Empyrion I: The Search for Fierra

by Stephen Lawhead

  “Dead?” Yarden asked in mild surprise.

  “No, I mean better off without him. He wasn’t much after all. You could have done much better. You were young, you had lots of other opportunities.”

  “Had,” huffed Yarden softly.

  “Yes, had. Well, like you say, it can’t be helped. You certainly did all you could. No one could have done more, I must say.”

  Treet groaned. Why were they talking like that? It was life and death they were talking about, not the price of eggs in Egypt. This was his life, his death—he wanted it treated with a little respect.

  “Stop it…” he murmured.

  But the voices went on talking in that odd, insane way. He could no longer distinguish the words, but he heard their buzz and at one point recognized Calin’s voice among them—a man’s voice, too, but not Crocker’s or Pizzle’s—his father’s voice. They were all talking about him, about his miserable life and even more miserable death—he knew it and resented it. “Stop!” he said again, his voice rasping in a dry throat, the mere rush of wind over desert sand. “Stop, damn it!”

  Treet pushed himself up on his elbows and inched toward the tent flap. His muscles, stiff and unyielding, trembled and resisted the feeble effort, which was, he knew, his final mortal act. They can’t talk about me like that, he thought. I’m dying. It isn’t right…

  He flopped forward and reached the door, pushed his head through the curtain. Though it nearly exhausted his ebbing strength, he stretched his arms forth and hauled himself halfway through the opening, where he stopped. The air was cool on his skin, the light dim. Either it was getting dark or his eyesight was going, probably the latter. He didn’t care. The voices stopped as he emerged from his room, he noted with grim satisfaction.

  Good, he thought, I’ve given them something to think about. They didn’t know I could hear them; now they’ll think twice before writing anyone off quite so casually. But there was something else he wanted to do—one final thing. It was why he’d crawled out into the hallway. What was it? His head was no longer clear; the thoughts wouldn’t come.

  Fog-wrapped images played before him. He saw once again the face of his father, looking at him in frank disgust over a priceless M’yung Dynasty perfume jar smashed into smithereens. He was seven years old and had not meant to break the ancient thing; it slipped while he was looking at it. “You’ll never learn, will you?” said his father. “You’re hopeless.”

  It would have been better if his father had hit him, walloped him a good one for his clumsiness. That he could have accepted. But the once-and-for-all pronouncement was too severe and unremitting. There was no appeal.

  “I’m sorry,” breathed Treet. “S-sorry …”

  The drone of the voices returned again, more insistent. He’d given them something to think about. Treet smiled, feeling his lips crack as the skin stretched. He tasted blood on his tongue. The taste brought him around somewhat—at least to the point of remembering why he had crawled from his deathbed. He had a message.

  “Yar-den … I… love you.”

  Again the voices buzzed over his head. Dark spots swam in the air above him. Flies, he thought. Not voices … flies. They were only flies all along.

  Pizzle heard the sound of his heart beating in his brain. It thumped with a droning monotony on and on and on. Beating, beating. Growing louder and ever louder. The sound reminded him of the Fieri airship’s engines beating in his dreams—the airship that had passed over them, thus condemning them to death. The sound made him angry. His anger propelled him up through unconsciousness, fighting through layers of heaviness like a swimmer ascending from cold, obscure depths.

  With an effort he pushed himself up on his elbows; Crocker lay beside him. Treet lay half in, half out of the tent. Both were still, barely breathing, the light inside the tent making their faces livid and grotesque.

  He licked his lips with a thick, dry tongue. The sound of the thrumming engines persisted. Now it came from outside. The sound became a hateful thing—a mocking, ugly thing. He would silence it.

  With a groan he lurched over Treet’s body and out into bright sunlight, where he lay on his back with his arm flung over his face. But the sound, the sound of the airship engines, grew louder. He roused himself to look up.

  The hot white sun dazzled his eyes. When his eyes could take the light, he saw an empty, uncaring sky, the blazing disk of the sun the only feature. As he watched, the sun went into eclipse. How strange, he thought, to witness a solar eclipse. I’m dying and I see an eclipse.

  Since when do eclipses make noise? he wondered. Wait … wait … this is not right … Muddled thoughts surged around in his head. What is it? What is it about this that is not right?

  Pizzle was on his feet now, swaying, peering through his shielding hands at the sun. An airship! It had to be. He had one more chance. One more chance to show the others, one more chance to survive.

  He staggered to the tent and thrust his arm in, dragged out the sling, and opened it. Out tumbled the smoke canister he’d made. He picked it up and knelt over it. His eyesight wavered, but he forced himself to concentrate on jamming the wires down inside the container. He held the fragment of solar cell toward the sun and felt the wires grow warm in his hand.

  Last time it had failed and he had let everyone down. It would not fail this time; he would not be the butt again.

  “Go-o-o,” he cooed, his voice a breeze through dry grass. “Ple-ease, go-o-o.”

  A fizzing sound came from the canister. “Go-o-o!” He willed the canister to ignite.

  Smoke started pouring from the top of the cylinder. But it wasn’t enough. The hole in the top was too small and only a thin, wispy trail of gray smoke emerged.

  “No!” he cried, jerking the wires out. Pizzle grabbed the top of the canister, but the cone-shaped top was hot and the metal seared his hands. He yelped and dropped it in the sand.

  He scooped it up again and scratched at the top, heedless of the hot metal or the pain. His fingernails tore, but the lid refused to budge. “Arghh!” he roared, scrabbling with his bloody fingers on the burning canister.

  His hands were blistered now. The airship was closer, almost directly above him. He held the smoke bomb in the crook of one arm and braced it there, screaming in pain. “Ahh-hh!” He placed all four fingers on the ragged edge of the lid, gritted his teeth, and pulled. “Off! O-off-ff!” he cried in agony.

  The stubborn lid finally loosened and spun off. Oxygen flooded in to touch the solid fuel inside, and the canister erupted like a small, mobile volcano.

  F-f-f-whoosh!

  Smoke and fire spurted out in a huge fireball that rolled up into the sky. Pizzle fell back, reeling, dazed, his face burned and blackened, his hair smoking.

  The orange-and-black fireball rolled heavenward—up and up—higher and higher, passing right in front of the airship.

  Pizzle rubbed the ashes of his eyelashes out of his eyes and looked up. The airship’s shadow passed over him, and he saw it glide by. He fell back, exhausted by his futile last attempt.

  It was then that he noticed the absence of sound.

  He had gone deaf?

  He shouted and heard his voice croak. No—not deaf! The engines had stopped! He squirmed and rolled over on his stomach, raising his head weakly. The airship, totally silent now, was heeling majestically around. It was coming back!

  Pizzle lay facedown in the sand and cried.

  FIFTY-THREE

  “What do you think that is?” asked one of the Fieri pilots idly. He leaned over his instruments, gazing down at the immense white sheet of desert beneath them.

  “Where?” his copilot responded.

  “There—just off beamline to the south. I thought I saw something—a glint of color. It’s gone now.”

  “You’d better tell Bohm.”

  “I don’t know. It was probably nothing. You look too long and you start seeing things down there.”

  “I know what you mean. Still,” the young m
an peered down at the dunescape as it rippled beneath the airship, “let’s take it down a bit closer and see. Bohm’s instructions are explicit.”

  “Do you really think they saw something?”

  “Oh, they saw something. But they should have turned back to check it out.”

  “Would you? Look at it down there. As many times as I’ve flown this route I’ve never seen anyth—” He stopped in midsentence to watch a bright red-orange and black ball of flame billow up right in front of the craft. “Now that was something! I’m turning back. Get Bohm—I think we’ve found what he’s looking for.”

  The Fieri airship hung like an enormous rusty moon above the two forlorn tents of the spent travelers. The rescue party had wasted not a second, deploying the survival cylinder the moment the airship hovered to a stop over the tents.

  Fieri physicians hit the sand running and quickly reached the dying wayfarer whose signal had alerted them. In the next fevered seconds, electrolyte fluids were administered and the condition of the patient was carefully noted. He was placed in the cylinder and whisked back to the airship, while the rescuers turned their attention to the women in the first tent.

  The Fieri spoke softly to themselves, wondering how the fugitives could have come so far in the desert, remarking on their unusual, old-fashioned clothing, coaxing their patients to live just a little longer so they could be cared for properly aboard the airship.

  They had been startled when one of the refugees, lying half out of the second tent, partially revived before they had a chance to minister to him.

  “Get him out of the sun!” said Bohm, director of the rescue operation. “Quickly! Get him a stabilizer!”

  “He’s saying something,” said Jaire, a young female physician. “Flies? I don’t understand it.”

  “He’s delirious. Here—you two,” Bohm directed two aides, “help Jaire get him wrapped up. He will go after these two.”

  “There is one more inside this tent,” said one of the aides.

  “Bring him out. I’m almost finished here. Take these two to the cylinder. Gently, now.” He touched a triangular tag dangling from an epaulet. “There are five. Three alive so far. Two are on their way up now. I want them started on fluid replacement and stabilization.”

  The Fieri leader hurried to the next tent, glancing at Treet as he passed. He peered into the face of the fugitive and whispered, “Infinite Father, guide our hands and minds; help us save them.”

  When all had been brought aboard, the airship, its engines booming echoes into the dune valleys, moved slowly off, gaining altitude as speed increased, leaving behind two orange tents and a scattering of footprints in the sand.

  Considering what one had to go through to get there, death was not so bad. At least it was peaceful and the body no longer ached. There was even a muzzy sort of awareness— call it a phantom persistence of being that allowed inconsequential thought—little more than I am …I am … I am… over and over and over.

  Most surprisingly, death was not black. It was red. Rather, it was vermilion with clear blue highlights. And it was anything but the everlasting silence Treet had always believed it would be. Death was a clattering din, truth be told. There was a droning hum that drummed like an irregular heartbeat, an aggravating click like that of many steel balls smacking together simultaneously, and the sound of static electricity snap-crackling as from an oversized Leyden jar.

  Were these the sounds of his own dissolution? He did not know. If not for the noise, he could have gotten used to it. But the incessant racket kept him from the quiescence of his insubstantial thoughts.

  Treet opened one eye a crack. Surely that wouldn’t hurt anything—being dead and all, one was allowed certain license, and as yet no one had read him any rules regarding the conduct of a corpse. He supposed that on opening his eye he would see that oft-described sight of his own empty husk of a body splayed where his soul had left it, staring blankly up into everafter, a poor advertisement for the tenacity and resilience of the human species.

  Instead he saw a woman with long henna-colored hair tied back to grace a slender neck, bent as she peered into the screen of a machine, not much bigger than a common calculator, which was emitting all those annoying clicks. Treet liked what he saw, so he opened the other eye—fearing that so flagrant an action might cause an immediate forfeiture of his corpse status, but being unable to help himself anyway.

  The woman sat perched atop a tall stool. She was dressed in a smock of sea-foam green with a loose, open jacket edged in blue. The jacket had deep pockets and a blue belt tied at the side, accenting the slimness of her waist. Her long legs were sheathed in soft white boots that laced to just below her pretty brown knees. Sunlight from an oval window flared her hair, making a halo of red gold around her head. A wisp of cloud trailed by the window, giving the impression of flight.

  This must be an anteroom of the afterlife, thought Treet, complete with angel and cloud city.

  Directly over him a cone-shaped instrument hummed and crackled with static electricity as a ruby light glowed from within it. He lay on a flat, padded table, his head held in position by a contoured pillow something like a sandbag. A white, gauzy cloth covered his loins or he would have been completely naked. Yet he was not cold. In fact, his skin glowed with the rosy hue of a sun-worshipping health freak, rather than the insipid pallor of the recently deceased.

  The rest of the room, from what Treet could see without moving his head, was kept in shadow. But the shadows were uncluttered, and apparently he and the angel were alone. He worked his mouth and found that it moved quite easily, although it took a few moments for his voice to emerge. And when it did, he did not recognize the raspy wheeze as his own.

  “Are you real?” he asked. The gummy film on his tongue tasted as if something nasty had crawled in his mouth and died.

  The angelic being turned from the clicking screen and fastened concern-filled eyes on him. Her eyes were the exact color of her hair—ruddy brown with flecks of gold. Delicate arched brows drew together, and her lips pressed firmly in a frown of competent care. She reached a long-fingered hand toward him and placed it on his chest. Her hand was warm on his skin.

  “Am I… dead?”

  The frown turned into a light-scattering smile. “No,” the angel laughed, her voice soft and full and throaty. “You are not dead, nor will you be for a very long time.” Her speech was understandable, though colored with a light dialectal lilt which made it seem decidedly otherworldly.

  “Oh,” Treet whispered.

  The angel touched his face with the back of her hand. “You sound disappointed.”

  Treet only stared upward into the lovely, flawless face, noting the sweep of her dark lashes and the silky smoothness of her cheek. He wondered what it would be like to look upon such perfection for an eternity. “No,” he croaked finally, “not disappointed.”

  Just then a door opened somewhere in the room behind them. Treet felt a rush of cooler air that entered with the new arrival. “So, Jaire, our Wanderer is awake, eh?” said a sharp, trumpet tenor. “Has he said anything?”

  The woman, Jaire, glanced up and smiled as a man with a cap of white frizzled hair came to stand beside her. Though he appeared well-aged, his muscles were firm, his skin supple. Vitality burst from his quick blue eyes like z-rays from uonium. Apparently there was no way to contain it—the life in the man simply overwhelmed its slight but sturdy container.

  “Yes, Bohm, we have been talking about life.” She winked at Treet. “He has decided to remain on this side of the Transformation.”

  “Was there ever any doubt?” said Bohm. He placed a ready hand on Treet’s cheek, glanced at the cone-shaped instrument, gazed into Treet’s eyes for a moment, and then declared, “The life force is stronger—no question about it.” He looked at Treet and said, “Your Creator has seen fit to grace the world with your presence a little longer. Ours is the benefit.”

  Treet swallowed, then gagged. His tongue felt twice its size
and sticky. A green cylinder appeared in Jaire’s hands, and a curved straw was placed at Treet’s lips. “Drink slowly,” she instructed.

  A cool, slick liquid slid down his throat, which felt like baked cardboard. “Thanks,” he whispered, and drew in another lengthy sip. “What about the others?”

  “Your friends are resting comfortably,” said Bohm as Jaire pulled a thin sky-blue coverlet over Treet. “They are still asleep at the moment, but should awaken before we reach Fierra. Please, don’t worry about them. Think no negative thoughts. Your trial is over. All will be well.”

  A little pinging sound came from another room. “Ah!” said Bohm, turning away. “Another has awakened to join us. I will look in and return when I can. Rest well, Wanderer.” He patted Treet’s shoulder as he went by; The door whished open, and he was gone.

  “Bohm is a busy fellow,” observed Treet, noticing the light in Jaire’s clear eyes as she watched him. “We’re on our way to Fierra, which means you must be Fieri.”

  “Yes,” she replied, pleased, and a little surprised, Treet thought. “You know our ancestral name. Now you must tell me yours.”

  “My name is Orion Treet.”

  “Two names? Which do I call you—Orion or Treet?”

  “Either.”

  “Then I will choose Orion. It has a mysterious sound.” Her eyes sparkled merrily. “What does it mean?”

  “What does it mean? Oh, it’s the name of a great hunter whose image is remembered in the stars.”

  “A good name for you then,” she said. She gazed at him with open admiration, making Treet feel like a rank impostor for presuming to use his own name. She reached down, pulled the coverlet up beneath his chin, and tucked it around his shoulders. “Bohm has said that you should rest. I will leave you now.”

  “No, don’t. I wa—”

  “I will be close by should you need anything. Rest now. Anyone who has come across the Blighted Lands needs all the rest he can get. Think no negative thought.”