Page 104 of The Book that Broke the World

Celcha carried the construct into the nearest portal and let it guide her.

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“The past...” It had always been a risk. Celcha had had to advance through the years. Letting time flow by you is a means of accumulating power. Plant a seed; return a lifetime later to reap what you have sown. And now her constructs had found their prey, but the deed was already done and all that remained was for Celcha to watch it.

She ghosted through untold walls, following the direction and the purpose that had sustained her for so long in place of the life that Hellet might have wanted for her. When she finally came upon them it seemed that the pair had hardly aged from the day of their dance. That was a good thing. Her vengeance might have consumed her youth but for the authors of the great crime it would be a swift thing, hard on the heels of their victory, striking before they could enjoy the spoils.

She found them in a reading room distinguished only by the fact that it held a Mechanism. It took her a few moments to find them amid the crowd of humans and canith. When she finally found her canith and her human she was shocked to discover the canith lying amid his own blood, apparently mortally wounded, and his paramour kneeling beside him in distress.

This was not the vengeance Celcha had wanted. This was not the victory. She had always known time would claim them both as it claimed everyone. To see the deceivers die at the hand of chance made her feel cheated.

Celcha watched despite this, and as she watched she saw that the wounded canith’s gaze aimed past his grieving partner to a pair of canith beside the Mechanism’s door, one tall and looming over the other who might be the shortest canith she’d seen. Something about the pair disturbed her. Some sense of the familiar.

While Celcha stared and tugged at the threads of memory, the taller canith did something to the Mechanism’s door and a moment later Hellet emerged. Not Hellet as she had known him, clad in the scars of past cruelty, but Hellet in the assistants’ white. Even so, she knew him without hesitation, as if her still-cracked sight offered up the ghost of him surrounding the whiteness like the memory of smoke.

Even the clanging advance of some huge new threat behind her couldn’t take Celcha’s gaze from her brother. For his part, Hellet walked past her without a flicker of recognition. Celcha turned, calling his name, and saw emerging from the constriction of the corridor a vast likeness of herself, somewhat battered just as she now was, trailing twisted steel behind it in mockery of the chains that she still dragged through the years. A lone canith ran ahead of it, dwarfed by the avatar, underscoring the towering height of the thing.

Celcha stood amazed. She had forgotten how large some of the constructs had been. At the time it had felt justified, somehow scaled towards the size of her anger. Now it seemed excessive, but at least the former ghosts would know the author of their doom.

“No.” Hellet held out a white hand, palm forward.

The mechanical Celcha lunged forward with an awful silent fury. It hit an invisible wall and came to a dead halt, though she saw that Hellet was jolted back some fraction of an inch. The canith that had run from the avatar tried to brace him, as if her strength might somehow make a difference.

“Why?” Celcha shouted. “Why, brother?” Why had he put himself between her vengeance and the ones who had tricked them into murdering a city?

The construct recovered itself and pointed with one finger, aiming its accusation squarely at the wounded canith and the human tending him.

“Why?” gasped the canith, no understanding on his face.

Few conflicts can match the ferocity with which siblings make war, their grievances born in the womb. The love that can run between them is more rare but similarly deep.

When Harry Met Morgan, by Nicholas Whitehall

CHAPTER 45

Livira

Why?” A shout.

Livira stood up, releasing Evar’s too-cold hand. “Why me?” she shouted again. There had been nothing ambiguous in the mechanoid’s aim. Its finger, scratched from tearing through a thousand steel poles, had been aimed squarely at her heart.

“My sister made this,” the assistant answered. Grey veins spread across him. “Her name is Celcha.”

At mention of the name the metal beast hurled itself forward, this time pressing against the assistant’s wall with untold force.

“I don’t know any Celcha!” Livira shouted. “I’ve never even seen a ganar.”

**

“Liar!” Celcha screamed the word at the girl’s face, eliciting no reaction, though at last Hellet’s head moved a fraction to acknowledge her.

**

“She saw you though.” A degree of effort trembled the assistant’s words. “I suffered the same malady in my former life. When I was her brother, Hellet. Ghosts visited me most days.”

“Where did she see me?”

“When is more revealing.” Hellet looked over his shoulder at her and under the gaze of his white eyes Livira felt seized by a sense of vertigo. “She saw you, Livira. You and Evar Eventari dancing above the necropolis she had helped me populate.”

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