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Not only did I overestimate my own importance. I underestimated the scope of war.
There is no escape from this. It will eat us all.
I could flee this pain, find refuge in the Mind’s Eye meditation and slip slowly into the Void as my body fails, but I cannot give Grandmother that honor. She did some
thing to me. Something I cannot understand. I was a child who needed love in the shadow of his parents’ deaths. Instead, she beat me into the shape of a cup and poured her lessons into me. I will not let those lessons be my last act in this world.
“Cry not, mortal child,” a voice says in the darkness. “They come on wings of sable, to rend your precious flesh, and send you to the doom which lies beyond this realm of pain.”
I sit up. Am I going mad?
“Lie still and it will end. Lie still and the seed of Silenius will wither to time.”
“Who is there?” I ask. A translucent mass squats in the shadows of the downed aircraft. It seems immense. The air warps above the ghostCloak with hornlike projections. If it is a ghostCloak and not the madness of the desert creeping in.
“Dwell not on me, mortal. Nocturnal devils are afoot. Awake, arise, or be forever fallen.”
I hear it now. The sound of gravBoots.
I watch through a fissure in the hull as seven armored men land in the night. Seneca’s voice drifts from the darkness. “Lysander, oh, Lysander, come out, come out, little boy. Death has come.”
So Ajax has sent his boar of a bodyguard to finish the task.
The thought of dying at the hands of some thin-blood brute fills me with irrational fear. I am not fit for this world of rough killers. My hand goes to the side of my neck where I received my mission implant. They tracked it at last. I turn to the man in the darkness.
“Help me,” I beg.
“I help no man who does not help himself, and no man do I help who is no boon to me. Six years I have collated knowledge to become the mightiest of mortal vessels. Yet one morsel still eludes my voluminous mind. Hidden in no Fury. No books. Trusted to no digital void. It lingers yet, this knowledge in one sepulchre. Four days I have followed. Four days you have denied me my quest. I must know the Mind’s Eye. Show it to me. Or perish.”
The air ripples as the man slips out of the ship.
“Lysander,” Seneca taunts. “There’s nowhere to run. Will the Heir of Silenius die in a rat hole? Have dignity in the end; your ancient blood demands it.” The thin-bloods chuckle to one another.
I spotted seven of them, all in fresh pulseArmor. I won’t stand a chance. But will I die here cowering? Or will I die with dignity? As I stand, my feet disturb the spilled munitions on the floor, and I sense a fresh variable.
Seven Peerless Scarred stand in the darkness as I emerge barefoot.
Their predatory Iron Leopard war helmets watch with no human emotion. As if my left arm were broken, I cradle the internal payload of a firebrand munition wrapped in torn seat lining.
I need those helmets off.
“Ajax couldn’t even take out his own trash,” I mock. My voice is ragged. “How admirable.”
Seneca chuckles. “He would, but Atalantia has him under lock and key, such is her grief at the death of precious Lysander. Shall we formalize it?”
Seven razors unfurl. Mine remains on my hip.
“What did he promise you, Seneca?”
“A torchShip each,” one of the Golds says.
“That’s the price of my life?”
“Draw your iron, boy. Ajax made me promise you’d die well.”
“Does any man die well if he cannot look his killer in the eye?” I peer around at the grim visages of the battered warhelms. “Which of you will it be? Which of you will kill the last Heir of Silenius? Don’t you want me to know as I lie dying?”
Oh do I know my people.
