284 (II)

  Return [II]

  Atlas of the Flesh Scryer 111 > 113

  Inertial Overdrive 215 > 217

  After handling an emergency orphan kebab situation caused by the orcs by way of prompt and incredible violence, Shiv reminded the grayskins once more about the penalties of eating any “unclaimed” babies and settled to take a breather atop his Court Leviathan. There were still other issues he had to deal with, but none of them were immediately pressing. Jessica, the Educator, half of the Legendary and Heroic fugitives, and also the Culturist, wanted to speak with him. But right now, Shiv just needed a moment to himself to reflect on all he'd been through and to face what he'd just lost. He'd taken several things from Georges, and he wanted to read through his former mentor’s journal.

  But every time he tried flipping through the pages, a crushing tension gripped him. It was an irrational thing. The feeling that if he truly opened the book and read Georges' words, he would fully accept the man as dead. But Georges was dead, and this was just pretend. A desperate desire for a boy to delay his final bit of mourning. But it had to be done, and he needed to know. He needed to know who Georges was. He needed to do right by the head chef of the Swan-Eating Toad and everyone who perished during Blackedge's desperate siege and escape.

  Once more, he tried mustering his will and going through the pages. He breathed in. He looked at the war-battered sky of the Tutorial. The clouds here shifted between black and rust red, massive boils that seemed on the verge of popping, tumbling through the dense midnight haze. Bodies fell in the distance. Bodies infused with newly grown orcs, souls of Pathbearers who succumbed to their rage after being infected, fell like a downpour, watering the scarred lands before. And from a garden of death and ruin rose newborn monsters sculpted for strife, braying their joy and desperate urge to do harm to the heavens.

  Distracting Shiv from his self-imposed grief-duties.

  “Godsdammit, Challenger, you’re just doing this shit on purpose. Distracting me with orc noises. I’m trying to deal with this right now, you felling—” Shiv stopped complaining. He had a feeling that the orc god was probably amused by this whole thing, and he prepared himself for his next proper conversation with the Challenger. Shiv knew him well enough to know that the Challenger was most certainly going to try to hurt him using Georges. It wouldn't feel good, but it was obvious. And it wasn't a vulnerability that Shiv was going to let all his enemies exploit. His encounter with Roland in the latrine taught him something: He didn't just need to grieve. He needed to make sure his grief didn't leave a lingering wound.

  A warrior with an unbalanced mind is someone waiting to be a corpse, Shiv thought to himself. Huh. That’s pretty cool-sounding. I should start writing my own journal for non-cooking stuff. Maybe get a list of lines.

  Writing 11 > 12

  But this thought was distracted by the nearby gateway flashing once more. The colors of the Outside fully faded now, and a familiar black static sheen replaced it. Shiv guessed that the mana-frequency had been fully attuned to Gate Piety, and they were ready to cross over at any time.

  Starhawk's Perch was being worked on by orc Geomancers. They called to each other as they replaced sections of destabilized infrastructure. Metal supports were ripped out surgically, and then entire lengths of steel were rendered into liquid streams before they were solidified in place, as if fluid injections frozen into a new skeleton within a brutalized body. Courtney, meanwhile, remained connected to the castle, protected with stretching tentacles and sprawls of extended biomass. The refugees remained within the guts of the massive monster, and Shiv monitored the biological signatures between them and the nearest orcs using his Atlas. He was half-hoping some more funny business might occur to distract him from fully accepting Georges was dead. No such luck. It seemed like he was running out of distractions to stop him from going through the journal.

  Alright, here goes.

  He swallowed and he flipped over the first page. Looking at the dense scrawl of text, he could make out a date and a series of curse words, along with… a few racial epithets directed toward automata. Shiv blinked at that. He knew Georges wasn't a perfect person, but this was a bit extreme. He also didn't remember Georges ever showing animosity to bots specifically. But as Shiv deciphered more of the text, he realized Georges seemed to be ranting about a specific group of bots that had insulted him gravely. Apparently, they'd all been capable of consuming food and had insisted that Georges, like the rest of his species, was “being unscientific in his pursuit of cooking.”

  Practically everything in life, from bird song to sunshine, set Georges off a little, but insinuating that he didn’t know what he was doing regarding his art was courting death; the chef would do everything he could to verbally push someone to “correct the mistake of their own existence” after that.

  Shiv lowered the book and let out a nostalgic sigh as he thought of all the times Georges psychologically and rhetorically brutalized unruly customers until they were crying and fleeing from the restaurant. Shiv’s joy faded as he recalled being made to mop up the puddles of trauma-induced piss some of the customers left behind on their chairs and the floor, but that was the life of being a Commis sometimes.

  To be a proper chef, one had to earn their dues, and sometimes, the dues came in the form of scrubbing piss away with a mop.

  “What are you reading there?”

  Shiv turned to see Adam's vector wings flaring a final time as they vanished, and the Gate Lord landed beside Shiv like a feather. There was a distant look in his eyes and a bone-deep exhaustion that seeped out from his body language. He collapsed, ass-first, beside Shiv on top of the Court Leviathan, and stared directly into the stabilizing gateway.

  “Some of Georges' old stuff. Includes a journal. Trying to stop being a pussy and actually read it.”

  Adam nodded. “How far have you gotten?”

  “A few lines on the first page, maybe.”

  “And what's it say?” Adam continued. He was looking for a distraction—just like Shiv had been a few seconds ago. Weird how they were serving as each other’s escape from what they actually needed to do for now.

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  “So far, he's just slurring out some automata for disrespecting his cooking. I thought he was really more racist than I remembered at first, but no. It's just a few specific people that set him off.”

  “Ah, that makes it alright then,” Adam said dryly, nodding as if Georges’ behavior wasn’t extremely alienating.

  “‘People will let you treat them like all kinds of shit so long as you don't feed them shit,’” Shiv said, quoting Georges.

  Adam laughed. Shiv smirked. It didn’t last. The joy fled both of them before long, and they were back to staring blankly at the gate.

  “I spoke to Isabella,” Adam breathed.

  “How’s she doing?” Shiv asked, fearing the worst.

  “Sometimes she's herself, and I catch glimpses of the girl I loved, or at least I thought I loved. Then, most other times, her mind is a mess. She thinks she's four. She calls me father. And I don't quite know how to deal with that. Helix, for all his orcishness, has been trying. He's stopped the sickness from overtaking her body entirely, but he says it's already done severe damage to her brain and her organs. Even if the orcs can see her healed on a biological level, she probably has already suffered immense memory loss.” Adam paused. “She might not remember me at all by the end of this.”

  Shiv winced. “Fuck. I'm sorry, man.”

  Adam nodded without any particular enthusiasm. “I am too. I felt bad for the Vicar. His death at Udraal’s hands… It still flashes before my eyes sometimes. So many deaths flash through my memories. But now, I want him to be alive more than anything, if only for the satisfaction of killing him slower.”

  “I know the feeling,” Shiv grunted. “I, uh, spoke with your dad.”

  “How did that go?”

  “Better than I expected.”

  Adam’s left eyebrow rose. “And what does that mean?”

  “I didn't really hurt him, if that's what you're thinking. I might have cursed at him a little, but he's the one who held onto Georges' effects for me. And, well, we came to an agreement.”

  “An agreement?” Adam said flatly. “What kind of agreement?”

  “Probably gonna fight each other at some point.”

  “So, new creative suicide opportunities for you,” the Gate Lord surmised.

  Shiv narrowed his eyes at his friend. "Hey, listen, I got a chance."

  Adam grunted, but he didn't say anything more, and that just agitated Shiv even more.

  "What do you mean, ‘hmph’?" Shiv said. "I have a chance! Like I've been scoping out your father's weaknesses, you know?"

  Adam grunted again, but this time he broke down into a snort.

  “Hey, fuck you. Let’s see you make that noise after I beat his ass.”

  “Sure. And when’s that going to happen?” Adam sneered.

  “After he gets well. And the Starhawk isn’t going to protect him this time.”

  “Yes. Because that was the only reason why you were instantly obliterated during the scouting run.”

  “You’re just trying to piss me off now,” Shiv hissed, growing slightly bigger from the anger coursing through him.

  “And it’s working,” Adam replied.

  “It is. And that’s not going to be a good thing for your dad. I felt his arms and tested his mindset earlier, you know. There are vulnerabilities there I can take advantage of. He’s not invincible.”

  “Sure…” Adam deliberately yawned, making Shiv gnash his teeth. “Moving beyond fanciful things—”

  “Fuck you again, Arrow,” Shiv seethed.

  “—it will be good to be back at my Gate. If it’s still my Gate. What do you think the odds are that Null Mont has built a hundred-meter statue of herself out of pure gold and stolen the role of Gate Lord?”

  Shiv’s outrage ground to a halt, and he considered that very real possibility. “I mean, she’s the type. But I hope she didn’t. For her sake. I’m in a real bad mood. I don’t have time to be dealing with any gate civil war shit. I won’t kill her, but I might just take all her limbs and cook them. Make her eat them.”

  Adam didn’t even react to that. “Do you imagine it would taste good? Weaveress arms?”

  “With my current curse? No. Probably like blood and rot.”

  “Ah, right.”

  “Yeah. Sucks. But I’ll deal with it. I have to. I’m not letting my Cooking Skill go. Maiden can eat shit. She’s not taking who I am from me. I’ll learn to use that Fae Skill as much as I can in the meantime, but I am clearing that Curse one way or another. Georges didn’t waste his time with me.”

  The Gate Lord turned and shot Shiv a reassuring look. “No, he didn’t.” A sigh escaped Adam. He sounded like he was on the verge of deflating. “I got a look at the mass graves too. Most of the dead were lost to the Fingerlings, but there's still so many bodies. So many people I used to know. They’re still packed tight. We’ll need to do burials and remembrances. Find a place for them.”

  Shiv grimaced as he realized just how many people Adam was mourning. After a while, grief left you empty. Didn’t make it any less miserable, though. “Shit. Sorry, man. I was thinking about that too earlier. Mainly for Georges and the others from the Toad. Tell me what you want me to do, and I’ll do whatever I can.”

  “I’m probably going to ask my father and the other survivors what they think. But we’re going to need to settle them first. Which is… going to be a pain. We still have around four thousand survivors. And then there are the mercenaries and former slaves and other existing refugees at Piety. Not sure if the Gate can sustain that at all, with how much it shrank when I took over. And with how favored we are, I wouldn’t be surprised if the damned First Blood and Compact launch a mutual offensive to retake the Gate the moment we get back in.”

  “Shit, Adam, why did you have to say that?” Shiv sighed. He could see that happening.

  “Because Pathbearers' Murphy’s Law is less a superstition and more of a ‘when’ for us, Shiv,” Adam said. “After a certain point of exhaustion, it is what it is.”

  “Murphy?”

  Adam sneered. “Irons might tell you about it if you ever get a chance to take his class.”

  Shiv glowered at his friend, who raised his hands in mock surrender. “Alright, alright. It basically means everything that can go wrong for a Pathbearer will definitely go wrong.”

  “Ah,” Shiv replied. “Seems to be true. For us. And the poor bastards coming for us. Tell you what. You focus on the Gate. I’ll deal with all the problems outside the Gate. If Compact, the First Blood, the Ascendants, or whoever show up, I’ll go do some personal grieving with them. And by that, I mean make more widows and orphans for people who we don’t care about.”

  “Thoughtful and magnanimous indeed, Deathless,” Adam muttered. “But… that does sound good. And we’ll have a lot more help this time. We have the orcs—who, admittedly, need to remain under control. The Culturist is going to torture and help us. By this point, I barely care about that anymore. Valor… We have to reassemble him and—”

  “Adam,” Shiv cut off. “Don’t overload yourself. One problem at a time. We help the people of Blackedge first. We do it however we can with whatever help we can get. We build up our foundation. We make sure the basics are good, and then we build up. Our perfect Gate isn’t going to be built in a day.”

  Adam sniffled and stared off into the gateway’s static portal, and bit his lip. “But I won’t need to do it alone.” A beat of silence followed. “And Shiv.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m glad I have you with me. Despite everything. I’m happy you’re here.”

  Shiv stared at Adam, and a weak but genuine grin emerged behind a mask of grief. He didn’t say anything at first. He just reached over and wrapped an arm around Adam's shoulder. “Yeah. Me too. And Adam?”

  “Hm?”

  “You got stronger arms and shoulders than your dad. So. Be proud of that.”

  Adam nodded, then blinked. “What?”

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