Fourth Under Sol (Digitesque Book 5) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Foreword

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  About the Author

  Fourth Under Sol

  Digitesque, Vol. 5

  Guerric Haché

  For all the people yearning

  To create things that have never been

  Don’t give up

  Foreword

  We speak strangely of our gods.

  We are now told we should not call them gods at all. Some pray to older gods, invisible gods, inscrutable gods whose presence is felt but never known. Their gods watch over them, always and forever. Life’s hardships are their tests and punishments, life’s successes are their boons and temptations. Their gods are nowhere to be found but in their heads, and this is proof they are everywhere. Our strange cousins have little patience and even less understanding when we look to the creatures of metal and light that live around our worlds and call them gods.

  But our gods harvest crops. Our gods build homes. Our gods guide us across deserts and seas and stars. Our gods cradle the dead in their arms, and sing to them sweet dreams of eternity.

  It is true, though; we once believed our gods far greater than that. I certainly did. And worse still. Sometimes, our gods kill us.

  It was through flaws, these failures, that Isavel beat her own path. She meant to hold the gods to account for their hideous neglect, for all the death and abandonment. She also meant, I think, to martyr the Herald, who she sometimes hated even more than the gods themselves.

  We have all seen the strange turns history may take, and in time the doubters may well come to see what Isavel showed me, under the alien cast of a familiar sun.

  Our gods are disappointing. Sometimes, our gods are outright pitiful.

  But should you come across one in a moment of weakness, remember why they stumble. Understand what they are, and what they are not. There may be comfort in gods who can never be found, and so can never be seen to fail. But there is truer comfort in finding your gods and watching them falter, true to their nature, if that is a nature you understand. If you know what they offer, and what they need. On this I speak from experience.

  They are deeply flawed, these gods of Sol. They cannot save the world. But they are ours, through and through, from cradle to grave.

  Chapter 1

  “What in the thousand hells are we supposed to do now?”

  They were on an island. It was tiny - appropriately so. The vastness of the world and the dark beyond had swallowed everything she had known or wanted, and as she lay on dead pine needles scattered across the ground, she felt the island understood her a little. Tiny, in the midst of a vast churn. Unable to effect any kind of change, but somehow persisting.

  “They tried to kill us. We can’t go back to Glass Peaks.”

  “Where else do we go? Do we just disappear?”

  “I’m all for disappearing.”

  “Of course you are, ghost.” Hail’s voice was taut. “Anyone who isn’t sure they want to be here should leave. I’m following her to the death.”

  The silence let a few rustles of the living pines above them reach her ears. They were none of them pathfinders with any sense of how loud they were talking, and they probably thought she was still sleeping. She was listening, though, ears attentive while her eyes tried not to see the silhouettes in the branches.

  “We’re staying.” She could practically hear Sam nodding.

  “What, you want her to lead you somewhere? It’s not - look. She’s been on about gods since forever, and they just shat godfire on you people. It’s clear they don’t give a damn about any of us, not even their Herald. So what’s left?”

  What was left was more than she would have liked. If she didn’t listen to her companions, she heard the distant shouts of people dying in fire and blood. She heard the roar of the rockets. She thought she heard her parents, though she was certain she hadn’t heard them at the time - she had been too busy dying.

  But here they were again, watching her from cracks in the island’s little forest and ferns. Waiting for her, maybe, just on the other side of Elysium.

  “Think about who she is. What she’s been through.”

  “You don’t know her, ghost.”

  “Sam, she was a mess before she went to sleep. She’s going to need a lot more than a midday nap to cool off.”

  “So we stay. We help out.” Tanos sounded quiet. “I think we owe her that.”

  We owe her that.

  Deep breaths. They were staring, from the corner of her eye - people she had lost. Mostly dead. Deep breaths were supposed to help. They didn’t help her not look for Ada in those shapes, but the closer she looked, the more she realized they were just trees and underbrush. She tried closing her eyes, but in the darkness they grew eyes and limbs and faces she would never see again.

  “Erran, why haven’t you left already?” Sam’s pitch dropped. “Go dance the thousand with Tevoria.”

  Hail’s agreement was quick. “I hate to let a ghost run free, but since I owe you my life once over, consider this your due. Run away, and I won’t kill you.”

  Consider this your due.

  “Listen, much as I’d like to, I’m sticking around until I know the whole song and dance. I can’t just leave someone like this in the woods without knowing her next move, especially when she’s killed some of us before.”

  “Then maybe you should just ask her.”

  Her eyes widened a little. Had Tanos, youngest and least gifted of the lot, somehow picked up that she was awake?

  “I don’t think she’s in the mood to make those decisions. Let’s get somewhere safe, try to settle down for a few days. When she knows what she wants -”

  Isavel pulled herself up from the ground in a slow, deliberate motion, and Sam quieted down. She didn’t face any of them; too many plants that way, too many chances for her eyes to find the shapes of her dead. She turned to look out at the water, at the great island and the mountains framing the strait, and rolled her shoulders. She already knew what she wanted.

  “I want Ada. Can’t have her.” She rubbed the locator stone in her hand, tugging on the binding that kept it around her neck. “I want to fade into the background, to have a quiet life. Can’t have that either.” Her hand moved up the binding to the black code Ada had etched onto her back, some ward against an ancient curse or weapon she didn’t understand. “I want to know what I can do to get away from this life, but the gods haven’t helped.”

  She turned around and looked at them. What a party it was - Hail still with her; Sam and Erran, ghosts who through obliterating pain had stolen human bodies to escape an intolerable afterlife Isavel had almost been tricked into destroying. Tanos, too, a young man who had somehow thrown his lot in with ghosts even though his own village was consumed by them. One day, when the dust had settled, she wanted to hear that story.

  The wraith was there too.

  As she looked into that wiry tangle of dark code and couldn’t help but see Ada in it. It was her creation, after all, its body a living cloud of Ada’s magic. And the others… most in this party, in one way or anothe
r, were tied back to Ada Liu. That did not help the ache in her chest.

  Alone as her world fell apart, Isavel had looked to the coder for escape, but in the end it was another poor choice, or perhaps another damnation from the gods. Ada couldn’t not know. Couldn’t not cross the stars, couldn’t not hunt for hoary old secrets among strange aliens hidden behind the nothing of space. It nagged at Isavel - part of her worried for Ada’s foolishness, but more than that she was bitterly frustrated and betrayed. This world and these gods and she were real and meant something now , and Ada had left it all. Had left her.

  She kept closing her eyes and trying to force her head clear, but that victory was easier wished than won. She looked away, into the woods, but kept seeing her dead. Deep breaths.

  It was Sam who broke the silence. “The lives we live need not be the lives we were given.”

  She opened her eyes to stare at the ghost. “What?”

  “It’s - an ancient saying, I think. You’re something unique, Isavel, but you don’t have to just be the thing the gods made you.”

  Isavel frowned. “What else can I be? I don’t exactly have choices laid out in front of me.”

  “Then we can find some.” Tanos looked like he was concentrating. “You need to forage. You don’t know what’s in the bush till you’ve had a look.”

  Hail scowled. “What bush? Where is she even supposed to look? You’re not making any sense. Or are you trying to be a poet?”

  She let her eyes stray to her dead. She saw them in dim memories, memories her brain was working hard to erase, to save her from melancholy. Not hard enough. She looked straight at her mother, her first creator, the one who had put her in this northern land as a half-stranger, forever marked out by the curls of her tongue and her hair, the lilt of her name and the olive of her skin.

  “I always looked to the gods for guidance.”

  Erran made a face. “Look how that turned out.”

  “Exactly.” She nodded, threads of thought suddenly pulled taut in her mind. “Poorly. But why did we look to them in the first place?”

  They didn’t seem to follow, but she was glad to lead.

  “Because they know the choices. They have the choices.” She squared her feet, looking up at the ring around the world. “I think they owe me some choices. I think, at this point, that’s my due.”

  She saw Erran straighten up a little at this, the ghost walker apparently taking interest. Hail stood, seemingly cautious. “What do you mean?”

  She glanced at the others. The wraith, uniquely, didn’t seem to be paying her much attention, latched on to a tree trunk a few strides away. “Can that thing talk?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  It seemed to shift a little, but it didn’t respond, so she shook her head and passed her gaze over the others. “I’m not going crawling back to the gods on my hands and knees begging for help. You, though - I’ll ask you all for help, if you’ll give it.”

  Sam nodded. “What do you need?”

  Isavel looked at them and tried to grin, the way Ada did when she was about to do something ill-advised. It was not the best fit. Not yet, perhaps. “Sam, you’re old as the damned hills and that might be useful. Erran, you’re a walker, enough said. Hail, you’re deadly and there’s nobody I trust more in a fight. Tanos, you’re a nobody whose face has never been marked and has no obvious stake in changing the world, so people won’t suspect you.”

  “A nobody?” He mocked offense. “Hey, I -”

  “And who knows, the wraith might eat someone at an opportune moment.”

  Sam’s lip curled slightly. “When, exactly, would that be opportune?”

  Her own grin grew a little sharper.

  And so Isavel Valdéz led a raid on the city of Glass Peaks. The irony was not lost on her.

  As evening fell and the hauler sped across the dark saltwater, the locator stone knocking against her sternum grew dim, no longer reaching its light towards Ada. Whatever that meant. Part of her wanted to throw it into the sea, but she wasn’t ready to yank out that particular barb. Not yet.

  Domestic firelight in the towers of Glass Peaks soon flickered above the mainland forest. Boating the army back across the strait would take time - the city would be less guarded, for a day or two at best. It was the least dangerous time to break into the temple with a pair of ghosts.

  What had she become? She curled her lips. Whatever the gods had made her. Whatever they knew she could become. All those possible futures were hers by right. She had bled enough for them; she needed to collect her due.

  They had settled the hauler into a ravine, pointing towards the sea, covered with as much forest detritus as they could find. It had still been painfully obvious, but they could always take another. They were raiders, now, weren’t they?

  She watched Hail’s face, framed by tussled golden locks, as they waited for Tanos to return from the city. She tried to see if it was breaking something inside the hunter, to be doing this again.

  The wraith quietly bobbed around this dip in the forest, barely visible in the evening dim, silent and attentive and somehow a part of the group.

  Tanos returned with just what they needed, as fast as could be hoped, and soon enough the five of them were swaddled in thick cloaks. Sam, Tanos, and Erran all carried guns as well, invisible in the folds of the cloth. Tanos’ was the same one Isavel herself had so impulsively “borrowed” from Ada weeks before, and so she avoided the sight of it. She was surrounded by the ruins of that particular hope, and felt more than ready to roar dragonfire at anyone who so much as glanced unkindly at her.

  But as much as she wanted to scream fire, she prayed she wouldn’t have to.

  He had brought relics to string around their necks on twine and fibers, strange machines that lit up or made sounds when poked the right ways. Most prized among honest pilgrims were relics that babbled in ancient languages; probably the only reason those languages retained any passing familiarity. She barely noticed at first, then, the look on Tanos’ face when he suddenly handed her one.

  “Isavel, you should have this.”

  She looked at it, a strange rectangle with images of wars in strange lands, arcane symbols flickering across the bottom of the screen. The ancient language coming from a woman’s voice was familiar in shape if not meaning, and she quickly noticed the symbols changed in tandem with the dim voice speaking from the relic. She looked back up at Tanos. “Why?”

  He rubbed the back of his neck, and if his skin had been paler she thought he might have gone red. “It was Ada’s. It helped her… something about those sigils, and the ancient language. It was important. I grabbed it - well, she left it lying around, but I think she would have wanted you to have it.”

  Isavel fumbled with the relic until she hit something that turned it off, and dangled it in a loose binding of string against the folds of her wraps. Her hands felt unnaturally clumsy as she tried not to think of that goodbye. “It’s just a disguise.”

  He looked at her uncertainly, balancing on two feet for a moment. “Sorry. Of course.” He made to turn back to his own gadgets. “If you ever want to talk about it, I’ll listen.”

  She stared at him briefly, wondering why.

  Soon they were all hooded and swathed and ready to shoot, the wraith following at a distance, gurgling through the air like a cloud of insects. The sun had just set behind the broken bones of the bridge Ada had destroyed, still blocking the city from the sea. It was dark when they came within sight of the gates, but at least they were not locked down. The guards seemed twitchy but didn’t stop anyone, simply keeping an unusually close eye on new arrivals. Isavel stared at her feet, keeping her hood low and her skin melded darker, as she entered the city.

  “Pilgrims?”

  She tensed, looking up only slightly. It was not her job to speak; that was Sam’s.

  “Yes.” Sam sounded tired; if it was an act, it was a good one.

  “If you’re here to see the Saint Herald, you won’t.” The
guard sounded like she had had to tell people this many times already. “She was martyred in the war, banishing the enemy.”

  Everyone was silent for a moment. Isavel was dead? Again? That was what they were telling people? A few people must have made it back from Campus, at least, to spread such rumours - but who?

  Sam put on a pained voice. “Then we shall pay respects.”

  “She was a hero.” Isavel could just barely see the guard nod. “Dragoneater Saint Herald of the Gods, White Lady Witch and Angel of Glass.”

  Isavel’s muscles tensed further - even in death, they were not going to spare her of the indignity of more titles. Titles, titles, useless titles enough to obliterate her human name itself from everyone’s mind.

  Almost everyone’s mind. That locator stone still weighed heavily against her chest.

  Hail spoke up. “Truly.”

  Isavel glanced at her as the guard let them pass. Hail didn’t make eye contact, but stepped closer and reached out to briefly squeeze her hand.

  She glanced up as briefly as she could, but nobody seemed to have noticed the wraith as it fluttered over the walls like a tiny, dark moth. Truth be told, she wasn’t really sure that was it - only later, when something seemed to occasionally obscure stars or the faint glow of the city rising into the sky, was she sure it had followed them inside.

  They walked slow enough to not feel conspicuous, passing without incident into Glass Peaks. Cityfolk ignored them; nobody followed, nobody disturbed them. Pilgrims were usually left alone, out of respect or fear of whatever gods they honoured. Respect. Fear. Those were growing less familiar by the minute.

  They came close to the temple, but didn’t approach directly. Hail split off to the right to scout the temple’s surroundings with hunter’s eyes, while the rest followed Isavel to the left. As they circled the complex she marked guards - different guards than she remembered, men and women with guns and awkward poses. Where were the gifted? Had they left civilians to guard the building while the war was on?

  When she met up with Hail, the hunter had a quietly contemptuous expression on her face. “Coders.”