Ruga growled quietly. Odalon glanced at Turan Adin and for a moment the otrokar and the vampire wore identical expressions.

“That creature disturbs me,” Ruga said.

“You are not alone in that,” Odalon told him.

“Because of how he kills?” I guessed.

“No.” Ruga grimaced. “Because he is desperate.”

“We are all desperate,” Odalon said. “Nobody wants to go back to Nexus.”

“Yes, but we are desperate but we still have hope that the fight will end.”

“True,” Odalon said. “There is darkness there.”

I glanced at him.

“A true spiritual advisor is more than a priest,” Odalon said. “We are the link between human and holy. We devote ourselves to service and that includes not just the spiritual but also the emotional needs of our congregation. We were chosen and drawn to our vocation because of our empathy.”

“We are similar,” Ruga said. “We seek to peer into the soul of the person and heal the frayed edges.”

That explained why the two of them had hit it off. Put two empaths into the same room for a few hours, and sooner or later they would naturally try to reach out to each other in an effort to understand how the other person feels.

“When I look into his soul,” Ruga said, glancing back over his shoulder at Turan Adin, “I see conflict.”

“Desperation is a catalyst that forces us to act,” Odalon said. “It summons the last reserves we possess in an effort to extricate us from danger. This is why we are here at this summit. We are so desperate, we are willing to negotiate with our sworn enemy. It pushes us to limits we normally cannot reach.”

“Desperation is a fire,” Ruga added. “It burns bright but it must have a chimney, an outlet.”

“A chimney?” Odalon’s eyebrows crept up.

The shaman rolled his eyes. “Fine. Desperation, as exhibited by that creature, is basically a prolonged lower state of fight or flight response. Where the flight or fight shot of adrenaline is a reaction to the actual manifestation of danger, desperation is the result of a perceived future danger. It primes the organism, forcing it to actively seek an avenue of escape before the danger actually manifests, resulting in a complicated cascade of hormonal interactions. You get higher metabolic rate, an entire slew of glands functioning at a greater output, obsessive thoughts, and so on.”

I stopped and pinched myself.

“I know,” Odalon told me. “When I discovered he has an advanced degree in microbiology, it was quite a shock to me as well.”

“It’s not a healthy state of being,” Ruga continued. “You are not designed to function in a state of desperation for a prolonged period of time.”

“It’s a short-term metabolic burst,” Odalon added. “The body will seek to vent some of that built up potential. If you are under a great amount of stress, you might have a panic attack, for example.”

“Turan Adin is desperate, but he is also trapped,” Ruga said. “It rolls off of him. To go back to my early metaphor, if desperation is a fire, his fire is raging inside a stone bunker. I don’t know what is keeping him where he is, if he is indebted, if he is disciplined, if he feels he is there for the right cause, but whatever it is, it has created a deep-seated conflict within his psyche.”

“He won’t be able to sustain this kind of pressure,” Odalon said. “His body and his soul desperately want to escape, but his mind is keeping him put. He is tired. He’ll kill himself in six months.”

“I would go as far as eight, but yes,” Ruga said.

“It makes him incredibly dangerous,” Odalon said, “because he doesn’t care. He has no thought of self-preservation beyond the basic instincts of his body.”

“He will never take his own life. He will try to die in battle,” the shaman added. “And I do not want to be on the battlefield when he decides that it is his last day.”

“That’s horrible,” I said.

“War is horrible,” Odalon said. “It ruins people.”

“War on Nexus is especially horrible,” Ruga said.

“Why?” I asked.

“Modern war is, in an odd way, merciful,” Odalon said. “Our technology permits us to precison-bomb strategic targets. When casualties occur, they are typically swift.”

“Death from high density beam bombardment takes .3 seconds,” Ruga said. “It is a loss of life, irreversible and irreplaceable, but it is a death without suffering. Advanced weaponry doesn’t function correctly on Nexus. Orbital bombardment is out of the question, because something prevents accurate targeting. Trying to pound your enemy with artillery is pointless as well.”

“We’ve had weapons explode,” Odalon said. “There is a record of a concentrated artillery assault in the first year of the war. The projectiles disappeared and thirty minutes later materialized above the House that fired them.”

“I remembered reading about that.” Ruga smirked.

“It is an up close and personal war, fought with savage weapons,” Odalon said. “At first when you’re young and dumb and you hear about it, you think it will be glorious. That you will be like the hero of old, ripping through the ranks of your enemy. Then you find out what six hours of fighting with your sword is really like. The first hour, if you survive, is exciting. The scent of blood is intoxicating. The second hour, you are injured, but you keep going. The third hour you realize you’ve had your fill of blood. You want to be done. You want off the battlefield. In the fourth, you notice the faces of people you kill. You hear their screams as you hack off their limbs. It is no longer an abstract enemy. It is a living being that you are ripping apart. It is dying by your hand, right there, in front of you. In the fifth, you bleed and vomit, and still you push forward, punishing your body and soul. In the sixth, you collapse finally, grateful that you survived or simply numb. Everything smells like blood and the smell of it makes you ill. You’re hurting and you try to keep your eyes open, because if you close them, you might see the faces of those you killed, so you look upon the battlefield, and you realize that nothing was gained and, as the medic is patching you up, you must do this again tomorrow.”