by A. R. Knight
Spirit’s End
A.R. Knight
Copyright © 2017 by A.R. Knight
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-946554-13-0
Print ISBN: 978-1-946554-14-7
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Contents
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
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About the Author
Acknowledgments
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The Mercenaries Trilogy
The Metal Man
Wild Nines
Dark Ice
One Shot
The Riven Trilogy
Riven
The Cycle
Spirit’s End
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For Matthew
Chapter 1
I had been alive the last time I kissed her lips. Soft, cool to the touch. Mine were likely the same. Selena’s eyes, though, still had life. Her soul was still there. Mine too.
We parted, grabbed our things from around the gray, ashy apartment. I slipped on my long black coat, a reminder of something I no longer was. A guide, meant to take the spirits of Earth’s dead stuck in Riven and send them on. Send them to the Cycle to keep them from crowding out this world. This grand, desolate place.
My home.
I hooked my lash into my belt, a ten foot long cord with a piercing metal point at the end. On my left side, I stuck in a long knife, a foot and a half of pointed desperation. On my back went the great sword I’d taken from the man who killed me. The sword stood half my height and took both hands to swing. It’s black and silver metal blade would have been heavy, but without a real body and its limitations, I had no problems hefting the weapon. I didn’t get tired anymore.
My crossbow hung over the sword, three sets of bolts looping around the shaft. Normal black-tipped quarrels meant to deliver pointed pain to anything they struck. Next were blue ones, ready to spit out wrangling fire that would deliver a spirit to its peaceful end. Last came orange. A shot that could be as dangerous to me as it was to the enemy. My favorite.
“You’re sure this is what we should do?” Selena said as she set her cleaver, as long as a knife and as thick as my sword, with biting ridges on the front edge, in its holster attached to the front flap of her coat.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But if Nara doesn’t have an idea, we’re stuck. Breaches are erupting everywhere, and the guides don’t have the numbers. We need a miracle, and unless you’ve thought one up in the last couple of hours, that spirit is our best shot.”
I didn’t bring up the other reason for speed. The voice whispering at the edge of my mind, calling me to drop everything I had and start on that long walk to oblivion. The Cycle murmured, always there. A honeyed hush inviting me to give up my troubles and embrace peace.
And they said the dead had no worries.
“Is it strong today?” Selena noticed my closed eyes. “Bad?”
She asked me every morning. Her passion kept the Cycle in check. If I focused on her, on what Selena was saying, what we had, then the Cycle’s siren call would diminish. Selena gave me a reason to stay, one far more compelling than the Cycle’s push to leave.
“No worse than any other.” I ran my hand over my face, gave her a slapdash smile.
Selena gave me a hard stare for a moment. She knew when I wasn’t telling her the whole truth. I didn’t have time for that discussion now, though. Bigger things to worry about.
“You ready?” I moved to the door. “Alec and Anna should be coming soon.”
“You’re the one with a dozen weapons.” Selena didn’t need blades to be deadly, though the two she carried were enough. One harsh look from those icy eyes and any spirit ought to run away.
Chapter 2
We left the apartment, the top floor of a three-story building that we kept frantically maintained as the rest of the city crumbled around us. Riven’s gray light burned through the glassless windows, omnipresent and lifeless. A reminder of what I’d lost when Piotr had me murdered. The color of dawn’s sunrise, the sounds of birds singing in the morning, even the roar and rumble of passing traffic. Riven stood a quiet ruin.
Most of the buildings in the city were decaying after centuries without care. Broken by fighting, by the tormented destruction of angry spirits, or left to rot away according to Riven’s mysterious laws. Normally the gray sky was a blank slate, but now sparks peppered its dull infinite with colorful bursts. Guides alerting and communicating with each other across avenues and miles of city blocks. Letting others know of a breach, a swarm of angry spirits bent on revenge or chaos or both.
On the ground floor we walked into a bustling lab, a large square space full of burbling machines, twisting metal, and fiery forges. Devices constructed in Riven’s harsh world by a madman I’d found years ago. Nicholas Salzer looked up as we came in and gave a quick wave before turning back to a large piece of fabric he’d spread out on a table. He held a stick with a burnt end in one hand. Paper was hard to find in Riven, so you used whatever dark ashes stuck to.
“What’s burning up your mind now?” I asked and Nicholas paused, turned to me with a spacey look on his face, a man arising from the depths of concentration.
“I’ve been trying to find a good way to solve this problem,” Nicholas said, holding up the ash stick as if it explained everything.
“This problem?” I tried to get a look at what he was writing, but the slew of mathematics etched on the fabric were fore
ign to me.
“The spirits,” Nicholas said. “It seems the bottleneck is simply that the Cycle takes too long. That the spirits are allowed to stay past their expiration.”
“You’ve found the obvious.” Selena leaned against the wall, arms folded. “But what are you going to do about it?”
“That’s precisely what I’m trying to determine.” Nicholas talked at the table, his back to us. “When I have a suitable hypothesis, I’ll be happy to let you know.”
A probing question came to my mind, but before I could ask it, the scientist broke out rhetorical mutterings. Meant for his equations, no doubt. I glanced at Selena and shrugged. Nicholas was his own man, and he didn’t suffer interruptions.
“Wait outside?” Selena said. I nodded.
The lab opened onto a broad road with various buildings on either side forming a low sort of canyon. The occasional spirit wandered up and down, looking lost or, in rare cases, nattering to themselves. Riven didn’t have any bias. Spirits from anywhere could show up, well, anywhere. You might be walking down the street and see a soldier from the war on one side and a tribesman from a land you didn’t know existed on the other. The afterlife was the ultimate melting pot.
Yet, among the ashen flakes and empty sidewalks, Alec and Anna were nowhere to be seen.
Chapter 3
The skies were clear of sparks. No panicked shouts came down the avenue. Unexplained absences in Riven usually led to dire conclusions, but I clung to a nicer reason.
“Did I lose track of time?” I said. Riven had no clocks, no day or starry nights with which to navigate the passage of hours. Only my intuition, that general sense of history inching forward, kept me from losing all idea of when I was.
“It feels right,” Selena said. “Which isn’t a guarantee.”
Before, when I’d been alive, I had felt time. My body, still on Earth, on the other side, would tell me when to wake up. When I should cross back over. Anna had buried that body somewhere. Or burned it. I never asked her what happened to it, and she hadn’t told me. I never planned to.
We both shouted at the same time we saw Anna, saw her stumble out from an alley half a block away, clutching at her side. Bleeding claw marks, the jagged lines left from fingernails, rending through her coat. Her flail, chain and spiked ball extended, dragging on the ground. Limping.
“Alec needs help,” Anna said as we ran to her. “There’s a breach just back there. It opened on top of us.”
We didn’t hesitate. I yelled back into the lab, told Nicholas to come out and help Anna, and then Selena and I took off running. Our feet pounded on the stones. We ducked between the buildings. Hit a back alley and then saw the breach to our right. In a small clearing formed when the rear halves of some of the structures had collapsed into a large pile of rubble. Now a glowing pool covered those broken boards and stones, only instead of water, the surface reflected up part of Earth.
Spirits climbed through the breach, their hands rising up into Riven like swimmers emerging from the water. People dying from violence, from disease, or even simple old age. Normally scattered throughout Riven, the breaches drew spirits together. Pulled them into single areas where their confusion, their rage and despair over their lost lives fueled each other and drove them into the hysterical rage that made the dead so deadly. They crossed over in ruined clothes, in uniforms, young and old, however the spirits saw themselves as they traveled that final line between life and loss.
A guide stood in the middle of those clutching hands, snarling mouths, and wild eyes. Alec bounced from one spirit to the next, delivering a series of short jabs with the ridged gauntlets that cloaked his fists and forearms. Spikes on those gauntlets burned with blue fire that enveloped every spirit they touched and torched away the anger showing in those dead eyes. Pacified them and sent the spirits on their final walk to the Cycle.
It would’ve been easy to watch that dance, to stay back and admire Alec as he wrangled one spirit after another. Only we could see the toll. Cuts appeared here and there as one hand or another swung a lucky swipe. A sidestep that dodged one sloppy tackle led Alec into another spirit’s bite. Being outnumbered in Riven was a death sentence, no matter how good the guide.
Selena and I waded in on either side. I struck with the lash first, sending its pointed tip out and wrapping around a spirit reaching for Alec’s back. The lash looped around the spirit’s arm and its point bit into his shoulder. The spirit, a posh gentleman in a suit that looked as though he came directly from a wedding, turned and snarled at me. His eyes burned with the pale fire, a lost mind.
I twisted the hilt of my lash and fire erupted along the cord, blue flames that matched the hue of the spirit’s eyes. As the spirit lunged towards me, the fire caught up to his body and wrapped him in its purifying burn. I felt his hand touch my shoulder, but rather than rend, it fell away and I looked up into a vacant stare. The empty eyes of a pacified spirit.
“Your arrival is most fortunate.” Alec dodged another spirit, delivering three swift strikes to its middle and sending it stumbling away, wreathed in a wrangling blue glow. “I have a tablet, and it is very nearly ready.”
I glanced Selena’s way and saw her with her cleaver in one hand and a knife in the other, dashing between spirits and severing their anger with stab after stab. A beautiful storm, a partner that I’d never realized I had next to me. I did not know where Selena found her ability, but watching her carve her way through those grasping arms and spitting mouths filled me with a kind of pride, a love that comes only from seeing the one you care about most exceeding your wildest hopes.
Yes, watching the love of my life carve up a bunch of dead spirits was the highlight of my day. I lived a strange life.
“Back away,” Alec called. I looked as the guide pulled a tablet off of his belt, a stone block with a sapphire set in the middle. A sapphire that glowed a deep blue, ready to fulfill its mission. To close the breach and drive the remaining spirits away. Alec put it down on the ground and pressed in on the sapphire as two more spirits reached for his back.
Blue tendrils lanced out from the tablet, striking through the spirits and wreathing them in fire. Others shot towards the edge of the breach, seeming to dive into the ground and pull the portal closed. And then Selena tugged at my arm, pulling me away.
“We’ve got to run,” Selena said. “If that thing gets us, we’re gone.”
My legs kicked into gear and we sprinted away down the alley. I’d forgotten. I was a spirit now. That tablet would destroy me as surely as it had our enemies. So many rules I had to relearn.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’m not used to it.”
“Pretty sure it was you who told me that Riven doesn’t give second chances,” Selena said. “That I had to keep watching my back.”
“Not as long as you’re around,” I said. Selena rolled her eyes.
I looked back down the alley and saw nothing left of the portal. Only Alec, picking up the tablet. Content spirits staring at nothing. In another minute or two they would shuffle off and start a days-long journey to a mountain west of the city. Into cave and down to its depths, where they would find the Cycle, a great blue lake.
Each and every one of those spirits would drop in and erase themselves from existence.
Chapter 4
So far as scratches go, Anna’s weren’t dangerous. Tears in the coat, a gash along her leg. Bruises on her wrists where spirit hands had gripped too tightly. Alec shared similar injuries. The common cost of doing business in Riven these days.
“Remember the times when we’d be able to walk in and out pain-free?” Alec stared at his wounds, shaking his head. We stood in the lab, getting ready for our jaunt to the other side of the city. “When all we had to fear was a little bit of bad luck?”
“I’m not sure what Riven you were in,” I said. “It’s always been dangerous.”
“It used to be fun,” Alec replied. “Now I cross over because it is my job, not because it is something I wish to do.�
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“You’re talking to someone who’s trapped here,” I said. “Forever.”
“Not if they break a hole,” Anna said. “Then you could come back.”
“To enjoy the world for the brief hours before the dead overran it completely,” I said. “What a happy thought.”
“Which is the reason for this adventure, no?” Alec said. “This woman, this Nara, she has a way?”
“That’s what we’re going to find out,” I said, glancing at Selena. “Speaking of that, we should move. Anna, are you going to be okay?”
“I can handle it.” Anna rose to her feet, her shoulders were set. Her head high. “Alec shouldn’t be alone out there anyway.”
The walking went slow. Anna still had to limp, and we were more cautious than usual. Kept our eyes scanning alleys, side streets, with one of us always watching our backs. I never relaxed while walking Riven’s streets, but now I stood on edge. Every moment my eyes flicked in a different direction, trying to see into all the corners and shadows.