Evan Burl and the Falling

by Justin Blaney

  "You have my word," I said. As I walked away I wondered if a single one of them had even the slightest clue they had just been taken in one of my more gorgeous swindles.

  I felt rather melancholy though as I made my way to the palace's enormous walk-in freezer box. Would I have felt better if at least one of them refused to sign? At least then I could have found a way to blackmail him or threaten his family or something. It was always amusing to see the shock on everyone's face when the one or two stubborn holdouts suddenly changed their minds.

  Oh well. At least I got what I wanted. I had to turn my attention to running El Qįr now which presented a whole slew of new problems. And then there was finding precious Evan Burl.

  But, first things first.

  I pulled open the large metal door that sealed the frozen air inside the icebox and stepped through the threshold. Instantly the hairs in my nose froze. I pulled my barathea silk cloak around me as tightly as I could. It was not made for cold weather.

  I wasn't sure how I was going to handle being the leader of such a repulsive people. There was nothing about El Qįr that recommended itself. How horrifying it would be if anyone I knew found out I was in charge of such a nasty, worthless corner of the world. I would be able to change some of that in time, but for now there were far more important tasks to tackle.

  I walked past row upon row of hanging carcasses. There must have been more than forty, 200 pound hogs hanging by their hind legs, waiting to have their hair burned off before being sliced into bacon and ham and tenderloin. The cold space was dark, and I wasn't fond of dead things, at least when they weren't stuffed. Particularly not a whole pack of slaughtered pigs hanging all around me.

  In the far corner of the icebox, where there was almost no light at all, hung eight slightly thinner shapes of various lengths all dangling upside-down by their feet and suspended in a row.

  Last night, the Chancellor and his seven sons, sadly, died in their sleep—that is if people fall asleep before they freeze to death, which I was relatively sure they did. Whether they were murdered or not didn't matter at that point. What did matter is that they died before midnight.

  In the matter of the Chancellor or his sons, the contract which the Regents just unanimously endorsed clearly stated 'As of today...' Everything that happened before 12:01 am that morning was immaterial and I was therefore the undisputed new Chancellor of El Qįr. Funny that none of the Regents thought of that as a possibility when they were calculating the odds of me outliving the Chancellor and his sons.

  I tried to ignore the shorter bodies hanging at the end of the row. I didn't like to see children mixed up in these kinds of messy affairs, but in this case it was impossible to keep them out of it.

  I stooped down and pulled at the Chancellor's Lictor Ring, wiggling it back and forth on his frozen knuckle. I breathed on it a few times to warm it up and then placed it on my left thumb. The man's robes were even more difficult to remove since he was completely stiff. I removed the belt that kept the robes from falling off his upside-down body, and then worked the thick garment off one arm at a time. The idiots who hung him up should have taken the robes off before they let the man's body freeze.

  Finally, I pulled the stiff robes around my shoulders, turned the old chancellor so his face was directed away from me, and found my way through the maze of pigs back to the exit. As I returned to the judgment room, I passed a large mirror and stopped to inspect my appearance. The brown color of the robes was not flattering at all, but the ring nicely caught a beam of sunlight streaking in through a nearby window. It looked as fine on my thumb as nearly any ring I owned. I always thought gold looked delicious against my dark skin.

  I turned, watching to see how the fabric lifted in the air behind me, but it didn't. It was still too frozen. I sighed and entered the judgment room where most of the regents were still taking their leave. Vice Regent Aman was gone, as I expected.

  When he returned, he would no longer be Vice Regent Aman.

  "Excuse me," I said.

  They stared in disbelief as I made my way around the table.

  "Before this session comes to an end, there was one more thing I wanted to speak with you about."

  The frosted Chancellor's robes draped around my shoulders and the Lictor Ring shimmered even more brightly in the well lit judgment room. As soon as possible, I would have the fabric thoroughly cleaned, but I was willing to endure wearing a dead man's things for a short while, if only to see the looks on the Regent's faces.

  "Regrettably," I continued, "the previous Chancellor and his seven sons died last night." I climbed the stairs to the raised chair and sat down. It, gratefully, was made of gold plated wood, not the reprehensible velvet on the rest of the Regent's chairs.

  "I'll thank you all in advance for your cooperation as we work through this difficult time of transition."

  And with that, the room exploded into commotion.

  I held up my hands, but they ignored me.

  "Silence," I roared, then after they fell quiet I added in a quieter tone, "we're not getting off to a very good start."

  They stared at me, blankly, and I was finally satisfied I had their attention, what little that was worth. Adrenaline began to pump through my veins.

  The hunt for Evan Burl was picking up speed.

  "When you woke this morning, you had no idea that today you would be called to turn from your pathetic lives of self-indulgence and live a life of higher purpose. Allow me to reveal that purpose to you now."

  Pulling something smooth from my pocket, I set it on the table and stood back. The regents leaned forward, craning their necks to see.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Evan

  Thursday

  6:03 am

  40 hours, 46 minutes until the Falling

  "Why are your fingers bleeding?" Henri asked. She looked like she was about to cry. I shoved my hands into my pockets to hide them from her. It wasn't the right time to explain.

  "It's nothing," I said. It had been almost three days since I threw the book in the fire. The questions were getting harder.

  "No. It's not." She tried to pull my hand out, but I turned away from her.

  "Just forget about it," I said.

  We were heading to the Caldroen, twenty minutes till sunrise, facing another long day of work. Henri was carrying the torch this morning because one of my hands still hurt from burns and the other was busy with my crutch.

  I wished for the thousandth time that we could go back to before Pike died; we used to be so happy. We were always looking for new ways to test just how special the fallings really were. Fire, cuts, broken bones, nothing harmed them. They could feel pain, just as severely as if they were normal like me, but no amount of personal abuse caused permanent damage.

  Cuts and bruises would heal, much faster than you might expect, but otherwise naturally. Except for feeling sick with hunger, they didn't even need to eat. We were starting to believe they might never die.

  I didn't share their gift, but they still needed me. Even Henri did. It would have been natural for them to look up to Henri—she was one of them and almost as old as me—but Mazol always treated me differently. After Pike died, I was the only thing standing between them and him. Mazol hated me more than anything in the world, but he always seemed to let me get away with more than the others. I didn't understand why until I read the letter in the book. He knew what I would become. He must have always been a little afraid of me.

  When we all had to start working, life got a lot worse. Mazol soon discovered how to use the fallings' gift against them. He made them work harder and harder, knowing he could never push them too far. Knowing no amount of exploitation could kill them. But they still got tired, still endured the pain of lashings and endless hours working in the Caldroen.

  For years, we thought the Fallings were blessed, but no one thought that anymore. When Little Sae died, we finally discovered the truth about whether they would live forever.

  Bu
t it didn't stop with Little Sae. They were all dying, one by one. After her was Anabelle. Then Lucy and Parkrose. It was the same with all four. They started acting funny, like their minds had cracked. They developed an itch, would disappear for hours, not show up for work.

  The last few nights have been sleepless for everyone. No one would dare close their eyes at night, with the screaming and pounding in distant rooms and dark passages of the castle and the fear of who would be next. Lucy tried to burn down the bedchamber wing before she disappeared. It took all night to put out all the fires she started.

  Just as the symptoms started alike, they all ended the same. Henri and I found Little Sae's body tapping against the window in the night, hanging by her neck in the wind.

  I try to remember the good times we had together, but all I can think of now is her bloody fingers. She managed to scratch words deep into the stone casing around the window between the time she hung herself and when she finally passed. When we found her, every one of her finger nails had been ripped off from the scratching. It must have taken all night for her to die, hanging there by her neck. I still didn't understand it. She was a falling. Even a hanging shouldn't have killed her.

  Then there was Anabelle. All that was left of her was a burned carcass we pulled from the Caldroen's furnace. Lucy ended her life as a misshapen mass of legs and arms collapsed in a closet.

  The three who were still recognizable when we found them were covered in scratches with something that looked like a rash on their necks and arms. Mazol said their deaths were accidents. Or suicide.

  I thought Mazol would want to help me figure out what was killing them. They were free labor. But he didn't want to talk about it. The first couple times I asked him about the affliktion he just stonewalled me. "Snooping around and sticking your nose where it doesn't belong" was what he said.

  I kept pestering him, but he would only say things like, "That's just the way things go sometimes," or "Death is a natural part of this world." Finally I gave up on him, not that I had a whole lot of other leads to go on.

  The fallings were an endangered species that was going extinct.

  Everyone was worried about who would be next, but no one talked about it. We were all watching—every itch could be the next case.

  "We should check on Pearl," I said.

  "We can't. We only have a few more minutes before sunrise."

  "We have time," I said, mostly to myself, but let it drop. Henri was trying to ignore what was happening; I couldn't blame her. Ignoring it was a lot easier than dealing with everything.

  I reached for her hand, but she jerked it away. She started dragging her fingers through her hair like a comb, as if she hadn't noticed me reaching for her. She was pulling back from me. And she wasn't the only one. Since the night I became a sapient, everyone had been acting so different. It was like they were all turning into robots. I feared Mazol was turning them against me, one by one. Could he be telling them what I was turning into?

  Well, they would all know soon enough anyway. I only had 40 hours left until the Falling. I was running out of time.

  I thought about the girls again who had died and rubbed my eyes to stem the tears. I could have saved them. I was with Anabelle when the symptoms appeared. If only I had done something when I saw her scratching her neck. I might have been able to save her. But I didn't. She died just hours after I kissed her good night. What a fool I'd been for not helping her when I had the chance.

  Pearl was acting strange now too, scratching her neck when she thought no one was looking, her pupils dilated, things like that. Fidgeting, scratching, shaking. All symptoms of the affliktion. I wasn't going to make the same mistake again. I had to do something.

  "Have you seen her eyes?" I said.

  She was staring straight ahead, walking one foot in front of the other like she had gears turning inside. "Huh?"

  "Pearl. Have you seen her eyes?"

  "Oh... her. No. I mean, they looked fine the last time I saw her."

  I let it drop again and devoted my attention to figuring out how to get out of working today. I couldn't afford to spend the next 12 working in the Caldroen. Not after wasting away the last two days, wavering back and forth, trying to decide whether I should resist using sapience or accept my fate.

  I had managed to not reveal my new powers to anyone else, but not using sapience was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. It built, like boiling steam inside me. The pressure was enough to make me start seeing things that weren't real. Once I thought I saw Little Sae walking through the dark hallways of the castle at night. I ran to her, but it was just my own shadow on the wall.

  To keep my mind off sapience, I spent every spare moment trying to figure out what was causing the affliktion. So far I hadn't gotten anywhere. There wasn't anything that matched the symptoms in any of my volumes of Natural History. Marcus called it the affliktion, but he really didn't know anything about it. He said he heard rumors about something like it one time, but he thought it was just stories kids tell each other at night. Mazol wouldn't say a word, of course. And none of the girls wanted to talk about it either.

  I had to figure it out before anyone else died, but I didn't have a clue where to look next. The closer we got to the Caldroen, the more my stomach churned. I couldn't keep Pearl out of my mind. What if she was already dead? I wanted to go check on her, but resisted. Henri wouldn't want to go, she would say I was being paranoid. Besides, we would know soon enough if Pearl didn't show up for work.

  We turned a corner and saw the heavy iron doors which lead into the towering, glass domed, Caldroen. There were six doors into the Caldroen, each door was made of 10 inch thick solid cast iron with a spinning combination lock on each side and 20, three inch round bolts that could be locked into place when the door was shut. They were far too heavy to mess with so we just left them all open. Mazol said one time that they were to keep the castle safe in case of an explosion in the Caldroen.

  I stepped through the door and the hairs stood up on the back of my neck. Glancing at Henri, I watched her glasses fog up from the change in temperature. She rubbed them with her shirt, seemingly unaware of the danger I felt. I walked to the edge of the third floor ledge and placed my hands on the rails. Leaning out, I looked all around the room, but saw nothing unexpected. We walked slowly up three narrow spiral staircases and I kept expecting to find little Pearl at every turn, seizuring on the ground.

  I tried to shake off the sensation as I made my way to the massive, finishing Clanker where I usually worked. We stepped onto the sixth level which serviced one of the largest clankers in the castle. I worked hard to keep my thoughts about Pearl to myself, yet I couldn't help but feel that someone was up there, on that very level, watching us.

  I shook off the feeling and began to limp slowly around the finisher, checking gauges, dials and levers. Henri stuck the torch in a hole in the wall and took a seat in one of the window seats and waited for the others to arrive. Her job didn't require any prep, so she usually just killed time until shift began. She sometimes offered to help me, but I usually refused. I wished she would offer today, I might have taken her up on it, but she didn't give any indication she was going to.

  I don't know why, but I felt suddenly angry; she wasn't the only one that had to deal with the fallings dying. But as I began to work I slowly found myself relaxing. Everything appeared in good working order and I began the complicated process of firing up the clanker. It was a good idea to let the finisher idle for a few minutes before work began, you didn't want to push a clanker like that full speed while it was still cold.

  I pushed a large black rubber button and pumped a foot switch several times. Then I turned a dial so it pointed to the number 50 and pumped the foot switch three more times. When I took my finger off the black rubber button, the clanker rattled for a moment, then sprang to life. Wheels and belts and gears began to move, slowly at first. After a few moments, I turned the dial to the number 70 and the clanker picked up sp
eed.

  I looked up at a long, thick, iron lever high above my head. It was for releasing the oil reserves that kept the clanker lubricated while in operation. There was a ladder nearby and a handbar up high for steadying myself, but I was overcome with the temptation to use sapience instead.

  I glanced at Henri; she wasn't watching. No one else was around. I could do it. It was tempting; just one little flick with my finger and the lever would point straight up. Of course, I could accidentally destroy the whole machine in the process. My ability to control sapience was totally unrefined. I was like an elephant in the dish pantries. But I still wanted to try. The familiar pressure of refusing to use sapience was building inside me. It would feel so good to let it out—like releasing the steam valve on the Caldroen boiler.

  Then I thought of having to leave Henri and Pearl and the others. I couldn't let them see what I would become. I had to fight it. That meant turning the lever the old way—with my hands.

  Well, mostly the old way.

  Ignoring the ladder, I jumped, easily heaving myself up by the bar with just one hand. I wasn't showing off, just frustrated about the whole situation. It felt good to burn off some energy anyway. Sapience wasn't just doing things with my mind; it had a lot of practical benefits.

  I touched my chin to the cold, damp bar and then pulled myself over so I was hanging by my armpit. The smell of machine oil made my nose burn.

  I reached with both hands and twisted the huge gauge. Just a week ago it took all my strength to move the heavy lever, but today I nearly ripped the thing clean off—and I was trying to go easy. I made a mental note to be even more careful of my strength, then dropped down.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Henri sitting with one arm pulled around her knees, staring out the paned glass into the courtyard. She twisted the black anklet ring nervously with her other hand. It was raining again, like it had been for weeks. We didn't get to go outside much anyway, but I still hated the rain. It seemed to make the huge castle feel even more empty somehow.