Riven
Page 1
Riven
A.R. Knight
Copyright © 2017 by A.R. Knight
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-946554-07-9
Print ISBN: 978-1-946554-08-6
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Contents
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
A teaser for the next book in the Riven trilogy - The Cycle:
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About the Author
Acknowledgments
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The Mercenaries Trilogy
The Metal Man
Wild Nines
Dark Ice
One Shot
The Riven Trilogy
Riven
The Cycle
Spirit’s End
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For Jonathan
Chapter 1
She’d been dead for a month, but damn if I didn’t love her.
Selena looked back at me from across the room, an ashen square occupied by swirling sheets of paper, a lone chair, and a closed door that Selena stood near. The walls were cracking, bits of mortar falling to the ground before getting swept up in Riven’s ever-present breeze. Selena gripped the doorknob, but she wasn’t going to open it. Not till I was ready.
My right hand slipped to the hilt on my waist, tied to my belt. My fingers fit into the creases on the leather grip. I lifted it free of the holster without a sound. As I held it up, the lash unrolled and played out along the floor like a snake waiting for its chance to strike. At the end of its long tail, the lash split into a pair of metal points. Points that glowed a faint blue.
“I’ve seen that enough times to not be impressed,” Selena said. Her voice came with a thousand memories, scratches and scars underlining every word.
“It’s part of my style,” I said. I walked forward to the door and took Selena’s hand off the knob. No reason to risk her for this. My gloved hand took her place, and I twisted.
The door opened inward, revealing an even greater disaster on the other side. Rubble from a caved-in roof spread across the floor, stone blocks split in half or smaller pieces scattered around. Dust swirled and danced in Riven’s cold light. The same gray cast colored everything in this world. Sitting on the rubble, head between his hands, was a man. Or at least what used to be one.
His hair was thinning, some spare spidery wisps falling to touch his dirty white collar. A bow-tie hung askew beneath his neck, the lone spot of black until the man’s torn trousers. He’d lost his shoes somewhere on the way to here. I noticed the watch on one hand, gold and shining. Rare to see something like that come through. Must have been a present, a treasured gift.
“Be careful,” Selena whispered. “This one’s got an edge.”
“It won’t get close,” I replied, and raised the lash.
As my lash went into the air, its length whipping up and stretching over my right shoulder, the man looked up at me. No matter how many times I’ve seen their eyes, they never fail to send a shiver running through my nerves. Pale blue fire burned where their pupils should be. The sign of a spirit that’s been consumed, that’s lost what little remained of who they were.
“Now you’ve come again,” the man said, standing. “Come to take what’s mine, as you have so many times before.”
“This will be the last, I promise,” I said, and then I swung the lash. It went forward, snapping in the air. The lash wrapped around the man’s neck, the metal points digging into the spirit. The points made the man’s gray skin stretch and warp as they dug in, and then I twisted my wrist.
The lash turned the same color as the man’s eyes. Blue fire tracing from my hand down the length of the lash and through those points into the man. The spirit howled, an otherworldly noise carrying all the pain the spirit had suffered to bring him here. To Riven and to let him stay.
As the blue flames covered the man, he fell to his knees and grew silent. Seconds later, I saw his eyes extinguish and twisted my wrist back. The lash returned to its normal black and, with a flick of my arm, I withdrew the coil and watched.
The man stood and walked towards me. I stepped aside, back into the room with the chair, and Selena moved with me. The man kept walking, right by us, through the room, and down the stairs at the other end. He would keep walking on a long journey until he reached the Riven’s center. The thing that both made Riven necessary and terrible. The Cycle.
“I thought you said this was a bad one,” I said to Selena. “He didn’t even put up a fight.”
“You heard him. He was angry,” Selena said. “You always say to let you know when there’s an angry one here.”
“You weren’t wrong. I heard him talk,” I replied. “He didn’t know where he was anymore. Thought I was someone else.”
“I hate that. I hate it when they talk about before.”
“All of them do that. Even you.”
“But you saw his eyes. Mine aren’t like that.”
That’s true. Any spirit with those burning blue eyes was lost. Needed to be sent back. I looked at Selena’s face, the smooth curves in the long scar down one side. Her eyes were gray, like the rest of this place. But her body, the blouse and pants that she wore, those still held color. And there was warmth in her lips. Warmth that I felt as I leaned in and brushed them with mine. Selena took the gesture, then looked away.
“There are more of them,” Selena said. “I keep seeing them, Carver. Keep seeing them running through the streets, losin
g their minds faster than before. I think they’re feeding on it.”
“Then we’ll just have to work harder,” I said. “I told you what’s happening out there. A lot of lives are being lost. Riven is going to be crowded for a while.”
“I feel it too.”
“What do you mean?”
“The rage. The anger at all the loss,” Selena said, pointing to her heart, and then her head. “It’s like a sickness, festering inside. Whispering to me and telling me to lose myself in it and follow the feeling to the end.”
I looked at her, studied those gray eyes for any hint of the fire. If you caught a spirit early enough, there were giveaways. Twitches and tells like clawing hands and snapping motions. The surest sign was a flicker behind the pupils, a spark that always led to the angry flame. Selena had none. I realized she was staring at my hand, my hand that still gripped the lash.
“You’re bound,” I said. “That should keep you safe. You can draw on my will, my life, whenever you feel that anger.”
Selena nodded. The same nod that she had probably given to her husband when she was alive, quiet and confident, but I could tell there was plenty left unsaid. She didn’t explain, just turned and walked from the room. As I followed, a far-off bell clanged, ringing through the vast gray maze of Riven’s city. That sound meant it was time to go home. Time to wake up.
Chapter 2
The first floor of the building consisted of a single room occupied by a lone table split down the middle, its two halves leaning down into each other. Square windows, with no glass, were bordered by empty bookshelves. Long ago cleared out by other guides. Before my time.
“How long had you been here before I found you?” I asked Selena.
She paused at the exit, a single doorway with the door no longer attached. Hinges hung off the sides at odd angles. The old door had been ripped off long ago. We didn’t like leaving hidden places in Riven.
“Thirty days,” Selena said. “Thirty days before Wiley lost his mind.”
Wiley. Her last husband. The one that gave her that scar. After she gave him one far worse.
“The man? The guy upstairs?” I said. “He’d likely been here a week or more. Long enough to lose himself. You and your husband had each other for help. He had no one.”
“You promise that won’t happen to me?”
“As long as I’m alive, you’ll be fine.”
Selena stayed quiet. She did that a lot. Whether that was because I couldn’t hold a decent conversation or because she had too many memories to dive into, I couldn’t be sure. Riven was a place for silence, though. There weren’t chirping birds. No noise from machines moving, crowds talking. Only the blowing of the wind.
I followed Selena into the avenue. Like the building we’d been in, the avenue was a mixture of ruins, empty storefronts, and unlit lampposts. A ghost town filled with literal ghosts.
We could see plenty of spirits, a dozen wandering the street as we looked up and down. Most were in various stages of being called. Pulled to the Cycle where they would vanish and find their way back to reality as a new life. Some, held through a stronger bond to something left behind, wandered with more purpose. Looked at the buildings with actual curiosity or longing. Those were the dangerous ones, the ones that would inevitably turn to anger if they resisted for too long.
Selena and I walked through them, passed by spirits wearing everything from rags to the wealthiest and most ostentatious of suits. There was no telling what a spirit would be wearing when they died.
Overhead an endless stream of thin clouds muted the light. Riven had no sun that I could see, only a constant gray cast. Ash filtered through the air. It was always there, had always been there, though none of the guides I’d ever asked knew where it came from. Not even Bryce.
My eyes moved to Selena. Even here she held her head high. That confidence, that willingness to confront whatever stood in front of her, I had noticed first. On the street not far from where I had crossed over. She had been fighting Wiley, right there on the road. Tearing at each other.
“I wanted to go,” Selena said as we walked along. “Wanted to be cycled. But then I kept seeing them, their mindless faces as they went on. I just couldn’t do it.”
“So you explored.”
She turned like this every once in a while. Reflective. Curious.
“And I wrote,” Selena said. “Don’t forget that. You’re going to memorize those and take them out of Riven, remember?”
“I promised, didn’t I?”
“I’ve heard a lot of those.”
“I keep mine.”
We reached the main square for this part of Riven. On one side, opposite where we came in, stood a large clock tower. The hours themselves were meaningless here. But the count, the number of those hours you spent in Riven, that meant everything.
“Do you want me to walk you back?” I asked.
“I’ll be fine,” Selena said. A flash of disappointment. “You’ll be back tonight?”
“Should be,” I said. “All depends on what we hear today.”
“Another one?”
“With the war, we have to keep in close contact. It’s getting rough out there,” as I finished the sentence my eyes took a jog around the courtyard. The large fountain in the center drew the most attention, spraying Riven’s water high into the air. I walked over to it, held out my hand, and felt the splatters on my palm. Lifted it to my mouth and tried to take a sip. The liquid went in my throat, over my lips, but it tasted like nothing.
“Carver. Are you forgetting something?”
Selena held me captive with a small smile. It twisted the scar cutting across her face into a sickle, and I loved it. It seemed so fitting for this place, for Riven. Beautiful imperfection.
“I can’t risk it here,” I said. Her face fell, settled into a line. “Sorry, Selena. If they found out, they’d blind me from Riven. Tonight though, I’ll meet you at the apartment.”
That didn’t quite knock the sadness out of her eyes, but Selena pulled her mask back on. Flashed one last smile, then left me alone in the courtyard. I went over the clock tower, pulled the handle on the large double doors leading inside.
The spacious chamber was full of stacked bookshelves, racks with various weapons, each one labeled for the guide who owned it. Table and chairs sat in the center. And behind that, leaning against the far wall, was a line of beds.
I slid the lash into its holder on my rack. Pulled the long knife out of its holster on my left and slotted it beside the lash. The next rack over held a giant double-edged spear Bryce called it a voulge. Waving symbols were etched into the thing’s pole. Bryce carved one every time he took out a ghoul. Something I hadn’t done. Hadn’t even seen. Bryce always said I was lucky for that.
I went over the beds, chose the one on the far right, and laid down. Almost as soon as I’d settled in, my eyes shut and sleep took me. I crossed over.
Chapter 3
The morning paper shot over my head as I woke up. The end of the tube came in over my window looking out over the streets west of downtown Chicago. The tube launched mail, paper, anything small enough to fit up from the ground and into my apartment, where it landed in a small basket.
The wall behind that basket, a jutting edge made just for this purpose, was padded with a thick cushion I’d nailed on when the first cracks from repeated impacts started to show. The start of the tube, at street level, had a small gate that only opened if you pressed the correct sequence of numbers on the keypad next to it. Prevented any kind of nasty bombs or pranks that people would otherwise send through the mail.
Outside the window, Chicago’s hazy morning was beginning. The sun bled yellow through a smoky filter. Buildings played staccato in the distance, and in between their rises shifted the occasional hulking mass of a mech, given away by their belching smokestacks. The sky overhead was peppered with thick blotches of varying length. Zeppelins carrying passengers, products, or in the case of the large one persistently
hovering over Lake Michigan, prisoners.
The cloudless March sky made it look like it would be a nice day.
I stood up and took the three steps from my bed to my kitchen, a squat affair with the table on one side, my icebox on the other, and the single oven in the middle. I pressed the button on the top of the icebox and it appeared to split in the middle, the cover rising to reveal two sides. On the left were the truly frozen items. An empty half, save for a bottle of Nikolai’s Finest vodka. I reached for it then paused. Not this morning. There was a meeting that I’d have to be presentable for.
The other side was loaded with small packets of food. One, labeled Breakfast Number Three, was on the top and I grabbed it. Breakfast Number Three was the best, eggs and bacon. Only two of those per week.
I slid it into the oven and turned it on by rotating a small dial on the front. Sparks sprayed out the back of the machine as it spooled up, adding their singes to the black smears on the wall behind. Then I had the chance to actually take a look at that paper.