Marked

by S. Andrew Swann

  “I am no murderer.”

  I spun around to face him, the torn sleeve of my blouse falling to my wrist. “The fuck you say?” He almost seemed as shocked at my f-bomb as he’d been when I punched him in the face. “You’re saying some other sword-wielding psychopath in steam-powered armor killed the man lying in my morgue?”

  “The man attacked me.”

  “With a chunk of asphalt. You were in armor that could handle a .45 slug in the head. He was essentially unarmed, and you cut him nearly in half. That’s murder in my book, and in any court in this country you’d be damn lucky to plead voluntary manslaughter.”

  “That was not my intent, my Lady.”

  “You’re swinging a sword about, and—” I stopped, because I realized that Ivan’s demeanor had changed completely. My Lady? I didn’t know what to do with that. Instead, I asked, “What was your intent?”

  “To return the man to the Emperor’s justice. He escaped, killing seven men in the process. What you saw was my failure. I did not expect the man to attack me, and I reacted before I had opportunity to think.”

  I sighed, pulling the torn sleeve off my arm. The plausibility of what Ivan said was enough to temper my anger. If anything, my John Doe shared culpability in his own death by rushing an armed man so stupidly.

  “So who was he?”

  “I have no name. He was simply a fugitive. I tracked him through the Chaos, until I caught up with him here.”

  Jacob finally joined in the questioning. “If he was a prisoner, what was his crime?”

  Ivan glanced at Jacob, then at me. He hesitated for a moment before saying, “He was not a prisoner. He entered the Emperor’s demesne without accepting the Emperor’s authority. He was a guest, who returned hospitality with bloodshed.”

  “And who is this Emperor?” Jacob asked.

  I swallowed a little bit of irritation at Jacob stepping in like that. I had wanted to be at least a little less forthcoming about what we didn’t know, at least until I had a better idea of who this guy was and what he was doing here.

  Of course, I probably should have mentioned that to Jacob, who sounded now like he was just questioning a suspect back at the station.

  “His Imperial Majesty, Napoleon V, by the Grace of God and the will of the Nation, Emperor of Europe, Protector of the Americas, and Sovereign of a Thousand Worlds.”

  I wasn’t any great student of history, but I remembered enough from high school to know that a Napoleon V was two more Napoleons than was standard issue. That, and the fact that Ivan spoke with a Russian accent, suggested that wherever he came from, “Waterloo” had a different connotation.

  “Sovereign of a Thousand Worlds” carried a whole other series of connotations, though. Enough that I decided to abandon any plans to be cagey, especially since this guy seemed to be more cooperative now. I asked him exactly what that bit about the “Thousand Worlds” meant.

  “The Emperor is also a Prince, my Lady. His presence stabilizes the Chaos around the Empire. Those worlds that abut his own are also part of his demesne.”

  “Of course, they are,” Jacob said in the way one humors small children and dementia patients.

  It took me a moment to respond because the implications of what Ivan was saying were still sinking in. To run an Empire across the boundaries between worlds, that would require an army.

  “This Empire of yours,” I asked, “it has many people like you and the old man?” Like me?

  He narrowed his eyes at me as if he didn’t understand the question. I pulled up his shirt and said, “Marked like him, like you.” I poked his back where the swirling pattern covered his skin. I really should have known better after almost stumbling down the steps when his Mark touched me before. I was too caught up in the moment to realize what I was doing until after I’d done it.

  Touching it, I felt a wrench in my insides as an unfamiliar hand pulled itself across my insides where only my own Mark had ever touched me. I quickly yanked my finger away, trying not to look as if I had just been burned. In a single moment I felt like I’d known Ivan Roskov more intimately than I had known anyone, and I felt weak from the knowledge.

  Ivan stared at me with wide eyes.

  Oh, God. Please do not tell me that the feeling was mutual.

  “Bozhe, pomogi mne,” he whispered.

  “If your Emperor claims territory beyond his own world, he must have an army of men like you to enforce his rule—”

  “He claims fealty from all the Walkers who reside in his domain,” Ivan said. “In return for administering his rule, they are spared the dangers to be found in the midst of the Chaos. Travelers through his demesne must accede to his rule.”

  I nodded, not quite believing. After being so long unique, an outsider in a world where I didn’t quite fit, it was beyond any expectations to think that there was somewhere where I might be normal, where I wouldn’t have to hide what I was . . . even if it was ruled by a French despot.

  Jacob asked him, “What dangers? What Chaos?”

  Ivan looked at Jacob and said, “Who is this man? He is not—”

  “Just answer his questions,” I said.

  He answered, and he did it with enough condescension that I could tell that wherever he came from, it was common knowledge. However, it was beyond my experience with the Mark.

  Ivan explained that the sea of worlds that Walkers could move between was not stable. Universes floated and moved like foam on a storm-wracked ocean, they appeared and disappeared, merged and split apart. Weak Walkers caught out in the Chaos could find themselves forever lost, never able to find a world they had left, and in the worst of it, could find the world shifting around them as the universes remade themselves. It was why he had been armed with a sword rather than a firearm. Any gun was a poor weapon in the Chaos, where reality might only be stable within arm’s reach. Shooting someone accurately at any distance, with a gun, an arrow, or a thrown rock, was impossible in such an environment.

  Even a Walker with a strong bloodline, like Ivan and those serving the Emperor’s White Guard, required years of training to navigate the Chaos with any certainty—and even then, it was an effort.

  Only those born of a Prince’s bloodline could natively walk through the Chaos unscathed. A Prince could move through the Chaos as quickly as he could through the isle of stability that was the Empire.

  No rogue can hide forever, even in the Chaos. . . .

  “Are we in that Chaos now?” I asked. If whole universes—past, present, and future—formed and dissolved in the Chaos, could anyone within them really know?

  “I apologize for implying such, my Lady. I traveled long in the Chaos tracking my quarry, and I did not know I had entered a new domain.”

  Okay, what?

  Jacob asked, “What domain?” while at the same time I asked, “So the man you killed was one of these Princes?”

  Ivan answered my question. “He moved confidently through the deepest parts of the Chaos where I could barely follow. He belonged to a Prince’s bloodline, child or sibling if he was not one himself.”

  “What domain?” Jacob asked again.

  “You do not know?”

  “Humor me,” he said.

  “I was not certain until I felt her touch, but this realm belongs to your Lady.”

  I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

  “And I truly beg her forgiveness for my trespasses.”

  * * *

  —

  JACOB followed me upstairs and, after shutting the door on the basement, said, “Give me one good reason not to think that guy’s a schizophrenic with paranoid delusions.”

  I stopped on the stairs up to the bedroom and told him, “Steam-powered armor.”

  “Okay, then give me a good reason to believe I’m not a schizophrenic with paranoid delusions.”

  “You�
�re saner than I am.”

  “Right now that’s no real comfort.”

  “What are you going to do?” I asked. “Are you going to turn me in?”

  Jacob sighed. “I should, I really should. The games you’ve been playing are the primary reason we have a Justice Department lawyer breathing down our necks.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Why didn’t you at least try to explain some of this before it got to this point?”

  “I—” I turned away from him because my eyes had started to burn. “I don’t have an answer for you.”

  I felt his hand on my exposed shoulder and I had conflicting urges: one to collapse into his arms, the other to run away up the stairs to my bedroom and slam the door. I compromised and stood on the stairs, facing away from him.

  “You don’t trust me?” he asked.

  Do I trust anyone?

  “I—” I sucked in a breath and closed my eyes.

  “Dana?”

  “I do trust you,” I whispered. More than I trust myself.

  “Then why didn’t you—”

  “I never even told my mother.” I shrugged out from under his hand and looked back over my shoulder at him. “You should go. I’m on leave, but you still have a job.”

  “And a lawyer to babysit.”

  I turned to go up the stairs.

  “Promise me something?” he asked.

  “What?” I asked without turning around.

  “No more beating on that guy, whoever he is.”

  I paused a long time because I didn’t want to make a promise I might not keep.

  “Dana?”

  “I promise,” I told him.

  FOURTEEN

  WHEN I CHANGED my blouse, I noticed that in tearing the sleeve, the side seam on the blouse had split as well, leaving the back of my blouse flapping behind me. Ivan would have gotten a chance to see a good part of my Mark.

  Right about the time his attitude changed.

  “Don’t trust him,” I told myself. I don’t know why I needed the admonition. He had killed the one person alive who could tell me about my past and where I’d come from. I knew that for no other reason than I shared a language with the dead man.

  I pulled on another blouse, blue this time, and told myself that if Ivan was going to ask this Lady’s forgiveness, I was going to make him earn it. I stopped in the kitchen to pour myself some coffee and walked down to find out more about the world this guy came from.

  I sat down in the folding chair that Jacob left and warmed my hands on the mug in my hands. It was high summer outside, but down here I felt chilled. Ivan’s anachronistic presence felt more disturbing to me as time went on. I was used to confining my weirdness elsewhere; I had compartmentalized the Mark socially, psychologically, and physically. Ivan’s presence was as much a symptom of my world crumbling as my serial confessions to Jacob.

  He had sat down at the base of the pillar, hands still cuffed behind him, knees drawn up, face downcast. His hair was light enough that I could see some bruises darkening beneath his hair.

  I sipped the coffee and said, “You’re rather quiet.”

  “I am awaiting leave to speak, my Lady.”

  “Uh-huh.” I sipped more coffee. I was going to milk this guy’s deference for all it was worth. Even if it was some sort of act, even if he lied through his teeth, I was getting more information from him than I had gotten during years of experimentation. “Tell me more about the man you killed.”

  As forthcoming as Ivan was, there seemed little more that he could tell me. John Doe had crossed into the Emperor’s domain, intentionally or unintentionally. He was initially treated as an emissary, clearly being of a powerful bloodline, but the man had violently rejected the overtures of diplomacy—a rejection that left bodies scattered all over the place.

  Ivan didn’t have any information about where the man came from or what he might have told the Emperor’s diplomats and scholars before escaping. It wasn’t his place to know. I didn’t press it since I knew what that was like. Ivan was in some sense, a cop. And if I had to hunt down someone lost by DHS or the FBI, probably no one would deign to give me the transcripts of their interviews, no matter how helpful that would be.

  However, Ivan’s description, if it could be trusted—big “if”—suggested that John Doe had been as disheveled and agitated when he crossed into the Emperor’s world as he’d been when he’d entered mine.

  His brief period as a “guest” of the Empire was ended by the carelessness of one of the Emperor’s doctors.

  “The man was a university professor schooled in dead languages, not a soldier or a trained interrogator. He assumed the man was restrained and docile.” Ivan snorted and added, “And the man was English.”

  John Doe, on the other hand, was both highly agitated and apparently quite skilled at hand-to-hand combat. He managed to kill the careless Englishman and two others before getting his hand on a weapon and escaping into the neighboring countryside. He would kill four more before escaping back into Chaos.

  Ivan tracked him, and even with the aid of his armor—which allowed him to move at a running pace tirelessly—he could only follow his quarry because of the “straightness” of his path. John Doe was uninterested in evading his pursuit, simply in traveling as far and as fast to his destination as he could.

  Ivan caught up with him only because John Doe had stopped when he had reached my world.

  While Ivan described finding the man as he pounded on my car window, I learned two things.

  The first thing I learned was that Ivan called it the Mark, too. I didn’t realize the incongruity until long after he had used the term. The thing on my back had always had that name—but only in my own mind. I don’t know if I had ever even spoken its name aloud before today. I had always assumed that I had named it myself in some forgotten part of my childhood. There was an old itch in my brain that started me thinking that it was not an invention, but a memory.

  The second thing that became apparent, if it wasn’t clear before, was the fact that John Doe’s appearance was far from random. The man had come explicitly to contact me. He had made a straight line from Ivan’s Empire to my world, and as soon as he reached here, he stopped fleeing.

  He had come for me.

  I set down the coffee on the floor next to my chair and leaned forward, looking down at my prisoner. It had been a couple of hours since I had cuffed him to the post, and I realized I couldn’t keep him there forever. The guy was going to have to, at a minimum, eat and use the bathroom.

  But I also knew that one step and he could be gone.

  I wondered how the Emperor handled that sort of thing. Why would John Doe have to kill anyone to escape? One step and he’d be away from them all . . . What am I missing?

  “You attacked me, why? And why come back and do it, and not when I first saw you?”

  He bowed his head. “At first, I did not know you for what you are.”

  “You can track one man from your world to mine, and though you were right next to me you didn’t know?”

  “Sensing another Mark is complicated. It requires a moderately powerful Walker to do so at all. Even then, most can only sense a Mark in use, a Walker moving between worlds, or their kinsmen. . . .” He trailed off as he seemed to realize something. “The old man was your kinsman, wasn’t he?”

  In my head I had been hedging my bets, thinking in “mights” and “possiblys,” but when Ivan asked me that question, I answered definitively, “Yes.”

  “That explains how he found you. Someone with a Mark that strong would be able to sense their own blood even when it was Stationary. He was coming for you.”

  That was probably a correct assessment, though I felt uncomfortable with the flat statement of it. “Why did you come after me?”

  He sighed. “After I confronted you and hi
m, I retreated to regain my strength for the long trek back, and I planned to possibly recover his body. Then I felt a Mark like his move through Chaos, but briefly, gone before I was able to follow.”

  I nodded. That was me walking back to try and find a nonexistent crime scene. “You thought I was him.”

  “I had to assume the fugitive still lived and could move into Chaos at any time. So I stayed and waited.”

  “Until I used my Mark again.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you attacked me because?”

  “My Lady, you started shooting.”

  I started to object, but when I replayed the event in my mind I wondered if that drawn sword could have been in a defensive posture? He had taken a step and started to say something, then I started firing.

  “What will you do with me?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I honestly didn’t. I wasn’t thinking more than an hour ahead of myself. “Keep talking, and I might figure it out.”

  For another half hour I quizzed him about generalities, how the worlds beyond my little patch of reality seemed to work. He confirmed my suspicion that all Walkers—those with the Mark—were indeed unique in all the flux of possibility that filled the Chaos: past, present, and future. He said that not only was the presence of a Walker the only thing that could stabilize the shifting sands within the Chaos—for a Prince that was even more so—but the Walker, in some sense, influenced the shape of the world around them.

  Not only did they lend a permanence to an impermanent universe, they affected the form it took—and the stronger the Walker, the more conscious the direction that form could take.

  That was a little too much existential baggage for me. It was bad enough that Ivan was calling me a Prince—or maybe that should be Princess—and placing me at the head of some trans-universal hierarchy. He also was suggesting that the windows of alternate pasts and futures I walked between existed because of me and what I wanted, or what I expected to find. . . .

  Worse, it answered a question I had always had, but had been too timid to articulate:

  How could the pasts and futures I visit be so similar to my own when I do not exist in any of them? The world where I stopped Roscoe Kendal from murdering the proprietor of Asia FX was exactly my own—the same city, same storefronts, same weather, same newspapers, same history—all without over two decades of my existence.