“So,” Alarion said after a long pull from his canteen. “Kalim, was it?”
Seated beside him on the bank of the river, the big man tried his best not to acknowledge the question. His attention, very conspicuously, remained fixed on the strip of dried meat in his hands while his body radiated the unmistakable, immovable stubbornness of a man hoping silence would substitute for an answer.
Unfortunately for him, Alarion had always been a curious child.
“That was what she called you, right? Kalim?”
A muscle in the Sergeant’s jaw twitched. “It’s Kali.”
“Not according to your dossier. That is your Specialist title.” Alarion smiled as the big man finally turned to glare at him. “You have read mine; it seemed only fair.”
The logic was hard to argue with, but he didn’t have to like it. “When?”
“Back in Ashad-Vitri. I had to know I could trust you.”
Truth told, the file had given him pause. For a provincial with some degree of authority, Kali had a surprisingly long record. It was pages longer than Alarion’s but less substantial in nature. Where Alarion’s infractions were major—disobeying orders, striking an officer, and so forth—Kali’s were all petty offenses. Late to duty, failure to report, intoxicated on watch. Collectively, they were a blight, but they’d been spaced far enough apart that no one officer had ever developed the grudge needed for a more serious punishment.
The stream of violations had tapered off a few years earlier when the Sergeant had been transferred to Ashad, but it had never entirely gone away. If anything, Alarion suspected it was less an improvement in behavior than a lack of oversight. Especially given Kali’s friendly relationship with their new Ordinate.
“And can you?” Kali asked, after studying him for a moment.
“I looped you in, did I not?” Alarion answered. “I was concerned, but-“
Kali snorted.
“Something funny?”
“Just your unfamiliarity. You’ve never heard of The Short Path?”
“No.”
“Verek Ferhal’s seminal work. I have a copy in my bunk.” Kali smiled in recollection, then bit off a large chunk of his lunch, leaving Alarion in suspense as he chewed. “He was Godborn, like me, and angry, like I was.”
“Angry?”
“You’re what, sixteen?”
“Seventeen,” Alarion replied, perhaps more indignantly than he needed to.
“I’m thirty-two. So that is what, fifteen years between us?” Kali squinted in concentration, double-checking the math in his head before nodding. “So about half my age. By the time you’re as old as I am, I’ll either be dead or so decrepit I’ll wish I was. Meanwhile you’ll still have decades left to live, and I didn’t grow up any faster than you. Even high-generation Godborn like me have less than twenty years in their prime.”
Alarion didn’t know what to say. The information wasn’t new; he and Bergman had speculated about Kali’s age and longevity before, but it was another thing to hear it from the man himself. So rather than say anything, he let Kali talk.
The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
“Most of us don’t mind. Being a descendant of a God tends to instill a certain level of religiosity and a belief in something after, be it the great return, the long wait, or even the wheel. Most Godborn view this life as temporary.”
“But you do not,” Alarion said.
“No. Or, it’s more accurate to say I have no idea.”
In that, at least, they had a certain kinship. No mortal being knew what happened after death, even if many were convinced otherwise. The Gods’ silence on the topic had led to four major strains of thought.
Some, like the monks of Kel-Taran, thought the world was an endless cycle of death and rebirth created to cleanse the impurities of those who lived. They believed that the Mothers were nothing more than purified beings and that, by creating idealized Thoughtborn, they helped hasten a world without death or suffering.
More popular among the Godborn, returners believed that all living things carried a fragment of the Mothers. This fragment would rejoin their Mother, or some higher being beyond her, and live forever in a paradise after death. The existence of ex-incarnates like Valentina gave some credence to this theory, but had also given rise to a schism more than a millennium before Alarion’s birth.
These doubters believed that the ex-incarnates hadn’t returned to the source, but that they were waiting for something—and they were not alone. Every life was saved at the moment of death, and when the time is right, every person who had ever lived would be made whole again.
And then, of course, there was the purely physicalist point of view. They were all meat or metal or thought. They’d live as long as they could, and then they’d die.
It was a complex theological debate that Alarion had never given much thought to before Sierra’s death. When she did, he’d sought solace in religion, but his dark mood had made every overture sound vapid and hollow. He’d opted out for agnosticism and seldom looked back.
He reasoned that he’d find out one day.
“Ferhal struggled with the same thoughts that I did. The bitterness of the years stripped from us by the choice of an ancestor. He was a violent man, an anti-deist who sought to burn the whole world down with him during the rise of the System. He killed three Incarnates and broke the spine of a continent when he ravaged Gartite.” Kali’s tone brimmed with admiration as he plucked a rock from the shore and skipped it across the river’s current hard enough to crack branches on the far side. “Do you know what Lal Sera did when she caught him? She sentenced him to life.”
Alarion barked a laugh despite the grim subject matter and was relieved to see Kali chuckle alongside him after a failed attempt at a mock glare.
“She wanted him counting down the days,” Alarion posited.
“Exactly, though it backfired. Ferhal wasn’t just a powerful Awakened; he was smart. And with nothing left to do but think, he spent his remaining years on philosophy. He wrote hundreds of books and pamphlets that were smuggled out of the prison, but the most famous is The Short Path. It is a treatise on the meaning of life—or the lack thereof—as he saw it.”
“And this has to do with you repeatedly showing up drunk for duty?” Alarion asked, reminding Kali of how they arrived at the topic.
“Intoxicated. I’m big enough to hold any liquor I can afford,” the Sergeant corrected, throwing another stone. “But yes. The meaning of life, as he saw it, is personal. Experiential. I’m not here for very long, and whether I rot in the ground or return to the wheel, I have no say in the matter. So, I embrace the life I have, I choose what matters, and I make it matter. Some desire family or friendship. Others, violence or knowledge. I seek out things I haven’t done before. Substances, games, partners. Pain and pleasure.”
“Is that not just…” Alarion scowled for a moment. It was rare for him to struggle for a Vitrian word these days, but this was a rare one buried half forgotten in his lexicon.
“Hedonism?”
“That,” he agreed, relief bleeding off him. It would have been stuck in his head until he remembered it.
“Perhaps. But men die at twice my age while living a quarter as much.” He shrugged and leaned back on his hands, staring out over the rushing river ahead of him as though it could be hiding an answer to their existential question. “The world doesn’t care if I bring a hundred women to my bed or see colors dancing between my fingers because of some powder I inhale. The world is indifferent, but I don’t have to be.”
Alarion considered Kali’s words. His mother—with her strong conservative beliefs—would have been appalled, which accounted for much of his knee-jerk disdain for the idea. But as he turned it over in his mind, he felt a certain familiarity with it.
“That last bit reminds me of something a Vitrian—a friend—once told me,” Alarion mused. “About obligation and ambition.”
“That’s one thing to remember about Vitrians. Everything they have, they took it from somewhere else.” Kali chuckled, “Now get up. It’s time for me to beat you senseless for snooping in my business.”
“I thought you were interested in new experiences.”
