Thunderhead (Arc of a Scythe #2)(34)
“I’m not your apprentice anymore. You can’t order me around.”
“No, but if you wish to wash at least some of the blood from your hands and win back an ounce of my respect, you will do it. You will write an honest epitaph for each of them. You will speak to the good each of your victims has done in the world, as well as the bad—for even the most self-serving, corrupt of scythes has some virtue hidden within the wrinkles of their corruption. At some point in their lives, they strove to do what was right before they fell.”
He paused as a memory came to him. “I used to be friends with Scythe Renoir,” Faraday admitted, “many years before his bigotry became the cancer you spoke of. He loved a Permafrost woman once. You didn’t know that, did you? But as a scythe, he couldn’t marry. Instead, she married another Permafrost man . . . which began Renoir’s long path to hatred.” He took a moment to look at Rowan. “If you had known that, would you have spared him?”
Rowan didn’t answer, because he didn’t know.
“Complete your research on him,” Faraday instructed. “Write an anonymous epitaph and post it for all to read.”
“Yes, Scythe Faraday,” Rowan said, finding a bit of unexpected honor in obedience to his old mentor.
Satisfied, Faraday turned for the door.
“What about you?” Rowan asked, part of him not wanting the scythe to go and leave him to his own thoughts. “Are you just going to vanish again?”
“I have many things to do,” he told Rowan. “I am not old enough to have known Supreme Blade Prometheus and the founding scythes, but I do know the lore they left behind.”
So did Rowan. “If this experiment of ours fails, we have embedded a way to escape it.”
“Very good; you remember your readings. They planned a failsafe against a scythedom that falls to evil—but that plan has been lost to time. My hope is that it is not lost, but merely misplaced.”
“You think you can find it?”
“Perhaps, perhaps not, but I think I know where to look.”
Rowan considered it, and suspected he knew where Faraday planned to begin his search. “Endura?”
Rowan knew very little about the City of the Enduring Heart, more commonly known as Endura. It was a floating metropolis in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It was the seat of power, where the seven Grandslayer scythes of the World Scythe Council lorded over the regional scythedoms around the world. As an apprentice, it had been too many layers above Rowan for him to care about. But as Scythe Lucifer, he now realized it should have been more than just a blip on his radar. His actions must have drawn the attention of the Grandslayers, even if they remained silent about it.
But even as Rowan considered the part that the great floating city might play in the grand scheme of things, Scythe Faraday shook his head.
“Not Endura,” he said. “That place was built long after the scythedom was founded. The place I’m looking for is much older than that.”
And when Rowan drew a blank, Faraday grinned and said, “Nod.”
It took a moment for Rowan to register it. It had been years since he had heard the rhyme. “The Land of Nod? But that place can’t be real—it’s just a nursery rhyme.”
“All stories can be traced to a time and place—even the simplest, most innocent of children’s tales have unexpected beginnings.”
It brought to mind another nursery rhyme Rowan remembered. Ring Around the Rosie. Years later, he had learned that it was all about some mortal-age disease called the black plague. The rhyme was just silliness without context, but once you knew what it was about—what each line meant—it made eerie sense. Children chanting about death in a macabre singsong.
The rhyme for the Land of Nod didn’t make any sense either. As Rowan remembered, kids spoke it while circling one chosen to be “it.” And when the rhyme was over, the child in the center had to tag all the others. Then the last one tagged would be the new “it.”
“There’s no evidence that Nod even exists,” Rowan pointed out.
“Which is why it has never been found. Not even by the tone cults, who believe in it with the same fervor that they believe in the Great Resonance.”
The mention of ?Tonists killed any hope that Rowan would take Faraday seriously. ?Tonists? Really? He had saved the lives of many Tonists on the day he killed Scythes Goddard, Chomsky, and Rand—but that didn’t mean he took any of their invented cultish beliefs seriously.
“It’s ridiculous!” Rowan said. “All of it!”
At that Faraday smiled. “How wise of the founders to hide a kernel of truth within something so absurd. Who among the rational would search for it there?”
? ? ?
Rowan did not sleep for the rest of the night. Every sound seemed amplified—even the sound of his own heartbeat became an unbearable thrumming in his ears. It wasn’t fear he felt, but weight. ?The burden he had placed on himself to save the scythedom—and now the added news that Citra could be in danger.
In spite of what the MidMerican scythes might think, Rowan loved the scythedom. The idea of the wisest and the most compassionate of all humans being the ones bringing life’s conclusion to balance immortality was a perfect idea for a perfect world. Scythe Faraday had shown him what a scythe truly should be—and many, many scythes, even the pompous, arrogant ones, still held themselves to the highest of values. But without those values, the scythedom would be a terrible thing. Rowan had been naive enough to believe he could prevent that. But Scythe Faraday knew better. Even so, this was the path Rowan had chosen for himself; to leave it now would be to admit failure. He was not ready to do that. Even if he couldn’t single-handedly prevent the fall of the scythedom, he could still remove what cancers he could.