Etherwalker

by Cameron Dayton

  When Enoch got back, the monitor looked different. He tried to look closer, to focus his eyes, but his vision was blurry after staring for so long.

  The monitor pulsed.

  Oh no.

  Terror began to rise in Enoch’s heart as the monitor pulsed again and then began to stream with symbols. It was just like before. Just like the time he was marked.

  An icy pain grew in Enoch’s head.

  But I’m safe! This Unit is shielded!

  Quickly, almost instinctively, Enoch paused and sent his mind into the cables surrounding the room. They were still intact. They still absorbed the noise, still pulsed their chaos.

  And then Enoch saw the pattern.

  A pattern! The pulse isn’t random anymore! It’s magnifying my signature into a roar!

  Enoch desperately sent his mind diving along the cables’ length, searching for the source of this pattern. He found an invasive power line and followed it out of the cables and into the floor. The culprit was hidden in a steel bracer—one of the same steel bracers Enoch had admired for its role in the temperature control.

  But I didn’t look close enough!

  It was a small disk, similar to the one at the heart of the Core Unit, only this one was tasked with one simple directive—something so simple that even Enoch could read it in the circuitry: wait for a Pensanden pattern, then repeat that pattern through vibrations in the shield cables.

  It was heart-wrenchingly simple. And it had been orchestrated seamlessly into the room by the same hands that had created the rest. Enoch’s heart sank.

  Why would a Pensanden betray his own kind?

  And almost simultaneously:

  Destroy it!

  Enoch threw his mind at the device, pushing the lines apart and ripping motes—ripping electrons from their intended paths. Knowing what he saw, understanding their names and roles, gave him a fierce confidence. Sparks flew from the ceiling.

  The cables moaned and then were quiet.

  The monitor went black.

  Did I stop it in time?

  The room was deathly quiet. Enoch could hear the Huntsmen just outside the door, laughing at something. Apparently Styles had brought another tin of smallfish for Mesha. He let out a sigh.

  The screen came to life.

  No!

  It was a face. A face just like the first one Enoch had seen, except for the eyes. These eyes were empty. Bottomless holes.

  The face smiled.

  “I see you, Enoch.”

  Chapter 16

  “If they won’t go to the rot, they go to the gray.

  To the gray.

  And so it goes.”

  —Lodoroi Specter Chant

  Perched on the lone branch of a hangman’s tree, the skeleton played his guitar to the moon. The notes were fiercely sad, and they ached of lonely years under this same cold light. A thick breeze pushed through the swamp below, stirring the reeds into tired motion. The music climbed to a sobbing climax and then held its breath.

  Naked in the audible vacuum, the air shivered. Waited. Listened.

  The ending chords struck with cried resolution, echoing tears and bones and the salt of forgotten centuries. Almost as if on command, the last threads of cloud pulled back from the moon’s face. A final note pierced the night.

  For a long moment, the skeleton cast a bleak silhouette. He was desolation pressed against the sky.

  Oh, this is too cliché. It’s pathetic. All that’s missing is . . .

  In the distance, a nerwolf howled.

  And with that, I’m done. Even washed-out zombie rock stars have standards.

  Rictus lifted his fingers from the frets and the note died. He shook his head and set the guitar down on his lap.

  Poor baby. Of all the recent tragedies we’ve seen, your scars may be the hardest to bear.

  The specter clicked his dry tongue at the jagged claw marks that transected the instrument’s soundboard from below the bridge almost to the neck joint. A guitar like this was a rare treasure nowadays, and Rictus had gone thirty years since his last—he was picky about what he’d play. That combined with the frustrating habit of outliving his instruments meant that Rictus tended to go long stretches with only a sword on his back. It was nice to remember why he’d had an amp built into his LifeBeat all those years ago.

  That was an expensive upgrade, but it may be the one thing I’m actually proud of wasting my fortune on.

  And the damage to the guitar was mostly cosmetic, with long strips of that beautiful red lacquer peeled away from the pale ash wood underneath. The strings were a loss, but a minor one. Rictus always kept an array of those wrapped around the grip of his longsword.

  Always keep some spare strings handy.

  Funny which habits won’t die no matter how many centuries you live. You’d think brushing your teeth would have lasted at least past the first hundred years. I stopped after fifty.

  He slung the guitar behind his back and sagged forward, his arms across his knees. With an audible click, Rictus dropped his chin against his chest. It was a posture of exhaustion. Of resignation. The red light at his chest winked knowingly.

  Little bastard.

  The LifeBeat had brought Rictus back together like it always did, and this had been one of the more memorable awakenings of his long life.

  Alone with a broken neck, missing both arms, and covered in congealing troll blood. Now those would make good lyrics to a song!

  The distant nerwolf howled again, and Rictus rolled his eyes.

  Waking up alone is always the worse part. I wonder if they left because they thought I was too mangled for a LifeBeat to fix. Maybe they had to escape, couldn’t wait? They were headed back off the bridge last I saw . . .

  Rictus deliberately avoided thinking of the other possibility—that the bodies he glimpsed in the shadows below the bridge did not all belong to trolls.

  Well, good for them. I couldn’t have been much use in the escape anyway, especially after losing Lefty and Righty.

  Rictus remembered coming to in the still darkness and calling for Enoch or Cal or anyone who wasn’t a troll to come help him re-arm; he remembered having to squirm around and use the dim red light of his LifeBeat to locate his scattered self. He’d done this before, of course, but never in such total darkness. It had made what was already an arduous process almost unbearable.

  The specter had inched his mangled body across the bridge and then taken a long and frustrating hour trying to position himself so that the knobby head of his bare humerus could slide right into the bony cavity below his shoulder. He finally found the right spot, pressed down, and tried to hold still while the nanites powered by his LifeBeat went to work. It was only a few minutes before the connective tissue was strong enough for Rictus to roll over and situate himself over the other arm. The LifeBeat had jetted steam into the frosty air as the tiny bio-fusion generator that powered the machine was pushed to its limit. Rictus wondered if his guardian angel would be able to handle another resurrection.

  The little gal is getting along in years—doing pretty well despite the neighborhood’s deplorable lack of repair centers.

  Rictus reached into the pocket of his newly-healed leather jacket to pull out the disc he’d found.

  Enoch will be glad to see you, won’t he? Almost missed you in the dark there.

  Newly rez’d and stiff, his LifeBeat steaming like a teapot, Rictus had almost walked right past the disc. Only a last-second reflection of red light had caught his attention, sparked his curiosity enough to investigate. It was still tied with the cord Enoch had worn around his neck.

  But no blood on the cord. No blood anywhere but around where I made my mess. They got in a scuffle, but I think they made it out. I have to believe that.

  The journey from the bridge to the exit hatch had been slow and uneventful. Rictus had tried to search for any sign of Cal and Enoch, but it was too dark to discern much in those cold metal tunnels. Rictus had waited at the tunnel exit, the one C
al had told him of, for an entire day. He had a hope that maybe this would be a meeting spot. That idea died as the sun set, and Rictus realized that he had to keep moving on the chance that Enoch and Cal were already ahead of him. So he had given a specter’s sigh and stepped into the murk, heading north.

  Enoch was going north, going to Tenocht. Nobody was going to convince him otherwise, that’s for sure. Stubborn kid.

  The specter had been making good time, avoiding the more obvious trails and cutting northward in a straight line. He didn’t want to deal with the nut-job Swampmen if he didn’t have to, but he wanted to catch up with his friends as quickly as possible. Rictus’s long bony legs allowed him to traverse even the boggiest areas at a swift pace, and he wasn’t bothered by the standard worries of leeches, snakes, or carnivorous fish.

  No blood. Just enough nanite-transfer fluid to make a mosquito puke.

  Rictus looked down and knocked some mud off of his big black boots. The LifeBeat kept the boots whole, but never really did much to shine them. He supposed that was provided by the later models.

  I think I covered fifteen miles today—an impressive hike for anyone packing a moly-vibe longsword and a six-string Stratocaster on his back.

  Rictus had only stopped because he feared passing his companions in the dark. A specter didn’t sleep, but he could take some down time and let his nanites recharge. The poor guys had been stitching up his shredded leather jacket all day, and Rictus was sure that their microscopic little spinnerets were tuckered out.

  He lifted his head and stared into the moon. Those old familiar shapes, the craters and highlands, were always a welcome sight. It was nice to have something so constant in a world that changed every couple hundred years.

  So I’ll keep following them north, then. I have to. Enoch and Cal are useless without me.

  * * * *

  In the still water beneath the tree, a dozen wet shapes moved silently and unseen. They had heard the music, and they came armed with ropes, nets, and long barbed spears. They knew how to subdue a specter. Such things did not belong in their swamp.

  Chapter 17

  “They will soar on wings like eagles;

  they will run and not grow weary,

  they will walk and not be faint.”

  —Isaiah 40:31 NIV

  Enoch had been spending more and more time in the Gardens. The trees, the greenery, all of it reminded him of home. He felt . . . emptiness . . . when he thought of the cottage he had grown up in. Sure, the tower he lived in now was incredible; the ancient tek structures the king had him bringing back to life filled his dreams with electrons and circuitry. Enoch finally felt like his mind and talents were being put to use instead of merely put to practice. But sometimes Enoch felt a void. There was no other way to describe it. He wasn’t sure if that meant that he missed Master Gershom, or if that meant that he was incapable of the feeling. Did this mean he was a bad person? Should he care? I don’t know if a Pensanden can miss somebody, really. I think a shepherd is supposed to.

  But now I’m a prince.

  A prince who cannot leave his own castle. And that is why I’ve decided to disobey the king and come up here. If I’m not allowed down in Babel, then I am going to go wherever I please inside the tower.

  Enoch felt guilty for going against King Nyraud’s orders. Father’s orders. But in a funny way, he felt like he was doing what a prince would do. Father was constantly urging him to “step beyond your commoner past and start preparing to rule.”

  Well, I’m going to start by ruling where I can go inside my new home.

  He cringed. Master Gershom would never approve of that kind of thinking.

  And Master Gershom is dead. He raised me blind to who I was, to who I can be, and then left me to figure it out all by myself.

  Thoughts like that had been troubling Enoch lately. He remembered being happy back in Midian, remembered long sunny afternoons free from the type of chaos, energy, and noise buzzing through the tower. But how could he have been happy as a shepherd? A commoner?

  Well, at least a commoner wouldn’t have to worry about the Serpent hunting for him. Finding him.

  The memory still brought goosebumps to Enoch’s skin. Huntsmen pounding on the unexpectedly-locked door, bright sparks against the darkness of the room, and a face staring midnight into his heart. The face was gone by the time the king had burst through the door, trailing alchemists and Huntsmen. By then, the room was dead.

  The surprising thing was that King Nyraud—father—hadn’t been worried when Enoch told him about the face. About the betrayal of the Core Unit. If anything, Father was excited.

  That excitement had condensed into a frenetic and unceasing energy. The king’s ability to inspire his followers, to imbue them with a shared sense of ambition, continued to astound his new son—in a matter of hours, Nyraud had transformed the tower into a hive of military preparation. Night and day, the halls were crossed with running Huntsmen and alchemists with their arms full of parts, plans, and newly forged weaponry.

  Enoch had been tasked with the revitalization of the Ark’s tek, from the defensive cannons to the perimeter cameras to . . . the Core Unit. He had been surprised that his new father wanted that to function again—after all, hadn’t the Core Unit alerted the Vestigarchy to Enoch’s location? Wasn’t that the reason why Babel was now locked down, with frustrated caravans camped out in the plains beyond the city walls?

  Again, King Nyraud wasn’t angry about the machine’s betrayal—he acted as though this message from the Vestigarchy had somehow freed him into action. It made no sense to Enoch. Not that his father’s movements were heedless—he was still being careful. But he was being careful at a breakneck speed.

  Father knows that he doesn’t have much time, but he knows that he can be ready. He’s been preparing for this his entire life.

  The king and a small army of his black-robed alchemists had descended on the Core Unit room with carts of tools, searching for any signs of intrusion or sabotage. Even with all of these supposed “experts” at work, Enoch had still found it necessary to point out the location of the treasonous circuitry that had broadcast his pattern to the sky.

  These alchemists were sometimes hard to work with. The strange, pale men treated him with an odd mixture of reverence and ill-disguised hatred. They took orders from him with swift and unquestioning determination, but Enoch felt a bitter tint of hostility in every “Yes, Milord.” He wondered about this and supposed that perhaps this was something nobility could always sense in the commoners due to their differing social stations. But then Enoch remembered his encounter with the alchemists upon first entering Babel: the angry looks of the crowd, the thrown fruit.

  I suppose they see me as a symbol for all of the persecution they’ve suffered. Just for learning about how the world works.

  In the end, even Enoch had to agree that the room was safe. The defensive cables were broadcasting their interference, and the damage he had caused trying to stop the signals was quickly repaired. Regardless, Enoch avoided that room; he only spoke to the Core Unit when father ordered him to, usually after encountering something completely baffling in the tower circuitry.

  Something that is happening with less and less frequency.

  Mesha leapt from his shoulder to chase after a redjay that had landed on the grass in front of them.

  At least she’s feeling at home. Smallfish from the Huntsmen, a warm cushion in front of the fire, and occasional covert trips through the Garden. I’ve never seen an animal so content. Or one that looked like she deserved to be so content.

  Enoch sighed and leaned back against the trunk behind him. The work his father had tasked him with was fascinating and exciting. But it was also tiring. The boy looked forward to these evening walks in the Garden with Mesha as times when he could step away from his afila nubla, away from the circuitry and microscopic busyness of Babel.

  If I get caught, I’ll tell father that I was practicing my abilities with the Ark camer
a network. Testing their range, seeing if it was possible to move through the tower—all the way up to the Gardens!—without being seen. He doesn’t need to know about the hidden lift I found . . .

  Enoch smiled, finally exulting in his powers. Father would be proud to learn that his son had been able to find a way into the forbidden Gardens, proud to know that the new Prince of Babel had been spending evenings here amongst the trees for several days now.

  At least he will be proud—whenever I decide to tell him.

  I am getting better at this. I’m understanding what my powers can do.

  Enoch flicked a beetle off of his sleeve and sat.

  Too bad I’ll never get to actually use these “understood” powers anywhere but inside the Great Ark’s dusty guts.

  King Nyraud had forbidden Enoch from leaving the gates of the city. He couldn’t risk losing the greatest asset he had against the Vestigarchy. Enoch understood. But these trips to the Garden helped him to feel a little less trapped.

  The king had said that the Hiveking and his blackspawn would be at their gates soon. Enoch wasn’t so sure—two weeks had passed already without a sign of coldmen. He asked how his father was so sure that the face he had seen was from the Vestigarchy. It certainly hadn’t said anything to identify itself—just those few chilling words of recognition before disappearing into the blackness of the monitor. Instead of answering, the king had gone quiet, staring Enoch straight in the eyes.

  He knows it was the Serpent. I do too. He is impatient with self-deception.

  Who else would have the power to respond so quickly to the pattern—no, the word is code—the code identifying a Pensanden, which couldn’t have been broadcast for more than a few minutes? Who else could have generated enough power to send a return signal back to Enoch’s exact location?