The God Mars Book Four: Live Blades (47 page)

“It’s okay! Bly, it’s me! Straker!”

I realize he’s pretty much naked, what’s left of his
armor just laying on him or half-off him. His pale skin looks
intact—unmarked—over dense hard muscle. And that’s odd, because the
Bly I knew before he became Chang’s Shadow Knight was bone-lean,
battle-scarred and covered with Zodangan tattoos. His once long
blonde hair has been chopped short, as has his beard. His blue
green eyes stare at me, like he’s not sure what he’s seeing, like
he’s not sure if he’s woken up from his nightmare or not. In his
irises, I see the telltale metallic highlights of a hybrid,
nano-implanted.

He twists his hands out of my grip, feels his face,
looks down at his body.

I get up off of him, my open hands trying to reassure
him that he’s okay. The others have filled the little room, as if
backing me up against some threat.

Bly untangles himself from the scrap-heap piled on
top of and all around him, gets his feet on the floor, stands up.
The rest of his armor falls away.

He’s… Well, perfect. I have to avert my eyes like a
shy little girl. Terina yelps behind me, and she actually hides
around the side of the doorway.

Bly seems oblivious to his nudity, or more accurately
is absorbed in it, staring down at himself in disbelief, even as
our hosts come running to see. I hear Jane gasp.

“I thought you said…” Cal begins, then realizes our
unanimous shock.

“Get Long,” Erickson insists. “Please. Now.”

Long is nowhere to be found, which somehow doesn’t
surprise most of us. What Cal returns with is a package, a neat
bundle of fabric, with a hand-written note that just says “For
Bly”. It’s a set of simple clothes: a thick hand-woven tunic, pants
and soft boots in different shades of browns and tans.

We manage to get Bly into the shower (he’s covered
with a rancid slime). He’s still in a daze, overcome. And then he
almost collapses when the water hits him. He screams like we’ve
either scalded or frozen him, then starts laughing, giddy. He keeps
looking at his own hands, letting the water run over them. I
realize: he probably hasn’t felt much of anything since Chang
sealed him in that suit. That was over a year ago.

Like me, he doesn’t need to be dried off. His skin
absorbs the water left on it. And his hair and beard have grown
inches just in the last hour.

“OWW!!” Bly snaps, clutching at his right shoulder. I
didn’t see it, but the Ghaddar apparently stabbed him with one of
her knives. I see a flash of blood between his fingers.

“You bitch!!!” he spits, pushing us away, glaring at
her as she falls back into a defensive stance out in the hallway,
knives still ready.

“
Look
,” she says icily, nodding to his wound.
He moves his hand. It’s already closed. Bly watches it fade away in
seconds, chuckling like a madman. Even the blood that was on his
skin vanishes, as if re-absorbed into his pores.

“You still have your nanites,” I state the
obvious.

He digests that, staring at where the wound was, then
at his hand (there’s no blood on his hand either). I can’t tell
from his expression if this is good news, bad news, or maybe
both.

“Bly… It’s…” I try to be comforting, but he ignores
me, pushing through us like he’s in a hurry to be somewhere.
(Thankfully, he also ignores the Ghaddar.) He grabs his new
clothes, pulls them on as he heads down to the kitchen.

With everyone watching and like no one is here, he
snatches up a pitcher of water and guzzles it, then takes a large
bite out of a piece of fruit, then tears into a loaf of bread. He
sounds like he’s having an orgasm with every mouthful. He goes from
edible to edible, sampling everything as our hosts look on, just
this side of terror.

“Bly…?” I try to get his attention. He spins on me,
grins like a fool, grabs my face in both hands, and kisses me hard
on the mouth like he’s trying to devour me. He tastes like food.
Thankfully, he breaks off quickly, but still holds onto me, leaning
in to smell me, my hair, my neck. I’m surprised that I let it go
on, wait him out. (I can’t say I don’t like it, but I know I can’t
trust my emotions, and there are lots of uncomfortable eyes on
us.)

Finally, he lets me go, looking sheepish, almost
embarrassed.

“Forgive, dear Lieutenant,” he apologizes with a bow,
but then he takes my hand and kisses it gently, just once. Then he
turns to our host, who’s been keeping her distance. “And to you,
great lady. I’ve certainly been a poor guest, conscious and
otherwise. But it’s been long since I felt anything on my skin,
tasted anything, smelled… even saw the world except through my
crimson lenses. I’d forgotten…”

He gets lost again, staring out through the window,
at the buildings, the green, the sky. Grinning. Laughing to
himself. Then he spins like a drunk and makes a dash for the front
door, runs outside, out into the path, into the sunlight. He spins
around and then faces the morning, stretching out his arms to greet
it, grinning blissfully. His eyes, I realize, are wet.

“I didn’t think I’d ever
feel
again,” I hear
him mutter to no one. “Anything. Ever.”

“You think it was Long?” Erickson quietly asks me
(though it sounds like he’s already decided), as we give Bly space
to have his moment.

“It would make sense,” I agree. “But why? Out of the
goodness of his heart? He doesn’t even know us.”

“But he seemed to know what our swords were.”

I realize we’re not alone. There are dozens of pairs
of eyes on us, watching from the surrounding buildings, curious,
probably still terrified of the strangers in their midst.

Bly’s beard has stopped growing after several
centimeters, and his hair has reached shoulder-length. He also has
hair on his forearms, his chest. He falls to his knees in the moist
dirt, claws into it with his fingers like he’s never felt anything
like it before, brings a fistful up to his face and smells it.

“We need to get to the Barrow,” Elias prods us,
either oblivious or not caring.

We give Bly a few more minutes to soak up the sun and
the fresh air, while the others go pack what little we brought with
us (Rashid has the only significant load, which he still won’t
share). We quickly snack on some of the foods Jane and Cal have set
out for us, then I go and gently tell Bly we need to get
moving.

“Of course,” he lets me know he still understands
duty. “Of course. I’m sorry. We need to be going.”

I feel like an ass. Then worse, because my sword is
again pumping pleasure into me, another reward for heading in the
right direction.

Bly straps on his sword and knife, after tying his
armor up in a bundle with some borrowed cord. His sleeveless
robe—badly burned and falling apart—wraps around that, looking like
a sack full of holes. He slings the burden over his back—he knows
we can’t leave technology like that here, no matter how inert it
may be, and not just because our hosts have forbidden it in their
borders. I offer to help him carry it, but he declines with a
slight smile.

Jane and Cal take us out of the colony and down a
path that runs north of the one we took getting here, headed west.
As we pass through the colony, hundreds turn out to watch us leave,
keeping their distance. I certainly can’t blame them for continuing
to be fearful. They should be. We’re likely the very opposite of
hero, savior, champion.

The path gets us pretty directly back to the shore of
the Lake. From the positions of the visible Rim and the sun, I’d
guess we’re on the most western tip of the Peninsula, probably only
a kilometer or so northwest of where Jed dropped us—the sand and
terrain look familiar. In the distance, south across the water, I
can still see the crests of the mountains from where we came, tall
enough to be seen over the horizon but half-masked in haze. There’s
no sign of the Charon anywhere on the Lake.

What I
can
see pretty clearly is the Barrow,
rising up out of the water maybe five kilometers straight ahead of
us to the west. It looks a lot narrower from this side, suggesting
the flat-topped mound is roughly oval.

There’s a brisk wind coming across the Lake’s shore
from the east. There are wisps of white clouds in the deep blue
sky.

“So… Where do the clouds go?” Elias wonders, still
clearly distrusting his surroundings. “I mean, I understand they’re
formed on Earth by evaporation, moved by winds, shaped or
dissipated by temperature shifts… But there’s been no rain
condensation to deplete them since yesterday, and they seem to be
moving beyond the claimed boundaries of this place… And if that
boundary is impassable, where does the
wind
come from?”

“It’s blowing just like it does where we came from,
which should take the thermodynamic shifts of the entire valley,” I
agree with him. “The only difference is the air density and lack of
dust.” And the latter detail makes some sense because this place is
so green and wet, the pervasive dust of our world—if it is a
separate world—is nowhere to be seen here. But the larger
implication…

“So somehow the barrier around this world is
permeable to both atmosphere and light—since we can apparently see
what’s beyond…” Erickson puts together.

“And don’t forget a magic ship,” Elias snarks.

“Just not people,” Murphy sums. “But there has to at
least be air beyond the barrier—air just as dense as here—or it
wouldn’t stay like this.

“It would bleed out, equalize.” Elias seems smugly
pleased that we’re falling in line with his incredulity. But Elias
is right: this place makes less sense the more we think about
it.

“Could the wind just be circulating within the
boundary?” I try. “Maybe pushed by whatever’s forming the
barrier?”

“It would show in the clouds,” Bly speaks up before
Elias can call me an idiot. “There would be a circular pattern.
These are drifting east to west.”

“You still think it’s an illusion?” Erickson asks his
brother seriously, trying not to let our hosts overhear.

“It’s not an illusion,” Bly insists. “Not this
space.” He crouches down, scoops up a fistful of wet sand and
pebbles from the water’s edge, plays it through his fingers. Smells
it. “This is real.”

Unless it’s that convincing across all senses, I
think but don’t say.

“If Yod was as powerful as the immortals say, could
he have made this place, or preserved it, somehow out of sync with
our own space-time?” Erickson tries.

Elias doesn’t say anything, but I can see his mind
spinning, considering something as he stares across the water.

Some of the locals come around the lakeshore carrying
two small light open “boats” (the word for them, according to
Erickson), not unlike the Charon’s transfer craft, only well-worn
and probably not bio-nanotech. (I remember seeing one left
abandoned on the sand where Jed dropped us off.) In fact, they seem
to be a plain laminate, probably some kind of resin. Our hosts set
them down at the edge of the water. Others have brought a dozen or
so long poles with broad flat blunt blades on one end and divide
them between the two craft. They also bring sacks of supplies—food
and clean water.

“Thank you for your generous hospitality,” Terina
surprises us by saying first.

“You’ve treated us like friends,” Murphy adds.

“For all you know, we could have been enemies,”
Erickson dares say.

“If it makes any sense,” Jane gives back, “you look
like enemies, but don’t feel like enemies. You seem to be good
people.” She emphasizes that last word as if some of us might not
be considered people.

Elias is still standing at the edge of the water, but
now he’s looking down at the exposed wet sand. He makes a boot
print in it, then watches as the water surges into it and over it a
few times, steadily erasing it, leaving the surface smoothed. He
does this several times, marking the sand and watching the mark
erased.

“Are you okay?” I get his attention.

“Fine,” he lies, preoccupied and distant, like he’s
seen something that’s deeply disturbed him. All I see is water and
sand. He shakes his head, like he’s shaking whatever thought away.
“It’s nothing.” But he sounds like he’s in shock.

We get in the boats, fumble with the odd poles until
one of the locals shows us how to use them to propel and steer,
calling them “oars”. Erickson and Elias take that duty in one boat,
while Bly and I work the other. The Ghaddar, Murphy, Terina and
Rashid are delegated to navigation (at least in terms of watching
where we seem to be going and keeping us on course).

“We may not see you again,” Bly says a final goodbye
to Jane as we use the oars to push the boats off the sand. “You
have our word that we
will
do everything in our power to
protect your colony.”

And I’m remembering my original plan, hoping we find
a way to maroon the swords here to save our own world.

As we push across the water away from our hosts, I’m
honestly not sure—given the choice—which world I’ll choose to save
and which world I’ll be willing sacrifice.

Erickson Carter:

“How deep do you think the water is here?” Bly asks
idly when we’re what looks like halfway between the Peninsula shore
and the Barrow.

When no one has an answer for him, the Ghaddar finds
a heavy bladed grapple on a long strong line and dangles it over
the side, feeding the line out as it sinks. I watch the line slide
through her gloved fingers for several seconds before I see the
tension change.

“About ten meters,” she tells him as she begins
reeling in the hook.

“I suppose that’s good enough,” he says absently.
Then he offers the Ghaddar his oars. “Could you take these for a
moment?”