“What are you doing?” he asked.
The boy’s head jerked upwards. His eyes were solid yellow-white. A growl began low in his throat, rumbling down through the register, into the depths of the earth below them. Before the command had been given, the armor tickled on Adrash’s wrist, began rising up his forearm. He placed his palm upon the boy’s chest, tried to push him down, and found that he could not. The boy gripped his forearm in steel fingers, as if trying to stop the armor’s advance.
“Want it,” the boy said. “Off. Now.”
White rose above the boy’s fingers, and Adrash felt a surge of strength flow through his limbs. Cold purpose flooded his mind. He took hold of the boy’s free arm and threw him from the bed. The furred body crumpled like a stuffed toy as it hit the sharp teeth of the giant gear projecting into their room. Vertebrae snapped audibly as his head ricocheted off the metal.
Adrash stood and regarded the body. For several seconds, it seemed to him that the world was mute, that all sound had been cancelled.
He had listened to the boy’s voice for so long he had ceased to hear it.
He vowed never to let this happen again.
‡
He encountered the voice of the prophet many times after Tsema. A thousand years passed between occurrences, two thousand—never more than three. Adrash heard it more clearly each time, but grew no closer to understanding its nature. For twenty millennia, the voice announced itself across the face of Jeroun, inhabiting the bodies of young and old, male and female and elderman. Its avatars were heroes and sometimes villains, but they were never ordinary.
Each attracted and repelled Adrash. As he grew ever more powerful, testing the ultimate capabilities of the divine armor, the fiercer those who spoke with the voice pursued it.
Sleum Edylnara, who wielded the crescent aszhuri blade with a dancer’s grace and made love like an animal, tried to decapitate Adrash during one of their practice sessions. Adrash caught the blade in his hand, broke it, and strangled the woman. She did not beg for her life or try to tear Adrash’s fingers from her neck. Instead, her eyes had slowly turned to golden fire as her true voice singed the inside of Adrash’s skull.
Kengon Asperis Dafes, the Necromancer of Bridgtul, fed Adrash a potion that paralyzed him for several minutes. While Dafes’s back was turned, the armor covered Adrash’s body and began filtering the poison from his system. Adrash watched as the necromancer attacked with magefire, enchanted blades, and corrosive liquids. He felt nothing, cocooned safely inside the impenetrable white material. When he finally could move, he moved swiftly, crushing Dafes’s skull between his palm and a marble autopsy table. The rumbling voice warbled and died, but its echoes resounded in his head for weeks thereafter.
Open Water, Full Chieftain of The Whal, Lord of Spearhandle, pushed an enchanted whalebone dagger through Adrash’s left kidney during an orgy the two hosted. By this time, nearly twelve thousand years after Adrash had first heard the voice, the armor had fused with his system to such a degree that he barely felt the wound—the kidney itself healed in the blink of an eye. He twisted, pulling the dagger from Open Water’s hands, and with the light from his eyes vaporized the chieftain before his closest allies and lovers. Those gathered fell to the floor and worshipped Adrash.
As time went on, the avatars of the voice ceased to be a challenge. Their acts became ever more aggressive, but depressed Adrash with their predictability. As his own power grew, he forgot his original goal, which had been to understand the voice. Like the elders, it too had proved a weak enemy.
But he wondered if the voice might one day be heard on a grand scale. What if it woke the elders and urged them to take up their glass war machines, if it persuaded mankind to gather its forces in alliance? Perhaps then he might be threatened.
Adrash discovered he desired this. Not entirely. Not yet.
Nonetheless, he could no longer bear to live in the world. With no enemies to fight and little inclination to continue policing mankind, he ascended to heaven. Weariness rooted deep in his bones. The cords linking him to mankind frayed and nearly severed.
He knew an illness had taken hold of him, but felt powerless to stop it.
He built weapons of destruction, and extracted frail promise from the minds of men.
He waited for the voice to return. Surely, it had noticed his absence. He imagined it, waiting in hibernation, gathering its power for a final confrontation. Eventually, it would announce itself. This time, he would leave it alone. Let it come to him.
He waited, and grew impatient. Impatience eventually led to weariness, weariness to forgetfulness.
‡
After three days of resting, reflecting upon the past, Adrash opened his eyes. The light of realization spilled forth.
The cratered surface of the moon sped by beneath him, bright as sunbleached bone. Adrash smiled within the divine armor’s embrace, and turned to regard Jeroun.
Four voices rose in concert from its surface with a clarity that made his bones shiver.
How he had not heard them before was a great mystery. That such souls had been hidden from him seemed nearly impossible, especially considering his first encounter with Pol. Alone, the elderman had moved one of the spheres. The act should have aroused Adrash’s curiosity, yet he had written it off as an unusually powerful spell, similar to the one the elderwoman had used to bewitch him. Certainly, the outbound mages had progressed a great deal.
As, apparently, had the voice.
Voices, Adrash corrected himself. Perhaps there had always been more than one, and his ears were simply too unrefined to notice.
Regardless of the number, whatever produced the phenomenon had evolved beyond his capacity to recognize. While he waited for a sign from below—or merely for his indulgence of mankind to end—his enigmatic opponent had altered itself to fool him.
Of course, the strategy had worked. His deafness had left him vulnerable to the elderman’s second attack.
Yes, the new god had stolen things from Adrash’s mind, had taken them as easily as a man takes a toy from a child. Pol now knew the secret of the Clouded Continent, the location of the nameless valley that contained thousands of elder corpses, and something of the nature of Adrash himself. He knew with sufficient power any man might be a god. Perhaps he had even discovered the other voices, well before Adrash.
Adrash’s cock stirred at the memory of the encounter. Such a beautiful creature, Pol Tanz et Som, composed of nothing but muscle and bone and anger. Such a vicious, self-serving mind, the fire of it leaking out of his left eye like smoke from a fumarole, the searing heat of it focusing like a spear point from his right. He would gather power to him and use it, turn good and evil to his own devices. But he was not yet ready, and so his voice roared in frustration from Jeroun’s surface. Clearly, his allegiance had shifted. He meant to unseat Adrash.
What he intended beyond this, Adrash did not know.
Turning his attention elsewhere, Adrash closed his eyes again, listening.
The second voice:
Brassy thunder, the ringing of a hundred bells, the rolling of a thousand metal spheres. The sound gained strength slowly, inexorably, like a mountain shuddering into the sea. Adrash plucked memories from Berun’s labyrinthine mind, marveling at the course of the creature’s development. Solidification had changed the constructed man, making him frailer physically but stronger mentally. How handily he had defeated the mage Omali! Adrash could not piece together how this was accomplished, which only added to his fascination. He felt an odd kinship with Berun, whose mind could be cold and uncaring to so many, warm and sympathetic to but a few. A mass of contradictions, not unlike Adrash himself.