Birthright (The Technomage Archive, Book 1)

by B.J. Keeton

  Chapter thirty-Two

  Ceril had always possessed a very active imagination; however, one thing he had never wondered about was what it would feel like to have his arm ripped off. It had never seemed like an issue, so he never given it much thought.

  If he had, he would have never been able to imagine the agony that actually came from having the flesh, muscle, and connective tissue torn and ripped until they were no longer part of his body.

  If there were one positive for Ceril in that situation, it was that his arm was already broken. He was at least spared experiencing that pain at the same time he lost his arm. It was as though the Jaronya’s high priest allowed him to atone for his heresy with an installment plan.

  He saw his arm tear. He saw the flesh rend, and he saw the blood gush. The pain was the only reason he knew that it was happening to him. In one way, he felt disconnected from the torture, like he was watching a holovid back in his quarters at Ennd’s. In another, far more painful way, he was connected all too intimately.

  His screaming peaked when his arm was actually severed and dropped into the Conjured flames beneath him. Ceril watched his former flesh bubble and constrict, burn and char like any meat would. There was no indication that it had once been a part of his body. Blood flowed freely from the wound, fell into the fire, and sizzled into coagulation rather than pooling.

  You Conjure as though you were the messiah, the high priest said inside Ceril’s head. You blaspheme. You wear their divinity on your skin. You are a heretic. You wield the Ancestors’ sanctified weapon as though you were a god. You commit sacrilege. Your presence here desecrates my temple. You kill my flock with no remorse. You are not welcome here. You are not divine. You are not the ones who will save us and return the Jaronya to their glory. You are pretenders, and you will die for it.

  She stood in the fire, its flames licking her robes, but not burning her or her clothing. The fire might as well not have existed for her.

  Ceril panted between screams. He managed to say, “I—never claimed to be—your messiah.”

  You did. Oh, you did. You came and you had their magic. Somehow, you had one of the swords.

  “Yes,” Ceril said. “We Conjured.” He panted between words and sentences. He gritted his teeth and continued. “We are Charons—”

  You lie, the priest said calmly. She waved her hand toward Ceril, and his head whipped to the side as though he had been slapped.

  “No,” said Ceril. “We are Charons—”

  His head snapped in the other direction. You will not speak the sacred name of the Ancestors in my presence, unbeliever. You will not dishonor the gods.

  Ceril closed his eyes. “If they are your gods, priest,” he gasped, “then…I am not…an unbeliever.” He spoke through clenched teeth. “My name is Ceril Bain, and I am the leader of a Charonic—”

  Ceril barely felt the snap when the priest twisted one of her holographic symbols to break his femur. The loss of his arm had almost numbed him to lesser forms of pain.

  “—team on a mission to find our way home,” Ceril finished through clenched teeth. “I never claimed to be your messiah. We never meant to kill…anyone. We only did what we…had to do,” he panted.

  As do I, the priest said. She walked gracefully through the fire to Ceril. The lowest symbol on her collar became active, and she tapped its surface with three fingers.

  Ceril dropped a few feet toward the flame, but he was still pressed solidly into the wall. His eyes became level with the high priest’s, and their gaze met and lingered. The situation would probably have made Ceril uneasy under different circumstances.

  It has been my duty longer than you can understand to protect the Jaronya. My people. My place. I will not believe that the messiahs referred to in the Text are careless, callous, ignorant whelps who abuse divinity.

  Ceril had nothing to say to her. No amount of logic was going to help him. She was a zealot. He could try to reason, to explain what he and the others were doing, but she wouldn’t understand.

  Maybe she couldn’t understand, given her interpretation and understanding of what Charons were.

  Do you deny the charges? she asked.

  Ceril almost laughed. They were in a noxious Instance where Charons were revered as gods. His leg was broken, he was missing an arm, and his friends would probably burn to death soon.

  Yet, the part that Ceril wouldn’t get past, the part that he felt was the most ludicrous was that this priest actually thought she was bringing him up on charges. The fire pit, the guards, all of this was her idea of a trial.

  Of justice.

  “No,” Ceril said, his teeth clenched. “I don’t deny anything.”

  I expected more pathetic lies. More of your heresy. I am impressed at your ability to recognize the truth in your final moments.

  Ceril opened his eyes and stared at her. Her eyes unnerved him. She had been too far away for him to notice, but now that they were inches from one another, Ceril saw that her eyes had no pupils or irises. She saw the world somehow through pale whiteness. Ceril was barely lucid enough to note the irony.

  “These are not my final moments,” he said.

  The priest sighed. Both her hands manipulated the glowing symbols projected from her collar. She twisted one to the left, another to the right; her hands working the holographic sigils like an expert musician would her instrument. She finally aligned the glyphs, reset each one’s position, and finished by pressing them like a sequence of buttons.

  As the last one depressed, Ceril felt a weight press against him, pushing him further into the wall.

  He found it hard to breathe as the pressure forced the air from his lungs. He felt his ribs strain and then crack, one by one, the sound echoing dully in his torso. His fingers and toes snapped under the weight of the invisible force, and Ceril screamed. He barely even noticed his other leg breaking. His voice wore thin, and within a few seconds, no sound came when he tried.

  The high priest waved at Ceril and his head snapped back and forth. He eventually found himself staring at her again. She said, It is time, heretic.

  Ceril closed his eyes and tried to find calm, but all he found was fear. Anger. There was no cause for this. There never had been. He and the others had been taken against their will when they were just trying to do their job. They were trying to find a way home, to find some way to protect the people of their world from terror. The Jaronya had kidnapped them, held them prisoner, and then this priest had killed Swinton, maybe all of them. They were just kids, not even Rited Charons yet. None of them deserved this.

  Ceril couldn't see if Chuckie's barrier was still active. If it was, he knew Chuckie had to be running out of juice soon.

  Ceril focused on his fear and anger, hoping that his nanite skin had recalled to him after killing the last Jaronya. If it didn't, then he had no hope. He would die here. If it had, there was still a very good chance he would die, but at least he might be able to save his friends.

  He thought about them dying senselessly. He thought about himself dying senselessly. He thought about never seeing Gramps again. His heart ached at the thought of the gentle old man, of the garden that they both loved. He thought of the twin suns beating down on them and the stories he had loved to hear at night. He became angry that he was never going to get to hear another one, never get a chance to give his grandfather another hug.

  He thought about all the time he spent on his thesis, doing research that served no greater function now than to be archived away and probably never read again.

  He thought about Ethan Triggs, and how the boy had been no older than Ceril was right now when he died. Ceril became angrier at the thought. Even though he had tried to atone for killing him, had worked hard to move past being a killer, the fact remained was that he had taken someone else’s life.

  Ethan Triggs had been roughly as old as Ceril was now. Which meant he was far too young to die. He had been able to leave nothing behind. Even if it had been an accident
, Ethan was still dead.

  Ceril thought about how young he was himself. And how in his mind, he, too, had accomplished nothing. He had left nothing behind, either. He had made it his unspoken goal to amount to something because Ethan couldn’t. And now, Ceril couldn’t.

  That made him angry. That scared him. He was scared of his existence meaning nothing.

  So he visualized the nanites shooting from his face to the high priest’s, penetrating her eyes, eating into her pores, filling her mouth and nose. He could see in his mind's eye the blackness burrowing its way through the soft tissue of her head and into her brain. He could see in his mind the nanites flowing across neural pathways, preventing synapses from firing, blocking vital electric current from reaching their destinations, making her body unresponsive.

  He visualized the tiny machines releasing any energy they had left, depleting them and severing the bond that bound them together in order to liquefy the grey matter that controlled the priest. He could see the terrifying white eyes collapsing under the strain of the tsunami within her head. Ceril pictured her brain tissue, sodden with inert nanites, pouring from her eye sockets, her nostrils, even her ears and mouth. He saw the grey liquid, speckled with black clumps of tiny machines and streaked with red blood, dripping on a floor barren of fire.

  He saw the priest's body go limp, her knees unlock themselves, her leg muscles no longer able to support the weight of her body.

  Ceril watched in his mind the symbols from her collar go dark, as though they required her very life energy to exist. With them gone, he saw himself falling to the ground, and he could see Chuckie's black-and-white dome still intact. He could see any remaining fire the priest had Conjured die, the nanites being recalled to the octagonal stakes to which his team members had been bound.

  Ceril saw all of this in his mind, focused on the outcome he needed, and with a tenacity and necessity he hoped was really inside him, he loosened any of the nanites still connected to his consciousness and made his vision a reality.