Titan Song Dan Stout (top 20 books to read txt) 📖

Your thought is endearing, but misguided. You are not the one who has been chosen.” He raised his eye plates and stared at me. “I am.”

“Chosen for what?” I said. “Why are you even here?”

“To find the truth,” he said, “and to drag it out into the light, kicking and screaming.” His nostrils flared, and the heat of his breath moved over me. “To shove it into the faces of the people, and make them look at it. How they choose to reconcile their hearts with it is out of my power.”

“All you wanted was to show people an empty hole.”

“The furthest thing from that. I believe everyone on the Path must dig for their own truth. For that to happen, there must be study, must be research, must be excavation.”

“Excavation?”

“Of one’s own psyche, of course.” Weylan dragged a sly hand through his chin hairs. “Though one must wonder, why are you people so averse to digging? You don’t bury your dead, you barely dig foundations for your buildings. It’s as though you’ve transferred all your instinct for the ground into the oil wells. Don’t you appreciate the secrets that lie beneath your feet?”

I stepped past Weylan, no longer fighting off the sense of anger and betrayal. Moving toward the rocks on their pedestal, hand stretched out. “And you were willing to let people die for that?”

The guide’s hairy forearm blocked me from getting too close. No doubt he feared I’d touch them, and make him lose control. It’d have been a death sentence for me, as well as for his plans.

“How many people have died in your various pursuits of the truth?” he asked.

I gave him my most condescending smile. I hadn’t been reaching for the rocks. There were manna threads on the rocks, plummeting straight down, linking to something beneath our feet. Weylan was using next gen manna. That meant I could sabotage it.

“A lot fewer than died in yours,” I said, and lowered my hand.

“Perhaps,” said the aging Barekusu. “Perhaps that’s true.” He turned his head, and stared upward, as if looking through the tent ceiling at the Mount. “But what is it worth to break our mental shackles? We need to fly, Detective. We need to soar. But the lies we tell ourselves will always tether us back to the ground.” He rounded on me, the thick horn of his eye plates rising once more. “It has been a long time indeed since I visited Titanshade. When this is done, I don’t believe I shall return. Go home, Detective.” He breathed out a great huff of air, riding on a low, humming note. “Go home, seeker of light. You don’t belong here any more than I do.”

I started to protest, to tell him he was wrong. But Weylan had already turned away.

He threw back his head and lowed, a deep and resonant note that reverberated in my chest. From all around, the rest of the caravan echoed the tone. I stepped back, uncertain how to react. Weylan’s sly hands danced in quick rhythm, and his lowing picked up a half-step, turning into the first notes of the song the caravan had sung as they entered town. “Requiem for the Titan’s Hade.”

I walked away. And the song named for a dead god who’d never existed echoed from the sacred hills as I descended into the filth and corruption of Titanshade.

40

I LEFT THE FOOTHILLS OF THE Mount in a daze, only passingly aware of my path as I wandered the streets of the city. I hopped a bus, and took a seat across from a guy determined to alert everyone else on the bus that we were all worms raveling through the corpse of a giant, and that the key to truth was encoded on the back of breakfast cereal boxes. He rattled on, until a woman across the aisle finally had enough and told him to shut up. He pushed her; she hit him with her purse. Other passengers stepped in, and the prophet of worms and destruction soon found himself cowering beneath the seats, shielding himself from the kicks and blows of the crowd. It occurred to me that if the guy had been wealthy or influential, it would have gone different. Maybe in a week the talking heads on the news would be debating our inherent worminess.

Weylan was a fanatic. Maybe he wasn’t born one, maybe he hadn’t been one for the entirety of his centuries-long reign as one of the continent’s spiritual guides, but at some point he’d become convinced that he had the one single truth.

I wasn’t a religious guy. Never have been. But I observed the old practices, and found comfort in the notion that though our steps were unique, we were all on one true Path, each of us merging into a single great journey.

Reluctantly, I stood and announced myself, badge held high. I slid between the combatants, and asked if the woman was hurt. She wasn’t, and once things calmed down, I asked the driver to stop and kicked worm man off the bus. I told him he was lucky to walk away with only a bloody nose and bruised dignity. He shot me an obscene gesture as the doors closed. The bus lurched forward with the hiss of hydraulics and a plume of black exhaust, and I rode on.

Eventually, I got off at the Sylvan neighborhood, a spot on the southeast edge of the Borderlands. I walked briskly, both because of the chill in the air—I hadn’t brought my overcoat to the warm-weather meeting in the Barekusu camp—and also because I had no desire to attract any of the desperate characters clinging to the shadows at alley mouths. Not to mention that I had a specific destination in mind.

Still, I almost missed it. The small green and white sign over a narrow doorway looked like an apartment walk-up entrance, rather than a commercial property. I stood in front of it for a long moment, wondering