God's Blood

Drag walked toward his brother.

No one stopped him. No one was close enough to stop him.

He halted five paces short.

“Three years.”

“Three years, yes.”

“The load arrived. You didn't.”

“Because I never meant to.”

“I left your name tag on the bottom of the dry sea.”

That was when Kale's face changed for the first time. Just slightly, his brows came down.

“…I see. I'll pick it up sometime.”

“What are those wings.”

“A gift.”

“From who.”

“From a lion who wanted to know things. He came south to look into something and got caught. We took his wings and sent him home. The Republic doesn't kill. It uses what it can use.”

Marlow remembered the voice at the old lighthouse.

I am of a disposition that cannot sleep while something remains unknown to me, and this disposition cost me my wings.

＊

“What did you come for,” Drag said.

“For god's blood.”

Kale looked over at Marlow. Then at One, at the foot of the tower.

“I heard they were both aboveground. Nine years, one of them alone at the bottom of a shaft. The other, nobody knew where. Neither one within reach. And now they're standing in the same place, under the same sky.”

Marlow's back went cold. He had a body that felt no cold, and still it went cold.

The first condition. Bring the man at the bottom of the shaft up.

That was what had set the two of them side by side.

“Central has been turning the sea into grain for two hundred and ninety years. Holding it all with one pair of hands. The Republic wants to do that with its own hands. With one god's blood, you need no cattle and no people.”

“God's blood, you say,” Marlow said.

“That's what we call it in the Republic. Blood that never runs out. Blood that makes grain without end. A man who has that is the same as a god, wouldn't you say.”

“A god stripping clothes off corpses outside the wall?”

Kale looked at Marlow's face.

Then he smiled a little. It was a way of smiling Drag had never once had.

“That's why it's hard to say out loud. For me too.”

＊

Mirabel cut in then.

“All right, all right, could you two save the family quarrel for later. I'm working here.”

Kale opened his wings halfway.

“…Central's Blade.”

“That's what they call me. Not a pretty name, is it.”

“The people here are in the Republic's keeping.”

“The people here go with Central,” Mirabel said. “Prior claim.”

“Prior claim is settled by numbers.”

“Oh really.”

Mirabel grinned.

“Let's count, then.”

＊

The first one to move was the man with the swollen throat.

His mouth opened.

No sound came.

No sound came, and blood ran out of Marlow's ears. Every pebble on the ground jumped at once. The south-facing wall of the shed where the nineteen miners were hiding blew inward.

Willa screamed. Her scream made no sound either.

Mirabel vanished.

She seemed to vanish. The next time anyone saw her, she was beside the man with the throat.

The blade in her left arm had extended.

The throat man's head tipped. It tipped, and then it came away from his body.

Sound came back.

The man with the griffin forelegs swung his talons in from the side. Each of the four claws was as long as a man's arm.

Mirabel didn't dodge. She took it on the metal arm.

Sparks flew.

All four claws fell off at the root.

Before he could cry out, Mirabel's right hand touched his chest. Only touched it. The man flew twenty meters backward and stopped moving, outside the pillar of light from the ship.

“Eleven left. Oh, ten. I'm bad at counting, ahaha.”

＊

The twins came.

Two bodies joined at the spine, clawing the ground with four arms, running like an animal. The face that looked forward and the face that looked back said the same words at the same time.

“Central's Blade. It is in the records. A model from two hundred and ten years ago.”

The voice came doubled.

“Don't call me a model, that's rude.”

Mirabel's blade swept sideways at the twins.

It missed.

The front head watched the blade, the back head read the next move, and four arms carried the body off in separate directions. The blade cut the air between them.

For the first time, Mirabel stopped her feet.

“…Well now.”

She was smiling. A different smile than before.

“I like it. I like you two. Watching front and back, are you. No wonder I can't land one.”

The twins' four arms swung at once. Mirabel cut two off with the blade and took one on the metal arm. The fourth went into her side.

Her body slid sideways.

The patchwork clothes tore, and what came out from under them was not blood. It was black, it gave back no light, and it ran like liquid grain.

“Ah. That hurts. That really hurts.”

＊

Marlow wasn't watching any of it.

He was watching the foot of the tower.

The rest of the Republic's soldiers, three of them, were running toward One.

One didn't run. Nine years at the bottom had made him forget how.

Marlow ran.

The legs that had climbed the wall for thirty days kicked the ground on their own. There was no pain, so he could kick forever.

He caught the first one. A man in the shape of a man, both arms covered from the elbow down in a black shell. The shell arm swept his shoulder aside.

The bone in his shoulder made a sound. The sound of breaking.

It didn't hurt.

With the broken shoulder, Marlow clung to the man's arm.

At the seam of the shell the skin had rubbed raw. Red flesh showed through, wet.

He cut his own palm with the hook. Deep. Blood came.

He pressed that hand against the skin at the seam.

The man cried out.

Around the pressed hand, everything went black. It went black, and a single grain dropped. A bucketful. A bucketful of water gone out of a human body in an instant.

The man's arm shriveled. It shriveled and became, inside the shell, like a dried branch.

He dropped to his knees and fell forward.

Marlow looked at his own hand.

The cut in his palm was already closing.

A grain lay at his feet. Half the size of a rice kernel. No stamp.

There was no machine here to strike a stamp.

There was no one here to write down what had been erased.

＊

The other two had stopped.

They were watching Marlow. Looking from their fallen comrade to Marlow's hand and back again.

Behind them, wings spread.

Kale was flying.

One beat of the eight-meter wings blew the sand out in a circle. On the second beat, Kale was at the foot of the tower.

He took One by the arm and went straight up.

“Let go. Let go of me, you.”

For the first time in nine years, One raised his voice.

Marlow jumped. He didn't reach. His fingertips grazed the sole of One's shoe.

Drag threw his pickaxe.

It went into the root of Kale's right wing. Ash-gray feathers scattered.

Kale's body tilted. It tilted, and he brought it back level.

He looked down. At his brother.

“…Good arm. Throwing was always the one thing you were good at.”

“Come down.”

“I won't. I'd like to tell you to come with me, but I won't say that either.”

“Why not.”

“Because if I said it, you'd come. You would.”

Kale rose into the pillar of light from the ship.

Still carrying One.

＊

Marlow turned toward Mirabel.

She had cut off one of the twins' arms and was standing with a hand pressed to her side. Two more Republic soldiers lay around her. Black liquid dripped between her fingers.

She was watching Kale rise.

Watching, and not moving.

“Hey! He's taking One!”

“I see him.”

“Stop him! You can reach him!”

“I can reach him.”

“Then why—”

Mirabel took her hand off her side and looked at her black, wet fingers.

“My job is taking the people here east, kiddo. Getting taken south is outside the job.”

“That's not a reason!”

“It is one. Two hundred and ten years, it's been enough.”

Mirabel grinned.

She grinned, but the brown eye wasn't smiling.

“And besides. Whether I really want to stop him, I haven't decided that myself yet.”

The belly of the ship closed.

The pillar of light went out.

A black shadow three hundred meters long slid south without a sound. The stars came back one by one.

What was left at the drill site: five fallen Republic soldiers, the one-armed twins, a shed with a wall missing, and a single unstamped grain underfoot.

And the water level, still rising past seven meters.

There are only two bloods left in this world that can bring the water down at the bottom of a shaft.

One of them is in the southern sky now.

End of Chapter 27