure my words become reality. I can cover a lot of ground in two minutes when I put my mind to it. Do you understand?”

Jamus tried to nod as his face darkened to purple.

Jav released him and his head shot back as if on a spring as he wheezed sharply, sucking in precious air. Jamus clutched at his throat, swallowed hard two more times to ready his voice. “Back away,” he cried hoarsely. “If you value your lives or those of your neighbors, do as he says without hesitation. Back away.” He continued to shout until Jav and Anis were alone.

Jav returned to normal and drank in the sight of the girl before him. To call her a girl was strange considering her size in comparison to his. She stood over two meters but her face was that of a girl in her late teens or early twenties. The more he looked, the prettier he found her. Her face was powdered with dirt, but beneath the thin veneer of grime, her cheeks were flushed. Her eyes were grey pearls, almost identical to his own, but hers shone with a strange light that Jav thought only he might be able to see. Her hair was like straw, both in color and in temperament; though short, she had it tied in back where it fanned impressively. Somehow he knew that if he put his fingers through it, despite its appearance to the contrary, her hair would be soft and luxuriant. He felt a little drunk. He now remembered once-forgotten moments of having known Mai, or really, of seeing Jennifer in her and he felt that now. The feeling was fading, but it lingered longer—and burned more intensely—than it ever had with Mai and this time he knew what he was experiencing. He still didn’t remember Jennifer, or know why this was happening, but he knew what it was like to encounter a soul echo now, of that he was sure.

Finally he said, “Do you know me?”

Her lips parted slightly as she held his gaze, considering her answer, “You fell from the sky, as shot from the Lightning Gun.”

“Did you see my arrival?”

She nodded.

“Then you know that I wasn’t shot from the Lightning Gun, that I’m not from Sarsa.”

“One need only look at you to know that,” she said matter-of-factly.

Jav smiled. “Of course.

“I come from very far away and yet when I arrive here, I, the first of the Empire ever to set foot here, feel as though I know
you
, that I have known you, or echoes of you, in other places twice as far from here and further still.”

She lowered her eyes, unable to meet the intensity of his gaze, and unable to see any logic in his words.

Jav touched her chin gently with his fingers, raising her face to his again.

“Beautiful,” he said, bringing a fresh flush to her cheeks. In that instant, deep within her eyes, in the place where the cogs and gears of the universe moved, he thought he saw recognition. He thought that she knew him, too, even if it was on a level far separate and removed from her own comprehension.

“There’s something here, Anis, some reason to draw us together for—at the least—a third time, and I would know it.

“Come on,” he said.

She was speechless and grinning in spite of herself, having grown intoxicated with his energy and his interest in her. She followed after him breathlessly, her hand held gently but firmly in his own.

“You want to keep her
here
?” Raus said.

“I want to keep her safe,” Jav replied.

Raus shrugged. “There’s a suite of rooms that she can have the run of, but she will remain behind locked doors. She’s not to leave those rooms. I don’t want to see her.”

Jav nodded. “Not even to see if she’s Milla Marz?”

“Especially not to see if she’s Milla Marz. If it’s her, maybe this will break the chain. Though I doubt that fate would make her both of ours.”

“Thank you, Raus.”

Raus put a heavy hand on Jav’s shoulder as he started to go. “I hope it works for you this time.”

Jav was taken aback by the other’s sincerity, and could only reply, “Thanks,” again, hoping that the reciprocated sentiment was understood.

Over the next several days, between briefings with Raus and reports back to the approaching Root Palace, Jav visited with Anis. He first saw that she was washed—and had to exercise a fair amount of willpower to prevent himself from taking advantage of her. Despite her differences to Jennifer and to Mai, she was so maddeningly familiar. Unclothed she was magnificent. He could think of no other way to describe her. Her body was that of a giantess, statuesque and perfect. She never uttered a single protest to his ministering, verbal or otherwise, and the idea of taking her felt like slipping into the past, comfortable and long overdue, like resuming right where they’d left off. And maybe it
was
like that, but not for Anis.

She was willing enough, something she’d made plain her second day at the Tower, but it was clear that, for as much as she was attracted to Jav and was excited by his pursuit of her, she still spoke in terms of bargaining for her life. He wanted to see an end to that before they progressed any further.

There wasn’t much to learn about Anis Lausden. She was the only child of parents she never knew, raised by her uncle and his family in the camps on the fringe of the Black Fields. She was 20 if her uncle’s count was right.