by JDL Rosell
“Yes."
“They took my two sons." Her voice had thinned of emotion.
“She was pregnant.” He hesitated, remembering the bloody bundle cradled in his arms. “The babe didn't survive."
“My sons burned. Half the town burned that year.” She glanced at him. “And I ended up here.”
Erik again listened to the falls of their feet and her soft breaths in between.
“Why did you come to Kuust?” she asked, her voice rough, speaking through all the sharp, dead memories. “What could be here for you? Don’t you have some livelihood in… Where are you from? Lienze?”
“Uh, yes,” he lied, even as it filled him with anxious guilt. “I’m from Lienze.” He wondered what he would say about his livelihood if she pushed it.
“That’s only part of the question.”
Inwardly, he sighed. “I’m apprenticed to a formulaist.” He looked to see if she would react, but her face remained smooth. She hadn’t seemed a particularly avid Amodist, but with relicts, one had to assume a certain hesitancy toward alchemy of any kind.
“And?”
He blinked, thinking quickly. “And I’m here to scout potential buyers.”
A look passed over her face, dark and angry, but it passed in a moment. “I see.”
“It’s not like I make nekros,” he said defensively.
You just are one, the voice said gleefully.
“We make formulae for all sorts of folk. Metalchemists need refining oils so their metals don't rust. Astrologists need hallucinogens to properly read the stars. Not to mention all the healing draughts we hand out. It’s not like we’re in bed with nekromists.”
“I never said you were, or implied it.” You did, her tone implied.
She has a point there, Erik, the voice continued. Maybe it’s because you do know formulaists and nekromists have a sick sort of relationship. But that was too close to thinking about his father. “I’m just saying,” he said. “We do some good. We’re not bad people.”
Sensing the souring mood, he ran a hand along a wall and thought quickly. “What about you? What do you do as a relict?”
A poor question from her dark expression. “I ask myself that all the time. Here we are in our castle—which it is, don’t tell me it’s not—while some people barely have a roof that keeps out the rain.” She shook her head. “But I do what I can. Half the catch on holydays goes to supplicants, and the rest of the week I spare what I can. Evenings, when I don’t have other duties, I make tunics and hand them out. Then there’s the orphanage we have inside Font Amode. You met Persey, and there are others down there with her. I visit every day and make sure they know someone is here for them.”
Then she talked about each of the orphans, growing more animated as she explained their stories and quirks. “And, of course, there's Persey. She’s practically my own, truth be told. I saved her.” Her eyes sparkled like jewels as she met his eyes. “There was a shipwreck far out at sea, and she was the only one to survive. I was out fishing by one of the sand banks when I saw her clinging to one of the ship’s planks, barely able to hold on. I got her on my boat and sailed straight in, then sat by her for five days and nights until she came back from what seemed certain death. When she opened her eyes and saw me sitting there, it was like my Hart or Aldy was looking up at me again.”
She suddenly stopped and blushed, tawny cheeks deepening to russet. “Mother, I suppose I indulge my flaw as much as the Senescent. Each act is so little, but the way I talk, I’m single-handedly feeding and clothing the town.”
“A bit of pride is good, I think,” Erik said, returning the smile. “Especially in good works.” He was happy to hear about her life, and how it wasn’t as gloomy as it first seemed. She’s certainly done better things these three years than I have. He wondered what his answer would be if she asked him: Well, other than brewing formulae for the town’s nekromist—who, by the way, I knew well enough to call uncle, but still murdered—I supported the local taverns and brothels and scoured the forests for nautded to kill. Just about fulfilled my communal obligations for a lifetime, I’d say.
But Tara stopped suddenly in front of a door. “This is it,” Tara said, cheeks still colored, and pushed the door slightly ajar. “Make yourself as comfortable as it allows. Penance primarily consists of meditation on the flaw and your indulgences of it, but, untutored as you are, you’ll also receive instruction from one of my sisters. Meals are twice a day, once at the rise, and once at the fall, always served to your room.” She stepped back.
“One of the other sisters will be tutoring me?” Erik asked, not moving towards the open door.
Tara looked down the hallway. “I’m not actually permitted to teach. My sisters believe I have too much to learn myself.” She looked at him, and he immediately knew the untold reason that was too often the reason. But Erik knew goodness wasn’t skin deep.
“I…” She seemed about to say something else, but she shook her head. “Your instruction begins tomorrow,” she said abruptly, then spun on her heel and left.
As she turned the corner at the end of the shrouded hall, he heard approaching footsteps from the other end. Not wishing to encounter anyone just then, he quickly turned into his new room.
It turned out to be little more than a long, stone closet, devoid of comfort and nearly of furniture. In a far corner was a reed mat, covered with a thick woolen blanket, and a small pillow no doubt stuffed with straw. In the other corner, a small stand held the lamp that dimly illuminated the space. Along the other wall, an altar stood, complete with a carved wooden image of the Tri-Circle, two small sandstone statues of the Mother and the Lastborn, and two unlit candles framing them.
Before long, a relict came and ushered him off to a bath, smirking as he stripped bare. Her grin fell away when she saw his marred body, though, and she barely looked as she handed him a scratchy gray robe to wear.
When he was back in his room, trying the shake the discomfort of the bath, his thoughts wandered to his problem at hand: how best to approach the Magpie. If he’d learned anything from his encounter with the hermit, it was deception and haste could only result in bloodshed. He was sick of it, sick of the violence, even against nekros.
Once, he’d relished it. Even before Ilyse had died, he'd gone out into the forest with Oslef and hunted lurchers for sport. Her death just made it that much more pleasurable. But in the three years that followed, even as the pleasure dulled with the pain of losing her, he still got a certain sense of pride and justice.
But now he himself was nautded. Now he felt what it was like to be the creatures he had killed. How could he know they weren't just as sentient, just as aware, just as human as he was, but they couldn't speak? Even with his bath, he felt filthy all over at the thought.
He turned the thoughts over and over in his head, first sitting on the reed mat, then standing up, never staying comfortable for long. In time, dinner came, delivered by an unfamiliar, squash-nosed relict who didn't speak. A simple meal of half-cold lentils—probably grown in Lienze—and aromatic sour bread. He let it sit by the door. If anyone asked, he was fasting, which was true enough but for a shot of water from the surinx. But the still-warm bread smelled so good that he bit off some and chewed it to mush before spitting it back onto the plate.
Sometime later, still mulling over what to do, still wishing he could eat, he switched to lying down. The exhaustion bore him down to it, kept him there and, faster than he thought possible, he drifted off.
And jolted back awake. What if the emptiness came again? What if the Void suffused all about him? It had been so long since he’d thought of how it felt to be dead, and he had no desire to think of it again. But as he shifted on his mat, rolling onto one cramping shoulder, then the other, he found he could think of nothing else. He was tired, so tired, but he couldn’t risk it. The last time he’d slept was when he’d first awoken into life again. Who knew what lay for him back there? Who knew if the Void would let go of him this time?
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He sat up and leaned against the cold stone, taking off his robe so that it shocked him back to vigilance. Somehow, he kept himself awake, though sleep stole across his eyelids twice. Yet each time it did, his head hit back against the wall, and he awoke again.
He sat against the frigid wall, shivering, and fear and sharp loneliness propelled his thoughts to a happier place. He thought of Dead Man’s River, his usual tavern, where the revelry would still be going on. Someone would be playing the threadbowl, and maybe a riverflute as well, and the whole tavern would be filled with it and clapping and laughing and stomping along. Bern would be pouring fresh drinks and bringing out hot meat pies to every table, grimacing in his own jovial way at his patrons. And Erik’s friends would be there, gathered around a table, singing their lungs out, to the song Erik had composed for their most noble citizen: "Vodrun the Prick Thief." Kesten and the married men wouldn’t be at home with their wives and children like they had been lately, and Erik, Oslef, and the bachelors wouldn’t be drinking in silence, listening to the lives of others. It would be just like the old times, the best of the old times. Better than they’d ever actually been.
Isn’t that something? When everything was normal, I wanted nothing more than for something to change; anything, just so that I could breathe air that wasn’t stale as a grave. But now that everything has changed, what I wouldn’t give to go back, to make it all the same. Hell, I even wish Vodrun were still alive and I called him uncle if it meant nothing else had changed. Because things change, they change and they change, and it’s always for the worse. Ever since I was seven, only I never knew it. The Mother gave me good things, hope and happiness, just so I could taste them. Just so she could take them away.
As he breathed through the torpor that seized him, a haze settled over his eyes, fuzzing white behind his eyelids. He tried to lift them, to stare into the thick blackness that clutched him in fingers of ice, but the mist pried it away. In the absence of everything else, it began to fill him.
He didn’t want to be filled. He tried to fight it, to stay empty. The emptiness was all he had now.
It filled him anyway.
Ten
The emptiness was gone; absence, absent. He was full again.
He was full of sun-white fire.
He screamed until his throat rattled like the chains of a prisoner taken to die, flames searing every layer of his mind. It was pain like formulae acid-burns, but everywhere at once, inside and out, with no escape. As if the very air had turned to fire, and he breathed it in but couldn’t let it out.
He couldn’t see. Couldn’t hear. The only sense now was pain, overwhelming, inundating, suffocating.
When a blackness that seemed like emptiness crept into his mind, he rushed into its embrace.
The darkness left, and he came awake by increments.
There were other feelings than the pain now. His arms, hands, fingers. His chest, lungs breathing, heart beating. His manhood, straining with pressure. His legs, all the way down to his toes, stinging, burning, but there.
Alive.
But wasn’t I—
“Erik.”
He knew this voice. He’d heard it during the black times, when all else was numb and empty. A voice weathered by years, the salt-bitten hull of a boat.
“Can you hear me? Blink if you can hear me, Erik.”
But he didn’t know how to blink. Could he even see? He tried and tried, straining his eyes. His heart thumped, pounding like his head was a melon against stone, fit to split.
It burst. No blackness this time, only bright, winking lights. He lost his way among the sparks.
It was easier to come back this time. The pain had retreated to the base of his neck and the inside of his chest. These ached as if a bear were clawing his insides each time he breathed, but he was growing used to that.
The stenches mixed in around him: an acrid, burnt smell, like too many lamps lit in one place, accompanied by a sickly sweetness, one he remembered from… somewhere. He thought of Ilyse for some reason, those three years ago. If only he could join her.
Why not? What’s keeping me here? He noticed a pull on his shoulder, his waist, his thighs and ankle, and he tried moving them. Bound.
Another animal inside of him clawed to get out, but he quieted his panting long enough to listen. Hisses from a several large iron stoves. A low moaning—his own. Footsteps, leather on smooth stone.
He opened his eyes and tried to make sense of the scene.
The world was inverted in light and dark, and color was confused in its hues. Blackness encroached on the room from the fires, while the room’s recesses were bright as the sun. Red and violet tinged most of the walls, and green was a film on the stoves.
Proportions had ceased to make sense. He could see the far end of the room, but it seemed almost nigh his face and as far as the sky at once. He felt as if his organs were on display, his internal parts exposed to the hot, stale air, even as he saw they were not. He was in the room, yet on a high mountain. Lightning buzzed in his veins.
His attention was drawn to the gray figure who stood in the center of things, a little larger than the rest, the shadow looming behind. The room began a slow tilt around the pair but for himself. He remained bound in place.
“Erik,” the gray figure said. As he spoke, the shadow echoed it behind him, pulsing with stars of light, adding a deeper resonance to the figure’s voice. “Blink if you can hear me, Erik. Blink.”
He closed his eyes and opened his mouth, and a torrent rushed out of him. He screamed until stars burst and his head spilled like a broken vase. He felt his body embraced by a cold pressure, cold down to his mind, numbing his thoughts.
And before he descended, he knew the Void.
Erik awoke in the darkness. His eyes were open, but he couldn’t see.
He felt the reed mat below him, the wool pillow uncomfortably bunched under his head, the weight of the blanket settled over him like summer heat.
The room was silent.
He tried moving, but he had no command over his body. His heart, unbidden, jumped like a startled charfur. His breath lodged like dried clay in his chest.
He would have whimpered if he could have. He would have sobbed. But he was allowed no movement.
Something pressed over his eyes, cold and clammy and chilling like ocean spray on a winter morning, and he felt he might never awake again.
He was still bound, but when he opened his eyes, he saw the room right, or at least in the correct colors and proportions. His head was clear but for a dull, pulsing ache. The awful stench from before had lessened but lingered, like the glow of the setting sun. It all felt strangely familiar, like he’d been here before. Two-see, it was called, and it was said to be a spirit passing through you. The children’s rhyme suddenly came to his mind in a little girl’s gleeful voice as if she were skipping and singing in a circle around him:
You see, I see
Two-see, two-see!
Twice spook comes
Twice goes through me
Twis-ty, run-ny
Twist inside me
Is it none?
Or is it foresee?
A chair screeched across the floor, and a short, slightly bowed figure stood. Erik couldn’t see who it was until the man was right in front of him.
“Hello, nephew,” Vodrun said, smiling thinly. His skin, unnaturally smooth and the black of onyx, stretched to accommodate the unfamiliar expression.
No, no, no, no…. “What have you done?” Erik whispered, his voice raw as if he’d screamed for hours. He probably had. “What have you done to me?” He searched the face of the man he’d called uncle and found only the thin, parchment smile.
“You might say I have improved you, Erik. You have left behind your human frailties.” As he stepped closer, Erik smelled his breath, sour and stale, as if it had been a long time since his last meal. “You need no more sleep, food, nor water. You can feel exhaustion, but a moment’s respite is as good for y
ou as a feast and night’s rest for another man. You could say I gave you a gift. Or, perhaps, your birthright.”
“You murdered me.” The words were acid, burning through the denials parading through his head of what had happened. What he was.
“Oslef murdered you actually, though yes, at my instruction. But he got his own punishment, didn’t he?”
Erik screwed up his eyes. “What are you talking about?”
“You do not remember? Perhaps it will come back to you.” Vodrun’s eyes, two black pits, never left him as he paced.
Erik turned his heavy head about to see what bound him. It was an upright contraption that looked to be two circles, one inside another, and with another at his feet. Three circles like the Tri-Circle, but in all the wrong places. The Tri-Circle gave primacy to the sun, the Mother’s astral body, while this had the eclipse dwarfing it. Mother, is this A’Qed’s symbol? Perhaps he should not have been surprised by its presence in the nekromist’s laboratory, but he’d never known anyone to display it. It was supposed to be for the religion of the Son of Dusk, practiced by forest witches and wicked, savage men.
“You feel betrayed, Erik. I understand. Were you doing this to me and not I to you, I could not have forgiven you.” Coming around Erik’s other side, he smiled thinly again. “I would, given the chance, kill you.”
Erik tried responding, but anger choked him, and he could only cough.
“But,” Vodrun said, clouding him with his bitter breath, “that would be very ungrateful after all I’ve done for you. Because of me, Erik, you will be the world’s savior. Or one of them. Now, isn’t that cheery?”
Erik worked up enough moisture to spit in his face. “Blight you,” he growled. “My father will kill you for this.”
“Your father?” Vodrun laughed, long and low. “Oh no, I don’t think he will. You see, I don’t work in this alone. Or did you not wonder why you were given elixir all your life?”