Dark Age (Red Rising Saga 5)

“Hyrg la Ragnar!” they scream, and the Queen of the Valkyrie and Valdir the Unshorn run forward, two dark blades cutting through the light of the moon. Their acolytes follow in a blue and gray tide, jumping out the back of the ship in tight, beautiful martial lines that’d make any Gray proud. The assault shuttles follow.

Boots over the edge of the ship door, Ozgard laughs uncontrollably. Possessed. As if this were all his making, and he were a god overjoyed with the fidelity of his children. He points to me and reels my soul toward him. I clutch my terrible rifle tight and abandon my safety. As his arms wrap around me where the floor ends, I feel my terror flee and the evil in him disappears. My jacket whips in the wind. My pants are pierced with freezing air. But I feel nothing but warmth and love and acceptance from his laughter and from his naked body as we stand together overlooking the face of a living world.

“See!” he roars. “See! Do you see with your spirit eyes?”

Mars is captured in twilight. Her two moons watch us on the horizon. Beneath our metal feet is a great white shield mountain of northern Cimmeria. It seems the head of a giant standing with his feet warmed by the molten core of his world.

The city of Nike sweeps from his northwest shoulder toward the sea like a cape of stardust. Explosions flash in the city near its spaceport. Across the landscape, lumps of metal lit by lights hunch in the gloom like little lonely goblins. Mines. They spit no fire. Only their warning sirens flicker, staining the ground red. Their sky guns are down. It’s working! Triumph swells in me. The skuggi did it. Freihild lowered the defense grid. That beautiful maniac. It’s working!

I’m not going to be executed!

Ore freighters on the horizon drop assault shuttles and airborne Obsidian over the winter landscape, over the shield mountain, and along the plains, spitting Sefi’s children down on the mines my plan and the skuggi prepared for them. The Republic defense fleet won’t be able to react. Quicksilver’s missiles streak up out of the mountains from hidden installations, but Alltribe ripWings swing down to silence them. All the colors dance in a wild, vivid frenzy. The ground, the sky, the ships, the mines, the air itself, are alive with spiritual fire. This is the domain of the Obsidian. A world within an unseen world.

Beneath the hallucination, I feel the beauty and inevitability of this day.

For ten years, the Obsidians were to the Republic as Volga was to me. Doggedly carrying the weight of all the rest. Only to be denied the fruits of their labor. Fight, the little ones said to them. Kill for us, Valdir. Leave your homeland, but have none of our land, Sefi. Don’t shop in our stores, Volga. Don’t stand too tall, Volga. Because we are afraid of you.

Well, a pox on hypocrites one and all. They had their chance, and now the Queen of the Valkyrie has come for their helium mines. I find myself proud of them as I laugh with the mad shaman, because in all this stupid, greedy world, the spirit comes alive when you see someone say, no more.

“Do you see!” Ozgard shouts beside me with tears in his eyes. His face is like that of a child, not a monster. “We have come home! Do you see! This is our Volkland!”

“Yes!” I proclaim, pumping my dread rifle in the air. “Yes!” He pushes me back and says he must join. “Yes!” I shout. “We must!” He bellows at me, and only after I jump off the edge of the transport ramp do I realize he bellowed at me to stay, that I wear no armor. But I do not care, because the gods protect me. He has seen my fate in the firebones, and I do not die here from the missiles that streak past me. I do not die from the railgun rounds that tear apart the sky. I fly toward a pack of falling Valkyrie, screaming for the glory of the Obsidian people and all their justified vengeance. I fall in amongst them. Armored women and men look at me. They gesture with eyes wide through bone helmets. They are laughing.

“Onward, Valkyrie!” I scream as wind pulls my lips back from my teeth. My gravBoots accelerate with a twist of my toes, and I dive toward the vanguard, streaking past Sefi and Valdir, filled with righteous glory as I tear toward the burning mouth of an open mine, unscathed through tongues of fire, and pierce the crust of the world to land amongst towering behemoths of metal.

They turn their glowing evil red eyes toward me, and I laugh when they do not fire, for I am a spirit warrior and I point my rifle at them, pull the trigger, and shit down my leg, because I am alone amongst a pack of hunterkiller robots and it is no rifle in my hand, it is only a mop.

Then Sefi and Valdir land, and the world goes mad.

During war, the laws are silent.

—QUINTUS TULLIUS CICERO

I RUN THROUGH THE WATER I stole from Ajax’s assassins in two days. Though heatstroke is unlikely due to my physiology, dehydration plagues me and obscures even the most basic mental and motor functions.

Though my eye was not blinded by the firebrand due to avoiding its core flare, my vision is dreadfully impaired.

Three times I nearly lose my way when the features of the desert mislead me and I lose sight of the mountains. But I keep as straight a path north as I can, knowing I must eventually run into Erebos if I stay along the mountains.

I could not accept Apollonius’s help, but I might find some unaffiliated aid in Erebos. If I recover enough, I can decide how to reach Atalantia without chancing Ajax’s interference.

I eat the meat of cacti, and suck the water from desert lotus, but I feel myself fading. I find myself wishing I were back on the Archi, listening to Cassius and Pytha bicker as I lie reading in my bunk. I wish Kalindora were with me, that she hadn’t assumed I died.

I wish Seraphina had simply stepped to the right.

Only my anger at the desert itself keeps me going. Everything seems like a bleached mirage now. The sun is a malevolent fat troll that squats over the desert, burning any uncovered skin in fifteen minutes and punishing me when I dare walk in the day. I sweat and sleep when I can find shade, and walk through the mornings when the playa is barren of grace. On my fourth day, I find the rotting carcass of a glass leviathan somehow swept in from the sea. The translucent flesh of the giant sea creature writhes with clouds of predatory bloodflies and a wake of buzzards thick enough to blot out the sky. I steer well around it.

When the northern storm sweeps rain showers over the desert, I lie down in joy to let it soothe my mangled face and the razor cuts Seneca and his men opened on my thighs and hip.

Mercury is a lovely planet, with temperate coasts, and mountain hotels, and hot springs, and cool valleys, and coral seas, but to have all that, it had to have the hell of the Ladon around its equator.

I curse the bastards that terraformed this planet. I curse the rocks. I curse the sun, the sand, myself for needing so much gorydamn water. And I curse Ajax. But more so, I curse the culture that let him grow wicked.

The Peerless scar was formalized by Silenius to mark a Gold worthy of respect, not worship. Our rigorous Institutes were built to educate us to be shepherds, not cannibals. The world provided Darrow to show us how far we’d lost our way. To fight him, we did not find our path again, we strayed further and further, learning all the wrong lessons.

Gradually, the desert gives way to a semi-arid climate as I make my way to more northern latitudes. The transition is subtle, barely noticeable at first. But even the smallest signs of life give me hope. Torrential rain has eroded hillsides but also seduced weeds and flowers to spring out of the rocky soil. My vision returns enough in my right eye to see green interspersed with brown. The ground is still unforgiving and spartan, but the worst danger is over. Where there is water, anyone can survive. Deerling with spiraling black antlers and birds shaped like faeries feed off the orange berries of gnarled geran shrubs only to zip home to their hivecastles amidst cacti the size of houses. While I haven’t the strength to hunt either with my razor, I eat as many berries as I can find amongst the thistles, never minding the cramps the excess fiber causes in my belly. I eat grubs from underneath boulders, and swallow the yolks of bird eggs I find in low shrubs. Tubers and roots make the bulk of my diet, which causes more cramps, until I find a sulfur viper basking in the sun beneath a dead olive tree. I crush its head with a rock and drink its blood, knowing my immune system will likely handle the pathogens it carries. The mild nausea is well wo

rth the valuable vitamins. When I’ve drained it, I roast its meter-long body over a fire. Its meat is tough and elastic, like langsat flesh, but the calories give me fresh optimism as I make my push toward Erebos.