Chapter 34

  The pain. It coursed through Arturo’s veins and muscles and bones. It did not bother him anymore. He did not wince at the sensations, and he did not grimace. Arturo embraced it and was present in it. The Mother said the Ministry would kill her and the Father. He was not a religious man, but the people of La Terra depended on their Parents for safety and sanity. Most people want normal lives, after all. Arturo was not special in that, but he knew he would never get what he wanted. He couldn’t, didn’t deserve to. But he could help. He could protect.

  And, in that mood, Arturo and Aquiles got ready for the day. It was the last day they’d spend in this forsaken place, destroyed by the tyrants that were coming back to destroy them too. The Parents had neither hated nor feared them, the Greatstorm. The Ministry didn’t fear them either. All they feared was losing their power. The brothers now waited on the crest of the hill looking to the east, watching the sun rise over the horizon. Clouds billowed in the sky at their backs.

  A storm gathered there. And the Greatstorm of La Terra waited.

  They didn’t deserve to die just for being. They were flesh and blood, and they had bled. No, they didn’t deserve to die. Not for existing. Maybe they’d deserve it after their sins today, but that was a worry for another time.

  A humidity of whispering winds and wanton destruction weighed heavy on the air. Arturo took a deep breath and felt the energy surge through his body. Six vials of syrup didn’t go down easy, despite his sweet tooth. It burned in his stomach, a warm haze of promise. The promise of revenge against the Stranger, and the promise to take back the land they called home. Arturo and Aquiles were demons in truth, abominations.

  Heretics.

  How they loved it.

  The Ministry could call them what they liked. It didn’t matter. They and their army had come to end them and set into motion something that could not be undone. The Ministry only feared losing their power, yes, but they would learn to fear the Greatstorm. To kill the Parents… their gods? These demons would not let that happen. They couldn’t.

  Aquiles stood just behind Arturo, the proper positioning for a Storm in a fight. A Thunderhead must protect their Bolt, at all costs.

  Rising with the sun, a mass of soldiers gathered and formed ranks, bristling with long spears and glistening swords, Storms embellished in their burnt and battered armors. Behind them, on another of the peaks of rolling land, a line of black robed men and women stood tall, statues but for the robes whipping about them. At the center of the group, the Stranger stepped forward. Over the distance, several hundred paces, a metallic voice rang out clear and menacing.

  “Come freely! And you may live! Come quietly! And your remaining brethren in the Monastery will not be harmed!”

  Arturo and Aquiles had discussed this possibility. The lives of any survivors could not be weighed against the death of the Parents. Arturo responded. Not in voice or shout. But in action.

  He took a single step forward and blasted a funnel of air into the sky. It shot far and true, disrupting the low, swelling clouds overhead. A satisfying CRACK echoed over the hills and simmered in those ranks. Not men. But beasts. Those beasts took steps back in fear. The Stranger signaled a charge, and the spears and swords leveled at the brothers. The tips bounced as the soldiers ran to their death.

  Arturo breathed in through his nose, moved it into his chest and into his stomach and down into his fingers and through his lanky legs and into his toes, just as Socorra had taught him, as Aquiles had taught him, and he used that energy tumbling inside him to melt away the ice that had come to infest every corner of his body and mind. He thawed, dripped in white hot vindication, freed from those chains, and felt a swell of fire reach into those cold depths.

  Yes, a storm gathered. He felt it, reveled in it. Arturo held his face still and apologized to Socorra for going against her other teachings. He would use these emotions today.

  So, Arturo widened his stance.

  Widened it further.

  He pushed his fingers into his ears.

  And the rain…

  …began…

  …to fall.

  ***

  Eugenio’s feet hurt from all this running, and now they had a thousand men rushing two boys just standing on a hill. This talk of Greatstorms was ridiculous. The Brother even said they weren’t all that powerful, that the monks just set a trick explosive in their tower somehow in an attempt to kill him.

  Eugenio couldn’t believe the waste here. The first couple guys would make it up to that hill, and he could go home. His arms were tired from lugging around this big, damned spear. He wasn’t going to use it anyway. What was the point?

  His armor had already begun to stink the day before last, and now he’d be sweating in it some more. Que bien. Rain spat onto his face from the dark clouds above. This whole thing was a waste of time, but the Ministry ordered it; and Eugenio needed the money. So here he was. Didn’t mean he had to like it. The wife back home was probably out with her friends eating and drinking, but he had to be out here in the mud. What a joke.

  That poor bastard on the hill looked scared, hands to the sides of his head like that. Why’d he have to go and blast that shockwave into the sky? It was quite a bit bigger than expected, sure, but what did it solve?

  Eugenio’s eyes refocused on that spot where the scared boy had been standing. There was a cloud of dust now, but that was all. Someone must’ve got them already. That was even faster than he thought it would be.

  What was that whistling? The storm? By the Father’s name, it was getting louder.

  Eugenio raised his face into the rain. A black dot grew into the shape of a man then into the shape of that b-

  ***

  Leandro buzzed with adrenaline. He’d seen what those two big ugly bastards in the Monastery had done to a few dozen men on their own. Would he get to see another display like that? He held his sword over his head and roared with excitement. Leandro survived that attack on the Black Pyramid, he and his friends had started to call it that, all dark and ashy on the outside now it was, so he knew he’d survive this one too.

  The demons were powerful, but there were a thousand men here. And the Brother brought his buddies. So really, there was nothing to-

  ***

  Veola has a stellar pikeman. Many of the swordsmen always mistook the pikes for spears. No, they were long shafted with thin points on the end. Scouts carried spears, shorter, stouter, better for quick fighting. Pikes were good for long reach and stabs, but not slashing like a maniac. She leveled hers at the Greatstorm as she charged.

  All these men claimed she couldn’t keep up with the training, but here she was on another of a dozen Ministry campaigns into the countryside. They quashed that uprising of crazed fanatics talking about some animal gods that told them their lives were a lie. Well, when she got there, they were all curled up in balls with quite the haze of pungent smoke in the air. There weren’t any houses on fire either.

  Veola didn’t get why people got hooked onto drugs like that. Made them go crazy. She was just happy to be part of something big-

  ***

  A Brother sneered at the two figures on the distant hill. They could have just come freely, and they wouldn’t have to die embedded with the blades of this mighty force. A Brother wished the demons could have been studied, but they couldn’t be trusted not to act out with their recent behavior. If A Brother’s estimation was correct, the force would be damaged, but a spear would eventually reach the demons.

  If only three-quarters of the thousand made it past the charge, the demons couldn’t fend off all of them in that proximity. The lives spent here were worth it. The Ministry couldn’t allow such a duo to run around La Terra with impunity. They were too powerful to be trusted.

  A Brother puffed out his chest as the demon put its hands to its head. It looked so afraid, so weak. This population had been molded just right. The resources of this continent were vast and untapped. Now, they had an army of workers willing to labor for the Parents. The Union’s plan to lay waste to these people was short sighted, but in their wisdom, they came to a better understanding. People didn’t need to understand the technologies to wield them.

  A Brother’s focus was interrupted. Had a thrown spear taken that demon already? Only a cloud of dust remained.

  A rush of wind lapped in A Brother’s ears. The All-Transmitters shifted in their stances, watched the force charge. The rush grew, expanded, yanked at A Brother’s attention.

  “Brother, did you see-”

  The rush became a whistle…

  It became a scream…

  It was a roar. A great, gusting maelstrom.

  A rebellion. There had been no spear. A man fell from the sky.

  A man shot down from the sky.

  A demon.

  There was silence as the demon streaked towards the ground as a projectile sent from a great artillery in places far away, as the strike of gods older than the land they walked, older than the sea. The charge seemed to stop. A Brother was scared. A Brother could tell the others were too.

  Then, the Thunderhead struck the mass of soldiers from on high.

  And the very earth shook with his might.

  A gargantuan wave taller than the twin pyramids and thicker than their stone RIPPED through the men and women down there in the fields. It exploded forth. It was mayhem incarnate.

  The rain was pushed away in a great white bubble bursting from the center of the soldiers. It rocketed forward, pulling dust and grass from a radius of a hundred paces into the vacuum behind it. The air sucked from around A Brother towards where the demon had struck, beckoned at its call. In a blink, the shockwave spanned the entirety of the charging ranks, one hundred men shoulder to shoulder, and reached into the sky, a great bowl of roaring wind expanding to engulf the entire force.

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  The nearest soldiers were caught mid-step and disappeared. Neither blood nor bone, they were unmade.

  The ranks followed as the shockwave tore through the soldiers, spraying red mist as arms, heads, and legs were wrenched from torso. The shockwave didn’t slow, and the ranks behind the first few were picked up and tossed into the sky. They became small specks overhead.

  The shockwave hit the All-Transmitters then. It was getting kicked by a horse in the chest. They all staggered, lost their footing. Bodies plummeted to the earth all around A Brother as the wave hit the line of All-Transmitters last.

  One of the Transmitters was caught by a mangled corpse hurdling through the air and twisting end over end. The body collided with the Transmitter with a slap, the smack of an open hand on stone, and a sickening crunch of broken flesh and bone. Blood spurted as the corpse burst apart and the Transmitter’s bones shoved through its skin at its ribs and thighs. The Transmitter didn’t even have time to scream as another corpse shot back towards the ground and smacked into its head, a symmetric painting of blood splattered about the impact, creating a red halo around the ruined flesh of the bodies.

  A Brother watched the display, wide-eyed, a crazed feeling in his chest. This wasn’t possible. A Brother crawled back to the top of their ridge and viewed the army he’d brought to this pueblo.

  A Brother knew now.

  It wasn’t enough.

  And, by the holy Union, the demons weren’t done. The Bolt raced down its hill with vigor. The remains of more than half of the force lay scattered about the field between the ridges. The Thunderhead stood tall in the epicenter of its destruction, the likes of which even the Father could not conjure.

  Every man and woman had been emulsified in the wind, blown apart, sent to fall to their death a thousand paces back the way they came, or they were knocked back to break bones and stab their weapon into another falling comrade. Several hundred men, ruined. In one blow. This wasn’t possible.

  A Brother didn’t bring enough.

  The Bolt ran to its twin, and the Thunderhead trudged through bloody consequences toward the last surviving vestige of an utterly failed expedition.

  A Brother could see the whites of the demon’s eyes through a rain of gore. They were gleeful.

  A Brother wept.

  ***

  Storms gathered in the falling rain, restored after that initial shock to the downpour from Arturo, and they waited for the Greatstorm to meet them in the field. They had been in the back of the force, furthest from where Arturo had landed and decimated it. Aquiles watched his brother’s back as he ran. The Storms in their burnished armor were leveling Bolt-arms at the Thunderhead, and a standing wall of distorted air shrieked in front of Arturo. Deep worry built in Aquiles’ gut, and he felt an instinct to protect. His legs pumped, his heart pounded, the ichor bubbled in his stomach, and lightning bristled about him, burned even the soaked grass.

  Aquiles examined the destruction he ran through with a sickened satisfaction. Something was unleashed here today for which the Ministry was not prepared, and the demon, slogging through the death he had wrought toward the soldiers reconstituting their remaining force, was not done; but Aquiles wanted to give his brother a break, wanted to stretch his own limbs, feel his own rage. Black robed figures waited atop the ridge behind the rest of their force. They had not fled.

  But it looked like they wanted to.

  Two quick bursts escaped from Arturo’s outstretched hands and caught stragglers too slow to feel the comfort of proximity with their friends. They broke against those funnels of hardened air, were flung against the hill like dolls forgotten in the ever-shifting attention of a child. They were nothing. Arturo stalked forward. Aquiles caught up, yanked on his brother’s shoulder. The man glanced back.

  “Did the Storms among them split the shock anywhere? I couldn’t see past the blast.”

  Aquiles didn’t detect any sorrow in that voice. Maybe like him, Arturo didn’t see this as killing people, but ridding a sickness from the world. “They tried. The armored ones out there were far enough.”

  Arturo looked back out over the red field, watered with blood and planted with bone. “I spent almost everything in me with that. Would you-”

  “Of course, hermano.”

  The lines set before them, and the Bolt-arms lowered. Aquiles got a good look at them in his brief trip to the Ministry. The projectiles were metal, and metal melted in heat. He touched each round in his mind, imagined them burning in the air before they could ever touch them. Nothing could stand against the heat of the furnace in the brothers now.

  Aquiles came across a man dragging himself away, left leg bent horribly at the knee and the right leg missing entirely. A brief flash of light and smoke curled from the man’s back. The survivors staggered.

  Maybe three hundred were intact enough to stand. Aquiles drew the sword he’d taken from the scout’s corpse in the night. It was his turn to point a weapon at someone. He swept the point across the mass of survivors still facing them.

  Every one of them flinched.

  These men were that scared? Aquiles hadn’t even done anything yet.

  He would.

  A call came from the black figures on the hill, from the Stranger, and zings and pops resounded across the field. No matter. Aquiles had just begun to connect to them anyway. He reached, through the sword, and touched the heart of each chambered round in the Bolt-arms. A web of bolts leapt from the sword, spun itself, undulating, wreathing, popping, and the smell of rain intensified with the waters falling from the sky.

  Flashes of white light echoed the demise of the projectiles looking for the brothers’ flesh. Some burned in an instant, combusting under the heat as the soft metals did in Child Hugo’s class on the elements, and some yet melted and cooled in their flight, flipping end over end and missing their targets. Still some nicked Aquiles’ arms and legs, and his blood ran in the rain, and the heat against his skin was nothing against the fire in his chest and he did not feel the pain.

  The sword melted then too, and Aquiles threw it to the ground.

  He reached with his body and connected to the first line of men now, took longer strides and ran at them, screamed at them. The men in leather dropped in an instant, shuddering with eyes rolling back, while some Bolts with their armor took the lightning directly and tried to dissipate the energy. Their own lightning struck those around them, sending pockets of men to the ground stiff as boards. In seconds, their armor began to glow, heating under the electricity coursing through it. They were cooked as the rabbits caught in Arturo’s traps, roasted by their vanity in thinking they could take on but a trickle of Aquiles’ might.

  He took a breath and reached again. He reached for everything he could touch in his sight and pulsed with violent energy. The web of lightning expanded, blinding with its ferocity, it jumped from man to man, snuffing lives as it went. Armor heated to glowing red in an instant, and its wearer died as fast.

  He ran forward hands outstretched, wreathed in a cloak of lightning to rival the Father’s, a god to these animals. It leapt from him licking the dead bodies around him, searing skin and singing hair. His vision was marred by black traces of the bolts in his eyes, and the three hundred survivors burned. A wall of smoke grew and grew, smoldering bodies giving off that aroma of charred meat.

  He reached the last standing men. They charged him. What else did they have?

  He ducked the first blow, stepped into the second and struck a blazing hand into the helmet of the soldier. A hole melted into it before Aquiles’ hand. The soldier collapsed as his skull fractured and his brain became coal.

  Aquiles took a hit on his back, and it felt like a light tickle. His lightning leapt into the sky, uncontained as he roared with laughter at the dead men around him. He kicked at the attacker's knee, and his fury severed it. The man fell, and Aquiles wrapped his hands into the armor and slung him into his comrade, both exploding in sparks.

  An arrow was shot and melted to nothing before it traveled a pace from the archer. Aquiles struck the man with a fallen spear pulsing with a red-hot glow. It went clean through the archer’s armor and its chest and its spine and it coughed blood and sank to its knees.

  He spun and connected to the remainder of the charge.

  Purple bolts like strikes from the sky itself burst to life between Aquiles and those animals. They were still, solid, and raging with an agonizing heat to burn away his eyebrows and singe his hands. His fingernails turned black. The soldiers disintegrated, utterly, completely, and Aquiles regretted how quickly they got to die. Craters were hollowed into the land where they had stood.

  And it was over. A thousand men laid to waste.

  And it was easy.

  Aquiles looked about, then up to the line of black robes. The Stranger was among them. And he had fear in his eyes.

  “This isn’t done,” his brother hissed behind him.

  Arturo blasted into the air, and the black robes all fell to their knees and cowered. He landed in front of the Stranger. Arturo shot two small blasts into his knees, buckling them backwards, bones snapping among the sounds of men dying. Aquiles rushed up the hill behind Arturo to watch the Stranger scream in agony. They stood over him, heads down, faces twisted in rage. “Come freely,” Arturo whispered, “And you may live.”

  The Stranger’s broken legs started to twist back to their natural shape, skin knitting back together. A bolt flashed from him, but Aquiles caught it and dissipated it to the cowering forms of gray people around them. They screamed and sank to the ground. Their power was nothing compared to the Greatstorm.

  Arturo punched two shockwaves into the healing knees again, snapping them for a second time. “No, I said come freely.”

  The Stranger shouted and cursed at them, tears running down his cheeks. Its legs began to heal. Arturo blasted them again, then punched shockwaves into the Strangers arms.

  “Stop healing.”

  The Stranger gasped and writhed, laying on the ground.

  “I can’t believe we were scared of you.”

  Aquiles watched Arturo work.

  The limbs of the Stranger healed, and Arturo would break them again. “Come freely, amigo.”

  Blast.

  “Stop healing and come freely.”

  Blast. Crunch and gurgle.

  Scream.

  Blast. Blast. Blast.

  Sobbing and pleading.

  Arturo stopped and turned to Aquiles. “I need the last vial.”

  Aquiles nodded and handed it to him. They each took six before, leaving this last one to use if they needed.

  The Stranger managed to spit words through his torture, “Demons! We will kill them and take this land!”

  Arturo bent down and touched a finger to the Stranger’s jaw. A small burst of air and the jaw broke to the side, mangling the Stranger’s words as he continued to scream them.

  “Stop healing. Die freely.” Arturo’s face was malice.

  Blast.

  Scream.

  Blast.

  Scream.

  The Stranger’s blood flowed freely. Aquiles gave him that, but the wreckage the Stranger was able to heal was horrifying. He had enough. “End this, Arturo.”

  Arturo froze then shuddered. He began to weep, uncontrollable sobs shaking his body.

  “You can do this. Just end it.”

  Arturo shook his head. “I can’t. I’m done. I don’t know what came over me.”

  Aquiles hardened with resolve. “Allow me.”

  Arturo stepped aside, and Aquiles bent low over the Stranger's face. “You should have left us alone.”

  The Stranger’s eyes rolled like a wild animal caught by a predator. The other gray men were motionless, burnt by Aquiles bolts. “I was worried my strength wouldn’t match yours. After your tantrum in the Monastery,” Aquiles sighed, “turns out, you are no contest at all.”

  Aquiles drew a dagger. The dagger they used to kill their rabbits for dinner. So small and harmless to a being of such strength as this Stranger. And yet… Aquiles touched the point to the skin between the Stranger’s right eye and his nose.

  “What can you really heal from?”

  He pushed the dagger into the flesh. The Stranger’s eye bulged, not enough room for it and the blade in his skull. The gray man writhed around, whipping his head back and forth. He was impressively not dead. Aquiles grasped the mended jaw and held the Stranger’s head still. He touched the hilt of the knife with the tip of his finger and sent a jolt of energy through the blade.

  It heated, growing white hot, the Stranger’s eye sizzling then popping in the heat. He screamed, piercing and desperate. Arturo wailed then kicked the Stranger’s head. It cracked and crushed in with the small blast Arturo put behind his kick. The Stranger grew still, and his blood seeped into the grass.

  All the Ministry’s men lay dead and dying in the field.

  Aquiles stood and looked towards the rising sun in the east, back toward the Capital, back toward where the Parents’ lives were in danger. He had a new purpose. Save the Mother. Save the Father. And figure out what the dog and jaguar had been saying to them in their minds.

  Aquiles looked to his brother. His brother. A strong man, tall and lean. Aquiles wiped the tears from Arturo’s eyes. “Don’t cry, hermano. We have work to do.”

  Arturo nodded curtly and sniffed, stared into Aquiles’ eyes and smiled, “Gracias, hermano.” He paused, then added, quietly and with a deep sincerity, “You do have our mother’s eyes.”

  Aquiles chest tightened, sadness and a pang of jealousy. Tears came to his eyes, and he smiled back, cheeks wet with happiness. “Gracias, hermano.”

  ***

  Arturo sat in their camp site and gnawed on a rabbit’s leg. He’d nearly wasted away using the blessings so intensely. He ate all he could then laid back on the ground. Aquiles was off trying to set another trap and likely failing. Arturo laughed to himself.

  Arturo needed steady things in his life to distract him from the pain. His pains might not be physical anymore, but they were real all the same. Arturo wanted a simple life. Eat, work, spend time with the ones he loved. Yet, Arturo didn’t seem to get the things he wanted in life. He’d lost so much, but that wouldn’t stop him now. He could make do with what needed to be done. Ignored what he had done already.

  They would travel back to the Capital and free the Parents, ending the threat of the Ministry. Arturo sighed. His life had really blown up in his face. He used to wonder why other people were always in such sour moods. Just relax and take it day by day. Well, he understood their hardships now. Despite that, Arturo looked up at the sky and at the beautiful life around him. The dirt was fresh with the recent rain, and Chico lay next to him, come to comfort the brothers after their ordeal.

  Chico looked up at him.

  Ts? jong

  “You know I don’t know what you’re saying.” Chico cocked his head then closed his eyes, seeming to concentrate on something.

  Hijos

  Arturo shot up and smiled. “Hijos, huh? Thank you for translating for me.” Arturo ruffled Chico’s hair. His ears perked and he looked past the clearing into the grasslands. The grass rustled, and Arturo sprang to his feet. “Aquiles! There might be more!” The grass continued to shift, and women in a ratty dress stepped into the clearing, long black hair slightly disheveled…

  And her honey brown eyes cascaded over him.

  “Arturo?”

  Arturo’s heart jumped in his chest, and all the joy in the world crashed into him at once.

  “Valeria?”