“Choose one,” he murmured.
Ratnayaka pushed up on his strong arms, so that he hung above his brother in his blood-spattered hammock. He closed his eyes, gently tugged his thoughts from Kalaman and let them wander the softly lit corridors and vast dark chambers of Helena Aulis until he found another there.
Sindhi.
Ratnayaka summoned him: an energumen with brick-colored skin like Kalaman’s, Kalaman’s eyes, Kalaman’s hands. And from where he slept, in the bedchamber that had belonged to the station’s Tertiary Architect, Sindhi answered: a thought that would have been a sigh if it had been given breath. A few minutes later he appeared in the doorway of the stim chamber, passing through the generated image of falling water and entering, miraculously untouched. Nearly invisible tendrils from the oneiric canopy descended to brush against his neck, a sensation like walking into a mist.
“Brothers,” Sindhi whispered. The tendrils sent their visionary fragments coursing through his brain. The impression of sunlight was so intense that he blinked, shading his eyes. He smiled as he stood and waited for Kalaman to welcome him. His bare feet left no impression upon the white sand he felt burning beneath his soles.
Come to me, Kalaman beckoned. Sindhi nodded and crossed to where Kalaman and Ratnayaka were tangled in the hammock. Without speaking, Kalaman slid from the fragile-seeming web. Ratnayaka followed, filaments from the canopy brushing against his face and chest and leaving a tracery of blood upon his arms. Kalaman embraced his brothers. The three of them sank to the floor, Sindhi between the other two.
Kalaman sighed, feeling Sindhi’s hands upon his thighs. It should not have been like this, with only the three of them savoring each other. He should have summoned all of his brothers, the seventeen of them who had survived the rebellion and then Kalaman’s depredations. One by one all the rest had been chosen, and shared, until only these few were left, much stronger than they had been before. But always Kalaman was the strongest, Kalaman was the first; Kalaman was the Chosen of the Oracle. It was an honor for Sindhi to have been summoned like this, a greater honor in a way since there were only three of them.
Kalaman drew away from the other two, his eyes narrowed, and after a moment Ratnayaka drew back as well. Sindhi knelt between his brothers with head bowed. For an instant, the shimmering impression of sand and lapping waves that surrounded them looked less solid, like a poorly transmitted ’file image; but then the likeness of a tropical beach grew strong once more, its heat and dampness seeping into their veins, though none of them cast a shadow. Sindhi laughed, his filed teeth flashing. His hair was very long and black, with a reddish, almost violet tinge. He wore it pulled through a small copper ring atop his skull. Ratnayaka sat behind him, nearly straddling him, and took the end of Sindhi’s hair and pulled gently until Sindhi’s neck arched. Beside them Kalaman watched. Without moving, he reached beneath the hammock, until his hand found the little raised panel there. His fingers brushed across the rows of tiny buttons, finally stopped when they touched one that felt more worn than the rest. He pressed it gently. A moment later a lenitive essence filled the air, an invisible mist that would stimulate neural centers in their minds to release a flood of opiates that would dull any pain. Kalaman took a few shallow breaths and focused on keeping the endorphins from clouding his will. Across from him Ratnayaka did the same. But Sindhi only shut his eyes. His blood traced a pulse point like a fluttering petal on his throat as he turned to Kalaman, his chin tilted so that the number of his birth-cluster could be seen tattooed there. Cluster 401: a brood whose members were as acquiescent as puppies.
“Thank you, O my brother,” Kalaman whispered as he leaned over Sindhi. With one hand he touched the kris within its worn leather sheath. Sindhi’s eyes fluttered open. He gazed up at Kalaman fearlessly and smiled.
“My brother,” he whispered, as Kalaman took his head between his huge hands. Kalaman drew Sindhi’s face toward him, as though he would hug it to his breast. Across from him Ratnayaka watched, his single eye slitted to an ebony tear.
Silently, Kalaman slid the kris from its scabbard. It was not the proper instrument for the harrowing. Its curved blade gave it an ungainly balance. But it would do; had done, many times before.
He held the kris up. It glowed turquoise, reflecting the false sea lapping nearby. Long ago there had been those among their Ascendant Masters who harrowed their own people as Kalaman had his brothers. The Oracle had told him about them. He had even shown Kalaman cinemafiles of their rites, simulated of course on film, but stirring nonetheless. Kalaman had been entranced: such magnificent people, with their stone pyramids and feathered capes! Since the insurrection Kalaman had read of them in talking books, and seen ’files of their artifacts, among them knives of turquoise stone, no clumsier than his sword. He pressed its tip against Sindhi’s skull, at the soft spot where maxilla and mandible joined beneath his temple. Sindhi grimaced as the point of the weapon punctured his skin. Sweat welled from the corners of his eyes, the ligaments of his face strained until they assumed the same grinning rictus they would show in death. Before fear could halt him, Kalaman drew the kris from jaw to jaw, slicing through Sindhi’s lips and cheeks and then running the blade across the back of his neck where Ratnayaka still held the hair in a taut black sheaf. Blood poured down Sindhi’s jaw, like the yolk from a cracked egg. More blood pattered to the floor, giving the lie to the sun-bleached sand. Kalaman set his hands upon the top of Sindhi’s skull.
“O my brother!” he cried, and felt Sindhi’s will yielding to his, a clear untrammeled ecstasy bubbling from beneath the pain. Kalaman tightened his grip, his hands trembling from the effort, until he could feel the plates of Sindhi’s skull begin to separate between his fingers. And still Sindhi smiled at his brother, his lips drawn back now to show blood-filled gums above his filed teeth, his ebony eyes bulging. Across from him Kalaman could hear Ratnayaka’s calm breathing and smell the sandalwood essence he wore mingling with the smell of the sea, fainter now as the coppery scent of blood filled the air.
“Sindhi.”
Kalaman’s heavy eyelids fluttered shut for a moment as he whispered his brother’s name for the last time. Their Ascendant Masters would have done it differently. They would have invoked a god, gods—finned Chac-Xib-Chac with his ax, the gaping maw of Xibalba, and the jawless head of Tlaloc. But the energumens did not believe in gods. They were gods. Soon those upon the Element would learn to worship them.
The kris fell, clattering loudly on the tiled floor that lay beneath the hazy vision of golden sand. Kalaman drew his hands to his breast, blood flecking his face with deeper red. He could feel Ratnayaka watching him, that single eye like an awl boring through his forehead. Now! he thought.
Quickly, so that no pain would have the chance to pierce the shield of opiates and mindlessness slipping over the brother in his arms, Kalaman cracked Sindhi’s skull open. The plates of bone and skin he moved apart as though prying the meat from a nut.
And there it was, their jewel, pale gray and pink like a stony coral, and like a coral trembling ever so slightly, as though in an ocean current. It was surprisingly bloodless, striated here and there where Kalaman’s fingers left ruddy smears, but heavy, much heavier than the brains of their masters had been. He lifted it gently, another medusa tethered by medulla and vertebrae to its stony shadow, and let Sindhi’s lifeless body fall away.