Machina Obscurum

by J. Edward Neill

  Jason took another deep breath, concentrated, and the images came into focus:

  Terry sat at a table wearing the same clothes he did now. More friends sat around him looking none too pleased as Terry raked in another stack of poker chips. Someone threw up on a fake plant in the corner. Still, Terry pulled in more and more cash.

  Seeing cash was easy to explain, everyone’s thoughts drifted to money, and as such, Jason picked up that information quicker than any other issue the customer might have.

  “You will be coming into wealth very soon. Cash won is much sweeter than money earned. It appears your friends here are not good poker players.”

  The short stocky friend spoke with disgust. “Standard. They always say something about money.”

  “Quiet please.”

  With the next image, Jason watched a young redheaded woman slap Terry across the face. He stood in the doorway, too stunned to respond or even make an effort to fix the perceived slight he must have visited on the female. She did not allow him the time anyway and slammed the door in his face.

  “You will have some bumps in your love life in the near future. Whatever it is you do, try not to piss off the redhead any more than you already have”

  “Obvious, relationship stuff… this guy is a joke.”

  Terry shifted his grip at the mention of the girl. Jason struck the correct cord.

  The scene dissolved into a shadowy place where a robed man placed a hand on a kneeling Terry’s shoulder.

  “A,” Jason needed to search for the word, “ceremony… in the days to come…”

  The moment disappeared into emptiness.

  You are not welcome here.

  The connection severed, and Jason released Terry’s grip.

  “Is that it?”

  Jason wiped palms on his vest before reaching out to grip Terry’s hands once more.

  “No…it is just that…I’m not sure you are concentrating on this. Without your cooperation, this is not going to work.”

  Terry nodded and clenched his eyes shut.

  Focusing, Jason rewound the vision to try and lock onto it.

  Jason strained, sweat rolled down his face, but he saw more of the same.

  Robes. Candles. Knives. Blackness.

  This differed from anything he experienced in a reading before. For one to stop on its own accord…

  He rolled the mental picture back to the last clear image: the ceremony. Through Terry’s eyes he looked up at the robed man who stood in front of him anointing his subject. White flashed from beneath the hood. A bright light filled his eyes…

  Undesired. Interloper. Begone.

  Again the connection severed.

  An electric spark seemed to leap from Terry into him. Jason jerked free.

  “Whoa, what happened there? Did you see something else?” The obnoxious friend leaned in close, trying to scan Jason’s face for any hint of what happened.

  Terry pulled back from the table and rubbed his hands. Jason guessed the electricity had not been a one sided affair.

  “Do you have a buzzer underneath the table?”

  Jason composed himself as best he could. He needed to remain in character and not betray the fact he did not know what had occurred.

  “I have no such need for parlor tricks. Check under the table for yourself if you do not believe me.”

  That invitation was all the unconvinced friend needed. He squatted down beside the table and lifted the table cloth. Jason watched as he felt around for anything that might have explained the jump.

  “Whatever it is you felt was both true and powerful. In the coming days you are going to be presented with an important choice. One choice made in darkness will bring great light, but…”

  Jason searched for the right words.

  “It will not be without its dangers. Choose wisely, your next step, for the futures of many will be at stake… not just your own.”

  Terry sat there for another second, either to contemplate what Jason told him or to determine how they had been ripped off. The two friends, who had enough of the show, grabbed Terry on the shoulder urging him to leave.

  “Let’s get out of here. I told you this was a scam.”

  While they were unconvinced, Terry’s face betrayed his own concern. Jason couldn’t be sure if it was due to the strangeness of the reading, or if Terry understood more of the reading than even Jason did.

  The three men left the curtained room muttering to themselves, but Jason did not give them any more notice. He lifted his hand up and found it trembling. His heart sounded off within his chest.

  The absence of an image…

  Still Jason could not shake the images he saw. He visualized many things in the few years since he discovered his gift. Some were standard beats, like Terry’s money or love life; those were common links between all humanity. Those are the things that subconscious minds dwell on. Will I find love? Am I going to be rich? Those were easy as Terry’s friend had pointed out. The blackness… that was not normal. It seemed there was only one way to interpret it:

  Terry Soone was going to die.

  Crawl

  An excerpt from the novel Nether Kingdom

  J Edward Neill

  A ndelusia’s eyelids fluttered open.

  The images of the Ur fled her mind.

  Only her body and her chains remained.

  All else was quiet.

  Shortest eve.

  Longest day.

  Time to go.

  She willed herself to stand. She felt as wobbly as a tumbling top, as weak as wintered grass. A moment’s courage, and she stepped blindly into the blackness. Dragging the iron ring slowed her, but with a grunt she propelled herself forward one step at a time.

  Small suffering compared to what the Ur will do.

  Like a willow against a storm, she dragged her burden behind her. Her chain bit into her forearms, and blood squelched beneath her manacles. Clank! the iron ring tumbled. Crunch! it made powder of ancient bones. A dread rhythm it drummed as she slogged forward. She stopped only when she reached what she imagined was the pit’s center.

  It was there, dead in the middle of the abyss, she halted. Something charnel lay near, something gruesome. Bretaen…she remembered the Thillrian’s anguished cry during his death-fall. They left you.

  Her breath tight behind her lips, she knelt to the ground and extended her quavering palm. Bretaen’s corpse lay before her, shattered and swollen. Her fingertips grazed his pulped limbs and her palm drifted across his splintered, protruding ribs. Calm as she could, she searched his cadaver. Her deepest hope was that she would find the key to her manacles, though she knew in her heart Grimwain would never have left it so close.

  For once, she was glad for the pit’s permanent darkness. Searching Bretaen’s body was far less stomach-turning for lack of being able to see him. Wincing from the odor, hands wet with putrescence, she pawed at his remains.

  After ten breaths, she found something.

  Her fingers grazed a leather strap, then another, both twisted around his mangled right arm. The straps were attached to a pair of leather satchels, neither of which had been destroyed by the fall. “Full or empty?” she asked aloud. She untangled both bags and drew them to her lap.

  Empty, like as not, she feared.

  She was wrong.

  She opened the first satchel, smaller of the two, and she knew right away it was the same wrinkled bag she had carried all the way from Muthemnal. She squeezed it close to her chest, adoring it. She remembered its texture, its smell of old rain and spilled ink, its frayed straps near to breaking.

  Digging inside, she knew she would find only three things: her journal, her quill, and a quarter vial of ink. The inkwell was shattered and her quill snapped in half, but when she touched her journal’s dry cover and twice riffled its pages, she breathed somehow easier. Crusty old thing. Always following me.

  She reached into the second bag, her fingers tensed. Within Bretaen’s dry, broad-sided sa
tchel, she found a whole loaf of hard tack, a half-filled waterskin, and a pouch stuffed to its brim with nuts from the Thillrian mainland. Also therein she touched a tinderbox, a whittling knife, and what’s this? A bundle of silver coins. She scrabbled through all the items, again hoping to find her manacles’ key, but when it failed to turn up, her heart beat no less steady. Food. Enough for days. Chained or not, I get to live longer than today.

  She stood and carried her new possessions far from Bretaen. On a pile of skulls she sat and dined as only a starving woman could. To anyone else, her meal would have seemed a snack, stale as the air in the pit’s bottom. To her it felt like a feast. She chewed a corner off the brickish bread, popped two dozen salted nuts in her mouth, and chased it all with several swigs of lukewarm water. She savored each speck of food as though it was a sweetmeat from a corner shop in Gryphon, and she smacked her lips as loudly as ever in her life.

  Again she stood, taking two breaths to regain her equilibrium. Once steadied, she tried to imagine what she looked like. Battered and bruised, she thought. A rotten apple. My hair an inky mess. My clothes like dishrags. I bet I look exactly how I feel.

  Sighing, she hoisted her satchels over her arm and pushed all peripheral thoughts from her mind. I only need to find the bottom stair, she convinced herself, and then climb until I can climb no more. Thus she went, forgetting Bretaen. Her eyes were useless in the dark and her ears filled with the sound of her thumping heart, but what use are senses?

  Dragging the ring, she set off in a straight line until she stung her shoulder against the pit’s outer wall. Ouch. Wall. Hurts. She slunk along it, her palm probing the darkness. She circled the vast room, ticking through the bonemeal like the only hand in the world’s cruelest clock.

  In far less time than she imagined, her bare, blood-streaked toes struck a raised surface. Chilly. Damp. Smooth. The bottom stair. She set one foot upon it, and she knew her life’s most treacherous journey was about to begin.

  The basalt stair felt as frigid and slick as a block of ice. Her sandals lost, she climbed ten stairs, then twenty. Her chain clinked, while the anvil-like ring banged below her, wanting to pull me down. The racket made her wince.

  If I reach the top, I will be deaf.

  Twenty stairs done.

  Twenty thousand to go.

  One by one, she slithered up the nether stairs. It felt like futility, but she made herself do it. She knew it was only a matter of time before her body betrayed her, that her legs would give out and her bones crack. And so what? Nothing else to do. After a hundred steps, her desire to stop nearly overwhelmed her. After fifty more, every cord of muscle in her trumpeted an anguished song.

  Much worse was her fear of falling.

  The darkness remained complete, and touch was her only useful sensation. She paused after the two-hundredth stair, acutely aware that if she slipped over the side, my end will resemble Bretaen’s. To spare herself a gruesome fall, she bumped her left elbow on the outer wall with each stair ascended.

  Bump. Two hundred one. Bump. Two hundred two.

  Thus regimented, she plodded up and up and up. The stair, like a snake’s twisted ribcage, felt as though it would go on forever. At three hundred steps, she sensed her sanity waning, as the ring’s rhythmic clang hammered within her skull.

  Wincing, she counted as she ascended.

  Four hundred.

  Seven hundred.

  One…thousand.

  No matter how high she climbed, no light reached her from above, and nothing of the surrounding atmosphere gave away whether she had ten thousand or ten million stairs left. Bleeding, sweating, bruising, and dying, she lost count. She was exhausted beyond mortal words. Her fingers felt ready to snap. Her muscles screamed with perpetual pain. Her body lost its pliancy, stretched thin as a wet sheet across a cold, spinning grindstone.

  Her joints aflame, her blood staining the rim of every step, her mind went blank as she waged war against the stair.

  Who cares…if I reach…the top?

  Who cares…if I fall?

  Easier…to die…than this.

  No.

  Still she climbed. Sometimes she crawled and sometimes she hopped, but never once did she rest for longer than a few breaths. Her sweat, so profuse at first she thought she might drown in it, ceased pouring from her body. Her flesh went dry and feverish, and her hands and feet so numb she guessed they would shrivel and fall off. She discarded Bretaen’s bag after emptying its contents into her own. Between steps, she sipped from the waterskin and chewed on the brick of bread. The feeble foodstuffs were hardly enough. She knew she had fallen below the point of nourishment, far too famished for anything but a week of feasting to cure.

  Still she climbed.

  After a time, each stair she climbed felt like a miracle, and each gasp of air an allowance from a much higher power than she. Like a soldier waging war long after suffering a mortal wound, she climbed higher and higher. She grunted, wailed, and cursed until her throat dried up and her voice utterly failed her. All sounds were muted thereafter, buried by the cold throttle of her heartbeat as it banged like a broken drum.

  And still she climbed.

  Hours, days, lifetimes her ascent seemed to last. Five thousand stairs gained, and her body felt as fragile as a dry river reed. Others would never have made it, she knew. With no reason to survive as important as hers, others would have lain down and starved or hurled themselves to a swift and painless demise. It was no longer the fear of Grimwain driving her so far past her breaking point. Once her voice was lost and all her thoughts obscured by a scarlet curtain of pain, her will emerged in the form of a vision. She saw a ring of light take shape far above, and she was certain her friends were smiling down upon her. She saw Saul, waving his staff as though to summon her for a walk, and she saw Marid, grinning in expectation of a kiss. Brightest of all, she saw Garrett. He looked stoic as ever, but something in his eyes compelled her to grit her teeth and try to reach him. She saw him nod and she tried to read his lips. “Climb higher, Ande,” he seemed to say. “Reach me, and I will bear the rest of your pain.”

  Her vision blurred.

  The hours streamed through her mind.

  No longer aware of herself, unsure of whether she was dying or already dead, she crawled up the stairs with little knowledge of what she did. The iron ring no longer felt like an anchor, but rather an extension of her broken body. She dreamed it was just another satchel on her shoulder, no heavier than a loaf of bread, and so it seemed to her she climbed faster even though the opposite was true.

  And still she climbed.

  The ring of light grew ever brighter above her. If it was real or a trick of her fevered mind, she no longer cared. She pretended it was a door leading directly to Father Sun, a path to a heavenly place, and that she only had a hundred stairs left before she emerged into a meadow of golden-bladed grass, where I will sip from cool streams and drowse every day away. It was only a dream, of course. Like a child, she created fantasies to sustain her, to propel her upward when no other power in the world could hope to.

  At long last, after climbing many thousand steps more than she should have been able to, her willpower faded. The ring of light dimmed, replaced by darkness so dense she felt even blinder than in the pit’s bottom. Her daydreams dulled, her muscles melted, and she forced herself over one final step before collapsing onto a surface she could not feel. Her vision lost all color, and a curtain of black sleep drew across her eyes. She curled on the ground and felt nothing, neither pain nor sorrow nor concern for anything to come.

  Comatose, the fires of her heart cooling, she dwelled in the grey realm between life and death.

  She felt herself floating on a colorless sea, drifting on a glass boat beneath a pale, silvery sun. The silence was complete, the sea endless, and all physical feeling muted. She dipped her fingers into the sea, but felt nothing. She hugged herself close, and the sensation was as though her body were made of cloudstuff and her hands of naught but rai
n. She might have been afraid, but the absence of pain was too welcome. No Ur here, no Grimwain or wolf-maned men.

  Given the choice, she would have stayed in the dream forever.

  But reality remained. Countless hours after her collapse, she crawled back to the craggy shores of consciousness. It was the rain’s doing again, peppering her as lightly as a lover’s touch. Her head still foggy, she stirred to half-wakefulness.

  Hurts, she creaked, almost disappointed to be alive. Not dead. Would not…hurt this much.

  She opened her eyes. The deep darkness was gone, the dreamed-of ring of light replaced by the dull sheen of a grey, dawnlit sky. Startled to have her sight again, she snapped her eyelids open and shut some dozen times. Her first feeling was disbelief. Where am I? Where did the darkness run to?

  Then it came to her. The last stair she had climbed before tumbling into sleep had been the last step she needed to take. A slow search of her surroundings and a glance into the cloud-covered sky, and she knew where she was. She had already climbed over the pit’s edge. She awoke now beneath Cornerstone’s firmament, a survivor of the nether abyss.

  She had no strength to celebrate. Wobbling as she sat upright, she scoured her satchel clean of the rest of her food. It was bitter fare at best. The bread took too long to chew and the Thillrian nuts bounced down her throat like salted river stones, but she savored it nonetheless. Lucky to have a last meal.

  And now? The question moved through her mind like a bank of clouds. Where to?

  She staggered to her feet, stained black with dried blood. The nether pit, its depths as black as the lashes of hair on her neck, gaped upward behind her. She shuddered, picked up her satchel, and wandered away, content for the moment just to escape its dreaded tug.