by David Moody
The pistol in Arridon’s waistband felt larger, and heavier.
“Your sister is a half-blood, like you?”
“Thistle, yes. House Frost. We just came through a mechanical portal in the Endless City. We heard water…and saw a woman on the ground in the dark, then…this. Where are we? Is my sister here?” Arridon’s brain swooned, stimulated by the alien environment and its assault on his senses. Traveling between worlds likely added to the effect.s
“I’ve heard of House Frost,” Phil who worked in insurance said. “Nobles. Took the fight to the Bleed for a good long time. Whole family lost in the wind for centuries, as I recall.”
“My mother is a…wait, who in Hell are you? Where is my sister? You say a war is coming?”
“It’s a bit shite, isn’t it, and I only know half your story. I have good news: the little birdie that chirped in my ear about you told me another traveler was getting deposited incorrectly, not far from here. Translation error across the interdimensional barrier, most likely. Could be your sister. Thistle, right?”
“Yes, how far away? Can we go right now? I promised her we’d never be separated not five minutes ago, and we’re already split. I’ll never live this down. Take me?” He was desperate.
“Of course. Nothing worse than being split from family. Just toss your shirt in the bin there,” Phil said, unbuttoning his own shirt. “You’re covered in blood, aren’t you.”
Arridon looked down and saw that the strange man told the truth. His father…Sebastian…the horde of transformed demons of the Bleed….
Phil turned and started to shuffle down the side of the road, away from the steady flow of the metal boxes. As each approached and passed, Arridon found himself stepping farther from the hard road surface they drove upon.
“They’re called cars. What kind of technology or magic does your reality have?”
“Um…magic of a sort, but only in the hands of the gods or their children. Technology is fueled by the gods, and was kept under their control in the Endless City.”
“Steam? Coal? Nuclear?”
“Steam and coal,” Arridon said, looking up as a small flock of the flying things left trails through the sky, just below the dense cloud cover.
“Those are aircraft. Flying machines. Powered by science, not magic. This reality has no inherent magic, though some magic gets through from other spheres of existence. You have power, don’t you?” Phil posed.
“Yes, some. I’m not very good with it yet. My sister’s powers were awakened too. Some kind of magical engine?”
“Turn here,” Phil said as they approached an alley that brought them away from the nearby river. “That’s a Thaumaturgical engine. Gods use them to kickstart the latent abilities they all have. Rare machines. There was one on the world you’re from?”
“Top of a massive clock tower in the Endless City,” Arridon said. “Why am I telling you this? I don’t even know you.”
“I remind you of your dad,” Phil said. “I’m a father; my daughter’s name is Jenny. You’ll hear about her before long, if you stick around, I’m sure.”
“I just need to find my sister,” Arridon said.
“Help me pry this lid up,” Phil said, stopping and leaning over a giant metal circle inset into the stone-like surface they walked on.
The two tried to pry the lid up from its recessed home, but neither could get purchase or leverage to make any headway. After struggling long enough to break a sweat, Arridon stood.
“Fuck it, back up,” he said to Phil. The man obliged.
The young man exhaled and envisioned an invisible pressure growing beneath the lid, lifting it up and away. The air crackled with the energy of a thunderstorm, and as the skin pimpled and prickled on his arms, the lid ascended a foot into the air, and hovered. Phil stepped forward and pushed it out of the space above the hole where it clattered to the ground with a dense metallic clang.
“Nice trick,” Phil said as he peered down into the black. “Got an electric torch?”
“I don’t even know what that is.”
“Not important. We won’t be down here long.”
A trembling voice called out in the darkness below. A man’s voice. A teenager’s voice.
“Hello down there,” Phil called into the hole. His voice echoed.
“Thistle?” Arridon screamed over Phil’s shoulder. “If you’re down there, come up! What in Hell is that stench?” the refugee recoiled away from the odorous vent in the street and fought a gag.
“Sewer down there,” the older man explained. “Piss and shit not far. Dead bodies just as likely. London isn’t the nice place it used to be.” Phil cupped his hands and called into the darkness, “Come on over to the light, young man.”
Down in the cavernous space beneath the street, Arridon heard the sounds of feet splashing through wet filth. A few seconds later, the sounds of feet climbing the rungs of a metal ladder came, and then a face appeared.
Younger than he by a few years at most, the wet teenager, matted down with rancid filth, crawled up and out of the access hole with Phil’s help. He stood in the street, buried in the depths of the multi-story buildings flanking on each side, and looked at his two saviors.
“What’s your name?” Phil asked.
“I’m Derrick. Who’re you people, and where is my sister?” he asked.
Arridon laughed.
After two bizarre hours of walking through a tense, violent city that seemed as large or larger than the Endless City, chatting at times about the even more bizarre events of the previous days, Arridon and Derrick were both freshly showered and newly clothed and sitting relatively peacefully in the dingy apartment Phil lived in.
“I won’t be able to drink much until my monthly water allowance rolls over, but I’ll be okay. I have a jug or two of prune juice in the pantry. Joke’s on them,” the old man said as he sat down. “I started to make some soup as well. It’ll be ready in an hour.” Car horns honked outside as a heavy rumble of something much larger passed, unseen. The whole place shook as the mass moved away.
Arridon sat on a worn, but comfortable couch in the living room and looked up at Derrick as he entered. He toweled his hair dry, exchanged a wary look at Arridon, and selected the spot on the far end of the couch to sit. The only other choice was a dilapidated leather recliner surrounded by a halo of chip crumbs. After he sat, the two boys watched Phil claim the leather chair.
“How do you know anything about what’s going on?” Derrick asked. “Who are you, exactly?”
“Gents, do they have the expression, ‘You’ve bitten off more than you can chew’ where you’re from?”
“Aye,” Arridon said. “We say it.”
Derrick nodded.
“Then you know the explanation is larger than the question. I’ll say this; Arridon, you already know about the gods, a bit at least, so you’re a bit ahead of our sewer-dweller friend, here.”
“Great,” Arridon said.
“As simply put as possible, I am the widower of a godly wife. My daughter Jenny is a half-god, as you two both are. I can tell by your eyes, Arridon, and Derrick, if you were able to traverse a portal, then you’re made of the same sturdy stuff.”
“Demigods?” Derrick said. “Like Hercules?”
“Who’s Hercules?” Arridon asked.
“Yes, more or less,” Phil answered as he fished out a pipe from a pocket that hung over the arm of his chair. He started to pack it with tobacco as he continued. “Gods are an ancient, pre-human civilization from a distant dimension,” he shrugged, “a different layer of the endless multiverse. They devised an ability to pierce through time and space to travel to other realities.”
“Aliens?” Derrick posed.
“As good a word as any, if only because no mere words really explain them. They’re ancient, and brilliant, and powerful in magic, and have controlled vast swathes of hundreds of realities. They were the Apex species of all time and space.”
The boys were silent.
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“But like anything with power, they have enemies. The Bleed happened; an entity, born out of their own hubris and science and magic, made of pure power and evil; it began to eat away at the universe, one dimension at a time, in an endless feast. Hungry for blood, flesh, life, along with admiration, fealty…. You name the sin against man, nature, or the order of things, the Bleed wanted it. It had to punish the gods, and any race the gods had ever lifted so much as a finger for.”
“And the Bleed always wins,” Arridon said. “My mother said it was unstoppable.”
“Thus far, she’s correct. I’d hoped it would never get here, but if you two are here, and if what I’ve heard of your tales is true, then you are a harbinger of what could come, and soon. The Bleed pursues everything that escapes it. We should point you away. Bring you back to the Shard and the clockwork room there. Set you in a direction that will steer the hound that is the Bleed’s attention away from here.”
“Why does it matter? You said this world was on the eve of war anyway,” Arridon said.
“Worlds can recover from wars, kid,” Phil said as he lit his pipe and took a long pull from it. “But worlds almost never recover from the Bleed.”
“Almost never?” Derrick pressed.
Back in the clockwork tower where Arridon and Thistle’s father died, their nemesis, Sebastian, still remained. The transformed and now ruined monster lay in a pool of stench-ridden, ill-darkened blood, encased in a sundered suit of armor made of bone and chitin. His ragged breathing echoed in the silent, empty chamber.
Nearby, the body of Gray—now no more than meat for the scavengers—twitched in evil spasms as the mutating quality of the Bleed waged war still.
“Heh,” Sebastian laughed. “A small victory.”
Half measures will not be tolerated any more than will half bloods, the voice of the Bleed echoed in his mind. Its clarion bell struck down the pain that wracked his body, and gave him clarity.
“This world is yours,” Sebastian reasoned. “You’ve won.”
A footstep not taken is not a victory in the war that consumes us, tool. This world, this reality shed refugees, and they must be hunted down and assimilated. The moons and other worlds, even the blazing star above must be brought to heel.
“I am broken. My use to you is passed.”
Broken, complete, dead, alive—it does not matter. I am not finished with you. You will be my hound. I will dispatch you on their trail. You will bring us to other places and set us free to feast and bring ruin. And the girl…the girl can still be yours.
Sebastian’s corrupted heart fluttered with a dismayed joy. The words of the thing inside him frightened him, but the power, the power it gave to him was too intoxicating to resist.
“What must I do?”
They think the Bleed is like water; that we consume along the path of least resistance, but they are only partially correct. They protect their precious realities with wards and blockades, and we flow around those places, seeping into the layers that aren’t protected, forcing them to hide behind their defenses. We sense these strongholds, like a stone inside one’s sandal, Sebastian, we feel them, and we know where they are. They think they are hiding from us, but instead…they are gathering into fewer and fewer bastions of false safety.
“Fish in a barrel,” Sebastian whispered.
And you will be our shark. Arise, servant, and be made whole anew.
Sebastian imagined for a flash that he’d be lifted off the floor in an ascension, where he’d be mended and made whole to do battle once more, but that wasn’t the way of the Bleed.
He exploded into a geyser of flesh, bone, and blood, floating in the center of the clockwork room in a storm of gore and miasma. Then one mutated, evil cell at a time, the entity that sought to ruin all creation put him back together again as something wholly different.
26
LONDON
“So, I’m from a Moon Colony…but in this future. Okay. Time travel, why not. Makes as much sense as any other thing that’s happened recently,” Derrick said. “And Arridon here is from a flat world in an alternate reality that’s already succumbed to the Bleed. Oh, and the Bleed is a pan-dimensional entity that might actually be the source of all evil?”
“Born from the gods,” Phil elaborated.
“How?” Arridon asked.
“They won’t say,” the old man said, turning his palms upright. He puffed on his pipe and added a shrug. “It’s their greatest shame. They were the seed that almost every sentient life sprouted from, and conversely, it would appear that they are also the root of the decay that will remove everything from existence.”
“Balance?” Derrick offered. “Maybe they’re like, a cosmic symbol of balance.”
“I suppose that’s possible. Before my wife…left us, she told me a story about where the Bleed came from. She was vague, but I believe she was telling the truth.”
“Spill it old man,” Arridon said.
“Don’t get uppity,” Phil retorted. “She said that the gods originated in one reality, on one Garden of Eden style world. Earth-like, I think. Things were perfect; their society was kind and just, but something really bad happened. A cataclysm. A meteor, perhaps. Something astral and mundane.”
“They didn’t all die, did they?” Derrick asked.
“Of course not. Remember; the gods were the progenitors of science and magic both. What happened after, she was even vaguer about. Her words were…half said. The gods fractured and became polarized. There was incredible strife, a war, even. Then, suddenly, one group of the gods left. They took all the toys they could carry with them, and they used their technology and magic to simply…leave.”
“One group?” Derrick said. “How many groups are there? Or, I mean, were there?”
“Two-ish. Those that left, and those that remained. What we know of the gods comes from the society they rebuilt among other realities.”
“And let me guess; what we know of the Bleed came from those that remained,” Arridon asked.
“That’s what I’m led to believe.”
“They created the Bleed to get revenge on the gods that left them behind?” Derrick asked.
“Cheeky, isn’t it? Although, that’s not quite accurate. From what I’ve learned, and heard, well, and know, those that remained became the Bleed. They didn’t make it, per se.”
“They became pure evil? That’s bullshit,” Arridon said.
“I’ve never seen a cow,” Derrick said. “We don’t have cattle on the moon. Protein pastes and even some 3d printed foods, but no real cows.”
Phil and Arridon waited for the kid to finish.
“I wouldn’t make this up,” Phil said. “If I were to spin a tale, I’d make it a lot more colorful than this.”
“Why don’t the gods fight the Bleed?” Derrick asked.
“Some do.”
“Can we get them to help? Will they help us find our sisters?” Arridon asked. His stomach grumbled. The soup Phil made smelled amazing.
“I don’t speak for them, or even to them,” Phil said. “I can’t take you to them; I’m not god-blooded enough to operate the technology in the clockwork room.”
“But you think we are?” Derrick posed, shifting in his seat.
“I know you are. Now, whether or not you can operate the machinery correctly is another hurdle to jump.”
Derrick and Arridon turned to each other. Two young men, faced with facts that defied their life experiences almost entirely, placed in a situation where they were being forced into action, but had zero control.
“I’ll go if you go,” Derrick said. “I want to find my sister.”
“I’m a fisherman,” Arridon shrugged. “Not even a good one.”
“I’m still in school.”
“You’re from a moon?”
“The Moon—the only one I’ve ever known,” Derrick said. “Dusty and cold with stale, recycled air. Not like this. The air here smells bad, but it’s fresh bad, if you get what I mean.�
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Arridon laughed and nodded. “New garbage, not old.”
“Hah, yeah,” Derrick replied.
“Where would we go? If we were going to try and find the gods?” Arridon asked Phil as the old man got up to leave the room.
Phil stopped at the threshold of the kitchen, pipe still in his mouth. He removed it, and turned to face the boys. “My wife told me the gods had a remaining city.”
“The Endless City is overrun,” Arridon said. “And the gods left there not long after I was born.”
“Whatever town you call ‘Endless’ is nothing compared to this place, boyo,” Phil said. “The Bleed will always find a place that can’t move far and fast.”
“What do you mean by that?” Derrick asked, confused.
“The gods of today built a city that jumps through time and space. I guess it’s as much a vessel, as it is a city.”
The two young men looked at each other, and they both saw excitement in the other’s eyes. That, and more than a little cockiness, trying to smother any visible fear.
Sebastian’s body had been broken down into viscera and meat, all tinged and tainted by both the Bleed’s evil presence and Sebastian’s own withered soul. It whirled and spun, roiling in formless fury. The Bleed then grabbed one minuscule bit of matter, then another, and stuck them together in a new and tragically awful puzzle. It built him again like this, one bite at a time, drawing from the disintegrated pool of flesh, skin, and bone.
Finally he stood, clawed feet, sinew-strewn calves, a powerful quasi-human torso with a back covered in a nest of shelled legs that would serve to allow for motion in four dimensions. Long, powerful arms tipped with clawed hands big enough to crush a man’s head with ease grew from shoulders topped with bony crenellations. Dark, furious eyes opened above a maw filled with tentacles, fangs, and saliva that sizzled with hatred and malice.
Sebastian set free a bellow that shook the dust off the gears and shattered the massive clock face on the side of the building. Visible waves of power emanated from his ashen skin as he felt his new form’s strength and power. He slunk down, growling, and flipped over onto his back, as agile as a hunting cat on the savanna, and crawled to the nearby wall using his crab-legs. He flipped then like a spider, and ascended ten feet in the blink of an eye before dropping back down to the stone floor of the god’s clockwork room.