Chapter 74: A Sacred Union (Patreon)

"And what happens if I don't take this deal? Do we stay locked in here? You have your two shadow servants kill me?"

Mordran wasn't listening to her anymore. Something pulled his attention away, and then he screamed in pain, and the Operator stepped back from the sound. "THEY'RE HERE." He looked at the shelves, then up at the ceiling. "They're watching me. Right now, they're watching me."

His hands started moving through the air, chasing numbers only he could see, and books began pulling off the shelves around him, three, four at once, spinning open while he tore through them without touching a page. "The Ommaru. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. They studied the energy of the soul; they could have hidden a mind from anything, and I never gave it any weight." He looked up. "There's no time to learn it. THERE'S NO TIME."

He threw that book aside and another shot into his hands before the first hit the floor. "The Verrok-Thaim. A cursed line of witches, and I laughed at them, I called their work superstition. The totems. With the totems, I could have buried myself so deep nothing would find me." He was already reaching for the next one, and the next, pages turning on their own all around him. "There has to be something in here. All this knowledge, thousands of years of it, and there has to be one thing that helps me."

The Operator stood where she was and watched him come apart. A man who did not want to die, tearing through everything he'd stolen for a way out that maybe wasn't there.

"I read almost none of it." His eyes went across the shelves, all of them, the whole span of the room. "You understand what that means? I killed for this."

His breath caught, and for a moment he couldn't get the next words out.

"I've had it for centuries, and I kept telling myself there was time. Most of it I never even opened." His hand rose, shaking, then dropped. "The rest I looked at once and decided it was junk. It could be in here." He turned in place, scanning the rows, his voice climbing. "The one thing I need. Out there on those shelves, and maybe I walked right past it."

He turned to her, and the composure was gone.

"And to answer your question. If you refuse, you die in here with me. We sit and wait for what's coming, together. Because I blame you, Operator. I blame the God who turned you into a traveler and chose our laboratory, out of everywhere, for his game."

"You want to know the funny part? Your God threw you into his little game, and he has no idea what he actually let in." The laugh dragged on, ugly. "Whatever's inside you, whatever's hunting you, it's going to reach him too one day. He just doesn't know it yet." He shook his head. "At least I get to die knowing that. It's something."

What's inside me? What the fuck is inside me? And now I have to take this piece of shit's deal too?

Operator. Simple math, and from what he's saying, there's a clock on it, so think it through. There's no way out of this place, and there's one way to walk out alive, which is to do what he wants. Stop thinking and say yes.

"What are the terms?" the Operator said.

"Swear it. The way you swore at your two administrators. This place is a dungeon to you, and even here, that oath should still hold."

"It won't do anything." She held his eyes. "The Guardian told me straight. The oath is between an administrator and a traveler, and you're not an administrator."

"THEN TRY!" His fists clenched in front of him, shaking, his eyes locked on her, waiting.

Yell at me again, and I'll break your face.

Spike in your blood pressure, and the nanos are flagging the adrenaline. You're about to do something stupid. Don't. You're not winning anything in here, so swallow it and swear.

She tipped her head up toward the dark above the shelves. "Hey. Guardian, Great Realm Portal, whoever's up there. I solemnly swear to give crucial information to the race of the man in front of me, to save their lives. In exchange, he gives me his head, or whatever it is, and everything in this place."

She looked back at Mordran. "Swear it."

He looked up. "I swear to give the Operator control over the library and my shadow, in exchange for her carrying a warning of critical danger to my people, to stop the extinction of my race."

They both waited on it. She watched the skin of her own arms, her wrists, the back of her hands, waiting for the burn she'd felt the last time an oath took hold. It didn't come.

"I don't feel any oath burning on me," she said. "You?"

Mordran touched his neck, held his fingers there a moment longer than he needed to, then looked at her and shook his head.

The Operator let out a long breath and sat down on the floor, her back against one of the shelf columns. "Then we're fucked, because there's no way you trust me, and no way I trust you either. You hand me control of this library, this whole shadow world, and I've got no way to know if you have something here that could fuck me over. Or that the message you give me carries something that says... hey, don't forget to kill the messenger."

She rested her head back against the wood.

I said that I'd get stronger. Sorry, this is where my luck runs out.

"Can you hear the singing?" Mordran said, rising to his feet.

He came off the floor slowly, and something in him had changed on the way up. He stopped. Then his head snapped sideways into the wood of the nearest shelf, hard, a dull crack of skull on timber, and he did it again, and again, like he was trying to knock the sound loose.

"It's monstrous." He pulled back from the shelf, blood at his hairline, his eyes fixed on something that wasn't the room. "It shouldn't exist. Nothing should sound like that."

He started toward her in quick steps, and partway across, a dark stain ran down the inside of his leg. The fear started climbing in her, too. Something with his power, breaking down this fast. Whatever he was hearing was pulling him into madness right in front of her, and she had nowhere to go.

"They're singing the name of my people. Over and over. And what they're going to do to all of us."

The Operator saw the fast steps, the eyes fixed on whatever his mind was showing him, and she started backing away.

I'm not sure I want to know about my past anymore.

A shadow of Mordran rose out of the floor in front of her and closed a hand around her throat, lifting her off the ground. She grabbed the dark arm with both hands and pulled, throwing the full weight of the mutation into it. The shadow didn't give. Her boots ran on nothing, and the arm held her up there, her whole weight nothing to it.

That new strength I got. Where the hell is it?

Mordran stood in front of her. The cuts the knife had opened were still bleeding down his body. He wasn't shaking now. He was crying. "I want you to hear the music. It's the music where there's death after death. Where the pain doesn't end, where the suffering is agony, endless."

The lights died. The library went with them, and in front of her, there was only Mordran's red eye, marking where he stood while the rest of him vanished.

"Listen to it," he said.

It reached her as one small note, far off, almost nothing, a sound she leaned toward just to be sure it was there. Then it found her. The singing came up out of the dark on every side, vast, and it didn't fill the space around so much as become it, until the all and the nothing around her were made of the same sound. The Operator clamped her hands over her ears, and it changed nothing, because the music wasn't coming through the air. It reached under that, into something that couldn't be covered or closed, and settled there, and made itself part of her.

There was no picture of what was coming. It came as a smell first, blood, and opened meat and rot. Then she understood how much of it there was. A whole planet and an empire of planets eaten alive and not one of them allowed to die, their souls kept and eaten again after the bodies were gone. The screams threaded through the music were the singers'. The wet sound of flesh cut loose and swallowed, the instruments. Out past all of it, the ones conducting sent their voices down across the planet and every colony that hung off it, patient and pleased. An orchestra of death where death was the one thing that never came. Only the cutting, and the swallowing, and no end anyone would ever reach.

"I know this music," the Operator said. The words came out before she decided to speak them. She hadn't heard it before; she was sure of that, and she knew it anyway. "Why do I know it?"

The lights came back, and the library stood around her again. The shadow set her down on the floor, slow, almost gentle.

"I hear the music, and I see the paintings," Mordran said. "I'm going to be part of that orchestra; it can't be stopped. But whatever you think I've done, whatever my race has done, no one deserves what's coming."

"And what am I supposed to do about it?" the Operator shouted. "You infected me. The music's still playing in my head. So what was the point of any of this, the deal, all of it, if I'm lit up on their radar now, the same as you? Another beacon on this world for whatever's coming."

"When I broke the wall in your memory, it held for a moment, then it closed again on its own." He kept his eyes on her. "It'll close again. Whatever it is that locks your memory away and wipes it, it comes back. You'll forget the music. You'll forget what it feels like to be marked."

Mordran knelt and set his head on the floor.

"I made you hear it because I had no other way. I'm begging you. My people have to run; they can't die like that." His voice went thin against the floor. "We chase perfection; it's what we are, and I won't stand here and tell you we'll stop. We won't. We'll keep burning others to get there. But that thing out there, that's not us. Whatever we've done, we're not that."

The Operator brought a hand to her head as the pain spread sharply through it. She pressed against it, and the orchestra in her skull started going quiet, one thread of it dropping out at a time.

It's already going. I'm starting to forget, I'm sure of it.

"How do you know I'll keep my word?" she asked.

Mordran lifted his head off the floor, and the man who'd been crying into the ground looked at her with contempt, like he'd never left himself at all.

"Because someone already infected you once, and it took root in you, whether you feel it or not. I saw all of it, remember? That man got into you, and he ruined whatever you could have become. You could have risen to something like us. He took that from you." His lip curled. "And I'm going to use what he left behind in you. His honor, sitting in you now."

She came closer and crouched in front of him. "And how do I know you'll keep yours?"

Mordran's hands shot up fast and hard, taking her head and pulling her eyes to within inches of his. "My full name is Mordran Orsavael, and I give you all of it. Everything I am."

He spat each word as if it burned to say. His fingers dug into her skull, and the force sent a dull pain through her temples.

"This is the union my race keeps for a husband and wife. The most sacred thing we have, and I'm wasting it on you."

"Husband and wife?" She pulled her head back, unable to break the grip. "What the fuck. Wait, husband and wife, how?"

He drove his fingers in deeper. The pain snapped her eyes open, and under it, she felt something else, what he felt, the raw hatred of doing this, every word coming out of him like it was being torn loose.

"Shut up and listen. I'm handing you my mind, my will, my name. Because of you, I lose everything I built, thousands of years of it, and I'm opening myself to you anyway, because there's nothing else left to me." The hatred reached his eyes. "This is what my people give to an equal, and you've got nothing to give me back for it. Take it. All of it."

He crushed her head tighter, his eyes locked on hers.

"Now swear to me. Swear you'll carry the message to my people, so they get out of this dead galaxy before it takes them." The pressure climbed through her skull; his hands clamped tight. "And I swear to you the secrets of my shadow, every question you ask answered, as long as it doesn't put my race in danger. Swear it."

"I swear." She forced it past the pressure in her skull. "I'll deliver the message."

A smile formed on his face, and their minds fused, and the fragments came, each one split into thousandths of a second, and together they were millennia.

She saw the love he had for his people. Whole, not a crack in it, a love that justified anything. Bound to that love, with no line between the two, came what it made him do. He came down onto a world and hunted the ones who knew things. Scientists, shamans, priests, anyone carrying something in their head. He took them the way he'd taken her, the gold eye sinking in, emptying out everything a lifetime had taught them, leaving bodies standing with nothing left inside. Once he held the knowledge of a world, he wiped out most of what lived there. The rest he carried away.

Then the laboratories, and they didn't stop coming. Face after face, no bottom to it, every one of them somebody before they reached the table. Some he opened and closed again. Into others he fed formulas, the same ones she'd watched twist Eron's soldiers, bone pushing out through skin, the body drawn long until it tore. New worlds under the needle, new species on the table, all of them begging for mercy he never gave.

And through every last piece of it, he was calm. No guilt anywhere in him. He didn't hate himself or waver or look back on any of it. He emptied a mind, cut a body open, and did it without a second thought, because each one left his people stronger, and that made it right. It made it holy.

Son of a bitch.

Mordran let her go. She pushed the pain in her head down and held his eyes, everything she'd just seen burning in her. "I'm going to kill you."

Mordran smiled, and the word came out of him soft, almost kind. "You already killed me." His eye moved over her face. "We're joined now. You'll know if I lie. Ask your questions and let me die."