That prickled his pride, and he straightened. A foolish move, as he immediately took a branch to the face.
Spitting out leaves that tasted of copper and rotten vegetables, he responded. “I'm not saying I won't go, I'm saying I'd like to be somewhat cautious.”
“Oh, I'll be cautious.” She steered the cloud to leap over a bush, rolling down a small hill as he clung to her arms for support. “Somewhat.”
Chapter 4
Iteration 217: Harrow
In the first strike, she exterminated humanity.
Suriel’s weapon activated as she whipped it down. It expanded in a microsecond, expanding from a meter-long bar of blue steel into a skeleton of blue metal containing a web of light. It looked like a bare tree, each of its branches arcing with power.
While it was sealed, Suriel called her weapon a sword. Now that it was released, the weapon regained its identity as Suriel’s Razor.
It had been handed down to her from her predecessor, along with the identity of Suriel, the Sixth Judge of the Abidan Court. More than a tool for destruction, the Razor was meant as an instrument of healing. An infinitely complex, incalculably powerful scalpel.
Her mind ran along its familiar pathways even as she struck. First, she isolated the bloodline she intended to target. That feature was intended to remove pests in a home or a strain of virus in a body, but she could just as easily expand her focus.
To mankind. They were corrupted now, fused to and altered by the same chaos that destroyed their world.
Once her target was selected, she simply provided the energy, and the Razor did the rest. The Mantle of Suriel, a river of raging white flame that hung from her back like a cape, rolled with power as it drew on the Way. She funneled that power to her weapon, which flashed so brightly they would see it on the surface of the burning planet, kilometers beneath her.
Millions of lights blinked into existence all through the atmosphere, a blanket of tiny stars. Each light flashed, spearing down to the surface, and then was gone.
Her connection to the Way slackened immediately, like a sudden flicker of weightlessness in the center of her stomach. Humans anchored a world, their lives and their minds tying it to the Way, and when they were gone…chaos reigned. She had cut this world adrift.
[Targets eliminated,] her Presence informed her, the voice feminine and impersonal inside her mind. [Ninety-nine-point-eight percent population reduction. Proceed with manual elimination?]
In her vision, points of green ignited all over Harrow, indicating those that had survived her purge. These were the scraps that remained pure, even with their world corrupted. The last remnant of Harrow’s population.
Abidan regulations stipulated that she complete the elimination, as the chaos could infect survivors at any time, but she was Suriel. She had fought her way to one of the highest positions in existence in order to save the lives that couldn’t be saved.
She denied her Presence’s request.
All told, there were two million, one hundred six thousand, three hundred and forty-four survivors scattered all over the dying planet. A huge number of lives, but only a speck of dust next to the number she’d just killed. Days ago, there had been five billion people on this planet. After the violent merge of Limit and Harrow, only twenty percent of the population had survived. Now? A scarce fraction, a handful of sand, easily swept away.
A weight settled onto her spirit, another slab of lead in a tower that was growing too high to manage. She knew the elimination was necessary, but she had still taken so many lives. How many had she killed now?
Her Presence could tell her, but she didn’t ask.
The previous Suriel, her predecessor, had not died in the line of duty. He’d passed the Mantle and Razor on to her when they grew too heavy for him, and then he’d walked away. He lived the life of a mortal now, his power forcibly veiled. She hadn’t heard from him in millennia.
The things he’d done in the name of his office had burdened him, broken him, and he was the Phoenix. His job was to save lives, not to take them. How much heavier was the weight borne by Razael, the Wolf?
Or Ozriel, the Reaper?
The world’s problems had not ended with the destruction of mankind. If they had, the Reaper’s job would not be necessary. Anyone with the power of an Abidan Judge were capable of eliminating a planet’s worth of people, and most Iterations only had a single inhabited planet.
Beneath where she floated, high in the outer atmosphere, the planet rolled in visible turmoil. Seas appeared and disappeared, caught between Limit and Harrow, continents flickered and boiled as though trying to decide on a shape, cities crumbled to dust and were rebuilt in seconds. Clouds spun in rapid circles, taken by chaotic winds, and fire raged across such a vast territory that it was visible from space.
Now, the difficult and painstaking part of her task began.
Gadrael, a compact and muscular man with dusky blue skin and tight-packed horns instead of hair, hovered nearby. His arms were folded so that the black circle on his forearm, the Shield of Gadrael, was pointed out. He wore the same liquid-smooth white armor as she did, and a Judge’s Mantle burned behind him as well.
He watched the world beneath him die without the slightest crack in expression. “Quarantine protocols will remain in effect for approximately six months Harrow time, after which my barriers will vent all fragments into the void and dissolve.”
The role of the Reaper was to eliminate a world without leaving such fragments behind, which could give birth to the most dangerous elements in existence. The best she could do was a messy approximation.
“Acknowledged.” She still didn’t leave.
She had six months to save as many untainted lives as she could.
Of course, that was Harrow time, which was notoriously unstable. This world had drifted from the Way, which governed the proper flow of time. She felt as though she’d been here for minutes, but another world may have seen days pass.
Ozriel could have done this in moments, but he was gone. For the first time, she felt a hint of personal resentment for that.
“After this reprieve, Makiel expects you to throw your full effort into the search for Ozriel. He wants results within a standard decade.”
Suriel turned to him, temper hot. Calling the power of the Way both demanded and produced inhuman self-control, but Gadrael was testing hers. Her Razor thrummed in her hand, sparking and hot.
“Do I have autonomy in this matter?” she asked coldly.
He had to see what she was doing, but he nodded once. “You do.”
Everything about her blazed as she flexed her power—hair emerald, eyes purple, Mantle and armor white, Razor a flickering blue. She burned with the colors of a celestial glacier, until even Gadrael had to conjure barriers over his eyes.
“Then this falls under the purview of the Sixth Division, not the Second. If you interfere before I have finished my operation, I will consider you to have violated the Pact and take action accordingly. Let it be witnessed under the Way.”
She couldn’t kill him, as he may have been the hardest man in all existence to actually destroy, but there were any number of ways one Judge could make life difficult for another. Schisms among the Court of Seven were not common, but they were known to happen. Suriel would not risk the stability of the Abidan on a personal vendetta, but Gadrael—and by extension, Makiel—were threatening her authority.
If she allowed that to happen, she would not be worthy to remain Suriel.
A curtain of rich, layered blue tore open on the starry canvas behind Gadrael, and he stepped back into it, arms still crossed. “Six months,” he said, “then you find the Reaper. We have set aside Iteration two-thirteen as a quarantine zone for your infected, so bypass Sector Control. A channel will be open for you.”