Year of miracles, p.12
Year of Miracles, page 12
part #1 of Collected Stories of the Old Races Series
A waste and a danger, because no human could be that strong, or should come back from taking a blow as easily as he did. That he might be the thing that betrayed his people to humanity loomed large in his mind, and after some months in London's stench he found Hajnal, far too close to dawn, to say, "I don't belong here. I don't want to belong here. Come back to the mountains with me, Hajnal. For a while, until the scent of humanity isn't in our bones anymore, until we're less than human, again. Or more than."
Stone didn't regret, not much, not often, but deeply, when it did; that was the pain that spasmed over Hajnal's features. "I don't belong there, Biali. Not anymore, if I ever really did. This is the world I've chosen. This is the world I want."
"And Alban."
She looked away, into the grey light of dawn, the closest thing to day that any gargoyle could see another in. Moonlight was kinder to them all, brighter, more flattering on the shadows and angles, but brightening twilight and its unkindness suited the sorrow on her face. "And Alban. I didn't expect that, but then, I didn't expect you would be so rooted, either. I thought that I loved you so much that you must be more like me. I think it's that you aren't like me that I do love so much, but in the end, I want someone to travel with."
"If I had known that," Biali said in a low voice, "I would have pushed him off a mountaintop before he could spread fledgling wings to save himself."
A surprised smile flashed across Hajnal's face. "No, you wouldn't have. If not out of nobility, then because killing each other is against our edicts."
"You may think better of me than I deserve."
"No." She reached up, put her hand against his cheek, and was caught that way by the dawn; when sunset's shadows reached them she finished, "I know you better than that. You're not even angry, Biali, much as you might want to be. This has been a long time in the making."
She was kind enough to not remind him that it had been of his making, too, as much as hers or Alban's; that he could have chosen, long ago, to join them on their travels. That he might have made things of himself, or them, that were not what came naturally to any of them, and had not, but that was what stone did, endured as it was, with little change save the great breaks that changed everything. She was right in that he wasn't angry, but that left room for regret, unfamiliar as it might be to their people. "Be careful in the world, Hajnal. I will take it out of his hide, if you come to harm."
Amusement flashed in her eyes. "As if I cannot keep myself safe. What nonsense, Biali. You're right. You've already been too long among the humans, if that kind of absurdity is what you've learned from them."
"Still."
She shook her head, but smiled. "I'll tell him. Unless you want to."
Biali glanced skyward, shaking his head. "If I leave now I should cross the Channel well before dawn. Come home soon, Hajnal. I'll miss you."
"And I you." She stayed where she was, watching until he had disappeared with distance, and still he felt her in the memories, watching where he had been, wishing him farewell, with a sense of loss that salved his pride more than he cared to admit.
Hours later, Alban's shock was palpable, a reverberation in the gestalt, and his loss was as acute as Hajnal's. Biali had landed by then, found a safely ruined old human building to take shelter in, and drew silence in around himself, detaching from the overmind to nurse regret and sorrow and a blossom that could be anger, if he tended it long enough. But that would be human, and there had been enough of that already.
He returned to a tribe on the verge of splintering, and, in returning alone, in rejecting the human world, unintentionally drew them back together. There was satisfaction in that, as if he'd struck a blow against Alban and his dreams of living in the world. That it was a blow against Hajnal as well was easier to ignore; perhaps without Alban's influence she would never have gone out into the mortal world again. But that became circular, because without her stories Alban might never have explored it in the first place. Biali put a stop to those thoughts and questions, burying them in the gestalt, and watched the stories that Alban and Hajnal added to it from a distance, never with the intimacy of earlier decades. For forty years or more those memories grew, and then abruptly, as if death had taken them, they stopped, but even death didn't cause a breach in the memories. Whatever had not been added to the gestalt, in death, settled into the minds of the nearest gargoyles, so that nothing would be lost; it was a sacred duty to then bring those last memories to the overmind, but no final hours were recorded, and only a very little while after that, Biali left the mountains again to learn what had become of them.
London, 1667
London had burned, in his absence. The tribe had known that, of course; even they were not so removed from the world as to miss the burning of a great city. Knowing, though, and seeing the startlingly scarred remains, the black marks where flame had flown, and the resurgence of humanity into those empty spaces, were different. Biali spent a handful of nights walking what remained of streets he had known, and flying above them to gaze without recognition at a city reshaped by fire. He searched for Alban and Hajnal in that time, as well, but it was the ruined city that captivated him, and woke a spark of loss in his chest. He wouldn't have imagined that he would care, but perhaps too much had been lost from his own world already; to see even a human city in ruins seemed a waste.
Hajnal and Alban were not—Biali believed—dead: their final memories had not come to the gestalt, as happened with all gargoyles at their time of death. The few other gargoyles who lived near London knew there had been a dragon in the city before it burned, but it had not approached them and they, distant in the hills, had been content to leave it be, in turn. Nor were there any humans to be found who had known either Alban or Hajnal; they had not, it seemed, had so close a community as they'd built in the south. They had traveled from England, though, never staying put as long as they had in Spain. Ireland, Scotland, even farther north than that, leapfrogging from one tiny weather-beaten rock to another until they reached places where the sun neither set nor rose, before returning through more conventional paths; Biali knew that, and yet expected, somehow, to find some trace of their presence in London. But perhaps it had been there, and had burned. The dragon might have known, but it was gone too, and if any other Old Races were near, they had nothing to say to a solitary gargoyle searching for two lost members of his kind.
The world was too large; any direction he chose was almost of necessity the wrong one. He searched regardless, feeling their absence—Hajnal's absence—in the gestalt like a wound; death would at least have sealed itself behind her, finishing her story in the overmind. They were not dead; Biali was convinced of it, but could hardly prove it. Could not, either, stop searching, not when the tribe quietly gave up hope; not when the elders began suggesting, then commanding, that he return. He argued; he was not in the world for its sake, not for the experience of humanity that had driven the other pair. He was there only to find them.
They do not wish to be found, the tribe told him. They have chosen to Breach. They are exiles, both of their own choosing and ours; we cannot forgive those who turn their backs on the memories, when the memories are all that we have and all that we are.
Return, Biali, they said to him, return before you too are exiled, in spirit, if not in body.
"Yes," he heard himself say to them, aloud, not within the surrounds of the overmind, "that would be wise." Then he continued on, learning to fight as men did to earn coin so he could feed his mortal form, which he used more and more, until his winged shape seemed almost alien to him. He never left the gestalt, not the way Alban and Hajnal did, but he lived in it less, grief giving way to fury at the empty place where they had been. The tribe became quieter, less important than finding the lost ones; had they spoken more loudly, they might have told him when the quest became a hunt for vengeance, when it was no longer worry, but rage that drove him.
Humanity suffered for it, if Biali did not: he was rarely in a place long enough to bother losing fights, and brutalized those who challenged him. Once in a while a mob of gamblers would turn on him, horrified by the violence he'd wrought; those occasions ended poorly for the mortals, and those who survived found themselves both bloodied and penniless for their efforts. Years went by quickly; decades, he could almost notice, pacing Europe and Northern Africa, Russia and back to Europe again, trusting that they would never leave their home continent for too long. St Petersburg rose; Lisbon drowned; between them wars staggered on, the endless effort of human domination. Biali, disdaining, profited from it, and searched.
He found Alban in the heart of revolutionary France, and by then it was too late.
France, 1785
Blood and rain lay puddled together, bootprints filled with both. Mostly bootprints: a few half-smeared prints were not human at all, and Biali crouched beside those ones, dipping his fingers in the muck. Massive width and depth at the ball, sharply arched toes. Claws. Little hint of the heel at all: a gargoyle's forward-leaning stance. He could all but see the crouch, the preparation for leaping upward. There were bullets lodged everywhere, some in the mud, others in buildings nearby. A few were bloody, the scent nearly washed away by unrelenting rain, but he knew even the hint of it: Hajnal's blood, spilled by humans in the storm. Her footprints, but not her body. Not even the broken remains of a statue shattered by axes and hammers. Either she still lived, or they had been thorough.
Alban's blood, too, and his footprints, deeper than Hajnal's. And then in the incessant rain, under the cover of night and clouds, the familiar sound of wings. Biali rose, and saw in the darkness a blur of white, with no smaller shadow in its wake.
He didn't fly, only launched himself into a cannonball to smash into Alban's gut, bringing them both to the ground. His fists rose and fell without compunction, not so much as a question asked, though he would beat the answer out of Alban if he could. The larger gargoyle blocked, arms crossed to catch Biali's blows, and shouted Biali's name, but refused to fight back. Biali leaned back to gain greater momentum for another massive blow, and Alban, given the space to breathe, flung him off and leapt to the air, fleeing like a coward.
Biali, roaring, gave chase, though within a handful of wing-beats he knew it was useless: Alban had the wingspan and strength to outpace him, and would never be caught unwillingly. He came to earth, though, well outside of the town, and settled into a preparatory crouch, waiting for Biali to renew the attack even as he shouted, "She is either not dead or has sealed herself off from the overmind more thoroughly than I thought possible. Her memories haven't come to me, Biali. We can find her."
"You stupid, naive—" No words could suffice. Biali never slowed his headlong rush, slamming into Alban with all of his airborne velocity. They skidded across mud and half-frozen puddles until a rocky outcropping—a fence—stopped them. Alban's head hit with a satisfying crunch and pieces of stone fell around him as Biali wrapped his hands around his throat and began to squeeze. Dust ground from between his fingers, from the sides of Alban's throat, and the sound was a glorious inexorable scrape of stone weakening stone. "You've been absent from the overmind for over a century, you faithless breach, and now you want me to believe she lives because she hasn't returned to it? No one leaves the memories for so long, no one knows what happens when you reject everything that we are for ever. You've lost her to all of us, you—"
Alban's hands were around his wrists now, tight enough to hurt, but not as much hurt as Biali did to Alban. Even gargoyles could be broken, even stone could shatter. Biali lifted Alban a few inches and shoved his head back down, hearing it crunch against stone again. Alban's grip loosened, then fell away entirely, and a vicious grin curved Biali's mouth.
It was the last whole expression he would ever feel. He didn't see Alban's hand close on another piece of stone, on a sharp-edged chunk of the fallen fence. He saw, perhaps, the flash of movement, turned his face toward it when he should have flinched away; the rock's edge caught his cheekbone with a sculptor's precision, and stone, which could, after all, shatter, did. His cheek, some part of his jaw, his eye: ordinary earthen rock stabbed splinters into shockingly tender stony flesh as shards that had once been his face fell into the mud and were swallowed. The pain went so deep he could hardly even scream, only make a wrenching sound of sickness that scraped from the bottom of his gut. He could hardly see: one eye didn't work at all, and the other swam with blackness as he fell away from Alban, gasping agony beyond comprehension.
It woke voices in the overmind, fear and concern and horror flowing through him so quickly he hardly knew which was his and what came from without. Gargoyles didn't take damage, not like this, not in their immortal forms; that they even could terrified the gestalt, and Biali's unfiltered thoughts spared no blame: this was the work of the exile, of the breach, of Alban Korund, and Hajnal had died at his hand, too. Disbelief swept him, but he pushed back with his conviction, and slowly the overmind reminded itself of Alban's strangenesses, his fascination with humans, his certainty that humanity's way was the future for even the Old Races, his departure from the gestalt; all of these things, fed by Biali's pain and rage, began to create a cohesive whole, a narrative that would stand in the memories forever.
Neither the overmind nor Biali latched on to the other truth, that as he writhed in the mud Alban, soft with shock, found what fragmented pieces of stone he could reassemble and crouched above Biali, pressing those shards back into place, and whispered, "Transform. Change, Biali. To stone and back again. Quickly, to heal."
Even the transformation was shocking, in its agony. There was will, deep in the silent heart of a gargoyle given fully to stone, else they could never take on their most immobile form without risking never returning from it, but will was almost always all: there was no sensation of relief, no reluctance to return to the living stone, no awareness of time's passage. But in this transformation lay all of those things, and a fundamental rage that knew Alban was right, that he must change again and again if he hoped to heal at all. That he had to go back to the pain, in order to find any release from it.
He came out of stone still roaring, anger and anguish perfectly paired, and went back into it so he no longer had to hear his own howls. Again, again, again, until the pain was, if not gone, at least bearable, and rage could drown it out. But Alban was wisely gone by then, leaving Biali nothing but the elements to take his madness on. He left the field in ruins, his hands battered from fighting Alban and even more so from mindlessly thrashing stone and wood and whatever else could be reached; cows and sheep died that night, and it was only fortune that no humans did. Fortune not just for mortals, but for Biali himself, whose passion and the thick grey clouds conspired to make him ignore—for no gargoyle could not know—dawn's approach, and he ended the night half buried in muck, hoping in his hate that it would obscure him enough from any human gaze that might glance over the landscape.
It did, or no one came seeking those particular fields that day; he awakened filthy and still enraged, but with a modicum of sense reasserting itself. He fled the fields and the carnage under cover of pouring rain, and was, at least, clean again when he finally found somewhere safe to huddle against the storm. He had almost no sight in one eye; a faint distinction between light and dark, that was all. His jaw, at least, held, but his cheekbone, the eye socket, they felt craggy with wreckage, sharp gaping wounds where stony flesh had once been. The next night it cleared, moonlight pooling in ditches, and that was where he first saw the ruin of his face, looking back at him from water turned blue by the night.
If this was what Alban had managed to repair, what had gone before must have been horrific indeed. A seam ran along his jaw and lower cheek, deep and pitted with marks where shards of flesh had had broken away and, having not been replaced, had gone unrepaired. The cheek and eye, though, were worse by far: gouges that went far beyond bone-deep, and which revealed inner workings, striations of stone-like muscle, pitted structure that looked nothing like mortal bones but could be seen as nothing else. His eye was clouded, a crease lying over it where, perhaps, a slab had been pressed back into place, and all of it glistened like raw mortal tissue, not like gargoyle flesh at all.
He shifted, taking on his human form with a shudder. It was somehow less shocking, that face, perhaps because he was less accustomed to it, but the scarring seemed less deep. Silvered skin instead of pitted, the bones crushed but the original angles less dramatic, and so not as dreadful in comparison. Even his vision seemed better, less occluded, and the bitter thought that he would prefer, now, to wear this face to his natural one arose. Alban had taken everything as relentlessly as time wore away stone, as implacably as water could crack it.
In exchange Biali hunted him relentlessly, harassing him whenever the opportunity arose, taking a certain bleak gladness in the regret shadowing the younger gargoyle's features when they met closely enough to speak, or even simply see one another clearly. When Alban left Europe for the New World, the elders of their tribe asked, though they hardly had to, that Biali follow the exile, settle where he did. Unspoken was the reason: there were other gargoyles, certainly, in the Americas, but it was Alban who held his own and Hajnal's secrets apart from the gestalt. Should he die—a prospect no one held in any great concern, not because his safety was in question but because it seemed better for everyone if he and his radical thoughts met a tidy end—it was thought best that those memories ought to return first to a member of the tribe, for examination before releasing them into the overmind. Memories were gathered by the gargoyle physically nearest to the one who died; in order to fulfill the tribe's needs, Biali of course must stay close to the Breach.
Very little distracted him from that duty; very little indeed, and what did distract him only fed the circle of loathing that burned in his heart. There were strictures against killing him, but time would offer an option; of that, Biali was sure.
