Chainworld

by Matt Langley

  Eventually, the two Townsguard who escorted them this far, left the pair at the steps of a small stone building on the western edge of the city. The streets were narrower still. The floating sewage filled the gutters, all of it thick and sludgy. A sign hung above the door that said The Surgery of Mage-Doctor Lucillian Drange. The windows were thick with grime and obviously hadn’t been cleaned since the building was raised. The door creaked on rusted hinges as she pushed it open and looked inside.

  The surgery, such as it was, was a dimly lit, dark cave of a room. The walls appeared to be more akin to natural rock than a man-made structure.

  Galdar let Shryke fall into a dusty leather armchair that sat closest to the meagre fire, which guttered in the grate, and sank down next to him. Several times she’d been dragging him while he was falling in and out unconsciousness, unable to support his own weight. She was spent.

  “Nasty,” whatever the name Mage-Doctor Lucillian Drange had conjured up for Galdar, the reality couldn’t be further from the dusty, sallow-skinned, ancient old man it sounded like. Lucillian Drange wasn’t much older than Galdar, maybe a year or two. Her golden hair was tied up behind her head in a tight bun. Thin-rimmed glasses perched on the end of her nose, through which she peered at Galdar with bright inquisitiveness. Her hands were working a sweet-smelling herb in a pestle with a thick stone mortar. She had emerged from a backroom separated by thick velvet curtains. From what she saw, the room back there seemed both brighter and more welcoming.

  Lucillian met Galdar’s incredulous gaze. “Not what you were expecting?” The woman said. “I know. Everyone assumes I’m some crusty old coot with nostril hairs you could tie bows in,” she grinned at Galdar. “That was my mother.” Galdar couldn’t help herself, she laughed, which pleased the woman in front of her no end. “I see your friend is dying. Shall we save his life?”

  The pair took Shryke through and laid him out on clean linen on a table in the other room. They were surrounded by brightly lit candles that gave off the scent of freshly cut flowers. A much larger fire burned in the grate.

  Galdar’s head was spinning with Lucillian’s constant babble. Streams of words washed from her mouth, not all of them making sense. She raged about Klane taking his agents cut, about hardship and misconception, about cutthroats and cutpurses and asked for the scalpel so she could cut Shryke, holding a hand out. Galdar didn’t know what a scalpel was. Her hand hovered over the tray of instruments until Lucillian pointed out which one she wanted.

  “Mother started the business, being a Mage and all. Dad was a Doctor. It was only natural they combine their gifts. After Dad died, Mum took on both roles with me helping and learning the trade. Magic came easy to me and I didn’t fancy working in some Prince’s court or shilling for Governor Klane here, so stayed on as an independent when mother passed away two years ago.”

  Lucillian wasn’t looking at Galdar, just holding out her hand and snapping her fingers while studying Shryke’s neck with a magnifying glass. She looked up and tutted.

  Galdar passed the sharp looking instrument across but not before Lucillian had screamed; “Handle first!” at her.

  Shryke stirred on the table, lips moving and eyelids fluttering. Lucillian felt his cheek with her palm and shook her head. “You did the right thing bringing him here. This is a magical infestation. There’s something inside. I don’t suppose you know how he came by the wound?”

  Galdar repeated what Shryke had told her about the robed skeleton and how it had reached inside his body. She thought at the time he’d just been delirious. The only magic she was aware of was that of the tricksters she’d seen at County Fairs or had heard about second-hand; practiced in the castles the Congregation had passed along their journey. She had never seen any real magic, and to be honest she wasn’t sure it wasn’t all fraudulent trickery and underhand mischief anyway. The Scriptures of Safehome warned against the temptations of magic and the wielding of it; saying it would only bring “ruin to one’s morals.” Even Mage-Doctors…

  Lucillian peered at the wound for an age longer in the glass, before deciding, “I think perhaps we should restrain your companion, just in case,” she said grimly. She reached down for a pair of leather cuffs, which she used to lash Shryke to the table about his wrists, then two more for his ankles, and twin belts to tie down his chest and thighs.

  Once Shryke was secured, she began the operation.

  She spoke a spell quietly on her lips and a searing light emanated from her open mouth. It hung, fizzing above the wound, illuminating it as though they were in direct sunlight.

  The rain outside lashed down against the window in ever forceful gusts, resenting the sunlight within.

  Lucillian waved her hand above the scalpel and the blade began to glow, the heat in the metal rising until a few seconds later it was red hot. She allowed the glow to fade, and when it did Galdar saw that the blade was clean and flawless.

  Lucillian approached the wound.

  “I’ve read about wounds like this, though I must confess I have yet to encounter one, which may not be what you wanted to hear, but is very much the truth and given the seriousness of your friend’s sickness, I don’t think lies, no matter how reassuring or well meant, are particularly helpful.” She didn’t wait for Galdar to agree. “These wounds are often loaded with safeguards, which if tripped do the real damage—to him and to us—so we don’t open this like we would an ordinary abscess. We take precautions.”

  Lucillian moved up from the wound and sliced a thin line along Shryke’s jaw, the white lips of the cut opened like a corrupt smile before filling with blood.

  Shryke moaned and stirred.

  “Hold his head steady!” Lucillian barked.

  Galdar moved around the table and placed her hands at the side of Shryke’s head, holding it in place.

  The Mage-Doctor wove two more spells; one which made the blood vanish in the wound, leaving the bone and muscle exposed, and another which seemed to fold the air around her left hand. As Galdar watched incredulously at her first real exposure to fresh wielded magic, Lucillian’s hand shank down to a fifth of its previous size. The fingers were suddenly tiny, like bird claws, the arm thin and flexible. With it, Lucillian reached down inside Shryke’s neck.

  A rising stench of putrefaction and blight rose up, making Galdar retch—a thin, gritty wash of vomit pooling at the back of her throat. She swallowed it down as Lucillian’s tiny arm moved inside the wound. Shryke’s face bunched up in pain.

  “Ah yes, very clever, ingenious even, but to be blunt not clever enough.” Lucillian’s face was a mask of concentration as she moved around blind, going only on touch and her knowledge of anatomy. She smiled, yanked, and then withdrew her arm. She dropped a ring of five smoking, sizzling black stones into a metal tray. They glistened with blood and small gobbets of flesh.

  “What is it?”

  “That’s the trap. Five killspells. Five different ways for him and us to die. I shall have to dispose of them very carefully. One could probably wipe out half the town’s wall.”

  “And that’s what’s been making him ill?”

  “Oh no. That’s just the protection set to stop us healing him.” Lucillian reached back inside Shryke’s neck with her thin arm. Instead of pulling something out, she appeared to be pushing something up through the infected wound.

  The abscess bulged and wept; the scabbing crackled and fell away as through a gush of foul-smelling pus and rancid, old black blood, an ivory-yellow oblong of material emerged, smeared with steaming juices.

  It clanked heavily into the metal tray with a solid clink.

  Shryke’s face and body relaxed.

  The wound in his neck continued to drain of its foul contents.

  Galdar looked at the piece of ivory in the dish.

  As Lucillian’s arm snapped back to its original size, she peered down at the tray, “I’d say your skeleton gave him the finger.”

  Chapter 26

  The skeletal fingers clawed at
Barl’s flesh, grasping for his eyes.

  He couldn’t lean the chair back. It was rooted to the ground, grown from the same material as the bubble walls. He tried to push away and launch himself sideways. The grinning skull kept coming out of the holoscreen, leaving flesh and skin on the edges of the terminal. Behind the creature, Barl saw the blasted terrain of The Plain. He could just make out the tiny armies fighting in the distance and the skeleton’s robe flapping in the winds of high altitude.

  Barl was too slow. He imagined with some bitterness, that his last thought before the fingers bit into his flesh would be how disappointed Master Rhoan would be he had not been ready for a ‘sudden attack at any time.’ If Barl ever got the chance to make a mistake again he vowed that it wouldn’t be this one.

  His second to last thought was the Skeleton only had nine fingers.

  That image registered just before both skeletal arms were hacked off above their respective elbows.

  The now armless skeleton was hurled back into the Plain by a burgeoning cloud of red energy, which sent it spinning off into the distance trailing a thin stream of smoke. The holoscreen blinked off then burst into flame.

  The two dismembered arms clacked and rattled like bone snakes on the ground, writhing for a few seconds near Barl’s feet before they too dispersed into a foul-smelling smoke, like a no-longer needed spell-weapons.

  Barl looked at Gharlin’s pressure-cage. It was changing shape from an extruded glass blade back to its normal configuration, and the tendrils, which had woven the red rejectionspell at the Skeleton, were slithering back through the air locks.

  The pressure-cage floated closer so Gharlin could observe Barl’s injuries.

  “You’ll live,” the Bantoscree said, turning off his terminal with the remote.

  “How did you do that?”

  “I listen.”

  “But the pressure-cage. It grew…what was that? A sword?”

  “We don’t just fashion armour, my young friend.”

  That much was clear.

  They were back in Barl’s dorm bubble, alone for now. It couldn’t last, of course. Someone would come looking of an explanation for what had just happened. Nothing went unremarked by the Assassins and their battlemasters. But, for now at least, no one else had returned from the afternoon’s recreation so they took advantage of the solitude.

  Barl sat on his bed wanting to scratch at the plasters Gharlin had put on his facial wounds to hide the deep scratches across his cheek. Barl had argued that surely covering them just drew more attention to them. The Bantoscree’s suggestion was a wry, “Oh, why don’t you just tell people you cut yourself shaving?”

  “I don’t shave.”

  “Perhaps you should start? Though you might want to come up with a good excuse for why you blew up that terminal.”

  “I didn’t exactly blow it up.”

  “Semantics, young Barl. Semantics.” Gharlin flushed and rotated in his cage. “Now, how about you tell me what that thing was?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You know more than you are saying.”

  “Only that it attacked me in the Minular’s escape capsule.”

  “Something or someone wants you dead. You should go to Professor Vilow.”

  “But what if it’s Vilow who wants me dead?”

  “Unlikely.”

  “But not impossible. There are only two people here I know I can trust. You and Summer, and I haven’t seen Summer since I got here. Something isn’t right.”

  Gharlin touched down on the bed in the cage. “Understatement. What shall we do?”

  “Stick close to me, Gharlin and…”

  “And?”

  “I don’t know… teach me how to throw energy bolts like you. I need to know how to fight this thing if it comes again.”

  “When.”

  The Plain was just as harrowing as it had been the last time Barl had set foot in that peculiar realm, but at least he wasn’t alone.

  Each member of the class, as well as Academician Xaxax, the Plain’s Mistress, sat in couches in the bubble and projected themselves to the Plain.

  It was unnerving. He knew that his physical body was still in a Guild Nest Training Bubble and The Plain was a construct weaved from incredible codemagics and mysticism. He knew that his body was unguarded back on Pantonyle, and he was vulnerable.

  They were met on The Plain by a platoon of Guild soldiers in their Exo-armour, three for each student. The soldiers were there to protect them while they sensed their way into the battle to find their own Familiar.

  Xaxax was a large boned humanoid woman with dark orange skin and silver eyes. She spoke without voice, her words appearing as a series of written messages across Barl’s eyes. She was a Dolanian; a race who prided the written word above all others forms of communication. They had evolved to never once utter words from their atrophied larynxes. Gharlin told Barl that the Dolanian’s were the master wordsmiths of the Galaxy and would probably have been its most artistically dominant species but for the fact they kept getting drawn into wars with illiterate civilisations.

  Barl couldn’t tell if Gharlin was joking or not but liked the idea so much he didn’t try to find out.

  They hadn’t spoken of the attack in the Library Bubble again.

  If he was being tracked, then it stood to reason the enemy could listen in on his conversations and talking was only going to betray what he was thinking.

  The attack had been five days ago.

  Other than having to answer a few questions from the grey-faced Librarian about the shocking amount of damage to the terminal, no one called out Barl for breaking into Maxol’s account, or anything else that had happened in that Library bubble.

  Knowing that he was the target of some unseen enemy, something capable of reaching him even here, in the heart of the Nest, circumventing all the defences of the Assassins, scared him. His sleep was fitful at best, disturbed by swirling nightmares, at worst—skeletons dug themselves out of the ground, codespells were cast by faceless beasts, the magic tearing through him, flensing flesh from bone. He woke time and again bathed in a sheen of sweat, gasping for breath and shivering where he’d kicked off the covers.

  The scratches had healed quickly. They didn’t leave a scar. Those were more mental; the memories of the two aethereal attacks wouldn’t heal in a long time, if they ever did.

  And travelling to the Plain for Familiar Attachment wasn’t doing anything for his anxiety levels.

  Words sped across Barl’s eyes. It was Xaxax.

  EACH OF YOU HAVE THREE BODYGUARDS.

  STAND WITH THEM NOW.

  They moved apart.

  For the first time Gharlin was without his pressure-cage. The Bantoscree floated freely in the air. Gharlin obviously enjoyed his freedom. The colours of his chromatic flesh sang vividly. It didn’t matter to him if this place was completely constructed in an unreal space.

  YOU’RE HERE TODAY TO LOCATE YOUR FAMILIAR.

  ALL OF YOU WILL HAVE ONE WAITING IN THE THICK OF THE BATTLE.

  IT IS YOUR JOB TO FIND THEM AMONGST THE DREAMING ARMIES AND MAKE YOURSELF KNOWN.

  YOU HAVE EACH BEEN BLESSED WITH THE CODE NEEDED TO EXECUTE A LOCATORSPELL. THE MAGIC CAN BE ACTIVATED ON MY COMMAND, BUT NOT BEFORE.

  Barl fingered the small piece of dry parchment on which the spell was written. Activation, if he’d understood the instructions, was no more complicated that ripping it in half. Around him, the others prepared their spells, eager to weave even this simple magic. The Guild soldiers moved into a protective formation around each of them.

  BEGIN.

  Barl tore the parchment.

  Around him, his fellow Trainees began to move toward the battle, chasing after a firefly-sized light that bobbed and weaved in front of them.

  The Guild soldiers drew their weapons and moved forward with them poised to strike.

  REMEMBER YOU MUST KILL COMBATANTS WHO ENGAGE. YOU CANNOT FLEE FROM THE FIELD OF BATTLE. THEIR DEATHS GIVE YOU T
HE ENERGY REQUIRED TO WEAVE CODEMAGIC AWAY FROM THE PLAIN. THE SOLDIERS WILL ONLY INTERVENE IF YOU CANNOT DEFEND YOURSELVES.

  GO HARD. GO FAST. FIND YOUR SOUL MATE.

  Barl waited.

  He held the two slivers of parchment between his fingers, willing the guiding light to appear, but it didn’t.

  The soldiers assigned to him started to look uncomfortable, exchanging glances, embarrassed. Academician Xaxax moved towards Barl at speed, stomping over the wet grass.

  SHOW ME YOUR SPELL.

  Barl was the last of the Trainees left. He held up the torn pieces of the guide spell.

  TEAR IT AGAIN

  Barl tore the two pieces into four.

  Nothing.

  Xaxax narrowed her eyes and reached into her tunic, pulling out a fresh spell. She handed it to Barl and nodded, encouraging him to try again.

  Three torn spells later, Barl still hadn’t managed to summon a guide light.

  MOST IRREGULAR. GO BACK.

  Barl’s eyes snapped open in the trainee bubble. Strapped into their seats all around him were the silent bodies of his classmates.

  The scene was eerie. It wasn’t like they were sleeping. It was different. Their eyes fluttered open after a few minutes of him staring at bodies that didn’t seem to be breathing, and then they came back towards consciousness. One by one they returned, brighter and more alive than when they’d entered The Plain. Their eyes shone. Some cried, others hugged each other. A few talked excitedly about their Familiars, describing a myriad of beings who would be their focal point in the endless battle of The Plain for the rest of their lives.

  Barl felt so utterly alone, removed from them. Different. Wrong.

  He watched them, not knowing what to say or think.

  When Gharlin reanimated inside his pressure bubble the Bantoscree floated excitedly over, flushing a rainbow of wild colours that Barl hadn’t seen from his skin before.

  Gharlin twisted and laughed inside his cage, tendrils shivering as crackles of energy sparked behind the glass.