> True healing remains exceedingly rare.
>
> The lesser arts abound: cards that speed recovery; that slow the impact of injuries allowing for other aid; improving the skill or efficacy of mundane applications of medicine; etc.
>
> Even those that exceed these limitations usually maintain significant drawbacks: injuries may be put off, but then return worse than before; disease symptoms eased, but fail to remove the underlying infection.
>
> The closer to death’s door the rarer the capacity, and frequently the greater the cost. It is not uncommon for a healing card without drawbacks to become latent for years after use—a fate that forces the bearer to compare every other death with the life of the one they saved.
>
> It is a bitter irony that the healing which cards are so often beseeched for is so scarce.
Jack returned to the roof quickly—the cached momentum of a dash from a standing jump was enough. He needed to see it all, to react to the chaos in the moment he waited for with immediacy.
The strength of the pheromones varied with location. He’d distributed them all around the tower, targeting the underground particularly. Many of the hivers kept some semblance of order, holding themselves back from attacking their own kind; they searched fruitlessly for the true enemy their senses were screaming was present.
Closer to the openings leading underground there was no such decorum. It was a bloodbath. The relative restraint of the hivers had been entirely eroded by the destructive drive of the threat pheromone he had inundated them with. What limited capacity they possessed had collapsed to a singularity of thought: enemy.
Warriors cut through workers like wheat, their scythe blades rising and falling in rhythmic motion, dewy blue blood rising in arcs at their motion.
The workers—too resilient for quick deaths—lacked the natural weaponry to butcher each other, resolving instead into brutal brawls of orgiastic violence.
Most died under the growing pressure of their injury, but the horror of those that didn’t shone clearly through the muddle of death. One worker missing its lower half, climbed the torso of the warrior responsible and gnawed its way into the open wound of its killer’s guts. Another stumbled away from the combat, managing half a dozen strides before a stumble saw its barely attached head slip from the miraculous hold it had maintained on the neck.
Jack watched it all curiously, like a child at an anthill. Several steps away from delighted, but certainly fascinated, fixated by the result of his design, by what he had wrought.
The next moment in his plan had yet to come. The main show wasn’t even here. All that happened before him was secondary to the underground. He had a singular purpose: make that unseeing space utterly hostile; impossible to move through without being assaulted by all those around. Swamped in violence that resisted all reason.
He could see them, lingering about the entries of the tower, shoving back the hivers daft enough to try them. The clever ones. The hivers that had come forth and taken the nobles in the darkness and brought them back. The ones that moved like people and, he hoped, thought like them.
He was crafting an illusion, the impression of a threat moving on the tower from beneath, caught barely in time by the watchers and stymied only through overwhelming force. Against such a threat what was there to do but run–to protect whatever was irreplaceable?
So he waited. Letting the tension rise, letting the fear of the threat grow inside whatever minds still held rationality below him. He fingered one of the avoidance orbs absentmindedly. He needed to present hope at just the right moment.
Suddenly, one of the domed support buildings for the tower gave way to the weight of massed hivers struggling atop it and a cloud of dust rolled out over the east side.
Reaching into the pot held between his knees, Jack began chucking handfuls of avoidance orbs to the opposite side. The hivers in the area immediately scattered, opening a noticeable gap in the swarm leading out and away from the tower.
A pair of hivers lingered in the entry to the west, seeming almost to converse.
‘An attack from the east! But look, a path opens to the west!’ called out the Eager Hiver in Jack’s mind.
‘No! We remain in the fortress! It is our strength! The Queen-Mother cannot be risked! If she is lost we are undone!’ the Cautious Hiver replied.
But to Jack’s delight the Eager Hiver seemed to render a persuasive case. Jack could see the flurry of activity as the clever hivers mustered about the entry and made space for themselves among the already thinned swarm.
An exodus was in motion.
Ranks formed, the hivers fleshing out multiple lines until the centre of their clump was completely secure from all directions. Only then did she emerge.
‘Royalty,’ Jack crowed.
Like the rest of the hivers, her form followed function. Grotesquely obese, a swollen tumour of flesh bearing only vestigial stick-limbs. Flocking and worrying at her corpulence was a diminutive nurse caste, made all the more miniature in her proximity. Even from his height Jack could discern the vacancy in her aspect, the wandering gaze and fitful limbs speaking to the absence of an underlying intelligence.
‘After all, a tool that wields itself can turn against its master.’
He was beginning to understand the logic of the Shapers. A people desperately afraid of their own capacity, but nevertheless pushed or pulled into creating greater horrors, crossing lines they swore against, only to have their own limits shift beneath them. The thought discomfited him, that it had been people, just people, that had crafted everything he had seen up to then.
Jack shook his head clear of those thoughts. The moment was nearly ripe.
The queen was being hoisted atop an open-top wagon. They meant to spirit her away into the city, no doubt to find a secure locale before returning in force to discover the source of the threat that had come so close to their queen.
There would only be this one chance. His body was at the edge of failure. His ribs were broken, he could tell from the pain every deep breath brought him. The mutilation of his arm would see him losing copious blood once the poison of the hiver finally wore off.
The taste of apples sung a pure note across his tongue. He understood it now. Every time he would falter, it was replaced by the taste, a reminder of the weakness–of the humanity–he was leaving behind.
‘I think... I want to be myself for what comes next.’
He imagined something then. Of returning home and crossing the city boundary to find a shy smile lighting up at his arrival. Of a tentative embrace suddenly becoming a desperate clutch.
What would he say then? What could cover the distance he’d travelled? But he knew.
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“I can fly now,” he said aloud, “Do you wanna see?”
The taste of blood had never been so welcome.
He was terrified when he crossed to the far side from the queen. His hand shook as he gathered the cord attached to the heavy cooking pot. Every step of his sprint brought his heart to his throat. Gotcha Dash.
But airborne he felt free.
The queen was too far for him to reach even with his running jump. But that didn’t matter.
He could feel his dash shadow shrinking, but his fall was faster and swiftly the shadow hit the ground.
Jack let go of the pot, tossing it upward a little as he triggered his first dash charge. He accelerated downwards, outpacing the natural falling speed of the pot, drawing the cord out until it was taut and he felt the sudden hard tug on his arm as it was pulled from its socket.
He screamed even as he played the next pair of cards. Empower. Pivot.
His brief experiments with the card he had initially described as ‘Double’ had revealed its true nature. It was a metacard, one that enhanced some aspect of the next card played. The effect wasn’t always obvious, he’d only managed to figure out the edges of its utility with Pivot.
That was enough.
He could feel the effect of Pivot cover his body, giving him free control of his orientation. The effect strength on held objects was an inverse function of their distance and weight, only barely affecting heavy objects or those held far from his body. Empower strengthened it.
Jack spun, head over heels, his arm held above his head not by his own will but the effect of Pivot. The cord bound to him did not tangle, instead it kept its taut position as if it were a solid shaft connecting to the nearly full pot wrapped at the end.
He could not see anything. The blur of motion was far too much, his optic nerves too slow to provide him useful data. He only remembered the position of the queen. All he could use was his distance from the ground and his orientation—senses given to him not through any fallible organ but imparted directly into his mind by his cards.
The pot struck the queen like a meteor. Flesh and blood exploded outwards in a cloud of viscera, everything in a dozen meters was immediately misted in blue blood.
The force was overkill, far exceeding what would have been necessary if her death was all he needed. But what would he have done then? Surrounded by vengeful hivers and him on his last legs?
All around him Jack watched hivers, coated in blue, take perhaps a step or two towards him before falling to their knees and growing suddenly listless. The death-scent of the queen was inescapable, and the self-destruction reaction in the hivers consumed them.
Jack watched the world as if from a distance, the earth tilted and suddenly he was lying on his back. Warm blue rain fell upon his lips. Darkness encroached, and his glimmer of awareness flickered out.
----------------------------------------
“He’s waking.”
A voice drawing him from the infinite depths where he dwelt.
‘How can I be waking if that’s the first thing I remember? I swear I’m not.’
“How can you tell?”
‘Self-fulfilling prophecy.’
“His breath became shallow, and his pulse quickened. He probably feels something awful, the pain will be bringing him up.”
The words cruelly drew Jack’s attention to the state of his body; which, true to Grant’s prediction, hurt.
‘Bastard.’
Laughter met his thought, which had apparently encroached on reality.
“Glad to have you back, Jack. I’m bringing you water, hold a moment. You two give him some space, you’ll get your chance soon enough, but for now he’s my patient.”
Jack felt hands beneath his head and back, gently raising him up until a water-skin met his lips. The water was stale and warm, but he couldn’t recall ever tasting sweeter.
Grant prattled on companionably while Jack listened with half an ear, imagining himself a desiccated husk slowly growing pink and turgid as liquid ran through cracked riverbed veins.
“—juries alone would have been enough to see you dead. If we’d arrived any slower it would have been to a corpse, and it was a near thing.”
‘That can’t be right.’ Jack’s thoughts caught up with Grant’s description.
“It wasn’t so bad. A few cuts. I do think I broke my arm. Took a couple fall-”
Grant’s expression finally pierced through his foggy mind and brought his explanation to a halt.
“What’s that look supposed to mean?”
“I’d hate to see what you ‘runners think is a bad injury if you thought this was mild. How often do you lot end up with a punctured lung? ‘Think you broke an arm’? Lad you’re lucky you have an arm left! Between the shattered bone and whatever went at you like a clumsy butcher… if you hadn’t tied it down, the scraps of tissue would not have held I’m sure.”
Jack winced at the final note, unable to keep the image of his arm flying off during his acrobatics like a flung garland.
“Was it truly that...”
“When we found you, you were as good as dead. I’m not trying to scare caution into you, I’m sure you did what was necessary, but you should know the truth of it. If Calre and Vasala hadn’t both given me license to save you, we wouldn’t be speaking now.”
Jack let out the breath he’d been holding. He hadn’t realized how close he’d come. The poison of the hiver had clearly slowed his bleeding just enough to survive to rescue, and no more. Still, it seemed strange.
“How did you manage to save me?”
“They gave their permission for me to use a card meant for them. Puts both of them at risk, and we’ll have to be more cautious from here on out, but they insisted.”
“What?”
Grant gave him an exasperated look.
“Jack, unless it was pure circumstance that found you next to the hiver queen—a corpse that looks suspiciously like it was struck by a falling star, you saved the lives of two nobles. Did you think that was without consequence?”
Jack didn’t know what to say to that.
“That you even managed it is frankly astonishing—the pair over there are practically giddy to hear about it. I half suspect they demanded you live because they couldn’t bear to not know how you managed it.”
“I… I scarcely believe it myself. But it wasn’t really me entirely, I couldn’t have done it without what you gave me.”
Grant laughed, “I hope you don’t think a few training sessions gave you all that! Sure I’d like to take credit but—”
“No, I mean the apple vial you gave me, I don’t think I could have...” Jack drifted off as Grant’s expression took on a new intensity.
“What do you taste right now? Tell me true,” Grant suddenly grabbed Jack’s shoulder squeezing tight enough to hurt. His eyes were stormy, but beneath it was a terrible fear.
“N-nothing. I tasted the apples before, but it came and went.”
Grant continued to stare at Jack, his gaze searching, before slowly releasing his grip and settling back, shrinking into himself unlike Jack had ever seen before.
“So you were in the Orchard,” Grant whispered, so quietly Jack could barely hear, “and left.” He looked at Jack again then and spoke quickly, “don’t speak of this to anyone. I will explain when there’s time.”
Jack nodded silently, not trusting his own voice.
They sat in silence then. Each lost in thoughts that could not be shared, a silence of secrets shared and secrets kept.
“There’s something else,” Jack was the first to breach it, “I don’t want you to think I lied. I told you I had three cards, that the last two were broken. That was true then, but I aligned the cards, they work. They’re how I managed to kill the queen. I’ve broken the Censure, that’s evident to anyone, but I didn’t mislead you before. I just… wanted to make sure you knew.”
Calre and Vasala suddenly appeared from the edges of Jack’s vision, their approach lost in the intensity of his appeal to Grant.
“I’ve always been more inclined to follow the spirit of the law than the letter,” Calre interjected smoothly, “the Censure is intended to promote social order. If the Censure punishes acts of valour and service to the nobility that goes quite against its intended purpose.”
A slowly broadening grin was beginning to overwhelm his face.
“And what’s this I hear about broken cards?”