The water covered his face, went into his eyes, nose, mouth and one ear. It was extremely unpleasant.
Making an effort, Esk’s mighty spirit absorbed the personality of this new body, including all its skills and memories, and corrected the body’s damage and defects on the cellular level.
Then, stumbling, he lurched to his feet and looked at the new world around him.
Some grimy youths stood at the edge of the puddle, their mouths wide open in amazement. One of them — Esk-Luca realized that it was Karim — shouted, wide-eyed.
“What the hell, cripple, you can walk now?!”
The memory of Luca Dezisimu, crippled seventeen-year-old son of the dead gladiator Severus, finally settled and structured itself in Esk’Onegut’s mind. The cripple’s personality boiled with such fury that Esk recoiled, as it were, retreating before the primal anger of the helpless pariah. He felt uncomfortable.
Damn! He was tired of living. Life wasn’t just pleasure, but also sadness, grief, pain, hunger, the loss of loved ones, the need to strive and achieve... Centuries, no, millennia of ceaseless living had wearied the universal traveler.
The traveler mentally whispered: Damn it, live then. I’ll watch. And then he handed to the former cripple the reins over the body, the Tsoui system and the mind.
Luca, incredulously clapping himself on the sides, on his arms and legs, realized that he was absolutely healthy.
He raised his head and cast a baleful gaze on Karim.
Chapter 3. Magical Healing
“KARIM HEALED the cripple!” Fat Pete shouted suddenly. “With a magic stone!”
The joke didn’t land. After the last hit, Luca fell from the wheelchair and lay for quite some time in the puddle. They’d decided that he might have died and were about to run away before a guard appeared. Unlikely as that was. But the cripple rose!
Unable to believe their eyes, the boys continued to gawk at Luca. He himself wasted no time. Whether his recovery was real or not, he had no idea when it might end. The boy wiped his face with his sleeve, climbed out of the puddle, chose a couple of likely stones nearby and, waving his arm inexpertly, threw one.
The stone flew three feet and splashed straight into the puddle. The hooligans were shocked, then broke into laughter.
Without delay, Luca threw the second, and it fell into the mud nearby. Angry with himself, Luca kept picking up and throwing stones at the boys, who continued to mock him even now that he had control over his body, but he couldn’t throw a stone even to the middle of the puddle. The ruffians stood on the opposite side, dying of laughter.
Karim even started choking, grabbing at his stomach, and the other boys laughed with him. Fat Pete, Karim’s right-hand man, laughed louder than anyone. He supported his leader with subservience in all his endeavors; the innkeeper’s son generously shared any uneaten leftovers from customers’ plates with him and the other boys, and in this district of the capital, food was the most valuable resource.
Luca had dreamed so many times of being able to pick up and return a stone thrown at him! And here he finally was... But he’d spent his whole life bedridden, he’d never learned to throw stones. If only his father were here... Or at least Kora, she could have taught him easily! But his sister was somewhere in a city watch jail cell while his mother saved up for her bail.
Luca looked around, but there were no more stones nearby.
“Hey, cripple!” Catch!” Fat Pete shouted, throwing another stone at him.
Out of habit, Luca watched motionlessly as the stone flew. But then he suddenly heard thoughts in his head. As if his own, but also... not. Move! Sorry, but I can’t just sit here and watch! Then his body began to move by itself, turned and leaned, dodging. The stone flew past him, nearly hitting him.
“Wow! Come on guys, let’s make him dance!”
The target was moving now, and that provoked the bullies. They got to work grabbing whatever was to hand and throwing it at Luca. But the boy even found a certain pleasure in not letting them hit him. Moving only as much as he needed to, he easily dodged all that came his way.
I’m bored, Luca-Esk thought. It’s my turn now. With confident, accurate throws, he put Natus out of action, the son of a fish merchant, then Jamal, a grubby halfwit without a single glimmer of intellect. Then it was Fat Pete’s turn — the stone hit him right in his jelly-like belly, knocking all the air out of his lungs. Pete doubled over and fell face-first into the puddle.
Luca tossed another stone in his hand, considering which part of Karim’s body to throw it at. Karim hesitated, not knowing whether to run or to help his friends. In the end, he hid behind Fat Pete, pulling him out of the water like a hippo out of a swamp.
Luca aimed. Karim’s shoulder stuck out from behind Fat Pete’s back, so Luca aimed at it. The stone was small, around the size of a quail egg, but that just made the throw even more accurate. The cocky and bold-faced seventeen-year-old innkeeper’s son wailed like a girl. His crew groaned at the sight, exchanged glances and... ran off!
“Wait for me!” Karim wailed before staggering after the others.
He turned as he fled and shouted in faltering tones:
“You’re dead, cripple! You’re dead!”
Luca watched as he went. He felt an unfamiliar feeling in his chest. It was satisfaction. He liked how well his body responded, how quickly the blood flowed through his veins, liked the crackle of his pent-up anger finally bursting forth. Before, he could only cry himself to sleep in silence so as not to wake his mother and sister, or grind his teeth and roll his eyes. He never allowed himself to express it, not wanting to appear weaker than he was, so his anger built and built, long since reaching the point of no return.
Now he’d let his feelings loose, and a quiet, peaceful satisfaction replaced his all-encompassing anger. The incident amused Esk, but he also felt the same as Luca.
They shared the same body, after all.
A body which now began to hurt terribly. Its atrophied muscles had apparently gone into shock from such excessive use. Luca’s legs bent, but he managed not to fall. Staggering, the boy reached his wheelchair, stood it upright and fought through the pain to pull it out of the puddle. No sooner had he done this than he fell into the seat, got into a comfortable position and rolled toward the house.
He walked into the hovel on his own two feet. His mother didn’t notice him coming in and kept scrubbing some laundry on her washboard. Sweat fell off her in streams, but she kept furiously scrubbing the clothes as if her children’s lives depended on it. And they did.
Horvac take me, where am I? Esk thought, and the same thought appeared in Luca’s mind. The boy looked at the place where he’d lived for the last few years with fresh eyes. And from a new height, to put it plainly — his height.
One room for everyone. One half of the poorly lit room housed all the beds, a small dining table, a chest full of old junk. The other half was the laundry area, strewn with clothes and sheets, with an ironing board and an old black iron sheltering by the wall. His mother scrubbed in the corner opposite. The washing water in the basin and buckets was already black from dirt, and soon his mother would have to venture across the neighborhood to the local well. There were no lakes, rivers or other natural bodies of water in the capital, and for the residents of the slums, the only source of clean water was the community well.
She squeezed the water out of the sheet she was scrubbing, put away the basin and stood up. Luca began to hobble toward her.
“Mom...”
Prisca raised her head, saw her son standing before her and fainted, started to fall, but Luca rushed toward her and held her up.
No strength at all, Esk noticed as he failed to hold his mother up and fell to the wet floor.
Gently holding the woman, he sat down and stroked her head. Prisca had been very beautiful when she married his father, but recent years had been far from kind to her. Her face had become lean, bags swelled under her eyes, her hair had thinned, her breasts had hung low s
ince Kora’s birth. But she was still attractive, even if it was hard to notice right away.
“Mom, mom...” Luca whispered quietly. “Mom, wake up!”
He touched his lips to her forehead. Prisca opened her eyes. Luca stood himself up and helped his mother stand.
“It’s not a dream! It’s not a dream!” His mother’s eyes filled with tears. “Luca! My son!”
“Yes, mom...”
“But how?!” the woman cried.
Luca told her everything, leaving out only the fact that he’d thrown stones back. In his version of the events, the hooligans ran off as soon as he stood up.
“It’s a miracle! A miracle!” Prisca kept repeating, kissing and hugging her son.
Tears fell from her eyes, she was wet from the washing and sweat, and Luca had only just climbed out of a puddle. They stood in embrace for a long time. Luca held his mother to his chest and looked down on her from above for the first time. Now he saw how many grey hairs she had.
“Mom, I’m going to go get water. Rest in the meantime.”
“Are you sure you can?” Prisca looked her son up and down sceptically.
“I’ll try. I’ll carry just one bucket at a time, don’t worry. Rest, mom.”
Luca led her to the bed and sat her down, then grabbed a full bucket. Gritting his teeth and taking tiny steps, he carried it out of the house to pour the dirty water into the gutter and bring back clean water.
Watching this, Esk thought the boy would break in half from the strain.
Time to spin the Wheel.
Chapter 4. One-Time Wheel Spin
LUCA STOPPED by the fence and set the bucket on the ground. His fingers burned, his shoulder felt leaden. Swapping hands would help, but a bell rang insistently in his head, demanding attention.
The hidden Esk smirked inwardly. Come on, dude, get on with it!
Luca wiped his eyes, grimaced and shrank back from a block of text that suddenly appeared in the very air in front of him. The boy stretched an arm toward the letters, but felt nothing. They hung before his eyes and moved as his eyes moved. The text stayed at the center of Luca’s vision!
What a dope! Esk sighed, but let Luca stay at the helm. The balance of two minds sharing a single body was incredibly fragile. The boy didn’t have enough spirit to recognize the impossible and preserve his mind if Esk intervened directly.
Pressed into the back of his consciousness, his personality would rot quicker than Esk could say “Horvac take you!” Horvac’Onegut was an old friend of his, and had managed to become a divinity in a world where Esk had trudged along as a priest of the local Veridic until he changed his faith. In that war, sacred for half the planet’s population, Horvac had been cast down, but he and Esk encountered each other again in other worlds and remained friends. And tales of Horvac remained.
While Esk reminisced, Luca had gotten a grip on himself and read the text several times, unwillingly whispering it aloud.
“Luca Dezisimu, of the essence Esk’Onegut... Tsoui points: minus nine hundred and seventy one... Activated privilege for one-time Wheel spin. Use? Yes... No...”
Luca’s mother poked her head out of their little window.
“What happened, son? Are you feeling alright?”
“Everything’s fine, mom. I stopped for a breather, my arms hurt.”
“Let me take it...” Prisca began, but the son interrupted her.
“No, mom. I can do it!”
Spoken with surety and confidence. The mother shook her head, but a flash of a smile told the true story; she was not only happy, she was proud! Her head disappeared from the window, and Luca returned to the strange text.
Thinking for a couple of seconds, he jabbed his finger at “Yes.”
The world around him froze and fell silent. The text disappeared, and a gigantic wheel took up his entire view. It looked entirely real, but was as much a mirage as the text before it. The surface of the wheel spread to either side of Luca, blotting out his surroundings. In height it stretched far into the sky, so that Luca could only see one segment of it, the one facing him. That segment was green, and on it was writ in huge letters: Start!
Esk planted some knowledge in the boy’s mind, and Luca realized that the divisions of the wheels were in different colors.
There was only one green sector, the starting sector. If it appeared again after the spin, he’d be able to make three more spins for free.
The red sectors gave the player illnesses, injuries, reduced stats or negative talents. For example, the talent of smelling like a cesspit. There weren’t many such talents, but each red segment was several times larger than the others.
The empty white spaces gave nothing to the player, just wasted the spin. They amounted to over three fourths of the total number.
The blue ones were very rare. They awarded useful talents, and the deeper the color—from pale blue to ultramarine—the higher the gift level. The ultramarine sector gave the player a highly demanded talent in their local community and turned them into an unparalleled master of the field, the best in the entire history of the world.
But the most desirable, and Luca felt it intensely, sensing the payoff, was the gold sector. The golden section of superpowers, gleaming as it reflected the sun’s golden rays. Each of those powers could violate the laws of physics and magic and act in opposition to all. Full invulnerability with no magic shields or armor, teleportation to any point on the planet, perfect invisibility, incredible strength and power that could bring down mountains with a single touch...
The chance of getting a sector like that was close to zero no matter how many times you span the Wheel. Every traveler lucky enough to get that coveted sector reached incredible heights in the world where they got it.
There was also a purple sector, the only one on the entire Wheel. At least, so said the rumors among the travelers. Esk had never seen it, though he’d tried his luck many times.
Glimmer by glimmer, idea by idea, step by step; that was how Esk slowly revealed the truth of the world to the boy, let him come to realize what had happened to come, so that sooner or later, they could achieve a full meld and live as a single individual.
Luca took a deep breath and touched the Start button.
Slowly, almost screeching into motion, the Wheel started to build up speed. The starting sector rolled past Luca, after which came a run of white sectors, then the flash of a gold sector, another group of whites, then red, white, white, more red, white, white, white, blueish...
The Wheel span faster and faster, building up to such a speed that the colors of the sectors merged into a single rainbow blur before Luca. He saw nothing, and both Luca and Esk lost control over their body. As the Wheel span, time stopped across the entire Universe, and only the consciousness of the player spinning it remained active, so that they might see the outcome with their own eyes.
Luca lost track of time when the mottled blur finally became clearer, then even clearer, finally reforming into the colors of sectors as they raced past.
A row of white... blue... white...
The Wheel slowed its pace...
Chapter 5. The Birth of a New Traveler
LUCA WATCHED with disappointment as the Wheel slowed its pace. The speed slowed down so much that a broad red sector took up his entire field of view for several seconds.
Both the boy and Esk’Onegut, the traveler in his head, prayed to the Wheel to move beyond the cursed red zone. Luca no longer even thought of superpowers or talents. He wanted just one thing: to remain healthy. With any other segment, he had a chance of over ninety seven percent to remain as he was. But the red segment could bring him something worse than paralysis.
The traveler himself grinned with irony; this was how Tsoui worked. If the carrier’s body was cursed, then the recent healing would turn into something similar — red. The sector was too wide. Any other would have already passed by.
The edge of the sector hove into view somewhere at the edge of vision. Come on, come on,
Luca begged. Please! Curse you in the name of all the gods! Esk growled inwardly, furious at the possibility of spending his final reincarnation in the body of a twice cursed boy. How could it be otherwise, if he was born a cripple and would become one again now?
The border between the sectors almost stopped in front of Luca’s face. The next sector after the red one was purple, and this was the first time the traveler had seen that color in all his ninety nine lives.
“Impossible! Seriously? Are you serious, gods?” The irony of the situation drove Esk, and Luca with him, to hysterics. The results hadn’t yet been declared, which meant the Wheel was still turning.
Blood of Fate Page 2