At some point, Kate, unnoticed, had slipped away from the conversation.
A Resistance guard stood watch over the door to the janitorial supply closet.
Kate gestured back to the main warehouse floor, “I think they were making soup over there.” This was not a lie. “I’ll watch over the prisoner for awhile, if you want to go have some.”
The soldier looked skeptical for a moment, but eventually his hunger won out, and he wandered off in search of the soup.
The janitor’s keychain on its lanyard had been hung from the closet’s doorknob. Kate unlocked the door and stepped inside.
Julian looked up at her. It took him a moment to recognize and positively identify her as Helen’s daughter.
Kate demanded, “Tell me what happened.”
Julian raised an eyebrow in query. Lots of things had happened, and he wasn’t entirely certain to what she was referring.
So she clarified, “Why did the wights go crazy?”
Julian considered whether, and how honestly, he might go about answering this question, and where he would start. Eventually, he decided on ‘yes’, ‘maximally’, and ‘from the most basic relevant principles’, respectively. So he tried to explain: “Bear in mind that any explanation I might come up with is mostly speculation.”
Kate gestured for him to continue, so he did so: “The Artifact is programmed with two directives: first, it must obey, above all others, the commands of any members of the Caluthian Royal Family. Failing that, it must obey any command issued directly to it by whatever human happens to control it.”
Kate interrupted, because it could be important, “How do you control it?”
Julian hesitated. How much did he want to tell these people? He didn’t want them to get control of the Artifact. With Julian in control of it, he could make sure it was used only for good. He had no such assurances about the Resistance. So he answered, “A supreme act of will.” Technically the truth, albeit an incomplete one.
Kate crossed her arms and waited. She didn’t look like she was buying it.
It wasn’t like Julian could control the thing anymore, anyway. Not with Adam around. And if he were killed, and nobody else figured it out, the Artifact could be left in control of itself forever – he wasn’t sure it was even possible to destroy the thing, because he had never particularly tried to do so.
So eventually, Julian sighed, and provided the rest of the truth: “And blood. My blood reactivated it, so its connection is to me.”
Satisfied with this explanation, Kate gestured for Julian to continue with his explanation. So he did, “Well, some of the pronouns Taitale used in his Personal Memoir are just slightly off –”
Kate interrupted, “Please spare the obscure grammatical nuances. We really don’t have time. Just the conclusions, please.”
Julian supposed that perhaps now was indeed not quite the proper time for a linguistics lecture, so he shrugged, and said, “Very well: I think the Artifact considers any corpse it controls to be an extension of itself.”
Even without the linguistics background information, comprehension dawned on Kate, “So if it controls a member of the Caluthian Royal Family…”
Julian completed the thought, “…then it is a member of the Caluthian Royal Family, and its own orders supersede mine.”
Kate pondered this for a few moments, and then declared, “Well, balls.”
Julian quite agreed with this sentiment.
Then Kate asked, “If I let you go, can you retake control without hurting Adam?”
“…what?”
“Can you –”
“I heard you.” It had not been that kind of ‘what?’ Julian had simply been taken aback, unprepared for the question. He had to mull it over for a few moments, but eventually answered, “There’s really not much left of Adam to hurt.”
“But can you do it?”
It was a difficult question. He would have to permanently sever the connection between Adam’s body and the Artifact, and the only way he knew how to do that was to destroy or damage the body enough that the Artifact’s power could no longer keep a hold on it. Even then, if it was anything like the other wights at all, the body was only a mindless puppet, and severing the connection, if it could be done without damaging the body any further, would just kill him again anyway.
So Julian answered, “Probably not.” It was almost an honest answer. In truth, he was pretty sure there was no ‘probably’.
Kate, thinking, bit her lip.
Julian broke the silence to ask, “You really want me to retake control? Your whole life spent trying to overthrow me, and now you want a return to the status quo?”
Kate looked rueful. “Try not to make me regret it. If anyone can do it, it’s you. The world was… it was objectively better off with you in charge than it is now, with the Artifact calling the shots and killing everything that lives.”
Julian could not disagree with this assessment, so he remained silent.
Kate returned to her previous line of thinking, insisting, “Promise you won’t hurt Adam.”
Julian was pretty sure he couldn’t retake control without hurting Adam. But he hadn’t even been trying to retake control. Until Kate brought it up, it hadn’t been on his agenda at all. And even if he did decide to try retaking control, well, maybe somebody else would destroy Adam to make it possible.
So, after several seconds of sitting in silence, watching Kate and thinking, Julian finally said, gravely, “Very well.”
Kate nodded, satisfied. “Good.” Then, one-handed (her other arm being in a sling), she unbuckled her sword-belt and held it out to Julian. He recognized it as his own; the sword and pistol hanging from the belt were his. How convenient.
Kate emerged from the supply closet, glancing in both directions. Julian followed, and Kate closed and locked the supply closet door.
In silence (except for the soft sound of Julian buckling on his sword-belt), they skulked to the warehouse’s back door, at the end of the hallway.
Kate pushed the door open. Rain fell in sheets, gusting inside.
Julian inclined his head to her as he walked out into the rain, saying, “Thank you.” For soliciting (and listening to) his explanation. For letting him go. For holding the door open for him.
Then something occurred to him, and he stopped and turned back to Kate. Loudly, over the driving rain, he asked, “What vendetta does your mother have against me?”
This was not exactly the best time or place for a long discussion of all the reasons Helen hated Julian. Kate hesitated even trying to start listing them.
But she knew that there was one root cause, and everything else was post hoc justification. So, tersely, she explained, “She blames two people for my father’s death. You’re one of them.”
Julian had suspected it must have been something like that. Something personal. Helen’s hate was too focused to be based on mere philosophical differences. “Ah. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize to me. I don’t remember him, I was only three when he joined the Resistance.”
“Ah. Nevertheless…”
Kate waved him away, “Just go.”
Without another word, Julian nodded and stepped away into the rain-soaked night. Kate let the door swing closed behind him.
Bodies were scattered around the marketplace. The torrential rain had washed most of the blood from the ground. Wares lay abandoned in heaps; several stalls had collapsed.
Wights in armor and shambling fresh corpses collected bodies, one at a time, and carried them into the palace’s front gates, one at a time.
Betsy, Helen, Kate, and about a dozen Resistance fighters lurked in the shadow of a building. Several of the Resistance guys, like Helen and Kate, sported various bandages. Somebody had given Helen new boots.
Quietly, Betsy, warned the others, “Careful of the fresh ones, kiddies. They may not look like much, but the fresh ones are stronger[6]. Could punch out a boulder, if it looked at ‘em the wrong way. Don’t let ‘em touch you.”
In the darkness and the rain, she squinted and tried to make out the face of her analog wristwatch[7]. “That look like twelve to you?” Midnight had been the appointed hour.
Helen shrugged. She couldn’t see the watch’s face well enough to read it, either.
Betsy frowned, but said, “Ehh, good enough.”
Stepping away from the building, Betsy aimed a flare gun into the sky. She hesitated only for a moment before pulling the trigger.
A flare streaked into the sky, illuminating the surroundings with a russet glow.
Several wights and shambling corpses noticed, and looked at Betsy.
Then half a dozen of the Resistance fighters charged the marketplace, yelling.
A few wights fired their rifles, and a few of the Resistance guys fell. The unarmed corpses shambled forward to meet the oncoming Resistance force in mêlée.
With the enemy thus distracted, Betsy, Helen, Kate, and the rest of the Resistance fighters kept to the shadows, making for the nearby side door, which Julian and Helen had left open.
Most of the corpses were swiftly beheaded in the mêlée. One managed to grab a Resistance fighter and snap his neck with its bare hands.
Then the ground quaked and the rain-lashed night was briefly illuminated by massive explosions at several of the palace’s other side doors. The Resistance was mounting a full-fledged assault.
The vestibule was a mostly featureless stone room. There were three closed interior doors; the fourth door led outside. Several Resistance fighters trooped inside.
Helen made a beeline for a side wall. When last she was here, she’d been with Julian, and they hadn’t come out any of the interior doors. There was another door, leading to the secret passageway they had used. She groped around on the wall, trying to figure out how to activate the secret door.
They had gone over the plan. They had no idea where the Artifact was actually kept, so the idea was to split up into pairs and search the palace manually, hoping some group would stumble upon the Artifact before the wights wiped everybody out. All agreed, it was not a very good plan, but it was the best plan they had.
So the group split up. Pairs of Resistance guys took the obvious doors to bland, industrial hallways. Betsy, Kate, and another pair waited for Helen to activate the secret passageway.
Betsy checked her watch again.
Eventually, Helen yanked on a lamp fixture in exactly the right way, and a wall swung open to reveal a spiral staircase.
Betsy gestured, and up they went.
Betsy and two Resistance fighters stepped out of the secret passageway, into the prison hallway. The floor was sticky with blood. Helen and Kate, splitting off from the group, continued further up the secret staircase.
A pair of Resistance guys make their way cautiously down a palace hallway. Several unarmed, unarmored shambling corpses burst from a side room, and the Resistance guys, though surprised, manage to hack them to pieces.
Wights ransack a palace infirmary, tossing boxes of medical supplies and bottles of chemicals to the floor. The Artifact and its army has no need of medical supplies, and wants to deprive its living foes of them. Something catches fire, and the whole room goes up in flames.
Several wights descending a staircase meet a full squad of Resistance guys coming up. A firefight ensues. None of the Resistance fighters make it out of the meat-grinder alive.
At the main gates, squad upon squad of wights and corpses march through the gates, into the palace.
Cautious, Julian snuck through a secret passage. Hearing wights marching in an adjoining corridor, he froze, silent, until they passed.
Steve led a squad of Resistance fighters sneaking through a dim storage room, filled with rack upon rack of unused wight armor.
From somewhere unseen, wights opened fire. Bullets clanged off the racks of armor.
Some of the Resistance guys returned fire. Some of them may have had targets, but some were just firing blindly. Others scrambled to find better cover, or an exit.
Steve managed to escape into an adjacent room. He began to yell, “In here—!”, but cut himself off when he noticed the room’s occupants.
It appeared to be some sort of combination fitting room and smithy. A hot forge and several anvils occupied one wall of the room.
Standing in the center of the room was Adam’s body, surrounded by several armorless corpses, fussing over him. Over his blood and mud-soaked clothes, he had been equipped with a modified[8] version of the standard wight’s armor – it was still smoking slightly, hot off the forge.
Steve backed slowly out of the room, but the Adam-wight had already spotted him.
It held out one gauntleted hand, and one of the shambling corpses handed it Adam’s battleaxe.
Then it stepped forward, advancing inexorably on Steve.
It intoned, <As the moths flock to the lantern’s light, so too do the insolent mortals flock to the seat of their master’s power, to bow and do abjection before him. So shall it be: a blood sacrifice on the altar of the conquering reaper.>
Steve, not being much of one for classical linguistics, could not understand a word of it, but the menace in the creature’s voice, and the hate on its face, was clear enough. He backed up against a rack of armor with a clang, and glanced back to see what obstacle was impeding his progress.
While Steve was looking away, the Adam-wight rushed forward suddenly, swinging its battleaxe.
Steve ducked out of the way, and the axe struck the rack of armor with a crash, cleaving through the rack’s structure and sending breastplates crashing to the floor.
Steve hastily drew his pistol and drew a bead on the creature, but it swung its axe downward, cleaving Steve’s arm off at the elbow with a shower of blood.
Steve was too shocked to do anything but yell a garbled “Shitting—!”
He was interrupted by a backhand swing from Adam’s axe, which took off the top of his head, spattering gore everywhere.
The Adam-wight, satisfied, turned to go. Bullets clanged off the racks of armor as he left them behind.
Kate and Helen made their way aimlessly through the corridors, searching for the rest of the Resistance, for the Artifact, for anything.
Helen was musing, “I might be able to find my way to the library; maybe it’s near there?”
Kate shushed her mother, with a “Shh, do you hear that?”
Helen canted her head to listen, and heard the tromp tromp tromp of a single wight approaching.
Drawing her cavalry sabre, she whispered, “Yes.”
But something about the sound sounded wrong to Kate. She began to say something, but trailed off as she saw Adam turn a corner, coming into view, in the armor of a wight, his bloodied axe slung at his back.
After a moment, Kate found words to say to her mother, “Don’t move,” and walked slowly down the corridor towards Adam. He showed no signs of noticing her presence.
Helen called after her daughter, “Are you mad?”
Kate called back, “I know what I’m doing.” Then she called out to the wight, “Adam! It’s me, Kate! Do you remember me?”
Adam slowed, then stopped. His face showed no emotions but hate and rage. It spoke, in a tongue unfamiliar to both Kate and Helen, <The land is reduced to desolation, the cities are burned with fire. The people are naked before the cleansing scourge.>
Kate slowly approached to within several yards of Adam, saying to herself, “That’s not encouraging.” Then, to Adam, “I know you’re in there somewhere, Adam. You remember me, don’t you?”
<A girl child shows no fear. The brave and the craven, the proud and the broken, the lion and the mouse, all shall wither into dust and crumble before my onslaught. For I am called Death, and before me, all things are powerless and impotent.>
Kate faltered. “I really can’t understand you, Adam. Can you hear me?” She was pretty sure that there must have been some remnant of Adam in there, else it would already have killed her.
<She calls forth the grasses to return to the salted earth and the nectar to flow in the cut blossom. She calls forth the deer to return from the wolf’s gullet, the words to be recalled to the lips once spoken. She calls for a soul, once fled, to return and form the words of her own tongue.>
Kate stopped walking towards the creature. It occurred to her now that the reason Adam hadn’t yet killed her might be because it didn’t perceive her as a threat, not because it remembered her. “…Adam?”
<The end of all things shall not be halted or delayed. The reaper shall continue on its inexorable mission.> The Adam-wight began walking forward again, paying no further mind.
Kate understood its movement, if she didn’t understand its words. “Balls. Adam, stop! I know you’re in there! Stop!”
The creature continued to walk forward, ignoring her.
Kate planted herself firmly in its path. Defiant, “Adam, if you’re on your way to go kill more people, you’re going to have to go through me to do it!”
This got the creature’s attention. It stopped a few feet from Kate. Slowly, it looked down at her.
They stood like that for several seconds.
Eventually, the creature spoke, for the first time in language Kate could understand. Its words were strained and slightly garbled. It said, “Very well.”
The creature raised its arms, as if to embrace Kate in a hug. Relieved to have finally gotten a response, she practically threw herself at him.
In one fast motion, almost too quick for the eye to see, the Adam-wight snapped Kate’s neck. She crumpled to the ground.
Helen, shocked into immobility, dropped her sword and emitted a high-pitched, wordless noise of grief.
The creature stepped over Kate’s body, paying Helen no mind, and continued on its way down the hall.
[7] Analog was, of course, the only kind of wristwatch available at the time.
[8] It lacked the glass visor, and the neck was more thoroughly protected by bulkier shoulder plates. Perhaps the dexterity of fresh corpses was great enough to manage these modifications on their own, or perhaps it was a new prototype that the armory boys had hoped to put into wide circulation. One assumes that it fixed the visor problem, if nothing else.
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